First, some background: “Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has been a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci.” (Per CNN story here.) So it’s not surprising he went off half-cocked, but this one is a doozy.
(Also relevant to this story, while Massie is an MIT grad in electrical engineering, he’s no intellectual … after all, he’s a Republican, which speaks quite loudly to that. See his bio here.)
“On Sunday,” CNN reports, “Massie sarcastically tweeted (see below), ‘You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science.’ Under those words, Massie posted an image that featured a giant hand crushing a group of much smaller people. The image includes a quote it attributed to Voltaire, the 18th-century Enlightenment writer and philosopher: ‘To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.'”
There’s a glitch: Voltaire didn’t say that. CNN says “Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi who pleaded guilty in 2008 to possession of child pornography,” did in “a virulently antisemitic 1993 radio broadcast. … The context … made clear that this was a reference to Jewish people.”
So how did Massie, the MIT grad, screw this up so badly, and make such an ass of himself? First of all, “The false Voltaire attribution for the quote has circulated online for years.” That’s probably how he stumbled across it. And secondly, he failed to fact-check what he found on the internet, which he easily could’ve done, had he bothered to make the effort, because the attribution to Voltaire “has been debunked in numerous previous fact checks” including in “a 2017 blog post by [the] director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation,” an authoritative source.
The appropriate term for this is mental laziness with a large dollop of internet gullibility. To not fact-check an internet find of this nature is foolhardy, since there’s so much garbage on the internet (and anything conservative just about guarantees it’s garbage).
Do I seem to pick on Republicans a lot? Let’s just say they’re low-hanging fruit. They’ve made anti-intellectualism an art form; they scatter integrity, honesty, and truth to the four winds; they put stupidity on a pedestal and worship it. In addition, it’s unclear whether they have anything against neo-Nazis; their leader, Trump, called them “fine people,” and they pretty much follow along wherever Trump takes them. By the way, never mind its source, that fake Voltaire quote quite nicely describes today’s Republicans.
Also, they don’t like Dr. Fauci, an honest civil servant trying to save our lives, because he doesn’t say what they want to hear. And Massie let himself get sucked into quoting a neo-Nazi child pornographer because, like most Republicans, he prefers ad hominem attacks to debating the science behind Dr. Fauci’s recommendations. One of the pitfalls of being anti-intellectual is there’s a high probability you’ll come across as stupid, like Massie does, despite his fancy education.
I won’t vote for these people. You can, if you want to. This is still a free country (for now).
Photos: Above left, Rep. Massie brandishing a gun at a Kentucky political rally a few days after the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection (details here); below right, neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom (more about him here and here).
