Anonymous RedState Editor Who Attacked Dr. Fauci as a ‘Mask Nazi’ Outed as Secret Dr. Fauci Staffer

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Through a bit of remarkable reporting by Lachlan Markay, The Daily Beast has revealed the mysterious life of  William B. Crews. Known professionally as an official for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the public health agency overseen by Dr. Anthony Fauci, he is also the anonymous managing editor of pro-Trump website Red State. Known there by the pen name “streiff,” he has written a series of harangues attacking Dr. Fauci and the “deep state” over the pandemic response.

For the blissfully uninitiated, Redstate holds sway in conservative circles, including with members of Congress and their staffers on the Hill. So a well-regarded website dedicating numerous posts designed to undermine the nation’s top immunologist, anonymously written by an anonymous individual who works for Dr. Fauci? That’s a big deal.

That’s right. This guy works professionally for the NIAID under Dr. Fauci, charged with promoting sound advice from medical and public health experts. But he also moonlights as an anonymous troll that actively publishes disinformation that, as Markay writes, “his superiors at the NIAID say is a major challenge to widespread efforts to control a pandemic that has claimed roughly 200,000 U.S. lives.”

The nut of this remarkably strange (and strangely remarkable) story:

Under his pseudonym, Crews has derided his own colleagues as part of a left-wing anti-Trump conspiracy and vehemently criticized the man who leads his agency, whom he described as the “attention-grubbing and media-whoring Anthony Fauci.” He has gone after other public health officials at the state and federal levels, as well—“the public health Karenwaffen,” as he’s called them—over measures such as the closures of businesses and other public establishments and the promotion of social distancing and mask-wearing. Those policies, Crews insists, have no basis in science and are simply surreptitious efforts to usurp Americans’ rights, destroy the U.S. economy, and damage President Donald Trump’s reelection effort.

Markay lists some of Crews’ more egregious RedState posts that often “allude to fascism and Nazism in describing efforts to combat the virus, with references to “the public health Gestapo” and “mask nazi” Fauci ” In June of this year, Red State published an opinion piece under the “streiff” byline that was titled: Dr. Fauci Decides He Is Galactic Commander and Warns That Protests Will Delay Reopening the Country. An example of anti-Fauci writing:

Fauci has a distinguished history of being a reasonable voice on public health crises, I’m just not sure that the current sh**show is his finest hour. The ‘guidelines’ issued by the federal government last week are just that. Guidelines. And they are guidelines for exactly as long as, to use the Tea Party vernacular, “We, the People,” decide they make sense, that the trade-offs are reasonable, and the damage done to the nation by the cure is not orders of magnitude greater than the disease.

The fact is, that there is no evidence, outside of the bullsh** being slung about in New York, that Wuhan virus is a problem. When one state has half of the nation’s fatalities, then you are left with one of three explanations: New York’s medical system more closely resembles something you’d expect to find in a rural area of Outer Mongolia than in the United States; New Yorkers are just very weak and disease-prone and die like flies; or, New York is juicing their death totals to try to get the federal government to underwrite the $6 billion-and-growing hole in the state’s budget.

As the Covid-19 pandemic has cost 200,000 American lives, many states are still struggling with trying to abate the spread. The vast majority of medical and public health experts insist that the most effective manner to stop the spread of the potentially deadly virus is to wear masks and follow socially distancing guidelines, positions, however, which have become curiously politicized by those who ignore scientific research.

Update: According to CNN’s Oliver Darcy, an NIH spokesperson has announced Mr. Crews plans to retire and offered no further comment:

New: After @lachlan‘s report, NIH spox says, “NIAID first learned of this matter this morning, and Mr. Crews has informed us of his intention to retire. We have no further comments on this as it is a personnel matter.”

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 21, 2020