Posted on 08/12/2026 7:26:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Every family has a wine aunt who makes weddings and holidays a chore. Her second glass of Sauvignon Blanc turns her into a lawn sign with legs, and she starts repeating slogans: Why don’t you believe in science? America is a nation of immigrants! Trans women are women!
In her day job as an administrator for a nonprofit organization or an associate vice president of human resources, Aunt Madge is an enforcer. She lives to police boundaries. You can’t say that! She has no thoughts. She says the slogans. She is received wisdom, embodied, and she knows that what you said isn’t true, because she hasn’t seen it in The New York Times. Yes, she owns some version of this shirt.
Wine aunt’s mind, to the extent that she has one, is shaped by credentials and authority. Professors are very important. Doctors are never wrong, unless they’re doctors who question the party line. Experts must be trusted, because they are definitionally correct. They have a degree in that. And is there another bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the kitchen?
Margaret Brennan is America’s wine aunt. If you doubt this at all, watch her astonishingly dimwitted encounter last weekend with the longtime Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who now runs the NIH. Bhattacharya has all the credentials, but public heterodoxy plus a job in the Trump administration take away all his credential points. The discussion is a witch-burning from the opening bell, and Brennan is fidgety and agitated in the presence of the witch.
As you watch, note above all that Brennan never says what she’s saying. She hints, she implies, she does the laziest guilt by association, but she never nails down any claim that she wants to suggest. Someone shot up the offices of the CDC, and he was influenced by “misinformation” — isn’t it bad that Trump, Trump, Trump?
Brennan doesn’t explicitly say that the shooter was influenced by any specific statement from any specific person. She takes two claims: The shooter was motivated by misinformation, and people in the Trump orbit spread misinformation. She then assumes that they’re both entirely true and connected by a bridge. (Bhattacharya, a gentleman to the point of being disadvantaged, never attacks her premise in a way that Marco Rubio or J.D. Vance would know to do immediately.) People questioned public health officials; isn’t that murder?
Every piece of underlying logic is insane. You can’t criticize a pharmaceutical corporation’s product, because someone might get shot. Government officials are not to be questioned, because someone might take it wrong and try to kill them. If anything bad happens in the second week of the month, this is proof that you should have remained silent and obedient in the first week of the month. You’re being dangerous!
Above all, Brennan is speaking for power and the status quo. She’s the voice of Albert Bourla and the GS-14. Weren’t you behaving very dangerously when you questioned the authorities? Incredibly, she carries this line through a conversation with a current authority without noticing that she’s eroding her own premise: How dare you question public health officials, Dr. NIH Director?
In the world of Wine Aunt Brennan, public health officials were right. They bravely fought the pandemic! No mistakes were made. No excesses occurred. They only wanted to stop the virus. To believe all of that in 2026, or at this point pretty much any of it, implies a level of self-hypnosis that brings to mind the Manchurian Candidate. Anthony Fauci is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
There’s nothing in there. She’s not thinking about any of it. No cognition occurs. There’s a fortress wall, and she’s firing at people who cross the moat, armed with some words that somebody wrote down on a piece of paper for her.
The great open secret about the leftist establishment girlboss is that none of them know anything, and none of them wish to know anything. When you meet with them, you hear their slogans, but they can’t answer a question or explain a premise to save their lives. A follow-up question slays them.
The Italian writer Luca Dellanna has succinctly described the descent into a culture of “ritual over merit,” a social world he calls a “mimetic society.” In that kind of society, he argues, people regard themselves as important and high-status because they can perform the status-defining rituals with exceptional uniformity. “In mimetic societies,” Dellanna writes, “conversations are rituals where turns are taken to reassure the other that he is performing well.”
This is exactly what Brennan is doing. A reference to “misinformation” is supposed to trigger a response that agrees about the importance of trusting the experts. It’s not an interview or a discussion; it’s an enforcement mechanism, like offering the secret handshake to see if the person on the other end of it knows how to return the signal.
Bhattacharya failed, because he thought. And Margaret Brennan won’t tolerate that kind of irresponsible behavior. We still don’t really care, Margaret.
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Do leftist journalists know anything that is true?
They know it...They just will not say it or write it...
She’s a rainbow flag that keeps adding colors. She gets the proper thoughts for the day and repeats them. Like women during Jim Crow, they just keep repeating “That’s just the way it is”.
“””Every family has a wine aunt who makes weddings and holidays a chore. Her second glass of Sauvignon Blanc turns her into a lawn sign with legs, and she starts repeating slogans: Why don’t you believe in science? America is a nation of immigrants! Trans women are women!”””
The author should not pick on AUNTS. We all have cousins, nieces, nephews, uncles, and grandchildren who use similar sound bites.
Half the country can just rest their brain while she does the thinking for them. She’s doing a great public service, deserves a medal of some kind.
Leftist journalists are here to remind us that stupid and arrogant is no way to go through life.
They are like AI. She knows exactly what is programmed into her. No sign of independent thought.
She may just win a lucite block for the hit job on the good doctor.
They know the truth, and they also know “the truth will set you free”.
That knowledge TERRIFIES them, because it threatens to undermines the power of their LEFTIST establishment to keep control of the media and spread their “liberal” (i.e. communist) propaganda.
As I posted on TownHall on an article about this “interview”, “Going on that program with Brennan is akin to going on SNL to be interviewed by Roseanne Rosanadanna. The only difference is when Margaret is exposed as a low IQ moron with a flawed point of view, she can’t even manage to utter that famous line “Never mind.””
Does anyone watch this crap anymore? The only time I ever hear about Margaret Brennan is on FR or some other conservative site that is making fun of her.
haha! wine aunts describe my sisters to a tee. they are not liberals but those broads always have something to SAY, and drink too much.
Exactly!!!!!!!!
The women who run the HOA like Nazis protecting the Reichstag, stand on the street screaming for rights for illegals.
The Wine Aunt... perfect. After the party, she can’t wait to get back to her cats and lack of grandkids.
Go to a toy store for the dolls who have strings in their back that you pull.
That is what creatures like her are.
She’s not a journalist. She’s a teleprompter reader. Every question she akses and every observation she makes is written by a producer. Some of those shows have several producers and writers. Probably more than Jiminy Kimmel.
Ron Getty on X: "Margaret Brennan is married to Ali Iyad Yakub, who is a Syrian-American attorney and a Judge Advocate in the United States Marine Corps. He is also known as "Yado". Their wedding ceremony included elements from both their Irish-American and Syrian-American backgrounds." / X
Margaret Brennan is married to Ali Iyad Yakub, who is a Syrian-American attorney and a Judge Advocate in the United States Marine Corps. He is also known as "Yado".
CBS News correspondent Margaret Brennan was married last night to Maj. Ali Iyad Yakub, a Marine Corps judge advocate. Brennan and Yakub first met 17 years ago when both were students at the University of Virginia, but were re-acquainted in 2013 when they ran into each other on the street in Washington, DC. The New York Times reports what happened next:
Married slightly outside her "faith tradition". Surprised she isn't wearing a veil. Maybe at home? Maybe after someone declares the U.S. Califate.
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