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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Jim
Stealing that.
Writer missed the reason she knew the shooter’s motive, “his father said he was brainwashed with misinformation.” Of course, this was Sunday, she was continuing her attack of the previous week on RFK that Tump administration was putting children at risk by causing vaccine hesitancy for childnood diseases like measles, an argument that RFK had crushed the week before ( but that CNN has renewed this week with coverage of Trump EO re autism, displacing coverage of Fauci i phone texts). So, I’m guessing she was particularly agitated , likely knew what Paul and Johnson were revealing the following day, or knowing that her “club” had given her performance against RFK an “F.” She was even more savage on Bhattacharya than RFK, who basically had told her she was lying. So Bhattacharya learned you can’t play nice, or don’t bother to go on, it ain’t about educating orinforming the public.
Thank you
This is very fine writing. It is sharp and to the point.
“””Ron Getty on X: “Margaret Brennan is married to Ali Iyad Yakub, who is a Syrian”””
Thanks for that much needed info. What info do you have on Yakub?
I agree. This is his Substack page: Chris Bray - Tell Me How This Ends
“I don’t really care, Margaret.”
“Sources say”
To lefty’s like Margaret the job is to carry water for democrats and throw water on republicans.
In other words a partisan hack and a joke to real journalism.
I called out Brennan’s BS on the Sunday Morning Talk Show thread, as she was flipping out because the new CDC Director was going against the narrative she’d been getting in her earpiece for years - going so far as to tell him that the information on the paper she was waving was more correct than what he was telling her.
What I should have added was how, during the COVID pandemic, she badgered guests who worked in the medical field on whether she could get her then-toddler vaccinated. Those guests either vacillated or just didn’t know, which wasn’t the answer she wanted.
It was obvious that the more-knowledgeable guests knew that children had natural immunity and nothing good would result from injecting them with gene modifiers - but Margaret kept on, oblivious to the look of horror showing on some of their faces. Her misinformed maternal instinct no doubt had that poor tyke needlessly and dangerously “vaccinated”.
That woman is a monster.
Margaret Brennan is to real journalism what the WWE is to real wrestling.
She’s just made up to act like she knows what she’s saying but she’s really just reading from a script.
She was a terrible interviewer
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