La Conner Weekly News - Your independent hometown award-winning newspaper

From the disgrace of Richard Nixon to the disgrace of Donald Trump, I have watched the Republican party deteriorate from a party of strong moral principles, fiscal restraint and true conservative values to a cult of personality. The Republican party did not even bother to craft a platform for the 2020 election because the platform is now what Trump says it is - subject to rapid change based on the mercurial and ever self-serving whim of the great leader.

Nothing reveals this utter moral collapse better that the treatment of Dr. Anthony Fauci by so-called Republicans. Dr. Fauci is a world-renowned expert in infectious diseases. As a physician with the National Institutes of Health for more than 50 years, he has advised every American president since Ronald Reagan. In scientific journals, he is one of the most frequently cited scientists in the world.

If Dr. Fauci had chosen to work for the private pharmaceutical industry he could have been a billionaire. But he devoted his life to his country and to the health and welfare of the American people. For this devotion he has been excoriated and vilified by Donald Trump, his minions, and the entire rogues gallery of conservative media. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that his head be cut off.

Since the onset of COVID-19 and Dr. Fauci’s refusal to participate in the fantasy world of Trumpism, he has received hundreds of death threats. His family, his daughters, have been directly threatened with death. When did vicious ignorance become a core American value? When did the nation whose scientists and engineers created the modern world decide that men like Dr. Fauci should be treated like pariah dogs and worse? When did it become acceptable to threaten an American hero and his family with death for simply telling the truth?

To Trump supporters I pose this question. Have you no sense of the monstrous evil done to this fine man? At last, have you no shame?

James Winchester

La Conner