Tipping Point for the Elite

Tipping Point for the Elite
Hugh Auchincloss, Jr., M.D., principal deputy director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. NIAID
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Updated:
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Commentary

The most striking reality of our present day is the mass discrediting of entrenched elites across all professions: government, education, media, and professional realms. For almost three years, they all burrowed down on a handful of narratives that have proven completely false. In the history of science, or the history of politics, this represents a genuine turning point. Maybe it happens fast or maybe it happens slowly but it is certainly happening.

Let’s drill down to one case in point to illustrate.

Have a look at the replacement for widely despised Anthony Fauci at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His name is Hugh Auchincloss, Jr., and he has served as principal deputy director of the agency for 16 years. It’s fair to say that he knows the ropes well and also knows where all the bodies are buried. That he would replace Fauci is an inevitability but he inherits a post that is completely discredited. He has fought his entire career for the job but part of him must dread it.

The more you dig into his personal biography, the more it reveals about his class, heritage, and the elite clan that elevates his type to the top. He did his stint at Yale in economics and then did his M.D. at Harvard, like his father before him who taught at Columbia. His mother is Katharine Lawrence Bundy, who is the daughter of Harvey Hollister Bundy—FDR’s special assistant at the Department of War and later architect of the Marshall Plan who eventually became head of the Carnegie Endowment—and the sister of William Bundy and McGeorge Bundy.

The Bundy brothers held high government posts in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and were instrumental in escalating and managing the war in Vietnam. William, a Yale (yes, Skull and Bones) and Harvard grad, married Mary Acheson, the daughter of Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Later he became a key advisor to Alger Hiss before Hiss was exposed as a communist. Later still, he served as honorary chairman of the Bilderberg Meetings but declined Nelson Rockefeller’s invitation to head the Council on Foreign Relations.

McGeorge Bundy had a legendary career too, first as a major influence on postwar U.S. foreign policy and the Vietnam War disaster, and then as head of the Ford Foundation.

Back to Hugh. He married Laurie Glimcher (also Harvard) who became a major executive in the pharmaceutical industry, and they had three children, one of whom (Jake Auchincloss) is a member of U.S. Congress from Massachusetts, whose sister Kalah Auchincloss, is the executive vice president and deputy general counsel of Greenleaf Health. Kalah, paid entirely by Big Pharma, was deputy assistant to Scott Gottlieb at the FDA before he joined the Pfizer board and became a huge influence over the U.S. lockdown. Again, that’s the daughter of the successor to Fauci!

I could go on in all directions with this family. Every direction you look, you find the same thing: elite educational pedigree, elite industrial and financial connections, high-end careers in government and medicine, parents and children all moving in the highest possible circles, all deeply invested in the status quo of the American administrative/government/educational machinery.

It’s a fascinating thing to observe closely because it makes one realize that for many generations, elite governing circles in the United States have been basically a family matter. No matter all this talk about equality, fairness, affirmative action, and breaking up the good ol’ boys club; it’s mostly all nonsense. A tiny group of people rule most institutions in this country, regardless of presidents or public opinion.

This is more-or-less the system that was designed after World War II in order to bring about political and social stability. All the pieces were in place and all the rulers, whether out front or behind the scenes, were part of this familial and financial clan where internal trust in each other was bred through intermarriage and educational and geographic connections. Looking back now, we can see what an enormous challenge Vietnam and Watergate were for this crowd because these events began the long and slow process by which this establishment lost credibility.

Following the end of the Cold War, there commenced a desperate scramble to keep this elite clan of rulers in charge of the United States both at home and abroad, including maintaining ownership and control of the commanding heights in military, education, and industry. But in that effort, there has only been one disaster after another, from the War in Iraq and the destruction of many countries in that region that unleashed a refugee catastrophe all over Europe, to the growing political fury in the United States.

In 2016, when Trump easily trounced his opponents in the GOP primary, my first thought was: the establishment should be grateful with this result. Why? Because the mood of the country makes Trump look moderate by comparison. If that was true then, how much more true now?

All of this happened before the great catastrophe of lockdowns, which has utterly smashed whatever credibility the establishment had. Not only did they violate basic American rights on a mass scale with lockdowns and then forced vaccines few needed or wanted, but, even more than that, the entire plan failed even to work to achieve its stated aim of mitigating the virus. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating this realization is for this crowd.

Trust is now nearly fully gone. Each day that goes by recruits more people into the ranks of the incredulous.

What’s fascinating to watch is the rare occasion when a defector from within the ranks of these elites steps away from all the nonsense and decides to reveal the fullness of the racket. This is essentially what happened in the course of the brilliant literary career of Gore Vidal, who was born into this clan—he was step-brother once removed to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—and became the nation’s greatest biographer of American history. He was the best kind of gadfly and of course despised by his own people for that reason.

Incredibly, there is a connection to Fauci’s successor here: Gore Vidal’s mother Nina was later married to Hugh D. Auchincloss, Sr.!

So you see here what I mean about America’s ruling families and how they keep power and the public mind very much as their own proprietary possession.

And speaking of defectors, please consider how incredibly fortunate we are to have Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s “The Real Anthony Fauci” plus his other writings. They are really masterpieces of exposition that tell an unvarnished truth about how the ruling classes have betrayed every core American value. It’s extremely rare for someone of his background, class, family connections, and moral passion backed by raw intelligence to come along and offer such a jewel of exposition to people. Absolutely every American needs to read it, and not only because of what it tells about Fauci but also his reconstruction of ruling-class antics since the end of the Second World War.

We should also appreciate how fortunate we are to have the wealthy and brilliant South African immigrant Elon Musk now revealing the truth about American media and technology. He has pulled back the curtain in ways that would have been inconceivable in previous years. He threw down $44 billion to create a free speech platform, while firing as many as 4 of 5 workers at Twitter and making the platform better than ever. His remarkable actions here, especially the Twitter Files, are a model for the future. Believe me, many hungry young entrepreneurs are paying close attention and are ready to replicate his successes.

What this country needs is a wholesale replacement of its ruling-class structures. Musk and Twitter show the way: sweep in, purge, and innovate. What we are seeing at Twitter could become the norm throughout media, government, academia, industry, and even touching massively entrenched interests in medicine and science. In other words, we could be watching the unfolding of an epic upheaval in the entire establishment. This could be the tipping point. This time, the ruling elites went too far.

Or maybe Fauci’s replacement will just have a normal career and everyone will just go back to sleep. It all depends on whether and to what extent the American people are willing to put up with the pillaging of the American dream. I’m optimistic that people are finally realizing what a bill of goods they have been sold, and will demand nothing short of revolution in the near future.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Jeffrey A. Tucker
Author
Jeffrey A. Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press, as well as 10 books in five languages, most recently “Liberty or Lockdown.” He is also the editor of “The Best of Ludwig von Mises.” He writes a daily column on economics for The Epoch Times and speaks widely on the topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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