“My own complacency on the matter was dynamited by the lab-leak essay that ran in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists earlier this month,” he continues, “a few weeks later everyone from Doctor Fauci to President Biden is acknowledging that the lab-accident hypothesis might have some merit.”

After a year of legacy media blaming “populism,” and “science-denying” incompetent leaders, it’s now becoming clear that “science” itself is responsible for one of the worst mass deaths in human history. Frank laments:

Now the media is filled with disturbing stories suggesting that COVID-19 might have come not from ‘populism’ at all, but from a laboratory messhap in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral convulsions beginning as the question sets in: What if science itself is in some way culpable for all this?

It’s a searing mea culpa, but it only tells half the story, as almost daily new reports are coming out showing how much our current saints are culpable for our current predicament. Public American funding (via grants from the National Institutes of Health) was spent on research carried out by the Chinese military.

In a damning new report, Katherine Eban points out how major conflicts of interest due to large U.S. government grants in support of controversial virology projects affected the real investigation:

Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, ‘warned’ leaders within his bureau ‘not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19’ because it would ‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.

More than $1.2 million of taxpayers’ dollars were spent on the virology research, according to the report. Nothing in the report is not already known, but none of America’s elite institutions and media wanted to clarify any of the hypotheses, partially due to a culture of conformity and partially because a majority of those elites have direct financial interests in China.

The worship of elite expertise is the under-analyzed aspect of this sorry saga. Frank’s article is what happens when someone replaces his religion with a new one but fails to recognize the reality of the switcheroo.

Anyone who studied Soviet history knows how a section of intelligentsia and bureaucracy were groomed to justify even the most ridiculous ideological overdrive. They filled the society with abject mediocrities who were thoroughly abreast with party jargon, knowing all the correct words to say often into the loudest mouthpieces. Most importantly, they had no accountability, as the decision-making process was designed to be collective and technocratic.

In the West, while we don’t have the same centralized totalitarianism, the bureaucratic mindset still works in the same manner. In the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci — now a modern saint to the left, with his own name day and prayer candles for worship — apparently ignored emails on the lab-designed nature of the coronavirus as early as January 2020. That is, after Fauci ignored suggestions about China fudging numbers and data.

In the United Kingdom, Imperial College professor Neil Ferguson is still considered a respected voice despite countless disastrously flawed predictions. Meanwhile, an entire archive of failed suggestions and prognostications, from masks, to economic considerations, to social distancing are being slowly memory-holed.

For more than 20 years, the left has projected itself as on the side of “science” whilst believing in a million different genders. To a degree, this posturing is partly tactical. Indeed, it’s easy to discredit and delegitimize any opposition or end any debate by tarring the other side as anti-science Neanderthals. It also gives one a sense of superiority. But, ultimately, it is also ideological.

Science is and has always been predicated on healthy skepticism of authority and dogma. A majority of human brains are not wired to be skeptical of authority, however, and not everyone has the natural propensity to be a Diogenes or an Epicurus.

What we’ve recently witnessed is the replacing of one faith with another, in which the new saints are the “experts” who “trust science.” Soviet Marxism turned somewhat similar. After claiming to be scientific socialism, it ended up with a belief system about a providential end state of humanity, its saints and sinners, and its faith in the enlightened clerisy.

The new ascendant leftism is no different. The rock star treatment granted to the stars of “new atheism,” shows like the Big Bang Theory with episodes which showed a scientific group making fun of someone who is barely a functioning adult, and the proliferation of Facebook communities like “I F—ing Love Science,” all demonstrate not healthy skepticism, but a collectivist, cultish behavior, where the natural human instinct of worship is bestowed upon, as well as channeled by, a new clerisy.

Of course, one can’t “believe” in science, much less “f—ing love it.” Science is not your child to love, or a deity to be worshipped. It is a tool used to discern and discover the truth of things, all while adopting constant skepticism.

Science is not the legacy media shouting loudest about whatever new fashionable opinion they are told to shout, nor is it faith in arch-bureaucrats like Fauci, who will likely face no repercussion for his incompetence and arrogance. The Soviet-lite intelligentsia and leftist media are already falling in line to support one of their own, and the mediocrities will support whatever next fashionable cause the sophisticates declare to be worthy.