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HHS misfires with new GOF policy; startling similarities between Anthony Fauci and Gavin Newsom, from an essay by the governor’s affair partner, who dramatically broke her 20-year silence.
JUL 29READ IN APP
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday— and it’s Fauci watch party day! Assuming, that is, he actually shows and doesn’t pull some kind of trick like taking the Fifth over potential state law claims. Just remember to consume the Mengele-like narcissist in small doses. Blame the human cockroach for today’s truncated roundup, since I’ll be glued to my screens and can’t blog more (some of you will undoubtedly be relieved to get a slimmer version). Anyway, today’s abbreviated but still-terrific roundup includes: Fauci watch party instructions; a misfired HHS policy intended to stop gain-of-function research but that actually enables it; a devastating, beautifully written essay in Vanity Fair that never once names the California governor but manages to incinerate his presidential ambitions with surgical precision; the wild, almost cosmically timed convergence of that essay with the Fauci hearings, which together constitute the most remarkable 72-hour reputational double-feature in recent political memory; and a meditation on what it means when powerful men, confronted with the wreckage they’ve caused, instinctively reach for the same rhetorical move—the passive voice, the stolen credit, the invisible hand that somehow did all the damage.
⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️
📅 Fauci testimony instructions: You couldn’t ask for a more dramatic setup. Today’s hearing could as well be the climactic confrontation scene from a Michael Crichton movie. On one side, the gnome-like megalomaniacal scientist who fooled everyone and is secretly trying to destroy the world because of some perverted childhood trauma— versus, on the other side, the overworked, boyishly handsome libertarian Senator who everyone considers kind of kooky but is so earnest and likable he squeaks by anyway.
In the movie, through clever questioning and irrefutable evidence, the dapper Senator finally rips off the mask, cinematically exposing the corrupt scientist for the world to see, and stopping the apocalypse clock in the nick of time at three seconds to midnight. Sadly, that’s just Hollywood. It’s probably not going to play out like that in real life. Catching bad guys in real life is a lot harder than in the movies.
The show starts (started) at 8:30am ET. After you finish today’s roundup, you can stream it at this link Senator Paul recommended, from the Senate’s website. If you plan to watch it live, it’s probably best to set your expectations low. For instance, don’t expect Fauci to lie (though that would be a wonderful miracle). I hope only to learn some all-new ways criminals deflect and obfuscate answers to damning questions. For science, of course.
UPDATE: Turns out I won’t even get any tips. Fauci took the Fifth in his opening statement, and is answering every single question by reading a Fifth Amendment reservation. What a yellow-bellied snake.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Yesterday, not coincidentally and with perfect timing given today’s dramatic hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced the agency’s new “United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research.”(Working title: use common sense, dammit.) Spoiler alert: it’s a stinker.
“Life sciences research is necessary,” the Policy begins, taking a broad view, but“there are clear cases in which the potential benefits of life sciences research do not outweigh the potential risks.” You don’t say.It was a terrific and promising start, but sadly —and you know how I can almost always find a silver lining somewhere— they just can’t seem to help themselves.
The Siren song of viral tinkering is, apparently, too strong to resist.
Bottom line: This Policy has more holes in it than an excuse from Hunter Biden explaining where the petty cash envelope went.
I won’t spend much time on this. The good intentions fueling this report began unraveling right in the introduction, with Democrat-style semantic games. They created the first of two new labels. Under the Policy, they redefined the bad thing. It is no longer “gain of function” research. No. The bad thing is “dangerous gain of function” research— cleverly plopping a “D” before the GOF to make DGOF, a semantic slip meant to reassure us but which is frankly quite terrifying.
The clear implication is that some GOF research is not dangerous. That would seem to be a highly debatable claim with which the new HHS Policy does not even try to wrestle. But they didn’t stop there. Get ready. They added another letter to the acronym festival.
In a dizzying feat of bureaucratic magic, HHS further subdivided DGOF into two categories. First, defunded DGOF, which once again started off well with a long list of ways research can get onto the banned list. But there’s always a catch, and this time it was the letter “P” for potential, prepended onto DGOF to make PDGOF.
After making a terrific start with a very long section defining DGOF into something I might actually tend to agree with, somebody tacked on a single sentence that erased it all. “Potential DGOF Research,” Table 1 explains, is “Research with a biological agent that could potentially result in one or more of the outcomes listed above.” So far, so good, though it seems like all DGOF research is potential DGOF research at the planning stage.
GOF‑like manipulations that fall into “potential DGOF” or are judged “technically possible but highly unlikely” to create DGOF‑level properties can nevertheless proceed after review and with a “mitigation plan.” We promise we won’t shop at the wet market after working in the lab.”
So, sadly, the Policy had good intentions but does not prohibit GOF. It only prohibits federal funding of a narrow, policy‑defined subset —“dangerous” GOF— and then builds a fairly elaborate bureaucratic structure whose central function is to rationalize that specific experiments do not, after all, meet that definition, or can be “de‑dangerized” on paper and green-lighted anyway.
I modeled EcoHealth’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal under the Policy’s new rubric. As a reminder, DEFUSE was the infamous proposal to take bat coronaviruses and add human-style furin cleavage sites so that a bat virus could infect humanized mice. With the tiniest modification of its language, DEFUSE could readily fall into potentialDGOF research. With a little cleverer and more creative drafting, DEFUSE could even fall out of the whole DGOF category— which is self-attested.
That’s right. Study authors are required to decide which category their research falls into. This will be enforced by sanctions for intentionally mischaracterizing the work, such as five-year funding bans.
The Policy is twelve pages long. The first three pages describe the ban (on funding). The next nine pages describe ways to evade the ban. It even creates a new government board —the ITPRB— that can ‘bless’ bad DGOF projects so they can be funded anyway.
It should have been cut to three pages. To provide an analogy for the whole thing, the Policy nods at ‘transparency’ of the new ITPRB board, but then defines transparency as a single annual report and then, my goodness, look at all the exceptions to the ‘transparent’ annual report, including the wildly amorphous “safety and security of research activities,” which sounds horrifyingly subjective:
And not a single word about what must be included in the annual transparency report. So … what can actually be printed in the once-a-year transparency report with five broad exceptions including “confidential business information” and “intellectual property interests”? Just a title? It is, apparently, too much to ask for the ITPRB to publish every decision to green-light PDGOF research along with the grant recipients’ proposals.
Sigh. It was, to say the least, disappointing. It certainly was not the stocking-stuffer I’d hoped for on Fauci day. That said, and anticipating how this will land with a dead thud, it is not a betrayal. The Policy had good intentions. It does not leave us any worse off than we were before. It incrementally makes GOF research harder by adding another belt of red tape. Worst of all, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish this “framework” for funding GOF research from what Fauci was cooking up as far back as 2013 (from his diaries):
To be honest, only Congress can fix this. GOF research needs to be illegal. Not merely subject to a five-year funding penalty, which is all HHS can do by itself. Plus, who knows what kind of pressure the deep state’s DARPA wing brings to bear on our public health bureaucrats. What we need is a new crime with a fifty-year prison sentence. And with capital punishment on the prosecutorial menu if anyone dies from a leaked GOF bug (including lab staff).
Hopefully, all together, the Fauci disclosures, today’s Senate show, and the disappointing HHS policy will provide the fuel for Congress to act.
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Talk about a political character assassination. It looks like the long knives might be coming out for California’s hair-gelled governor. Yesterday, the Guardian UK reported, “Former Gavin Newsom aide shares fresh details of affair.” Ruh-roh.
The Guardian reported about the publication of a paywalled essay published yesterday in Vanity Fair, titled, “How I Blew Up My Life. (Or, the Gavin Newsom Affair).” If you can find a legal way to access and read it, you should.
I want to be extremely fair here, because this essay was not what you might expect from a political hit piece. By all accounts, it’s the opposite. Ruby Rippey is remarkably, almost painfully honest about her own failures. She was an alcoholic. She was using cocaine. She was sleeping with her boss while her husband —a man named Alex Tourk, who was Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and later managed his re-election campaign— went to work every day for the man who was sleeping with his wife. She takes full responsibility for all of it. She doesn’t cast herself as a victim. She calls herself “the culprit.” She is, by any measure, a person who has honestly done the hard work of genuine accountability.
But there’s a buried lede, and it’s a beauty.
🔥 In her entire essay, Rippey never uses Newsom’s name explicitly. Not once. He is always “my boss” or “the mayor.” And yet, in the act of being scrupulously honest about her own conduct, she inadvertently —or maybe very deliberately— illuminates his.
A critical moment appears in a scene at Newsom’s swanky penthouse in Russian Hill. Ruby has knocked over a glass of red wine. It blooms across his pale carpet. He is on all fours, scrubbing furiously at the Macbeth-like stain with a washcloth. He looks up at her, frustrated, and says, “You know, we really can’t do this anymore. Youcan’t be doing this to Alex.”
Wow. Not we can’t do this to Alex. Not Ineed to stop. In a moment of unguarded vexation, Newsom exclaimed, you can’t be doing this to Alex.
He was sleeping with his deputy chief of staff’s wife. His “best friend’s” wife. In his own penthouse. With his own driver waiting outside. And in the moment of reckoning, the moral weight of the entire situation lands on her. Newsom’s not any culpable actor in this scene— he’s a concerned observer, blurting out that she has a problem that is affecting his employee.
Even at the time, after the affair went public, Newsom’s public story started falling apart. It’s only gotten worse since then. He lied and lied. Headline from the Daily Mail UK, 2025:
This, my friends, is what clinical narcissism looks like when it’s not being managed for a camera. It’s not dramatic. It’s not even particularly angry. It’s just a man who has so thoroughly reorganized reality around his own centrality that he genuinely cannot perceive himself as a cause. He can only perceive himself as an innocent bystander.
🔥 And then there’s the ‘memoir.’
Newsom published his self-serving political manifesto earlier this year —conveniently timed before he leaves office and before he formally announces a 2028 run. In it, he describes their 20-year-old relationship as “the briefest of affairs” (his sister, he noted approvingly, had observed that Rippey was “hanging a bit too close”— which is a remarkable thing to include in a memoir about an affair you conducted with your own employee). He also writes that he was the one who “came clean” to Alex. Making himself the hero of his own story.
Rippey’s response to that outrageous claim is worth quoting in full. It is a masterpiece of controlled, lawyerly precision:
Ruby told Alex. She sent the email. Shemade the confession. Alex confronted Newsom. And in his memoir, the governor took the credit.
He couldn’t help himself. Even in a story about his own unforgivable, married-wrecking misconduct, Newsom had to be the hero. He had to be the one who did the brave, honest thing. The man who spent months sleeping with his deputy’s wife while that deputy drove to work every morning and built his boss’s political career— that man, in his own telling, is the one who ultimately stepped up and did right by Alex.
Technically defensible, perhaps.
That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work. It is the most polite way I have ever seen anyone call a powerful man a liar.
🔥 Now here’s where the timing becomes wildly supernatural.
In the exact same 72-hour window, on the other side of the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci is having his own moment of reputational reckoning before Congress. The “good doctor”—the man who told us to cancel Christmas, close schools and churches, who told us the lab leak theory was a dangerous conspiracy, who oversaw the suppression of dissenting scientific voices, who appeared on magazine covers and was celebrated as America’s conscience— will be watching his own carefully constructed narrative dissolve in the Senate hot seat under oath.
His emails. His aides’ testimony. His own words, placed in context, doing exactly what Ruby Rippey’s words did to the oleaginous governor: revealing the gap between the public performance and the private reality.
Two malignantly narcissistic men. Two weeks. Two reputations, torched not by their enemies but by the documentary record of their own conduct.
This couldn’t possibly be scripted. No opposition researcher is clever enough to time these two stories to land in the same news cycle. Life did this. Fate did this. Providence, if you’re inclined that way, did this— and Providence apparently has a morbid sense of humor and a flair for the dramatic.
🔥🔥🔥 Let’s talk about what these two men have in common, because the parallel cannot be superficially dismissed.
Fauci and Newsom are both products of the same poisonous progressive political culture: the toxic culture of the credentialed expert who knows better than you, who demands your compliance in the name of a greater good that he defines, and who is constitutionally incapable of admitting error because error would require acknowledging that other people’s judgment might be as valid as his own. And they are both superheroes in their own eyes.
Fauci: I didn’t suppress the lab leak theory. I didn’t close the schools. (His own ‘diary’ shows otherwise.)
Newsom: You can’t be doing this to Alex. (His own driver was waiting outside for him to climax and drive him back to the office.)
The rhetorical move is identical. In both cases, the men positioned themselves as passive observers of consequences they were actively causing. In both cases, the documentary record —the emails, the essay, the memoir— makes the performance impossible to sustain.
Both men gained Democrat followings not for what they did —which in both cases was disastrous— but because of who they opposed: President Trump. Why did celebrities fawn over Fauci? Because he stood up to the president. Why do liberals love Gavin Newsom? Because he mean-tweets against Trump.
And in both cases, the damage is not being wreaked by political opponents. It’s being done by the words of people who were close to them, who watched them operate up close, and who are now, for their own reasons, telling the truth.
Democrats lowered their standards to the underground parking garage’s lowest sub-floor. This is the Self-Inflicted Wound archetype in its purest form. Newsom, Fauci, Democrats— they did this to themselves. Hubris, meet Nemesis.
🔥 One more thing, and this detail matters most for what comes next for Gavin.
Rippey noted the timing of her essay with quiet precision. Newsom’s memoir is out. He’s in the final year of his second term. He has not yet formally declared a 2028 run. She is writing now— after his self-serving account of events was published, before he leaves office while he’s still politically relevant, and before an official campaign announcement would have opened her essay to charges of opportunism.
The timing is not accidental. She is a smart woman. She knows exactly what she’s doing. And what she’s doing is establishing the record before the mythology hardens.
“For my former boss,” she wrote, “it is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent. For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after.”
That sentence will follow Gavin Newsom to Iowa. It’s going to follow him to New Hampshire. It’s going to be in the first paragraph of every profile written about him between now and November 2028. Not because it’s a political attack— but because it’s true, and because it was written by someone who has no apparent interest in destroying him, only in telling her own story honestly.
The most dangerous thing in politics is not a political enemy. It’s a credible witness.
Have a wonderful Wednesday, C&C! Don’t race off—we’ll be back tomorrow with more essential news and caffeinated commentary. And if you’re in California, maybe pour one out for what might have been. (But drink responsibly!)
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Rose Rambles... 
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