In the worst possible meaning of that term

Dan Gelernter: Fauci is Just a Bureaucrat

…. Bureaucracy is a permanent decoupling of activity from morality. A bureaucrat isn’t paid to understand the rules he enforces or the forms he is required to have you fill out. There is no “why” involved in his life, and so he allows no common sense or flexibility to inform his actions. Bureaucracy is there for its own sake; it is its own justification. Bureaucrats are often called civil servants, but in reality they provide no service at all: It is you, the individual citizen, who must come to serve them, to follow their instructions, to bend the knee and do exactly what they say, as a token of submission to the powers that be. Otherwise no license, no permit, no job.

….

Anthony Fauci is a terrible man. And he has been identified in the public mind with a great deal of the evil in our current situation. But the real danger in Fauci is that not that he is unique, but that he is typical. Fauci is just a bureaucrat. He is no worse and—this is the key point—no better than the vast army of faceless fascists who have insinuated themselves into every aspect of our daily lives. His medical experiments on dogs and children are just routine to a genre of people whose idea of right is aligned entirely and absolutely with anything that will increase their own power and authority.

Fauci lacks the imagination and the intelligence to become a tyrant-king, but he offers the king his own insatiable greed, an eager helping hand, an impenetrable stupidity, a mind totally divorced from absolute moral distinctions. He will never be the top man, but he is just as dangerous in his enabling role—he represents the rest of government: the No. 2 man, all the way down to number 3 million. And apparently we do have about 3 million federal government employees at this point—let that sink in for a moment. One percent of the country spends their lives taking money from the rest. We could call them one-percenters . . .

This is not to suggest that federal bureaucrats are evil—only that their jobs deliberately slice away their humanity, and suppress, through rules and regulation, the care they might otherwise have for a poorer neighbor. Bureaucracy allows people like Fauci to get the money and power they crave in the only way they understand—not by adding value or inventing new things, but simply by stealing it from other people.

The tightened lockdown measures prompted some Xi'an residents to turn to social media for help, saying they are 'starving' and appealing to neighbours for supplies. 

'I'm about to be starved to death,' wrote one person on Weibo, China's equivalent of Facebook. 'There's no food, my housing compound won't let me out, and I'm about to run out of instant noodles ... please help!' 

'I don't want to hear any more about how everything is fine,' said another. 'So what if supplies are so abundant - they're useless if you don't actually give them to people.'  

Xi'an's outbreak is being driven by the Delta variant and is believed to be linked to travel to Pakistan a week ago.

The city has been in lockdown since last Thursday when mass testing revealed a case had escaped quarantine and then spread the virus widely.

So-far this month, Xi'an has reported 810 Covid cases - China's largest outbreak since the virus first emerged in Wuhan.

The 13million-person lockdown is also China's largest since Wuhan was locked down early in 2020, which affected 11million people.