Every family has a wine aunt who makes weddings and holidays a chore. Her second glass of Sauvignon Blanc turns her into a lawn sign with legs, and she starts repeating slogans: Why don’t you believe in science? America is a nation of immigrants! Trans women are women!
In her day job as an administrator for a nonprofit organization or an associate vice president of human resources, Aunt Madge is an enforcer. She lives to police boundaries. You can’t say that! She has no thoughts. She says the slogans. She is received wisdom, embodied, and she knows that what you said isn’t true, because she hasn’t seen it in The New York Times. Yes, she owns some version of this shirt.
Wine aunt’s mind, to the extent that she has one, is shaped by credentials and authority. Professors are very important. Doctors are never wrong, unless they’re doctors who question the party line. Experts must be trusted, because they are definitionally correct. They have a degree in that. And is there another bottle of Sauvignon Blanc in the kitchen?
Margaret Brennan is America’s wine aunt. If you doubt this at all, watch her astonishingly dimwitted encounter last weekend with the longtime Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, who now runs the NIH. Bhattacharya has all the credentials, but public heterodoxy plus a job in the Trump administration take away all his credential points. The discussion is a witch-burning from the opening bell, and Brennan is fidgety and agitated in the presence of the witch.
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