Nobody Said Sorry, Part II: The Audit They Wrote Themselves

CONNECTING THE DOTS

In Part I, we traced what was claimed and what it cost: a six-foot rule its own author could not source, a transmission claim asserted on national television and withdrawn seventy-two hours later in a newspaper, and four federal mandates that were never repudiated but simply allowed to expire.

This installment asks a different question:

If the certainty was never possessed, who built the machine that delivered it, and what became of the citizens who doubted it?

The answer begins not with a policy, but with a file.

WHILE THEY WERE ASKING YOU TO TRUST THEM

In September 2020 the Food and Drug Administration awarded a contract worth nearly fifteen million dollars to a consulting firm called Atlas Research. The work was to produce public service announcements pairing entertainers with public health officials. To choose the entertainers, Atlas built a file.

There were more than two hundred and fifty names in it. Against each name the contractor recorded which demographic groups that person could most effectively reach, whether the person had ever been arrested, and the person’s political affiliation, or, where none appeared on the record, whatever the person had said in public that might indicate one.

They were actors and singers and athletes, private citizens who had committed no offense except fame. They didn’t know the file existed. It was compiled with money appropriated by the Congress of the United States, so that the government could determine which Americans would be permitted to speak to the other Americans.

The Government Accountability Office found the file and published the finding on March 29, 2022.

Nobody was fired. GAO recommended no action of any kind. The report closes by noting that the auditors sent a draft to the department for review, and the department stated that it appreciated the opportunity to review it, and had no comments.

THE MACHINE THAT TOLD YOU

The scale of what was built to persuade you is not in dispute, because the people who built it published it.