To Protect Fauci, The Washington Post is Preparing a Hit Piece on the Group Denouncing Gruesome Dog Experimentations

[DKW 86 7,440]

To Protect Fauci, The Washington Post is Preparing a Hit Piece on the Group Denouncing Gruesome Dog Experimentations

For years, the White Coat Waste Project was heralded by The Post as what they are: an activist success story uniting right and left. But now its work imperils a liberal icon.

Glenn Greenwald 15 hr ago 466 277

 

Footage from “Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation,” May 17 2018, reported by Glenn Greenwald and Leighton Woodhouse for The Intercept

Anger over the U.S. Government's gruesome, medically worthless experimentation on adult dogs and puppies has grown rapidly over the last two months. A truly bipartisan coalition in Congress has emerged to demand more information about these experiments and denounce the use of taxpayer funds to enable them. On October 24, twenty-four House members — nine Democrats and fifteen Republicans, led by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci expressing “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs commissioned by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases." Similar protests came in the Senate from a group led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

The campaign to end these indescribably cruel, taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs has been underway for years, long before Dr. Facui became a political lightning rod. In 2018, I reported on these experiments under the headline "BRED TO SUFFER: Inside the Barbaric U.S. Industry of Dog Experimentation.” That article described “a largely hidden, poorly regulated, and highly profitable industry in the United States that has a gruesome function: breeding dogs for the sole purpose of often torturous experimentation, after which the dogs are killed because they are no longer of use.”

Along with the videographer Leighton Woodhouse, I also produced a two-minute video report which used footage from experimentation labs filmed by activists with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) to show the graphic, excruciating horrors to which these dogs are subjected (the video, which is hard to watch, is appended to the bottom of this article). In our reporting, we noted the cruel irony driving how and why particular dogs are selected for this short life of suffering and misery and detailed just some of the barbarism involved:

The majority of dogs bred and sold for experimentation are beagles, which are considered ideal because of their docile, human-trusting personality. In other words, the very traits that have made them such loving and loyal companions to humans are the ones that humans exploit to best manipulate them in labs. . . .

They are often purposely starved or put into a state of severe thirst to induce behavior they would otherwise not engage in. They are frequently bred deliberately to have crippling, excruciating diseases, or sometimes are brought into life just to have their organs, eyes, and other body parts removed and studied as puppies, and then quickly killed.

They are force-fed laundry detergents, pesticides, and industrial chemicals to the point of continuous vomiting and death. They are injected with lethal pathogens such as salmonella or rabies. They have artificial sweetener injected into their veins that causes the dogs’ testicles to shrink before they are killed and exsanguinated. Holes are drilled into their skulls so that viruses can be injected into their brains. And all of that is perfectly legal.

Most of these dogs, after being bred, are "devocalized,” which the advocacy group NAVS describes as “a surgical procedure which makes it physically impossible for the dog to bark.” Though entailing pain and suffering, the procedure prevents the dogs from screaming in pain. As we noted in that article, researchers acknowledge that few to none of these experiments are actually medically necessary. This 2016 op-ed in The San Diego Union-Tribune by Lawrence Hansen, a professor of neuroscience and pathology at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine who once engaged in experimentation on dogs, explains why he is so ashamed to have participated given their medical worthlessness.

While numerous advocacy groups have been working for years to curb the abuses of these experiments, one group, White Coat Waste Project, has found particular success as a result of an innovative strategy. Advocacy groups know how polarized American politics has become, and that, as a result, a prerequisite for success is constructing a movement that can attract people from all ideologies, who identify with either or neither of the two political parties, but unite in defense of universally held values and principles.

White Coat has accomplished this with great success by fusing the cause of animal rights (long viewed as associated with the left) with opposition to wasteful taxpayer spending (a cause that resonates more on the right). The fact that love for dogs, and animals generally, has grown across all demographic groups further enables them to unite people from across the spectrum, including in Congress, in support of their cause. They routinely attract both Democratic and Republican members of Congress to sign on to their campaigns to end taxpayer-funded experimentation on animals, and are funded almost entirely through small-donor, grass-roots support that comes from the right, the left, and everything in between. Each year, they publicly award members of Congress “who have demonstrated outstanding leadership in the War on Waste, by exposing and stopping $20 billion in wasteful and unnecessary taxpayer-funded animal experiments,” and those honored are always a bipartisan group of lawmakers.

More than any other group, it is White Coat that has elevated the cause of stopping these horrific government experimentations on dogs and puppies into the mainstream political conversation. And numerous media outlets — led by The Washington Post — have spent years publishing flattering profiles on this group and its innovative bipartisan strategies. In November, 2016, for instance, The Post published reporting about White Coat's activities — under the headline: “Should dogs be guinea pigs in government research? A bipartisan group says no” — which heralded the group and its activists for being one of those rare Washington success stories that unites both left and right around a common cause:

The Washington Post, Nov. 15, 2016

That Post article detailed how White Coat was a group that had drawn from both Republican and Democratic political circles, and had deliberately formulated its messaging and goals to appeal to all sides of the political divide:

It’s no accident that the Congress members hosting the event are a bipartisan pair. White Coat Waste emphasizes that it is not a traditional animal advocacy organization, but one focused on what it says is government waste on testing — the kind of issue that could appeal to both fiscal conservatives and animal rights activists. Its founder, Anthony Bellotti, is a Republican strategist whose LinkedIn profile lists experience managing campaigns against Obamacare and federal funding for Planned Parenthood. [Vice President Justin] Goodman formerly worked for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

“We oppose taxpayer funding of animal experimentation. That’s it,” Bellotti said. “We don’t take a position on cosmetics testing any more than we do on vegan nutrition”. . . . In 2014, a Pew survey found that 50 percent of Americans oppose the use of animals in scientific research, with Democrats and political liberals slightly more opposed than Republicans and conservatives.

“Finding effective ways to limit unnecessary and expensive animal tests is good for taxpayers and is good for our animals,” [Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)} said in a statement sent to The Washington Post. “As a member of the Appropriations Committee that funds these agencies, I certainly welcome more analysis on what federal agencies are doing in terms of testing on dogs and other animals. I look forward to collaborating with a bipartisan group of my colleagues in Congress to address this problem.”

Throughout the Trump years, The Post continued to report on the group's work in flattering ways, always emphasizing its purely non-partisan agenda and their ability to bring together left and right. Though The Post once referred to them as “a right-leaning advocacy group,” White Coat has been described by the paper for years as an animal rights group uniting all camps by combating the use of taxpayer dollars for experiments most would find morally reprehensible. After all, during the Trump years, they were protesting experimentations done by agencies controlled by the Trump administration, so heralding their work aligned perfectly with The Post's political agenda of flattering the views of their liberal readers.

One 2018 Post article on White Coat described how “a nonprofit animal rights organization filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against the U.S. Agriculture Department, seeking information about experiments during which thousands of cats have been euthanized at a facility in Maryland.” A 2020 Post article described White Coat as “a small watchdog group that has generated bipartisan congressional opposition to [the Veteran Administration's] dog research by arguing that federal animal testing is a waste of taxpayer dollars.” A 2018 Post article on a similar campaign simply described it as “an animal rights group.” A 2017 Post article described White Coat's success in recruiting renowned British primatologist Jane Goodall to the cause of stopping cruel FDA experiments on primates, calling it “an advocacy group that says its goal is to publicize and end taxpayer-funded animal experiments.”

So The Post, like most major media outlets, has been reporting on the successes of the White Coat Waste Project fairly and favorably for years. Most people in Washington and in the media regard success in bridging divisions between the citizenry and ideological camps as a desirable and positive objective, and few groups have done that with as much success as White Coat. And thus, along with trans-ideological public support, the group has been lavished with positive media coverage — until now.

---

Now everything has changed. The government official who oversees the agencies conducting most of these gruesome experiments has become a liberal icon and one of the most sacred and protected figures in modern American political history: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Biden's Chief Medical Advisor. Many of the most horrific experiments, including the ones on dogs and puppies now in the news as a result of White Coat's activism, are conducted by agencies under Fauci's command and are funded by budgets he controls.

In other words, White Coat's activism, which had long generated bipartisan support and favorable media coverage, now reflects poorly on Dr. Fauci. And as a result, The Washington Post has decided to amass a team of reporters to attack the group — the same one the paper repeatedly praised prior to the COVID pandemic — in order to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group motivated not by a genuine concern for the welfare of animals or wasteful government spending, but rather due to a partisan desire, based in MAGA ideology, to attack Fauci.

In emails sent last week to the group, Post reporter Beth Reinhard advised them that she wanted “to talk about White Coat Waste and the #beaglegate campaign.” She specifically asked for a wide range of financial documents relating to the group's funding — far beyond what non-profit advocacy groups typically disclose. “May I request your 2020 filing with the IRS,” Reinhard first inquired. White Coat quickly provided that. On October 30, White Coat Vice President Justin Goodman provided even more financial documents — “attached are the Schedule Bs. I’ve also attached a breakdown of our funding sources from 2017-Q3 2021,” he wrote in an email to Reinhard — yet nothing satisfied her, because nothing in these documents was remotely incriminating or helpful to the narrative they were trying to concoct about the group's real, secret agenda.

After White Coat voluntarily provided more and more detailed documentation about its finances, it became obvious what fictitious storyline The Post was attempting to manufacture: that this is a far-right group that is funded by "dark money” from big MAGA donors, motivated by a hatred of science and Dr. Fauci. But in trying to manufacture this false tale, The Post encountered a rather significant obstacle: White Coat is funded almost entirely by small donors, grass-roots citizens who use the group's website to make donations.

Once The Post was repeatedly thwarted in its efforts to concoct the lie that the group is MAGA-funded, Reinhard continued to insist that there must be hidden right-wing funding sources, and even began demanding that White Coat take some sort of bizarre vow never to accept right-wing or "pro-Trump" funding sources in the future. On Monday, she sent them this flailing email:

In response, Goodman — who, prior to joining White Coat, had spent close to a decade as PETA's Director of Laboratory Investigations — pointed out the obvious: “We already have disclosed our largest donor, which is the grassroots, and it's been our largest funder for many years in Democrat and GOP Administrations.” He added: “we have not turned down, solicited or received a dime from any Pro-Trump or conservative groups, nor have any approached us before or during #BeagleGate.” While noting that “some of our other larger supporters, like LUSH Cosmetics, are already public,” Goodman detailed that little has changed in terms of fundraising as a result of this recent campaign targeting cruel experimentations on beagles: “Regarding fundraising, we estimate that Aug-Sep 2021 is approximately 31% lower than the prior period during 2020. And we estimate (and I stress estimate) that fundraising in October 2021 was approximately the same as Sept 2021, give or take."

Documents provided by White Coat both to me and The Post demonstrated that the group's average donation in 2020 was $30.47, obtained by 81,805 individual donations (that includes all donations, including from groups). The group took no PPP bailout funds, and received, in its words, “$0 gifts from conservative aligned groups ever.” The spreadsheet they prepared shows estimated and approximate totals for 2021 along with detailed funding sources for the prior two years:

Funding sources of White Coat Waste Project, 2019-2021, prepared by the group

What is going on here is almost too self-evident to require elaboration. For years, The Post favorably covered the animal welfare work of this group without even remotely suggesting it had some nefarious ideological agenda, let alone investigating its finances. Only one thing has changed: their work in highlighting gruesome dog experimentations now has the possibility of undermining Dr. Fauci or harming his reputation, and thus The Post — acting like the pro-DNC liberal advocacy group that it is — set out to smear White Coat as right-wing MAGA activists in order to delegitimize and discredit their investigative work and, more importantly, give liberals a quick-and-easy way to dismiss their work as nothing more than an anti-science MAGA operation even though they are nothing of the sort.

Even more disturbing was the telephone call which Goodman had on Monday with Reinhard and another Post reporter, Yasmeen Abutaleb, assigned to the health and COVID beat. During that call, Abutaleb in particular repeatedly demanded to know whether White Coat was concerned that the activism they were doing on these dog experimentation programs could end up harming Dr. Fauci's reputation and thus make him less able to manage the COVID crisis. They even suggested that by encouraging people to call the NIH telephone lines to protest this experimentation, they might be making it difficult for people with questions about COVID to get through. The obvious premise of the entire conversation was one completely antithetical to the journalistic ethos: it is immoral to do anything that reflects negatively on Dr. Fauci now, no matter how true or warranted it might be, because his importance is too great to risk undermining him. (Request for comment from Reinhard was not responded to as of publication of this article, but will be added if supplied).

In general, as this controversy has unfolded, media outlets have expressed almost no interest in the immorality and atrocities of these taxpayer-funded dog experimentations, and instead have acted as political activists with only one goal: protect Dr. Fauci. PolitiFact, for instance, purported to fact-check White Coat's campaign (laughably calling them “a conservative watchdog group”) by implying they were lying. Aside from citing (but not verifying) NIAID’s denial that they funded one of the experiments, they acknowledged that they did indeed fund others, but then pointed out that nobody could prove that Fauci personally approved the funding for these experiments. Yet that is a claim White Coat has never made and which, in any event, is as unlikely as it is irrelevant given that, for thirty years, Fauci has been the head of the agencies conducting these experiments which have long been the target of activist protest. It is simply impossible that he was unaware of these controversies.

After speaking with the two Post reporters, Goodman told me that “it’s clear based on my conversations with them that rather than investigating the horrific puppy experimentation being funded with our tax dollars by Anthony Fauci — about which they have asked virtually nothing — they are instead interested in attempting to discredit our organization and #BeagleGate campaign in order to run defense for Fauci.” He also described the sudden change in The Post's behavior in reporting on them: “in just five 5 years, the paper went from featuring our group as a model of bipartisanship in the animal protection movement and highlighting our winning campaigns to end taxpayer-funded animal testing to now trying to smear us a conservative front group that doesn’t really care about animals, all because we dared to criticize St. Fauci.”

Bellotti described The Post's sudden turnaround this way:

Having personally witnessed the horrors of animal testing, I founded [White Coat] to unite liberty-lovers and animal-lovers, Republicans and Democrats, Libertarians and vegetarians to fight against wasteful taxpayer-funded animal experiments. Widening the tent is how you win campaigns, and we’ve done this more effectively than any other organization, resulting in historic wins for animals, from shutting down the government’s largest cat experimentation lab to freeing monkeys from federal nicotine addiction experiments to bringing dog testing at the VA to record lows. This has all been done on a shoestring budget with overwhelming support from grassroots advocates and donors. Apparently for some though, disparaging Anthony Fauci for funding the abuse of puppies is a bridge too far. But, to suggest that we’re out to accomplish anything other the save animals from wasteful government spending and abuse is simply not true nor supported by any actual evidence.

Newspapers like The Post vehemently deny that they have any political agenda, insisting that they are devoted to non-partisan and apolitical reporting. Very few people believe this fraud any longer, which is why trust in journalism has collapsed so precipitously, but rarely do we see a test case that so vividly illustrates how they really function.

For years, The Washington Post reported fairly and truthfully on this group, because none of its activities threatened any government officials whom the paper wishes to protect. Suddenly, when the work they have been doing for years began to reflect poorly on a government official vital to American liberalism, The Post launched a campaign that is not even thinly disguised but nakedly clear in its goal: to smear this group by impugning its motives and distorting its agenda so that its work is immediately and uncritically disregarded by the paper's overwhelmingly liberal audience.

[DKW 86 7,440]

Watch the video at the end and defend what is going on there and how the Washington Post is about to smear the people trying to shut it down.

[CoffeeTiger 5,179]

So where is this hit piece though? This is just an article about a few emails the group got from a Washington Post reporter. That doesn't mean a "hit piece" is coming. 

And what Greenwald doesn't mention in this article is that this White coat Project is directly pushing a  anti-Fauci campaign. Their Twitter accounts main picture Says "STOP FAUCI's DOG EXPERIMENTS", and their account is just dozens of retweets and stories from almost exclusivly Conservative and Republican websites about how evil Fauci is. The current campaign they are running is obviously trying to connect Fauci to the experiments directly and accuse him as being the primary figure behind them, even though White Coat admits they don't have any proof that Fauci is in charge of any of it. Using his name does get a lot of Republican media attention though.

I think it's fair for the Post or any journalist to wonder why they all of a sudden are specifically targeting Fauci for this campaign. 

Honestly, White coat seems like another crazy PETA type offshoot. Animal experimentation is unfortunately a necessary reality in Medicine and science. 

Edited November 3, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[DKW 86 7,440]

Funny, but when people publicize things, they dont happen. Amazing...

[jj3jordan 2,061]

On 11/3/2021 at 2:12 PM, CoffeeTiger said:

So where is this hit piece though? This is just an article about a few emails the group got from a Washington Post reporter. That doesn't mean a "hit piece" is coming. 

And what Greenwald doesn't mention in this article is that this White coat Project is directly pushing a  anti-Fauci campaign. Their Twitter accounts main picture Says "STOP FAUCI's DOG EXPERIMENTS", and their account is just dozens of retweets and stories from almost exclusivly Conservative and Republican websites about how evil Fauci is. The current campaign they are running is obviously trying to connect Fauci to the experiments directly and accuse him as being the primary figure behind them, even though White Coat admits they don't have any proof that Fauci is in charge of any of it. Using his name does get a lot of Republican media attention though.

I think it's fair for the Post or any journalist to wonder why they all of a sudden are specifically targeting Fauci for this campaign. 

Honestly, White coat seems like another crazy PETA type offshoot. Animal experimentation is unfortunately a necessary reality in Medicine and science. 

So NOW you are worried about fair reporting?

[AU9377 5,038]

The degree to which some people will go to take shots at Fauci is what is unbelievable.  The man has contributed an enormous amount of knowledge toward the control and eradication of many infectious diseases.  Had he wanted to simply make money, he could have been making hundreds of millions decades ago working for his pick of pharmaceutical giants.  He was admired around the world until he dare to disagree with Trumptard Nation.  Thereafter he has been demonized to the degree that he now requires secret service protection.  That is a sad commentary on who we are as a nation.

[CoffeeTiger 5,179]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/11/19/fauci-beagle-white-coat-waste/

Here's your "hit piece"

Turns out the White Waste project was basing its worst accusations against Fauci on a animal study from Tunisia that incorrectly listed the NIH as a source of funding. In late October the journal cited by the White Waste issued a correction saying that the NIAID was incorrectly listed and did not provide funding for the study and was removed from the study. White Waste says they don't believe the Journal and will continue to use the study as an Anti-Fauci attack advertisement. 

The rest of the article is a much more detailed article basically retelling what I said in my original post on here: that the group is using Conservative anti-vaccine and anti-fauci sentiment as a vehicle to drive this story and now other animal rights groups like PETA are latching on to it, and are now even getting interviews on fox News to attack Fauci and call for his resignation. 

 

A big nothing burger from White Waste and Greenwald here IMO. The Right Wing entertainment Ecosystem will forget about them and toss them aside in a short while after their audience starts getting bored of this story. 

"

Anthony S. Fauci was swamped by so many angry messages and threats that in late October his assistant quit answering the phone for two weeks. The U.S. covid chief got 3,600 phone calls in 36 hours, just as he and other Biden administration officials were preparing for the campaign to vaccinate young children.

 

Much of the onslaught stemmed from a viral and false claim that the agency Fauci leads, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had funded a medical experiment in which beagles were trapped in mesh cages filled with diseased sand flies, according to four National Institutes of Health officials familiar with the calls. The outrage was supercharged by a bipartisan letter signed by 24 members of Congress that questioned the agency’s funding of medical research on dogs.

“You worthless piece of s---, you should be put in prison. Torturing animals!” said a caller in one of 15 voice mails obtained by The Washington Post. “I’d like to take you out in the sand, tie you down, put them fleas all over your a--.”

“The constant harassment in the form of ridiculous accusations and outright lies makes doing my job and that of my staff of fighting the covid-19 pandemic all the more difficult,” Fauci, who also serves as President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview with The Post. “This attack on me, which clearly has political overtones to a nonpolitical scientist, I feel, is dangerous to the entire field of science and [shows] how people try to intimidate scientists.”

The wave of anger grew out of a campaign by a little-known animal rights group called the White Coat Waste Project, which leveraged existing hostility among conservatives toward Fauci to further its cause, a Post review found. White Coat Waste has only a small fraction of the budget of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the nation’s most prominent animal-research opponent, but the group’s message was amplified by a right-wing echo chamber eager to thrash Fauci over everything from vaccine directives to NIH funding of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in the Chinese city where the pandemic began.

 

 

White Coat Waste was well positioned to stir conservative opposition to the trapped-beagle study, and to bring attention to five experiments that were funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, some of which resulted in the animals being euthanized. The group’s founder and president is a seasoned Republican operative, and most board members and some top staffers have worked for Republican members of Congress or GOP-leaning organizations.

The false claim about the funding for the beagle study, research that was conducted in Tunisia, originated with an error by scientists. Initially, the researchers mistakenly listed NIAID as a funder when they published a paper in a scientific journal in late July. The journal issued a correction Oct. 26, when the agency flagged the mistake to the researchers amid the deluge of angry phone calls.

 

But by Oct. 28, “Fauci’’ and “puppies” had been posted online, shared or responded to 375,000 times in five days, resulting in potentially billions of views, according to Jeff Yang, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a California-based nonprofit, who studies the flow of information online. Donald Trump Jr. was selling “Fauci Kills Puppies” T-shirts and hoodies. #FauciLiedDogsDied was trending on Twitter. Far-right platforms such as 8kun were awash in memes casting Fauci as a mad, puppy-killing scientist.

 

 

As the attacks escalated, White Coat Waste issued a statement saying that it focuses exclusively on animal research and does not take a stand on any of Fauci’s policies regarding the pandemic. “To be clear: it is 100% possible to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ with Dr. Fauci on most public policies and issues,” the group said in a statement, “but go ‘toe to toe’ with him on the issue of beagle experiments.”

By the time the statement came out, the ugly memes about Fauci had spread far and wide.

“He’s been turned into this supervillain, a caricature of a mad scientist cooking up experiments to torture puppies, and it’s kind of mind-bending,” said Yang. “The Fauci-puppies meme has become a phenomenon.”

 

Fueling much of the chatter was a heart-rending image of two beagles, their heads trapped in sand-fly-infested netting — a photo that White Coat Waste began using over the summer and has continued to use to attack Fauci in fundraising appeals even after the scientists and the journal said NIAID did not fund that study.

But in the voice mails reviewed by The Post, several callers link the allegations about NIAID-funded animal experiments with Fauci’s management of the pandemic.

“When you take those little beagle puppies and you torment them and treat them like they’re trash, we’re not putting up with it,” one caller said. “I wouldn’t take this vaccine from that man for nothing after I saw this.”

Said another: “You have killed billions of people, and now you’re killing animals. Your sick treatment of those beagles, you need to be dealt with.”

 

Several callers specifically referred to the trapped-beagles study NIAID did not fund.

 

Most of the voice mails were referred to Fauci’s security team because of hostile or threatening language, according to one of the NIH officials, and those were not among the messages The Post was able to review. The official declined to say how many were then referred to police. NIAID eventually gave security direct access to the voice mail system, the official said.

...

Edited November 19, 2021 by CoffeeTiger

[homersapien 11,447]

I'll be sure to listen in on our local MAGA radio.  No doubt they will spend as many hours correcting their broadcasts as they did ranting for hours about Fauci torturing animals.

Edited November 19, 2021 by homersapien