Angelo Codevilla, who passed away at 78 on September 21, was a man of “remarkable intellect and insights,” on full display over a long and productive career. For his many readers, and those who didn’t know him at all, the brilliant scholar might have saved the best for last.
Born on May 25, 1943, in Voghera, Italy, Angelo Codevilla came to the United States in 1955 and became a U.S. citizen in 1962. The eager immigrant earned degrees at Rutgers, Notre Dame and Claremont Graduate School. Codevilla taught at Georgetown, Stanford and Boston University, but he was much more than an academic. Codevilla served in the U.S. Navy, as a foreign service officer, and a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Community.
A keen student of Machiavelli, Codevilla found the so-called “intelligence community” inept and ineffective. Codevilla was also a critic of the “war on terror,” as conducted by the administration of George W. Bush. The purpose of war, as one of Codevilla’s books explained, was To Make and Keep Peace. By disregarding that principle, the author argued, Bush left the nation in even greater peril. See Codevilla’s “Epitaph for the War On Terror,” published on September 14, days before the car accident that claimed his life.
Codevilla authored the highly regarded The Character of Nations but the book that gained the most acclaim was his shortest. Back in 2010, Codevilla wrote an essay on “America’s Ruling Class” that so impressed Rush Limbaugh that the conservative radio host read it on the air. Codevilla duly expanded the essay into The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It, with an introduction by Limbaugh. As Codevilla kept careful watch, the ruling class morphed into an all-out oligarchy.
“The exercise of coercive powers by and for self-selected elites who claim to know better and who validate one another is the very negation of the constitutional republic within which Americans have lived since 1776,” Codevilla explained last May. “It is oligarchy.” In 2020, as the oligarchy mounted a surge against the “country class” – the American people – Codevilla’s intelligence experience in served him well.
With the pandemic in play, the face of the oligarchy was White House medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci. The establishment media billed Fauci as the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert but for Codevilla Fauci was a “deep state fraud.” Though fully accurate, that description was actually on the kind side.
Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 and in 1968, to avoid treating wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, Fauci became a “yellow beret” with the National Institutes of Health. In 1984, Fauci became head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a post for which he was unqualified, according to Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction. True to form, Fauci’s bio includes no advanced degrees in microbiology or molecular biology.
As Peter Duesberg noted in Inventing the AIDS Virus, Fauci used the power of his office to cancel those who challenged the government narrative. Fauci’s prediction that AIDS would ravage the populace was hopelessly wrong, yet he remained on the job.
Codevilla knew Fauci was a fraud “after listening to him for about 10 seconds” on the origin of the pandemic. Dr. Fauci had funded Communist China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology through NIAID. Fauci “knew a lot” but remained evasive.
As Codevilla observed, Fauci acted “as a politicized, partisan bureaucrat while pretending to be the disinterested authority of physicians and scientists.” Fauci reversed himself on many aspects of the pandemic and dismissed hydroxychloroquine even as peer-reviewed studies confirmed its usefulness.
“This is not how scientists behave,” Codevilla wrote. “Fauci, unfortunately, behaves as an ordinary creature of the Washington swamp.” Few politicians or journalists were capable of such candor, but it wasn’t just name-calling.
As Codevilla broke it down, Fauci was treating COVID-19 as the plague and his “pseudo-medical, pseudo-scientific pretense is the foremost pillar of that lie.” Contrary to Fauci’s prophecies, based on computer models, Codevilla compared the infection/fatality rates of actual plagues and found that COVID-19’s IFR was “roughly that of the flu.” The most important fact about COVID-19 was the true mortality rate, the number who die of the virus divided by the number infected by it. Dr. Fauci avoided that simple arithmetic.
In “Doctors, Doctored Numbers and Democracy,” Codevilla showed how changing definitions of the term “case” made it possible “to substitute the Oligarchy’s agenda for COVID’s reality in the minds of Americans.” For months, Fauci and company “messed up millions of lives and commandeered trillions of dollars while scaring the hell out of people and watching curves based on meaningless numbers.”
“Who the hell do they think they are?” Codevilla wondered. “We belong to ourselves, not to them.”
Rest in peace, Angelo Codevilla, and thanks for leaving the key by the back door. The American people must know their rights, recognize the foes of freedom, and call out the ruling-class frauds for what they are.
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