thedailybeast | The managing editor of the prominent conservative website RedState has spent months trashing U.S. officials tasked with combating COVID-19, dubbing White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci a “mask nazi,” and intimating that government officials responsible for the pandemic response should be executed.
But
that writer, who goes by the pseudonym “streiff,” isn’t just another
political blogger. The Daily Beast has discovered that he actually works
in the public affairs shop of the very agency that Fauci leads.
William
B. Crews is, by day, a public affairs specialist for the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. But for years he has been
writing for RedState under the streiff pseudonym. And in that capacity
he has been contributing to the very same disinformation campaign that his superiors at the NIAID say is a major challenge to widespread efforts to control a pandemic that has claimed roughly 200,000 U.S. lives.
Under
his pseudonym, Crews has derided his own colleagues as part of a
left-wing anti-Trump conspiracy and vehemently criticized the man who
leads his agency, whom he described as the “attention-grubbing and
media-whoring Anthony Fauci.” He has gone after other public health
officials at the state and federal levels, as well—“the public health
Karenwaffen,'' as he’s called them—over measures such as the closures of
businesses and other public establishments and the promotion of social
distancing and mask-wearing. Those policies, Crews insists, have no
basis in science and are simply surreptitious efforts to usurp
Americans’ rights, destroy the U.S. economy, and damage President Donald
Trump’s reelection effort.
“I think we’re at the point where it
is safe to say that the entire Wuhan virus scare was nothing more or
less than a massive fraud perpetrated upon the American people by
‘experts’ who were determined to fundamentally change the way the
country lives and is organized and governed,” Crews wrote in a June post on RedState.
“If
there were justice,” he added, “we’d send and [sic] few dozen of these
fascists to the gallows and gibbet their tarred bodies in chains until
they fall apart.”
After The Daily Beast brought those and other
quotes from Crews to NIAID’s attention, the agency said in an emailed
statement that Crews would “retire”
from his position. “NIAID first learned of this matter this morning,
and Mr. Crews has informed us of his intention to retire,” the
spokesperson, Kathy Stover, wrote. “We have no further comments on this
as it is a personnel matter.”
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