The staff at this site nearly began this article with the requisite humor regarding the utter hopelessness of the modern Republican movement. But as one sees videos of parents carrying bloody children in the streets, and civilian apartments blown away without any military purpose, killing just to kill, there is nothing funny about lumping Fauci with Putin.

But some MAGAs are making a direct comparison between the two. From Rolling Stone:

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) is concerned. Innocent people are dying needlessly. A tyrannical government has grossly overstepped its bounds. Freedom and democracy are under attack — and it’s all Dr. Anthony Fauci’s fault.

In an appearance on Fox News Friday evening, the Texas Congressman and outspoken anti-vaxxer used his platform not to decry Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but instead to continue peddling his wild conspiracy theory that the government is failing to report deaths caused by the Covid-19 vaccine.

We believed that this quote stood out as even more offensive:

Chip Roy: As we are looking at what’s happening in Ukraine… we’re looking at that and we’re talking about war crimes, I want to talk about the crimes against humanity that has been perpetrated by Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and the federal government against the American people.

Okay, let’s talk about it.  The CDC hasn’t been perfect, not even close. But they’ve been pretty good and that is how science works. When a new virus arrives on the scene, one studies it the best one can but there is no predicting how it will mutate (argument for evolution in disguise.)

But we suspect that Roy is referencing the unproven genetic uplifting theory, in which Fauci supposedly worked alongside the Chinese on this particular virus, a non-fact that, like all not facts, will forever remain unproven.

As just one researcher put it in March of 2021:

The evidence for that pathway is that the market in Wuhan, the Huanan seafood market, was selling live animals and frozen mammals. And so there’s a pathway there. There are animals that we know can carry coronaviruses in the market.

The MAGAs reject it in part because they have a natural tendency to reject science (except when they have cancer). Second, they need to be able to blame the Chinese for such a horrendous mistake, and last, they see Fauci as a Democrat.

But what they don’t see are all the people in Ukraine dead, not because of a fluke of nature or a serious mistake at a lab, but from the direct orders of one man. Preposterous.

Chip Roy: As we are looking at what’s happening in Ukraine… we’re looking at that and we’re talking about war crimes, I want to talk about the crimes against humanity that has been perpetrated by Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and the federal government against the American people pic.twitter.com/7zjmlnlie2

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 5, 2022

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[email protected] with Nicole Hickman