WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2026
Compagno does it again: In our view, Emily Compagno belongs on major "cable news" shows the way a flounder belongs on a bicycle.
That doesn't mean that she's a bad person. By normal standards, the vast majority of people, ourselves included, would be un- or under-qualified for the prominent role afforded to Compagno by the gruesome corporate tools who run the Fox News Channel.
Having said that, whatever! Last night, there the reliable firebrand sat, part of the stunningly undistinguished panel which had been assembled for the Gutfeld! show.
(For the record, Gutfeld! isn't a "late-night comedy show," as the channel likes to pretend. It's a propaganda messaging program which airs in classic primetime slots—at 10 p.m. in the East, at 9 o'clock in the Central time zone, at 7 p.m. on the coast.)
Last night, the usual collection of droogs had been assembled to pretend to discuss news topics—and before long, there she went again! During the program's second segment, Compagno piped up with this outburst—with an outburst we'll explain below.
She spoke with guest host Tom Shillue:
SHILLUE (8/18/26): Has the corner finally turned on Fauci?
COMPAGNO: I mean, it must have. Look, when I first saw this—
First of all, none of us are surprised, and we've been covering it here—the abject fraud and corruption that that horrific shell of a human Fauci was wielding during Covid to really destroy our lives and lose lives.
As you can see if you click that link, she ranted on, in this dangerous way, as she routinely does, attacking "that horrific shell of a human."
According to Compagno, Dr. Fauci had been wielding power during Covid "to destroy our lives." Given the world we're all living in, that of course is dangerous talk.
For the record, we don't doubt Compagno's sincerity for a moment. Here's what she was talking about:
Last week, Terry Moran described a report about the possible origin of Covid which he said he once prepared for ABC News. As Mediaite reports, Moran said this, along the way, about his own personal conclusion:
Terry Moran Says ABC Gutted His Covid Lab Leak Investigation...
[...]
Moran pitched the story to Nightline, which producers accepted enthusiastically, and said the resulting investigation included interviews with molecular virologists and former Trump administration officials. He also claimed the reporting “broke a little news” that the Wuhan lab had received funding from the Chinese military, citing information from a U.S. intelligence source.
Moran said his reporting left him personally believing a natural origin was “probably a little bit more likely,” while adding that he would not have been surprised if the virus had escaped from a laboratory.
“But I didn’t reach that conclusion. I just laid it out,” he said.
Maybe a lab leak, more probably not. That was Moran's impression at the time.
Needless to say, that part of Moran's recollection wasn't mentioned by Compagno or by anyone else last night. On the Gutfeld! program, the Covid virus will only be said to have come from the lab. Gutfeld! viewers are constantly told that everybody "knows" that.
According to Moran, he created this report for Nightline in early 2021. On the very day it was slated to air, the report was heavily edited—was made "incomprehensible," Moran says—by ABC's lawyers and standards officials.
Moran said he was told that the lawyers and standards officials had run the original transcript by Dr. Fauci. He stressed the fact that he doesn't know that for a fact.
At this site, we're not sure why the network officials wouldn't have done that. Moran isn't sure that they did.
Moran didn't like the "incomprehensible" finished product. His judgment may have been good. But that podcast presentation by Moran formed the basis for the second segment of last night's Gutfeld! program. In the first segment, the obedient panelists wasted everyone's time pretending to discuss the latest pointless remarks by the irrelevant Hunter Biden, who's easy for MAGA to mock.
With respect to Dr. Fauci, Compagno engaged in her typical dangerous talk. These were the mutts on hand as she sounded off:
Gutfeld!: Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Rob O'Neill: Former member, Seal Team Six
Kat Timpf: Comedian
Tom Shillue: Guest host, comedian
Emily Compagno: Co-host, Outnumbered
Rich Vos: Comedian
We ourselves know Rich from long ago. We think of him as a very good guy—a very good guy who has no earthly business being on a major "cable news" program, pretending to discuss major, life-and-death topics.
As for the ongoing attacks on Dr. Fauci manufactured by mutts like these, we direct your attention to the following recent articles:
On August 16, print editions of the New York Times contained the following article. Online, the article was published three days earlier:
Trump Officials Falsely Connect Covid Vaccines to Miscarriage
Trump administration officials and other prominent Republicans falsely suggested this week that Covid-19 vaccines were linked to miscarriage, seizing misleadingly on old text messages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s that were recently released by Republican senators.
In January 2021, when Covid vaccines had just been released, Dr. Fauci and other Biden administration officials discussed the limitations of the data then available about vaccination during pregnancy, as well as the theoretical risks for pregnant women based on information available at the time. Since then, studies of hundreds of thousands of women have shown that Covid vaccination is not linked to an increased risk of miscarriage, stillbirth or preterm birth.
While those specific conversations were not public, health officials did not hide the uncertainty in early 2021. There was limited data because of a longstanding practice of excluding pregnant women from clinical trials. What was known then was based on women who happened to become pregnant while enrolled in a vaccine trial and on animal testing.
But pregnant women were becoming critically ill and dying from Covid infections, so the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that they talk to their doctors about vaccination, weighing the known risks of Covid itself—which, along with severe illness and death, included miscarriage and stillbirth—and the vaccine safety data that existed.
The report continued from there. This is not the topic which Moran discussed, but it was an examination of the misrepresentations which have continued to emerge from within the MAGA world—and from the profoundly irresponsible if well-intentioned Compagno.
On August 15, The Atlantic published a lengthy, nuanced report about the irresponsible MAGA behavior. We won't attempt to walk you through the whole thing, but Daniel Engber's lengthy report started like this:
Anthony Fauci’s Group Chat Is Making People Lose Their Minds
...Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable. In the meantime, though, Johnson has shared just a single set of texts: a Fauci group chat that he considered so explosive in its implications that it had to be released forthwith. “This is a blockbuster revelation,” the senator said on Tuesday. The public had to know.
The texts in question were from a short exchange that Fauci had with two other public-health officials—former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky—in January 2021. Murthy had asked whether either of them knew of “any data or theoretical reason” why an expectant mother might choose to vaccinate early versus late in pregnancy. Walensky answered no, that this was all “data free.”
Fauci agreed, but a couple of hours later, he followed up. After asking around, he’d heard about a theoretical concern: A second dose of the vaccine could lead to fever and cytokine storm—an overactivation of the immune system, also linked to COVID itself—which in turn might lead to early-term miscarriage. In an interview that Fauci gave just one week later, he alluded to the need for balanced thinking on vaccination during pregnancy, given the lack of clinical-trial data. But he noted that thousands of expectant mothers had already gotten shots by then, and no issues had arisen. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said, but “I would rather take my chances with a vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant.”
Fauci’s critics now assert that this was tantamount to murder. Fauci knew that COVID shots were killing babies, they argue—he said so in a private text—and then he went out and pretended that the shots were safe. Representative Anna Paulina Luna called this “a crime against humanity and the most evil thing that could’ve ever been done.” Meghan McCain demanded that the 85-year-old be handcuffed, perp-walked, and put in a jail cell for the rest of his life. (“This is not hyperbole,” she noted, rather unconvincingly.) Senator Roger Marshall called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the matter—either that, he said, or “a full 9/11-style commission.”
...In fact, the new material is unremarkable, unrevealing, and—worst of all—maddeningly irrelevant to the many, far more interesting questions that still surround one of our most important public-health leader’s behavior and decision making during the pandemic...
And so on, at length, from there. Crazy accusation is easy. Establishing facts is hard.
(For additional Republican bungling, click here.)
As Mark Twain once never said, accusations of murder get halfway around the world before nuanced assessment can get its boots on. And then, up will jump the well-intentioned Compagno with her latest irresponsible language, toying with life and death on a mutt-rich national stage.
Our own Blue American journalists refuse to discuss the conduct of this "cable news channel." All too plainly, any society which functions this way has already become a failed state.
Tomorrow: Woke/Not Especially Fruitful
