Angelo M. Codevilla, a man of “remarkable intellect and insights,” passed away this month after a long and productive career. In his response to the pandemic, Codevilla might have saved the best for last.

Born in Voghera, Italy, in 1943, Codevilla earned degrees at Rutgers, Notre Dame, and Claremont Graduate School (Ph.D.). Codevilla taught at Georgetown, Stanford, and Boston University, but he was more than an academic. He served in the U.S. Navy, as a foreign service officer, and as a staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

A keen student of Machiavelli, Codevilla was 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, is To Make and Keep Peace. By disregarding that principle, the author argued, Bush left the nation in even greater peril. See “Epitaph for the War on Terror,” published on September 14, days before the car accident that claimed his life.

Codevilla authored a number of books, including the highly regarded The Character of Nations. The book that gained the most acclaim, as it turned out, was his shortest. Codevilla wrote an essay on “America’s Ruling Class” that so impressed radio host Rush Limbaugh that he 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.

In recent years, Codevilla watched as the ruling class morphed into an all-out oligarchy. As he explained last May, “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. It is oligarchy.” Codevilla’s experience with the “Intelligence Community” served him well as the oligarchy deployed against the people.

White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci, a government bureaucrat since 1968, has headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. The establishment media billed Fauci as the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, but for Codevilla, Fauci was a “deep state fraud.”

Codevilla knew that Fauci was a fraud “after listening to him for about 10 seconds” on the origin of the pandemic. Fauci, whose bio includes no advanced degrees in microbiology or molecular biology, had funded the 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.” He 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 if any politicians were capable of such candor, and 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. 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.” In effect, Codevilla left the key at the back door.

Know your rights, recognize the foes of freedom, and never hesitate to call out ruling-class frauds for what they are. That’s how the “country class” can push back.