Governor Gavin Newsom’s November 10 executive order extends California’s state of emergency until the end of March 2022, as Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, making the “emergency” effective for a total of more than two years. “Winter is coming, winter is here,” Newsom told a California Forward conference in Monterey, “COVID is not taking the winter off.”

Newsom told the conference the winter surge is his “biggest anxiety” and that other states, like countries with colder weather, are already in trouble. Embattled Americans have good cause to wonder about that.

According to a National Institutes of Health study on seasonality, COVID-19 can be “influenced by a variation of environmental factors” but “its underlying mechanism in the current and onward transmission pattern remains unclear owing to the limited data and difficulties in separating the impacts of social distancing.”

“Unclear” is hardly the basis for dogmatism on seasonality, and on health issues the governor is not exactly convincing.

After getting his booster shot in late October, Newsom went missing. Days before his prophecy of a winter surge, he attended the wedding of Ivy Getty, with scores of unmasked guests at San Francisco Hall, a facility local residents are encouraged to interact with only remotely. Under Newsom, a Jerry Brown crony backed by a “coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families,” the ruling class holds special privileges.

On November 15 in Santa Clara, the San Francisco 49ers crushed the Los Angeles Rams 31-10. In Levi’s Stadium, which can hold 70,000 spectators, few empty seats or masked faces were evident. Governor Newsom has not clarified whether such events will contribute to the winter surge. His attendance at the massive wedding, and his unmasked caper at the upscale French Laundry last year hardly motivate Californians to take the governor seriously.

That also applies to White House advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984. In 2020, Fauci predicted a “surge upon a surge” following Thanksgiving. Last month, Fauci said it was “just too soon to tell” whether holiday gatherings should be limited for the second year in a row.

Fauci has reversed himself on many aspects of the pandemic and now claims that his critics are actually attacking science itself when they come after him. If that is not megalomania it’s hard to know what to call it. The late Angelo Codevilla quickly pegged Fauci as a “deep state fraud,” and the NIAID boss, a government bureaucrat since 1968, has been under fire for funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. As that plays out, another doom-and-gloom prophet has picked up the bullhorn.

“We’re going to see a post-holiday spike, there’s no question about that,” said former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) boss Dr. Scott Gottlieb on November 13. In the Great Lakes area, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and other regions, Dr. Gottlieb told reporters, “things are going to get worse before they get better.” Gottlieb, who sits on the board of Pfizer, is a medical doctor but like Fauci his bio shows no advanced degrees in biochemistry or molecular biology, vital sciences for anyone in the field of virology.

“White Coat Supremacy,” by contrast, has less to do with medical science than power and control. Under a WCS regime, unelected bureaucrats with shaky credibility override the constitutional rights of the people, such as their freedom of assembly, to name only one.

At the time of holidays the people hold dear, white coat supremacists unleash a surge upon a surge of baleful prophecies. Embattled Americans can be forgiven for having a joyful time at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and if they choose to attend a wedding or sporting event it would be hard to blame them. As for a happy new year, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.