Just about the time you think there’s no bottom to the lunacy we’re witnessing in our world, straight out of the mouths of institutions that we count on for information, a new contestant emerges. And no, I’m not talking about the socially phobic OCD scab pickers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the United States Department of Health and Human Services pirates who kept toddlers in masks with their recommendations until only a few months ago.

This one’s super-depressing, because these are positions taken by what I’ve considered the most responsible of all our nongovernment organizations (NGOs) — the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. These are the Doomsday Clock folks — the ones who tell us theoretically how close we are to Armageddon. The clock, in the face of the Russo-Ukraine War, has been stuck at something like 100 seconds for a while.

They recently published an article that was supposedly about raising the awareness of the biological weapons threat. Timely, of course. COVID-19 is almost certainly an engineered virus that suffered a lab accident. And we’ve had to live with the chaos of that for the last three years.

The article was about Bio-Safety 3 and Bio-Safety 4 labs. These are the baddies, where if you want to go inside, you get to hop in the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man suit, and have an air tube in your hermetically sealed helmet. The problem, which the piece does discuss, is that these facilities have containment failures. And that’s elite-discourse speech for “superbug headed out the door.”

We all know that bugs/viruses can be bad news. But superbugs are things that humans invent. The fancy term for this is gain of function research. But what they really are are illegal bioweapons. What that means is that scientists in these BSL 3 and 4 labs are weaponizing viruses and making them so they are even more contagious, and can make us sicker.

And one of the biggest proponents and funders of this kind of work is our own evil elf, Tony Fauci. You know — the short little dude who’s a superhero to so many of the mental chihuahuas who like to write screeds about my opinion pieces. If there’s any justice in the world, Little Tony should be in the dock at the Hague for crimes against humanity. But as Clint Eastwood so notably stated — “deservin’s got nothing to do with it.”

Usually an organization like the Bulletin would be all up in Tony’s grill about the fact that we’re seeing a construction wave of BSL 3 and 4 labs, and he’s been writing some of the checks. But instead, we’re treated to lukewarm condemnation of “everyone else,” claiming disinformation while saying our side is noble and pure. It’s utterly mind-boggling, especially from an organization that has been a champion of nuclear disarmament through the decades.

Here’s the real problem. Watchdog organizations are supposed to watchdog. Those of us working in our lives, making a buck, are supposed to be able to throw organizations like this $25 a year and consider that contribution enough that we’ve weighed our conscience and worked to make a difference.

But in the past three years, there’s been a profound collapse of that responsibility among many of my favorite lefty organizations. Instead, I’m seeing courting of power, and fawning at the feet of the elected criminals. Watchdogging is hard work, because power must be held to account.

Why are we here? We’re locked into, as I’ve written before, some belief that all of this left/right stuff is some kind of live-action role-playing game. But tons of this stuff we should share consensus across the political spectrum, and at least realize that it’s real. It’s more than just “play stupid games and win stupid prizes.”

What’s it gonna take? I honestly don’t know. But I guess I’d encourage everyone to review their charitable giving before tax day. Short version — if your organization is always sucking up to the man, they’re not doing their job. The other side isn’t always wrong.

Pezeshki is a professor in mechanical and materials engineering at Washington State University.