Politics & Power Quote by Steven Hatfill

“I am extremely proud” is doing heavy defensive work here, less a victory lap than a preemptive strike against suspicion. Steven Hatfill’s statement reads like a credential pinned to a lapel at exactly the moment the wearer knows the room is side-eyeing him. In the early-2000s anthrax panic, “service with the government” wasn’t just resume filler; it was both shield and spotlight. Working in biodefense could certify patriotism while simultaneously making you look like the guy who knows too much.

The phrasing is carefully bureaucratic, almost weaponized in its blandness. “Efforts to help safeguard public health” borrows the language of caregiving, steering attention toward medicine and away from the darker implication: that anyone close to biowarfare research can be imagined as adjacent to biowarfare itself. Then comes the moral clarifier: “offensive biological warfare.” He doesn’t merely oppose “biological warfare,” but the offensive kind, a subtle line that signals technical expertise while insisting on ethical positioning. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of showing your hands.

“Scourge” is the tell: a near-biblical word that inflates the threat and, by extension, the nobility of the work. It invites the public to see him not as a suspect or a lab rat in a media frenzy, but as a sentinel on the frontier of invisible danger.

The subtext is an appeal for narrative control. When facts are uncertain and fear is ambient, identity becomes evidence. Hatfill is trying to lock in the only story he can: patriot, protector, professional - not villain.