Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
This video was recorded before Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than answer questions from the Senate Oversight and Homeland Security committees.
This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
By the time you hear this, Anthony Fauci has testified before Rand Paul’s senatorial committee, and he’s going to be extensively cross-examined. Why now? Because Anthony Fauci had come under a lot of controversy for his role as Donald Trump’s unofficial COVID czar between 2020 and ’21, and Joe Biden’s czar from ’21 all the way up to the end of the Biden term, and he had communicated through emails, but he was very careful usually to say, “Erase this email,” or not to be candid.
But for some reason, he kept a diary, and he did so on government files, government property. It was very hard to find. It was on 11 different servers. But Rand Paul’s team compiled some 1,100 pages since 2019, right on the eve of the COVID pandemic, and it is completely at odds with what he was telling you, the public, telling the President of the United States, and telling colleagues in the scientific community.
What does one learn about Anthony Fauci? I must say at the beginning, it is kind of unfair to expose someone’s inner thoughts. I’ve never kept a diary, but I suppose that people who do vent sometimes, they exaggerate, they let off steam, and we don’t know to what effect he was doing that, but we do have an incriminating record written by Fauci himself.
He is a narcissist. While 9,000 to 10,000 people are dying a day, he’s talking about whether he’s going to be eating with Jake Tapper that night. That’s against Fauci’s own rules of social distancing and in-house quarantine. You can’t go out. Remember, you couldn’t go out for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
And like Gavin Newsom and like Nancy Pelosi, we see the architects of these policies. Fauci, in particular, is violating them. But he talks about all the awards he could get, how he could angle to get a million here, five hundred thousand there, what type of exemption he could get, how wonderful he was on CNN or MSNBC, how Trump is impressed by him.
He’s the most important famous man in the nation, maybe the world, on and on and on. It’s just unfiltered egomania unchecked. He’s also unscientific. Remember, he told us that, “I remain the science.” But in his own admission, he calls in 12 expert virologists, and he asks them, given the genetic imprint of the SARS-2 virus, where did this come from?
Because everybody thinks it came from the Wuhan lab. Did it? Ten out of 12 basically said the genetic sequencing is so rare, and it has so many variables that had to be exactly right. It had to be made in the lab.
And he admits this in his diary and then he goes out and for the next two years promulgates this myth that it came from a dead pangolin in a meat market in Wuhan or a bat.
I think the closest bats are 100 miles away, a colony of bats. And so, he knew it was false. So, why did he do it? He did it because, as he had admitted in an earlier email exchange with Francis Collins, he did it because he knew that gain-of-function research was illegal in the United States since 2017. He wanted to conduct that, but he could not.
So, he helped fund, maybe in a symbolic rather than a huge amount of money, he granted through his friend Peter Daszak, the head of EcoHealth, a kind of circuitous route that would be untraceable and help this lab have funding.
But more importantly, many of the people in the lab had been trained in the United States, so he greenlighted the idea that people could communicate freely with them, add expertise, send instrumentation, visit, in what was a very, very dangerous operation to enhance viruses without proper safety considerations and outlawed in the United States.
And that had burst out on the American scene, and he wanted nobody to know that he was involved. It’s clear from the diary, he used the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His own fiefdom wasn’t necessarily designed to be as important as the CDC, FDA, or NIH, but it was because he was an empire builder, and it’s very clear that people who apply and agree with him for multimillion-dollar grants succeed, and those who cross him will not be funded by our federal government and our money.
He knew from the beginning, as he was criticizing Scott Atlas, an adviser on COVID to the White House, Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. [Sunetra] Gupta, other authors of the Great Barrington Doctrine or Manifesto that said that shutting down the economy, shutting down the schools would ruin lives, increase suicide, substance abuse, rob children irreparably of key years of their education, and in a cost-to-benefit analysis, be much more deadly and destructive than the virus itself, which mostly was a danger to people 55 and over.
And he knew that because he said in his diary Scott Atlas was right that the schools are not spreading the virus and need not shut down. He said in his own diary that Scott Atlas did not say let it rip about herd immunity. And yet that’s what he wrote privately, but publicly he was assuring us that you had to have no mask at first, then one, then two.
He was assuring us that if you got vaccinated, you would not be infectious, nor would you be infected. He was infected a few months after he was inoculated, and he didn’t tell us that he had a severe side effect with probably a pulmonary embolism. So, it was not, “I remain the science,” as he assured us. He was one of the most unscientific of all of our bureaucrats.
He was bragging on the scientific method as he was rewarding and punishing critics and admirers. So, how did he get away with this? Who empowered him? Well, the media empowered him. He was an obscure bureaucrat that, from time to time, given his longevity, appeared during the AIDS crisis, the influenza outbreaks, and then he receded back into the obscurity of the bureau.
But this COVID brought him worldwide attention because he weaseled his way into the Trump administration. By the way, he did not like Donald Trump, and he was the toast of the liberal Washington media, and he used that position to really undercut the president. And remember, 2020 was not just the outbreak of the virus, but it was a campaign year, and it became a political manifesto, so to speak.
In other words, Fauci represented the science and Joe Biden and sane, inductive, educated people. And the Fauci critics were conspiratorial, they were yahoos, they were drinking bleach and taking hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. They were nutty. That was the narrative that he helped spread.
But the lessons are the media now has zero credibility.
Not after the Jussie Smollett caper that they ran with. Not after the hands up, don’t shoot caper. Not after the Steele dossier caper. Not after the laptop is a Russian product. Not after the 51 intelligence authorities. And not after the Wuhan bat caper that a bat flew in and was flying around Wuhan. Bottom line, it’s also a morality tale.
It’s right out of Greek tragedy. Sophocles could have done no better than write a tragedy about Anthony Fauci. He did all that he could to become famous, to become rich, to turn his government bureaucratic billet into a fiefdom where all of the scientific community would be scared of what he said because to disagree with him would mean a declination of funding and to be obsequious and a toady would be to have funding lavishly given to you.
And what was the tragic message that Sophocles would have said about Anthony? Everything he did to increase his power and fame and riches ensured his destruction. He was going headlong into destruction because he was hubristic and he ended up completely self-destructive, and he will go down in history as someone who abused his position, lied to the American people, and adopted policies that tragically led to more deaths than were necessary.
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