How to Destroy a Lesbian Bar

By Helen Lewis

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Way back in the wilds of 2013, I organized an event on feminism at a public venue in London. I was then the online editor of a left-wing magazine, and we had some of the best feminist columnists around. What a chance to show them off! A warm and supportive evening to celebrate a social movement that was then having a resurgence! Can you guess where this is going?!

 

I remembered that event as I read The Boston Globe’s extraordinarily viral account this week of a meltdown at the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The lesbian bar strayed from the path of righteousness—brace yourselves—by announcing late last month that it would go mask-optional on Saturday nights. (“Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months,” the Globe’s Annalisa Quinn notes.) The bar was deluged with complaints that it was engaged in a “mass disabling event” that would kill its patrons, and was “no better than a fascist.” Even worse, some people involved were probably white women. One Instagram user, an artist who goes by Soe Noire, accused the owners of flirting with eugenics and “putting profit over people.”

 

Now, my event didn’t quite generate that level of take-me-to-the-fainting-couch backlash. But we were besieged online by a squadron of nitpickers, who started from the position that they hated the event and worked backwards to find out why. Deviously, I had foiled them by ensuring that the panel was racially mixed, and by including a transgender woman, foreclosing the promising “cis white bitches” line of attack then popular in feminist circles. The hall was wheelchair-accessible and had a hearing loop for deaf attendees, Gaza had not yet emerged as a purity test, and COVID was not even a twinkle in a diseased bat’s eye. Conceding that the event had passed every intersectional test, the detractors fell back on the great constant: capitalism. Although all of the panelists had waived their speaking fee, we were charging £5 (about $6.50) a ticket, to cover the room rental. Was I not aware, one tweeter asked, that £5 was the cost of a meal to a single mother? Checkmate. The crime had been found, and I was guilty of being a privileged idiot, rolling around in my feminist loot like Scrooge McDuck.

 

The event went ahead, but you never knew when one person’s gripe would derail everything; what we had envisioned as a warm, community-focused discussion instead felt like volunteering for a sprint through a minefield. (In the end, none of the haters turned up, and it was a pleasant evening.) This was the moment when I realized that social media had empowered drive-by whinings by sociopaths, and that progressive politics had allowed them to cloak themselves in righteousness. What might once have been recognized as narcissism, jealousy, the result of a personality disorder—or just plain boredom—was now transfigured into “calling out” those who had erred. The people pointing fingers usually did nothing themselves, apart from complaining, which had the happy side effect that they could never be accused of committing an impure act.

 

***

 

My experience pales beside that of Jackie Matellian, the 26-year-old proprietor of the Last Ditch, who, according to the Globe, had run up $50,000 in debt and had been sleeping in her truck as a result of the business’s troubles. She tried to do everything right: The bar was declared to be a safe space for the unhoused, and a no-go zone for police. She and her former co-owners (one of whom uses it/its pronouns) waived the cover charge for anyone who couldn’t pay; more and more patrons took advantage. After the backlash to the change in the mask policy, the bar apologized, explaining that the mask-optional night would help members of the queer community who needed to lip-read. None of this appeased the critics, one of whom felt the bar was insufficiently devoted to “revolutionary praxis,” which is like normal praxis but the discussions you have about it go around and around forever. “How are we supposed to be ‘connected in the revolution’ if we are spreading disease to one another? Nah,” Soe Noire posted.

 

At this point, Matellian should have realized that you can’t negotiate with terrorists, even ones with long COVID. Instead, though, she optimistically subjected herself to a struggle session—sorry, a mediation-and-accountability process—so that everyone could air their grievances.

 

The podcast Blocked and Reported, which broke the story of the Last Ditch earlier this month, obtained audio recordings of this meeting, in which pronoun declarations were required. As Katie Herzog, a co-host of the podcast, observed, the participants included “two people named after plants” (Sage and Moss; a third was named Yams). Those attending on Zoom were relentlessly hostile, demanding to know the mediator’s race and whether they would be institutionalized for disclosing any mental-health conditions to her. One of the Last Ditch volunteers told the meeting that the bar was $3,900 in debt and needed to pay within days, but Soe Noire—a self-declared lesbian using he/him pronouns—changed the subject to how the policy change made him feel unsafe. The Last Ditch had failed to uphold “COVID-cautious principles, anti-racism, or revolution,” Noire said. (Reminder: This is a bar. You know, the place where you go to drink beer.)

 

Most people might be surprised that arguments over masking are still so febrile years after even cautious blue-state schools resumed in-person teaching. But across the United States, some small subcultures live as though it’s still April 2020. That’s because pandemic protections and mitigations quickly became left-coded, to the extent that Donald Trump now has to pretend he didn’t oversee the successful vaccine program. In this context, perma-masking is every bit as much a political symbol as wearing a MAGA hat or a keffiyeh.

 

Anxiety and depression rates spiked during the pandemic, and some vulnerable people have never really recovered from the effects of physical isolation and the sense of oppressive dread they felt during months when thousands of Americans died. On the right, these emotions drive people toward conspiracism about Chinese bioweapons and false flags and “mass formation psychosis,” the idea that gullible populations were hypnotized into accepting shutdown measures. On the left, these anxieties coincide with a political critique—that Americans and their predatory private-health-care system do not care about disabled people. Masking is a visible symbol of resistance to this injustice, as well as a practical measure against the spread of disease. Notably, too, self-reported long COVID is disproportionately high among trans and bi Americans. Unless science uncovers measurable respiratory differences between bisexuals and the rest of the population, one explanation is that more LGBTQ Americans live in social contexts in which vague, unpleasant symptoms such as brain fog are interpreted as long COVID.

 

The political division helps explain why masking is portrayed in certain progressive enclaves as a way of resisting eugenics. But it doesn’t quite explain the boiling fury of the people demanding masks at the Last Ditch. At this point, let me also bring in the word mimophant. This is a term for someone who has the hide of an elephant when criticizing others, but the delicate skin of a mimosa flower when criticized themselves. At the mediation meeting, Soe Noire, who had previously performed at the bar but was otherwise not deeply involved with it, was extremely attentive to his own feelings of pain. He also groused that while other speakers were limited to two minutes apiece, Matellian—who had faced sniping from all sides for more than an hour—chose to “go overtime and cry for three minutes.”

 

Anyone who has spent time in dysfunctional activist spaces will be familiar with this dynamic: The designated target is expected to soak up endless criticism in silence, or even express gratitude for the correction. If the target gets upset, they can be accused of “centering their own pain” at the expense of the marginalized. Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling White Fragility has a whole section about the tendency of certain women to weep in such circumstances, a phenomenon she dismisses as “white tears.” The overall effect of this approach is like when a school bully slams someone into the lockers and then taunts them for crying. Oh, the widdle baby got hurt, did they? This is sadism disguised as activism.

 

The audio reveals that Noire followed up on his complaint by explaining that “as a trans person, there’s a lot of emotional and physical labor that goes into this.” (The physical labor of—whining?) Returning for another meeting would expose Noire to “harm.” In the second round of complaints, Noire demanded a complete change of leadership in the bar’s management team, and concluded: “Pay me.”

 

***

 

What followed my own feminist-event drama was a political education. Gradually, my friendship group began to pass around articles that made sense of the patterns we were seeing. In a 2012 blog post, the writer Matt Bruenig described what he called “purity leftism.” “When purity leftists do actions and organizing, their interest is not in reducing oppression as much as it is in reducing their own participation in it,” he wrote. “Above all else, they want to be able to say that they are not oppressing, not that oppression has ended.” Such people were prone, Bruenig said, to “self-marginalizing lifestyles and costumes.” A year later, he offered another useful phrase: identitarian deference, or the presumption that “privileged individuals should defer to the opinions and views of oppressed individuals.”

 

Since then, I have become alert to all of the red flags of purity leftism: complaints about “white tears,” the sadism of the get-up-so-I-can-hit-you-again tendency, the use of jargon such as praxis while fretting that the conversation is dominated by the privileged, and the hyperbolic assertions of nebulous “harm.” (Rhetorical inflation has gotten so bad that everything is a genocide.)

 

These gambits work because accommodating the oppressed and less fortunate is a social good. Public venues should have wheelchair ramps, and you shouldn’t go to the children’s cancer ward with a terrible head cold. What the purity leftists exploit is a reluctance to say how much accommodation is enough. If masking was desirable at the height of the COVID pandemic, it must still be appropriate now—and anyone who says otherwise doesn’t care about the disabled. If respecting people with gender dysphoria is a sign of tolerance, then no one should question whether calling a human being “it” is reasonable or progressive. Communities that talk like this are very attached to the concept of “mutual aid,” but some people suck up a lot of care and support without ever putting a shift in to help others. Good-natured herbivorous lefties are easy marks for narcissists and mimophants.

 

It’s noteworthy that the Last Ditch meltdown was caused, ultimately, by the pandemic of 2020. The coronavirus and wokeness were two novel pathogens. Our physical immune system didn’t know how to react to COVID, while our social immune system adapted slowly to the speed with which activists organized on social media. Several of the cancellations I covered in that period would not have played out the same way without Slack groups, Zoom meetings, and Twitter threads—forums that allowed bad actors to dominate the discussion, and prevented the broad mass of reasonable people from realizing that they were in the majority. I’ve lost count of the number of times a small clique of whiners so hijacked a left-wing event that the organizers eventually conceded defeat: One fond memory is of the fat-positive club that was forced to apologize for playing the song “Spice Up Your Life” because one of the lyrics refers to a “yellow man in Timbuktu.” The situation at the Last Ditch is very similar. Soe Noire rampaged through Greenfield’s LGBTQ community like a dose of the clap.

 

The most interesting aspect of the Last Ditch saga has been the reaction. The story drove 1,000 subscriptions to the Globe, and generated more traffic than any other article the paper had published this year, according to Semafor’s Max Tani. Even on Bluesky, the spiritual home of perma-masking, the response settled somewhere around “the pandemic broke people’s brains,” with the occasional interjection that queer communities should not air their grievances in public, for the sake of the movement. Soe Noire alone is unrepentant, posting on Instagram that “the antimaskers and randos coming in to give their useless two cents, you might wanna read a book.”

 

In the 13 years since I got mobbed for charging £5 to attend an event, and the six years since the beginning of the pandemic, our social immune system has learned to adapt. Even the 83-year-old Democratic ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro, has been joking online about taking a tour group to the bar. The Last Ditch’s future might be precarious, but so is the future of the social-justice protection racket.

The Last Ditch for Mask Hysteria

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, September 25, 2026

 

Maybe it says something about my excessively bourgeois, disproportionately right-of-center, gay-friendly but mostly not gay social and professional circles, but I haven’t met anybody who didn’t love the Boston Globe piece on the Last Ditch Bar. I’ve barely even seen any criticism of it, and the criticism I have seen has been more like a continuation of the joke. The most forceful condemnation of the Globe piece that I’ve come across was issued by the Western Massachusetts Communist Party USA.

 

Let’s stop right here. I love that there’s a Western Massachusetts Communist Party. It implies the existence of an Eastern Massachusetts Communist Party, and from there the People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front jokes just start tumbling out like patrons leaving the Last Ditch on ladies night. I mean, we all know that those Eastern Massachusetts faux communists lack the revolutionary zeal of the true believers of the Berkshires and Pioneer Valley. When the revolution comes, the Kulaks of Boston and Salem will be the first to be reeducated or liquidated.

 

Fun fact: When I googled “Western Massachusetts,” I got results describing the region. But when you google “Eastern Massachusetts,” the results are just for the whole state of Massachusetts, which any Western Massachusetts Stalinist will tell you is evidence of how the Easterners are in bed with the corporate hegemons, colonizing the whole state with their settler ideology. This will no doubt be part of the indictment when the trials come.

 

The Western Mass Communists objected to the story because it invited “heightened national scrutiny” at a time when the Trump administration and Republican governors are carrying out a “genocide of LGBTQIA+ people.”

 

“The Western Massachusetts CPUSA rejects the use of conflicts among LGBTQIA+ people and organizations as a tool of division by the extreme right,” the statement said. “We reaffirm our solidarity with all those struggling against the genocide of transgender people.”

 

Okay, like whatever. But here’s the thing. Or a thing. Or something. The people profiled in the story aren’t mobilizing and protesting against Donald Trump or Republican governors. They’re tearing down a lesbian bar opened to be a safe haven for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It even welcomes the “poor and unhoused” and serves them for free when necessary. The only condition: You had to wear a KN-95—or higher filtration—mask.

 

Because the bar was struggling financially—who could’ve guessed that serving people for free was not a great business model?—its operators announced, very politely, that they were going to go mask-optional on Saturday nights. A fierce backlash ensued. One patron replied, “I hope you get firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists[sic].”

 

Now, call me a cis-heteronormative, sellout-to-neoliberalism-and-patriarchal-values square, but I kinda think this is overkill.

 

One of the central themes of communist history, and radicalism generally, is the tendency to tear down the groups, institutions, tribes, whatever, closest to you. Who were the first victims of the Jacobin Reign of Terror? Their fellow revolutionaries, the Girondins. Long before the Nazis turned on the Jews, they first turned on the leadership of the SA, aka the Brownshirts. Stalin’s Terror mostly liquidated fellow Communists. In the 1960s, the new left disliked conservatives and Republicans, but they hated liberals and moderate Democrats. The radical jabronis of the new right hate the Reaganites and Bushies, maybe not more than they hate the left, but they dedicate a lot more time and energy to them.

 

I think there’s a lot of this kind of dynamic in the riot of dysfunction chronicled by the Globe. But the more interesting thing to me is how the ideological rhetoric the angry patrons of the Last Ditch deployed is really a mask for something else. For instance, Soe Noire, the stage name of a leading critic of the bar and the head of another “Queer COVID-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts,” hurls all sorts of ideological buzz phrases at the bar’s proprietor during a struggle session. Noire accuses the owner of shedding “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and accuses the Last Ditch of not being “a safe environment nor interested in revolutionary praxis.”

 

If your irreducible requirement for a good bar is that it be dedicated to “revolutionary praxis,” you might end up drinking alone more than you want. That’s late capitalism for you.

 

What I mean by a mask for something else is that the Marxist and Marxish vocabulary is the language the critics have available. I don’t know if this has happened to you, but sometimes when I am in a non-English-speaking country, I will lapse into using whatever tidbits and snippets of any foreign language I do know. I’ve spoken bits of Czech to Germans, slivers of German to Czechs, and chunks of Spanish to French people. Your brain grabs what it can from the lost-and-found box of foreign languages.

 

The language these people have greater fluency in is obviously the subdialect of gender theory. But between the Marxist jargon and the trans terminology, there lies another vocabulary of neuroses, or psychobabble, or hygienic paranoia. It’s a weird dialect or “fusional language” that blends terms like “revolutionary praxis” with racialist identity politics, even a bit of anti-Zionism, and medicalized phobias about contagion. It’s a kind of Yiddish for the immunocompromised, real and, I firmly believe, alleged alike.

 

The COVID-19 epidemic ended years ago. There are vaccines and many treatments for it, but like the famous Japanese soldiers keeping World War II alive in their hearts long after the paperwork was signed on the USS Missouri, the ranks of the traumatized and COVID-neurotic live on, hiding in plain sight from an ended epidemic. The Last Ditch is a kind of Brigadoon for these people.

 

And I have to say, while I think a lot of it is funny, pathetic, and weird, I also find some of it kind of touching. I don’t think these people are living happy and healthy lives. But the Last Ditch was a place for unhappy and unhealthy people to enjoy each other’s company.

 

But I also think there’s something else going on. The tendency of radicals to attack those closest to them gets at it a little. But I think that’s too political. I mean, I doubt many of these self-styled Marxist types could speak for three minutes on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program.

 

I’ve long argued that American or even Western culture is suffering from a kind of autoimmune disease. It’s a cultural and political version of the hygiene hypothesis. Why do so many kids get asthma? One reason is that the environments they grow up in are too clean. Not having enough real allergens to fight, our immune systems become hypersensitive. You know how you can prevent kids from getting peanut allergies? Give them peanut butter when they’re young. Wait too long, and the body overreacts to peanuts. Kids who grow up on farms are much less likely to get asthma, because their bodies learned to deal with dirt and dander from day one. (Alliteration for the win!).

 

America has gotten steadily less racist over the last 70 years. But large chunks of our society, the lymphatic system of the body politic, are more attuned to spotting and combating racism in the nooks and crannies than ever before (this tendency, I believe, has invited an ugly right-wing racist reaction. But that’s a topic for another day). Noire, a lesbian who uses masculine pronouns, is so hypersensitive to racism, he is sure that it’s not only the explanation for the mask-optional policy, but also explains why the apology for the policy was insufficient. “I’m not going to give grace,” he explains, when someone is “spreading rhetoric that will get people hurt.” The evidence of this dangerous rhetoric spreading? The bar’s Instagram account “liked” some of the responses that supported the initial policy announcement. That’s not exactly Bull Connor with a megaphone.

 

This is the problem with our cultural autoimmune disorder. It has a kind of China Syndrome logic to it. People who suffer from it cannot turn it off; they cannot take the win. The meltdown is inexorable, burning through every barrier, every obstacle. Noire’s emotional meltdown acts the same way. He cannot offer “grace” to someone who is losing money on a bar that caters to people like him, because such thinking has no ends—it’s means all the way down. Acid doesn’t say, “I’ve dissolved enough material.” Fire doesn’t declare, “I’ve burned enough of the house.” Water doesn’t decide, “This is a nice spot, I’ll seek my level tomorrow.”

 

We get the term “last ditch” from the military. It appears to have come from William of Orange, the idea being that it’s the last line of defense. To die in the last ditch is to fall in battle because there’s nowhere else to fall back to. To fight to the last ditch, or make a last-ditch effort, is to stand your ground because there’s no other option, save dishonorable surrender. Noire and friends are fine with seeing the Last Ditch go under, even if it might be the last ditch for people like them in Western Massachusetts. Because for them, revolutionary praxis means tearing down anything that is good—on their terms—in the name of the perfect, and the impossible.

We Must Not Let China Plead the Fifth on Covid’s Origin

By Jianli Yang

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

Anthony Fauci was back in the hot seat last week. Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) once again sparred with the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) over the origins of Covid-19, while newly released materials — including Fauci’s personal notes and diary entries made public through congressional investigations — provided fresh fuel for accusations surrounding Fauci’s role in directing the country’s response to the pandemic.

 

I have little interest in the political theater surrounding a renewed Fauci drama. What concerns me is something far more consequential. Covid-19 caused an estimated 28 million excess deaths worldwide, shattered hundreds of millions of lives, and inflicted economic damage measured in the tens of trillions of dollars. Yet more than six years after the pandemic’s onset, remarkably little progress has been made toward discovering the virus’s true origin.

 

That failure should disturb anyone who cares about preventing the next pandemic. Unfortunately, the American debate has been focused on the wrong battles.

 

There are two principal hypotheses regarding the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The first is that the virus emerged naturally and spread naturally into the human population. The second is that it escaped from a laboratory. But even that second hypothesis contains two distinct possibilities that are too often conflated. One possibility is that a naturally occurring virus was being collected, stored, or studied in a laboratory and accidentally escaped. We have historical precedent for this: In 2004, the SARS coronavirus escaped from a laboratory operated by China’s Center for Disease Control in Beijing. The other possibility is that the virus resulted from laboratory manipulation, including gain-of-function (GoF) research, before leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

 

These distinctions matter.

 

Even if scientists eventually establish that SARS-CoV-2 originated in nature, that would not eliminate the possibility of a laboratory accident. A naturally occurring virus can still escape from a laboratory. By contrast, if convincing evidence were ever produced that the virus had been artificially engineered, then laboratory leakage would no longer be merely one possibility — it would become the only plausible explanation, because nature does not manufacture laboratory-designed viruses.

 

This is where the United States enters the story. Did NIAID, under Fauci’s leadership, provide funding through EcoHealth Alliance that ultimately supported gain-of-function-related research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

 

If the answer is yes, and if future evidence were to establish that Covid-19 resulted from an engineered virus leaking from that laboratory, then American institutions — including the National Institutes of Health, NIAID, and their leadership — would inevitably bear part of the responsibility.

 

China’s refusal to cooperate makes it extraordinarily difficult for the United States to determine conclusively whether the virus was engineered in Wuhan. But determining whether American agencies funded or collaborated on research that crossed into gain-of-function territory is largely within America’s own power. Why, after more than six years, does this question remain unresolved?

 

That is precisely the investigation America should have undertaken thoroughly and transparently. Instead, Wednesday’s hearing seemed designed less to resolve these substantive questions than to produce another round of made-for-television partisan combat. If Congress truly wishes to advance the search for Covid’s origins, it should conduct a comprehensive, credible accounting of NIAID’s relationship with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Such an inquiry would not only clarify American accountability; it might also uncover critical evidence pointing toward the pandemic’s true source.

 

More importantly, the United States should be leading an international political and scientific campaign to compel genuine cooperation from Beijing. From the very beginning, the Chinese government violated both the spirit and the obligations of international public-health cooperation. Authorities suppressed whistleblowing doctors, silenced journalists, censored scientists, destroyed or restricted access to early data, refused independent access to crucial records, removed online databases, and tightly controlled every stage of the investigation. Every meaningful inquiry encountered political barriers erected by Beijing.

 

To borrow an American courtroom metaphor (indeed, one that Fauci himself displayed on repeat on Wednesday), Beijing has effectively “pleaded the Fifth” hundreds of times. The irony, of course, is that the Fifth Amendment exists to protect constitutional rights. Beijing has transformed it into a governing philosophy.

 

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the entire Covid-origin investigation is how unserious the international community ultimately became. The so-called joint World Health Organization–China investigation in early 2021 was less an investigation than a carefully choreographed diplomatic performance. Its most memorable conclusion — that transmission through imported frozen food was more likely than a laboratory leak — would have been hilarious had the stakes not involved millions of deaths.

 

The report quickly became a symbol of how political constraints can overwhelm scientific inquiry. At first, governments demanded answers. International organizations raised concerns. Scientists called for transparency. Then, gradually, the voices faded. Congress largely moved on. Successive American administrations shifted priorities. Scientific institutions turned their attention elsewhere. The WHO continued requesting information but lacked meaningful leverage. The United Nations General Assembly, pandemic-related international meetings, the G-7, the G-20, NATO, the European Union, and numerous multilateral forums quietly allowed the issue to drift into the background.

 

It is as though Covid’s origins became the world’s forgotten cold case. One almost gets the impression that the international community collectively granted Beijing the same kind of pardon President Biden granted Anthony Fauci.

 

Still, the most curious question is not whether China obstructed investigations. It clearly did. The real mystery is why so much of the world eventually accepted that obstruction.

 

One overlooked fact deserves greater attention. According to reporting by the Associated Press, Chinese leader Xi Jinping ordered a nationwide scientific mobilization on Covid origins in early January 2020, shortly after the outbreak became apparent. Beijing rapidly directed enormous state resources toward investigating the virus while simultaneously tightening political control over information related to the outbreak. Around the same period, Major General Chen Wei, China’s leading military virologist from the People’s Liberation Army, assumed a central role in Wuhan’s pandemic response and in work involving high-security laboratories.

 

Xi’s urgency was entirely understandable. At that moment, perhaps no one on Earth had a greater incentive to know the truth than China’s supreme leader. Until he understood where the virus came from, Xi could not know whether China faced another biological threat, whether military laboratories had experienced a catastrophic accident, whether local officials had concealed vital information, or whether the political survival of his own government might eventually depend upon the answer. Every day without certainty would have been another day of strategic anxiety.

 

Now more than six years have passed. Given Xi’s extraordinary concentration of power, his obvious motivation to discover the truth, the immense resources of the Chinese state, and China’s world-class capabilities in virology and biotechnology, it strains credulity to believe that he still does not know far more about Covid’s origins than the rest of the world.

 

Knowing the truth, however, is not the same as revealing it. If the truth threatens the stability or legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, concealing that truth becomes a political imperative. If this analysis is correct, then Covid’s origins are no longer merely a scientific question — they are a geopolitical one.

 

If Senator Paul — and every American leader genuinely committed to uncovering the truth — truly wants answers, then the objective should not be to win another cable-news argument with Anthony Fauci. America has already spent years fighting theatrical, partisan, and deeply personal battles that generate headlines but very little knowledge.

 

The real challenge is building sustained domestic and international political will to make transparency on Covid origins an enduring priority in relations with Beijing. That means coordinating democratic allies, integrating origin transparency into broader diplomatic engagement, demanding continued access to evidence, supporting independent scientific investigations, protecting researchers from political intimidation, and refusing to let the issue quietly disappear simply because it has become inconvenient.

 

In short, stop giving Beijing a pardon. With all due respect to constitutional traditions, it is long past time to stop allowing the Chinese Communist Party to “plead the Fifth.” The victims of the greatest pandemic in a century deserve better than another Washington shouting match. They deserve the truth.

Fauci’s Treatment at Republican Hands Retraumatizes Politico

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

The Covid-era retrospectives that Anthony Fauci’s congressional testimony (or lack thereof) inspired are not exclusive to the right. Politico, too, reflected on the indignities that typified that grim period in American life. Indeed, Fauci’s treatment by the GOP reminded the outlet’s reporters of what they claimed many Americans resented most about the pandemic: the incivility.

 

“Rather than an evaluation of what went wrong and right, or how to do better next time, the rage stood out,” wrote the three reporters who bylined Politico’s roundabout defense of Fauci’s professional integrity.

 

“Republicans said it was about accountability; Democrats a vendetta,” the dispatch continued. “The nasty divide, which historians have said tracks that of prior pandemics, underscores the challenge in hoping to do better when the next pandemic hits.”

 

Logically, then, if the “next pandemic” hits while Democrats are in charge, we will rerun America’s Covid experience. After all, how can we “do better” if we studiously avoid any critical retrospection on that period?

 

Sure, there was plenty of incivility to go around during the pandemic, but that hardly rates as a concern when compared with the pandemic’s myriad other outrages.

 

American schools were closed longer than anywhere else in the industrialized world — a policy that Fauci regularly advocated. The learning loss that a generation of students inherited from that disastrous and epidemiologically questionable policy will plague the country for years to come.

 

In the name of “equity,” pandemic-era relief schemes violated the fundamental rights of property owners and somehow convinced Biden administration officials to abrogate the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

 

Religious liberties — the right to worship as well as freedom of conscience objections — were violated, and the federal judiciary spent much of its time beating back unconstitutional usurpations of power by the executive branch.

 

The pandemic represented a unique threat that compelled policymakers to experiment and innovate. Many of those experiments were valuable. Others weren’t. But those that weren’t hung around far longer than a rational evaluation of their merits would warrant.

 

As I wrote at the time, nearly 1,000 days into America’s pandemic experience, the number of inexplicable governmental interventions into private affairs seemed increasingly untethered to the threat still posed by Covid:

 

Vaccination cards are still currency in parts of blue America. Masking in almost every medical setting, up to and including veterinary offices, is standard. Performative displays of hygiene theater contribute to a rise in “behavioral” maladies such as hypochondria, even if they have few other measurable effects on our environment. Colleges and universities maintain Covid-testing regimens that conflict with their education.

 

According to the researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz, “Many people still say they feel more anxious, emotionally exhausted or socially disconnected than they did before 2020” — a “lingering” effect of “prolonged pandemic stress” that can “reshape both brain and immune system function over time.”

 

It’s a miracle that many people aren’t psychologically tortured by their experience during the pandemic. The incivility that Fauci experienced from Congress on Wednesday objectively pales before a cursory audit of the era’s many affronts to individual liberty. A thorough accounting of that period would be an elementary act of civic hygiene. And, yes, there is still some residual “rage” — understandably so.

 

Either Politico’s reporters experienced none of this, or they cannot bring themselves to make any concessions to a version of our shared reality that conservatives would recognize. That may be an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable piece of reporting, but it’s no excuse.

Fauci Makes the Case for SCOTUS’s Decision in Slaughter

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

The editors note this entry in Anthony Fauci’s diary:

 

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I am so busy . . . seriously.

 

This is embarrassing, yes. But, more important, it is human. And because it is human, it underscores the importance of the recent work that the Supreme Court has done in ensuring that power in the United States is exercised by those to whom it was granted by the voters, rather than by those who staff our allegedly “independent” agencies.

 

Unlike the revolutionary utopians in France and in Russia, the framers of our Constitution understood that human nature is immutable, and that it is imperative that our institutions attempt to channel its vices, rather than to extirpate them. Because ambition was inevitable, they reasoned, it ought to be harnessed and used to counteract ambition elsewhere in the system. Thus, power in America was to be separated, and each of the branches within that fractured system was to be held directly accountable for its actions.

 

The progressives of the early 20th century had no time for this insight, believing that it empowered the unworthy and created stasis within the system. As a result, they looked outside of the ordained three branches, to the bureaucracy, which they wished to fill with brilliant, detached, learned figures who were set apart from politics. In their estimation, the best system was one in which the substantive decisions of state were made by experts who were unsullied by the electoral process.

 

The problem with this — other than that it is completely incompatible with the Constitution, which is not a suggestion, but the law — is twofold: First, that there is no such thing as a brilliant, detached, learned figure who is set apart from politics, and, second, that the electoral process is the means by which we reach those who have power over us, and demand that they correct course.

 

Anthony Fauci believed himself to be “the most famous and talked about person in the country,” and he may well have been right. Had he been a singer or an athlete, this would not have been a problem. But he wasn’t: He was a prominent bureaucrat, with a great deal of influence over our lives. It is probably unavoidable that we will have such people within our government. But if we wish to live in a republic, we ought to insist, as, the Supreme Court increasingly has, that they are treated not as immortal philosopher kings, but as the temporary employees of the figures whom we are able to reprimand and remove.

The Covid Reckoning Will Never Happen

By Judson Berger

Friday, July 31, 2026

 

“Anthony Fauci’s diary” is not a phrase we had on our bingo card. But published entries from his personal, voluminous notes prompted yet more recriminations this week over the Covid era’s excesses and deceptions.

 

The famous immunologist, frustratingly but predictably, invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions Wednesday when he appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by Rand Paul, who released the documents. The Covid czar cited the senator’s “unhinged obsession with me” and the possibility of being prosecuted for perjury. The senator accused the Covid czar of myriad contradictions and peppered him with questions on gain-of-function research and more, to no avail (Paul is planning a contempt vote in committee next week).

 

Indeed, there is plenty to get spun up about. As National Review’s editorial summarizes, though Fauci insisted he was not responsible for strict lockdown policies at the state and local level, the notes say he convinced the mayor of New York City to “close the NYC schools” and pressed him to “close the bars and restaurants.” He “had a similar call” with a top California official. Fauci seemed to revel in his own rising fame and the media attention that came with it. At a time when the so-called lab-leak theory was often downplayed or dismissed, Fauci wrote early on that a Chinese wet market was “not the source, it was the amplifier.” As Jim Geraghty recalls, Fauci’s “public comments throughout 2020 emphasized the likelihood of a ‘natural origin’ and rejected the notion that the virus could have leaked from a lab.”

 

This follows a separate document dump of messages showing that scientists at the time were not nearly as confident in ruling out a lab leak as they seemed.

 

And yet, I’m afraid these developments will simply be absorbed into the cyclone of unresolved angst over the pandemic. I still think those awaiting a Covid reckoning will do so indefinitely, and not just because Fauci pleaded the Fifth.

 

Similar revelations have been delivered piecemeal for years, without making much impact. In 2023, former NIH head Francis Collins acknowledged that public health officials took a “narrow view” by placing all emphasis on stopping the disease and saving lives and “zero” on the disruption to lives, businesses, and students’ education, an approach he called a “mistake” in hindsight. In 2024, testimony emerged raising questions about the science behind social-distancing rules and child-masking. Around the same time, the New York Times published an op-ed arguing that the pandemic probably started in a lab. Numerous reports have documented the educational harm from remote learning, which persisted in some jurisdictions long after the risk associated with in-person class had been minimized; other Western nations had a much better record on reopening.

 

Amid this slow but steady release of information, “we have had no national reckoning with that traumatic event,” M. Anthony Mills wrote in NR magazine last year. We still haven’t.

 

A select subcommittee issued its final report on the pandemic in 2024. That the Fauci drama played out this week is a sign of how conclusive that process was seen to be. That Randi Weingarten hasn’t been driven out of public life by now is another. No aha moment is on the horizon, it seems, perhaps because people are too dug in, or too much time has passed, or the updates are too diffuse or too contested.

 

As Mills’s piece put it, it’s not just that science got politicized; “politics got scientized” in such a way that “suppressed the moral and political dimensions of pandemic decision-making,” as many lost faith in institutions.

 

Jim notes that Fauci’s image in the media may be suffering these days, and Noah Rothman observes “indifference” toward him on the left. But even now, coverage of his notes simply varies by tribe. (The Washington Post sent a push alert on Monday that highlighted Fauci’s thoughts on a “rambling” Trump.)

 

Rand Paul’s Musk-like conduct online hasn’t done his cause any favors either. While the senator has done important work in bringing these Covid documents to light, the rollout leading up to the hearing was, to put it mildly, unserious: His office presented Fauci’s notes below a page dressed up to look like a child’s diary. He trolled Fauci on social media with an image of him as a ’90s girl writing in a unicorn diary. He mocked his pitching. It’s hard to imagine anyone being persuaded by this.

 

So the warfare goes on over the pandemic that killed 1 million Americans and spawned untold schemes to stop it that soon calcified into articles of partisan faith whether they made sense or not. Resentment built into a crisis of distrust that persists today. “A thorough accounting of that period would be an elementary act of civic hygiene,” Noah writes. And Fauci, as NR’s editorial notes, “reinforced the public’s suspicions about the honesty of public health officials.” When the next pandemic hits, will health officials strike a better balance? If they do, would the public listen?

Liars and Loons

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, July 30, 2026

 

You know populism is having a good week when the White House Correspondents’ Dinner isn’t the most self-discrediting elitist spectacle of the past seven days.

 

That came on Wednesday, when COVID pope Anthony Fauci was hauled before a Senate committee to explain why some of his public statements during the pandemic didn’t jibe with the thoughts he recorded in the private diary he was keeping at the time. Modern congressional hearings unfailingly generate far more heat than light, and this was no exception. But the heat was enough to melt a meaningful chunk of what’s left of Fauci’s reputation.

 

On the advice of counsel, to avoid the risk of perjury charges that might arise from his testimony, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to answer questions no fewer than 111 times. A man who spent seemingly every waking moment of 2020 and 2021 chattering into microphones suddenly had nothing to say.

 

It’s true, of course, that pleading the Fifth isn’t proof of wrongdoing, no matter what Josh Hawley might tell you. But it’s also true that it’s a tactic that the public associates with criminal lowlifes like gangsters, or the president. Fauci will never fully recover.

 

Just as embarrassing was the habit revealed by his diary of the doctor squeeing like a teenage TikTok influencer about how famous he was becoming during the pandemic, replete with name-checking the celebrities who had reached out to him. The eternal populist critique of the ruling class is that its highest priority is enhancing its own prestige, and now here was apparent confirmation in Fauci’s own words.

 

“Reading this, I truly worried about someone who would take a call from Dionne Warwick to talk about vaccines in a moment when the country really needed him to be a bit more focused,” The Atlantic’s Gal Beckerman sniffed of the diary entries.

 

And then, to round matters off, there was the matter of the blanket pardon Fauci received from Joe Biden during the final hours of the former president’s term. Biden would say that he did that to shield the doctor, a longtime MAGA hate object, from being unfairly harassed by a renegade Trump Justice Department. (A reasonable concern, to be sure.) But it had the effect of immunizing Fauci from any crimes he really did commit between 2014 and 2025—like, say, perjury in the testimony he gave to Congress during the pandemic.

 

So Fauci is untouchable legally—living proof that Trump and the right haven’t quite cornered the market on granting clemency to ideologically aligned cronies and shielding them from public accountability. Fauci will never need to explain whether he deliberately undersold the possibility that COVID leaked from a Chinese lab when, it turns out, he was privately agnostic about its genesis early on. Or whether his public skepticism of the lab-leak theory had to do with the fact that his own agency helped fund the Wuhan lab that was carrying out the sort of research that might plausibly have produced a Frankenvirus.

 

The political script here writes itself. You can’t trust the experts. They’re drunk on their own power and will lie to protect it. They care more about their own press than they do about your life. As I say, a good week for populism.

 

But not as good as it might have been.

 

No reckoning.

 

“It’s a real shame that the country cannot have an honest conversation, with the benefit of hindsight, about the many mistakes that were made six years ago,” the Washington Post wrote in an editorial about yesterday’s dismal Fauci hearing. “America has never fully grappled with the causes and consequences of COVID.”

 

My editor made a similar point this morning. In the past, he noted, major national failures typically generated serious inquiries into finding out what went wrong. Sometimes, as with segregation, those inquiries were informal matters of cultural reflection and debate. But with acute episodic crises—the Kennedy assassination, September 11, Nixon-era abuses by federal intelligence agencies—Congress opened bipartisan fact-finding investigations that ended with recommendations for reform.

 

Not the pandemic, though. Even if Fauci had agreed to answer the committee’s questions, it’s hard to imagine yesterday’s hearing producing anything more illuminating than Republican members telling him that he belongs in prison and Democratic members asking him how it feels to be a hero. Why is that? Why can’t America do a fruitful, thoughtful examination of what everyone agrees was a mismanaged once-in-a-lifetime calamity?

 

The easy answer is that the same bitter hyperpartisanship that’s made presidential landslides a thing of the past has made earnest nonpartisan problem-solving a thing of the past too, at least in matters as intensely politicized as COVID. Consider this: Unlike with most major national failures, the two sides can’t even agree on what the failure during the pandemic was.

 

The Warren Commission probed the government’s failure to detect an assassin and to protect the president from him. The 9/11 Commission probed the government’s failure to sniff out and foil a terrorist plot. The Church Committee probed the government’s failure to keep intelligence bureaus from being turned against the public those bureaus were supposed to protect.

 

Which failure would a “COVID Commission” probe? The failure to limit transmission of a virus that ended up killing more than a million Americans? Or the failure involved in locking down schools and businesses and imposing mandates for masks and vaccines?

 

The divide over how America failed during COVID is less an ideological “disagreement” than it is a divorce. It’s why, to borrow a term my editor used, Fauci has become a “totem” of sorts for both sides. In a country where each party increasingly regards the other’s continued viability as a threat to the American experiment, politics is less a shared struggle toward national improvement than a battle for dominance to crush an incompatible worldview. Each worldview reflexively polarizes around sources of authority, and so Fauci became an angel to the left and a devil to the right.

 

That also explains why idiot socialists are still masking in 2026. It’s not because they’re terrified of COVID. It’s because they’re keen to signal their allegiance to a worldview in which the state is empowered to take draconian measures in the name of “safety”—as leftists define it, at least. Masks are totems too.

 

In my darker moments (which are most moments, admittedly), I’d go further and hypothesize that Americans aren’t clamoring for a “COVID Commission” because they simply no longer expect national problems to be addressed seriously, let alone solved. In May, Pew Research Center published a poll in which it asked respondents whether they thought the country’s best days are behind it or ahead of it. Across all parties and all races, majorities answered “behind.” An America that continually stumbles into wars it can’t win, that remorselessly amasses a national debt it knows it can’t sustain, and that twice elected a character like Donald Trump is plainly incapable of dealing conscientiously with challenges.

 

We’re in our “managed decline” phase as a nation, and most of us know it. So why go through the motions of pretending that a “COVID Commission” might be productive?

 

There’s another reason that a thoughtful bipartisan investigation into the pandemic is impossible, though. One of our two major parties is beholden to populists, and “populism” and “thoughtfulness” are basically a contradiction in terms.

 

The lesser evil.

 

The two lessons I gleaned from yesterday’s hearing and the right-wing commentary around it are (1) Fauci isn’t very trustworthy, and (2) if you’re forced to choose between letting him set your scientific policy and letting Republicans do it, take Fauci every time.

 

That’s what I meant when I said above that the hearing was a missed opportunity for populism. Having effectively discredited the expert di tutti experts, the GOP should have been teed up to assert itself as the superior choice for Americans on public health. It … did not do that.

 

When I say that Wednesday’s “right-wing commentary” about COVID wasn’t reassuring, I’m not talking about crank randos on social media. I’m talking about Republican lawmakers. Sen. Ron Johnson babbled at the hearing about an alleged epidemic of suicides among people who’ve been “injured” by the COVID vaccine. Rep. John McGuire complained to Newsmax that Americans had been urged to take a vaccine that includes “human fetus baby parts” when they could have simply used ivermectin instead. Then Sen. Tommy Tuberville topped both of them by accusing Fauci of having been responsible for no fewer than 9 million deaths.

 

Granted, not every Republican in Congress is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics, which is how we ended up with Bill Cassidy, M.D., feeling obliged to support the most infamous anti-vaccine advocate in the country to be head of the Department of Health and Human Services. In a declining America, you can have Fauci spearheading pandemic policy in between signing autographs—or you can have Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presiding over an unfolding disaster in American vaccine uptake with potentially dire long-term consequences. Take Fauci.

 

QAnon chronicler Mike Rothschild captured the absurdity of populist strains of thought about COVID with what’s at best a half-joke: “The overwhelming right-wing sentiment is that COVID was an engineered bioweapon that was also harmless. Trump overreacted to it by shutting down the country, then engineered a drive to create a vaccine that was the real bioweapon that killed millions, and it’s Joe Biden’s fault.” Another Twitter user flagged a dispute between two populists, one insisting that the virus leaked from a Chinese lab and the other insisting that the virus never existed, with the caption “the diversity of right-wing thought on display.” Those are the impulses that congressional Republicans somehow have to navigate.

 

How could they possibly conduct a serious pandemic investigation under the circumstances?

 

What about Ron DeSantis? you might say at this point. The governor of Florida is very much a populist, and he had a thoughtful COVID policy in the early days of the pandemic, back when Democrat Andrew Cuomo was seeding contagion in nursing homes across New York. DeSantis is the exception that proves the rule, though: Having boldly defied the left-wing lockdown consensus and followed the facts initially, he began meekly pandering to right-wing anti-vax paranoia as he prepared to run for president in 2024. At last check he was busy pushing his state legislature to repeal certain vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.

 

Not every Republican politician is a lunatic. But they all answer to lunatics.

 

The supreme tragicomic example is Trump, of course, who’s never been free to celebrate his momentous achievement in helping to bring the COVID mRNA vaccine to market during his first term. He spent months after leaving office in 2021 urging supporters to take the vaccine, only to discover that this is one matter in which their loyalty to him isn’t absolute. By 2024 he had stopped mentioning it altogether; “I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said, not a little resentfully, “because I’m a Republican.”

 

Two years on, though, he seems to have finally caught up with his own base. Reportedly, Trump approached Kennedy recently to ask why he wasn’t moving faster to reduce the number of childhood vaccinations recommended by the federal government. The president is now more eager than his fanatically anti-vax deputy to scale back immunizations. Once again, for emphasis: Take Fauci.

 

Brain worms.

 

Even thoughtful right-wing commentators, when writing about left-wing pandemic failures, rarely reckon seriously with the fact that they’re allied with a faction of witch-doctor lunatics who’d rather spend money studying whether ivermectin cures cancer than encouraging mRNA research.

 

In noting that, I don’t mean to imply that, because the right is crazy, it’s acceptable for Fauci to lie or for Democratic policymakers to take dictation from the teachers unions on opening schools. But if we’re going to critique the expert class usefully, with an eye to convincing readers to trust it less blindly, we should probably be more forthright about pointing out that the main alternative to Faucism in modern America has brain worms. Literally.

 

Nor should we excuse populist derangement over the pandemic as an understandable or even defensible reaction to the expert class’ deceptions. It’s doubtless true that Fauci’s deceit about masking and revisionism about herd immunity piqued skeptics’ mistrust in the science bureaucracy, but right-wing mania over COVID was already raging long before Fauci became an Enemy of the People. As early as April 2020, just a month after the virus began spreading aggressively, the FDA had to debunk the populist craze over hydroxychloroquine as a pseudo-folk remedy against it.

 

You can have Fauci telling “noble lies” about masks to try to protect the supply available to hospital workers, or you can have the president musing about bleach injections and his fans praising the magical healing powers of a deworming medication. Only a doomed, decadent country would put itself in a position of having to choose between the two, but if we do have to choose—and most right-wing critiques of Fauci implicitly invite us to do so—the choice is clear. “The experts are untrustworthy” does not rationalize brain-worms populism.

 

And that’s the only kind of populism there is in practice, I suspect. Even when it has valid grievances, even when it’s led by obviously intelligent figures like DeSantis, the intense pressure populism is under to affirm and ventilate the suspicions of its supporters—whether those suspicions are reasonable or not—will lead it inevitably toward crankery. To its own detriment.

 

It’s why DOGE, led by the richest man in history and driven by an obviously legitimate belief that government is too wasteful, ended up cutting federal programs so vindictively and indiscriminately that Elon Musk himself recently admitted that he’d gotten carried away. It’s why Trumpists, despite enjoying strong popular support for measures like mandatory voter ID, can’t resist framing calls for better election security in terms of ludicrously paranoid conspiracies to rig elections. Populism could and should win on those issues, just as it should win its case against Fauci.

 

But the brain worms always find their way in.

 

Maybe we’ll eventually see a form of it that’s better suited to governing responsibly. (Leftists might point to the New Deal or the Great Society as examples, although you can imagine what an anti-statist conservative like me thinks about that.) “Populism, but smart” is the implied warranty of J.D. Vance 2028; a brilliant Ivy-trained mind like his can deliver the sober, reality-based people power that skeptics are waiting to see, his fanboys would insist. Could be—but remember that the vice president has also “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” according to the White House chief of staff. Even in a brain as formidable as his, the worms are stirring.

 

I’ll believe “populism, but smart” when I see it. In its current incarnation the movement is a purely adversarial force, unequal to the challenge of governing effectively and not even very interested in doing so. It won’t pursue an inquiry like “What went wrong with COVID?” because it won’t risk having to reach conclusions that challenge the inviolable suspicions of its supporters. If populists were more intellectually honest and civically virtuous, Wednesday’s Fauci disaster would have been the first chapter in an earnest effort to improve America’s scientific bureaucracy. As it is, the book is closed.

 

 

The Left Has No Use for Anthony Fauci Anymore

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

 

It’s been a long fall for Dr. Anthony Fauci. Four years ago, he was hailed as real-life Atlas — the avatar for an army of selfless physicians and medical professionals and proof that bureaucracy and competence were not incompatible concepts. Today, Fauci is invoking his right against self-incrimination in what may be a fruitless effort to avoid accountability for what Republicans allege was a pattern of misconduct. And for all his troubles, Fauci’s performance before a congressional committee on Wednesday may yet result in a criminal referral. After all, what else would you call that spectacle but “contempt?”

 

A few dead-enders still enamored with the fictionalized account of Dr. Fauci that ensorcelled so many liberals in the depths of the pandemic mounted a half-hearted attempt to defend his honor. But they seemed more outraged by the GOP’s behavior than aggrieved on Fauci’s behalf.

 

The left’s indifference is understandable. Why bother? As an instrument of political utility, Fauci is a spent force.

 

There’s a reason why, more than any other public health official under Trump at the outset of the pandemic, Fauci so quickly became a dashboard saint to the American left. No other figure in public life had the demonstrable power to convince the public to subordinate their financial self-interest to the state, severing the bonds of community and family that mediate the personal and the political.

 

Even as public officials with more propriety assured Americans throughout the Covid years that a return to “normalcy” was the goal — “or as normalized as you can be, post-Covid,” in former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s formulation — a segment of the American left convinced itself that returning to normal would be worse than the perpetuation of the pandemic.

 

Vox’s Sigal Samuel called it the kind of anxiety that “might be worth cultivating.” Theirs was a fear of returning to a world in which mental health was incompatible with “the rigidity of the modern workday,” a world of wealth disparities and racial inequity, a world defined by “harmful systems” and no collective will to alter them. “We shouldn’t go back to ‘normal,’” he admitted. “Normal wasn’t good enough.” That outlook was hardly exclusive to the far-left fringe. “There is no getting ‘back to normal,’ experts say,” CNN’s headline read. “The sooner we accept that, the better.”

 

This outlook was overrepresented in the Biden administration. His White House fast lost sight of its initial modest objective — putting “the nation back on a path to get closer to normal.” By the fall of 2021, Fauci told reporters in the first weeks of Biden’s presidency, he hoped only that America would “start approaching some degree of normality.” After all, “our lives are not going to be the same,” Barack Obama’s CDC director, Thomas Frieden, contended. If these were only prudent expressions of uncertainty, they wouldn’t have erred only in one direction — and there would not have been consequences for administration figures who diverged from that depressing pattern. And as 2021 drew to a close, Fauci abandoned normalcy as a goal in favor of advocating the pandemic’s anti-social practices indefinitely.

 

Fauci was never an honest broker. When it came to the “herd immunity” threshold, the doctor “acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts” in an interview with the New York Times. He convinced Biden not to relax the federal government’s recommended vaccination schedule because that would be “a logistical and messaging nightmare” — as if pandemic-era guidelines were ever static, and best practices should be subordinate to the ease with which they’re communicated. Fauci has defensively insisted that he never insisted on the closure of schools, in accordance with the demands of core Democratic constituencies like the teachers’ unions, although his diary tells a different tale. But we don’t need the diary to indict Fauci’s mendacity. As he boasted to reporters in October 2020, “I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.” Quote, unquote.

 

None of this diminished his standing in progressive eyes. Rather, it seemed to intensify the affection for him. Whether he was a man of the left himself was immaterial. He was a man of the state.

 

At the height of his power, Fauci had his hands in nearly every aspect of American statecraft — from its foreign policy to the preservation of Americans’ constitutional rights — and he would often contradict Democrats who displayed any sensitivity to the public’s demand for normalcy, the president included. It was power he managed to amass, in some reasonably significant measure, due to the cultural phenomenon around him. In his private musings, Fauci indulged his own celebrity. He never seemed to recognize it for the contrivance that it was.

 

Fauci was the perfect technocrat; impassive, disdainful of public opinion, and single-minded in his assumption and application of state power. That’s what they loved about him. But just as Andrew Cuomo discovered that the cult around him — what with the prayer candles, ornamental “love gov” socks, and celebrities confessing their “Cuomosexual” tendencies — wasn’t sincere, Fauci has learned the hard way that he was only ever useful. Now, he’s not.

 

It was the doctor’s own hubris that brought him low, but, of the many miscalculations he made, believing himself to be anything other than a tool in his political allies’ hands was his gravest.

The Damning Fauci Diaries

National Review Online

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

 

When Anthony Fauci appears before Senator Rand Paul and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday, expect fireworks.

 

According to Paul, “During his time as NIAID Director, and particularly during the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci took meticulous notes about his work. He made note of conversations, decisions, and his thoughts about actions taken by politicians and other officials.” This past weekend, Paul released a gargantuan 1,141 pages of Fauci’s notes. Very little in these pages enhances Fauci’s already deeply tarnished reputation.

 

Most notably, on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote:

 

It now appears using epi data and genomic data that the first infection was in early December and was not connected to the market. The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection and that gave the virus time to establish itself in multigenerational (sustained) spread. Remember, early on the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans. [Emphasis added.]

 

America and the world spent most of the next two years in an increasingly furious debate over whether the virus emerged from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, perhaps from a pangolin; or from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the separate institution of the Wuhan Centre for Disease Control (which was also doing research on coronaviruses found in bats); or somewhere else. Fauci apparently knew — notice he didn’t write “believe” or “theorize” — he could rule out the wet-market theory but never felt obligated to share that conclusion with the rest of us. Instead, he repeatedly dismissed and downplayed the lab-leak theory.

 

Fauci has insisted he’s not responsible for the far-reaching and strict lockdown policies that many states and localities enacted during the pandemic. “Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” he told the New York Times magazine in 2023. And yet, here’s Fauci’s personal writing from March 15, 2020:

 

I spoke with Bill de Blasio (Mayor – NYC) and convinced him based on what I was saying publicly and my conversation tonight to close the NYC schools (he had already decided based on what I was saying on TV). I went on to tell him he should close the bars and restaurants in NYC. He said that he would base this on my recommendation.

 

I had a similar call with Ann O’Leary, the COS of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California. Ann said that based on my TV appearances today and yesterday, the Governor has decided to close the schools in California as well as the bars and restaurants.

 

Did Fauci himself give the order to close the schools? No, but Democratic lawmakers did so after listening to him. Fauci has been disingenuous in pretending that America’s lockdown policies just emerged out of nowhere, separate from his own beliefs and recommendations.

 

On November 24, 2020, Fauci made clear that he was willing to lie to the press in order to keep confidentiality:

 

Biden tweeted today that he has not spoken to me but his staff has and I have been “very, very helpful”. I had told the press that I had not heard from the Biden team since my conversations with Ron Klain were supposed to be confidential since over the past several days Ron has contacted me about my advice for CDC Director and FDA Commissioner.

 

Finally, Fauci’s personal notes reveal an unsurprising but still bothersome obsession with his own press coverage. By March 28, Fauci wrote, “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous. You can [buy] Fauci T-shirts, mugs, donuts, sweat shirts, candles, pillows, etc. Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.” Fauci may not have loved the swag, but he reveled in the attention.

 

On May 21, 2020, Fauci wrote:

 

Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable person in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I am so busy . . . seriously.

 

Many medical experts, scientists, and public health officials have asked why public trust in them has declined so severely since the start of the Covid pandemic. More than any other American, Anthony Fauci reinforced the public’s suspicions about the honesty of public health officials — and we’re still paying the price for his duplicity.