Photo: WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 29: Former NIH Director Anthony Fauci is sworn in before testifying to Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on July 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. Fauci was expected to be questioned about his diary entries during his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The rise and fall of Fauci is one of the great political lessons of our time about the folly and destructiveness of rule by so-called expertise.
On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in his appearance before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
He may well indeed be fortunate to have that right and his pardon from former President Joe Biden given the grilling he received from the senators following the release of his diary by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., on Saturday.
The diary revealed a man, once revered as a paragon of science and medicine, as a vain, egomaniacal, and ultimately frivolous glorymonger who knew a lot less about what was really going on during the COVID-19 pandemic than his massively inflated media persona let on.
Fauci wasn’t even smart enough to refrain from jotting it all down in his journal to boot, hence his need to clam up rather than answer questions from senators who were given a serious bone to pick with the former self-styled bureaucrat in chief.
Fauci’s diary posts remind me so much of the letters of Civil War Gen. George McClellan during his ill-fated time in charge of the Army of the Potomac, explaining in the most grandiose terms to his wife how he could be a dictator if he wanted to but won’t because of “admirable self-denial.”
McClellan at least had some reason to think of himself as a wunderkind, a young Napoleon, given his exceptional early military career.
Fauci was little more than a career bureaucrat who’d suddenly been promoted by the media as the face of pandemic response.
Even though he refused to answer to the American people, it’s nevertheless remarkable how far this man’s star has fallen, just like McClellan’s.
Fauci was hyped by so many in the media as practically a demigod, a man of science without reproach who only a crackpot could be against. It wasn’t just the media.
I remember during the dark days of the pandemic seeing a woman walking around New York City wearing a disturbing shirt that said in big letters, “I believe in Faucism.”
He wasn’t just a scientist; he was a secular savior.
It’s obvious now, with the release of Fauci’s “Dear Diary” accounts, that he was more than happy to cultivate that messianic impression.
Obviously, Fauci couldn’t handle the fame, and that led to his undoing.
As Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., pointed out, the fact that he was praised for his desire for lockdowns likely pushed him to promote even more draconian recommendations that too many leaders lapped up without question.
Fauci was lionized by the legacy media, which made him the de facto covid oracle. The more Fauci advocated for restrictions/lockdowns and the more he criticized states like FL and GA that spurned his edicts, the more the media would treat him as a saint. Fauci’s increasingly Show more
Fauci's private diary. March 2020. March 21 — "deaths 9800": "Big front page article about me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering." "my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable" "It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most
Fortunately, some resisted, and took a wiser, more balanced approach.
But there are a lot of young Americans who will never get the time back that they lost in school, a lot of families who didn’t say goodbye to loved ones, and many will never place faith in institutions ever again, for good or ill. That’s in large part because of Fauci.
There is a serious lesson in all this while Fauci is crashing out, one that shouldn’t be forgotten now that the pandemic lockdowns seem long past.
What’s to be learned isn’t merely that Fauci was a dissembling blowhard so narcissistic that he would have made Narcissus blush with shame.
He wasn’t the first and won’t be the last of that sort.
No, it’s that his existence completely invalidates the idea of a kind of detached, technocratic style of government imagined by the original progressive movement.
Here was a man who was entrusted with an enormous amount of power and was expected to make rational decisions for the country. He was exactly the type of technocratic manager that Woodrow Wilson and other progressives imagined would guide us in our glorious, post-constitutional future.
Instead, when finally given real power, he ignored scientific evidence that didn’t suit his narrative, attempted to silence those who questioned it, wasted his time during a crisis basking in the adulation of Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand, and all while basically declaring, “I am science.”
He had all the traits we associate with the worst aspects of monarchy without the grandeur and pomp of nobility, such that it is. And many Americans sadly seemed to crave this.
They wanted a king or really a series of kings in lab coats.
As we should see now, this is every bit as bad a way to govern as the monarchies of old, and in some ways it’s much worse.
The divine rights of kings had limitations, sometimes strict ones.
Unlimited government by millions of Faucis, unconstrained by democratic politics and genuine statesmanship doesn’t lead to the kind of rational, enlightened decision-making that was promised.
It instead leads to the perversion of science, arbitrary rules, and ultimately ruthless tyranny.
Fauci, the ultimate technocrat, behaved just as absurdly as any caricatured, blowhard politician drunk with fame and power.
This is what the fools who dreamed of rule by experts were leading us to, a world in which Fauci and his ilk could rule without any kind of accountability ever again.
Under this system the foibles that haunt mankind, including ambition, vanity, irrationality, and at times just plain stupidity, can be countered by nothing other than bureaucratic inertia.
That’s a chilling thought.
The Founding Fathers, on the other hand, knew that men aren’t angels, that Washington would have its Faucis.
To ensure that we don’t become governed by beasts, they created a constitutional form of government where they hoped ambition would check ambition. They understood that leaders must be empowered to make wise decisions that balance various interests but must never be above the people they’ve been elected to rule.
That constitutional system has taken its lumps over the years and doesn’t exactly work just as the Founders intended, but the wisdom of its creation remains.
Whatever happens with Fauci the man, let us remember what he became before we ever dabble with “Faucism” again.
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