Revisiting the Nightmare

Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Wednesday and invoked the Fifth Amendment one hundred and eleven times. For nearly three hours, the man who orchestrated the most destructive public health response in modern history—who locked down the American economy, closed schools, masked children, destroyed small businesses, suppressed early treatment, and funded the very research that likely created the virus—refused to answer a single substantive question about any of it. He sat behind his microphone, eighty-five years old, shielded by a presidential pardon signed by Joe Biden on his last day in office using an autopen, and declined to explain himself. The pardon covers any federal offense Fauci may have committed since 2014. It does not require an admission of guilt. It does not require an apology. It does not require him to say a single word. And so he said nothing—one hundred and eleven times.

I watched this spectacle with a mixture of emotions that I suspect many of my readers share: gratification that he was finally forced to sit in that chair, relief that the questions were being asked at all, disgust at the arrogance of a man who destroyed millions of lives and has never suffered a single consequence, and ongoing concern about what his defiance reveals about the state of the country. Because Fauci did not come alone. He came with the full support of the Democrat Party, whose members on the committee treated him not as a witness under investigation but as a persecuted hero. He came with the full-throated defense of media outlets that have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Harvey Levin of TMZ called the hearing a "witch hunt" and compared it to McCarthyism. He described watching Fauci invoke the Fifth Amendment as "heartbreaking" and praised him as an "amazing public servant" who saved countless lives. CNN echoed the same narrative. The man who did more to harm the Western world than any single individual since the Second World War is still being celebrated by the institutions that enabled him.