I was caught between worlds in 2020. I began the year as a faithful, loyal Democrat and a true believer in Fauci the Hero vs. Trump the Villain. I was never an anti-masker or anti-vaxxer, at least, not in the beginning. As the year wore on, however, the questions started piling up in my head.
Why, I wondered, was it politics as usual if this pandemic was as serious as CNN said it was?
Why, if the virus was microscopic, did masks suddenly become not only essential but mandatory identifiers in our society?
Why, if it was so serious, did millions flood the street on Memorial Day Weekend to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police, and 1,000 health experts signed a letter saying protesting was more important than a pandemic that was supposedly hitting the black community especially hard?
Every time I’d ask a question, the unified whole would scream back at me, parroting the exact same talking points from the legacy media and the Democrats. No one was allowed to even ask a question, much less question the official party line.
Why? The cult of Dr. Fauci. We hadn’t seen a hero rise like that since Barack Obama in 2008. We believed in him. We trusted him. We loved him. To question him became blasphemy, and even now, if you say his name among liberals, they will scowl at you.
The cult of Fauci and the legacy media became one in 2020. They made him a star and, in turn, he went along with the official narrative that Trump was not competent in a crisis and helped the media convince the public to vote him out.
But the truth was always chasing Dr. Fauci like a shadow, and the questions were not going away. Lucky for all of us, he kept a record of what he thought and did in 2020, and it is one history will never forget and should never forget.
Dr. Fauci showed the half of America that voted for Donald Trump what he thought of them when he declined to answer any questions in Congress and instead pleaded the Fifth 111 times.
Americans required something other than politics as usual when the pandemic arrived on our shores, but taking out a president was already the establishment's primary objective, and Dr. Fauci would prove instrumental in convincing Americans that Trump could not be trusted in a crisis.
As Ann Coulter says on her Substack:
Fauci was the left’s most promising silver bullet to take out Trump. As such, the media would brook no dissent from his COVID edicts. Liberals would not only destroy the economy, but countless lives, in order to slay a pestilence worse than the virus: Donald J. Trump.
Taking down a president
It might sound conspiratorial to say that the Democrats and their allies in the administrative state would crash the economy just to take Trump out of power, but the truth is even darker. Everything had to go wrong under Trump, including the economy.
The more Fauci contradicted Trump, the more the legacy media celebrated him, elevated him, and the more the Cult of Fauci rallied around him. That led to more attacks by Trump.
It’s not a coincidence that cases began to surge as their own kind of October surprise, allowing the Democrats to increase measures ahead of the 2020 election. All the while, what Fauci seemed to care about most was the attention paid to him by high-profile celebrities.
I was one of those people who trusted CNN and watched as they scared us, night after night, with the death count from COVID ticking upward, with no mention of who was getting hit the hardest. It just looked like everyone, everywhere was getting sick and dying.
What sweet relief to hear RFK, Jr. confront Dana Bash on CNN about their willingness to pump fear into the veins of the unsuspecting public:
And yet, as we found out by the Cup Foods surveillance recording, in areas the Democrats supposedly governed, like Minneapolis, the day George Floyd died, no one in that store, including him, who was still recovering from COVID, was wearing a mask. When I saw that, I realized just how small our bubble really was.
Dr. Fauci knew he was a media-made star. He marvels at it throughout his diary, shaking his head at the attention paid to him but hanging on every word. But he had no immunity to this level of adulation and celebrity. This was a lot for a guy almost no one knew until he became a household name.
Fauci and the Bobbleheads
Fauci’s diaries throughout 2020 paint a picture of a seduction. Fauci the Hero was drawn in by those who projected their distrust and hatred of Trump onto him. The more he played that role, the higher his profile would rise.
Of course, Hollywood would cast him that way. That’s what they do. But it wasn’t just Hollywood. It was all the most high-profile figures on CNN, ABC News, MSNBC, NPR, PBS and SNL.
Fauci kept a healthy remove in the beginning. This wasn’t his first rodeo, but he is only human after all. Trump was trying to open the country back up even in late March, instinctively knowing that in an election year, crashing the economy would be the end for him.
And then, the press began to tie him to Trump:
July 13, 2020:
Fauci lapped up the praise with a mixture of astonishment and bemusement. Praise and adoration from Funny Girl and Pretty Woman would have gone to anyone’s head.
Or the painting and growing friendship with folk singer Joan Baez:
A note to actor and chef Stanley Tucci promising to send cookbooks in January of 2021:
Zoom calls with the best and the brightest in April of 2020:
The press detailing just how beloved he was becoming in April of 2020:
And of course, the bobbleheads:
And somehow, Dr. Fauci even became a sex symbol.
When you feel the warm embrace of the cultural elite, and you breathe that rarified air for the first time, it can be intoxicating. I’ve experienced a bit of it myself, but one thing you should never do is believe you are one of them, and by the end, that is what happened to Dr. Fauci.
He was vulnerable because he was uncool.
And of course, being routinely attacked by Trump the Villain, who was desperately trying to win re-election and could see very well what the media was doing by elevating Fauci the hero, only made Fauci more inclined to side with the side that would write his legacy.
Fauci became the most important weapon against Donald Trump, as he redirected better solutions to help save kids from lockdowns, bring the economy back, and allow some common sense with masks and social distancing. Trump had to fail, and that's why Fauci became a superstar.
Mass Formation Psychosis
By the time Biden took power, the entire Left was locked into “Mass Formation Psychosis,” per Mattias Desmet by way of Dr. Robert W. Malone:
Fauci was trotted out to validate all of the bad policy pushed out by the Biden administration once they took power. Through it all, he maintained his tight connection to Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, having dinner with them, advising them privately. Many were singing songs about him.
Love for Fauci, trust in his word, became interchangeable with taking the vaccine. Fauci was the vaccine just as he was the science. No one would dare doubt him or question his advice. He was the leader of a cult by now and drunk on that power.
But in casting his lot with the Trump “resistance,” he abandoned the other half of the country as most of our ruling elite did. But they are Americans and Fauci worked for them too. He betrayed their trust again and again and could not even be bothered to show them the respect of answering their questions.
The truth would eventually come out. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was brought back on X after having been shadow-banned for “disinformation” and is now the head of the CDC.
We would finally find out that toddlers didn’t need to be masked and most children did not need to be kept out of school, and Trump’s efforts to open them back up that he was attacked for again and again were the right call.
Why had we done that to them? How had we all gone along with it? This got much worse under Biden. It was as though the campaign to dump Trump turned into the new normal and everyone had to stand by the story.
Here is Jeremy Boreing:
The Fauci myth also propped up the legacy media so much so that even now, they have to link arms with the Democrats to defend him.
For many Americans, the legacy media propped up the official story the Democrats needed to be true to take out a one-term president with a strong economy. But they built a high wall of protection that meant even when we finally knew the truth - that the vaccine did not stop the spread and masks offered minimal support - the legacy media would not tell the public the truth.
My nephew flew in from Thailand to finally see all of us after a year of separation. He’d already contracted and survived COVID, so he was immune, but because he was not vaccinated, members of my family forbade him from visiting.
I kept screaming, “He already got COVID! He doesn’t need the vaccine!” But no. If Fauci didn’t say it, if ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times didn’t say it, they would not listen. You had to be vaccinated to enter restaurants, theaters, even family gatherings.
Dr. Fauci knew the truth. He knew the vaccine was from a lab leak. He knew it might cause harm to some. He knew it was untested. He continued to push a one-size-fits-all solution, and anyone who didn’t go along with it was treated like an enemy of the state. But for him, his legacy was already written, and nothing was going to take it from him.
I lost three loved ones during COVID. One overdosed during lockdowns from loneliness. Another dropped dead suddenly of a heart attack in his early 50s. My uncle did not take the vaccine and died from COVID.
It was never a one-size-fits-all solution to force everyone to inject an experimental drug, even if it saved the lives of many. It probably saved my life. But it should have been a choice, not a public pressure campaign that demanded all go along with it or they would be demonized as “anti-vaxxers.”
People should have been told the truth about what it was and what it wasn’t. That was Dr. Fauci’s job, but at some point, he realized he had to push the party line because that is what got him into the club, over that high castle wall and in the presence of greatness.
The two mirror events that depict the Two Americas could not be more stark, as now Dr. Fauci has been held in Contempt of Congress. Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were not just held in contempt but thrown in jail over January 6th, the first time in over 50 years anyone was put in jail for the offense.
It’s unlikely Dr. Fauci will go to jail. Instead, he will go down in history as a hero because the more powerful side still writes that history, at least for now.
Fauci might have been a real hero if he’d faced the committee and the people and simply answered the questions, no matter how difficult. That is what you do when you have nothing to hide.
