Icarus Descending

She’ll never see the boy falling out of the sky,” sings Mumford & Sons in “Icarus.” As the sun was receding from view, Icarus at least realized that his wings had melted and he was plummeting toward the earth; whereas Anthony Fauci sees this and believes he is still ascending past the sun into some empyrean realm beyond the reach of mere mortals. He’ll never see the boy falling out of the sky, and it’s bound to hurt when he hits the ground.

Last week, Fauci was subpoenaed to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, where he was grilled for three hours by committee chair Rand Paul and fellow Republicans. Topics included, among others, pandemic origins, gain-of-function research, lockdowns, vaccine injuries, suppressed Covid treatments, records destruction, and Fauci’s alleged use of public resources and personnel to secure cash awards for himself totaling over $1 million. After a brief opening statement, Fauci gave the same response to all 111 questions from senators: “I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.” 

Fauci did whisper frequently to his half-dozen lawyers present, one of whom was thrown out for repeatedly attempting to speak without being recognized by the Senate. “America’s Doctor” doggedly pled the Fifth even when Sen. Hawley trolled him by asking, “What day of the week is it today?” and “What color tie are you wearing?” Senate hearings have become a form of political theater, especially in our age of social media, but this surreal show took the genre to new heights. 

Fauci’s gaggle of lawyers might be sweating at this point, since it’s not clear he had the legal right to invoke the Fifth under the circumstances. Their client was granted a blanket pardon by Biden for unnamed federal crimes over an eleven-year period—an unprecedented and questionable form of legal immunity. Assuming the pardon is valid, under Brown v. Walker (1896), a pardon generally eliminates the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, permitting the person to be compelled to testify about those acts in court, before a grand jury, or in a congressional hearing. Refusal could lead to contempt proceedings, which Rand Paul already indicated he will pursue.

Regardless of potential legal consequences for this gambit—and given Congress’s general fecklessness, there probably will be none—the show provided a window into Fauci’s character. In the days leading up to the hearing, Sen. Paul released Fauci’s “diary” (not personal journals but government records created on a government computer by a federal employee), which makes for astonishing reading. They reveal, for example, that Fauci not only was wrong, but knowingly deceived the public about Covid’s origins, lockdowns, vaccine efficacy, and other public health topics of global consequence.

The first time Fauci was compelled to testify under oath about his conduct during Covid was not before the Senate, but in a case called Missouri v. Biden in which I was a plaintiff. We alleged—and the government’s recent settlement confirmed—that the federal government violated citizens’ free-speech rights through online censorship. Fauci’s entry for November 23, 2022, recounts his deposition in our case. As on virtually every other page of his diary, Fauci congratulated himself on his stellar performance: “I must say I did extraordinarily well and the DOJ lawyers said that that was one of the best performances and the deposition [sic] that they have ever seen.”

Except that, like his performance at the Senate hearing, his deposition was actually an exercise in public humiliation. It involved Fauci giving the same canned nonresponse to every question that he happened not to like. He answered “I don’t recall” 178 times during the depo, demonstrating an idiopathic case of acute-onset amnesia that impaired his basic memory of the scientific evidence or rationale behind virtually all his consequential decisions during Covid. He complained in his diary that our lawyer had the temerity to even ask such questions.

If past behavior predicts future behavior, Fauci has doubtless congratulated himself on his superb performance at the recent Senate hearing. His smug stonewalling of our elected officials suggests a belief that he is so far above them in wisdom, power, influence, fame, beauty, and charisma that he need not lower himself to entertain their petty inquiries. He seems blithely unaware that any sane American who watches those clips will see only a self-absorbed man of boundless egotism who refuses to answer for his actions, even after assuming enormous influence and power over people’s lives and their health. 

Whenever Fauci is in the news, Elon Musk takes the opportunity to post on X, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Based on the number of reposts, even by Elon’s standards, countless disaffected Americans—who lost years of education during school closures, who were injured by a shot they were forced to take or who (like me) lost their jobs for refusing to take it, who were prevented from sitting with loved ones dying in hospitals, or who suffered depression, drug relapse, or suicidality during prolonged lockdowns—agree that there should be legal consequences for Fauci’s record of deception and manipulation, now thoroughly documented for anyone who cares to look.

Commentary on Fauci’s diary has focused on his astonishing displays of vanity, and the conspicuous absence of any attempt to wrestle with emerging scientific evidence or data. Instead, during a global crisis he obsessively documented each media hit, celebrity endorsement, and invitation to the glitterati’s cocktail parties, including a fawning petition to make him “Sexiest Man Alive” and stories about “grandmothers who have crushes on me.” But this toxic level of self-regard seems to have produced something even worse: a degree of blindness that impedes the most elementary degree of self-knowledge.  

St. Augustine said that sin is its own punishment. Fauci’s diary reveals no awareness that the media was using him as much as he was using them, or that he served as a cardboard cutout—and now the fall guy—for a biosecurity and pharmaceutical apparatus that leveraged the crisis to achieve its own political and financial aims. He remains puzzled as to why countless Americans view him with contempt. As he is falling, Fauci still thinks he is rising. To become incapable of experiencing warranted shame or justified humiliation, as unpleasant as such experiences may be, is already to be in some kind of private hell—locked in the prison of one’s own mind with no ability to even see the bars. I would suggest that this might be a worse punishment than federal prison, where a man at least has the opportunity to come to terms with the truth about himself before it’s too late.

Image by Sipa USA via AP