The Hero Complex That Held America Hostage

Bad guys always think they’re the heroes.

Case in point: Anthony Fauci.

Perhaps the best predictor of monstrously egotistical behavior is if you have a giant portrait of yourself in your house. And we now know that Fauci was a fame-obsessed publicity hound who was willing to use power to subvert the truth.

That’s not speculation. That’s reality, because Anthony Fauci kept a diary — consisting of 1,100 pages — and Rand Paul just dropped all of it.

A diary is where you write what you actually think, not what you tell the cameras. And what Anthony Fauci told the country and what he wrote in private turned out to be quite different stories.

In the list of motivations for human beings, ego is at the very top of the list. Ego is one hell of a drug.

Fauci’s personal diary contains entries running from late 2019 through Fauci’s retirement in December 2022. It has hundreds of articles about himself inserted into it; 641 entries are labeled “press” that are largely about himself.

As Tom Elliott noted:

The tone of what he preserved is worth registering. He kept the Washington Post column comparing a Rand Paul cross-examination of him to “watching Albert Einstein being disputed by his dry cleaner.” He kept the Joan Baez portrait and her calling him an American hero (p. 292). He kept the cookies from Joe and Jill Biden with the note “You are our hero” (p. 175), and Julia Roberts gasping on an Instagram livestream that he was her personal hero, and Marian Wright Edelman calling him “a true national treasure” (p. 1113), and Beth Cameron of the NSC texting that he was her hero for what he did with Rand Paul (p. 815).

That’s the kind of person that Anthony Fauci is and was.

A lot of the public indicators were there. In 2021, Fauci suggested that attacks on him were identical to attacks on science, saying on MSNBC, “A lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people, and there was pushback against me.”

Fauci used every opportunity to get in front of a camera. He had red-light syndrome like no one’s business. Do you remember that you couldn’t go to the ballpark during the pandemic, and there was no reason for that,  because it turns out that COVID did not travel in the open air. COVID was not being driven by outdoor exposure.

It didn’t matter. An entire baseball season was played without human beings in the stands, except for Anthony Fauci, who personally went to a Washington Nationals game where they piped in fake applause. He showed up wearing a mask, which he then took off during the game to talk to his friends in the stands.

He had the entire place to himself, but he threw out the first pitch. It was one of the worst first pitches in baseball history.

In his diary it is all ego, all the time.

Fauci, May 2020: 

Big front page article about 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’m the most famous and talked about person in the country, and one of the most recognizable persons in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written about me since I’m so busy … seriously. POTUS seems to be enamored of me, even though I am taking the spotlight away from him. We’re developing a very unique and interesting relationship. The entire Secret Service Corps is coming over to me and chatting. They let me into the first gate without even checking ID. Everyone is worried about my health and welfare, probably because it is all over the place that I am almost 80 years old.

It must be great to be Anthony Fauci.

If you sit there reading your press clippings all day, you’re doing your life wrong.

It turns out that Fauci knew pretty much all along that the origins of COVID were not related to a wet market; they were almost certainly a leak from the Wuhan laboratory. That was speculated early on by Tom Cotton of Arkansas, whereupon everyone on the Left, including the legacy media, jumped all over Cotton and suggested that it was a conspiracy theory to speculate as to whether the virus had come not from some weird guy eating a bat, but actually had come from the lab that did infectious disease studies on coronaviruses.

But as early as January 26, 2020 — before anyone even knew this was going to turn into a global pandemic — Anthony Fauci was writing in his diary that it almost certainly did not come from the wet market.

In March 2020, he bragged that he convinced everyone to shut down the country. He wrote, “When I left the White House and crossed Pennsylvania and 17th Street, several cars honked their horns and shouted ‘thank you’ out the window.”

What a hero.

He then went out publicly and lied in July 2022, saying that he did not recommend locking anything down.

His diary explicitly says he did recommend locking things down.

Fauci was the bad guy. Not because bad guys know they’re being bad, but because they think they’re lying for a higher purpose. Fauci was lying because he thought that he was “doing the right thing” — that just happened to align with his personal interests, such as being on the cover of InStyle magazine, which actually happened; an 80-year-old doctor featured on the cover of InStyle magazine.

That’s who Anthony Fauci was.

It just goes to show you the foibles of human nature. I’ve said a thousand times, you try to attribute things to stupidity rather than malice, but it turns out that those two things can cross streams, “Ghostbusters”-style, and you end up with Anthony Fauci with outsized influence over policy.

This is one of the reasons our founders were big fans of federalism and checks and balances in the federal government.

Whenever anyone tells you what we actually need is a government that moves faster and hits harder and does things more quickly, I remind you, the government is staffed by lots and lots of people just like Anthony Fauci, because it turns out in life there are lots and lots of people like Anthony Fauci.

And that’s not good.