Victor Davis Hanson: Anthony Fauci’s Fall Is a Modern Greek Tragedy

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
It was not I remain the science, as he assured us, he was one of the most unscientific of all of our bureaucrats. He was bragging on the scientific method as he was rewarding and punishing critics and admirers. So how did he get away with this? What was, who empowered him?
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. By the time you hear this, Anthony Fauci has testified before Rand Paul's senatorial committee, and he's going to be extensively cross-examined. Why now? Because Anthony Fauci had come under a lot of controversy for his role as Donald Trump's unofficial COVID czar between 2020 and 21, and Joe Biden's czar from 21 all the way up to the end of the Biden term. And he had communicated through emails, but he was very careful, usually to say erase this email or not to be candid. But for some reason, he kept a diary, and he did so on government files dash government property. It was very hard to find. It was on 11 different servers. But Rand Paul's team compiled some 1100 pages since 2019 right on the eve of the COVID pandemic. And it is at completely at odds with what he was telling you, the public, telling the president of the United States, and telling colleagues in the scientific community. What does one learn about Anthony Fauci? I must say at the beginning, it is kind of unfair to expose some inner thoughts. I've never kept a diary, but I suppose that people who do vent sometimes, they exaggerate, they let off steam. And we don't know to what effect he was doing that, but we do have an incriminating record written by Fauci himself. He is a narcissist. Why nine to ten thousand people are dying a day, he's talking about whether he's going to be eating with Jake Tapper that night.
That's against Fauci's own rules of social distancing. And in-house quarantine, you can't go out. Remember, you couldn't go out for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And like Gavin Newsom and like Nancy Pelosi, we see the architects of these policies, Fauci in particular, is violating them. But he talks about all the awards he could get, how he could angle to get a million here, 500,000 there, what type of exemption he could get, how wonderful he was on CNN or MS, how Trump is impressed by him. He's the most important, famous man in the nation, maybe the world, on and on and on. It's just unfiltered egomania, unchecked. He's also unscientific. Remember, he told us that I remain the science. But in his own admission, he calls in 12 expert virologists, and he asks them, given the genetic imprint of the SARS-2 virus, where did this come from? Because everybody thinks it came from the Wuhan lab. Did it? Ten. Ten out of 12 basically said the genetic sequencing is so rare, and it has so many variables that had to be exactly right. It had to be made in the lab. And he admits this in his diary, and then he goes out, and for the next two years, promulgates this myth that it came from a dead pangolin in a meat market in Wuhan or a bat, I think the closest bats are 100 miles away, a colony of bats. And so he knew it was false. So why did he do it? He did it because, as he had admitted in an earlier email exchange with Francis Collins, he did it because he knew that gain-of-function research was illegal in the United States since 2017 He wanted to conduct that, but he could not. So he helped fund, maybe in a symbolic rather than a huge amount of money, he granted through his friend, Peter Dasik, the head of Echo Health, a kind of circuitous route that would be untraceable and help this lab have funding. But more importantly, many of the people in the lab had been trained in the United States. So he green-lighted the idea that people could communicate freely with them, add expertise, send instrumentation, visit in what was a very, very dangerous operation to enhance viruses without proper safety considerations and outlaw the United States. And that had burst out on the American scene, and he wanted nobody to know that he was involved.
He used his, it's clear from the diary, he used the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease. His own fiefdom wasn't necessarily designed to be as important as the CDC, FDA, or NIH, but it was because he was an empire builder. And it's very clear that people who apply and agree with him for multi-million dollar grants succeed and those who cross him will not be funded by our federal government and our money.