The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Anthony Fauci’s Fall Is a Modern Greek Tragedy

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

Anthony Fauci’s private diary presents a starkly different account of the COVID pandemic from the one given to the American public. The records reveal his awareness that the lab-leak theory was credible, his private agreement with arguments against school closures, and his fixation on media attention, awards, money, and personal influence. Fauci publicly portrayed himself as the embodiment of science while dismissing opposing experts and exercising enormous power over federal research funding. His private admissions, public contradictions, involvement with gain-of-function research, and support from the media turned his pursuit of authority and fame into a modern Greek tragedy—one that severely damaged his legacy and public trust in American institutions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take. Summer heats up in FX's The Shards. Set in 80s, Los Angeles, the Shards follows a group of beautiful, privileged prep school students who are preyed on by the trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city. This fever dream of youth, beauty, sex, and mystery is a must see. FX's the Shards. Streaming August 5th on Hulu on Disney Plus.

Sign up now at Disneyplus.com. 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? 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 in unofficial COVID-Zar 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 1,100 pages since 2019, right on the eve of the COVID pandemic. And it is completely at odds with what he was telling you, the public, telling the present 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 9 to 10,000 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.

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 all. It's just unfiltered egomania, on check. 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? 10. 10 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. 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 Dasick, the head of Echo Health, a kind of circuitous route that would be untraceable and helped this lab have funding. But more importantly, many of the people in the lab had been trained in the United States. So he greenlighted 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 of 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.

He knew from the beginning, as he was criticizing Scott Atlas, a advisor on COVID to the White House, Jay Baccharia, Martin Kulendorf, and Dr. Gupta, other authors of the Great Barrington Doctrine or Manifesto are a decree that said that shutting down the economy, shutting down the schools would ruin lives, increased suicide, substance abuse, robbed children irreparably of key years of their education and an cost-to-benefit analysis be much more deadly and destructive. than the virus itself, which mostly was a danger to people 55 and over. And he knew that because he said in his diary, Scott Atlas was right that the schools are not spreading the virus and need not shut down. He said in his own diary that Scott Atlas did not say, let it rip about herd immunity.

And yet that's what he wrote privately, but publicly he was assuring us, that you had to have no mask at first, then one, then two. He was assuring us that if you got vaccinated, you would not be infectious, nor would you be infected. He was infected a few months after he was inoculated. He didn't tell us that he had a severe side effect with probably a pulmonary embolism. So 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? Who empowered him? Well, the media empowered him. He was an obscure bureaucrat that from time to time, given his longevity, appeared during the AIDS crisis, the influenza outbreaks, and then he receded back into

the obscurity of the Bureau. But this COVID brought him worldwide attention because he weaseled his way into the Trump administration. And by the way, he did not like Donald Trump. And he was the toast of the liberal Washington media. And he used that position to really undercut the president. And remember, 2020 was not just the outbreak of the virus, but it was a campaign year, and it became a political manifesto to speak. In other words, Fauci represented the science and Joe Biden and sane, inductive, educated people, and the Fauci critics were conspiratorial, they were yahoo's, they were drink bleach, intake hydrochloroquine, and Iver Metz, and they were nutty. That was the narrative that he helped spread.

But the lessons are the media now has zero credibility, not after just the Smollett Kaper that they ran with, not after hands up don't shoot Kaper, not after the steel dossier caper, not after the laptop is a Russian product, not after the 51 intelligence authorities, and not after the Wuhan bat caper that a bat flew in and was flung around Wuhan. Bottom line, it's also a morality tale. It's right out of Greek tragedy. Sophocles could have done no better than write a tragedy

about Anthony Fauci. He did all of what he could to become famous, to become rich, to turn his government bureaucratic billet into a fiefdom where all of the scientific community would be scared of what he said because to disagree with him would mean a declination of funding and to be obsequious and a toady would be to have funding lavishly given to you.

And what was the tragic message that Sophocles would have said about Anthony? Everything he did to increase his power and fame and riches ensured his destruction. He was going headlong into destruction because he was eubristic and he ended up completely self-destructive and he will go down in history as someone who abused his position lied to the American people and adopted policies that tragically led to more deaths than were necessary. Thank you. This is Victor Davis-Hanson for The Daily Signal.

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