A useful idiot.

Dr. Anthony Fauci appears before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee at the Capitol, Wednesday, July 29, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)

One hundred eleven times. On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government face of the COVID-19 pandemic, appeared before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

When questioned by that committee about his role in the government’s response to the pandemic, Dr. Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 111 times. 111 times. It may be a record.

The committee is chaired by Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a frequent and vocal critic of Fauci, and it came in the wake of the public release of Fauci’s personal diary that he kept on a government server, which makes it government property.

(Just as an aside, what grown man do you know who keeps a diary?)

The intent of Wednesday’s hearing was for Fauci to be finally held to account. That didn’t happen. Though he was granted a preemptive pardon by Joe Biden and is thus not subject to prosecution, he refused to answer questions – even benign questions such as, “What color is my tie?,” 111 times. Many of the questions were ones the answers to which we already know. It just would have been nice to hear Fauci at last own up.

We now know that though Fauci claimed in public that COVID came from a Chinese wet market, he knew full well that the source was  a leak from a research lab in Wuhan, China. A lab in which gain of function research – officially banned under U.S. policy – was taking place thanks to funding provided through a back door by Fauci’s agency with Fauci’s full knowledge.

One could thus argue that the source of the COVID pandemic was Fauci himself.

That’s one example. It’s bad. But it’s not new.

What’s new is Dr. Fauci’s diary. While Americans were effectively placed under house arrest by governors, mayors and county officials who acted on Fauci’s recommendations, while small businesses failed, wiping out the livelihoods and life savings of countless thousands of Americans, while churches were closed and elementary school children were placed in lifelong educational deficit by the closing of schools, and while old people were made to die alone and uncomforted in nursing homes, Fauci was giggling like a school girl at his newfound celebrity.

Early in the pandemic I came to dislike Fauci. What I now understand is that I didn’t dislike him nearly enough.

Gushing about being on magazine covers and talking to the likes of Julia Roberts is galling as hell against a backdrop of 330 million people being stripped of their civil liberties. People were losing their livelihoods, their marriages and for too many, their very reason for living. But all the while, Tony Fauci was having the time of his life.

Anthony Fauci is the classic example of a small man in a big role. It’s clear that his juvenile fascination with his own celebrity made him a useful idiot to the media. That’s because for the media, the pandemic wasn’t a story, it was a means to an end — the taking down of Donald Trump.

Toward that end, they played Fauci like a fiddle.