Fauci – Symptom, Not Disease

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

I’ve been on the road since last Friday.  Yesterday was a day long travel day so I had no time to write, just as the Fauci diaries broke.  I have had no time to read them, but I spent this morning reading reaction pieces, with major pull quotes and commentary.  Frankly, from what I have seen, I see nothing revelatory, but there is a lot of confirmation there.  I think Victor Davis Hanson summed up Fauci best, “The Fauci files reveal not just a sociopathic narcissist, but also a pathological schizophrenic.”  Framing this in term of mental pathology is useful in leading to the ultimate question – How did such an individual get into such a position?

Rather than try and weave the stuff I have read into my commentary, here is a list of recommended reads

• From which the VDH quote came, other links included, read them all.
• The first story on the diaries I saw – from Fox.
• The media made Fauci, they even aced the president out of influence – follow all links.  Despite reliable sources to the contrary.
• Liar, liar pants on fire.

The diaries confirm something that anyone with commonsense has known for a while – Anthony Fauci was the wrong man for the job.  The host actually tried to make that point to the man himself, ineffectually.  But Fauci was in that job for a very long time – 38 years. How in the world does that happen?  This question makes Jim Geraghty’s 2014 book, The Weed Agency, a work of seri-comic prophecy.  Anyone who seriously wants to begin answering that all important question needs to read that book.

One difference between Geraghty’s fictional scenario and this all too real-life one was the role media played.  Geraghty imagined a scenario of bureaucratic fumbling that happened pretty much below the media radar, while this was, of course, well above the fold.  If we are honest, media shoved the President and Vice President of the United States out of the way and coronated Anthony Fauci as king.  That’s blunt and dramatic, but I do not think overstated.  This happened for two reasons that were deeply intertwined.  One, T.D.S. and the other was a fixation on expertise.

Because news media is these days largely a search for expertise to use as a talking head, they have forgotten that there is a “big picture.”  When it comes to something like covid, no one could possible have the big picture save for a head of state because if you are going to talk about shutting things down from school to commerce to travel the big picture encompasses literally everything.  But media got narrow focused on the virus as if none of the rest of it mattered.  And, given T.D.S., media assumed that POTUS was “an idiot,” which to them meant they had to rely on expertise even more.  No one that is a head of state, unless they are non compos mentis (like, say, Joe Biden) is an idiot.  The entire executive branch of the government is designed to provide the person in that position with the best information, from all perspectives, in the most rapid way possible.  By definition heads of state are the most well-informed people on the planet – and that is especially true in this country.

And so, to no small extent, media made Anthony Fauci.  Of course he had to have a massive ego for that “making” to have the effect it did.  But in a normal, well-functioning media environment, such an ego would never have gained the traction it did.

The second thing that must be considered is how bureaucracies function – and this is where Geraghty was entirely prophetic.  Fauci was the head of a smaller government agency that exists several levels down in the government org chart.  From 1984, when Fauci took over NIAID to 2022 when he stepped down, the budget of that agency grew from $350M to $6.3B – that’s a growth of 170,000% while during the same period inflation rose a “mere” 140%.  By bureaucratic standards that would be considered a “success.”  A huge one.  Unless, of course, you consider the mission for which the agency was created to begin with.  Fauci was clearly a bureaucratic expert – you would have to be to grow an agency like that.  But that does not qualify him as an expert on disease. – and certainly not on all the other aspects of our covid response – economics, education, etc.  Heck when it comes to commerce, he knew nothing – as bureaucratic budgeting and business budgeting might as well be conducted on separate planets.  Fauci reacted in precisely the way you would expect a bureaucrat to react – a way that would enlarge the profile and prestige of his agency – that would put it in the eyeballs and consciousness of the appropriators in Congress.

It is up to the president to make sure he does his job well, Congress just gives him money.  We have already established that media shoved the president to the side, leaving Fauci unfettered as to performance and so his massive ego played perfectly with his bureaucratic instincts.  Thus he hoarded media time and national attention, hoping to turn it into budgetary dollars.

This all then gets mixed in a pot that includes the growth of socialist viewpoints in the nation which has been lead by the institutionalization of medicine.  Medicine was once a profession mastered by individuals and practiced between a doctor and the patient.  But it has become something quite different – it has become a machine where even the doctors are reduced to cogs and gears.  This has become true because of concerns about equity in medical treatment which admirable as they are, remain a socialistic impulse.  Socialism is the ultimate expression of bureaucratic thought, and as we have just seen, such thought loses the mission in the operation of the machine.

The last 24 hours have been all Fauci, all the time.  He was indeed a bad actor in a very bad play.  But replacing the actor won’t fix the script.  Unless we fix the script, there will be another just like him come along sometime.  We can ill afford it.