Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs โ even after receiving a preemptive pardon from President Biden.
The craven move brought back the darkest memories of the COVID-19 pandemic: the insanity of lockdowns, the hypocrisy of the “trust the science” mob, and the crushing of dissenting voices by the Left.
Fauci’s refusal to defend himself under oath speaks volumes โ not just about his own conduct, but about the entire premise of the progressive administrative state.
“Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) ripped into Fauci during the hearing, according to Breitbart reporting. “You have avoided responsibility for years,” Paul said, adding that Biden’s pardon “doesn’t rewrite history.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) accused Fauci of “hiding behind a fraudulent autopen pardon,” according to the same outlet.
The litany of the pandemic’s sins is long โ and bears repeating so it is never forgotten and never happens again.
The lockdowns killed the most vulnerable among us, especially senior citizens whose families were barred from seeing them in their final moments. Liberty and livelihoods were crushed.
Americans were told it was acceptable โ even imperative โ to pause lockdowns and protest against “systemic racism” in the midst of a lethal pandemic. The abstraction of a political talking point was supposedly more dangerous than COVID-19 itself.
Dissenting voices who suggested the virus originated from a gain-of-function experiment at a Wuhan lab were smeared as “conspiracy theorists” or racists. Worse, those who said federal money had been laundered to illicitly outsource that research to communist China โ where lab standards are far more lax โ were canceled entirely.
If the “experts” like Fauci outsourced gain-of-function experiments to communist China and caused a pandemic, then directed the cover-up by improvising public health measures out of whole cloth โ who in their right mind would ever blindly “trust the science,” let alone the Administrative State?
Before pleading the Fifth, Fauci did make an opening statement that portrayed himself as the victim. He complained about Sen. Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” and “slanderous comments,” claiming the hearing’s “sole reason” was to “get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.'”
Yet the man who in 2020 never met a camera or microphone he didn’t like refused to publicly defend himself against such “slanderous comments.”
His silence was the silence of the entire progressive project โ the lie that rule by the Administrative State’s “experts” is better than self-governing sovereign citizens.
Should the one-time media-adored doctor whom half the country unreservedly trusted prove to be a fraud โ possibly a criminal and negligent mass murderer โ the whole leftist siren song to turn Americans into hapless, couch-bound neurotics dependent upon secular high priests of therapy and science implodes from its own authoritarian conceits.
And not soon enough.
