The anti-Trump resistance has settled on its Anthony Fauci narrative. The Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing Wednesday was a witch hunt. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who deeply influenced the restrictive guidelines during the Covid pandemic, had no choice. The good doctor had to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
It’s a nice story, but the camera doesn’t lie. More than an hour into the proceedings, Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, exposed the stone wall strategy. He requested those in the audience to stand up if they had paid a professional, legal, or personal price for dissenting from Covid orthodoxies during the pandemic. The senator then asked Fauci to turn around and look at them. Fauci refused.
Then Moreno told the story of a family in Ohio who attended a high school football game in the middle of the lockdowns. “They went to the stadium. They sat alone, far from anyone else. They didn’t feel they needed to wear masks because it was stupid and they were outside. Dr. Fauci, do you know what happened to . . . that family?” Fauci responded with the line he must have repeated more than a hundred times in the hearing. “On the advice of counsel I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,” he said.
Moreno went in for the kill. “They were dragged out of that stadium and arrested,” he said. “Those policies were put in place because you had moronic politicians that listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people.” Fauci just sat there, stone faced, without emotion.
