Dear Diary

The congressional theater of a pre-pardoned villain reminded me of why I got involved in politics in the first place.

I live with my own disappointments with the reality that government, regardless of who is in charge, is seemingly immovable. I have watched as people who I wanted to win the election to “drain the swamp” or “fix Washington” have all struggled to make any substantive moves through that molasses morass of a city. Endless panels of task forces, designed to make sure that real discussions are always sidelined. Vaccines? Nope…but food dyes? That’s the ticket. The bureaucracy is the fourth and most powerful branch of government, and until we admit that voting has no power to fix that, we will be left with boisterous campaign rhetoric followed by itty-bitty, incremental movements. Our insistence that “little wins” are “how politics works” is the secret ingredient that allows Washingtonians to make sure the American people never see anything of substance change.

I took a long break from it after February this year. I tried to write as much as my mind would allow, but everything I typed sounded the same. A noisy cymbal, yelling about a war that no one but Ben Shapiro wanted, and a government that is too big to be anything but a bully. So I stopped. There were better things to do. One of my oldest sons was getting married in the summer, and my youngest would be off to college by August, so sitting down to type out another diatribe about the government's abuses seemed futile. I wrote one last scathing piece about my frustrations, and when I realized it had only caused harm, I took it down, closed the laptop, and resolved not to engage in any of this again. Life is far too short to make people angry, especially when the anger has no results. There were plenty of people who could take on the ire in the podcast sphere for me. Besides, all of that had grown tiresome too. Who hates Candace more, the seventeen things about Charlie Kirk that don’t add up, blame Israel for everything, RFK is a charlatan, are all daily covered in the podcast world with great aplom.

I hate the war because we aren’t good at winning them, not because there’s some kind of secret operation by a bungling foreign government to destroy the United States. I am easily frustrated by how quickly we are manipulated by tribal politics, and how principles are irrelevant as long as the Red or Blue team, depending on my predisposed tastes, wins. Washington is silly; state governments are silly; the post-World War two world has been created for the stability of the government, not the benefit of the citizen. It’s nearly impossible to argue the opposite perspective. The citizen is at the bottom of the machine. They are the ones burdened by regulation, taxation, and behavioral modifiers in every situation. The people in the cubicles in Arlington, or Langley, or on Constitution Avenue, will always get next year’s CPI increase, will never miss a paycheck, will always have health care, all at the cost of the people whom they purport to serve. But yelling about it from my keyboard in Colorado is not terribly effective, and if there were anything more damaging to my health than my battles with craving too much salt and my love for the taste of beer, it would be my hyperactive obsession with the dysfunction of government.

I had done pretty well with ignoring it too. We had a lovely wedding for my son. I have had the chance to travel with my son, who is leaving for college, and we have even managed to sneak in more fishing than I thought we might this summer, given the schedule. I rediscovered my love for music, and my wife and I played more concerts than we ever thought we would.

But they just had to march the diminutive doctor from Brooklyn back into the foreground.

And like a tape in hypersonic rewind, hearing his voice again took me right back to the early days of COVID. The voice, the smug answers, even how he pleaded the Fifth, were all bad reminders of why I had become so activated in politics. We have never been a “news” family. We have no television, canceled our cable package in 2002 when we couldn’t afford it and never looked back, and after 9/11 and the clear manipulation that the media put upon the American people, have no trust in anything that the “mainstream” media writes. So, when on a ski trip with my dad and my youngest son in March of 2020, just before the lockdowns, my father turned the television on to Fox News as we settled in for bed at the hotel, my youngest son looked at me with perplexity about what this panican machine was saying.

And there, for the first time, was my introduction to Dr. Fauci. For so many, his avuncular presence seemed a nice-tempered restraint on the orange man. The now-famous photo of Fauci with his hand over his eyes standing behind Donald Trump became the meme of the moment. He embodied how many felt about Trump’s response to the pandemic, and he confirmed their biases that Trump was an idiot. Dr. Fauci gave them someone in the room they trusted, and he became a national hero to those who really loathed the Fifth Avenue monster. No one wanted to say it at the time, but the reality was that they loved Fauci, not for his “science” or his “doctoring” but because he was a kryptonite to Trump. The pandemic would be managed by credible people in their minds. Trump could say whatever he wanted, but in the background, Fauci and his team were the real heroes, stopping Trump from his panacea of horsepaste and malaria cures.

On that same ski trip, we had dinner at a local steakhouse called the Mint. It’s a favorite stop of ours: a cook your own steaks on a grill, rummage around in an old salad bar type of place. The owner was in real panic. Not the kind on Fox News, but the kind I knew from my life in business. “The governor is going to bankrupt me if he keeps talking about shutting everything down.” He continued, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

I have no medical training, and, as I have often expressed here, I haven’t been to a doctor in a long time. The whole system is so broken that I barely trust anyone or anything in relative proximity to it. So you can imagine that my skeptic's alarm bells were firing early and often during the pandemic's early days. Shutting everyone in their homes and locking everything down did not seem like a solution for a free people, nor did it seem like the right one even if we had been living in Soviet Russia. Nothing like the proposed worldwide governmental response had ever happened before. There were no precedents for a national or global lockdown. But there we were. And just like that, daily press briefings from the president, or the vice president, who would step embarrassingly aside in sheer demure to allow for the “experts” to have the podium. Dr. Fauci seemed to love the whole thing. There didn’t seem to be a camera he didn’t want to be on.

With each passing week, month, and year, Dr. Fauci's stature grew. Trump was vanquished in the 2020 election, and Fauci, to so many, was the hero who had helped make it happen. He was the most important person in America to anyone who didn’t like Donald Trump.

The MAHA Seeds

But there was a group of people who didn’t want to be forced into the choice of surrendering their autonomy as people for a political win. They may or may not have liked Trump. They might have been like me, skeptical of government power, and well aware that whatever power is conceded to government by force must be wrested back by the force of the people. They could have been anti-vaxers who knew the playbook and didn’t want to see the inevitable coming mandates and societal pressures that would be lathered upon the people. Whoever they were, and whatever political persuasion they came from, they formed a resistance. It was a coalition of farmers-marketeers, libertarians, and anti state/business collusion watchdogs that gathered in the shadows to express their frustrations with the government's response.

For that group, Dr. Fauci became the target to call out. He was the one presenting his case minute by minute on television. He played his “expert” card often and would shut down dissent with a mere laugh or scoff. He had led the initial response, the charge for the vaccine, mask mandates, and anything else that could impede the normal way of life that had existed pre-COVID. That’s probably, in retrospect, giving him far too much credit, but at the time, he was the easiest and most visible person to frame the discussions around. And for that group, their pseudo-reluctant raising of a hand in question about the government’s response usually meant being throttled and labeled as a January 6th, science-denying, MAGA-tard.

My Own Story

In 2011, I had been hospitalized with Myocarditis. It was on the heels of a particularly stressful season, and could have been much worse had I not gone to the emergency room. So anytime I hear that word, I tend to listen. One of the early studies on the COVID-19 vaccine showed indications of that being a side effect of the drug. A doctor from my church and I spoke, and I expressed my concerns about it given my medical past. He agreed and said it might be best to wait until there was more data about it for someone like myself. That choice, however, had many consequences in a world obsessed with vaccinations. I was part of the problem. I was the one preventing everyone from “returning to normal.” There was talk of my real estate state license being revoked without proof of the shot. At the other business I run, I couldn’t enter the building to talk to my team unless I was registered as vaccinated. I resigned from my real estate brokerage, and created a workaround at the other business, but I was a second-class citizen in the eyes of many. Friends with whom I thought I had a long-standing relationship became angry and condemning. Some of whom I have never spoken with again.

The propaganda was very strong. Safe and effective or not, it was clear that society had made the choice that those of us who were refusing the vaccine were the problem. It was us who were killing grandma and not allowing everyone to get back to normal. Our selfishness was the problem. Their worlds were being impeded by our choices. I remember being in situation after situation in which the first question I was asked was not who I was, but if I had been vaccinated. Walkthroughs for real estate transactions required a COVID test or proof of vaccination. We couldn’t see my wife’s family in Canada without that same proof. The places we loved to go were off-limits because we would either have to lie and fake a vaccination card or be barred from participating. We had to mask up skiing, and our normal bula-type neck gators didn’t count. Only the stupid paper masks over our bulas were acceptable. We talked about moving to Wyoming or South Dakota, somewhere else where there at least were some sensible people in charge of public policy. It was the strangest time of our lives as a family. It wreaked havoc on my teenage kids. It has taken us years with our oldest to even return to something resembling what we had before the lockdowns.

For those of us who chose not to participate in the ways society wanted us to, the consequences were real and difficult. We were not seen as champions of freedom or the Constitution. We were pariahs.

A Bad Memory Faded

Until I saw the Doctor in Congress this past week, memories of that era had faded. I knew how I felt about it, but for the most part had wanted to forget it. My disillusionment with Washington had helped me shove the memories away. It is clear there will be no consequence for the actions of people like Dr. Fauci. He has a preemptive pardon, a plethora of defenders, and his cultural status is forever protected because, for half the country, he was the “sane” answer to Donald Trump. For the record, I didn’t want to see a second term of Donald Trump when the ‘24 election got underway.

(The first video I created that caught the attention of The Kennedy Campaign)

I wanted to see RFK Jr. become president almost exclusively because of his desire to protect the Constitution and because, during the campaign, he emphasized that the government’s sole responsibility is to protect citizens' constitutional rights. He was one of the voices willing to stand up and say that what the government was doing was wrong. He put a magnifying glass on the bad choices that the bureaucrats and politicians were making and was unashamed to say so. He showcased how the Washington machine worked. The revolving door of money, politics, and pay-to-play in government was evident to anyone willing to shed even the slightest shade of skepticism about the system. I loved him for it. I will always be thankful for him. He was a voice that helped so many of us find our own bravery to speak up and ask whether the government was as pure as the wind-driven snow it was proclaiming itself to be. Even in his choice to join Trump at the end of the ‘24 campaign, I saw someone who was trying to do the best thing he could for the country. Perhaps he has become too politically malleable and partisan, but regardless of my disappointments about what I see as the small incremental gains he is allowed to make by the Trump administration and the Washington money machine, he will always be an admirable character who gave a voice to millions.

For My Public Health Friends

I’ve spent a lot of time this past year becoming friends and acquaintances with a number of people in the public health space. My pseudo-regularity on the podcast “Why Should I Trust You?” has introduced me to a group of really well-intentioned people who I genuinely like. So, before I totally destroy their readership of my writing, I want to try to articulate why Dr. Fauci needs to be separated from public health if public health is ever going to regain any trust with the average American. I know he is being given a wide alley of forgiveness right now by most who are in the health space, and the theater of Washington did seem like a pig-pile on an old man who should be sailing off into the sunset of retirement, but for so many of us, Fauci is the centerpiece of all that is wrong with the scientific backbone of the healthcare system. Any honest assessment of how he handled himself during COVID must include his faults. I think it is important to understand why he and those who surrounded him during the pandemic dismantled trust in the institution.

Politics

Dr. Fauci became a political figure. Like it or not, Fauci played Trump’s nemesis and was embraced politically as the momentary solution to someone who seemed unstoppable at the time. History will look at the decline of Trump’s popularity in his first term from the State of the Union speech in February of 2020, where Nancy Pelosi tore up the speech, and Rush Limbaugh was given the Medal of Freedom, to his loss in November of that year as the fastest decline of an incumbent in American politics. He was soaring in February of 2020. He was popular with his base; he had outlasted an impeachment, a Russian collusion narrative, plus a dozen other “scandals” and seemed poised to easily win re-election. The Democrats had a Bernie problem, and Mayor Pete, Joe Biden, and Amy Klobuchar were not going to fix it. Trump seemed ready to coast to a rather easy second term. A month later, it was all gone. Bernie was ganged up on by the three also-rans and was out, and Trump was buried by a virus. He had some initial skepticism toward the people telling him what was going on, but the media and the inner Washington circle made him appear crazy for suggesting things like that it was a virus from a lab in China, or that there were perhaps medical alternatives to try. And stepping into the spotlight was Dr. Fauci. He was the answer for nearly everyone who disliked and distrusted Trump. He was like a breath of fresh air to Democrats who believed that Fauci made Trump look crazy. He seemed like the trustworthy figure in the room, and while the Donald could bluster and ramble, when his rants fell flat, it was Dr. Fauci who could calm the room down. No one may say it out loud, or even be willing to make this analysis, but Fauci was much more than a doctor to many. He was their answer to a political problem. Their disdain for Trump elevated Fauci to the leader of the rebellion against the “fascist” Trump regime. Public Health must be honest about this embrace. Most people who work in the public sector are more politically aligned with whoever isn't Donald Trump.

Surveys of public-health faculty, researchers, and practitioners (and broader health-sciences faculty) repeatedly find large majorities identifying as Democrats or left-of-center in their voting and politics. Republican or conservative self-identification is typically in the single digits to low teens. Similar imbalances appear in FEC campaign-contribution data for employees of major public health agencies, schools of public health, and medical schools. For many, COVID was a political opportunity to showcase Donald Trump's buffoonery and eliminate him from the public sphere of politics. Fauci was the key figure in this political exercise. And before an argument can be made that he was an unwitting figure in this and shouldn’t have all of these political issues cast upon him, his own diary reflects an understanding that he was the “inside the building” opposition to Donald Trump. Here are just a few examples:

• March 28, 2020 (describing a meeting):
  “It was a disturbingly rambling discussion since he kept talking about TV ratings, and HC [hydroxychloroquine], and influenza and virtually everything else as I was trying to keep him on track (with the help of the VP).”

• May 22, 2020:
  “Trump getting out of control in pushing to open up the country and get the economy back before election day. He is desparate. This is all about re-election.”

• July 28, 2020:
  “The POTUS is playing a weird game of acting Okay with me in person and saying that our relationship is fine to the press and then retweeting stuff that attacks me. He is a very strange guy.”

• October 15, 2020:
  “Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control. A true embarrassment.”

• November 16, 2020:
  “POTUS has no interest at all in the Pandemic. He is focusing on blocking Biden from being POTUS. He is embarrassing the USA. However, 72,000,000 voted for him. Difficult to understand. Craziness has overtaken part of our country.”

• March 29, 2021:
  “[Trump] is truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

• June 6, 2021:
  “The entire extreme right wing republican group in the House and Senate have completely sold their soul to the infinitely lying ex president trump.”

Dr. Fauci embraced his role as political thwarter. He saw it as some kind of noble effort to make sure that Trump looked like the inferior mind as it related to the pandemic. He embraced the way he embarrassed Trump in the media. He took on the political hopes of the people around him and projected a persona that was the cure for Trump.

If public health ever wants to regain trust, it has to first admit this bias. They were in part cheering on Dr. Fauci, not because he was solving the problems of the pandemic, but because he was helping to vanquish Donald Trump. Embracing behind-the-scenes politics while attempting to serve a 50/50-aligned public is a complicated tightrope to walk for an institution that is supposedly there for the health of the people it serves.

Control the Info

Public Health is filled with a great deal of daily heroes. People who work tirelessly for less-than-ideal dollars, because they want to help others. At the beginning of the pandemic, the spirit of medicine was on full display. Doctors were sharing information with one another, in an attempt to help find a cure for what was clearly a threat to the public. There were doctors trying therapeutics and seeing success. There were still others using already approved drugs to help shorten the symptoms and keep people out of the hospital. But early on, it became clear that Fauci and others at the top of the bureaucracy wanted to control what information was out there, and how people were supposed to treat the disease.

While there is some plausibility that his hesitation to support these early successes stemmed from his view that most of it was anecdotal, by the summer of 2020 it was becoming evident that Fauci wanted to be the primary source of information distribution. In a Wall Street Journal article about the diaries by the Editorial Board from July 27, 2026:

“Dr. Fauci gloated to himself about his viciousness toward critics. July 14, 2020, saw him trying to quash a skeptical memo about his policies by Journal contributor Stephen Moore. “I told [White House aide Alyssa Farah] that the White House (either Meadows or the POTUS) need to shut up Stephen Moore and stop his publication of ‘Dr. Wrong’ paper. If he does not the entire academic community will dump all over the POTUS.”

He attempted to freeze lockdown skeptics out of policy-making roles. He refers to Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff, authors of the lockdown-critical Great Barrington Declaration, as “the 3 stooges.”

I believe that if Public Health wants to understand the ire around this suppression of information, it has to understand the role Dr. Fauci played in silencing alternative conversations. Fauci was the dominant public scientific voice from early 2020 onward. He repeatedly characterized reports of success with HCQ and (later) ivermectin as “anecdotal” and insufficient without large randomized controlled trials. NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines (which Fauci’s agency heavily influenced) recommended against routine use of both drugs outside clinical trials. And while these weren’t enforceable government edicts, devotion to Fauci and his team among public health professionals, potentially due to the aforementioned political biases, shaped hospital protocols, physicians' practices, and media coverage nationwide.

And Then There Was The Hubris

Perhaps nothing raises the hair on the back of the necks of those who opposed the COVID world more than hearing Dr. Fauci talk about himself. He was good at it during the pandemic, and the more he was challenged by people like RFK Jr. or Senator Rand Paul, the more an undercurrent of arrogance surfaced. To be certain, no man is designed for that much spotlight, and fame is a destructive cancer to even the best of people — if you are predisposed to the “love of self”, the consequences of embracing fame can be disastrous. For those who opposed Dr. Fauci, nothing was more galvanizing than his insistence on being the central figure in the pandemic. The longer it went on, the more he wanted the spotlight. It seemed no one loved the sound of their own voice more than Dr. Fauci. For people who were unable to bury their loved ones because of the lockdowns, or see their dying parents in rest homes, or others who were cast out of society or lost their livelihoods because of their refusal to comply with government lockdowns, edicts, or mandates, Dr. Fauci’s pursuit of fame and the camera were reprehensible. He seemed evil in his blatant disregard for what was actually happening to the American people. His diary is a confirmation to many of us of what we suspected at the time. Fauci seemed in it for himself. He loved being the center of attention, and the heartbreak and devastation his policies caused were seemingly met with callous indifference by someone who never seemed to shy away from a running camera. Reading his diary stirred all of that up again for me. From the pages of his writing (spelling kept intact to the original):

• March 2020: “Many print profiles and features on me. Ridiculous – too numeous [sic] to count!”

• March 10, 2020: “For better or worse, I am becoming an international celebrity. Calls from all over the world.”

• March 22, 2020: “Press is going wild with me. Front page in Washintgton Post [sic] yesterday and Op Ed by Maureen Dowd in NY Times today about me and my relationship with the POTUS. Profile by Peter Nicholas on me in The Atlantic.”

• Around March–April 2020: “The ‘swag’ around me is getting really ridiculous. You can buy Fauci T-shirts, mugs, donuts, sweat shirts, candles, pillows, etc. Geeeez!! I do not like this one bit.”
  “Continued crazy stuff: Petition to name me ‘Sexiest Man Alive’; video games named after me; Fauci Bobblehead; dishes in restaurants named after me, and on and on.”

• Around the same period (referencing merchandise and publicity):
  “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me.”
  “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.”
  “Intense publicity about me continues with stories of granmothers who have crushes on me.”

• May 3, 2020 (after listing global and U.S. case/death figures): “Fauci-maddness continues with multiple articles and every sort of paraphernalia and restaurant and foods named after me.”

• May 21, 2020: “Big front page article abut me appeared in the Washington Post. Very flattering. The situation with my national and international fame is explosive and really unimaginable. It is not hyoperbole [sic] to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable peson [sic] in the world. Countless profiles on me in multiple media. I cannot even read all the things that are written abuyt [sic] me since I am so busy….seriously.”

• Other entries note: being followed by “a horde of at least 20 paparazzi,” Secret Service agents waving him through without ID checks and chatting casually, invitations to Dancing with the Stars (“no thanks!”), standing ovations and being “totally mobbed” for selfies (claiming “at least 100”), and frequent celebrity contacts (Julia Roberts, Barbra Streisand, Joan Baez, etc.). One entry states “Millions of people idolize me.”

While millions of people had to deal with the real-life consequences of his policies and “recommendations,” Dr. Fauci was lost in his own world of celebrity. It was so detached and filled with idolitry that many of us began to reject everything he said simply on the merits of his own self-aggrandizement. The lesson for public health in all of this is to ensure that, if this ever happens again, no single voice is elevated to speak on behalf of the community. Science is the work of consensus building around ever-changing data sets. Science isn’t ever, by its nature, “settled” as many acolytes of the era claimed. Dr. Fauci was even an early advocate for “let(ting) the science speak,” and that “you’ve got to evolve with the science. Science is a self-correcting process.” But by the time the information reached the public, especially through the government’s recommendations, there were only narrow lanes for people to access. Fauci’s hubris about himself in the moment discredited him with a large swath of people in the country. Fixating on bobbleheads, even if he “didn’t like it,” was out of touch with what millions were enduring for months and years because of the policies he and his team instituted.

I want trust to return to all of our institutions. But there has been tremendous damage, and no figure embodies it more than Dr. Fauci. That may be unfair, and to be certain, Donald Trump played a huge role in all of the decisions that were imposed upon the people of the country too, but if public health wants to try and rewrite the slate, which I believe it is incumbent upon them to do, not the people who were harmed by their policies in the pandemic, then they have to distance themselves from Dr. Fauci.

He may be their political hero, but as long as he remains so, they will not be trusted again. The diaries are damning and embarrassing, I am sure, to him, but they should be. They should be to public health too. Those who are this era’s on-the-ground leaders need to admit that embarrassment. Forget the Washington mess. I don’t think anyone there is going to fix it, but those on the frontlines need to learn to exercise their muscle of independence. Speak out, as Dr. Craig Spencer has about the need for transparency. Do I agree with every assessment Craig writes? No. But I admire someone who sits in a very different political seat than I do for attempting to take an honest look at the issues that created an environment that could manifest a Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci will face no consequences for the COVID era, which will disappoint the die-hards. Admittedly, if I had been someone who couldn’t bury a loved one or be by their side during their death, I would be a person with uncontrolled rage at the people who were responsible for all of it. I wish there were more accountability in government, but there isn’t, and our system isn’t designed for justice — so it will remain in the realm of the theatrical for the foreseeable future.

I don’t want government involved in any of this health space. But given our broken political world, and the insistence by most in the public that it is the government's responsibility to continue to be a central character in healthcare, the best we might be able to muster up is the reappropriating of power to the people who face the challenges of the American medical system firsthand. Patients need Doctors to be at their best in the moments that they need them. That requires something very different than how it went down in COVID. No patient needed Dr. Fauci, and if they were honest, no Doctor needed him either. He represents the broken aspects of our system, and he should be left alone to retire to whatever beach house he might aspire to own in Maryland. I do hope that people recognize his role in dismantling public trust in public institutions. His Fifth Amendment serenade last week should be enough for people to understand that there is at least a political witch hunt that engenders distrust of public health, and, at worst, some true cover-up criminality involving gain-of-function research in which he has a hand. Either should be enough for people in Public Health to bid the doctor adieu.