New Zealanders can only dream of having an elected representative with the balls of US Senator Josh Hawley. Or of seeing their own Covid-era celebrity ‘scientists’ dragged as comprehensively over the coals as Anthony Fauci was this week. Unfortunately, Americans can still only dream of the loathsome Fauci actually doing some much-merited prison time for the misery and lies he inflicted on them from 2020 on. The generation of children mentally crippled by the completely unnecessary misery foisted on them will probably never see the guilty liars in labcoats held properly to account.
For the moment, then, they’ll just have to make do with the magnificent rhetorical beating Hawley meted out to Fauci at a Senate hearing about the origins of Covid-19 and his handling of the pandemic. Watching Fauci visibly squirm as even he realised what a complete scumbag he looked like, as he robotically parroted “On the advice of council, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the fifth amendment to the Constitution.” Likely, as Hawley and Senator Rand Paul both reminded him, in breach of the law.
Senator Paul said Dr Fauci was not allowed to plead the Fifth Amendment right to refrain from answering senators’ questions, that a pardon from former US president Joe Biden would not protect him, and that there would be consequences for refusing to answer, adding the committee had scheduled a vote next week to hold Dr Fauci in contempt.
Hawley hammered the message home:
Let’s just get one thing straight. You don’t have any rights under the fifth amendment because you’ve been pardoned, as you very well know, as the Supreme Court has been clear for a century and more. Brown versus Walker, 1896. “When he has been pardoned, he may not stand upon his privilege.” You know that. Your lawyers sitting behind you now shifting nervously in their chairs. They know it. This isn’t about the Constitution. This isn’t about the law. This is about contempt. Contempt for this body and contempt for the American people.
Yet, Fauci wouldn’t even tell Hawley what day of the week it was, what colour tie he was wearing or what colour the carpet in front of him was. It was astonishing. It was humiliating. It was only too well deserved.
As Hawley reiterated in a blistering take-down, Fauci’s overriding compass during the Covid pandemic was self-promotion and self-enrichment. As Hawley used internal emails from Fauci’s staff to illustrate, while millions of Americans were grappling with the pandemic, he was using taxpayer-funded staff to solicit cash prizes totalling over a million dollars. Fauci also found time to sit for glossy magazine covers.
Good Oil readers should be all-too familiar with this sort of behaviour.
“We’re working on this nomination for the Dan David Award for Fauci,” Hawley read from the email. “We need to beef up the Covid part.”
Hawley alleged the Dan David Award carried a $900,000 cash prize and claimed Fauci used federal employees to help obtain it. He further accused Fauci of using government staff and resources to pursue at least eight additional cash awards, including honors from the Partnership for Public Service, the Adelson Prize, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Academy of Medicine and the CDC Foundation.
“In fact, you turned your staff into a full-time application machine,” Hawley said. “You actually wrote to people and said, ‘Do you think maybe I’d qualify?’”
The self-serving Fauci opened his non-testimony by whining that Senator Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution”. Well, yes: in much the same way Eliot Ness was obsessed with prosecuting Al Capone.
The full text of Hawley’s final remarks to Fauci are worth quoting in full. Watch the video for yourselves, and then dream of other Covid-era scientists being held under such a blowtorch.
Yeah. Well, silence is admission. And here’s the real thing. At the end of the day, it wasn’t just about the money really, was it? It was really about a power trip. I mean, through all of this, you want to be the most famous scientist in the world. You were so focused on getting every award and every drop of cash that you could, all because you wanted to be on TV. You wanted to be the sun god of science. You wanted to be the guy who was in charge of it all. You wanted to blame Trump. You wanted to make sure that nobody else stole your spotlight. You wanted to be the guy.
You had time to sit for InStyle magazine. Here’s what you were doing with your time. You could sit for InStyle magazine, but you can’t answer questions for the American people. You could sit for InStyle magazine, but you’re here taking the fifth. You could sit for InStyle magazine and get a million bucks in cash awards, but now the cat’s got your tongue. I bet he does.
I tell you what, here’s my conclusion from all of this. This was really all about you the whole time. Somewhere along the way, you lost your way. You may have been a good public servant at one time. I don’t know. But what I can tell you from reading your emails now, from looking at what you did, how you used your employees, somewhere along the line, it became all about you. You became a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar. And you’ve lied to the American people. And you’ve lied to this body. And you’ve disgraced your profession by doing it.
You called yourself the most famous scientist in the world. You’ve done more to harm science than anybody in my lifetime. And I hope you’ll go home and write that in your diary. Thank you, Mr Chairman.
[Emphasis added]
And that, dear readers, is what the kids call a ‘mic-drop moment’.
