Anthony Fauci, long the highest-paid employee of the United States government, with sheer power that even the late J. Edgar Hoover never dreamed of, appeared before the United States Senate this week, and invoked the Fifth Amendment an astonishing 111 times.
The Senate has to focus on Fauci’s own direct crimes, and that is fair. The Senate can concentrate on how Fauci violated clear federal law to fund types of virology research at a Chinese facility so dangerously sloppy that even the United Nations recommended against using it as an outsourced research vendor. The Senate can focus on how Fauci himself clearly committed perjury so many times. The Senate can study how many knowingly wrong guidances Fauci issued in order to develop a “need” for new vaccines. And the Senate can focus on how Fauci flip-flopped on issue after issue as the 2020 pandemic developed.
Exposing these specific crimes by one of the nation’s most powerful bureaucrats is important. Even though he’s retired so he can’t be fired, and he may not even be able to be prosecuted due to a questionable pardon by a questionable regime, shining the light of truth on a malevolent officeholder is always worthwhile, because it reminds the American people of the danger in giving such powers to government bureaucrats in the first place.
But many of the worst crimes of that evil period – roughly 2020-2021, but it lasted even longer in many areas – weren’t committed directly by Fauci, but were essentially committed by state, county, and local officials in his name. And many of these crimes have already been forgotten, because we don’t want to remember them. It hurts too much.
For decades, we have complained about how television, and then computers, video gaming, and the internet, keep our kids from getting enough exercise. Our tax dollars fund public parks, children’s softball and baseball leagues, anything, to get the kids outside, to get them active.
What did the draconian rules of Fauci and his clones do? They cancelled both school and park district sports – in some places, for a year, in some places, for two! They locked down the playground equipment in taxpayer-funded public parks, removed nets from tennis courts and blocked the hoops of basketball structures. They removed swings and chained down playground roundabouts so kids couldn’t even spin.
For a full year, sometimes two, children were denied the ability to use the taxpayer-funded equipment specifically installed for their health. And they were kept indoors, even after virtually everyone know that the Vitamin D provided by exposure to the Sun was a tool in withstanding the virus.
And what did this do to career prospects? It hasn’t yet been long enough to see the full destruction this all caused, but high school sports are a critical route into college, a route that parents count on, no matter whether their kids plan on sports for a career or just for a way to afford college. In the mostly blue states, teenagers lost one, or even two, critical seasons that kept them out of the colleges they might have attended, and therefore, likely kept them out of the careers they could have pursued.
And all for what? Children and teens who had a near-zero chance of ever getting a serious case of Covid anyway got robbed of a year or two of enjoying life, and many of them likely lost a chance at a career and/or a college education.
And these state, county and local governments – acting on Fauci’s fearmongering – closed shops. Department stores. Entire malls. They ended shopping in person, in some cases for weeks, in other cases for months. They said it wasn’t safe to be in public, so they banned you from shopping. You can order online, after all. You don’t “need” the brick and mortar stores.
You know the term “Black Friday?” That’s the day after Thanksgiving, when the Christmas season’s shopping traditionally begins in earnest. The world of retail is so financially harsh, even in a good year, it loses money ten months of the year, and is only saved by a good November and December. 2020 and 2021 were forced to be so bad for retail that thousands of businesses closed locations or went out of business entirely.
And for what? Regular shoppers and retail employees are in the public eye all the time; they have powerful natural immunities as a result. They weren’t at serious risk of this virus, but that didn’t matter to the petty bureaucrats. Stores were closed, workers lost their jobs, entrepreneurs and retail chains lost everything. For nothing.
Factories and offices were shut down. For the most part, these businesses were able to reopen quickly enough – if they spent a few weeks making enough changes to satisfy the commissars. At the factory I worked at in 2020, for example, we had to install acrylic curtains between positions on every assembly line. We had to install high acrylic sheets between cubicles. We had to add “sanitizer stations” all over the place, at every entry to every hall or manufacturing cell. It cost a mint to do all this silliness, but it was better than shutting down. Many companies never recovered.
Grocery stores and liquor stores weren’t spared; they were deemed “necessary,” so they could stay open, but they had to install those acrylic sheets in front of each cashier so that nobody could understand each other’s talking for about a year. Or two. And they put arrows on the floor, turning every aisle into one-way lanes like the one-way streets of a busy metro’s downtown. Expensive stickers had to be placed on the floor so you’d remember what direction to go; busybody Karens would shout at you through their masks if they caught you going the “wrong” direction in a supermarket aisle, or if you didn’t keep your arbitrarily required six-foot distance from every other shopper.
And the masks. Oh, the masks.
Polyester, cotton, paper, plastic. Disposable, or washable and permanent.
We were told to carry them with us at all times, to wear them before entering any building or we’d be denied entry. They cost the country countless millions, as did the idiotic, ever-present Covid tests, all of which were made in China – like the virus itself. Those masks, tests, and sanitizer bottles sure made a lot of money for somebody. Especially somebody in China.
It had been well-known scientific fact for a century – ever since the Spanish Flu of the late 1910s – that masks are not a defense against broadly distributed viruses, and that in fact, the longer you wear a mask, the worse it is for your health, not better (because of what the mask traps).
But this didn’t stop Fauci and his minions, working in governors’ offices and city halls, park district centers and school district administrations. They adored the baseless idea of the mask requirement, and it was the hardest change for many of them to give up. Some still encourage wearing the damnable things today, six years later.
Remember movie theatres? And plays. And Broadway musicals. And concert venues. We had theatres in this country that had never closed down, never before – despite wars, recessions, depressions… entertainment always helped get us through such challenges. The House that Fauci Built shut them all down. In some places, they recovered. In others, they never did. Theatre people are notoriously fond of statist politicians; one would have expected them to notice when they found themselves in the crosshairs of those extremist health tyrants, but they never seemed to understand what was going on. Actors and producers obediently, passively, just shut down the lights, drew the curtains, went home, and accepted their unemployment checks. How many careers never came back as a result? How many careers on the verge of discovery never had their moment at all?
The schools were locked too – teachers and professors with zero experience in the totally different field of remote teaching were suddenly directed to teach classes on the internet – on Teams, Zoom and Webex. A tiny minority made this transition work. The vast majority of students lost years of education, falling hopelessly behind.
Then there’s what Fauci’s fearmongering did to medical care. No, not just the crimes related to treatment of Covid itself; that’s getting plenty of attention this week. No, the worse horror is how all other medical care suffered. Hospitals, medical clinics, urgent care, practically every doctor’s office in some states, almost completely shut down. They refused patients, refused care, refused checkups. They told customers to wait a few weeks, then months, and come back in when things were “safer.”
How many toothaches that had only needed a cavity filled were let go until teeth needed to be pulled? How many minor illnesses that might have been cured with antibiotics ended up turning into more serious afflictions? How many cancer signs should have been discovered at stage one, but weren’t diagnosed until stage three or four because of being turned away at the first suspicions? How many “minor” incidents like a fainting spell or a sore arm turned out to be strokes or heart attacks, that weren’t caught in time because of the hospitals’ insane effort to keep sick people out of their buildings?
I saved the churches for last.
The United States of America were founded by religious refugees from persecution back in the Old World. Our Founders didn’t risk dangerous ocean voyages for fun, or for the excitement of trying to farm untilled soil full of rocks and clay. They were Catholics fleeing protestant persecution, or protestants fleeing Catholic persecution, or Jews fleeing everybody’s persecution. Even different brands of protestants didn’t get along in the Old Country – remember the Puritans who came here to get away from the Anglicans.
America was literally founded by Judeo-Christians, so that the faithful could freely practice their religious faith.
And yet… when they came for the grocery stores and the movie theatres, the clothing shops and the schools, they came for the churches and synagogues too. Either banning services outright in some jurisdictions, or requiring insane practices like roping off every other pew in others.
We have protections in the law against such tyranny.
The Freedom to Assemble, and the freedom to worship in the denomination of our choice, are fully protected in the very First Amendment to the Constitution, the very core of the Bill of Rights, celebrated and taught as sacrosanct in our schools for almost two and a half centuries.
But nothing stopped Mr. Fauci and his horde of little local dictators.
Mr. Fauci says we need to keep our distance from each other, so we’re closing your school. Then we’re closing your parks. And shutting down your factory. Closing your theatre. Banning you from visiting your relatives in hospitals and nursing homes. Forbidding you from spending their last moments with your dying parents or siblings or friends, in nursing homes and senior centers. Banning the loving contact of family at one’s final moments. And even locking you out of your church.
This was the tyranny that Anthony Fauci wrought. There is no punishment severe enough for such a monster.
He has never taken responsibility for it. He has obfuscated on every question and pretended he wasn’t behind it all, when in fact it was his offices that funded the illegal gain-of-function research in the first place, his offices that developed and pushed untested vaccines on us, his offices that virtually shut down entire economies on a virus that was ultimately little different than a bad year of the normal seasonal flu – potentially lethal for the very old, obese and immunocompromised, but just another bad flu for the rest of us.
But he redesigned our society, our business sectors, our economy. He almost singlehandedly destroyed the commercial real estate industry, cost our children two years of education, and normalized the literal disregard of our Bill of Rights.
And the fatally-corrupt Biden-Harris regime issued him a preemptive pardon before they left.
Why?
Because while the Biden-Harris cabal had no interest in protecting law-abiding Americans from drug gangs, rapists, department store flash mobs, homicidal illegal aliens or any other class of common criminal, Anthony Fauci was the one person they absolutely had to protect to the end, no matter what.
And what does that tell us about the whole den of vipers he came from?
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” and his brand new collection of stories about the heroes of the American Founding, “The Founding Generation: The Patriots Who Built America,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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