The AIDS crisis’s best-known activist—and the most vocal critic of the NIH response—playwright Larry Kramer, may have been the first to make the cold assessment about Dr. Fauci’s winning capacity for combining charm and flattery with evasion, misdirection, and misinformation to bedazzle the media into suspending skepticism and overlooking his reliable incompetence. “The main reason that Fauci has gotten away with so much,” Kramer observed in 1987, “is that he’s attractive and handsome and dapper and extremely well spoken and he never answers your question.”68 Historians Torsten Engelbrecht, author of Virus Mania, and Konstantin Demeter call Fauci “Dr. Baron of Lies.”69
Asked to offer thoughts on Fauci, veteran AIDS “war” reporter Celia Farber pulls back and takes a broad view. She said:
People understand the Arendt concept of the “banality of evil.”
You have set yourself the formidable task of deconstructing him. Why is he “evil”? (Which he is.) It’s not because he is so “banal,” so bureaucratic, so boring. That’s the drag costume.
In fact, he is a revolutionary—a very dangerous one, who slipped behind the gates when nobody understood what he was bringing in.
What was he bringing in? He was bringing in—as a trained Jesuit and committed Globalist—a new potion that would achieve any and all aims for Pharma and the powers he served. The potion was then known as Political Correctness—now called “woke.”
Fauci switched the entire linguistic system of American science, from classical “speak,” to woke “speak.” He brought in Cancel Culture, essentially, before anybody could imagine what it was. It was too perverse for genuine scientists to conceive of such a thing mixing with science, they could not believe it, or grasp it. Like a rape. It was incredibly confusing. That’s what I documented, on the ground, that horror and confusion among real scientists, as American science changes so radically before their eyes, to accommodate HIV.
Farber went on:
Let me elaborate a bit. Fauci’s reign begins in 1984, a year of total change. Everything changes, all of a sudden. Gallo is deployed with Margaret Heckler to make the declaration by US Government fiat that the “probable cause of AIDS” had been “found” and that it was some kind of trans-Atlantic fusion that looked “virus like” on the big screen, but was really neither a cogent virus nor a pathogen. The reason it “flew” to use [Nature Bio/Technology founding editor] Harvey Bialy’s word, was because everything had already changed. It was understood, without overt commands, that the “gay cancer” that had everybody in such a panic could not be assessed as complex toxic illness with a complex cause. The entire US media understood what to say and not say, and not only because of the allegiance to the shadow government, but because the era of classical science had ended. It ended that day. It would henceforth be a crime against decency to, for example, address anything that could be making gay men sick other than “the virus.”
That’s not “bad science.” That’s perfectly executed political correctness. And they are diametrically at odds, in the Biblical sense of good and evil.
What Fauci did was he made political correctness the new currency, of his funding empire. Peter Duesberg was not “wrong” about HIV and AIDS, he was politically incorrect about it and that was how Fauci banished him—sentenced him to funding and reputation death, as though he had done something really bad by dissenting against HIV theory. Stop and think how insane this is. An elite cancer virologist brought over from Germany’s Max Planck Institute whose credentials are so outstanding, who was well on his way to solving cancer’s genetics . . . felled suddenly by a fatwah, issued by this . . . Mufti? Who was he to issue a fatwah against America’s top cancer virologist? Well, he did. He blocked every federal research dollar to Duesberg after 1987, because Duesberg repudiated the woke ideology Fauci’s HIV empire, in a few paragraphs of a scientific paper that was about something else. He sustained the economic and reputational attack/vendetta for the next 3 decades. Without blinking. It’s really an unbelievable story. It would make Americans’ blood boil if they knew about it—because almost all have lost somebody in their family to cancer.
Fauci had, by 1987, when Duesberg wrote the Cancer Research paper that sealed his scientific fate, an apparatus that included mass media, psychological operations, public health—this octopus that just straight-up throttled the entire scientific tradition of Western civilization. Evidence based science and the discourse culture that goes with it— gone. That’s what he did. It’s no small feat. He destroyed American science by snuffing out its spirit, the spirit of open inquiry, proof and standards.
The reason so many outstanding scientists lent their names to opposing Fauci’s vendetta on Duesberg was not that they cared, necessarily, about the cause of AIDS; This was, for them, a battle over the very soul of science. Kary Mullis [PCR inventor] broke down crying in an interview I did with him in 1994, talking about it—talking about what Fauci did to Peter Duesberg and what it meant.
The real scientists were horrified. Suddenly a guillotine was present. A new and strange terror. People were “guilty,” of thought-crimes like “HIV denialism.” Fauci had made political correctness the new revolutionary language, see? And that meant if you were “bad,” if you didn’t push agenda driven science, everything was taken away from you. And the media cheered. And anybody who didn’t was destroyed, vilified, harassed, fired, in a word, canceled.
His gifts for deflection, misdirection, and obfuscation, and perhaps his boyish charm, give Dr. Fauci a Teflon quality—which he shared with President Ronald Reagan, under whom he initially came to power. Something about Dr. Fauci allows him to escape responsibility for (or even mild questioning about) his steady parade of sketchy decisions, his confident claims unsupported by scientific evidence, his relentless cascade of lies and failed predictions, and his miserable track record for keeping Americans healthy.
As the nation’s newly appointed AIDS czar, Dr. Fauci was now a gatekeeper for almost all AIDS research. NCI already had long experience and robust infrastructure for conducting clinical trials on new drugs. NIAID had neither. Nevertheless, parroting NCI’s vows to cure cancer, Dr. Fauci promised Congress that he would quickly produce drugs and vaccines to banish AIDS. In his 1990 book, Nussbaum concludes that Fauci’s triumph over NCI cost many thousands of Americans their lives during the AIDS crisis.70 Myriad contemporary critics concurred with that assessment.
The PIs: The Pharma/Fauci Mercenary Army