They Just Won't Leave Him Alone

The problem with heroes.

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You know what they say:

Great minds discuss ideas.
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people.

Sometimes, you have to use a person as a gateway into an idea. So, let’s talk about Anthony Fauci, who’s been dragged back into the public spotlight by small minds who’d rather talk about people than ideas.

In 2023, Anthony Fauci was trying to get away from the small minds. Nonetheless, he did an interview with BBC where he said vulnerable populations “will fall by the wayside” as Covid continued to spin new variants and drive new waves of illness. In that moment, he stopped being a hero for many. Of course, one of life’s biggest lessons is that you’re better off without heroes. Maybe that sounds cynical, but that’s not my intention. We spend far too much time talking about people, and far too little time talking about ideas. We should champion ideas. We should realize people hardly ever measure up to our expectations. Our notion of heroism comes from fiction. In real life, nobody can be a hero all the time.

That’s the trap on full display this week as Congress hauls Fauci to yet another hearing, with the explicit purpose of entrapping him and prosecuting him for purjury. They’re throwing all kinds of accusations at him. They’re saying he lied to Americans. They’re saying he abused his power.

Republicans are trying to make a villain out of Fauci, but he’s not. Maybe you think he’s a hero. Maybe he was just a guy with good ideas. These days, someone with good ideas certainly looks like a hero.

As for the vilification, it’s all nonsense.

As I wrote last year, there’s a substantial and even overwhelming amount of evidence that the kinds of protections Fauci pushed at the beginning of the pandemic saved countless lives. If anything, more effort and better communication about masks would’ve saved even more lives. Of course, it wasn’t just Fauci. It was legions of epidemiologists, immunologists, physicians, and medical researchers. It was a team effort. We all did our part, and that’s the story.

That’s not a person, it’s an idea.

The small minds that occupy the right can’t really discuss ideas. Or, perhaps, they prefer to talk about people because they want to appeal to small minds. They also want to shrink your mind down.

It’s easier to control.

They know they lose on the ideas front, because their ideas are horrible. They can’t contest that N95 masks and air purifiers work. So they engage in personal assaults and retribution. Consider what the Trump regime has managed to do in less than two years. They’re responsible for outbreaks of everything from measles to explosive diarrhea. We’ve never had a less qualified, more reckless group in charge of public health. So it’s really the height of irony that they would try to project all of their malicious incompetence onto someone who actually got a few things right.

But we have to understand, the right’s relentless pursuit of Fauci isn’t about Fauci. It’s their avenue to attack ideas. It’s not about the man. It’s about what the man represents. During the early pandemic, Fauci reassured Americans that somebody with a brain was still in charge. He made Trump look stupid, even when he wasn’t trying. Trump never forgave him.

Beyond that, there’s a much broader effort by the super rich to rewrite the history of the pandemic. They’ve been doing it since the Great Barrington Declaration, a document produced by the likes of Jay Bhattacharya, current director of the NIH. We could tell you things about this guy that would send chills down your spine, but again it’s not about people. It’s about their ideas.

Bhattacharya doesn’t think children should be vaccinated for Covid. Even in 2020, he vehemently insisted that we should let the disease spread throughout the population to “establish herd immunity.” That idea was wrong, because actual science has shown that Covid weakens your immune system. Dozens of papers document Covid’s impact on immune function. If you just want a quick summary, you can read this article in The BMJ. It gets right to the point: “A growing number of scientists believe that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may instead [of immunity debt] be subtly altering our immune systems. If correct, their hypothesis will change how we understand everything from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to shingles to sepsis.

Continuing to let Covid spread was always a very bad idea.

No matter who pushed it…

By prosecuting Fauci, guys like Bhattacharya and political flunkies like Rand Paul are trying to control the narrative. They want the public to believe that their ideas were right, even though they were catastrophically wrong and they are the architects of a massive public health failure. Do you see how it works? If they can jail Fauci, they can complete their project of rewriting the pandemic.

If we’re going to talk about ideas…

Fauci’s remarks about the vulnerable “falling by the wayside” tell us less about Fauci, and more about a tragic turning point in the public’s perception of disease. There’s almost no room left in public discourse to talk about ideas anymore, and certainly not with any nuance. We seem to have welded them together. People and their ideas have become one in the same, and that’s dangerous.

You see this trend all the time now, and you saw it in 2023. You couldn’t criticize Fauci or anyone else when they did something that contradicted the ideas they were supposed to uphold. The public defends their heroes, no matter what. Ideas? Not so much. Ideas are disposable now.

Everyone cries in outrage over the Trump regime’s anti-vaccine policies, but they won’t update their flu or Covid shots. They’ll rightly skewer RFKJ over his failures or his bizarre remarks about snorting cocaine off toilet seats. They’ll rightly burn Elon Musk over gutting funding for Ebola prevention. Then they’ll chuckle when Christina Applegate jokes about giving Covid to Jimmy Kimmel. They won’t call her out. They won’t say anything about it.

That’s a problem.

If you criticize the Biden administration’s public health failures, then they accuse you of supporting MAGA. And so it goes with Fauci. You can either think Fauci is a hero, or you can think he belongs in jail.

But we should be able to call out celebrities and politicians when they tacitly endorse, promote, and execute ideas that upend public health or basic human rights. When we refuse to hold our own “heroes” accountable, we let bad ideas spread like disease. We become the villains of our own story.

And then there’s people like me, and hopefully like you. We reject the binary. No, it’s not fair to put Fauci on a pedestal. He’s human. He’s flawed. He caved to political pressure to prematurely end precautions for a disease that’s killed millions and disabled tens of millions more—a disease that remains a threat to public health. This isn’t conjecture. It’s fact. Unfortunately, it’s a fact that a large majority of western society has decided to ignore, much like climate change, much like Gaza, much like the true implications of our technofascist future.

Multiple ideas can be true.

I’m sure I’ll get comments saying we’d be a thousand times better off with someone like Fauci now than the current lineup. Yes, obviously. Doesn’t this go without saying? I guess not. So let me just go ahead and say it: Yeah, we were a thousand times better off with public health officials like Fauci. Compared to RFJK and Dr. Miracle Cure (Oz), any sane person would pick someone who isn’t going out of their way to destroy the little bit of public health we have left.

No, Fauci doesn’t belong in jail.

But if we’re truly interested in building a better society, it doesn’t help us to stay mired in the realm of small minds.

This is what bugs some of us when we see the constant hero worship in both parties. Yes, I get irritated at posts pouring out praise for people instead of ideas. This is the stuff of small minds. I don’t worship AOC. I don’t worship Bernie Sanders. I don’t worship Fauci. They’re not my heroes.

They’re simply adopting good ideas.

There’s a reason why it’s so dangerous to engage in hero worship, regardless of your political orientation. It’s called moral licensing. When you weld people to their ideas, when you give the credit for the ideas to them, everything gets tangled up. When those people fail to live up to those ideas or they miss opportunities to put them into practice, it becomes hard to call them out. Instead, you find people justifying and excusing everything they do.

Everyone’s identities become bound up with their heroes. If you criticize their heroes, then they feel like you’re criticizing them.

Instead of listening, they do the opposite.

They silence you.

That’s moral licensing in a nutshell. Once someone adopts good ideas, they establish themselves as a good person. They do a few good things. They earn their place in society, and then society protects them.

That’s one reason why society keeps getting stuck. We idolize people instead of the ideas they represent. We fail to see witch hunts against Fauci as what they are, an attempt to tear down entire ideas.

As for those ideas:

It’s really something to hear people chant “protect the vulnerable” in 2026, after spending three years saying that they’re going to fall by the wayside, and that has to be okay. Do we not see the contradictions here? When it comes to ICE, we’re going to protect the vulnerable, but when it comes to fighting pandemic diseases, we’re going to let them fall by the wayside?

We’re going to simply look the other way as someone we’ve put on a pedestal says something like that, as a casual observation?

Perhaps we shouldn’t even put this on Fauci. Yes, he said that. He was making an observation. He was making it about us—as a society. He observed that we as humans were going to let our vulnerable fall by the wayside. If nothing else, we should’ve pushed back against the idea. We should’ve made a decision not to do that. Some of us did make that decision. Many others instead chose to shrug and agree, and then they went out and proved Fauci right.

They left the vulnerable by the wayside.

That’s also small-minded.

This is what the persecution of Fauci seeks. They want to make it okay for us to continue leaving the vulnerable by the wayside, not as a concession, but as a starting point for all public health issues going forward. They want everyone to think they’re invincible while treating each other as disposable. They want to make it a matter of public policy. They want to make it official.

If you’re going to protect the vulnerable, then protect all of the vulnerable. Understand that it doesn’t always or even usually require acts of cinematic heroism. Understand that we’re all going to be vulnerable one day. In fact, we’re even vulnerable now—just in ways we don’t see yet.

That’s not a person.

That’s an idea.