Fauci 3 Morens

sorta oops

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RWW

08/20/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Robert Jeffress believes that Donald Trump "will be remembered as the president who probably helped our nation make the most critical U-turn in that way that we needed to make back to the faith of our fathers."
Chad Connelly warns that "we're in a 5-alarm fire" heading into the midterm elections because the left is focused on "dismantling our country."
Dave Kubal declares that "the greatest persecutor of the church in our country is the United States government."
Erwin Lutzer claims that former President Barack Obama's statement about "fundamentally transforming" the nation was a sign that he was "beginning the process toward a more socialist America."
Rick Green insists "there's nothing but positives that come from prosecuting Anthony Fauci" even if all it does is "cause the man pain through the prosecution process."
Finally, Janet Porter reveals that she did not enter the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection because her friend had a prophetic dream warning her not to do so: "Thank God for that warning, or I might have spent the last four years incarcerated."

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RWW 8 26

Rick Green Says Anthony Fauci Is 'No Different Than The Nazis'

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rww

Auron MacIntyre asserts that "a country in which Anthony Fauci is not executed by the state after a fair trial is a country that has died a spiritual death."

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7 26

bengHazi? why now? trump policies fail, war no end in sight, midterms loom; trump must be cleared of covid fail, so fauci must be the villain; plus distrust science/experts rfk fail measles, explode diahhrea screworm...

TOOK 5 ~ PERJURY TRAP B/C PARDON

MORENO ORIG STORY HS FBALL MOM ARrESTED OUTSIDE

RAND PAUL WFB?

HAWLEY?

On MS NOW's On the Line with Alicia Menendez, Angelo Carusone discusses how Fauci coverage has become a rallying point to unify a fractured right-wing media

MMA 7 26

MMA

July 27, 2026, edition of Sirius XM's The Megyn Kelly Show

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON (GUEST): Obviously, if you see from Fauci, he has an — I like the idea that we're all saying "files" now, because it's redolent of the Epstein files. That really bothers him, because that's —

MEGYN KELLY (HOST): Fauci hurt a lot more people than Epstein did. A lot more, amazingly.

HANSON: Oh, millions, millions, millions, millions.

08/03/2026

Kyle Mantyla

Kent Christmas and Steve Shutlz declare that Dr. Anthony Fauci ranks alongside Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Idi Amin, and Pol Pot "for the deaths that he has caused worldwide."
Eric Metaxas says that Fauci is "the new Eichmann": "The Israelis went after Eichmann & other top Nazis for YEARS after WW2 ended. You don't let perpetrators of evil get away with what they did. Fauci must be made to face the consequences of what he did. He is the new Eichmann, the modern face of the 'banality of evil' in our time."

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MMA

Fox fixates on Fauci instead of numerous current health crises

07/31/26

Right-wing media's unhinged response to Fauci's diary and congressional testimony

07/30/26

Right-wing media's unhinged response to Fauci's diary and congressional testimony

Right-wing media obsessed over Fauci, mentioning him relentlessly on cable news and podcasts

Written by Helena Hind, Reed McMaster, Jane Lee & Isabella Corrao

Research contributions from Rob Savillo

Published 07/30/26

Right-wing media have gone into overdrive to denigrate Dr. Anthony Fauci following the release of his private diary by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), accusing him of being a “mass murderer” whose “body count is higher than Hitler” and claiming he “deserves to be in prison.”

Right-wing media revived their anti-Fauci coverage after Republicans published pages from Fauci's journal

- On July 25, Rand Paul published over 1,100 pages of COVID-19-era journal entries from former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci in an attempt to claim that he had covered up the origin of the virus. Paul also released records ranging from 2001 to 2015, which he dubbed the “prequel” to Fauci’s diary. These releases are Paul’s latest effort in his yearslong investigation into claims that COVID-19 leaked from a lab. Despite Paul's claims, the diary does not provide any “smoking gun”; rather, as New York Times notes, “It echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved.” [NPR, 7/27/26, 7/29/26; New York Times, 7/27/26]

- On July 29, Fauci appeared before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and invoked the Fifth Amendment in response to the committee’s questions. With Fauci making it clear he was going to plead the Fifth, Paul used the hearing to repeatedly accuse him of lying, suggesting “that while Fauci said publicly that Covid originated naturally, he privately believed the virus originated in a medical lab.” [NPR, 7/29/26; AP, 7/29/26; BBC, 7/29/26]

- Right-wing media have long used Fauci as a pandemic scapegoat. Conservative media personalities started attacking Fauci in 2020, with Fox News programs portraying him as power-mad and using his influence to “favor what the Democrats want.” In 2022, then-Fox host Tucker Carlson called Fauci a “dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” [Media Matters, 8/23/22, 3/24/20]

Following the diary release, right-wing media devoted significant coverage to Fauci

Right-wing media went all-in on covering the Fauci story. From Monday through noon on Thursday, Fox News mentioned Fauci 687 times, while on Newsmax, Fauci was mentioned 740 times (this includes mentions when the networks aired live coverage or clips of the hearing). In the online media space, Megyn Kelly said Fauci at least 75 times on her podcast across 3 episodes; The Charlie Kirk Show mentioned Fauci at least 87 times across 3 episodes, and Steve Bannon devoted significant attention during the July 29 edition of War Room to airing live portions of the hearing, with Bannon himself saying Fauci at least 26 times.

Right-wing media accused Fauci of being a “mass murderer” and called for his imprisonment

- Podcaster Benny Johnson claimed Fauci's “body count” is higher than Adolf Hitler’s. He said Fauci is the “single greatest mass murderer in modern history, who has a body count much higher than Hitler.” [YouTube, The Benny Show, 7/30/26]

- Radio show host Megyn Kelly claimed “Fauci hurt a lot more people than Epstein did.” [SiriusXM, The Megyn Kelly Show, 7/27/26]

- TPUSA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet claimed Fauci “deserves to be in prison.” [Rumble, The Charlie Kirk Show, 7/29/26]

- Podcaster Tim Pool suggested that the Trump administration should attempt to charge and jail Fauci in El Salvador. He said, “Go to El Salvador, calculate what was their — how many deaths. Criminally charge Fauci under Salvadoran law; El Salvador can then file for extradition and we can send him on his way.” [Youtube, Timcast, 7/29/26]

- Pool also claimed, “If Fauci doesn’t go to prison, you have no country.” He added, ”The American people come to realize you can murder millions of people. You can massacre en masse at the institutional international level and you will never face accountability. And then what happens? Confidence in the system breaks down and you get chaos." [YouTube, Timcast, 7/29/26]

- Fox News contributor Clay Travis claimed that “Fauci belongs in prison for the rest of his life.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 7/28/26]

- Newsmax host Carl Higbie argued that “Anthony Fauci should just be in jail, full stop.” He later added, ”I hope they find the deepest prison on earth to bury this guy in." [Newsmax, Carl Higbie: Frontline, 7/29/26]

- Article III Founder Mike Davis called Fauci “one of the worst criminals in our history.” Davis claimed Fauci “got this pardon from Biden because he's a monster and he needed a pardon because he's one of the worst criminals in our history, a mass murderer.” Host Megyn Kelly agreed with him, saying, “You state your opinion that he's a mass murderer. Maybe some who are thinking that's too harsh. I'm not one of them.” [SiriusXM, The Megyn Kelly Show, 7/29/26]

- Podcaster Steve Bannon claimed, “Fauci's a mass murderer. A mass murderer.” [Real America's Voice, War Room, 7/29/26]

- PBD Podcast panelist Vincent Oshana called Fauci “a freaking mass murderer.” He added, “If you think about it, Pat, he's been killing people for how long?” [PBD Podcast, 7/27/26]

- Fox News @ Night guest and Moms for Liberty chapter leader Becky Grosskreutz said she hoped Fauci would experience “consequences both here on Earth, and beyond.” Talking about Fauci's testimony, she said, “I saw his smug face today and all the times that he pleaded the Fifth, and I honestly just want, you know, something to happen, and I want to have him to have consequences both here on Earth, and beyond.” [Fox News, Fox News @ Night, 7/29/26]

- Newsmax host Rob Finnerty claimed Fauci is a “sociopath” who deserves to be alone. [Newsmax, Finnerty, 7/29/26]

Methodology

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gmail 7 26 zeteo pt 2

Leading virologist Dr. Angela Rasmussen dives into what the evidence actually shows about the origins of the Covid pandemic. Spoiler alert: It's not what Trump, RFK Jr. and Gabbard are telling you

...as Tulsi Gabbard departed her role as the director of national intelligence, she released what she characterized as a bombshell reveal that former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci lied to Congress about masterminding virology research that created SARS-CoV-2, which leaked from a lab and caused the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), has done the same, releasing a trove of similarly uninformative documents this week, which mostly show some of my co-authors joking around, discussing politics, and changing their minds when faced with evidence (full disclosure: they mention me in the context of complimenting my Twitter game). Paul claims this is evidence that they conspired with Fauci to help him cover up the truth about the lab leak by writing a paper for a scientific journal.

Upgrade to paid

These documents are not proof of anything besides showing that, yet again, efforts across multiple intelligence agencies and the Senate HSGAC failed to uncover any hard evidence that a “lab leak” occurred. That’s because the sole piece of evidence supporting that version of events is that the pandemic began in Wuhan, where there is a lab that studies coronaviruses. There was also a market, where live animals were sold.

This is the second part of a two-part series. In Part 1, I examined how disinformation about the “lab leak” is being weaponized to attack science and persecute scientists, including Fauci, furthering the advancement of authoritarianism and erosion of democracy in America. Part 2 discusses what the evidence actually shows about the origin of the pandemic – and none of it indicates that it started in a lab.

What Evidence?...

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1 25 PARDONED BY BIDEN BUT SOFTER TARGET LEFT:

01/23/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Self-proclaimed "prophet" Manuel Johnson claims that God took him "ahead 12 years in the spirit" to show him that the inauguration of President Donald Trump has opened "a supernatural window for the body of Christ."
Mark Driscoll is excited that the Trump administration will provide a host of new opportunities for "heterosexual alpha males."

Lucas Gage explains why he fills his social media accounts with photos and videos of Adolf Hitler: "Because the Jews have demonized Hitler so much, and use him to maintain their cancel culture, he has ironically become a symbol of freedom of speech."

Steve Deace wants to see former White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator "hung by her bedazzled scarf Nuremberg-style."

Finally, Nick Fuentes says that Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde should have been arrested for humiliating Trump during the National Prayer Service.

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MSN IS ACTUlly newsmAX SANDY FITZGERALD

An active CIA officer told senators Wednesday that Dr. Anthony Fauci played a significant role in influencing intelligence officials to back away from concluding that COVID-19 originated from a laboratory leak in Wuhan, China.

James Erdman, a CIA special operations officer, testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that the intelligence community in August 2021 was nearing a determination that the pandemic likely stemmed from a lab leak before the assessment changed days later, reports The Daily Mail.

IFrame Content

DOJ indictments are converging with MAGA media narratives

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 04/30/26

Recent Justice Department indictments whose validity have been questioned by legal experts demonstrate an increasing alignment of the Trump DOJ’s activities with the narratives of the MAGA media echo chamber.

President Donald Trump has long sought to use federal law enforcement to punish his enemies, and under former Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ and FBI launched scattershot and apparently pretextual probes targeting figures like Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff over behavior unrelated to the president’s gripes.

But since Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche became acting attorney general last month, the president’s federal retaliation machine has seemed to sync up more closely with long-running talking points of his propaganda arm rather than simply focusing on the same targets.

Federal charges were filed or unsealed in recent days against the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group; former National Institutes of Health official Dr. David Morens; and former FBI Director James Comey. Legal experts have said that each of these cases are either weak or concern behavior common among Trump administration officials.

Each set of charges, however, has buttressed MAGA arguments, and provided their proponents with fresh opportunities to leverage them for content. And they foreshadow the potential fruits of DOJ’s ongoing “Grand Conspiracy” investigation, which unifies a string of conspiracy theories promoted by Fox News hosts like Sean Hannity under the auspices of Joe diGenova, a Republican lawyer and longtime fixture in right-wing media.

James Comey

Citation

Fox News

The target. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 until May 2017, when Trump fired him over his handling of the federal probe of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which the president describes as a “hoax”; he subsequently became a key figure in the right’s “deep state” conspiracy theories. The DOJ indicted Comey last year over congressional testimony he gave in 2020, but a judge dismissed the case, ruling that the appointment of the prosecutor who filed the indictment (and replaced a U.S. attorney who had questioned the case) had been unconstitutional.

The charges. Federal prosecutors on April 28 charged Comey with one count of “Threatening the President” and one count of “Transmitting a Threat in Interstate Commerce” related to a now-deleted May 2025 Instagram post in which Comey posted a photo of shells arranged on a beach to spell out “86 47” and commented, “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” In the press release announcing the charges, Blanche said, “The temperature needs to be turned down, and anyone who dials it up and threatens the life of the President will be held accountable,” while FBI Director Kash Patel added, “James Comey disgracefully encouraged a threat on President Trump’s life and posted it on Instagram for the world to see.”

The underlying right-wing media narrative. MAGA pundits have argued that recent examples of political violence targeting the right are the result of overheated commentary from Democrats and the media, often erasing incidents of right-wing political violence and ignoring violent rhetoric from the likes of Trump in the process. Numerous Fox News personalities suggested last May that Comey face an investigation or charges over his post, with Jesse Watters calling for it as “retribution.” And the indictment came days after a gunman allegedly targeting the president was stopped trying to breach the perimeter at the April 25 White House Correspondents Association’s annual dinner, which Trump, the White House, and media allies subsequently blamed on criticism from Democrats and journalists. VID]

The response from legal experts.“Supreme Court precedent has placed a high bar for convictions in threat cases like these, and former prosecutors and First Amendment scholars alike were highly skeptical the new prosecution would be successful,” CNN reported. Even some lawyers who are Fox News contributors aren’t buying DOJ’s argument — George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox that Comey’s Instagram post would “very likely be viewed as protected speech if it was the basis of a criminal indictment” and “have a hard-time standing up in court,” while Andrew McCarthy wrote at National Review that the “bogus” indictment is a “farce,” called Comey’s conviction “inconceivable,” and added: “Of course, when the Justice Department abuses power this way, as it has repeatedly, it shreds its credibility with the courts and undermines the integrity of all its work.”

The response from the MAGA right. While the indictment drew skepticism on Fox’s daytime coverage, the network’s evening programs championed it on Tuesday night. MAGA lawyer Mike Davis said on The Ingraham Angle that the charges were “a long time coming,” offered “cheers” to Blanche and Patel, called Comey’s post “a clear threat,” and claimed, “There have been people who have gone to prison for a lot less than this.” Hannity, meanwhile, mocked the idea that “86 47” could mean anything but “get rid of Trump,” and hosted Fox legal analyst Gregg Jarrett to claim that Comey “surely knew what the phrase meant” and that “if he tries to claim free speech as a defense, that's not going to work.”

Dr. David Morens

Citation

Fox News

The target. Morens is an expert in public health and infectious diseases who served from 2006 to 2022 as senior adviser to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

The charges. The Justice Department announced on April 28 that Morens had been charged with “conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting,” specifically by using his personal Gmail account to conduct what prosecutors allege was government business in order to avoid public disclosure. Blanche alleged in the press release that Morens “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19,” while Patel claimed that “circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI.”

The underlying right-wing media narrative. The right-wing media echo chamber responded to the COVID-19 pandemic in part by turning Fauci into a hate object. Its participants also claimed that the coronavirus originated through a lab leak from a Chinese virology facility and its development may even have been funded by American tax dollars, rather than the prevailing view that the virus initially spread among wild animals before jumping to humans at a market in Wuhan, China. Morens and his email practices came under scrutiny from congressional Republicans and right-wing media in 2023 and 2024. While the Justice Department suggests Morens was acting to suppress the lab leak theory, The New York Times reports that the DOJ’s investigation “has so far yielded no evidence that scientists or health officials were involved in research that started or spread the coronavirus outbreak” and his emails in the indictment “do not show him trying to conceal evidence of a lab leak.”

The response from legal experts.Scott Amey, general counsel at the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight, told The New York Times that “the allegations are quite concerning,” but also “noted that senior members of the Trump administration have themselves been accused of trying to evade federal record-keeping laws.” Indeed, The Washington Post reported last year that top Trump administration national security officials were communicating over their private Gmail accounts, and in March 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared operational details of an impending U.S. military strike over an unsecured Signal chat with Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, other Trump administration officials, and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been accidentally added to the chain.

The response from the MAGA right. The New York Post reported on — and effectively generated — “pressure on DOJ to prosecute Anthony Fauci” in light of Morens’ indictment. Its Thursday article claimed that “critics say Fauci … bears the most responsibility and that he should be hauled into court,” citing the head of a right-wing think tank, Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and a former DOJ official who is now national political reporter at the right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice.

The Southern Poverty Law Center

Citation

Fox News

The target.The SPLC is a nonprofit civil rights organization best known for its monitoring, researching, and reporting on white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and others it describes as “hate and antigovernment extremist groups” that “make up some of the most extreme elements of the hard right.”

The charges. The Justice Department revealed April 21 that a grand jury had returned an indictment charging the SPLC with “11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering.” DOJ alleges that by using paid informants to infiltrate hate groups, the SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups” from 2014 to 2023, including to one individual who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia, and attended the event at the direction of the S.P.L.C.” Blanche claimed in a press release that SPLC was “manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” while Patel alleged the group “engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors.”

The underlying right-wing media narrative. As the American right adopted positions previously espoused only by explicit white supremacists, the SPLC drew its ire by expanding its monitoring to include “extreme” right-wing elements that were nonetheless accepted within its mainstream, like Turning Point USA. Right-wing media figures denounced SPLC’s characterizations of TPUSA after the assassination of its founder, MAGA operative Charlie Kirk, in September 2025, and the following month, Patel said the FBI was cutting ties with the group, which he described as a “partisan smear machine.” Right-wing media figures have also pushed back hard against links between Trump and the deadly Charlottesville event, and described white supremacy itself as a “hoax.”

The response from legal experts.The SPLC indictment “may contain serious legal defects that could lead to a full or partial dismissal because it struggles to articulate the elements of the alleged crimes,” CBS News reported after consulting former federal prosecutors. “Legal experts say it is not clear exactly how the SPLC's statements to donors represent material falsehoods or omissions, or why its past use of paid informants would run counter to its mission of dismantling white supremacist groups, a tactic that federal and local law enforcement also utilize to infiltrate and break up criminal organizations,” the report added. Andrew Weissmann, who led the DOJ Fraud Section from 2015 to 2019, likewise wrote in a piece for Just Security that DOJ’s claims “may sound superficially plausible in a press release against an organization dissimilar to the SPLC, but nothing in the speaking indictment against the Center appears to meet the legal standard required” for the charges.

The response from the MAGA right.Right-wing pundits have gleefully parroted the DOJ allegations, using them both to the SPLC and to suggest that the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally had been a false-flag hoax instigated by the left as a way to sabotage Trump. Fox personalities alone have mentioned the SPLC nearly 400 times since the indictment’s release, according to a Media Matters review. (The indictment was “huge breaking news,” as Hannity put it before hosting Patel to accuse the SPLC of the “ultimate definition of hypocrisy.”) Trump himself has picked up the story, rambling about how “Southern Law” is a “total scam” in an interview with CBS over the weekend. The president said in part:

I see these No Kings which are funded just like the Southern Law was funded. You all that Southern Laws, financing the KKK and lots of other radical, terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we’ve got to stop the KKK. And yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It’s a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that, like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal, too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election. This was a part of the rigging of the election. And that’s what you really should be doing. I mean, I hope one of your 60 Minutes episodes, which really hasn’t changed very much for the last few years, I’m surprised. But one of those episodes should be on Southern Law, and the fact that they spent millions and millions of dollars on absolute far right and just bad, bad groups, and then they’d use those groups and they’d say, these are Republican groups, and we’re coming to your rescue, and they’re the ones that have funded it, and they’re the ones that kept them, keep them going. Pretty sad.

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REF 1 How the right turned on Dr. Fauci | Media Matters for America

How the right turned on Dr. Fauci

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 08/23/22

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease official and a public health adviser to seven presidents, announced on Monday that he plans to retire in December after more than 50 years of public service. President Joe Biden toasted Fauci as “a steady hand with wisdom and insight honed over decades” and praised his “unparalleled spirit, energy, and scientific integrity,” while top scientists touted his record of “sav[ing] countless lives.”

While Fauci once earned the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then-President George W. Bush, his impending retirement was not greeted with plaudits from the right. On Fox News that night, Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue described him as “a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” The New York Post headlined its editorial the next day “Good riddance to dangerous Dr. Fauci,” while The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board concluded that “his legacy will be that millions of Americans will never trust government health experts in the same way again.”

Fauci, like everyone else involved in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than 1 million Americans, does not have a perfect record. But he spent his career trying to remain impartial, avoid partisanship, and offer the best advice he could, and for decades, he was respected on both sides of the political aisle. That reputation ultimately could not survive the relentless propaganda of the right-wing press, which needed a coronavirus scapegoat and found one in the octogenarian scientist.

Right-wing propagandists began turning Fauci into their latest hate object in March 2020. At the time, states had imposed stay-at-home orders and other social distancing measures that were recommended by the Trump administration to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. Fox and other pro-Trump outlets consistently downplayed the threat posed by the virus and promoted a minimalistic response that dismissed such efforts in favor of snake oil miracle cures.

Trump’s media supporters could not or would not try to directly challenge the president, and settled instead on targeting Fauci, who was a face of the administration’s response. He initially drew their ire as a critic of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, the malaria drugs that Fox hosts and then the president had recommended as a coronavirus treatment (numerous studies have found the drugs ineffective) and as part of the supposed “ruling class” that could weather a long-term economic shutdown.

At the time, even right-wing pugilists like Fox’s Tucker Carlson were still pulling their punches. “Imagine another year of this,” he said on his April 3, 2020, show. “That would be national suicide, and yet, that is what Anthony Fauci is suggesting, at least.” But Carlson went on to acknowledge that Fauci wasn’t trying to “hurt America,” saying that he “seems like a very decent man” who was simply misguided.

That gentility would not last. The pro-Trump media — and Carlson in particular — became increasingly unhinged and vituperative toward Fauci as the pandemic wore on. Ultimately, the right-wing attacks on Fauci had dramatic impacts for the country.

By mid-May of 2020, Fox’s prime-time stars had decided that the crisis was over. When Fauci said in congressional testimony that it was not, and that the virus was likely to recur in the fall and winter, they began pushing for Trump to fire him. On programs that the Fox-obsessed president watched religiously, they portrayed Fauci as power-mad and using his influence to “favor what the Democrats want.” Those attacks continued over the following weeks and months.

In July, Trump began publicly echoing the right-wing media’s concerns about Fauci. The following month, the president appointed Scott Atlas, a radiologist and right-wing think tanker who caught his attention through frequent Fox appearances, to the White House coronavirus task force.

Atlas effectively displaced Fauci as Trump’s top coronavirus adviser, and used that position to promote a “herd immunity” strategy for coping with the virus. His actions ultimately helped bring about the very wave of hospitalizations and deaths Fauci had earned the opprobrium of the right for warning about months earlier.

But the right’s attacks on Fauci continued over the months and years to come.

Carlson was the scientist’s most implacable media foe. He described Fauci as an “elderly power-drunk epidemiologist”; “capricious and transparently political”; a “hypocritical buffoon”; an “oily politician on an ego trip”; and an “even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.” He denounced the scientist’s recommendations as “authoritarian,” falsely claimed that Fauci “helped to create” the coronavirus, and called for him to “never work in public policy again.”

Other right-wing pundits demonized Fauci as “one of the great criminals of our civilization” and a member of the “medical deep state” who was “on a jihad” against Trump and behaves “more like a monarch.” They called for an investigation into his purported crimes and fantasized about him being put in “leg irons” or even beheaded. They even accused him — falsely — of killing puppies, with one describing him as “the dog-murdering and orphan-killing doctor, Anthony Benito Fauci.”

Fox’s attacks on Fauci have become so habitual that they often seemed to serve as background noise on the right-wing channel. But at times, the network’s talking heads have issued comments so abhorrent that they trigger widespread public outrage and even a response from the network brass. Fox sidelined Lara Logan, a host on the network’s streaming service, after she compared Fauci to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele during a November 2021 appearance. The following month, the network publicly defended host Jesse Watters after he drew controversy for exhorting an audience of young right-wing activists to “ambush” Fauci with a rhetorical “deadly” “kill shot.”

Amid the flurry of often violent public criticism, Fauci divulged that he regularly received threats. Earlier this month, a man was sentenced to more than three years in prison for sending Fauci emails with comments like “You and your entire family will be dragged into the street, beaten to death, and set on fire.”

Fauci’s retirement announcement has opened a debate about who might succeed him. But senior members of the U.S. medical establishment are warning that the right’s attacks on Fauci may limit the pool of applicants willing to try to fill his shoes.

“What keeps the former surgeon general [Jerome Adams] up at night is his fear that talented candidates won’t want these jobs after what Fauci and other public health officials have faced over the last few years,” Politico reported on Monday. “Fauci has received death threats, and his daughters have been harassed — and Adams worries that this vitriol is a big part of why Fauci is stepping down.”

When the next pandemic hits, the U.S. response might thus be hobbled, thanks to the right-wing media’s impulse to destroy a vital public servant for political gain.

### Tucker Carlson: Dr. Anthony Fauci is suggesting “national suicide” and “we should never let someone like that run this country”

04/03/20 8:50 PM EDT

### Laura Ingraham calls Dr. Fauci part of “the medical deep state”

06/15/20 10:26 PM EDT

### The Fox cabinet is trying to get Fauci fired

05/13/20

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REF 2

Key Ron DeSantis medical ally: “Fauci should face a firing squad”

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published 01/31/23

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been featuring anti-vaxxer Dr. Jon Ward at COVID-19 events as he positions himself for a 2024 presidential run. Ward said in a podcast appearance last year that Dr. Anthony “Fauci should face a firing squad” because of his work.

Ward is a Florida dermatologist who, as Politico recently reported, has become “a central figure in DeSantis’ Covid-19 events.” He at a COVID-19 press conference with DeSantis on January 17. In August 2022, DeSantis appointed Ward to the Northwest Florida State College District Board of Trustees.

Ward has linked the death of Lisa Marie Presley to “Pfizer and Moderna” and told parents to lie to schools about their children’s COVID-19 history.

In a statement to Politico, a DeSantis spokesperson defended the governor and praised Ward, stating: “We thank Dr. Ward for lending his time and expertise to our press conference to ensure medical freedom is preserved in Florida.”

Ward has regularly appeared on podcasts and radio programs to discuss medical issues. During the September 8, 2022, edition ofThe Driveway Liberty Podcast, Ward piggybacked off of DeSantis’ statement that he wanted to chuck Fauci across the Potomac River by stating: “I think Fauci should face a firing squad myself.”

Jon Ward on The Driveway Liberty Podcast

September 8, 2022

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From the September 8, 2022, edition of The Driveway Liberty Podcast

JON WARD: It’s just one of those things where I say Fauci by pushing only drugs that were Big Pharma drugs, by not being willing to tout very cheap, inexpensive, widely available medicines, Fauci killed hundreds of thousands of people. When Ron DeSantis said he would like to take that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac, I said, “Let me be the next one to chuck him across the Potomac.”

CO-HOST: Right. Yeah. So I think the next question — you’ve been through all the medical ethics classes that I sure as hell haven’t — what should happen to these people?

WARD: For Fauci, given what we know about the gain of function research in Wuhan and for him knowingly collaborating with international scientists to publish a paper claiming that there was no way that COVID was manmade and that it for sure was natural, I think Fauci should face a firing squad myself.

### On MAHA Media Hub, MAHA Action President says the Trump administration's support of Monsanto in Roundup lawsuit is a “mistake”

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### Far-right media and MAHA figures have rebuked Trump’s Pfizer deal

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REF 3

Scientist searching for a coronavirus cure exposes right-wing “disinformation campaign” that led to Trump cutting his funding

60 Minutes’ Scott Pelley: “There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab”

Written by Eric Kleefeld

:{Published 05/11/20

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Fox-Trump feedback loop has been a dangerous factor undermining the United States’ response to the crisis. Now, as CBS News’ *60 Minutes* documented on Sunday night, right-wing media misinformation about the coronavirus’s origins — the idea that it originated in an infectious disease research laboratory in Wuhan, China — has even resulted in the Trump administration shutting down funding for actual pandemic research.

CBS anchor Scott Pelley spotlighted infectious disease researcher Dr. Peter Daszak, head of the New York-based nonprofit medical organization EcoHealth Alliance, which just recently lost a $3.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As CBS noted, Daszak's “work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure.”

The broadcast traced the chain of events back to when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said during an April 14 appearance on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight: “The NIH gives this $3.7 million grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They then advertise that they need coronavirus researchers. Following that, coronavirus erupts in Wuhan.”

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From the April 14, 2020, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight

Newsmax correspondent Emerald Robinson then asked President Donald Trump about the supposed grant during a White House briefing on April 17 — attributing this grant to actions by the Obama administration — to which Trump said he would end it “very quickly.”

But these allegations were untrue.

“There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab,” Pelley explained. The grant was actually to EcoHealth, of which about $100,000 per year went toward working with the Wuhan facility — and even that could only take place after careful review by the NIH.

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From the May 10, 2020, edition of CBS News’ 60 Minutes

PELLEY: His funding from the NIH, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, was killed, two weeks ago, by a political disinformation campaign targeting China's Wuhan Institute.

...

PELLEY: On April 14, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz claimed China's Wuhan Institute had, quote, "birthed a monster." Gaetz is a vigorous defender of the president. He's been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly threatening a witness against Mr. Trump and he led a protest to delay impeachment testimony.

...

PELLEY: There never was a $3.7 million U.S. grant to the Wuhan lab. But, the falsehood spread like a virus, in the White House, and without verification, in the briefing room.

The specific claim that $3.7 million was sent to the Wuhan lab has been spread by a variety of sources, such as when the U.K.-based Daily Mail on April 11 mentioned “documents” it obtained that it said showed scientists in Wuhan had “experimented on bats as part of a project funded by the US National Institutes of Health”; the article featured comments from Gaetz regarding the Wuhan Institute.

And on April 26, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani tweeted:

IFrame Content

PolitiFact rated the claim as “False,” noting, “The grant was made in 2014, and the amount that went to the lab was a bit under $600,000. The grant restriction did not apply to identifying naturally occurring viruses.”

In an interview on a New York talk radio show on April 26, Giuliani opened a new rhetorical front to pin the blame on another target: Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and a target of right-wing ire since the crisis began. Outlets such as The Washington Times, RedState, and Gateway Pundit all picked up on Giuliani’s false allegations attempting to tie Fauci to this supposed large grant of money to the lab.

Fauci has repeatedly dismissed the right-wing media’s conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, and in an article published last week in National Geographic, he reaffirmed not only that the virus was not manipulated artificially in a lab, but also dismissed the secondary conspiracy theory that it could have been discovered occurring naturally but then leaked from the facility in the course of other research work:

“If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, [the scientific evidence] is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated … Everything about the stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that [this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped species,” Fauci says. Based on the scientific evidence, he also doesn’t entertain an alternate theory‐that someone found the coronavirus in the wild, brought it to a lab, and then it accidentally escaped.

Fox News has played a key role in spreading these right-wing media conspiracy theories and other coronavirus misinformation throughout the pandemic.

Earlier in the crisis, Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) actively pushed the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus was released from the Wuhan research facility. They and other voices on Fox News repeatedly cited a study from the respected medical journal The Lancet to allege that the virus did not come from the city’s wet market — and therefore it must have come from a laboratory — even as The Lancet itself has disavowed the very notion that right-wing media are trying to spin.

More recently, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs said, “I personally believe it's entirely possible that they engineered the Wuhan virus.” And just last week, Fox host Tucker Carlson claimed that a multinational intelligence dossier “confirms much of what we've suspected” about the virus coming from the Wuhan facility. Intelligence professionals have refuted the fringe theory and the claim that the dossier even supported the idea amid this latest push from Fox and other Murdoch media outlets, such as The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, Australia.

Other right-wing media voices from outside Fox News have also pushed this theory:

The Washington Times ran an article in late January, titled “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program.” That article now contains a disclaimer at the top: *“Editor’s note (March 25, 2020): Since this story ran, scientists outside of China have had a chance to study the SARS-CoV-2 virus. They concluded it does not show signs of having been manufactured or purposefully manipulated in a lab, though the exact origin remains murky and experts debate whether it may have leaked from a Chinese lab that was studying it.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former Chief White House Strategist, has spread the idea and given interviews to one of his financial benefactors, Chinese billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui. At one point, however, Bannon interviewed an actual virologist who told him that idea was “a load of crap.”

Right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who Trump recently awarded the Medal of Freedom, declared in February: “It probably is a ChiCom laboratory experiment that is in the process of being weaponized. All superpower nations weaponize bioweapons. They experiment with them.”

Sebastian Gorka, far-right political commentator and former deputy assistant to Trump, agreed on the April 27 edition of his radio show that “one of the most likely scenarios” is that China deliberately released the virus to the rest of the world in order to take down other countries’ economies.

Sinclair Broadcasting host Eric Bolling, who was in regular communications with the White House about the pandemic back in March, has repeatedly asked about this theory in interviews with White House officials and members of Congress. In one example, he told the U.S. assistant secretary for health: “This virus feels to me that it was more engineered than simply someone eating a bat in China in a wet market and it jumping from animal to human.”

One America News Network, a far-wing outlet repeatedly promoted by Trump himself, has been tying in the idea about the Wuhan lab together with other conspiracy theories about billionaire philanthropists Bill Gates and George Soros, the “deep state,” and population control.

Update (5/11/20, 6:00 p.m.): This post has been updated for clarity.}:

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