Better in their words…

JEFF CHILDERS JUL 30, 2026

Coffee and Covid

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! You know there was only one story I could cover today: Fauci’s catastrophic testimony in Congress yesterday. Or, rather, his non-testimony. We’ll quickly cover the legalities, then move to the much more interesting part: how Fauci and his overpaid lawyers made the worst possible decision and have completely transformed the entire public health debate in a single smug, deplorable performance.

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Well, that happened. And a large portion of the world witnessed it. Fauci defied many predictions (including mine) and took the Fifth. He took the Fifth 111 times. He took the Fifth like an addicted Autopen operator in the Biden White House popping Adderall. The New York Times reported, “Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment More Than 100 Times in Bitter Senate Hearing.”

Here in C&C’s columns, on podcasts, and at speaking events from coast to coast, I have repeatedly insisted that, while covid might be mercifully purged from the headlines, the pandemic isn’t over. Nor will it be over until we experience closure. The longer we resist paying closure’s tab, the higher the eventual butcher’s bill will be.

That’s how I approached yesterday’s hearing. I did not expect an apology from Fauci. I was certain he would say nothing helpful in understanding the pandemic’s origins, and deliver a masterclass on bureaucratic dissembling. The only real question in my mind was: would whatever happens move the needle even slightly closer to the reckoning we desperately need in order to move on?

Everyone, including me, is still processing yesterday and observing the reactions to it. I was especially interested in how the pro-Fauci side of the political landscape took it.

The answer was surprising. Maybe even shocking. The needle moved a long way. Senator Paul set a trap, and Fauci scurried right into the roach motel.

🪳 Even though most of you already know, let’s summarize what happened. Around 8:30am, Senator Paul delivered a short, well-crafted, brutal introduction, and then swore Fauci in. The human cockroach vowed to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” (He told nothing.) At 8:35, Fauci was invited to make an opening statement. He did, briefly, and we’ll return to it soon. It dripped with venom.

Clearly, Fauci does not like Rand Paul. Not even a little. That much was abundantly obvious.

At around 8:40am, Senators started asking Fauci questions. He answered every single question by reading a single sentence off the single piece of paper he’d brought with him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

“What day of the week is it today?” asked Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO). “What color tie are you wearing? What color is the carpet in front of you?” Each time, Dr. Fauci gave his one-line response.

Even though it quickly became obvious that “Chatty Kathy” Fauci —for once in his annoyingly garrulous life— was keeping his fat trap shut, every Republican Senator still asked him every one of their prepared questions anyway. (I am glad they did.) They also took the opportunity of Fauci not interrupting (for once), and each gave him a little piece of their skeptical minds, while he had to sit there and take it, which was perhaps the most scintillating part of the show.

But when the witness won’t talk or even react, there’s not much in the way of entertaining conflict. Oh, there were occasional moments of higher drama, like when Senator Paul had one of Fauci’s several criminal attorneys thrown out because he refused to shut up. (Which was met with applause.)

Time flew, Senators did their thing, and then it was over.

“Did his actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?” Sen. Paul asked rhetorically as the session concluded. “Are millions dead because of his experiments?” The Times noted that Dr. Fauci “left the room stone-faced and flanked by police officers.”

It was about lunchtime. Arguably the most important interview in modern human history ended in around three hours with zero questions answered, except, of course, that we are all now keenly aware of Fauci’s legal position.

🪳 Questions for us lawyer-influencers came fast and hard. Can he legally do that? What about the pardon- didn’t that take the Fifth Amendment option off the table? Was he implicitly admitting his autopen pardon is no good? And so on. We could write a legal treatise on all those questions, but it all boils down to what happens next.

Fauci was not the first witness to refuse to answer Congressional questions. He won’t be the last. The next step is well known. The Committee will vote to find Fauci in contempt. Then there are two tracks. If the witness is conservative, like Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, they will sit in prison for a few months (even if, as in Bannon’s case, the Supreme Court later vacates the sentence).

If the witness is a Democrat, nothing will happen.

The problem is not Republicans. The problem is DC courts. By itself, Congress can’t put anybody in jail. Nor would anyone sane want them to wield that awesome power. So Congress must take its difficult witnesses to court. In DC.

Judges in the nation’s capital find it easy to agree that Republican witnesses who refuse to talk clearly need jail to help change their perspective, but Democrat witnesses who clam up are privileged, excused, excepted, or —if all else fails— are let off the hook because they are being pursued for an improper, ‘non-legislative’ purpose.

And don’t even get me started about the juries selected for DC courts. A DC jury pool is twelve people who already know how they’re voting plus one alternate who lost his parking voucher.

Republicans once held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It’s the punchline to a joke now. They’d have been better off doing nothing, however bad that would have been.

I guess you could say this deplorable situation is Republicans’ fault, at least in the sense they allowed Democrats to take over the DC court system without thinking through how bad things could get.

The Committee plans to vote on Fauci’s contempt as early as next week. They should, and I expect they will find Fauci contemptible. But that won’t automatically mean jail. Even someone like Fauci gets his due process. So we must await the outcome of the massive court battle to see whether it results in any meaningful consequences for the 85-year-old fake scientist. We’re talking months, at minimum.

Personally, as a lawyer, I support strong consequences. I operate in courts. Apart from Democrats who refuse to testify before Congress, courts generally take a very dim view of contemptible activity. Civil contempt generates daily fines; criminal contempt earns misdemeanor jail time. Those are the only two real options. Even in traffic court.

In other words, don’t expect much. A jailed Fauci would be welcome, but it would be a statistical miracle. The show might be all we get this round.

🪳 Now let’s return to Fauci’s little “last word” opening statement. He first bragged about his 38 years of infesting NIAID and having testified before Congress more than 200 times. Then he unloaded.

“However,” Fauci began, warming up, “given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

I found this remarkable. Fauci, as skilled in word salad as any career bureaucrat, leaned into a rhetorical trick. He boiled down the raw hatred of half of America and every Committee Republican into persecution by Senator Paul. In other words, he refuses to recognize that Senator Paul is the symptom of his problem— not its cause. Senator Paul is merely the form of Fauci’s destructor. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Fauci picked him.

No accident or brain damage prevented Fauci from recognizing that hundreds of millions of people are furious at him. He chose not to engage with that reality. Logicians call that fallacy a “category error.” They are trying to collapse a mass legitimacy crisis into a personal vendetta narrative.

This, by the way, is why we are far from covid closure. The public health establishment refuses to even recognize that a lot of people are still angry. Ignoring it is not a good plan. That anger will only continue to grow until they deal with it.

So far, it’s working. Fauci’s still in his protective bubble, and his allies —like the New York Times— are helping him stay in there.

Or, are they?

🪳 Everyone reading this knows how Republicans feel. But look at the left-wing response to the hearing. Sure, they are defending Fauci. He is their guy. He hates Trump too! But … is their knee-jerk defense cooling off?

Consider this recent clip from Joe Rogan’s interview of leftist celebrity Tim Robbins. I was shocked to find myself agreeing with Robbins more often than not. Get this: Robbins said, without any qualification or hedging: “I don’t believe in experts. I don’t trust them anymore.”

CLIP: Tim Robbins explains how he lost his belief in the experts (5:01).

“Science became a religion,” Robbins said. He gets it now. “If you questioned the religion, you got kicked out of the cult.”

Robbins is a Bernie Sanders progressive who glanced down at the evidence and was permanently changed. For years, the Democrats’ reflexive pro-expert mantras were cognitive superstructure, things like “follow the science,” “don’t do your own research,” and “no denialism.” No permission structure allowed different thoughts.

But something has happened, and it has quietly changed the calculus. The something has a name, and it rhymes with Phony Ouchie.

There’s evidence of cooling liberal sentiments in the Times’ article. Beyond personalizing the problem in the form of Senator Paul, it also reframed Republicans’ arguments into a childlike straw man, falsely claiming conservatives accused Fauci “alone” of all the pandemic’s many ills.

Which is a backhanded way of admitting that Fauci was wrong. It’s just wrong to blame it all on him. He wasn’t the only one, see?

Nor did the Times mount any vigorous defense of Fauci’s decisions. At all.The article called the pandemic “a fast-moving crisis with an unknown virus in which the science was evolving quickly,” and then called it “uncharted territory.” But they never capped that developing argument, not explicitly, not with the logical conclusion the reader expected: “he did the best he could.”

The Times characterized the hearing as a useless drama that offered zero insights. But I reject that argument. The publication of the diary and the hearing were not useless. I think the S.S. Fauci took a direct hit, is listing to starboard, and taking on water.

🪳 Here’s the thing, and it’s the reason why my prediction that Fauci wouldn’ttake the Fifth was wrong. I think liberals had expected Fauci to mount a total defense of his time in the hot seat and wipe the floor with Senator Paul. It was billed as a showdown. But at the last second, the good doctor pulled out. I think that Fauci’s visible cowardice hit his progressive fan base hard, even if they’ll never admit it.

Behold: brave truth-teller Fauci was too chicken to even answer a question about the color of his tie. What kind of optic is that?

When I advised a billionaire target of the January 6th Committee through their congressional testimony, we answered two-thirds of the questions and took the Fifth only on the important ones. It was for this reason. I didn’t want my client’s testimony weaponized against them in the public arena. My client tried to cooperate.

Fauci did the opposite. Day of the week? Fifth. Color of his tie? Fifth. Color of the carpet? Fifth. A hundred and eleven times. Every single question. That is not careful lawyering in the public arena. That is chickening out so completely that even his own fans, primed for a rousing showdown of a defense, got a yellow-bellied man too terrified to even describe his own clothes.

Even CNN was skeptical. Yesterday, Erin Burnett posed the same question to her NYU law professor guest. “112 times to invoke the 5th Amendment. Does that just make it worse?”

CLIP: ‘I think it makes it worse,’ law professor says (1:07).

Professor Ryan Goodman replied, “I think it makes it worse. It’s even a curious way in which you wonder what his legal advice was, why they decided to do that.” Burnett questioned, “Will that strategy work? To the layperson, it’s saying, well, ‘Why wouldn’t you just say the truth? What would be the problem in that?’ So… it doesn’t sound good.”

In short, a new narrative has crystallized. Fauci cannot defend himself at allwithout criminal exposure. His conduct, now exposed by his diaries, was literally indefensible.

Dr. “The Science” A. Bobblehead is the apex predator of centralized pandemic authority. He just reached the point where non-explanation is safer than explanation, and everyone sees it. Even CNN, Tim Robbins, and parts of the New York Times.

🪳 The new narrative wasn’t the only thing that crystallized. Believe it or not, I gained an entirely new understanding of the pandemic and what must now happen to prevent the next catastrophe. Fauci spent years insisting that one man should answer for everyone. Yesterday he wouldn’t answer for himself.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong.

For decades, we operated under a catastrophically wrong assumption, often stated explicitly: communal, coordinated, federalized action beats a local response. One set of guidelines. Universal mandates. One flowchart of treatments. One vaccine technology. Respirators and remdesivir for all— even if you don’t want them. Every hospital told to shut “non-essential” care —including cancer screenings— regardless of local case counts or empty beds.

That was not an accident of panic. It was the model. WHO, CDC, and CMS framed pandemic response as a coordinated system with a “common operating picture.” The whole world was enslaved to it. It all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge. On April 2, 2020, Fauci told Anderson Cooper, “The tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into, but I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that — we really should be.”

In March 2020, CMS told hospitals to postpone elective and non-essential procedures nationwide; states piled on with blanket orders. Peak result: nearly 95% of surveyed hospitals canceled electives— and cancellation tracked national pandemic stage, not local deaths or local bed supply.

Many wards sat under-capacity or empty, while screenings and surgeries vanished. The same communal logic produced the six-foot rule for everyone, closed beaches and gyms, masking while jogging, school closures for kids at negligible risk, and a single messaging apex predator anointed as ‘the science.’ Follow the science. Just one kind of science.

Coordination sounds like strength. In practice it was a single point of failure wearing a lab coat: one wrong flowchart, applied everywhere, with dissent treated as heresy. Local knowledge —this ICU is fine, that nursing home is on fire, these kids are not vulnerable— got subordinated to the universal template.

Fifty states, three thousand counties, one flowchart. What could go wrong? Well, when the template failed, the whole country failed in the same way all at once.

🪳 Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”— but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming —the Global Health Security Agenda, the Pandemic Fund, the endless capacity-building grants that spiked after every outbreak and never produced a system that could distinguish a nursing home from a skate park.

The Pandemic Fund, for just one example, established on September, 2022, and hosted by the World Bank, had built an $11.5 billion investment portfolio by December 2024.

And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

We must nuke ‘public health’ from orbit. And then carpet bomb the ruins with roach traps. It’s the only way to be sure.

Have a terrific Thursday! We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Till then.