The real reason the right hates Anthony Fauci

The real reason the right hates Anthony Fauci

Anthony S. Fauci, the chief medical adviser to President Biden, at the White House on Dec. 1. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

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By Paul Waldman

Columnist

Today at 12:46 p.m. EST

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the American right is still consumed with hatred for White House adviser Anthony S. Fauci. So much so that not only do they scheme to destroy Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but their obsession sometimes devolves into violent fantasies.

Speaking at a conference of the right-wing “youth” organization Turning Point USA, Fox News host Jesse Watters instructed the assembled activists on how they should track down and confront Fauci, to create a viral moment that Fox could then use to achieve the movement’s political ends.

Watch this disturbing scene here:

The next time someone says Fox is a “news” organization, you might want to recall this moment, when one of the network’s stars tells activists to find and confront Fauci, “go in for the kill shot” of what he thinks is a clever question (“Boom! He is dead!”) and then “get that footage to us” so it can be used against him.

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Fox is hardly alone. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis sends out fundraising emails warning that Fauci will turn “our communities” into “Faucian dystopias in which people’s freedoms are curtailed and their livelihoods destroyed.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) introduced a bill to have him fired. You can barely tune in to a conservative media outlet before someone starts ranting about Fauci.

You might find the right’s venom for Fauci to be inexplicable. He’s not some kind of partisan going around telling people to vote for Democrats. What did he do to make them so angry? He did what any public health official would have done, which is to explain what we know and don’t know about the virus and encourage people to take precautions.

And while Donald Trump was still president, Fauci supported his administration’s efforts. Even if he declined to engage in the pathetic public performance of sycophancy that Trump demanded from nearly everyone, he avoided contradicting Trump wherever possible.

Nevertheless, within just a few months of the emergence of covid-19, hatred of Fauci went from being a fringe-right belief to an almost universal marker of Republican identity.

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Ask a liberal why this is, and they might say, “Because he’s a scientist and Republicans hate science!” It’s true that conservatives often harbor antipathy toward scientific authority, particularly the kind that comes with credentials and earned expertise. At the same time, they can be drawn to fake expertise and irrelevant credentials, like the engineer who declares that he knows more about climate change than any climatologist, or the economist who thinks he has caught what all the virologists have missed.

But I don’t think conservatives’ views on scientists and science explain their bottomless loathing for Fauci.

I would suggest that it has two primary roots. The first is that from the beginning of the pandemic, Fauci was embraced by many liberals looking for reassurance that this was a solvable problem. He was a renowned scientist, but also a personable, grandfatherly figure who excelled at explaining complicated questions to a lay audience. He quickly became a star, complete with bobblehead dolls.

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And though he was anything but a Trump critic, when asked directly by reporters whether some idiotic utterance of Trump’s was true, he would say no. Which convinced liberals that he was quietly their ally, further reinforcing their affection for him.

If liberals loved him, that meant conservatives had to hate him. At this moment the Republican Party’s policy agenda is a desiccated husk to which no one in their party pays more than the most perfunctory attention. What animates them is hatred of the left and the ongoing, endlessly renewable need to Own the Libs. Bashing Fauci became one more way to accomplish that goal.

The second source of rage at Fauci is that conservative media needed a villain for the pandemic story. And not just a villain, but a domestic villain, a target for all the loathing they could muster in order to turn the pandemic into another weapon in the endless war against liberals and liberalism.

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Had a Democrat been president at the time, that president would have sufficed, but Trump was president when the pandemic began. So Fauci became the focus of their anger. He was responsible for every public health measure they didn’t like. He was taking away their freedom. And in a particularly insane twist, people even convinced themselves that he created the pandemic in the first place. No conspiracy theory involving Fauci is too bizarre for some conservatives to embrace.

So today, Fauci is a vehicle for the conservative elite to achieve its goals. For Fox News — which runs on anger and fear — he’s a means of keeping viewers agitated and excited. For someone like DeSantis, he’s a fundraising tool. For other Republicans, raging at him is a way to show the voters you love freedom and hate government bureaucrats.

A Fox News host may tell a crowd that the right question thrown in Fauci’s face will be the “kill shot” that renders him “dead,” but that’s the last thing that elite really wants. If he retired tomorrow, they’d be crestfallen. As long as the pandemic lasts, they’ll need Fauci for their own ends.