You know…when Dr. Fauci revealed himself to be a narcissist, a coward, a fick, and an all-time American villain.

The Fauci Ethics Train Wreck is yet another integrity test for the American Left and the Axis of Unethical Conduct. It has flunked the others, so it is not surprising that it is flunking this one. The ethical course would be to admit the truth:

“Yes, they were thrilled with the pandemic lockdown, because it wrecked the Trump economy and gave them a chance to install a puppet President who could be manipulated by extreme left unelected functionaries. Yes, that made us especially willing to accept Dr. Fauci and Co.’s draconian measures, especially since it gave Democratic elected officials an opportunity to play dictator and constrain Americans’ civil rights in the name of “safety.” Yes, we sanctified Dr. Fauci beyond all reason to enhance our irresponsible “follow the science” grift, which has been so successful in the climate change policy debate. Yes, we were complicit in installing ruinous and unnecessary policies, based on panic that our media sowed, that retarded a generation’s education and social development, ruined businesses, permanently damaged whole industries, and killed people.”

Nah! That’s not how the American Left rolls in 2026. How much better it is to deflect, lie, ignore multiple metaphorical elephants, and maintain a position that has become completely untenable.

The op-ed titled “What We Really Learned From the Fauci Hearing” (gift link, but this is no present) from the New York Times could have been designed by an AI bot with the instruction, “write an op-ed denying that the Fauci hearing was what it was, using the topic to blame Republicans while avoiding inconvenient facts.”

This paragraph, near the end, is a masterpiece of dishonesty and sophistry:

“Dr. Fauci is a complicated man who has been both elevated and reduced to a symbol. His legacy after a decades-long career at the intersection of science and politics is now defined by incompatible, contested accounts of his pandemic-era impact. There is little hope of resolving that contest any time soon.”

“Complicated”! The smoking gun of brazen sophistry, prevarication and equivocation. There’s noting complicated about Fauci. He’s a lifetime bureaucrat who became intoxicated with power when the opportunity arrived, and abused that power for the benefit his own ego, his political party, and the detriment of millions. It is an old story. Faucis have been analyzed by historians, playwrights and novelists for centuries. “Complicated” is an anodyne, toothless word used to excuse wrong-doers.

Lesson: It’s a joke.

I have concluded, over the past year of almost constant disillusionment, that the public is being deliberately deceived regarding the legal profession’s “self policing” duties. To watch TV or legal-themed movies, one would think that any significant violation of a lawyer’s jurisdiction’s Rules of Professional Conduct is likely to result in disbarment. That isn’t true. It isn’t close to true. The overwhelming majority of unethical lawyers, even flagrant, criminal unethical lawyers who prey on trusting clients, are never disciplined. Not only that, lawyers use their bar associations to make certain that is the case.

I have two clients who have been victimized by the same D.C. lawyer. A detailed and fully competent complaint by one of those clients, a non-lawyer, was ignored. I am a recognized legal ethics expert, and after I learned the facts regarding a second client’s victimization by this predatory lawyer, I realized that as a D.C. lawyer myself, I was ethically obligated to file a complaint to the D.C. bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel, as well as the lawyer’s other bar association. Rule 8.3 in almost all U.S. jurisdictions requires lawyers to file complaints when they know that another lawyer has engaged in conduct calling into question his or her honesty, integrity, or fitness to practice law in other respects.

A third bar association in a jurisdiction where this unethical lawyer has practiced law without a license refused to receive my complaint, arguing that since this crooked lawyer wasn’t licensed to practice law there, they had no jurisdiction. I’m not making this up.

In undertaking this task, I was shocked at how deliberately burdensome it is in every jurisdiction. You are forced to use websites which are written in jargon, with unduly verbose instructions and explanations. You are forced to fill out on-line forms which freeze and often don’t work. It is almost impossible to get anyone in the appropriate offices to answer the phone, so questions are not answered. The process is confusing for lawyers; non-lawyers are likely to find it impossible.

I believe this is intentional. I know the contempt lawyers have for client complaints; they are open about it. And it is true that a lot of clients think lawyers must be unethical because they didn’t prevail in a case. Therefore there is an institutional bias against complaints against bar member by non-lawyers, and that presumption that they are just a nuisance. Apparently the complaint system has been made so confusing and user-unfriendly in order to make all but the most determined victims of lawyer misconduct give up, throw up their hands and say, “Oh, the hell with it.”

But I am a lawyer and an ethics expert, and I was and am determined to get this spectacularly unethical lawyer where he belongs, ideally in prison, but at the every least in some other occupation where he will do less damage.

It was suggested that I lead this post off with this now well-circulated meme…

…but to me, it is too kindly and trivializes the villainy of the man. The old Ethics Alarms reliable, the unmasking of Lon Cheney in “The Phantom of the Opera,” better expresses just how repugnant his conduct has been.

If you are shocked—shocked!—to learn that Fauci is a celebrity-obsessed liar and unapologetic villain, you haven’t been paying attention or you just aren’t very bright. You certainly haven’t been following Ethics Alarms very long. I’m embarrassed that it took me as long as it did to write a full post about how despicable Fauci was, though by mid-summer 2020 I had figured it all out thanks to the photo of him maskless with two companions at a Nationals baseball game, where he had ostentatiously thrown out the first pitch (like a little girl) while wearing his virtue-signaling mask at least 60 feet from any other human being.

Here is Fauci’s EA dossier, more negative than that of almost any public figure, including the Clintons. I already took a victory lap for pegging Fauci for what he was this April, so I will spare you another “I told you so.” That month, Anthony Fauci’s former adviser David Morens was indicted and charged with one count of conspiracy, two counts of destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations and two counts of concealment, removal, or mutilation of records relating to the origins of the Wuhan virus. He faces up to 51 years in prison. I wrote, “If Morens is guilty so is Fauci, who denied under oath that he funded ‘gain of function’ experiments that modified bat coronaviruses in the same city where the pandemic started.”

Sen. Rand Paul came to the same conclusion, not that it was elusive. In his excellent recitation of Fauci’s betrayal of trust and the public this morning as the doctor who proclaimed himself the personification of science was called to account, Paul said in part,

“There will be another pandemic. There will be another crisis. And there will again be officials that insist uncertainty must be hidden for the public’s own good. They will demand obedience. They will invoke science. “I am the science!” as though it were a commandment. They will argue that government officials cannot be questioned, because questioning them would undermine public trust. They have it backwards. It is secrecy that destroys trust. It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust. And it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy.”