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The internet is currently in full meltdown mode after a weekend of collective double-takes, face-palms, and blunt realizations about Dr. Anthony Fauci. What started as the quiet release of personal documents quickly snowballed into one of the loudest online reckonings of the entire post-pandemic era.On July 25, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul published more than 1,000 pages of what he describes as Fauci’s near-daily private diary entries spanning late 2019 through 2022. Within hours, screenshots, highlighted passages, and reaction videos flooded X, Instagram, and every other major platform. By Sunday night, users were openly declaring they had finally “woken up.” One widely shared post captured the mood perfectly: people across the country were suddenly realizing Fauci had been “a manipulative weasel” all along. The accompanying GIF of a smiling Fauci saying “I think you can trust me” only poured gasoline on the fire.

thehill.com

The diaries themselves are driving the reaction. In a January 26, 2020 entry—written when the virus was still largely confined to China—Fauci noted that the first infections occurred in early December and were not connected to the Huanan wet market. “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier,” he wrote. Just days later, on a conference call with leading virologists, roughly half the participants privately expressed the view that the virus’s unusual furin cleavage site made it look “constructed.” Fauci recorded the skepticism. Yet in the months and years that followed, he and allied scientists publicly and repeatedly insisted the science pointed overwhelmingly to a natural origin and treated the lab-leak hypothesis as little more than a conspiracy theory.

paul.senate.gov

Other entries show Fauci privately coordinating aggressive lockdown measures. In March 2020 he documented direct conversations with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and California Governor Gavin Newsom about shutting down schools, bars, and restaurants. Later public statements downplayed the extent of his personal influence on those decisions. The diaries also capture Fauci’s growing awareness of—and apparent enjoyment of—his sudden celebrity status. He noted that “the press is going wild with me,” described media attention as flattering, and recorded invitations to high-profile social events even as the death toll climbed.

x.com

Critics on the right have seized on the documents as proof of a deliberate dual track: private doubts and active policy-making on one side, confident public messaging on the other. Supporters counter that diaries are personal reflections written in real time under extreme uncertainty, and that scientific understanding of the virus evolved rapidly. Both sides agree on one thing: the release has poured fresh fuel on questions that never fully went away—U.S. funding of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the definition of gain-of-function work, early communications with Chinese scientists, and the speed with which dissenting views on origins were sidelined.All of this lands less than 24 hours before Fauci is scheduled to appear under subpoena before Paul’s committee on July 29. The hearing was already expected to be contentious. With the diary pages now public, the stakes have risen dramatically. RFK Jr. and others have already warned that any testimony that conflicts with the newly released private writings could raise perjury concerns, noting that a prior presidential pardon does not cover future statements under oath.

x.com

Whether Wednesday’s hearing produces fireworks, carefully lawyered answers, or both, one outcome already seems clear. The weekend’s online explosion has shifted the public conversation. For a significant and highly vocal segment of the internet, the image of Fauci as the steady, apolitical scientist has been permanently altered by his own handwritten words. The testimony tomorrow will determine whether that shift accelerates—or whether Fauci can still convince a skeptical audience that the man in the diary and the man on television were never that far apart.