by Clay Waters at newsbusters.org
The latest PBS American Masters documentary profiled the face of COVID in America, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for decades and who came into public attention during the AIDS crisis and especially during COVID.
The tone is of a tireless hero Fauci bringing hard truths down the mountain to ungrateful conservatives. Yet left-wing anti-Fauci protesters from the AIDS era are remembered fondly.
Fauci won’t be doing that with anti-mandate, anti-lockdown protesters:
The motivations of these people who are attacking me, they speak for themselves. We’re dealing with a completely hyper-hostile partisan group who fundamentally – I guess you could say hate me for reasons I think I can figure out. Because I stand for something that may be inconvenient for them. It’s called the truth. That is 1,000% different than the AIDS activists. They were trying to get me to see what the truth was for them.
The doctor certainly has a healthy ego. Regarding his critics, he has previously said, “So it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science.” Science?
Fauci didn’t call the gay ACT-UP activists “crazy people,” as he did with right-wing protesters. He actually praised those activists and their 80’s-era disruptions at the Golden Gate Bridge and St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, as well as “firebrand” Larry Kramer, who called Fauci an “incompetent idiot” and “murderer” in the San Francisco Examiner. Fauci is now friends with radical AIDS activists and the documentary shows them sitting down in a living room drinking wine.
A film crew began following Fauci at the dawn of the Biden administration and kept it up through 2022, conducting 10 interviews in all. The two-hour piece opens with Fauci at home watching CNN’s coverage of the Biden inauguration, which goes on for two and a half minutes.
Fortune magazine talked to doc director Mark Mannucci, who betrayed how his profile was tilted toward hagiography from the start: “The story illuminates — and [Fauci would] be the first to say it — some very dark stuff about this country and how a person who has devoted his life to helping individuals got so twisted in this current climate….”