They're Going To Try Fauci For Treason
At least, that's what they promised
Hungary, István Csurka wrote, had been invaded by aliens.
For most of the 20th century, the nation was forced to accept influence and control from the rest of the world — Romania, Germany, the USSR, Yugoslavia, NATO, Europe, America — and it seemed like things weren’t letting up.
“Even in a democracy, especially here where the masses are so unprotected from the influence of charlatans, society must defend itself against this culture of waste, dirt and drugs,” Csurka said in an interview. “If being modern means that I have to watch programs like Dallas on TV, okay, then I’m a conservative.”1
This was the early 1990s and Hungary was independent once more and wary of joining the European community. And Csurka, a playwright, nationalist and politician, was one of the loudest voices against this alien element. He had become a beloved opponent of the Communist autocracy in Hungary, and not even evidence that he had fed information to the secret police would tarnish that reputation.
“Now, we don’t speak about their racial alienness,” Csurka assured his readers. “Today alien means an indifference toward fatal questions.” Hungary was in peril, he wrote. Flames were lapping at Hungary’s borders. He warned there was an “eternal alien-like elite” that prevented Hungary from facing this crisis. “Instead it maintains its own inner motion, distributing power corruptly according to its own principle, namely liberalism without nationalism.”
A core part of this evil alien invasion, Csurka wrote in one manifesto, is a small cabal of Marxists who established “hegemony of the Hungarian Jewry.” And they were cooperating with other global forces, a plot run between “Paris, New York, Tel Aviv.”2
At the center of this evil elite was a single man, and Csurka — leader of a loud and antisemitic wing of the governing Hungarian Democratic Forum — knew him well. In fact, this man had helped finance the Forum when it was still struggling under Communist rule, and had supported its push for full democracy.
This man’s name was George Soros.
To most of the country, Soros was a hero. He was obsessed with steering a newly-independent Eastern Europe against the forces of illiberalism: And he personally undertook the mission to fund the ‘open society’ which would form a bulwark against autocracy. He funded politicians of all stripes, provided capital for NGOs and activists, and catalyzed an independent press. In capitalism, civil society costs money. And Soros was happy to play financier.
Politicians did not like this. His Central European University, which would be a hub for the humanities and social science, was supposed to be headquartered in Slovakia: But nationalists forced him out of the country. As did leaders in the Czech Republic. So Soros, undeterred, approached Hungary, which was happy to have him.
Csurka’s conspiratorial campaign ultimately flopped. Soros opened the university and Csurka was shoved out of the Hungarian Democratic Forum. Csurka started a new far-right party where his antisemitism would flourish, but it remained marginal in Hungarian politics.
In 2012, Csurka was dying. As one of his final acts, he spoke at a rally in defense of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister who had taken office two years earlier and unleashed a campaign to make the independent state loyal and weak — but who had kept his distance from the toxic Csurka.
In death, Csurka suddenly became a North star for Orbán. He wholesale adopted the long-forgotten crusade against Soros. (Ironic, as Orbán obtained his Oxford education thanks on scholarships from Soros.)
“One lesson learned during the past 13 years in Hungary, is that there is no illiberal democracy without a devilish enemy image.”
In 2017, Orbán moved to shut down Soros’ University. All the principles of the “open society” he sought were, Orbán told the public, a cover to turn Hungary into an “illiberal state.”
In the ensuing years, Soros became the cause and financier of all Hungary’s supposed ills: Homosexuality, moral depravity, migration, economic woes, terrorism, and so on. By invoking his name, the state cracked down on charities which aided migrants and NGOs which advocated for LGBTQ rights. In reality, however, any and everyone could be a Soros stooge hiding in plain sight: And the only arbiter of these ties was Orbán’s government. When he wanted to enact a broad crackdown on migrants, Orbán dubbed the legislation the “Stop Soros” law.
Even as right-wing politicians and influencers around the world began targeting Soros as a source of unique evil, Hungary was still on the leading edge of this paranoia with antisemitic inflections.
“Great forces are once again moving to eradicate the nations of Europe and unify the continent under the aegis of a global empire,” Orbán wrote in 2020. Soros wasn’t just a bad man, the prime minister warned, he was the head of a spider’s web of interests and dark forces. He was head of “the Soros network.”
This network wanted to create “multi-ethnic, multicultural open societies by accelerating migration, and to dismantle national decision-making, placing it in the hands of the global elite.”
Last year, Orbán’s government dropped all pretenses when it unveiled a monument to Csurka. Orbán’s associates openly venerated his legacy: “Csurka was the first to uncover the Soros network,” one declared.
But Hungary, apparently, needs help in dismantling it. For that, Orbán has turned to Donald Trump.
Now that Orbán has a kindred spirit in Washington, he says the crusade against this nebulous “Soros network” must be redoubled. “They must be swept out,” the prime minister declared earlier this year. “The whole Soros network must be eliminated.” And it will be the “Trump tornado” that will bring this “cleansing wind.”
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless: The Trump administration is coming for its enemies, and there’s no reason to think they’ll stop anytime soon.
“[George Soros’] Open Society awarded at least $23,275,000 to seven groups that directly assist domestic terrorism and criminality on U.S. soil.”
That is the eye-popping takeaway from a report published last month by the Capital Research Center — which styles itself “America’s investigative think tank.”
In this slick-looking report, the Center writes that this Soros cash went directly to funding “anarchism-associated” groups which employ “direct action,” provide “assistance to rioters,” and even to organizations which engage “in arson, property damage, and violence against law enforcement.” Even more money went to groups “linked to foreign terrorist organizations.”
Follow the links and scratch the surface of this investigation, however, and this report starts to unravel. Huge claims are never substantiated, and weasel language allows the Center to allege everything and nothing at the same time.
One of the groups targeted in the report is 18 Million Rising, which mobilizes Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and which generally supports progressive causes and which has recently stood up to oppose Trump’s mass deportation operations.
The Center, however, saw something more sinister in the group. 18 Million Rising, they said, is an “extremist” organization with ties to terrorism and which “endorsed the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023.”
Except it did no such thing. The Center is basing this claim on a single Instagram post, where the group called for an independent Palestine and for an end to the “decades-long cycle of violence in Gaza and beyond; a cycle that harms both Palestinians and Israelis.” It provides not a single piece of other evidence tying the group to terrorism or extremism.
It’s a similar story with the scary-sounding Ruckus Society, which they call an “extremist” group. Except it’s the opposite: The group trains activists on how to do nonviolent direct action. Over three decades, they’ve protested Walmart, worked with Students for a Free Tibet, and participated in actions with Indigenous and environmental groups. The most evidence I can find of Ruckus contributing to domestic extremism is a couple of court cases where activists who underwent their training program went on to face charges for property damage during a protest.
This entire report is a lazy slander, convincing only if you never bother to check a single claim.
Shortly after it was published, Trump’s Department of Justice ordered prosecutors to draw up plans to prosecute Soros. To inspire the government lawyers, per The New York Times, the Department sent along the Center’s report and suggested that charges could range from arson to material support of terrorism.
This effort follows Trump’s own commands. The president has demanded that Soros be tried for racketeering, claiming that “Soros, he’s at the top of everything.”
It is as clear an indication that you can find that Trump intends to throw his political opponents in jail, that the Department of Justice is happy to carry out those orders, and that the broader MAGA movement is happy to cook the necessary evidence to give it all a patina of plausibility.
The big question now is: Who’s next?
Four years ago, Dr. Andy Wakefield joined broadcaster Stew Peters to talk science.
The COVID-19 pandemic had celebrated its first birthday some months back, and the world was transitioning from fear and solidarity to a particular kind of loopy paranoia.
“There is such utter chaos surrounding this, such extraordinary disinformation going on,” Wakefield said. “I mean, those of us on the inside said — from the outset — this came from a laboratory. This is a laboratory virus that was part of gain-of-function studies funded by Tony Fauci.”
Let me back up: Wakefield is no more a doctor than Peters is a journalist. He is, in fact, a serial fraudster. He had been a surgeon, but his career became so rife with lies and fabricated evidence — often trying to prove a causal link between vaccines and autism, without success — that his license was revoked. He was not ‘inside’ anything. He has no expertise in gain-of-function, virology, biosafety or biosecurity, or much of anything else. Peters, on the other hand, was sure that COVID was snake venom and that the vaccines were alive. (Dispatches #3, #16)
But in the emerging backlash to science and public health, Peters and Wakefield were very minor celebrities. And they were early advocates for a particular idea.
“In my opinion,” Wakefield said, “Tony Fauci should be held up for treason.”
Such a proclamation, at the time, still had the power to shock. When a YouTuber heard it while doing streeters in Union Square, it elicited incredulous looks. Fake news sites thought the idea was so attention-grabbing that they ran made-up stories about Trump calling for a death sentence for “Fraudulent Fauci.”
Just a year prior, Steve Bannon declared on his podcast that Trump, if re-elected, ought to fire Fauci and go even further, putting “heads on pikes.” Bannon was probably being metaphorical, but nevertheless the comments earned him a suspension from pre-Musk Twitter.
It was a clear message: No matter how you felt about the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, anyone who called for his arrest was probably a raving lunatic.
But then, more and more people did.
Major news outlets, Republican senators, foreign governments: They all began trumpeting supposed evidence that COVID-19 was not some accident or freak of nature. The coronavirus, they said, was the byproduct of risky research at a shadowy Chinese lab. And American taxpayer dollars had funded it.
For those angry and distrustful of the chaos wrought by the virus, it was a comforting fiction. They finally had someone to blame.
Senator Rand Paul, who has long been fixated on the idea of COVID-19 being a bioweapon, sent rounds of subpoenas to various government agencies. A contact provided me a copy: He sought “all records to, from, between, or relating to EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak, gain of function research, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Dr. Lanying Du, Dr. Yusen Zhao, dual use research of concern, the DEFUSE proposal, DARPA PREEMPT, USAID PREDICT, DEEP VSN, the Rocky Mountain Lab, Ralph Baric, Dr. Vincent Munster or Dr. Anthony Fauci.”
This list of names, places, and acronyms all weave into this bizarre theory. No matter how many subpoenas Paul sends, there is no evidence to substantiate it. That didn’t matter.
The drip-drip-drip of allegations, individually, proved nothing unless the overarching meta-theory were true, which it wasn’t.
As I’ve written before (a lot) this story does not hold water at all. (Dispatches #1, #104) The clues we have point to COVID-19 emerging from nature, though we can’t rule out the possibility that the virus was a sample collected by, and later leaked from, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But the overwhelming scientific evidence, backed up by human and signals intelligence, tells us that the idea of COVID-19 being manipulated by humans is somewhere between nearly and totally impossible.
In our current hyperreality, that doesn’t matter. For a growing population of people obsessed with this pandemic misinformation, it became established fact that Fauci was engaged in shady things. Maybe those shady things involved giving money to mad scientists or a hostile foreign power, maybe they involved conspiring with a Deep State or Big Pharma, maybe it was all a quest to maximize his own power. Like a firefighter setting a home ablaze just to save its inhabitants, maybe Fauci made us all sick just to offer the cure.
Day after day, the maybes kept coming. And it became harder every day to slay maybe.
The real danger with this deluge of allegations is not that everyone will believe it — most won’t — it's that the right people believe it, that many people will use this campaign for their own motives, and that people will believe it just enough to think that Fauci’s arrest isn't worth worrying about.
After nearly five years of being waterboarded by this nonsense, there is a real danger that people have been conditioned to believe that, when Fauci finally is led away in shackles, maybe he had it coming.
Instead, they should be looking at the movement that turned him into a criminal in the first place.
A few years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a private conversation with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson. They were discussing some contracts that Kennedy had coughed up, showing collaboration between American researchers and their colleagues in China.
“I’m very reluctant to use the word “treason,” but-” the senator began, “it does come to mind.”
The work Fauci funded was above board. It was disclosed, it was in the spirit of broader American-Chinese cooperation at the time, and it was in the name of combating the threat of emergent coronaviruses — something that would prove quite prescient, if you believe that COVID-19 emerged from the bat-lousy caves of Southern China.
But things had changed. In this new woven tale of bioweapons and deep states, the inconvenient facts were ditched and new ones substituted in. The profile of both Johnson and Kennedy had skyrocketed with the pandemic, and they were keen to keep it going.
Kennedy includes this conversation in his book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, a deranged book which was shunned by the mainstream press but which helped coagulate this emergent meta-theory into a coherent political philosophy.
As we know, Kennedy spent years developing the idea that Fauci was a Batman villain-level agent of destruction. (Dispatch #108) He, perhaps more than anyone else on the planet, sold the idea that Fauci had been orchestrating a national-level depopulation scheme since, at least, the 1980s.
In his first book about the man, The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy never makes the allegation of treason — but he indicts Fauci for just about everything else.
Kennedy writes that “some have viewed” Fauci’s approval of AIDS treatment AZT as rising “to the level of homicidal criminality.” Elsewhere, Kennedy quotes an AIDS denialist in insisting that “Anthony Fauci should be brought before a criminal court and stand trial for destroying American science, and virology, and cancer science.” He paraphrases another AIDS denialist, Peter Duesberg, in accusing “Dr. Fauci of committing mass murder with AZT.” (Dispatch #59)
By the time he got to The Wuhan Cover-Up, though, his conspiratorial movement had radicalized substantially. And Kennedy escalated his rhetoric to match. Now, this was a “treasonous Chinese bioweapons experiment.” The book takes his previous work further, tying Fauci into a sprawling tale of CIA plots, the JFK assassination, and a deep state plot to take over the world.
Kennedy, through his multi-million dollar charity Children’s Health Defense, funded a raft of other quacks who beat the drum for Fauci’s supposed criminality.
CHD was funding, for example, “Dr.” Andy Wakefield’s series of faux-documentaries, entitled Vaxxed. In the most recent, subtitled Authorized to Kill, a band of Kennedy-aligned doctors make claims like “The majority of hospital deaths [during COVID-19] were actually caused by Anthony Fauci.” They called the Fauci-approved vaccines tools of mass murder. They allege that Remdesivir — which was the first drug approved to treat COVID-19, and which has a proven “significant” impact on saving patients3 — “killed more people than placebo.”
The broader MAGA movement was, with Kennedy’s help, turning in this direction.
Take Kash Patel, who went on the openly QAnon X22 Report to talk about his priorities in recapturing the state. (Dispatch #81)
“The top three,” Patel said, “are DOJ, FBI — for every reason we’ve talked about — and all things Fauci.” Prosecution, he said, would be necessary to prove that “Fauci lied, and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, by lying about masks, by lying about the vaccine, by lying about everything — COVID origins — all while making money.”
Past-and-present trade czar Peter Navarro (Dispatch #125) made a similar argument on the same show. After the pseudoanonymous host remarked that “Fauci knowingly turned [hydroxychloroquine] down, because he knew that it worked, and the whole pandemic could have ended right there and then, so this is treason at the highest level.” Navarro agreed: “It is,” explaining that Fauci “serves two masters” — big pharma and the Democrats.
Indeed, Patel is now FBI director and Navarro is back as chief trade apparatchik not in spite of these insane comments, but because of them.
These Trumpian figures have been existing in a state of symbiosis with grassroots actors and conspiratorial influencers who have become obsessed with Fauci’s supposed dark arts. “Fauci for Treason” bumper stickers still sell well, calls for a “Nuremberg 2.0” remain commonplace in some circles, and elected members of Congress have heeded their calls.
Representative James Comer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, has said he “likes the idea” of arresting Fauci. “At the end of the day, if you lie to Congress, that’s a felony.” Comer argued that Fauci’s crimes involved recommending social distancing and lockdowns and, after Fauci defended those measures before Congress, that “hopefully we can take his words today and continue to gather evidence and take steps to try and hold him in criminal wrongdoing.”
Paul, too, has continued to beat this drum. He believes that Fauci directly lied about funding gain-of-function research in China, and has repeatedly asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Fauci for this reason.4
In the politically-motivated prosecutions which have already been launched by the Trump administration — against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and erstwhile National Security Advisor John Bolton — it is often said that Trump is settling scores. Comey was responsible for the much-maligned “Russiagate,” James spearheaded a prosecution of the Trump Organization, Bolton wrote a tell-all book revealing Trump to be the wannabe despot that he truly is.
In this telling, Trump’s prosecutions have a clear end goal.
But I don’t think that is what’s happening. I very firmly believe that the prosecutions are the point.
There is one big problem with prosecuting Fauci: He was pardoned by outgoing President Joe Biden, who was fully aware of the legal danger posed to him by a rogue administration.
Enter the autopen.
For months, Trump has rambled on about “Biden’s autopen.” Most people have no idea what he’s talking about or why. It has been written off as more unhinged conspiratorial nonsense. There was much chuckling when Trump replaced Biden’s White House portrait with a photo of said autopen.
In fact, Trump’s autopen crusade is very nakedly about locking up Trump’s opponents.
As Paul points out in a letter to Bondi: “New information has revealed that these pardons were executed via autopen, with no documented confirmation that the President personally reviewed or approved each individual grant of clemency….This raises serious constitutional and legal concerns about the legitimacy of Dr. Fauci’s pardon.”
This is, on every level, stupid. It is complete legal fiction. And, of course, the president adopted it wholesale.
In June, the White House signed a memo ordering his lawyers and the Attorney General to investigate whether Biden’s use of the autopen “would constitute an unconstitutional wielding of the power of the Presidency, a circumstance that would have implications for the legality and validity of numerous executive actions undertaken in Biden’s name.”
It is as clear a sign as any that the White House is gearing up to indict and imprison those it considers enemies.
Plenty have twisted themselves in knots to ignore what Trump is saying and doing.
Before the election, even as he spent weeks promising to prosecute his enemies, outlets like the New York Post ran headlines proclaiming “Kamala Harris claims…Trump ‘has an enemies list of people he intends to prosecute’” were “without evidence.” Since he took office, some comforted themselves by believing comments made by Bondi during her confirmation hearing: “No one will be prosecuted, investigated because they are a political opponent,” she said. Others have chalked up these prosecutions to the normal back-and-forth of rival administrations — cynical bothsiderism that the White House has been happy to feed into.
As this inane debate plays out, Bondi has pushed out and fired prosecutors who won’t do the president’s bidding while appointing prosecutors and judges tasked explicitly with pushing these prosecutions through.
Trump, meanwhile, has added more and more names to his hit list: He’s accused Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook and Senator Adam Schiff of mortgage fraud; demanded former New Jersey Governor and one-time ally Chris Christie finally be charged over an old bridge-closing scandal; successfully got the Department of Justice to investigate former special counsel Jack Smith for Hatch Act violations; the list goes on.
These are not the actions of an administration merely meting out payback. This is all an opening act. These investigations and prosecutions are all designed to push against the limits which stop a rogue president from waging lawfare against their political opponents. With each new set of charges, Trump is proving that he doesn’t need evidence, or a special counsel, or an independent investigation — if he accuses someone of a crime on Truth Social, the Department of Justice is expected to find the right facts to make the case work.
Judges will, no doubt, quash these charges at first. With time, however, they will be expected to take Trump’s interpretation of the law as gospel — lest they be replaced with more pliable actors. Or, perhaps, Trump will find avenues to deport these political enemies to his overseas concentration camps. Or maybe the Gatling gun of criminal charges will be enough. He could yet legislate his own Stop Soros Act.
Whatever avenue he takes, the successes of Viktor Orbán clearly showed how this process works. And it does work.
Make no mistake: The administration is building up to something better. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are likely targets. George Soros will face the brunt of the Department of Justice soon. And, if we listen to the very people who run the administration, Anthony Fauci will be tried for treason.
Months ago, I was talking to a scientist who had been repeatedly and consistently targeted by these conspiracy theories — someone who could genuinely be forced to stand next to Fauci in one of these show trials.
“Do you have a sense of what comes next?” I asked. “I mean, they’ve talked openly about criminal charges…”
They seemed taken aback by the insinuation. “I don’t know what the crime is,” they said.
For years, this group of scientists has faced consistent and serious death threats. Envelopes of white powder have been sent to their homes. That is daily life for these people, now. Not just for them and their colleagues, but for lots of scientists who study virology, vaccines, or any other field which faces the scrutiny of this conspiracist movement.
But this is no longer a function of a paranoid fringe looking to do vigilante harm. The most powerful people in America are the ones who have openly talked about their arrest, prosecution, imprisonment, even execution.
Even with that fact in mind, they shrugged and reiterated their belief that it couldn’t happen: “I just can’t imagine what crime they would come up with,” they said, given there is just zero proof that they have done “anything nefarious or wrong.”
It struck me then that this was delusional. Time has, unfortunately, proven me right.
Of course these scientists are innocent — not just that, but that they are the reason we developed the tests, vaccines, and biologics which saved millions of lives worldwide.
But in an America where the Department of Justice has been utterly perverted by politics and the delusions of Trump and his movement, guilt is no longer a function of reality. Guilt is whatever the president says it is.
This is not just blowback. If it were, this revenge would have an end date.
But these political prosecutions aren’t just going to stop. Once they are allowed to happen, they will continue.
Once you can prosecute your foes, critics, and the characters in your conspiracy theories, you keep doing it.
That’s it for this week.
Generally I offer a little apology when the rate of these dispatches slow down — not this time! While you haven’t gotten a Bug-eyed and Shameless in your inbox for a couple of weeks, I have a very good reason. I’ve got a super-secret project in the works that has eaten up a lot of my time, but will be launching in the coming weeks. And it will be launching right here, on this newsletter.
So stay tuned.
Until next week!
Free to Hate: The Rise of the Right in Post-Communist Eastern Europe, Paul Hockenos (1993)
National Post, October 31, 1992.
A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of the Effectiveness of Remdesivir to Treat SARS-CoV-2 in Hospitalized Patients: Have the Guidelines Evolved With the Evidence?, Michele Bartoletti, Essy Mozaffari, Alpesh N. Amin, et al. (Infectious Diseases, July 2025)
Paul is not entirely wrong in his criticism of Fauci, here. The former NIAID director categorically said America did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan — but it did, however, contribute a small amount of money, through an NGO, to help create chimeric coronaviruses. Fauci, and serious virologists, have argued that this work was not gain-of-function, and point out that the work was reviewed by a biosafety committee that came to exactly that conclusion. (Although the lab was doing other, non-U.S-funded, gain-of-function work.) Indeed, this research was done during a U.S. government freeze on gain-of-function research, and actually showed a loss of function in these studies. In short: You can take issue with Fauci and his work, but there is absolutely no way that his testimony rises to the level of criminal perjury.
Great article. Thanks for your ongoing work on this.
Guess the question now is how do we proactively make sure this can't happen here in Canada? Especially as we tend to run a few years behind US trends.