Tucker Carlson opened his show with a scathing monologue slamming Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday night, likening his retirement from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) as the “equivalent of a targeted nuclear device detonated over the most emotionally vulnerable elements of our most privileged population.”
Fauci, also the White House chief medical adviser, announced his resignation on Monday morning, confirming he will step down in December after more than 50 years of public service.
On Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host of America’s most-watched cable news show went for blood, claiming Fauci, 81, is “a dangerous fraud, a man who has done things that in most countries, at most times in history, would be understood perfectly clearly to be very serious crimes.” He even went so far as to label Fauci a “dictator.”
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Fauci will now be “sitting masked at Brian Stelter’s house watching Chris Hayes tonight,” Carlson said, claiming Fauci resigned because he wants to avoid an investigation into the handling of the pandemic following the midterm elections, or “a new Congress.”
“Imagine the pandemonium at SoulCycle studios across the Northeast this morning when Tony Fauci announced his retirement,” Carlson began.
“Ugly doesn’t begin to describe it. Picture the chaos, if you can, in the organic chaga aisle at Whole Foods in Brooklyn. Try to envision the panic and hysteria that must have broken out at espresso bars in Edgartown and Aspen and Santa Monica and Bethesda as thousands of masked ladies in Lululemon discovered, all at once, that the one religious leader they still revered, their own even tinier version of the Dalai Lama, had decided to retreat forever from public life.”
“You can picture the carnage, the wailing, the swooning, manicured hands clutched to breasts, then fumbling for Xanax and expensive handbags. Not since the orange man seized the White House in a Russian coup have more 46-year-old Cornell-educated lawyers with weak husbands wept shamelessly in public.”
Carlson then claimed Fauci has “a lot to answer for” and said he “recommended treatments and preventative measures for COVID that not only didn’t work but that he knew didn't work.” The Fox host used the drug remdesivir as one example. Masks were another: “As your kids were suffocating during gym wearing a mask, Tony Fauci knew they didn’t work,” he said.
Then, he claimed Fauci’s allegedly “most notable crime” was that he “covered up evidence that he, Tony Fauci, helped create that virus in the first place.”
Carlson used footage of Fauci last July, testifying under oath before the Congress, where he denied the NIH ever funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
Carlson added a letter sent last year by NIH official called Lawrence Tabak to the House Oversight Committee as a basis for his argument. The letter confirmed that a “limited experiment” had been conducted in Wuhan in order to test if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China.” Tabak this year confirmed that U.S. health officials concealed early genomic sequences of COVID-19 at the request of Chinese scientists.
“Tony Fauci was lying in that clip. He knew he was lying. At some point, all of this is going to become public and it seems to be accelerating. No wonder Fauci’s leaving,” Carlson said.
Carlson then likened Fauci’s COVID response to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“It’s an indictment of our system and the rest of us, certainly us in the media, that a guy in charge of America’s COVID response could say so many things serially, back to back, one after the other, week after week, month after month, year after year, that turned out to be false, and he still has the job. How does that happen? It’s like the withdrawal from Afghanistan. No one responsible for that was ever punished. They were elevated. That’s a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed immediately.”
“Tony Fauci gets to collect his enormous government retirement and he’ll be lecturing you from the stage at CNN very, very soon.”
