Episode Details

If you watched the video, you already know what the scapegoat mechanism is and why it explains the Trump administration’s obsession with Anthony Fauci better than any political explanation ever will. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the timeline, and why a man who advised six presidents on infectious disease became the most hated person in the Republican Party for doing his job.

The Diary

On July 27, 2026, Senator Rand Paul released over a thousand pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s personal diary entries from December 2019 through December 2022. Paul framed the release as evidence that Fauci’s private views contradicted his public statements. He posted the entries on X under the heading “Tony’s Diary” and made them available through his committee reading room as part of his ongoing investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

The diary revealed a scientist wrestling with a crisis in real time. Fauci wrote about disagreements with Trump over hydroxychloroquine. He wrote about his frustration with the administration’s tendency to minimize the threat. He wrote about his own sudden celebrity and the strange experience of becoming the most recognized public health official in American history.

What the diary did not reveal is any evidence that Fauci covered up the origins of COVID-19, lied to the public about gain-of-function research, or conspired to suppress information about a lab leak. STAT News reported that the documents “offer no proof that the pandemic originated from a lab or that Fauci or any other officials worked to cover it up.” NPR confirmed the same. Virologist Robert Garry at Tulane University stated that there is “no actual evidence” for a connection between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the start of the pandemic.

None of this matters to the people who want Fauci destroyed. And there is a psychological reason for that.

The Scapegoat Mechanism

René Girard was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science who spent most of his career at Stanford University. In 1972, he published “Violence and the Sacred,” a work that introduced his theory of the scapegoat mechanism to the academic world and fundamentally changed the study of collective violence.

Girard’s central insight is that human communities resolve internal conflict through a specific, recurring pattern. When a group is in crisis, when tensions are rising and the group is at risk of tearing itself apart, the group unconsciously converges on a single individual or minority group to blame. All of the group’s anxiety, guilt, shame, and aggression is projected onto this target. The target is then punished, expelled, or destroyed. And the act of collective punishment temporarily restores order and unity to the group.

The critical feature of the scapegoat mechanism is that the target does not need to be guilty. The target is not chosen because of evidence. The target is chosen because the group needs someone to carry what it cannot carry itself. The scapegoat absorbs the sins of the community so the community never has to examine its own.

Girard found that the scapegoat mechanism operates most powerfully when the group is unable or unwilling to confront the real source of the crisis. If the real source is too powerful, too diffuse, or too implicating of the group itself, the group will find a substitute. Someone close enough to the crisis to be plausible but vulnerable enough to be punished without consequence.

Anthony Fauci is that substitute.

The Real Source of the Crisis

Over one million Americans died from COVID-19. That is the crisis. And the real source of that crisis is not difficult to identify.

In 2018, the Trump administration disbanded the National Security Council’s global health security team, a unit specifically created to prepare for pandemics. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, eliminated the dire