Fauci and his beloved client, the bureaucratic regime

In the late 1980s, while I was finishing my PhD at Claremont Graduate School, President Ronald Reagan appointed my thesis advisor, Dr. William Barclay Allen, to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. A year later, in 1988, Dr. Allen tapped me as his executive assistant, a mind-boggling experience and grist for lifelong reflection.

That year’s major hearings, the heart-wrenching Enforcement of the Indian Civil Rights Act and the media-circus Civil Rights Aspects of Public Health Policies and Initiatives to Control AIDS, exposed me to the categorical cruelty and waste of regulatory regimes, science’s corruption by political patronage, and a bureaucratic regime’s total identification of the common good with patron-client dependency.

Fauci and the politics of the AIDS crisis

The AIDS hearings were an education in bureaucratic deceit, in the person of Anthony Fauci. The real issue, soft-peddled by Fauci and buried by the mainstream media, was the pressing need for the time-tested three pillars of epidemiology: contact-tracing; closing known loci of infection; and restraining recalcitrant carriers. In the 1950s, the three pillars contained highly infectious tuberculosis, and HIV was much more containable. It was transmitted only by blood or semen. Its loci of infection were street-drug “shooting galleries” and gay bathhouses. And its transmitters were intravenous drug users (25 percent) and homosexuals (70 percent) via anal intercourse.

Early in the epidemic, then-Surgeon General C. Everett Koop had warned, “Anal intercourse is so dangerous” with any disease, given the inevitable trauma to the rectum, “that no-one should ever do it.” HIV’s spread was so dependent on blood-blood (sharing needles) or semen-blood transmission, that the spouses of carriers who avoided sodomy were mostly uninfected. So a containment policy was obvious. Had it been implemented, it might have saved well over a hundred thousand young gay lives. The problem, however, was voiced by the baffled president of the Texas Medical Association: “Mr. Chairman, this is a disease with a lobby.”

By 1988, there were approximately 40,000-45,000 AIDS-related deaths. So in a week of hearings, we heard from everyone: tearful Christian hospice workers, the decimated hemophiliacs (victims of contaminated blood supplies), insurance providers, EMS blood-handlers, prison staff (sodomy again), and, of course, angry gay activists. The theatre’s back wall was occupied by ACT UP-AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, dozens of chanting gay protesters, all wearing Bozo-the-Clown masks. USCCR Chairman Clarence Pendleton gave them 10 minutes to vent, then told them they’d have to remain silent if they didn’t want to be thrown out. So they stayed quiet, yet remained the constant focus of the cooperative network film crews.

ACT-UP’s contention was that gay-hating American bigots were blocking medical science from inventing—tomorrow!—a cure for their lifestyle choice. But in fact, ACT-UP was caught in a cleft stick. If AIDS posed little danger to the general public, it would get little research funding. If it were a great danger to the public, the bathhouses would be closed. So ACT-UP founder Larry Kramer’s solution was to short-circuit any rational policy deliberation by means of Enraged Minority Victimhood, and the more enraged, the better. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as editors say, and if it’s wearing a clown mask, it opens the evening news.

At the hearings, the oh-so-moderate Dr. Fauci argued that public education—exclusively promoting the use of condoms—was already reining in the gay transmission rate (and this, despite having visited a bathhouse). Further, he argued, the drug AZT was showing great promise. So, he concluded, any attempt to quarantine the disease would have minimal effect. Given the research demands of other diseases, like cancer and heart disease, the level of research funding seemed, well, adequate.

Yet the sceptical USCCR counsel challenged: wasn’t the disease transmitted almost entirely by IV-drug use or sodomy? Fauci remained vague, balked at the term “sodomy,” and waffled on anything resembling a quarantine. And he was the expert.

USCCR chairman Clarence Pendleton and my boss, Bill Allen, saw the potential disaster. Both black men had been long-time opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the War on Poverty’s destruction of the black family. Pendleton had famously branded affirmative action programs as “working on the government plantation” (with the likes of Jesse Jackson and Vernon Jordan being the programs’ richly remunerated overseers). And now these two Reagan appointees saw another civil rights catastrophe looming, sacrificing real people for the movement. Unfortunately, the other commissioners were mostly political grifters. The “gay community” had insisted, implicitly but angrily, that bathhouse sodomy was intrinsic to their minority identity, and insisted that contact-tracing was discriminatory.

So, inevitably, the three pillars faded from sight.

The Fauci-Kramer collusion

Over the next decade, Fauci and Kramer regularly debated on the network news, Kramer furiously berating Fauci for his failure to find a cure, and Fauci agreeing patiently that, yes, perhaps more funding would bring a cure more quickly. Predictably, the funding ballooned all out of proportion to the relative number of AIDS victims, in a cohort representing just 3 or 4 percent of the population. Yet equally predictably, it took until 1996 before the drug “cocktails” started effectively suppressing HIV.

So, the bathhouses stayed open, and AIDS deaths peaked at 50,000 per year, with poor, young cannon-fodder for the privileged apparatchiks of a victimized minority.

When ACT-UP founder Kramer died in 2020, Fauci proudly boasted to NBC, PBS, and Rolling Stone that he and Kramer had been colluding since 1987, for a year prior to our hearings. He would dine with Kramer in New York, or Kramer with him in DC, planning the media campaign to keep AIDS at the head of the victim queue. Greased by Fauci, research funding flowed, and not even the Heart Fund dared complain. Such was the dawn of politicized scientism, the religion of a bureaucratic culture. “We loved each other,” Fauci told the NYT, though Kramer kept up the pantomime until his death.

In decades past, ordinary citizens would have been enraged at a high-level bureaucrat, brazenly torquing “the science” to favor an interest group (or its spokespersons). Yet thirty years later, the mainstream media lauded the Fauci-Kramer collusion as bureaucratic compassion for an oppressed minority, victimized by bigoted legislators and electorates. No one cared to connect the dots between the open bathhouses and the many young collateral casualties. Surely, gay men would have continued in their sodomy, but ending the institutionalized, anonymous promiscuity of the bathhouses, with multiple partners nightly, would have saved many, many lives.

Kramer was an extremely choleric character, totally invested in the Gay Nation, so he may have honestly accepted the human cost of his (or his movement’s) political ascendancy. But the contrast between Fauci’s laissez-faire HIV policy and his COVID authoritarianism, 22 years later, is a bitter one. Ironically, when given a chance to quarantine the entire population and direct an even larger bundle of research funding, he did not let the crisis go to waste.

For a bureaucratic gauleiter, a hundred thousand deaths are merely a statistic.

The irony and the bureaucracy

The grander irony is the fact that the Western medical institution was a Catholic inheritance, an expression of Christian love, animated by the vision of the Imago Dei in each and every human person (including each young gay male). Yes, the medical profession is timeless, coterminous with civilization itself. And Hippocrates established its ethical standard with his (now abandoned) fourth-century BC oath.

But nursing the sick was always a familial responsibility, like teaching the young and sheltering homeless relatives. Princes had more urgent concerns: defending borders, administering justice, building roads, and collecting taxes. The Church alone nurtured the hospital or hospice as a free, voluntary institution, an organ of the Body of Christ offering familial love, first in the monasteries, and then serving pilgrims to the Holy Land.

For the next thousand years—to within living memory—our most trusted hospitals were run by religious orders. The Church earned her moral authority through familial services of nursing, teaching, and sheltering, services voluntary, personal, and sacrificial. In contrast, government is always coercive. Given its duties of defense, civil justice, and public works, the State’s actions are necessarily mandatory, categorical, and monetary. Bound by a substantive code of justice, the State cannot care discerningly and sacrificially for the Imago Dei in each unique person.

In short, the categorical State cannot love.

Tragically, in the early 1900s, America’s progressive Protestant elite betrayed their Christian duty by indenturing American education to the emerging bureaucratic regime. With the inevitable growth of bureaucracy, the State then absorbed shelter as welfare, and nursing as the medical industry. So our free society’s services of love were sucked into the bureaucratic bubble, for which, Thomas Sowell says, regulations are everything, and results, nothing.

In the 1960s, teachers’ unions nationwide imagined they could build the society of the future, initiating socialism’s Long March through our schools. So, over a century, civic education became industrial training and now socialist indoctrination; shelter became welfare dependency and now foederati subsidies, and tragically, nursing care became industrial protocols and now herd management (with culling now commonplace).

Anthony Fauci’s alleged malfeasance is an inevitable consequence of the bureaucratic regime, metastasized into our broader culture, especially in progressive cities.

First, in a bureaucratic culture, we celebrate our status as worker bees in an authoritarian hive, with docility the highest virtue. Second, threats to the hive are defined by the precautionary principle: Any potential catastrophe warrants any hypothetical remedy, of whatever public expense. Third, the culture assumes that its apparatchiks willingly observe its regulations and protocols. This was perhaps true of imperial China’s Confucian mandarins, but, as John Adams famously said, free government is possible “only for a moral and virtuous people.” For the selfish and malicious, regulations and protocols become opportunities rather than obstacles. So, for clever bullies, public school zero-tolerance for bullying policies are opportunities to harass their fellows, gaming the system.

Final note: USCCR chairman Clarence Pendleton died one month after the AIDS hearings, suffering a heart attack on his exercise bike. Penny was a great American, ignored or mocked by the political elite and mainstream media, like all black conservatives, for his rejection of racial clientage and his insistence on black self-reliance and family integrity. (His legacy was celebrated in the Lincoln Review VIII:4 Summer 1988.)