How’s Your Buddy Rand?

Three years ago I shook his hand and joked about Rand Paul. He's not laughing anymore, and neither am I.

By the time you read this, the Rand Paul Senate shit show featuring Dr. Fauci will have consumed the media. As it was unfolding, I posted this Note — the “fuck you” one — that kinda went viral, at least for me.

Here’s the story behind it.

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April 3, 2023. Barbara and I were standing in a reception line at James Madison University, waiting to shake Anthony Fauci’s hand. JMU isn’t just some campus to us — it’s Alison’s school. She graduated from there. So did Jim Acosta, who’d just spent the last hour moderating a town hall with Fauci in front of a packed house — candid, sharp, the audience lobbing good questions and Fauci batting them back without flinching, not a hint of the bullshit he’d be forced to eat three years later. Before the doors even opened, they’d set up metal detectors to screen everyone coming in — not to keep an eye on Fauci, but to keep some deranged asshole who’d swallowed years of conspiracy garbage from getting close enough to hurt him.

The Madison bust was staring down at the whole exchange, three years before Bernie Moreno would invoke Madison’s name at Fauci in a Senate hearing room.

That should have told me everything. It didn’t, not fully — not until I noticed four or five guys in suits standing along the wall, earpieces in, doing that thing security people do where they’re not looking at anyone and looking at everyone at once. I asked one of them, half-joking, what kind of security they were. Local, maybe, or state.

“No,” he said. “We’re US Marshals.”

Holy shit, I thought. This man needs a federal protective detail to shake hands at a college town hall, because a pack of grifters and cowards decided the guy who told the truth about a virus that killed over a million Americans was the enemy.

When I finally got to Fauci in that line, I shook his hand and asked him, “How’s your buddy Rand?” He just chuckled and shook his head — the kind of tired, knowing head-shake of a man who’d had that exact conversation a hundred times already and would have it a hundred more.

I had no idea how much more. None of us did.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve written about this man, because I keep watching the same movie.

In June of 2024, I watched Marjorie Taylor Greene and James Comer treat a Congressional hearing like a WWE script, hurling conspiracy theories at Fauci while he calmly, patiently debunked each one — the same quiet resolve he showed at JMU. I wrote then that it’s why he needed five Marshals just to walk into a building. I wrote that good men shouldn’t have to live in fear for their families.

In September of that year, I ran into a physician — a physician — at a local festival who told me with total sincerity that Fauci was a criminal and vaccinated kids would suffer for it. Trained in science, teaching at clinical hospital, and still swallowed whole by the same misinformation machine.

In January of 2025, right as Trump was taking the oath again, I wrote about Biden’s preemptive pardons for Fauci and General Milley — a safeguard nobody should have ever needed, and a lament for what we’d become. I asked then whether Trump would dare go after people who’d already been pardoned. I didn’t have to wait long for an answer. He didn’t need to revoke a pardon. He just needed to pull the security and let a Senate committee do the rest.

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Last Wednesday, Rand Paul tried again to get his pound of flesh.

Fauci sat before Paul’s Senate Homeland Security committee under subpoena — dragged there, let’s not pretend otherwise — and took the Fifth on every question, not just about COVID’s origins, but on damn near everything else too. Paul had spent the run-up to the hearing leaking over a thousand pages of Fauci’s private diary entries to anyone who’d print them, insisting they prove Fauci said one thing publicly and another privately. Then he closed the hearing by announcing the committee will reconvene next week to decide whether to hold an 85-year-old retired public servant in contempt of Congress, because that’s what passes for governing now.

Paul promised “repercussions.” Senate Republicans made a point of noting that Biden’s preemptive pardon for Fauci wouldn’t cover perjury committed that day — as if the theater of the whole thing wasn’t obvious enough already.

Let’s talk about that diary for a second, because the right-wing media machine has been having a field day with it. Turns out the man wrote, in his own private journal, that he was stunned by his own fame — called it “explosive and really unimaginable,” noted he was “the most famous and talked about person in the country,” joked about turning down Dancing with the Stars. Fox has been running it wall to wall for two days now, treating “Fauci enjoyed the attention” like a smoking gun.

Here’s my take, and I’ll say it plainly: so what? The man became an accidental celebrity in the middle of the worst public health catastrophe in a century, got action figures and candles made in his likeness, and yes — some small part of him found that strange and, fine, a little flattering. That’s not corruption. That’s not a crime. That’s a human being reacting like a human being to something completely unprecedented happening to him.

I know a little something about unwanted celebrity myself. Mine started the worst way imaginable — with Alison’s murder, broadcast live, watched by the whole country. And I won’t pretend it’s simple. There were moments, God help me, when being recognized surprised me, and some small part of it felt almost good, like I mattered, like I wasn’t invisible. And right behind that feeling came the guilt — because the only reason anyone knew my name was that my daughter was dead. Fauci got famous for trying to save people. I got “famous” because someone took Alison’s life. Different as those two things are, I understand exactly what it’s like to have a spotlight land on you that you never asked for, and to feel something complicated and human about it anyway. That doesn’t make either of us liars or frauds. It makes us people.

Being a little vain isn’t the same as lying about a lab leak, and the fact that Paul’s crowd can’t tell the difference — or worse, doesn’t want to — tells you everything about what this whole spectacle actually is. It’s not an investigation. It’s a character assassination dressed up in subpoenas, and they’ll take whatever thin gruel they can get, be it a diary entry about Barbra Streisand or a Fifth Amendment invocation, and serve it up as proof of guilt.

Then Ohio’s Bernie Moreno took his turn, and it stopped being theater and started being something uglier. He brought up an Ohio mother who was tased and arrested for not wearing a mask at her son’s outdoor middle school football game, blamed Fauci for “moronic politicians” enforcing policies dreamed up by a man “more interested in meeting a Kardashian than in the suffering of the American people.” Then he leaned in and asked him, on the record, “who the fuck do you think you were for doing that?”

Here’s the detail that would be funny if it weren’t so telling: Moreno wrapped up by invoking James Madison — noting Madison once lived a few blocks from that hearing room, and wondering aloud what the man who wrote the Fifth Amendment would think of Fauci hiding behind it now. Madison. The same name on the university where I stood next to Fauci in a reception line three years ago, under a roof he needed federal Marshals just to walk into.

Fauci conferred with his attorney and took the Fifth again. Of course he did — because at that point it wasn’t a hearing, it was a public flogging with a gavel.

So: fuck you too, Bernie Moreno. Get in line behind Rand.

And in his own statement, Fauci said the quiet part out loud: Paul’s attacks “kindle the crazies out there” — the same crazies who’ve sent him and his family death threats for five years running, the same crazies who forced the very Marshals detail I stumbled into at JMU.

Here’s the part that should make every one of us furious: that protection is gone. Days after his second inauguration, Trump pulled Fauci’s federally funded security detail entirely, and had the balls to tell reporters, “when you work for government, at some point your security detail comes off... you can’t have them forever.” Bolton lost his. Pompeo lost his. Men facing ongoing, credible threats, tossed aside like garbage because the man running this country doesn’t extend a shred of decency to anyone who’s ever crossed him — pandemic or no pandemic, Iran or no Iran.

Fauci pays for his own security now. Out of his own pocket. For doing his job — a job that saved lives, while the men screaming at him last Wednesday got rich off the outrage.

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That’s the through-line, from an April afternoon at Alison’s school to a Senate hearing room last Wednesday: a man who told the truth when five thousand people a day were dying and was hunted for it for half a decade by cowards who never lost a single night’s sleep over it. He was stripped of the protection he was owed by a president who’s never done a decent thing for anyone who didn’t kiss his ring, and hauled in front of a committee so two shit weasels — a washed-up eye doctor and a used-car salesman — could get their moment screaming obscenities at an 85-year-old man for the cameras.

He just chuckled at me that day, three years ago, on his buddy Rand. I don’t think he’s laughing anymore. I wouldn’t be either.

So let me say what I said back when I wrote “Unconscionable” in June of 2024, and I’ll keep saying it as long as it’s true: fuck you, Rand Paul. Fuck you, Bernie Moreno. You too, RFK Jr., you unhinged whack job. And fuck every gutless politician who found their spine only after it was safe to swing at a man who can’t fight back without incriminating himself. You don’t get to call yourselves patriots for beating up on the guy who tried to keep this country breathing while your buddy in the Oval Office pulled his security detail and left him to twist.

We stand with Dr. Fauci. We always will.