Lab coat leviathan
Date
07/29/2026
Hosted By
Hunter Baker, Nick Eicher, Lindsay Mast
Lab coat leviathan
0:00
WORLD Radio - Lab coat leviathan
Washington Wednesday with Hunter Baker: Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era role shows how disputed science, public trust, and political accountability blurred when elected leaders let expertise stand in for governing. Also: the DSA’s constitutional demolition plan, and why major cities are losing children.
Dr. Anthony Fauci testifies during a House Subcommittee hearing on the Coronavirus crisis, July 31, 2020 on Capitol Hill. Associated Press / Kevin Dietsch / Pool
Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.
LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday, July 29. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.
NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Time now for Washington Wednesday, and joining us is Hunter Baker. He is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Good morning.
HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.
EICHER: Issue one today, Hunter: revisiting the Fauci Ouchy. Former White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci finds himself this morning in the waiting room, awaiting a hearing in front of his great nemesis, Doctor Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky. Senator Paul plans to question him using Fauci’s own pandemic diaries—that’s more than 1,000 pages covering the first reports from Wuhan all the way through Fauci’s retirement in 2022.
MAST: Those diaries contain plenty about Fauci’s TV appearances, favorable press coverage he received, and relationships with political power players and cultural hotshots like Barbra Streisand—that’s the embarrassing stuff. But the most consequential entries concern the origin of COVID-19. Early in 2020, scientists told Fauci that laboratory manipulation and an accidental release were plausible possibilities. A year later, Fauci wrote that advocates of the lab leak hypothesis were distorting reality, and he complained that Congress would keep hassling him about it. Well over six years on, scientists still have not reached a consensus on the origin of the virus. Hunter, this hearing is just hours away, and if you can set aside the personality material and the fixation on media coverage, what do you see as the most consequential discrepancy between what Fauci knew privately and what he said publicly?
BAKER: I think the biggest thing is the consensus that existed in the epidemiology community. There’s a fantastic book called In COVID’s Wake by a couple of Princeton political scientists. For me, maybe the biggest revelation was this understanding that the entire medical community had thought about this sort of thing ahead of time, and that they had settled firmly on the idea that non-pharmaceutical interventions—all the kinds of things that we did—were useless and maybe even counterproductive. Yet we pursued all of those things and therefore radically interfered with American life, cost the government trillions of dollars, shut down schools, interfered with the studies and maturation of young people, and radically interfered with the American economy.
EICHER: Hunter, I don’t expect at the conclusion of this hearing to find that the scandal is necessarily that Fauci reached the wrong scientific conclusion. Scientists do, after all, get things wrong. Do you think the deeper problem really is that he helped to discredit a plausible hypothesis and, more than that, play character assassin to the scientists and journalists who pursued it, while privately knowing that the evidence was actually unsettled?
BAKER: I think there are a lot of problems with the way that he conducted himself in the middle of this. I won’t try to be a substitute expert, but one thing is clear: he worked very hard to try to prevent anybody from really exploring the lab leak possibility and publicizing that. In addition, when well-credentialed people tried to argue that the response was the wrong response, he was part of that group that tried to intimidate them, potentially interfere with their existing status in the expert community, and maybe their academic positions. For whatever reason, he felt a real need to try to manage this thing in a particular direction. I think the reality is, it’s a sensitive issue. People disagree over it as strongly as anything else in my life, other than whether you can lean an airline seat back. But I think they got this thing wrong and that the costs and the benefits were not well managed. I think he never really conceded that.
MAST: Hunter, Fauci was formally an adviser, but elected officials, governors, journalists, and much of the public treated him as though scientific expertise gave him authority to decide questions involving schools and businesses, as Nick mentioned, but also churches, travel, and ordinary civil life. We never had a funeral for my grandmother, who died in March of 2020. When does expert advice become the exercise of political power?
BAKER: A lot of people blame Fauci for this. They blame Collins. I have always thought of it a little bit differently. I don’t think that Fauci and Collins were right about a lot of these things, but they really were not in power. I think what happened is that our political leaders deferred to Fauci and Collins to an unacceptable degree. I was present at a meeting where Collins openly said, “Look, we were only thinking about this thing through the medical lens. We were not really considering the effect on children’s education, the effect on the economy, or other related things.” That was really the revelation for me, because who was supposed to be thinking about those things? Fauci and Collins were not trained in government. Our elected leaders, members of the cabinet, and other folks like that were the ones who were supposed to figure that out. They gave it all to Fauci and Collins, and that was a mistake.
EICHER: Interesting. Not trained in government, but certainly trained in politics. Now I want to get to the exit question here. We could talk all day about Fauci. How do elected leaders, Hunter, obtain the advice of these experts without transferring governing authority to this expert class, whom voters cannot remove?
BAKER: This is really a major 20th-century and now 21st-century type of question. When you look at a president like Woodrow Wilson, who really was one of the inventors of the academic field of public administration, he wanted a government that was run by experts. He really didn’t want it to be such an electoral kind of affair. Certainly, we have done a lot of things to empower experts within the government, and with the global epidemic, we saw that everybody wanted to defer to experts. Why? Of course, they’re experts in that matter, but we have all seen the movie where the expert knows the right thing and the political leaders don’t, and they lead us into disaster. In this case, we learned that the experts are not infallible and they can, in many cases, offer bad advice.
MAST: Hunter, moving on to issue two, we’ll call this one “Democracy with No Brakes.” The Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA, have now supplied a case study for the argument you made in a WORLD Opinions column this week. You argue that Americans increasingly no longer understand the Constitution’s purpose, so they view its restraints as defects: federalism, two houses of Congress, staggered elections, separation of powers, and an independent judiciary all make political power difficult to exercise—and deliberately so.
EICHER: Now, Hunter, the DSA’s new national program is almost a point-by-point rejection of that constitutional design. It calls for a new democratic constitution, abolition of the Senate and Electoral College, and replacement of the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. It also proposes proportional representation and public ownership of major corporations and industries. That is the structural part. There are also demands for open borders, amnesty for illegals, no more ICE, defunding the Pentagon, prisons, and on and on—like a right-wing fever dream. That is not merely an economic agenda operating within the existing constitutional order; it’s a proposal for a fundamentally different order.
MAST: Hunter, here’s the question: Do you think today’s Democratic Socialists may have skipped civics class entirely, or is it more that their leaders, at least, understand the constitutional structure quite well? It’s just that they affirmatively reject it. In other words, is civic ignorance really the problem, or are we witnessing a collision between two fundamentally different meanings of a democratic society?
BAKER: I think both things are there. My opinion is that if we quizzed the members of Congress, we would find that many of them have an appalling ignorance of certain fundamental realities of our Constitution, our founding, and the philosophy behind why things were constructed the way they were. There’s that. But then, yes, there is an understanding of how our government works and a desire to overcome all of those restraints. Certainly there is. But here’s what I would say to you about this: Normally, when you propose something radical, it’s because you’re failing. It’s because a company’s gone bankrupt. It’s because nothing works anymore. Performance is terrible. We’re still the leading nation in the entire world; we still have the longest-running written Constitution in the history of the world. I don’t think there’s anything that suggests we need to overhaul the whole thing. I think we may need some reforms. I actually think that most of the reforms are in the people—how they think and what they do—but I don’t think the engine that we call the Constitution needs to be overhauled in the way that has been suggested.
MAST: Last issue today: cities without children. America’s large cities are not necessarily losing people, but what they are rapidly losing is children. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that the number of children under 18 in large cities fell 6% over the past decade, compared with the 1% decline nationwide. Among children under five, the urban decline exceeded 15%. Two-thirds of the 38 cities studied lost children, and some cities gained population while their child populations fell.
EICHER: Families cite housing and childcare costs, safety, schools, and general quality of life. The Journal also pointed to a growing number of adults deciding that children would require financial and lifestyle sacrifices they simply do not want to make. Hunter, what does a city lose when it loses its children?
BAKER: We think about God’s charge to human beings, and part of that is to be fruitful and to multiply. I think that having children, raising them, providing for them, taking them through the stages of life, mentoring them, parenting them—these are all core, core, core human activities. I think that as more of us become more disconnected from that, we’re going to see a different life for people. I think it’s going to have a certain unreality to it. I always go back to “The Life of Julia,” that campaign ad for the Obama administration. You have this atomized person, Julia, whose partner in life is really the government, and that’s where we’re going. If we continue to dissolve our normal bonds and responsibilities, cities will be like a place where human beings engage in economic activity and maybe not much else.
MAST: Hunter Baker is a senior fellow at the First Liberty Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy. Hunter, thank you so much.
BAKER: Thank you.
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