"Who the F--k Do You Think You Were?": Bernie Moreno Delivers the Reckoning Fauci Has Dodged for Six Years
- Staff @ LPR
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Typically, we tend to cover Louisiana-centric news. But what happened yesterday in the Senate questioning of Anthony Fauci is too important not to acknowledge. Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, is not a Louisiana politician, and this is not a Louisiana story. But when a sitting United States senator looks Anthony Fauci in the eye and asks him, on the record, "who the f--k do you think you were," it becomes everyone's story. Louisiana families arrested for gathering outside. Louisiana kids locked out of classrooms for a year. Louisiana small business owners who watched their life's work shuttered on the word of a bureaucrat who has never once had to answer for it. Wednesday, somebody finally made him answer for it — or tried to.
The moment came during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who subpoenaed Fauci as part of the ongoing investigation into COVID-19's origins, the federal funding that flowed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the gain-of-function research at the center of it all. Paul has spent years building the case. Moreno spent his allotted minutes delivering the verdict.
Moreno didn't open with policy. He opened with people. Before he got to Fauci, he asked everyone in the hearing room who had questioned the government's COVID-19 guidance, and who was made to feel "like less than a human being" for it — fired, coerced, shamed, or forced to choose between a paycheck and a shot — to stand up. Rows of people behind Fauci rose. Moreno asked Fauci to turn around and look at them. He wouldn't.
That refusal set up everything that followed. Moreno recounted the story of an Ohio mother arrested for not wearing a mask at her kid's outdoor high school football game — a memory he said he still carries. "When that story broke, I said to myself, I cannot stand idly on the side and watch this happen," Moreno told the hearing. "It was about six years ago today that I decided I'm going to give up my businesses, sell them all, run for office, run for the United States Senate."
That's not a talking point. That's a man telling you the exact moment the country's COVID response radicalized him into public service. And Wednesday was the payoff.
Then came the moment that broke through. Moreno, laying out the toll of mask mandates, school closures and social-distancing edicts pushed under Fauci's guidance, didn't reach for a euphemism: "Here I am sitting in front of you six years later saying, who the f--k do you think you were for doing that? It is a total disgrace what you did to this country." No hedging. No "with all due respect." Just a direct, profane, entirely earned indictment of a man who spent years lecturing Americans from behind a podium while never facing a ballot box himself.
Moreno then asked Fauci a simple question: would he apologize to the American people? Fauci's answer was to invoke the Fifth Amendment — as he did more than 100 times over the course of the hearing, refusing to answer even the most basic questions about his own record. Moreno also wasn't done making the character case. He pointed to Fauci's Zoom call with Kim Kardashian and more than a dozen other celebrities during the pandemic, arguing the nation's supposed top public health official spent more energy courting fame than leveling with the country he was supposed to be protecting.
The clip detonated online within minutes. White House Communications Director Stephen Cheung posted: "Senator @BernieMoreno throwing a high-heat fastball!" Fox News contributor Joe Concha didn't mince words either: "Fauci should go to jail. Full stop." Jace Yarbrough, an Air Force veteran and Republican congressional candidate in Texas, thanked Moreno directly, writing that he was among the service members discharged for declining the vaccine: "Many were removed from service, lost their livelihoods, or received career-ending reprimands simply for declining the shot. Thank you Bernie Moreno for taking this man to task and standing up for those who were targeted by his regime." Even Moreno's own chief of staff, Philip Letsou, seemed stunned by what he'd just watched, posting: "Never seen a moment quite like this in Congress." Fauci's attorney, David Schertler, offered Fox News Digital a one-line non-denial denial: "We have no comment on anything Senator Moreno had to say other than he is completely wrong."
Louisiana readers lived every part of the story Moreno told. The mandates, the closures, the arrests for standing outside — that wasn't an Ohio phenomenon, it was a national one, and it landed on this state's families, schools and small businesses same as anywhere else. Six years on, the man whose guidance drove those decisions has faced Congress, invoked the Fifth Amendment over a hundred times, and still hasn't said sorry. Bernie Moreno asked the question millions of Americans have been asking since 2020. He just happened to be the one with a microphone and the nerve to ask it in exactly those words. That's not a Louisiana story. But it's one worth telling anyway.
