Anger, hatred and conspiracy theories: the rise of One Nation

A week ago, I watched Tony Fauci being eviscerated at a US Senate committee hearing, watched him being accused of the most terrible things, as if, for instance, the way he had run the public health response to the Covid epidemic in America amounted to mass murder.

The fury, the contempt of him, was hard to watch. Fauci refused to answer some of the questions and has now been charged with contempt of Congress. This old 85-year-old scientist may end up in jail.

It was hard to watch the way he was rendered speechless by all this hatred and all these accusations, watch as he shrunk further and further down into his chair, as if he wanted to disappear. Tony Fauci, who, at the height of the Covid pandemic, was America’s doctor/scientist who held the lives of millions of Americans in his hands.

This Senate Committee hearing was like something out of a Kafka story, because for all the fury and hatred – take a look sometime at the eyes of Senator Rand Paul when he was questioning Fauci – it was impossible to know what crimes Fauci was alleged to have committed that rendered him a mass murderer.

Tony Fauci was a revered scientist before the Covid epidemic. He was in charge of the response to the AIDS virus, a virus that was killing thousands of young men across the developed world and thousands of men and women in Africa and Asia. Now Fauci has become a hated figure in the MAGA movement in America. Robert Kennedy Jr, Trump’s Health Secretary, a man full of conspiracies, is the embodiment of this hatred of Fauci.  

One afternoon, a few days after the Senate Committee hearing, I read an article in The Atlantic magazine by a 93-year-old writer who wrote that America was heading back to the America of her childhood, when infectious diseases – measles, whooping cough, polio – killed many tens of thousands of children and ruined the lives of millions of others.