THE DEVIL AND DR. FAUCI

A pro–Donald Trump LGBTQ+ activist takes on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to the president of the United States.

Driscoll, a literary critic with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, has a distinguished publication history that includes scholarly books on Shakespeare, John Milton, and Carl Jung. His three decades as an LGBTQ+ activist culminated in the 1990s, when he was a leading voice against the Food and Drug Administration, whose red tape delayed availability of lifesaving AIDS treatments. In this book, he combines a firm command of literature with his disdain for American medical bureaucracy. Its titular villain is Fauci, who’s compared to Dr. Faustus of lore. Both, he claims, are “egocentric” men driven by “the shared lust to possess the black magic of power, fame, and forbidden knowledge.” The author portrays Fauci as the personification of America’s flawed “Drug Testing, Licensing, and Marketing Complex,” embodying the “self-serving excesses” and “dangerously deficient oversight” of a bureaucracy he heads. Chief among Fauci’s mistakes, according to Driscoll, was his endorsement of lockdowns that led to “collateral damage” that outpaced Covid-19’s toll, including deaths due to undiagnosed cancer, suicide, substance abuse, and depression, as well as a collapse in birthrates. If Fauci is the book’s evil “Pied Piper,” its “heroic” protagonist is Trump, the author asserts. Although Trump pressured the “dilatory FDA” to push through a vaccine, his tragic error was tasking Vice President Mike Pence (“the Swamp’s most predictable yes man”) to head the Covid-19 response. Pence’s failures not only included bowing to Fauci, according to the author, but also his refusal to assist Trump during the events of January 6, 2021.

Much of the book’s middle section moves far beyond Fauci with conspiracy-laden claims. Pence, former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and other establishment Republicans are attacked for allegedly abandoning “an accurate count of the votes.” Most shocking is the book’s venom toward what the author calls “Woke hooligans” whom he says embrace “reverse Jim Crowe [sic] discrimination” in the form of critical race theory. The work ignores the history of Black scholars in developing critical race theory inside niche academic fields, and instead turns it into an undefined straw man whose supporters aren’t driven by intellectualism, but by “religious fanaticism” akin to Nazism. Perhaps most glaring is the book’s claim that “CRT bullies” are not informed by data and that their “argument of choice is the ad hominem.” This is a particularly cognitively dissonant claim in a book whose premise is to analyze Fauci’s bureaucratic “Satanic power drive” and whose prose is rife with ad hominemquips. Additionally, although there’s an argument to be made that bureaucracies “instill an amoral totalitarian code,” the book’s survey of bureaucracies from Pharaonic Egypt to the present ignores the 19th-century origins of modern bureaucracies, which offered citizens meritocracies that broke aristocratic control over the levers of power. And although a reasoned critique of Fauci’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis is possible, this book dispels its own credibility with its penchant for the absurd.

A mean-spirited and unconvincing polemic.