CLAY: Breaking news for you right off the top. Within the past hour, Dr. Fauci — the worst bureaucrat in American history, a man who should be being raided by the FBI for the lies that he has told surrounding gain-of-function research and the disastrous advice that he has given over the past two years — has done what Buck and I told you he would do.

He’s running and hiding in advance of Republicans at least taking back the House and hopefully taking back the Senate. We will be joined by Rand Paul — a senator who has sworn he will do everything he can to hold Dr. Fauci accountable — in about a half hour. But let’s go ahead and dive in. Buck, you hate Fauci as much as the anyone on the planet can hate Fauci.

BUCK: True.

Former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield joins Neil to discuss the agency’s response to pandemic. pic.twitter.com/3xs1xmTu5l

— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) August 20, 2022

CLAY: I am in the upper echelon of Fauci haters. But this feels exactly, Buck, like what we expected. He gets out of town before the Republicans can come in and hold him accountable. They announce it far enough out that it’s not directly, directly connected to the midterms so he can claim, “You know what? It’s just time for me to go.” What was your reaction when you saw this pop about, eh, 45 minutes ago?

BUCK: (impression) “Well, really, Clay, it’s a victory lap after 300 years of selfless service stretching all the way back to the pre-Colombian era of the Americas. Fauci is the longest-serving government employee in the history of the planet, of the world we live in — which is, by the way, a massive congregate setting altogether.” This is really just because his work here is done, “After saving so many millions and millions and —

CLAY: Maybe billions!

BUCK: “– billions and billions of dollars for Big Pharma. He’s done an amazing job with the Pfizer stock price, although it’s gone down a little lately. And after making sure he’s done everything possible to ruin as many lives and businesses and childhoods, he really thought it was time to accept a cool 5 or 10 million for his memoirs.” That’s my thought on Fauci right now.

CLAY: I guarantee you, unfortunately, he’s going to get 5 or $10 million for that book, which would be filled with lies about his tenure. He’s the highest paid government employee. He’s finally stepping down. I believe he’s 81 years old-ish. But if there were any justice in the world, Fauci would get charged with crimes. And we can talk about during the course of today’s show where I think he could get charged with crimes. But, Buck, this is going to still force covid back into the main storyline, and what you’re going to see is the last vestige of shutdown, lockdown defense.

And from here… I legitimately believe this. You and I are both history nerds. History over time is a weighing device, and you end up with truth dominating over passion. I believe that Dr. Fauci will go down in history — in the years, in the decades ahead — as the worst bureaucrat in American history. And while he tries to argue that Fauci is synonymous with “science,” in the years ahead, Fauci’s name will become a true signifier of scientific failure, of an unwillingness to examine truth and what happens when people who should know better all give away their logic and their rational thought in favor of a supposed expert and fear —

BUCK: Oh, you are far more optimistic about the rationality and honesty of Americans.

CLAY: Over time.

BUCK: Well, see, this is what I’m going to say. They’re going to slow roll this. They’ve gotta… Let’s understand what the apparatus has to do here. Fauci and truth about Fauci would be a political liability for them right now.

CLAY: Right now, I agree.

BUCK: And that will continue, right? That will continue for the next couple of years. It’ll continue probably the next two or three years into whatever the administration after that may be. I bet you’re not gonna see honesty about this, about Fauciism and what was done to the country for at least six or seven years from now.

CLAY: I think that’s about right.

BUCK: I mean, basically getting close to a decade. Okay. So you and I have a similar timeline in mind. As long as there’s a political component of this, they have to prop up Fauci because it’s not about what was true, it’s not about what really happened in the pandemic. It’s that… I mean, think, Clay, if you go back, I mean, it’s almost… I have a hard time because it’s so rage inducing. When you go back and watch just all the smug, idiot, overpaid TV news anchors who spent… What’s now the full…? We’re looking at now two years and how many months? They spent —

CLAY: Two and a half years solidly now, basically.

BUCK: Two and a half years. And they spent all this time not just suggesting that Fauci was a genius. They were slobbering over him. It was going to be. It was, “Oh, Dr. Fauci.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: “Please tell us how we can all be so sciency and help us all save ourselves,” you know, idiots and all across CNN, mouthpiece for the regime, Brennan over at CBS News, all of them, the same garbage from all of them for years, “Oh, please, Fauci, tell us the truth about the science.” This guy is a Moran, folks.

CLAY: Yeah. He got everything wrong.

BUCK: He was wrong about everything. I know people say, “Oh, no, he did it intentionally.” No, I think at the beginning he was gesture an anxious idiot who did what people wanted him to do and didn’t actually have the foresight to look at the data early on and see what’s really happening and realize his job was just to be a little bureaucrat. It was a massive failure not to fire him during the Trump administration. If we’re doing a full accounting, let’s do it, Clay. Let’s really do the after-action report here.

Fauci should have been fired in the summer. Not right away. I understand. Summer of 2020, he should have been fired, they should have brought in people who were looking at the data then, but then the Biden, to evaluative this guy, to prop him up, Clay, how much worse could it have been? Fauci wanted to go full China in this country. If he thought he could get away, he would have. He would have made people stay in their homes. He would have locked us down multiple times. He would have made you get shots four and five as a federal mandate.

CLAY: Yeah. I think the time frame on this is key, Buck, because in a decade, I really do believe Trump, Biden, and Fauci are all unlikely to still be alive. So, politics of covid when Biden, Trump, and Fauci are all gone, and in a decade that should… I mean, look. I don’t want to be morose here, but if you look at actuarial tables, the odds of all three of those guys being alive in a decade are very, very low. And so as we look ahead and the passions and the politics of the moment fade and as there are younger people coming into the history-writing era and they haven’t necessarily been committed to one side or the other, you will get a full accounting.

And I have never been more confident that people, Buck, like you and me and Alex Berenson who argued against lockdowns and masks and so many of the Fauci health care apparatus will be, over time, rendered to be correct by the verdict of history. And what is interesting about this to me that has always been so fascinating is, Democrats and left wingers in particular are so fast to say, “You’re gonna be on the wrong side of history with what you have argued!”

And ultimately all of those people who spent time lecturing us are going to be found lacking by the verdict of history. And I believe that Fauci, in the decades ahead, will become synonymous… It would not shock me if his name becomes offhand verb for the failure of experts and of the mass delusion of huge parts of the population. I think he has undermined science for decades to come, and science will only heal itself by acknowledging all that he got wrong and all the failures.

The original sin, Buck, as you well know… If we could go back in time and change one thing — and there’s a lot that I would change — but the original sin, I think, was in March shutting down every school in this country because that set in place the apparatus that allowed us to be sitting here two and a half years later. I think, unfortunately, the cost associated with so many kids, many of them disadvantaged, poor, minority, without Wi-Fi reliably at home, without laptops. Fauci is a stain on their abilities for the rest of their lives, trillions of dollars in costs in lost education. He will be, I believe, one of the great villains in American history in the decades ahead.

BUCK: It’s gonna take 10 years, though.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: In the meantime, we often have in discussion about whether it’s the FBI or the CDC, “Just a few bad apples! Not the rank-and-file.” How many resignations were there from the CDC over policies that somehow you and I and anyone listening to this show… First of all, they were voting for us in terms of agreeing with us about these things. It’s why they listen, right? Everyone knows if you’re coming here, we’re talking about covid, you understand we’re telling you the truth and you’re on board with the truth and you’re trying to do what you can to get the word out there.

But Fauci never cared. It was always political, right? It was always about what was going to help him in the moment, and the shutdown of schools was bad. But, Clay, they lied to us in the beginning. And we were supposed to act like that didn’t matter. Fauci lied about masks. I still say this to this day, that he said that masks don’t work because he thought we’d run out. Would you say, “This antibiotic doesn’t cure this infection because I’m afraid the public is going to want too much of that antibiotic”? That’s crazy. You can’t get away with that. That is what he did. And people idolized him. The idiot governor, witless Whitmer of Michigan, had the Fauci pillow in the background.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: People were selling Fauci faces on underwear in the summer of 2020, and also there were the Cuomo people that were doing that, too, for Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York. We saw a mass hysteria happen here, and there were people at the CDC and the NIH and NIAID, which is the Fauci kingdom within the NIH, who knew better, and they didn’t do a damn thing about it, and they should hang their heads in shame. It wouldn’t have taken that many doctors.

The people who signed the Great Barrington Declaration — thank you to them, by the way, ’cause they were right, and they took a stand and a lot of them took professional consequences. The bureaucrats at the CDC and the NIH should be ashamed. They should be ashamed of what a catastrophic failure their institutions were. The one time we really needed them, by the way, in recent memory, at one time we turned them.

We said, “Look, the whole country, the whole world needs you.” Total failure. They lied to us. There’s no accountability, and they don’t even have the honor at this point to bureaucratically fall on their swords and say, “You know what? This place is a disgusting disgrace, and I don’t want to be associated with the CDC anymore.” They’re gonna write books about how awesome they are instead.

CLAY: They are. And that’s why it’ll take 10 years, because, as you well know, history swings, right? Like, until we get outside of the passions of the moment, there will be a bunch of hagiographies out there. I’m sure, as you mentioned, Fauci’s gonna get 5 or $10 million to write a book about how brave he was and what an incredible job be the CDC and the NIH and everybody else did in unprecedented times, and that will get mass appeal.

And then a decade from now, all of this sort of reappraisal with Fauci dead, with Trump likely to be dead, with Biden likely to be dead and the politics of the moment becoming much less of a fever pitch, there will be a examination. It will be logical, it will be rational, it will be thorough, and it will destroy Dr. Fauci, who will go down in American history as one of the great villains of this republic. I would bet a massive amount of money that is what the verdict of history is gonna be.

We’ll ask Rand Paul — also a doctor — about this, senator from Kentucky. He’s scheduled to join us in about 10 minutes. The timing on this… Don’t mistake what’s going on. At a minimum, the House is going back to Republicans. The Senate up in arms. We’ll talk some about that, about what’s going to happen in that midterm race going forward. But it is not a coincidence that just in time for there to be accountability, Fauci is riding right out of town.