Fauci Kept a Diary. It Undercuts Two Years of "The Science Is Settled."
Plus: the DSA co-chair said "true" to all of it on Fox. And Berlin let an ISIS convict walk
It’s Monday
Sorry, I am late. It was an exhausting weekend, and the day has started slowly. But The Read is here, and the weekend news was busy.
So, let’s get into it!
In today’s Read:
Rand Paul released 1,141 pages of Fauci’s private diary. The clout-chasing is a sideshow. The January 31, 2020 entry is the story, and he’s under oath Wednesday.
The DSA’s co-chair confirmed the whole platform on Fox: abolish the Senate, ICE, borders, prisons. The party that runs them on its own ballot line pretended not to know her.
Berlin gave a convicted ISIS propagandist a suspended sentence. Ten weeks later he killed a woman at Pride. Tolerance, they called it.
Quick Rundown: the EU trade deal, a shootout at the Bite of Seattle, Mamdani’s grocery price tag, Maine’s third-try Senate nominee, and a correspondents’ dinner with no comedian.
Fauci Kept a Private Diary Through the Pandemic.
The Story.
Senate Homeland Security Chairman Rand Paul released roughly 1,141 pages of Anthony Fauci’s private diary this week, covering late 2019 through his December 2022 retirement, along with about 136 pages of internal correspondence about awards and prize money.
Two threads run through it. One is vanity: Fauci tracking his own press, calling the coverage “hot and heavy,” describing his fame as “explosive,” logging an invitation to Dancing with the Stars, and fretting that he was starting to “outshine” the president. The other is the one that matters. According to the released entries, as early as January 31, 2020, top virologists told Fauci on a call that the virus’s furin cleavage site raised real doubts about a natural origin, with roughly half the scientists on the line saying it looked “constructed.” He then spent the next two years publicly ruling out the lab-leak theory and treating anyone who raised it as an enemy of science. Paul subpoenaed Fauci after he backed out of a voluntary appearance; he testifies publicly before the committee Wednesday, July 29.
The Left’s read. A personality quirk, not a scandal. Mediaite ran the “press is going wild with me” entries as a fun character detail. The mainstream desks that spent 2020 through 2022 building the Fauci halo have mostly gone quiet on the lab-leak contradiction, and where the framing appears at all, it’s that these are private musings, not proof of anything, and Paul is a longtime antagonist running an oversight grudge before a hearing.
The Right’s read. Vindication, and a receipt. Townhall, the Daily Caller, and Power Line ran it two ways: the man was a brand manager who watched his own coverage like a stock ticker, and, more seriously, his own contemporaneous notes show he entertained the lab-leak possibility in private while ruling it out in public.
What both sides are skipping. The right is having too much fun with the Dancing with the Stars entry, and the left is using the vanity to avoid the science. The checkable question is not whether Fauci was vain. It’s whether a public official told the country the origin question was settled while his own diary recorded that it wasn’t.
Skip the Dancing with the Stars entry. I know, it’s fun. Can you imagine this old man’s little legs fox-trotting on the dance floor? Also, the audacity of the most powerful doctor in America penciling in a fame diary while the death count climbed is gross. It’s also the least important thing in 1,141 pages, and the people waving it around are doing Fauci a favor by keeping your eyes on it.
Quick context on the science, before we dive in. A furin cleavage site is a little feature on the spike protein that helps the virus break into your cells. The thing about this one is that its closest relatives in nature don’t have it, which is exactly why, on a call on January 31, 2020, some of the best virologists in the world looked at it and said out loud that it looked engineered. Half the room, per Fauci’s own notes. He wrote it down. And then he spent two years telling you that “lab leak” was a racist conspiracy theory and that attacking him was attacking Science itself.
To be clear, Fauci expressed doubts privately in January and spent the next two years calling that same doubt a conspiracy in front of Congress.
The diary doesn't only catch Fauci shading the science. It catches the press carrying his water. In the diary, Fauci wrote that CBS's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Jon LaPook, emailed him to get prepped for LaPook's own on-air segment, then went on TV and name-checked Fauci several times. He wrote that when the Washington Post's Lena Sun called to check a tip that China pressured the head of the WHO, he told her it was nonsense and "probably stopped her from writing the story." He logged George Stephanopoulos texting "Thank you, Tony. So impressive" after an interview, and NBC's Andrea Mitchell calling him "very apologetic" for not booking him.
Then there’s Jake Tapper. Fauci had the CNN anchor and his wife over for dinner and wrote it down: “Terrific couple. Friendship building.” Before one interview, per the diary, “Jake wanted to make sure the interview did not cause me any problems.” A network anchor, checking that his own questions wouldn’t inconvenience his source. And when CNN sat a Trump testing official, Brett Giroir, down for a grilling, Fauci wrote the line that should retire the word “journalist” anywhere near Tapper’s name: “I gave Jake some questions to ask him.” The source wrote the interview. The next morning, per the diary, Tapper woke Fauci up “furious at POTUS” for tweeting about how hard Tapper had gone at Giroir.
So when the same outlets now tell you a private diary is sacred ground and Rand Paul has an agenda, remember they had Tony over for dinner and let him write the questions. Sure, everyone has an agenda. Theirs came with a place setting in the middle of a pandemic.
He’s under subpoena. He’s on the stand Wednesday at 8:30 in the morning. For once the man can’t refer the question to a communications team, and the question is one sentence: on January 31, 2020, what did they tell you, and when did “constructed” become a conspiracy theory?
Watch whether a single senator makes him read his own January 31 entry into the record. Watch whether the Post and the Times cover the lab-leak page or the dinner-party pages, or neither. And watch whether Jake Tapper says one word, on air, about his own name turning up in the diary of the man he was taking questions from.
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The DSA’s Co-Chair Went on Fox and Confirmed the Whole Platform.
The Story.
DSA national co-chair Megan Romer went on Fox News Sunday with Shannon Bream on July 26 and confirmed the group’s platform on camera, answering a run of “yes” and “true” as Bream read the planks back to her: abolish the Senate, abolish ICE, abolish borders, abolish prisons, defund the Pentagon, and move most large corporations into public ownership.
She called the Senate “an anachronistic institution” built to blunt the influence of ordinary people, and described open borders as “part of a longer-term international plan” tied to the United States ceasing to destabilize other countries. It’s the on-record position of the group whose written platform, “Workers Deserve More!”, says the same thing in print, and whose candidates run on the Democratic ballot line.
The Left’s read. An off-message rounding error. Mediaite called the hit “wild.” AOC, the highest-ranking DSA member in Congress, poured cold water on the Senate plank: “we’re working with the institutions that we have, this is a constitutional question,” and “I don’t have the power or ability to do that.” Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison went further: “if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination.” The frame is that Romer speaks for a faction, not the party, and that Republicans are inflating one TV appearance.
The Right’s read. They said it out loud, finally. Breitbart, Townhall, and Newsbusters ran it as the DSA confirming on national television what conservatives have said it believes all along, with Speaker Mike Johnson labeling it “Common Sense vs. COMMUNISM.” The angle: this is not a pamphlet anymore, it’s the co-chair on the record, refusing to dodge.
What both sides are skipping. The interesting fight isn’t left versus right. It’s inside the Democratic tent, and both sides keep flattening it. The right wants the DSA to be the Democratic Party. The establishment wants it to be a stranger it’s never met. Neither will say the actual arrangement out loud: the DSA runs its candidates on the Democratic line, by Romer’s own admission, because it can’t win as a third party, so the party keeps absorbing a wing whose stated goal is to dismantle the institutions the party’s own members are sworn to uphold.
Give Romer credit for the one thing she didn’t dodge. Bream read the list, abolish the Senate, ICE, borders, prisons, defund the Pentagon, seize the corporations, and Romer just said “true.” No “that’s taken out of context.” No pivot to health care. She said the quiet part at full volume, on Fox, on a Sunday.
Then watch the hour after. AOC, a card-carrying DSA member, abruptly discovered the Constitution. Jaime Harrison told people who “hate the Democratic Party” to stop running as Democrats, which is a fascinating thing to say about people who keep winning Democratic primaries. If they’re such strangers, why do they keep getting the party’s nomination? Because that’s the whole play. “Democratic socialism” is branding, the word “democratic” bolted onto the front of socialism to make it sound like a book club. The DSA isn’t a wing of the Democratic Party. It’s using the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle, a costume rack, a way to win under a label voters already trust, and then run its own program from the inside.
And look at what AOC's newfound caution is actually made of. Asked whether this DSA push is a slide from socialism toward communism, she laughed and waved it off. Asked about abolishing the Senate, she suddenly reveres "the institutions that we have." This is the same woman who called the Electoral College a "scam" and a tool of "racial injustice" in 2019, who wants the filibuster gone and the Supreme Court packed, who keeps calling the Senate a relic "founded on Jim Crow" earlier last week.
Her respect for the Constitution shows up right when a camera is rolling, and 2028 is on the calendar. That isn't a principle. It's the same costume the rest of them wear, pressed for a general election.
And the Electoral College is the one to keep your eye on, because it's the quiet threat that makes every other item on Romer's list possible. Kill the Electoral College, move to a straight national popular vote, and you have not made the country more democratic. You have handed a few dense metros permanent power over everyone else, which is the exact mob rule the Founders built the system to stop. The Electoral College is a load-bearing wall. Pull it, and the filibuster, the Senate, the Court's independence, everything else that slows a bare majority down comes out easier, because the line that knocked the first one down works on all of them: it's old, it's unfair, one person one vote. A country that quit teaching its own founding is buying that line in bigger numbers every year, and most of the people cheering couldn't tell you what the Electoral College is for. It's for this exact moment.
So put it together. If that wall ever comes down while this wing is holding real power, the rest of Romer’s list stops being a Sunday-show gotcha and becomes a to-do list. That’s not a scare story; it’s the sequence. AOC can soften her voice for the general all she likes. Remember where she comes from, what she is on the record wanting, and that the DSA is not a guest in the Democratic Party. It’s moving in.
And here’s the part the “they’ll fizzle” crowd gets exactly backward. They will fracture. Every socialist project sits on the same fault line between the reformers who want to work the system and the revolutionaries who want to burn it, and that crack is what killed Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party a century ago. The DSA will hit it too. The only question is when. Debs at least built his own party, so when it split, it took down Debs and nobody else. The DSA is running the other playbook, taking over one of the two parties we’ve actually got. So when they crack, they don’t go down alone. They take the host with them. Which is why you should want that break to come now, while they’re small and out of power, and not later, after they’re the ones holding it.
The media’s job in all this is to keep you from noticing. Rebrand them “progressive Democrats,” never dig into who they praise or what they’ve read, and file Romer under “wild interview” instead of “confirmed agenda.” Romer just did the reporters’ work for them and confirmed it herself. The least the rest of us can do is believe her.
You don’t get to host the wing and disown the wing in the same news cycle. Romer made them pick, and most of them picked “please stop talking.”
Related
The DSA Just Passed Eugene Debs. Ask What Happened Next.
On July 4, 2026, the Democratic Socialists of America handed out a number and a name.
Berlin Let a Convicted ISIS Propagandist Walk. Ten Weeks Later He Drove a Van Into a Pride Crowd.
The Story.
On the evening of July 25, a van plowed into a crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, the city’s Pride celebration, in the Tiergarten. One woman was killed and 29 people were injured, several critically. The driver kept going on foot with a machete and wounded more before fleeing. Police tracked the suspect, Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese origin, to an allotment garden in Spandau and shot him dead on July 26 after he charged officers with a knife.
Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt called it a suspected Islamist terrorist attack and said Ballout was known to authorities and part of Berlin’s “Islamist scene.” Here are the important details: in May 2026, a Berlin juvenile court convicted Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence, publishing Islamic State propaganda on Instagram, and related offenses, and handed him a suspended sentence of one year and ten months. The court credited time he’d spent in a Lebanese jail and in pre-trial detention, plus his claim that he had admitted the crimes and “distanced himself” from ISIS. Prosecutors appealed. He was free, appeal pending, when he did this.
The Left’s read. Grief and a manhunt, with the ideology kept at arm’s length. CNN and Bloomberg led on the search and the police shooting of the suspect, with the ISIS conviction and the “Islamist scene” description lower in the story and hedged behind “what we know so far.” The reflex is to center the Pride community’s mourning and the security-response questions and treat the suspended terror sentence as a detail.
The Right’s read. The system let a known jihadist walk. Outlets ran the blunt version, “Islamist Terror Convict Freed Before Attack Near Berlin Pride Event,” foregrounding the two facts the establishment flinches at: this was Islamist terror, and a German court chose not to jail a man it had already convicted of spreading ISIS propaganda.
What both sides are skipping. The suspended sentence is the whole story, and it’s the part the sympathetic coverage keeps smallest. A court had this man dead to rights months ago and sent him home on the strength of his word that he’d changed. He hadn’t. The fact is that the political movement most devoted to defending open-door leniency is what produced the man who drove into it.
Start with the woman, because a life ended here and that comes before any argument. She was somebody’s daughter, and she was murdered on a public street by a man who drove a van into a crowd and then pulled a blade on the people who survived it. That is a horror. It would be a horror at a farmers market, a soccer match, or a church picnic. A person who should be alive is dead, and her family is living the worst week of their lives. It didn’t need to happen.
Ten weeks before this, a court in Berlin looked at a young man convicted of posting ISIS propaganda and preparing an act of violence, and decided a suspended sentence would do it. Why? Because he said he’d distanced himself from ISIS. He told them he was done; they believed him, and they wrote it down and opened the door. This is the tolerance they keep lecturing the rest of us about. Somewhere along the way the West decided that the real danger to social peace wasn’t the man posting jihadist content, it was the person impolite enough to point at him and say the words “Islamist radicalization” out loud. So they hand out suspended sentences and call it compassion, and someone else always pays the price.
This is the most frustrating part. Germany didn’t get stuck with this man. He’d already left. He flew off chasing ISIS, landed in a jail cell in Lebanon, and Berlin had him extradited back home and then set him loose on probation. He was another country’s problem, on another continent, behind bars, and the German state went and brought him back. Bringing him home was a choice. Freeing him was a second one. Both belonged to Berlin.
My thoughts? If you leave the country whose passport you carry to train or plot with a group at war with that country, the passport should leave with you. Born there, naturalized there, it makes no difference. The minute you cross a border to join people who want your countrymen dead, you are a national security threat, and a serious country treats you like one instead of booking your flight back. If the law wants a hearing first, fine, hold it. Hold it on a base outside the border, where he stays a problem over there instead of a probation case over here. What you do not do is fly him home, seat him in a juvenile court, and hand him the street.
Here’s the actual sickness, and it isn’t confined to one Berlin courtroom. It’s a brain worm the whole Western left is running, and there’s a name for it now: suicidal empathy. Compassion metastasized past the point of self-preservation, the reflex that keeps extending the benefit of the doubt to the exact people who have told you, out loud, on Instagram, that they want you gone. A man posts ISIS propaganda and prepares an act of violence, and the system’s instinct isn’t to lock the door. It’s to workshop his feelings and believe him when he says “I’m all good now.” Naming the threat feels cruel to them, so they don’t. Jailing the threat feels intolerant, so they won’t. And the people who pay the consequences. This weekend it was a woman on a Berlin sidewalk.
A government that refuses to jail a convicted ISIS propagandist isn’t being generous. It’s choosing the next victim. And it was Berlin’s choice. Same weekend, a man knifed three women in northern Paris, motive “not immediately clear,” the phrase Europe now reaches for on reflex. Forget that following the stabbing he said: “It’s Allah who made me do it.”
Watch whether the German press runs the suspended sentence in the headline or keeps it in paragraph nine. Watch whether the appeal that was already pending turns into a review of how a convicted extremist walked. And watch how many outlets over here call this “terror” versus “motive unclear.”
Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores got a price tag and still no open date. The mayor’s office rolled out the pricing model: 30% off a core basket of staples like meat, produce, bread, and cheese, market rate on everything else, and the discount is capped on essentials specifically so the stores don’t undercut nearby businesses. The city pitches about $1,000 a year in savings. What it doesn’t have is a store. The first location, in the South Bronx, isn’t slated to open until the end of 2027, with East Harlem’s around 2029.
The Bite of Seattle turned into a shootout. Three people were killed and four wounded, including a toddler, when gunfire erupted at the food festival near the Space Needle on July 26. Police believe two people were shooting at each other and bystanders were caught in the crossfire; two guns were recovered, one suspect was taken into custody, and a second fled and was still being sought late Sunday. The dead were a 19-year-old man, a 44-year-old man, and a 56-year-old woman.
Maine Democrats found a Senate nominee on the third try. Former state Senate president Troy Jackson won the Democratic nomination to challenge Susan Collins, stepping in after Graham Platner exited the race. Jackson had finished third in June’s gubernatorial primary, so the party’s marquee Senate shot goes to a labor-left candidate who lost his last race two months ago.
Trump got his EU trade deal, and it’s 15% across the board. After meeting Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland over the weekend, Trump announced a framework days ahead of his August 1 deadline: a 15% tariff on most European goods including cars, steel and aluminum held at 50%, plus $600 billion in EU investment in the U.S. and $750 billion in American energy purchases. It’s higher than the 10% Europe wanted and lower than the 30% he’d threatened.
The correspondents skipped the comedian and let the president host. The White House Correspondents’ Association held its rescheduled dinner Friday night, the makeup for the April event that ended when a gunman opened fire in the Washington Hilton lobby. Trump gave a rambling hourlong speech, took shots at journalists and political rivals, and closed by pulling on a “Trump 2028” cap. The association booked no comedian this year, hiring mentalist Oz Pearlman instead.
That’s The Read.
See you Wednesday.
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