There are government museums and there are government museums whose Fauci exhibit generates a Fox News segment titled “‘Woke’ Smithsonian exhibit lionizes embattled Fauci amid conservative scrutiny of museum’s messaging,” which is the headline that arrives when a federally funded institution honors a figure who spent the same week testifying before Congress about a diary that contradicted his public statements, while invoking the Fifth Amendment on other questions.
The Smithsonian Institution, which receives approximately $1.4 billion in federal funding annually and oversees 21 museums and galleries in Washington, D.C., and New York, has an exhibit that Fox News describes as lionizing Fauci, confirmed on the Fox News July 30 sitemap. The exhibit’s specific location within the Smithsonian and its specific content have not been detailed in the sitemap entry, which carries the headline and the substance of the criticism. The Smithsonian’s chief said he had “no regrets,” per a separate Fox News July 23 headline that described Ben Franklin’s treatment in a separate Smithsonian exhibit as “shocking.”
The timing is the issue. Fauci testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, at the invitation of Chairman Rand Paul, after Paul released 1,000 pages of Fauci’s personal diaries. The diaries revealed that on January 26, 2020, Fauci wrote privately that the Wuhan wet market was “not the source” of COVID but “the amplifier,” which is the assessment he wrote four days before helping coordinate the scientists who produced the Proximal Origin paper publicly ruling out a lab leak. He invoked the Fifth Amendment on multiple questions relating to grants to EcoHealth Alliance, which funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Fifth Amendment is constitutionally available to any American and its invocation does not indicate guilt. It does complicate the Smithsonian’s timing.
The Smithsonian chief has no regrets. The exhibit is up. Fauci invoked the Fifth. All three are true on the same Friday.
When the national museum is lionizing a figure who invoked the Fifth Amendment at a Senate hearing this week, what exactly is the institution commemorating?
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