Fauci, one of the most destructive bureaucrats in human history, sat down with The New York Times this week to put a spin on his failures ahead of the coming wave of justice and judgement that will define his dark legacy for generations to come.

Here's how The New York Times titled it:

The dark motif is less than subtle.

Fauci is no longer the saintly knight who saved us all from the dragons. Now, he's the wayward hero who sacrificed much and must grapple with his flaws in order to make peace with his place in history.

The storytellers over at The Times are clearly trying to give him the chance to choose how he'll walk off into the sunset.

Writer David Wallace-Wells starts off the article like this:

It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.

It was impossible, you see! Even the greatest of men couldn't have done the job. But thanks to you little people and that rogue billionaire who bought Twitter, we have to admit that our favored tyrants made mistakes.

Still, in December, when Elon Musk joked on Twitter that his "pronouns" were "Prosecute/Fauci," it felt like the cresting of a turning tide against the man who had played essentially that role for the first three years of the pandemic.

Let me remind you:

• Fauci approved U.S. funding for gain-of-function research (how to make viruses more infectious to humans) on bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
• Fauci sent emails trying to get ahead of the story when said bat coronaviruses started infecting people in Wuhan.
• Fauci, an unelected bureaucrat, used his position to push unconstitutional orders that caused businesses to close forever, patients to be separated from loved ones at their deaths, hatred to be stoked between neighbors, and jobs to be lost over vaccines.
• Fauci was used by the media and politicians to give authority behind the decision to force masks and vaccines and censor opposing views.
• Fauci arguably lied to Congress about his involvement in the whole mess.

This is who The Times is talking about here.

This January, the month after Anthony Fauci retired as the four-decade head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, barely half of Americans said they trusted the country's public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic. The Wall Street Journal named that as his legacy — sowing distrust about public health and vaccines.

Wallace-Wells says this like it's unfair to pin on Fauci, but understand this: Millions like myself will never again trust the CDC or the medical establishment because of how this was handled. We will always be suspicious of anything they have to say because they wanted to destroy anyone who didn't listen to them. Fauci was the face of that and he knew he was the face of that.

Over several hours and multiple Zoom and phone calls in April, I spoke with Fauci about that: how he saw the full story of this historic public-health emergency and the role he played in it.

I wonder how many paintings and statues of himself Fauci had in the background.

"I'm a physician," he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. "That's my identity. I've taken care of thousands of patients in one period of my life during the early years of H.I.V. I believe that I have seen as much or more suffering and death as anybody has in most careers. I don't mean to seem preachy, but I don't want to see people suffer and I don't want to see people die."

There are a lot of well-meaning "experts" who thought they were doing the right thing and never realized how much they would hurt people by using their power to steamroll liberty and God-given rights.

This is the story of most people who try to wield power. Pay heed, my friends.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies." - C.S. Lewis

Fauci goes on in the interview to talk about how 1.1 million Americans have died with Covid, using that stat to lament how only 68% of Americans got the vaccines that kinda worked for five minutes.

Then Wallace-Wells asked Fauci if the mandates were a bad idea.

Man, I think, almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this? And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that's palpable politically in this country.

This doesn't answer WHY YOU WERE FORCING US TO DO THAT.

It simply acknowledges that America has that "sometimes-beautiful independent streak" – you know, the kind that's saved humanity from tyrants and mass suffering a hundred times over in the last two centuries.

He also tried to backtrack on the "recommendations" of the CDC he passed along every day on CNN that drastically influenced the decision to shutter schools and businesses.

I'm not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organization. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint.

The problem, dear doctor, is that a bureaucratic agency would have the power to use recommendations to justify things such as housing moratoriums, preventing landowners from collecting rent for years.

If you cared, you would have been telling CNN that these lockdowns and mandates were unconstitutional and required congressional backing in order to be law. THAT is how our nation of laws works.

But here's the most interesting part of the interview: Fauci admits, finally, that masks are not the cure-all he touted for so many years.

From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent. But for an individual who religiously wears a mask, a well-fitted KN95 or N95, it's not at the margin. It really does work.

This is a far cry from the triple-masking days of Fauci just two years back!

He now admits that only "well-fitting" N95s work (Hint: This means it's so tight that it gives you bruises, as anyone who understands PPE will tell you). The vast majority of people are not wearing N95s correctly, and even when they do...

To be clear: I refused to wear a mask early on.

I did so because I knew 1) How PPE works and 2) That natural immunity was the best way to protect those around me. I wanted to get Covid so I could get antibodies that would keep me from passing it on. The best thing we could have done was to tell young people to get Covid so we would have mass natural immunity and force the virus to adapt quicker in the human immune system to less-lethal versions.

Instead, we isolated the healthy and drove them into bankruptcy and paranoid depression to boot. Then we made their kids deal with the consequences of not seeing faces for two whole years.

I am proud to have stood against that madness, even if I was the only person at the store and in my church who appeared to be the evil one for holding my ground.

If Fauci was truly honest with himself, he would realize that he stands where many a scientist has found himself as time and scientific discovery advance past their own careers. The most preeminent minds once thought the concept of hand washing was asinine, and not that long ago.

Instead, later in this same interview, Fauci continues to rant against the lab-leak theory and blame things on the "culture wars."

I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, David, when it comes to masking, I don't know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint.

How will those who live 100 years from now look back at the barbaric scientific understanding of our own day and measure it against the pride of men like Fauci?

History will not be forgiving, my friends.