Who is Anthony Fauci? Who is Erika Kirk, or Lindsay Clancy? Each has become a star in a peculiar kind of reality show, their characters vivisected across social media and podcasts. The fixation on these and other figures has produced a kind of fan fiction (that mostly-online genre of storytelling, in which enthusiasts of a given book or entertainment franchise craft their own spinoff tales using existing characters). The real lives of Fauci and Kirk and Clancy have become fodder for a feeding frenzy driven by journalists, podcasters, and influencers. Whoever they may be in reality, they have become “content.”
Yet many of the questions about their lives are not frivolous. We are witnessing an agitated battle for the American mind, for some national consensus on the truth. The digital age clobbers us with information—factual or otherwise—and we scramble to make sense of it. We are storytelling creatures, struggling to land on the right story.
Who is Anthony Fauci? Who is Erika Kirk, or Lindsay Clancy? Each has become a star in a peculiar kind of reality show, their characters vivisected across social media and podcasts. The fixation on these and other figures has produced a kind of fan fiction (that mostly-online genre of storytelling, in which enthusiasts of a given book or entertainment franchise craft their own spinoff tales using existing characters). The real lives of Fauci and Kirk and Clancy have become fodder for a feeding frenzy driven by journalists, podcasters, and influencers. Whoever they may be in reality, they have become “content.”
Yet many of the questions about their lives are not frivolous. We are witnessing an agitated battle for the American mind, for some national consensus on the truth. The digital age clobbers us with information—factual or otherwise—and we scramble to make sense of it. We are storytelling creatures, struggling to land on the right story.
Fauci, of course, is the physician and medical researcher who served as a leading policymaker during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to leaving office, then-President Joe Biden granted Fauci a broad federal pardon, spanning any wrongdoing committed since 2014. That hasn’t spared Fauci from federal scrutiny: he was recently ordered to testify before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on matters including “the origins of COVID-19, risky life-sciences research, and [his] tenure as a federal government employee.” During the hours-long hearing, Fauci was alternately scolded and championed. He mostly sat in silence, citing his Fifth Amendment rights over 100 times. When asked what color the carpet was, he refused to answer.
The scene calls to mind the divine judgment awaiting each man, complete with an accuser and defender. Fauci was not being charged with a crime, but he was being accused. His life’s work was under review, including jottings from a private journal; shortly before the hearing, Senator Rand Paul published over 1,100 pages of “Tony’s Diary,” a document retrieved from government servers, which included frequent entries spanning late 2019 through 2022. The world thus received unique insight into the mind of a man who once wielded enormous authority. A preface to the published diary insists that “Fauci’s daily historical account completely undermines the official narrative that Fauci and other public-health officials espoused.” In his opening statement at the hearing, Paul insisted that the “American people deserved an apology,” and urged Fauci to “come clean” and to “ask forgiveness.”
It is unclear whether Fauci will face any meaningful legal consequences regarding his handling of the pandemic; he was held in contempt of Congress for stonewalling during the Senate hearing, and attorneys general in Florida, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana are investigating the possibility of prosecuting him at the state level. A former advisor to Fauci, Dr. David Morens, recently pleaded guilty to conspiring to evade public-records laws. Yet the technical question of Fauci’s legal guilt or innocence is beside the point. It is Fauci’s legacy—the story he leaves to history and the meaning of his public life—that is in question.
The two other figures mentioned above face similar scrutiny. At the time of this writing, Lindsay Clancy stands accused of brutally killing her three children, which she admits to having done before attempting suicide herself. A cultish movement has sprung up to defend her; seemingly composed of true-crime patrons and frustrated moms, it urges fevered study of Clancy’s mental health and psychiatric treatments at the time of the killings, as well as the conduct of her loved ones—particularly her husband, Patrick. In one paradigmatic example, the actress-turned-reality-television star Lisa Rinna stated that she and her therapist agreed that Patrick had killed his children, insisting that “women typically don’t strangle.”
Erika Kirk, meanwhile, is the widow of the slain political activist Charlie Kirk. Charlie was fatally shot at a college event just over a year ago, on September 10, 2025. His alleged murderer, a young man named Tyler Robinson, is now on trial. Following the assassination of her husband, Erika was selected to take over as CEO and chairman of the campus-activism organization Charlie founded, Turning Point USA (TPUSA). Erika swiftly became the target of a shocking and relentless online campaign spearheaded by the podcaster Candace Owens—a notorious conspiracist and former employee of TPUSA, who has claimed Charlie was her “best friend.”
Owens produced an eight-part video series titled “Bride of Charlie,” which has many millions of views on her YouTube channel. It combs through intimate details of Erika Kirk’s life in an effort to vilify her via countless snide insults and malevolent suggestions about her character. Just one minor example of the “fan fiction” spun by Owens: Erika mentioned in an interview that she hadn’t been awake when Charlie left home the day of his murder, so they hadn’t said goodbye. Owens suggested, with no evidence, that the couple didn’t say goodbye because they’d had a fight the night before. These pernicious aspersions are part of Owens’s broader effort to destroy TPUSA by implicating its leadership in Charlie Kirk’s murder. And the battle concerns Charlie Kirk’s legacy too—whether, as he explicitly wished, he will be remembered most for his faith, or else as a player in an ongoing psychological drama of Owens’s creation.
Without going into detail on either the Clancy or Kirk trials, it is worth reflecting on the media circus surrounding both. The cases have spawned fringe entertainment industries and political factions, all seeking purchase on the American imagination. The winners in this battle of narratives could influence policy and culture for generations to come. Was Lindsay Clancy a calculated murderer or the wretched victim of temporary psychosis and of an inept—and perhaps malevolent—pharmaceutical system? The answer might have implications for the future of criminal justice and our basic understanding of mental illness. Erika Kirk might be remembered a courageous young woman seeking to carry on her late husband’s political work or, if Owens has her way, as something else entirely. Such questions can shape minds and hearts and reality itself. Do we see things as they ought to be seen?
This is the pressing question of this period of the Jewish calendar, suspended as we are between Rosh Hashanah—the birthday of creation, known in the liturgy as the Day of Remembrance or the Day of Judgment, among other titles—and Yom Kippur. An unlikely source, Fauci’s publicized diary, ought to prompt us to consider it well. What story was he telling about himself at the peak of his influence?
I admit to having laughed out loud more than once while glancing through some 200 pages of Fauci’s curious journal. It is surprisingly thin on the subject matter one might expect to preoccupy a public-health official during a pandemic: discussion of the evidence backing preventive measures like masking and social distancing, for example, or the social costs of closing schools. But there is exhaustive coverage of Fauci’s “fandom”: the donuts decorated with images of his face, the restaurant dishes and beers named in his honor, the petition to name him “Sexiest Man Alive.” He kept meticulous accounts of his media appearances and encounters with celebrities. In some entries, he lingered lovingly on the details of soapy magazine profiles of himself. He noted in May 2020, perhaps in wonderment: “It is not hyperbole to say that today I am the most famous and talked about person in the country and one of the most recognizable persons in the world.”
Lines like these were seized upon by Fauci’s accusers. Senator Rick Scott of Florida shot off the following at the abovementioned hearing:
Dr. Fauci, your entries made clear that you love being a hero, a celebrity, and having the eyes of the world upon you. You loved every newspaper profile, every photo shoot, every fancy dinner with the elites. To many Americans who lost family members, who lost trust in our federal government, you're not a hero. Unfortunately, you’re a villain. You made yourself the story and abandoned the American people to serve your own ego.
Alongside such polemics, there were substantive criticisms or questions leveled at Fauci during the hearing. But the point in this essay is not to evaluate concrete claims against him. We are witnessing competing morality plays in which Fauci represents abstractions—the essence of grasping elitism on the one hand, the ideals of public service and commitment to scientific rigor on the other. The fight concerns Fauci’s motives: was he a well-intentioned, if flawed, public servant, or a narcissistic toady? The real war, it seems, is over whether Fauci, an eighty-five-year-old man, will keep his good name or enter the twilight of life in utter disgrace.
If his published diary is any indication, Fauci too cares enormously about his reputation. I was struck by his attentiveness to the impression he made on others, expressed in lines like “Trump continues to become more and more enamored of me,” and myriad notes on people complimenting or thanking him. I wondered at times what he thought of himself—how often he doubted his decision-making during the pandemic or took criticism seriously on the merits, rather than in light of how it might affect his standing.
We cannot know. “You alone know every human heart,” Solomon says in the book of Kings, addressing the Almighty. That elemental belief presses in at this time of year. The liturgy reminds us that “there is no forgetfulness” before God; all that is fashioned by Him is remembered—every thought, deed, motive. What stories do we tell about ourselves? Do we know our own hearts? What are we getting wrong? What will our remembrance be?
It is tempting to look away from such questions. C.S. Lewis’s 1942 epistolary novel, The Screwtape Letters, invites us into the mind of a man sitting in the British Museum who finds himself engaged in what might be called t’shuvah—Hebrew for repentance. The titular demon, narrating the scene, gleefully describes how he turned the man back via “the pressure of the ordinary.”
I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way. . . . Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter. If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defense by argument I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch. . . . Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.
The “pressure of the ordinary” is not the only tool at the disposal of Lewis’s demon. At times, he seduces with the promise of a contemplative life. The demon persuades certain “clients” of the untold richness of their interior lives, guiding them to an existence of selfish navel gazing and blank indifference to the needs of others. He seeks to “aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.” He urges his pupil to bring his client “to a condition in which he can practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office.”
The High Holy Days call for introspection. But engaging in the wrong kind of self-examination, Lewis warns, can be as dangerous as avoiding it altogether.
Fauci, Clancy, and Erika Kirk have had the dubious privilege of having their characters surveyed in extraordinary detail for mass consumption. Millions seek to pull back the curtain, to know for certain if Fauci deliberately lied to the public and for what reason, or to know for certain what was going through Clancy’s mind in her children’s final moments. The cultish fixation in each case seems itself to be a sort of madness—a symptom of, among other things, an uncertain media environment made more disorienting by the rise of AI. But within reason, we ought to seek the truth in such cases. And they can serve as reminders to seek the truth about ourselves and our own conduct.
The late Rabbi Yehuda Amital, who survived a Nazi labor camp and eventually helped to found Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel, emphasized the importance of not hiding from oneself and one’s calling, as the biblical Jonah—whose eponymous book is read during the Yom Kippur service—tried to do. Amital suggested that the popular practice of reciting biblical verses related to one’s name at the end of the silent Amidah prayer (attributed to the rabbi and mystic Isaiah ha-Levi Horowitz, also known as the Sh’lah, ca. 1555–1630), helps people remember who they are: “On the Day of Judgment, a person confronts the gulf between his self-image and his true self. This disparity can cause him to forget his own name.”
Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Judgment and the Day of Remembrance, enjoins us not to indulge in such forgetfulness. We are pressed to consider all the ways in which we may be remembered by God and our fellows, to recall that our smallest deeds are subject to scrutiny. God does not forget, the liturgy reminds us; despite this, we pray for a “favorable remembrance” before Him.
Devorah Goldman is a contributing editor at Mosaic and other publications and a visiting fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She writes frequently on medicine.
