FRIDAY, AUGUST 7, 2026
Group rage comes to the Senate: Just to be honest and fair, what happened last night supports the idea that news orgs should never involve "mental health" issues in their political coverage.
Caroline Sunshine (actual name) was appearing on the 10 p.m. shoutfest, CNN NewsNight. The program is designed to replace attempts at intelligent discussion with a raucous modern-day Babel.
Sunshine is a former Disney Channel child star. In 2018, at age 22, she became a Trump press assistant.
She's now out there as a political commentator on "cable news" programs. Judged by conventional norms, she does look good on TV.
(When she appeared on Gutfeld! last month, the host called attention to her very little "little black dress." "I ran out of turtlenecks," the surprise guest sagaciously said. She was way off message in that Gutfeld! appearance. In our view, and speaking quite frankly, she can say whatever she wants!)
Sunshine may be completely sincere. David Gilmour of Mediaite reports what she said last night:
CNN Panel Explodes as MAGA Pundit Claims ‘Sociopath’ Fauci Belongs in ‘Mental Institution’
A CNN panel descended into a shouting match Thursday after former Trump White House aide Caroline Sunshine declared Dr. Anthony Fauci “should be in a mental institution” and branded the longtime public health official a “textbook sociopath,” prompting immediate disbelief from host Abby Phillip and fellow panelists.
The clash unfolded on CNN NewsNight during a discussion about renewed Republican scrutiny of Fauci, who has been hauled before Congress and faces the prospect of further legal action following the release of diary entries from his time leading the nation’s Covid-19 response.
In our view, it's long past time for Phillip to drop her performance of shocked disbelief. This show is designed to produce blow-ups like this. Why else was "author Leigh McGowan" also a guest last night?
(McGowan recited Standard Blue Cant. You've heard it a thousand times by now. It doesn't exactly make sense.)
Gilmour's report includes videotape of Sunshine's declarations. Along the way, he quotes her in the manner shown:
“Forget about prosecuting him, the guy should be in a mental institution! He’s a textbook sociopath. I mean, DSM 5 level sociopath running our pandemic response, low empathy, ability to inflict pain on innocents, narcissism.”
[...]
“What are you talking about?” the host asked before pressing Sunshine further: “Are you suggesting that he should be in a mental institution for having an ego, which I think would characterize just about every single person in Washington?”
Sunshine attempted to cite Fauci’s diary entries, mocking passages about media attention he received during the pandemic.
And so on from there. In fairness to Sunshine, buzz like this is the fairly obvious goal of the way CNN NewsNight assembles its panels.
That said, should news orgs honor their version of the Goldwater Rule, according to which they never discuss possible mental health / mental illness issues within their political coverage? One part of the reasoning has always been clear, and it has always made sense:
As soon as you conduct some such discussion with medical specialists, people like Sunshine will show up on some cable news show offering their own diagnoses. Indeed, such guests may be actively sought, perhaps for reasons of propaganda, perhaps due to ratings concerns.
That said, what happened in the Senate last week was even worse than last night's debacle on CNN. Even before yesterday's "contempt of Congress" vote, the hearing to which we refer had generated these questions:
Did Dr. Fauci do something wrong during the course of the Covid pandemic? Indeed, did he possibly do something which might have been criminal?
For ourselves, we can't answer those questions. Regarding the question of criminality, we showed you yesterday what the Wall Street Journal has said:
Dr. Fauci Takes the Fifth, Alas
Anthony Fauci’s decision to invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the Senate on Wednesday is a shame. The public could have benefited from his exchanges with Senators, even if they would have been contentious.
Sen. Rand Paul has been investigating the government’s response to Covid, and Dr. Fauci was at the center of the decisions to close schools and lock down the economy for months. President Biden granted Dr. Fauci a pre-emptive pardon, but Mr. Paul said that wouldn’t protect him if he lies to Congress.
Dr. Fauci blamed the Senator for an “unhinged obsession” with him and decided on silence as a strategy. Mr. Paul is too set on criminalizing policy differences in our view, and Dr. Fauci doesn’t belong in jail on any evidence we’ve seen.
And so on from there. That's the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, one part of the Murdoch empire.
Yesterday, the editorial board of the Washington Post offered a somewhat murky set of assessments. That said, they started with a clearcut denunciation of yesterday's "contempt of Congress" vote:
The contempt vote against Fauci was a stunt
Anthony S. Fauci should have been forthright during his Senate appearance last week, offering a full explanation of his past misstatements and reflecting on lessons learned during the pandemic. But he had legitimate reasons—and constitutional protections—for staying tight-lipped.
A Senate committee voted Thursday along party lines to approve a resolution holding Fauci in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 111 times. It would be an abuse of prosecutorial power if the Trump administration were to use this stunt to pursue criminal charges against the 85-year-old.
[...]
[T]his will do nothing to help the public understand the origins of the coronavirus or what went wrong in the government’s response. That’s a shame, because Fauci has a lot to answer for: He was slow to accept the airborne transmission of the coronavirus, and his guidance kept millions of kids out of school for far longer than was necessary. There are also questions about whether the agency he led at the National Institutes of Health supported research that altered coronaviruses in Wuhan, China, where the pandemic began.
Covid was hugely disruptive for society, and it is fair game for Congress to exercise oversight. Indeed, lawmakers should have done so years ago in a bipartisan way. But this contempt vote was clearly less about illuminating what happened than about exacting revenge.
As is often the case with editorials at the new version of the Post, this editorial is somewhat unclear.
Plainly, the editors reject the contempt vote as a Republican stunt—as a way of punishing Fauci. They also say that Dr. Fauci should not be criminally charged for his refusal to answer questions last week.
That much is clear. But they (very murkily) suggest that Dr. Fauci may have played a major role in the fact that the pandemic ever occurred in the first place.
(Did the editors actually say that the Covid virus originated in the Wuhan lab? Surely, the murkiness of the relevant passage was executed that way by design, not through limited competence.)
Did Dr. Fauci engage in some form of criminal or unethical conduct during the Covid years? Was he somehow involved in the pandemic's very existence?
We don't know how to answer those questions, but we do know what we saw last week in that Senate hearing room. We saw the dangerous type of tribal rage which has been causing civilizations to fall dating back to the fictional death of Troy, as described by Professor Knox:
The death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history...
In that remarkably vicious way, so went the fall of Troy—and every Greek citizen knew it. Again, here's Mary Lefkowitz in the Washington Post, back in 1990:
"It was [Homer] who first portrayed [women] in their important role as survivors and the continuers of the culture that the men sought in their violence to destroy."
The men sought to do that through their violence, but also through their group rage.
At any rate, that's how rage was expressed in the Late Bronze Age. The means of assault are different today, but the ugly power of tribal rage is unchanged.
The ugliness of what happened last week was matched by its sheer stupidity. It's hard to be a bigger fraud that the pitiful Senator Hawley chose to be:
HAWLEY (7/29/26): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc? Let's try something:
What day of the week is it today?
[...]
What color tie are you wearing?
[...]
What color is the carpet in front of you?
Once it's clear that the witness is taking the Fifth, people like Hawley understand that they're free to tear the wings off the insect seated before them.
Incredibly, the showboat who posed those pseudo-questions is a graduate of Stanford, but also of Yale Law School. Later, he clerked for John Roberts.
He knows why a person in Fauci's position will have been told that he can't pick and choose which questions to answer. He knows the target has been told not to answer any question, not even a question from a creep like Hawley about the blue of the sky.
He also knows that most of his constituents don't know such things, and that members of the press will often be so dumb as to marvel at the fact that Dr. Fauci too the Fifth 111 times!
(Why did he take the Fifth 111 times? Duh! Because that's the number of questions he was asked! He had to plead every time!)
What has made Hawley as small as he is? Pathetically, once again, this is the way he started:
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, nothing says honesty like taking the Fifth, huh, Doc?
Knowing the witness wouldn't respond, this small child chose to taunt him. And later, this childish child of the Yale Law School dimwittedly piped up with this:
[Hawley] Claims ‘No Honest Person Pleads the Fifth’ After Fauci Hearing—Gets Immediately Reminded of Trump’s Own History
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) claimed “no honest person pleads the Fifth” after Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hearing. He was promptly reminded that President Donald Trump has done the same.
Hawley was part of the committee that questioned Fauci on his Covid-19 guidance Wednesday. Throughout the hearing, Fauci repeatedly declined to answer questions by pleading the Fifth Amendment. Hawley began his line of questioning by answer Fauci a set of basic questions about what he was wearing and the room they were in. Still, Fauci refused to answer.
Later that day, Hawley posted a clip of his exchange with the former Chief Medical Advisor to the President on X/Twitter. He then declared that “no honest person pleads the Fifth.”
Critics of Hawley were quick to point out that Trump has used a similar strategy in the past.
How pathetic can this guy get? As Austin notes in his report, President Trump took the Fifth more than four hundred times in a 2022 deposition directed by the office of the New York State Attorney General. And of course, as a graduate of Yale Law School, Hawley knows that innocent people do plead the Fifth.
He also knows that many members of the public may not fully grasp that fact, and that they might be impressed by the courage with which he seemed to go after the demonized Dr. Fauci.
Should Dr. Fauci have refused to answer questions last week? He did so in the context of the latest astonishing criminal charge, the bogus charge lodged against The Olympic Oarsman Who Wrecked the Reflecting Pool.
The madness that was evident during the fall of Troy is all over our failing society now. But the madness and the rage exist in modern forms.
Where did Covid begin? Messengers like Gutfeld are all over Fox, saying "we know" the answer to that question.
The New York Times is too afraid to report what happens on Fox. But last week, in that Senate chamber, madmen were coming over the walls in the rage-filled world we increasingly live in.
Tomorrow: Tyrus and Kat explain?
