The Smithsonian Institution put Anthony Fauci on a pedestal — literally.
While Fauci was busy refusing to answer a single question before the United States Senate, taxpayer-funded museum curators were displaying his baseball cap and jersey like he was some kind of national treasure.
And now the full picture of what the left-wing Smithsonian built in Fauci’s honor has come to light — and it will leave you stunned.
A Shrine Built on Taxpayer Money
Aspects of Dr Anthony Fauci’s career are prominently displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, with the former leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) featured in the museum’s “Entertainment Nation” exhibit — highlighting how the mask-wearing doctor threw the first pitch for Major League Baseball in 2020 while there were no fans in the stands.
The “Entertainment Nation” exhibit cost $18 million in total, with the Biden administration completing it for $13.5 million after the initial planning phase and opening it in December 2022.
A placard in the exhibit honors Fauci with the words: “Amidst a cacophony of misinformation and denial, advice from Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, urged leagues to make decisions about resuming play ‘based on scientific evidence and public health judgment.'” It continues: “When baseball became the first league to retake the field, Fauci threw the ceremonial opening pitch — wearing a facemask in a stadium empty of fans.”
Alongside that heroic characterization, the museum prominently features the Washington Nationals baseball cap, signed by the doctor, that he wore while throwing out the first pitch when MLB resumed play after lockdowns.
There’s a small detail about that mask the museum doesn’t exactly advertise. The mask on display is actually an unused one that Fauci signed and donated to the Smithsonian after the game, as investigative journalist Emily Miller discovered. The Smithsonian’s own explanation: there were two masks, and he wore one to throw out the ball, then signed and donated the unused one — because, as the museum put it, “Dr Fauci is an infectious disease specialist, you can understand why the unworn mask was the one selected.” The man who spent years telling Americans to mask up couldn’t donate the actual mask he wore.
The Smithsonian website also features an artist’s portrait of Fauci. Artist Hugo Crosthwaite, who won first prize in the National Portrait Gallery’s fifth triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, incorporated scientific illustrations, images from popular culture, and art historical references to create a stop-motion drawing animation that examines Fauci’s career.
The museum also presented Fauci with a specially minted medal struck from 1.85 ounces of fine gold during its “Great Americans Program,” at which point Fauci donated his personal 3D model of the SARS-CoV-2 virion to the museum’s national medicine and science collections.
The Diary the Placard Doesn’t Mention
All of that would be one thing if the historical record backed up the Smithsonian’s glowing portrait. It doesn’t.
A diary kept by Fauci while the pandemic raged, recently exposed by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), shows a man fixated on his own fame, who acknowledged answers to controversial questions in private, but said the opposite in public.
A February 8, 2020 diary entry assessed the case fatality rate as “more like 0.2-0.3%.” But in public statements in March 2020, including under oath before Congress, Fauci described the fatality rate as about 3% overall — characterizing the virus as up to roughly 10 times more deadly than his own private diary entries indicated.
His diary and newly released Slack messages show Fauci and allied scientists privately considered a lab leak plausible from the earliest days of the pandemic, then publicly dismissed it. They privately acknowledged gain-of-function research while denying it before Congress.
Senator Paul put it plainly after the hearing: “We saw a constellation of what he was saying privately, and then what he was saying publicly. In January of 2020, he was saying privately, ‘We now know that the earliest cases did not come from the wet market.’ But he then argued for years and years publicly, ‘Oh no, it came from the market.'”
And then there is the matter of the lockdowns. Fauci’s diary shows he advised New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in favor of a shelter-in-place order. For years, Fauci denied being behind the pandemic-era lockdowns that shuttered churches, destroyed small businesses, and kept children out of government schools for months on end. His own diary tells a different story.
Senator Paul released more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s typewritten diary before the hearing. Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr said the notes were government records because they were written by a federal employee on a government computer during a public health emergency and found on government property. Paul said the diary showed differences between Fauci’s private discussions and his public statements.
A Senate Hearing He Refused to Answer
Republican senators vowed to vote to hold Dr Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he declined to answer a barrage of questions at a hearing about his role in handling the COVID-19 pandemic. Fauci, the former director of NIAID, repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment during the hearing before the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Fauci read from a prepared statement: “Although it pains me to do so, because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government, and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”
He said it 111 times.
Paul told reporters after the hearing: “This is about contempt — contempt for this body and contempt for the American people,” adding that Fauci did not want to answer questions because he did “all kinds of terrible things” during the pandemic.
Paul also raised serious doubt about whether Fauci even had the legal right to plead the Fifth after receiving a presidential pardon from Joe Biden. “The legal question is, if you’re pardoned, can you really claim the Fifth?” Paul said. “The Fifth Amendment is to claim immunity from self-incrimination. But if you’ve already been given immunity, you can’t self-incriminate unless you lie. I don’t know how you plead the Fifth Amendment to something you’ve already been granted immunity for.”
Fauci was pardoned by former President Joe Biden in January 2025 after Biden said the former NIAID director could potentially face “unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions” by the incoming Trump administration. A man with nothing to hide generally doesn’t need a preemptive presidential pardon.
Senator Paul said in his opening remarks at the hearing: “No scientist is above scrutiny, no government official is beyond accountability and no public servant has the right to treat the suffering of millions of Americans as a footnote to his preferred version of history.”
One of Fauci’s attorneys was removed from the chamber during the hearing, while Democrats deemed the proceedings a partisan waste of time.
The Smithsonian’s Broader Problem
The Fauci exhibit doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The Smithsonian is under fire on multiple fronts, and the timing of this story landing alongside the Senate hearing is not a coincidence.
The embattled former face of the United States’ COVID-19 response is prominently displayed and heroically framed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, as the network of Smithsonian institutions faces scrutiny over messaging from government officials.
The director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History recently faced pointed questions from House Republicans over exhibits and materials they characterized as woke, including a display linking Mickey Mouse to racism and a museum toolkit discussing “objectivity” as a feature of White supremacy culture.
When asked directly, “Is Mickey Mouse racist?” Director Anthea Hartig replied that the cartoon character is rooted in “minstrelsy,” which in turn is rooted in blackface and carries “obvious racial undertones.” That’s the institution currently running a shrine to Anthony Fauci on the taxpayer’s dime.
The White House has also listed the National Portrait Gallery’s stop-motion animation of Dr Anthony Fauci among its objections to Smithsonian content. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle stated: “Taxpayer money should not be used for things that pit Americans against one another.”
None of this is a coincidence. The same institution that spent years collecting COVID “artifacts” — including, according to reports, a Black Lives Matter facemask and stickers reading “Vaccine of Hope” — is now sitting on a Fauci exhibit that reads like a campaign brochure for the lockdown era.
Millions of Americans lost businesses, missed funerals, watched their children fall behind in school, and were told their concerns about mandates and lockdowns were dangerous misinformation. The people who raised those concerns were right. Fauci’s own diary says so. And the Smithsonian is still displaying his baseball cap like it belongs next to Muhammad Ali’s gloves.
Senator Paul and Secretary Kennedy have spent months making the case that the American people were not given the full story during the pandemic. Paul and Kennedy had openly vowed to find new ways to pursue perjury charges against Fauci, with Kennedy saying he led an eight-month search within HHS for new evidence, eventually turning up entries from the scientist’s diary on a government server.
But the Smithsonian keeps the exhibit up. The placard still calls it a “cacophony of misinformation and denial” — language that treats every American who questioned the official COVID narrative as a problem to be managed rather than a citizen with legitimate concerns. That’s not history. That’s a political verdict dressed up as a museum display.
The voters who sent Donald Trump back to Washington, DC in 2024 did so in no small part because they remembered what the pandemic-era government did to their lives. They haven’t forgotten. And they’re paying for the exhibit that says they were wrong.
Sources: Breitbart News, Fox News Digital, NPR, ABC News, The Federalist, RedState, Smithsonian Institution, Fox Business, The Hill, NewsNation