The release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s emails has proven to be a gold mine for those willing to actually report on them. While the White House press corps asked zero questions today of Jen Psaki on the matter because they are left-wing hacks, right-leaning outlets that have consistently been ahead of the curve are busy mining the documents, and what’s been discovered so far is nothing short of shocking.

In general, the emails tell the tale of a lying, manipulative bureaucrat who sought to spin his poor job performance into fame and fortune. To a large extent, he succeeded in that regard, being escorted along the way by a compliant media and a Democrat party who granted him sainthood.

Regardless, the scandal here is real. Take the issue of masks. Early on in the pandemic, Fauci himself said publicly that masks don’t work due to the particle size of COVID-19 and aren’t needed. Later, the doctor would completely flip, becoming an obsessive mask-pusher, claiming that he initially lied to protect PPE stockpiles. See the trend? Everything Fauci does is always spun as him simply being a valiant protector of the people.

But, a stunning email reveals exactly what Fauci was saying privately early on about masks. Was he protecting PPE for first responders? No, he was telling his colleagues that masks weren’t necessary and giving scientific reasons for his assertion, which undercuts his present claim that what he was saying publicly was just a lie to influence public behavior.

Fauci defended his initial public statements downplaying the efficacy of masks as something he had to do to keep the PPE supply available to front line medical personnel. This is a private message to a colleague, saying the same thing. He lied to all of us – he has always held… https://t.co/ekvRQwVzQS

— Jason Beale (@jabeale) June 2, 2021

No matter how you slice this, Fauci lied multiple times about masks. If what he’s saying privately in this email is true (and it is), masks don’t work anyway, so why would first responders need huge amounts of them? Given that, his later claim that he was initially lying to the American people for the virtuous reason of protecting first responders is also a lie.

Further, Fauci piled more lies on top of his previous lies, when he changed his public position to being pro-mandatory masking. He’s been lying from the beginning, carefully shifting his positions to match what the left-wing politics of the day demanded. Past that, pushing masking the way he did gave cover to him and his political allies. While Trump was correctly skeptical of masks, Fauci used them as a bludgeon in the public sphere, pretending as if every failure was the result of not enough masking.

Eventually, as RedState has extensively reported, the data would come out, starting late summer of 2020, that masks were largely ineffective. The most recent study on the efficacy of mask-mandates, released just in the last few weeks, came to the conclusion that they made no real difference at all. In other words, the thing Fauci put the most stock in and lied his butt off about — he was wrong about.

In short, there are two parts to this. One, Fauci is a lying liar who lied. He did so to elevate his own profile and has now cashed out millions of dollars as a result. Two, those of us here at RedState and elsewhere who questioned the science of mask-wearing early on were right. Vindication is here for those who were brave enough to stand up and say none of this makes sense. Meanwhile, far too many on the right spent their time telling their fellow conservatives to just go along to get along, giving deference to Fauci until just recently. That’s a problem for the conservative movement, and it’s one that needs to be talked about going forward.