No American has been more revered by the media in the COVID era than Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Since early 2020, TV and print profiles have deluged Fauci with endless adulation, spurring the sale of Fauci votive candles, Fauci bobbleheads and #trustFauci Twitter hashtags. But Wednesday, Fauci’s mind vanished.

Or at least that’s what he claimed. A federal judge compelled Fauci to answer questions from lawyers suing toreveal the role of “dozens of federal officials across at least 11 federal agencies “ to suppress “disfavored speakers, viewpoints and content on social-media platforms.” That lawsuit is exposing how Biden’s war on disinformation is demolishing Americans’ freedom of speech.

Fauci was deposed on Wednesday by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry. Landry labeled Fauci the “man who single-handedly wrecked the US economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science.’” But “over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry said.

So Fauci is “omniscient except during depositions”?

Missouri Attorney General Schmitt said the deposition revealed: “When Fauci speaks — social media censors.“ The lawsuit will continue to expose federal shenanigans with perhaps the biggest bombshells still to come.

How many lies did Fauci tell on Wednesday? The transcript has not been released, but a few “pants on fire” snippets have come out. After Fauci championed lockdowns to vanquish COVID, top scientists from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard in October 2020 issued the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that “focused protection” for high-risk groups (such as the elderly) was vastly preferable to shutting down society.

When asked about his role in assailing that Declaration, Fauci declared, “I have a very busy day job running a $6 billion institute. I don’t have time to worry about things like the Great Barrington Declaration.” But less than two weeks after the Declaration’s release, Fauci emailed Deborah Birx, the White House COVID chief, “I have come out very strongly publicly against the Great Barrington Declaration.” Fauci did multiple media interviews castigating any suggestion that lockdowns were unnecessary to save America.

Fauci apparently sees himself as part of a caste of politically favored scientists entitled to rule Americans’ lives. Schmitt tweeted that Fauci declared during the deposition that “the rest of us ‘don’t have the ability’ to determine what’s best for ourselves.”

Fauci has consistently behaved as if federal health officials deserve unchallengeable dictatorial powers. When a federal judge in April struck down the Biden administration mask mandate for airplane travelers, Fauci caterwauled, “This is a CDC issue, it should not have been a court issue.” Fauci neglected to reveal the secret provision of the Constitution that entitles political appointees to nullify the rest of the nation’s founding document.

Fauci has had more flip-flops than a Ringling Bros. trapeze artist. In early 2020, he scoffed at the notion that masks would prevent COVID transmission — and then jumped on the bandwagon to champion unreliable cloth masks. In May 2021, Fauci said the vaccinated would not transmit COVID — a claim he continued to repeat long after the evidence debunked that claim. He opposed vaccine mandates until he endorsed them.

Endless flattery convinced Fauci he is sacrosanct. When Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested prosecuting Fauci for his false congressional testimony regarding his funding of the “gain of function” research in Chinese labs that may have unleashed COVID, Fauci huffed that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” But not as dangerous as a megalomaniacal political appointee secretly wielding power to undermine American freedom.

Fauci declared in August that the COVID lockdowns he championed had not “irreparably damaged anyone.” What about the 51% increase in suicide attempts by young girls during the first year of the lockdowns? Forced isolation made far more people depressed and contributed to the 25% increase in alcohol-related deaths in 2020 and record drug-abuse fatalities. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that Americans suffered “171,000 excess non-COVID deaths during 2020 and 2021.” Many of those fatalities were “collateral damage” from shutdowns and other COVID policies.

Perhaps Fauci will paraphrase a quotation attributed to Stalin: “One death is a tragedy but 100,000 deaths are just a statistic.” Despite all the sacrifices Fauci sanctified, more than 200 million Americans still contracted COVID, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Maybe Fauci’s memory has recovered since being compelled to explain how he used his power. But we must never forget how politicians pretended that stomping the Constitution would magically “flatten the curve” and keep us safe. America will not fully recover from the pandemic until all the COVID lies and abuses by officialdom have been exposed.

James Bovard is the author of 10 books and a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.