At a Senate hearing yesterday, Fauci refused to answer questions about covid. His lawyer attempted to answer on his behalf and, to great public applause, was escorted out of the building.

Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during a contentious Senate hearing on 29 July 2026. He refused to answer more than 100 questions regarding the covid “pandemic.”

The hearing, chaired by Republican Senator Rand Paul, was intended to investigate Fauci’s handling of the “pandemic” and alleged cover-ups, but Fauci described it as a partisan crusade aimed at smearing him.

As Krystal Stirling writes below, the best part of the hearing was when Fauci’s lawyer was escorted out of the hearing by security.

As for Fauci, following his refusal to testify, Senator Paul announced plans to hold a committee vote next week to hold him in contempt of Congress, a move that could lead to federal criminal charges despite a previous presidential pardon.

Rand Paul Boots Fauci Lawyer From Hearing as Gallery Erupts in Applause

By Krystal Stirling, as published by LifeZette on 30 July 2026

Anthony Fauci finally found himself back under congressional scrutiny Wednesday morning, and the scene delivered exactly the kind of accountability moment millions of Americans have been waiting years to see.

The former face of the federal covid regime appeared before a Senate hearing chaired by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of Fauci’s most persistent and well-informed critics.

Fauci opened with a statement claiming Paul had an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution,” then promptly invoked the Fifth Amendment.  That move may have kept Fauci from answering direct questions about his record, but it did not spare him from an embarrassing spectacle.

His attorney, David Schertler, managed to become the main event after repeatedly ignoring the rules of the hearing.

Schertler had reportedly been instructed not to sit at the witness table because he was not a witness.  He did it anyway, parking himself beside Fauci as the former bureaucratic pandemic czar declined to answer questions.

The attorney then began speaking during the proceedings despite not being recognised and despite not having a microphone.

Apparently, the same crowd that lectured Americans for years about respecting institutions suddenly forgot how hearings work.

Paul was not interested in letting Schertler hijack the room.  The Kentucky Republican cut him off and reminded him that he had no right to take over the proceedings.

“You will respect these proceedings. You were told not to sit at the table. You insist on sitting at the table and we told you [that] you would not be recognised. You are not invited here for testimony, sir. You are being disruptive. Would you behave this way in a courtroom? No, because the judge would put you in jail. I can’t do that today. But I can have you escorted from the premises,” Paul told Schertler.

That should have ended it.  Instead, Schertler kept talking, giving Paul every reason to call security and have him removed from the room.

“There’s a row behind you, sir. That’s where you were told to sit … and now you’re disrupting the proceedings,” Paul said as the attorney continued his performance.

The chairman made clear that the hearing would not be turned into a Democrat friendly sideshow.

Then Paul delivered the line that captured the whole mess. “This is the way Anthony Fauci wants to be remembered: For a lawyer not listening to the rules. That’s the way you want to be remembered, and that’s what you’re going to do.”

As security escorted Schertler out, the gallery broke into applause.

alk Red: Rand Paul Boots Fauci Lawyer From Hearing as Gallery Erupts in Applause, (2 mins)

For a public that endured lockdowns, mandates, school closures, shifting guidance and endless sanctimony from Fauci and his allies, the reaction was not exactly hard to understand.

The moment was made even richer by the fact that Fauci was hardly abandoned.  Paul noted, with obvious dry humour, that Fauci had several other attorneys present, so nobody needed to faint over the idea that the most protected man in pandemic politics had been left alone.

Investigative journalist Catherine Herridge, who was seated in the gallery, shared what she witnessed from inside the room.  Her reporting added to the sense that the hearing had become a revealing snapshot of how the Fauci orbit operates when it is not being treated like royalty.

For years, Fauci presented himself as the embodiment of science while federal power was used to crush dissent, silence questions and shame ordinary Americans into compliance.  Parents watched their children fall behind, workers lost jobs, churches were treated like threats, and small businesses were flattened while the expert class congratulated itself.  Yet when Fauci had the chance to answer questions under oath, he chose the Fifth.  That is his legal right, of course, but Americans are also free to draw their own conclusions from a man who spent years demanding trust and then refused to provide answers.  Schertler’s removal only sharpened the contrast.

The same political machine that scolded citizens about rules and responsibility could not even follow basic hearing instructions when the spotlight turned back on them. 

Paul, who has challenged Fauci for years on covid policy, federal health power and research questions, did not allow the hearing to become another carefully managed performance.  He enforced order, called out the antics, and gave the public a rare sight in Washington: someone actually refusing to indulge the protected class.

Fauci wanted to frame the hearing as persecution. Instead, he helped remind the country why so many Americans lost trust in the public health establishment in the first place.

The applause in the gallery said plenty.  After years of lectures from Fauci world, plenty of Americans are ready to see the lecturing class sit down, stop talking and finally answer for what it did.

Source: https://theexposenews.com/2026/07/30/faucis-attorney-is-kicked-out-of-senate-hearing/

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Before he walked into Number 10, Andy Burnham announced plans to scrap Keir Starmer’s controversial digital ID scheme as one of his first acts as Prime Minister.  Many have applauded him – but their applause was misguided.

This isn’t a time to celebrate a perceived end to digital ID. There’s still a big fight ahead. Under this new agenda, the machinery keeps growing no matter who holds the keys. Burnham, Britain’s new keyholder, has spent two decades asking for exactly this machinery, and he now has it, Cam Wakefield explains.

Andy Burnham Scrapped Digital ID. His Internet Plans Say Otherwise

By Cam Wakefield, as published by Reclaim the Net on 20 July 2026

The new UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is in Downing Street, and he has spent twenty years telling you exactly what he wants to do to the internet. He won the Makerfield by-election on 18 June 2026. He then collected the backing of roughly 349 Labour MPs, more than 85 per cent of the parliamentary party. By the time he walked through the black door, the job had been settled for weeks.

His first big announcement was the one privacy campaigners had been hoping for. Starmer’s digital ID scheme for all adults is dead, scrapped before Burnham had finished unpacking, the money moved to the cost of living. The applause came quickly. Perhaps it should not have.

This is a read on a government barely a day old. On speech and privacy, the early signals point one way, and it is not the way that loosens the state’s grip. He is not about to tear up the settlement he inherits from Keir Starmer. The open question is how much further he carries it.

Burnham arrives with a long record on all this. He is one of the few senior British politicians with a documented, two-decade appetite for putting the government closer to what you can see, say and read online.

His first ministerial job, at the Home Office in 2005 and 2006, was pushing Tony Blair’s Identity Cards Bill through Parliament. He told the BBC that compulsory national ID cards would be a major breakthrough. Twenty years later, asked about it again, he was unembarrassed about the principle: “I’m not kind of arguing against the principle. I was very pro, actually, I thought there was a real clear case for it.”

Two decades of hindsight, and the case is still clear to him. What that case rests on is a claim about the relationship between a person and the state, and it is the same claim underneath every age check and identity gate now being built. The Identity Cards Act reached the statute book on 30 March 2006 and was repealed on 21 January 2011.

Then came 2008, and Culture Secretary Burnham produced a plan that looks like a blueprint for everything running today. The organising idea was that online content should meet the same regulatory standards as television. He wanted taste and decency rules applied to the web, cinema-style age certificates and warning signs on anything featuring sex, violence or strong language, alerts bolted onto viral content, and ISP-level “child-safe” packages.

He floated making YouTube and Facebook delete offensive material within a set time once alerted, and changing libel law so suing an online publisher got easier. He even wanted to sound out the incoming Obama administration about international rules for English-language websites. Age gating, takedown clocks, regulator muscle aimed at platforms, it is all sitting there in 2008, waiting for the technology to catch up.

The plans died, and the body that killed them was Ofcom, which called them undesirable and unworkable online. This was back when the speech regulator was more level-headed. The regulator that told Burnham in 2008 that broadcast rules could not be stretched over the internet is the regulator now enforcing the Online Safety Act. The intellectual weight at Ofcom has obviously severely declined.

Then 2016, and the episode that should be read before anyone celebrates this week. As Shadow Home Secretary, Burnham went after the Investigatory Powers Bill. He said Britain needed a new law in this area, then listed what was wrong with the one in front of him: thin privacy safeguards, surveillance powers that went too far, thresholds set too low, weak oversight, definitions loose enough to justify almost any intrusion. Labour abstained in March 2016. The government made amendments. In June, Burnham and Labour voted for it, and the Snoopers’ Charter received Royal Assent that November.

The Act remains one of the most expansive surveillance laws in any democracy, and it exists because the opposition of the day decided its objections had been satisfied. That is the pattern worth holding onto. Burnham objects to how a power is packaged, wins changes to the packaging, and votes the power into the statute book. Ten years later, the objections are a footnote and the Act is still there.

The recent statements finish the picture. During an April 2025 Times interview, he talked warmly about regulating social media for teenagers, saying that if it is not a ban it needs to be something.

By January 2026, he agreed with much of what Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch was saying about children and social media and welcomed a cross-party mood for bolder action. Earlier this month, days after winning Makerfield and while the leadership was already effectively his, he confirmed the current government’s online age verification scheme keeps running and imposes election purdah rules online.

That is twenty years pointing the same way.

The purdah idea has a name attached to it. Lucy Powell has argued that social media platforms should face something close to the rules that restrict broadcasters during election campaigns. Powell was elected deputy leader by the membership, which means Burnham cannot remove her, and she is close to him. The same government is separately pushing to lock legacy media outlets into people’s feeds. Put those together and the shape is familiar: the state deciding which voices get carried during an election and which get turned down.

Expect the Online Safety Act to survive Burnham intact, because the pressure on him runs toward strengthening it. A coalition of charities, campaign groups and academics wrote to him before he reached No 10, asking him to toughen the law.

Their specific wish is to drag it past illegal content and into “legal but harmful” territory, the exact area the Act was careful to leave alone. The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee wants the same, arguing the Act is too weak on “misinformation” and that platforms should answer for how they amplify lawful content people dislike. 2024’s Southport unrest is the case they keep reaching for.

That “legal but harmful” line is where the state stops chasing crime and starts refereeing opinion. The government gets to write the definition of harmful, and then the government gets to enforce it.

A change of direction was always likelier on digital ID than on the Online Safety Act, and today proved the point.

The enforcement machine that has already pushed platforms into restricting British users has been inherited whole and will probably be widened, while ministers keep insisting that none of this touches free speech.

Here is where the flattering headline about Burnham falls apart on contact. He confirmed before taking office that Starmer’s digital ID programme for all adults is being scrapped, with the money redirected to the cost of living and the whole thing badged as a reset of priorities.

The Office for Budget Responsibility had costed the programme at £1.8 ($2.42) billion over three years, a figure Downing Street rejected without offering one of its own.

Read on its own, that sounds like a victory for anyone who values privacy.

That reading collapses for two reasons. The objection was never to identity infrastructure as a principle. Asked in September 2025 whether he backed Starmer’s digital ID plans, Burnham said “not now,” and the reason he gave was tactical.

He pointed back to 2005 to 2010, warning of an opportunity cost situation where something consumes a huge amount of time and does not come through, exactly as the last ID card scheme consumed a lot of airtime and never materialised. That is a complaint about political return on investment, not a commitment to civil liberties.

This is the same man who sold compulsory ID cards as a major breakthrough and who still says the case for them was clear.

Mandatory right-to-work checks had already been softened to voluntary before he arrived, which makes the announcement partly a decision to stop paying for something that had already lost its purpose.

And killing a work-linked BritCard sits a very long way from opposing ID to use the internet. Burnham’s team confirmed he intends to press ahead with plans to demand everyone pass digital ID checks to post on social media. His spokesperson said he is “committed to keeping kids safe online, and has been vocal in his support of age restrictions for kids using social media.”

Follow that logic. A government can drop the digital ID card, bank the applause, build the far more consequential thing, an identity gate between you and your ability to speak online, and sell the swap as a retreat.

There is no way to enforce a ban on under-16s without checking the age of everyone else, and no way to check age at that scale without checking identity. The card you were not going to carry becomes the login you cannot avoid.

Age checks and social media IDs hand more of your privacy away than a right-to-work card ever would, because they bolt your name to what you say rather than to where you work.

So, take the win, but count it properly. What was scrapped is a £1.8 billion database. What was kept is the part that touches speech. The infrastructure of the digital ID scheme is still being built, and none of it ever depended on the card.

GOV.UK One Login isn’t going away. Digital driving licenses are coming, and they’ll be used to grant access to social media. Police are getting access to driving license records with facial recognition. Mandatory Companies House identity verification stays. The NHS Logins and the Single Patient Record are coming.

Assemble that list and you have a national identity system. It is arriving one service at a time instead of in one bill, which is precisely why it never gets a launch announcement to celebrate or a cancellation to campaign against.

Then there is the hire. On 16 July, Burnham appointed Matthew McGregor as his head of political strategy in No 10, and the appointment tells you something concrete, provided you do not oversell it.

Start with the facts. McGregor was Director of Campaigns and Communications at Hope Not Hate and remained a listed director there until 29 April 2022, then ran 38 Degrees as chief executive until this month.

Hope Not Hate is not a neutral party in the fight over online speech. The organisation has argued, out loud and often, that deplatforming works and platforms should be pressured into removing content. It has endorsed deplatforming as a tactic in its own material, which says tech companies had to be shamed into changing their moderation policies and then shamed again into enforcing them, and that the pressure to remove content comes from governments, journalists, researchers and campaigners.

Install a former campaign director from that outfit at the heart of political strategy, and you learn how the people around the prime minister see the world. Content removal and pressure on platforms are treated as good governance rather than a danger to speech.

One detail is hard to read as anything other than what it looks like. Within a day of the appointment being reported, McGregor deleted his X account.

Here are the honest caveats, because the case gets stronger when it stops reaching. McGregor’s own public record is campaigns, communications and, lately, tax, not content policy. His job was messaging.

There is no evidence in front of me that he personally ran online-censorship campaigns, and the clearest examples of Hope Not Hate pushing for removals came after he had left. But what it says is that Burnham has drawn his inner strategy team from the campaigning world, Hope Not Hate, which treats organised pressure to delete online speech as legitimate and effective. The people who see deplatforming as a feature now sit closer to power than the people who see it as a fault.

So, the signal from Burnham is not reassuring. He believes in regulating speech, he has the paper trail to prove it and he inherits an enforcement machine he shows no interest in dismantling while people lean on him to extend it into lawful speech.

His one privacy credential dissolves the moment you look at it, a scrapped ID card, while the more speech-relevant version, ID and age checks to post, goes ahead.

This isn’t a time to celebrate a perceived end to digital ID. There’s still a big fight ahead. Under this new agenda, the machinery keeps growing no matter who holds the keys. Britain’s new keyholder has spent two decades asking for exactly this machinery, and he now has it.

Source: https://expose-news.com/2026/07/22/burnham-scrapping-starmers-digital-id/

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