Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Anthony Fauci, the Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, received much public praise but he was also vilified by right-wing conspiracy theorists as a traitor. This accusation has been ‘trending’ on the internet and in print publications and political statements for over two years. This article offers an explanation for its longevity by investigating the hypothesis that Fauci’s public persona fills a slot in the war metaphor scenario of the pandemic. On the basis of a US-UK media corpus, I chart the emergence and escalation of conspiracist accusations against Fauci in 2020-2022 and analyse their semantic-conceptual structure, using methods of cognitive scenario theory. The article concludes that the traitor-accusation was not just a polemical addition to the conspiracist war scenarios of the pandemic but was used to ‘prove’ their ‘truth’, and that Fauci’s vilification case is therefore of general significance for the analysis of conspiracy theories and war metaphors.

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