Hoist with his own petard

Fauci as Hamlet, but 'twas not so

There’s letters sealed; and my two schoolfellows,
Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged,
They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petard; and ‘t shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines
And blow them at the moon. O, ‘tis most sweet
When in one line two crafts directly meet.

William Shakespeare

This morning’s first thoughts

As in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, recent times have been tragic. Anthony Fauci and the pedestalling public-health apparatus designed and played the highest-of-stakes game → they pushed for task-oriented interventions, conflicted messaging and research priorities that resulted in the destruction of countless lives.

Years of lauding legacy-media coverage, a Presidential pardon and awards made Fauci perceivably unassailable.

But as recently revealed from The Reading Room releases - emails, FOIAs, shifting guidance, gain-of-function funding debates, lab-leak discussions, etc. - one might conclude that a petard¹ is going off under him, in spite of his apparent infallibility. In this read, Anthony Fauci is not Hamlet - the clever man who refuses to walk into the trap prepared for him - but his own enginer. Rand Paul and his team - who forced these bomb-like documents into the open - are akin to playing the Hamlet role - turning the original apparatus against its author.

Anthony Fauci, on the other hand, would clearly see himself as Hamlet: the clever expert fighting a dangerous pathogen and a wave of misinformation and political attacks. The critics, FOIA requesters, and skeptics are the engineers (enginers) setting traps. In this version, Fauci is the one who - at least for a long time - stayed ahead of them, kept institutional support and outmaneuvered the conspiracy theorists and “opposition”.

But here’s another reading using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an analogy. Perhaps both our Hamlet and the enginers were hoist with the same petard - both believing they were Hamlet. The larger web of deception, poison and revenge that Hamlet plots eventually does kill almost everyone - including himself. And by the final scene, the entire court has been destroyed by the very culture of plotting and counter-plotting they all thought they were mastering.

Once everyone starts treating the public sphere as a battlefield of clever traps, the traps tend to multiply until they catch more people than any single player intended - including the ones who played the hero.

In this way, both sides end up hoist: each camp believed it was the clever operator - the “Hamlet” - while the machinery kept expanding until it consumed them all.

Sounds to me like someone wants to ruin humanity.

To be more precise, I believe that the petard upon which Anthony Fauci hoist himself was the legacy media machine, and I believe that the petard upon which the legacy media machine hoist themselves was the “deep state”.² I believe that the legacy media - commanded by the deep state - appealed to Fauci’s lack of self-confidence and apparent need for adulation and used this to keep him on a “congratulatory” high during the entire COVID-19 era, for a reason. From million dollar prizes, to his face on doughnuts, Fauci drank it all up and as demonstrated in his diary entries, he simultaneously interwove his announced accolades with rising death counts of human beings - effectively hoist-ing himself, and all of us, up with his ‘accepted’ petard. Pardon my words dear Shakespeare, but he effectively screwed us all.

In this real-life Hamlet play, we all got poisoned, and it is up to us to fight for a best outcome knowing what we know today.

I have always seen Anthony Fauci as the perfect choice for a talking head - the deep state players may have even taken a vote on who should fulfill this role. From the white coat, to his short ‘cute’ appearance as a family guy, his decades at NIAID as indicative of merit, to the HIV scandal where he was similarly lauded for his “efforts”; all of it made him perfect for the “job”.

I am not exculpating his clear role in the COVID-19 scandal - he even had control of the POTUS to some degree for a time - but he did not act alone. Let’s remember that and make him THE FIRST PERSON to be truly held accountable for his actions on July 29, 2026, and turn this tragic play into a wonderful blessing.

Photo taken in Prague by me.

1. A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a gate or wall.

2. We all know that the legacy machine is controlled by singular individuals and self-interested groups and there’s no reason not to refer to them as the “deep state”.