Barbra Streisand took to Bluesky this week to announce that Dr. Anthony Fauci — the man who presided over school closures, business shutdowns, and mask mandates that upended the lives of 330 million Americans — is actually the victim of the whole COVID saga.

"Dr. Anthony Fauci has been subjected to a disgraceful witch hunt by Senate Republicans," Streisand wrote. She then called him "an American hero."

One million Americans died during COVID. Small businesses were destroyed. Children lost years of education. Families couldn't attend funerals. Grandparents died alone in nursing homes while their kids stood in parking lots. But sure — the real tragedy is that a Senate committee asked the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases some uncomfortable questions.

Streisand's full post reads like a greatest-hits album of pandemic revisionism. "He was instrumental during the AIDS crisis to stop disinformation and pushed to discover the vaccine to allow AIDS patients to live with the virus," she wrote. On COVID, Streisand declared that "Dr Fauci was a voice of reason and helped speed the development of the vaccine to prevent hospitalization." Her conclusion: "The GOP is attempting to rewrite the history of the pandemic."

That's a fascinating accusation coming from someone who is, at this very moment, attempting to rewrite the history of the pandemic.

Here's what Streisand conspicuously left out of her tribute. The Senate voted to hold Fauci in contempt. Not over politics — over his refusal to cooperate. Fauci received a blanket pardon from President Joe Biden, a pardon so sweeping it reportedly reaches back to 2014. And despite that pardon — which should have eliminated any legal exposure — Fauci pleaded the Fifth. The Senate then obtained a forensic copy of Fauci's personal cell phone. Florida is currently investigating what it describes as "potential self-dealing during the pandemic," as reported by Breitbart.

A pardoned man who pleads the Fifth and whose phone records are being forensically examined doesn't exactly scream "victim."

The "witch hunt" framing is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Senate Republicans didn't haul Fauci in because they were bored. They hauled him in because his own emails and testimony raised questions about gain-of-function research, lab leak suppression, and whether the nation's top infectious disease bureaucrat was more interested in protecting institutions than protecting people. That's not a witch hunt. That's oversight. The kind of oversight that exists specifically for unelected officials who wielded more power over daily American life than most presidents ever have.

But Streisand's post reveals something bigger than one celebrity's bad take. It's the tell. The entire establishment class — Hollywood, Washington, legacy media — has settled on a narrative: Fauci was the hero. The lockdowns were necessary. Anyone who asks questions is conducting a "witch hunt." They need this to be true because the alternative — that the people in charge got it catastrophically wrong and then covered their tracks — implicates all of them.

Streisand called Fauci "a voice of reason" during a pandemic that killed a million Americans. She posted it from the comfort of a Malibu estate where lockdowns meant the gardener couldn't come on Tuesdays.