Sen. Bernie Moreno draws 'direct line' from Fauci's school closures to youth violence in American cities

Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno says Anthony Fauci's push to close schools during COVID created a generation of isolated, hopeless young people now driving violence in America's cities, a charge that lands harder after Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times before the Senate.

Moreno appeared on Breitbart News Daily the morning after Fauci's combative July 29 appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The freshman senator did not hold back about what he sees as the downstream wreckage of pandemic school shutdowns, and who bears responsibility for it.

Moreno told host Mike Slater that the youth violence gripping major American cities is not some mystery. It traces, he argued, straight back to Fauci's influence over governors and local officials who locked children out of classrooms for two years.

"I believe that a lot of the inner city violence that we see today in a lot of our major cities has a direct line to what this guy did closing schools."

Cleveland kids lost two years, and Moreno says they lost their futures

Moreno pointed to his home state as a case study. In Cleveland, he said, children left eighth grade when schools shut down and did not return until tenth grade. They missed the ninth-grade year entirely, what Moreno called "the most important transitional year," citing studies on the significance of that period for adolescent development. He did not name specific studies.

The consequences, as Moreno described them, went far beyond academic setbacks. These were children trapped in difficult home environments, cut off from structure, meals, and any sense of forward motion.

"These kids don't feel like they have a future. They were shut inside of sometimes not great family situations. A lot of these kids, this is the only meal they had was what they had at school. They felt isolation, and now you see this lashing out of youth violence. This youth violence epidemic is absolutely the result of this."

Moreno's argument is not that Fauci personally padlocked school doors. It is that Fauci used his authority and influence to pressure state and local leaders into shutdowns that lasted far longer than the evidence justified, and that the people who paid the price were children in the poorest neighborhoods in the country.

Fauci's diary contradicts his own testimony, Moreno charges

The senator went further, accusing Fauci of lying about his role. Moreno said Fauci claimed during Senate testimony, "I had nothing to do with shutting down schools." But Moreno alleged that Fauci's own personal diary, which has since been released to the public, tells a different story.

"He bragged about the fact that he convinced these morons, like for example Governor Cuomo, to shut down schools. In my own state, by the way, my governor, I take no pleasure because he's a Republican governor, but he shut down schools too."

Moreno did not spare his own party. He acknowledged that Ohio's Republican governor also closed schools, making clear his criticism is about the policy and its architect, not partisan point-scoring. That willingness to name a Republican failure lends weight to the broader charge: Fauci's influence crossed party lines, and so did the damage.

The release of Fauci's personal COVID diaries has already raised serious questions about the gap between what Fauci knew privately and what he told the public. Moreno's allegation, that the diary contains boasts about convincing governors to shut down schools, adds another layer, though S1 does not provide direct diary quotes to verify the specific claim.

Moreno also recalled the atmosphere of pandemic enforcement, describing conditions that "got dystopian." He referenced a mother who was tased and physically removed from a high school football game for not wearing a mask outdoors, while Fauci himself was photographed at a baseball game without a mask, despite telling Americans they had to wear one.

115 Fifth Amendment invocations in a single hearing

Moreno's broadside came less than 24 hours after Fauci's stonewalling before the Senate committee chaired by Sen. Rand Paul. The Washington Examiner reported that Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment approximately 115 times during the hearing, refusing to answer questions from senators of both parties about his handling of the pandemic.

Fauci arrived under subpoena but armed with a legal strategy built around silence. He told the committee he was invoking his constitutional right against self-incrimination, despite holding a preemptive pardon issued by President Biden before he left office in 2025. That pardon covered potential federal offenses between 2014 and the end of Biden's presidency.

Republicans argued the pardon made the Fifth Amendment claim legally dubious, if Fauci cannot be prosecuted for the covered conduct, what exactly is he protecting himself from? AP News reported that Paul announced the committee would vote the following week on whether to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions. Republicans also noted that a pardon does not shield Fauci from perjury charges for any false statements made during the hearing itself.

Paul did not hold back in his assessment of the day.

"All he had to do today was tell the truth. If he testified and told the truth, even if he admitted to destroying thousands of records, which we think happened, there's no penalty attached. It would just be the truth."

Fauci, for his part, framed the entire proceeding as a political trap. He told the committee that Paul's "obvious obsession" with prosecuting him meant any testimony would simply be used to justify putting him "behind bars." Sen. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat, echoed that framing, saying, "This hearing is designed to entrap you."

The declassified documents released earlier alleging Fauci lied to Congress and steered intelligence agencies away from the lab leak theory provide critical background for understanding why senators from both parties pressed him so hard, and why his refusal to answer carried such political weight.

Fauci's diary revealed private knowledge that contradicted public claims

National Review reported that the hearing was prompted in part by the release of Fauci's personal diary, which revealed significant gaps between his private knowledge and his public statements. In a February 1, 2020 call with scientists, 10 of 12 participants felt "deliberate insertion was possible" regarding COVID-19's origins. Eight days later, Fauci publicly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory.

The diary also showed that Fauci privately agreed the COVID mortality rate was "0.2, 0.3%," while he testified before Congress that the rate was between one and three percent, a tenfold difference at the high end. That gap matters because the higher mortality estimate was used to justify the very lockdowns and school closures Moreno now blames for a generation of lost children.

Sen. Paul released over 1,000 pages of Fauci's pandemic-era diary, and the discrepancies have fueled demands for accountability that extend well beyond the hearing room. Just The News reported that the Florida attorney general's office launched its own investigation into Fauci following what it called his "lack of candor" at the hearing.

The diary entries showing Fauci recruited allies including a Washington Post reporter to manage fallout from earlier controversies suggest a pattern: a public official who treated transparency as a threat to be managed rather than an obligation to be honored.

Moreno's charge connects policy failure to human cost

What makes Moreno's argument distinct from the broader Fauci accountability debate is its focus on consequences rather than process. Most of the Senate hearing centered on gain-of-function research, lab leak origins, and whether Fauci lied under oath. Moreno shifted the frame to the children, specifically poor, urban children, who bore the heaviest burden of school closures and have received the least attention since.

His argument carries an implicit rebuke of the progressive establishment that championed prolonged school closures in the name of public health. Teachers' unions fought to keep schools closed. Blue-state governors complied. And the children who suffered most were disproportionately in the low-income, minority communities that those same leaders claim to champion.

Moreno did not provide specific data linking school closures to youth violence rates, and the causal chain he describes, isolation, missed schooling, hopelessness, violence, is his own characterization. But the underlying facts are not in dispute: schools in cities like Cleveland closed for roughly two years, children in those systems lost enormous ground, and youth violence in American cities has surged in the years since.

The Slack messages released by Sen. Paul showing COVID paper authors privately doubted their own conclusions add to a broader picture of a public health establishment that suppressed inconvenient truths during the pandemic, truths that might have shortened the very closures Moreno now condemns.

Fauci, meanwhile, sat before the Senate and said nothing 115 times. He offered no defense of the school closures, no accounting for the children who fell through the cracks, and no explanation for why his private writings appear to contradict his public testimony. He simply invoked his rights and waited for the hearing to end.

When the people who made the decisions refuse to answer for them, the people who lived with the consequences deserve to know why. Moreno, at least, is asking.