If your kids are school-aged, then they’ll never forget it.
The year the playground had tape across it. The birthday parties over a screen. Grandma waving from the far side of a window, or giving hugs through weird plastic contraptions. Their teacher's faces in little rectangles.
This strange new civic lesson, absorbed young and absorbed deep, taught that being “good” meant doing what you were told.
I've thought about that a lot. About what it did to a generation of kids who spent some of the most formative years of their lives learning that "the experts said so" is where a conversation ends instead of where it begins.
This weekend, Rand Paul released Anthony Fauci's private pandemic diary. The dump comes just days before Fauci is scheduled to testify under subpoena and includes over a thousand pages of private writing from Fauci to himself.
Be warned: Reading it will make you angry.
On January 31st of 2020, top virologists told Fauci the new virus had a feature that raised serious doubt about whether it came from nature. Roughly half the scientists on that first call thought it looked “built” or “constructed.”
January of 2020.
Yet for years after that, the public position—the one your kids' entire world was reorganized around—was that the question of origin was settled, and that anyone who raised it was a crank. The scientists whose paper got cited as the "independent" proof were, in their own private messages, actually putting the odds of a lab origin at up to thirty percent, while publishing conclusions that ruled it out completely.
We know that they knew exactly what they were doing because some of them talked about being “careful” about what they put in writing, in case anyone ever came looking.
Fauci had set that tone himself. One of his own February 2020 emails instructed the head of the NIH to "please delete this e-mail after you read it."
So millions of kids were kept out of classrooms for a year and more, businesses were padlocked (some forever), churches were closed and funerals held over video, while neighbors turned in neighbors. A whole generation of kids absorbed the lesson that obedience is the highest virtue, and all while the people writing the rules privately recorded serious doubt in their own claims.
The diary also happens to reveal a man cataloging his own fame one line beneath the daily death count, and collecting nearly a million dollars in prize money—some of it for awards his own taxpayer-funded staff wrote the applications for—handed to him for "defending science" that it turns out everyone “in the know” knew was faulty at best.
It’s really easy to make this an email about being angry at Fauci. Listen, I think he’s probably one of the worst guys around. But anger at one man is close to useless, because removing him changes nothing about the machine that made him.
Fauci is not the disease. He's the symptom.
The real story isn't that one official fooled a country; it's that the country was so out of practice at doubting that it was easy to fool.
And the responsibility for that lands squarely on us as parents. Because that skill—the reflex to ask "wait, how do you actually know that?" before you fall in line—is not something a person is born with. It's built slowly, unglamorously, and mostly by a parent who keeps asking their kid one more question than she actually wants to answer. It's the mom at the dinner table who says "okay, but who told you that, and how would they know?" It's letting an eight-year-old argue with you and actually taking the argument seriously. It's the deeply uncool, deeply important work of raising a child who treats a credential as a claim to be examined rather than a verdict to be saluted.
That instinct is exactly the one a compliance-based school system is designed to crush.
Sit still, raise your hand, memorize the answer and then repeat it for a grade, trust the person at the front of the room, and on and on. A child trained for thirteen years to defer to (and seek approval from) authority is a child who grows into an adult who defers, and an adult who defers is exactly who "trust the science" was built for.
And Covid showed us that it works.
"Trust the science" was always a strange phrase, when you think about it. Real science is not a thing you trust. It's a method for doubting—a whole discipline invented specifically to frustrate our very human hunger to already be right. What got sold to us under that label wasn't science at all, it was deference to a handful of people whose paychecks, reputations, and prize money all depended on one answer holding up, and no other answers being considered.
Our kids are going to face their own version of this.
Maybe it won't be a virus next time. It'll probably be something we can't predict yet. But whatever it is, you can bet there will be (as there always is) a confident face on the screen with a settled answer and a strong suggestion that good people don't ask questions.
The only real defense we can give them is the courage to ask anyway.
That's a large part of why we do the work we do.
Our guidebooks for older kids and teens—including one on modern villains which definitely needs a sequel now—exist to show young people how power actually behaves when it thinks no one's watching: how it flatters itself, buys its own applause, manufactures certainty, and treats the people asking honest questions as the enemy.
We’re not out to make kids cynical, but we do want to make them hard to fool.
Our Back to School Sale is live right now. It’s the biggest one we run all year with up to 70% off:
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Back to School Bundle — $119.88 (down from $419.44). All 14 children's books, plus every workbook, parent guide, and audiobook. Each one built on a real thinker and turned into a story kids actually want to finish.
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Family Starter Pack — $229.95. Everything above, plus all three volumes of America's History with the full curriculum, videos, and audiobooks.
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Mega Bundle — $529 (down from $1,371.20). The whole library — everything in the Starter Pack, plus the 7 teen guidebooks (including Modern Villains), all 5 Choose Your Consequence novels, Tuttle Rebuttals, and 5 more ebooks.
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Business Basics Grade 3 — $39. Our brand-new financial literacy and entrepreneurship course for 8- and 9-year-olds.
Millions of kids spent a couple of their most important years learning that the “experts” had it all figured out, and that obedience to authority makes a person good. Now we have definitive proof that the people in charge were largely lying through their teeth and padding their own coffers.
Now we know that blindly following authority makes you anything but good.
We owe it to our kids to teach them the history of the world’s worst ideas, and the well-documented outcomes of following charismatic authoritarians who tell you not to think for yourself, and who use fear as a weapon of submission and control.
Fauci wasn’t the first, and he certainly won’t be the last. We should take seriously our responsibility to prepare our kids for anything the so-called experts dream up next. Parents like you are going to be leading that charge—we just make books and resources that help in the vital work you’re doing.
Thanks for trusting us.
— Connor
