THE TOXIC FIDGET QUEEN VILLIFIES DR. FAUCI

 One of the latest additions to the MAGA Fauci pile-on is bestselling psychological spin doctor Lillian Glass. You might recall Glass as the “self-help” pundit who allegedly invented the term “toxic people”—the title of her first worldwide bestseller back in the nineties—and as the self-styled “Queen of Communications” whose claim to fame is supposedly being able to tell you everything there is to know about a person just by how they blink their eyes, cross their legs, smile, frown, sweat or scratch their…whatever.

Dr. Lillian Glass

MAGA has apparently enlisted Dr. Glass (yes, she does have a PhD, but not, as it turns out, in psychology) to do a very public hatchet job on Dr. Fauci. She is doing it in articles and also on podcasts—on Newsmax among other places.

Speaking of Newsmax, I saw an interview she did there. They came to her home. My first impression was that, for a supposed expert on body language, you would think she would be better at controlling her own.

During that apparently uncut interview, at one point a dog comes into the room and starts barking at the strangers. The camera remains on Glass but you hear the dog barking. Glass suddenly grows very tense, seems to lose track of what the interviewer is asking her, tightens her upper lip (wonder what that means?) and shouts “No!” at the dog out the side of her mouth.

The dog keeps yapping and Glass gets increasingly agitated and distracted. At one point she leans forward, upper lip still tight across her front teeth, and appears to pick an item up from an invisible table in front of her—we’re only seeing her from the chest up. Whatever it is—we can’t see her hand—her shoulder shows that she has side-armed at the dog.

Then suddenly, interrupting the interviewer, she shouts at someone else in the house to come get the dog. By then, I’d pretty much lost interest in the interview—the body language (her body language) portion had been fascinating—because from there on it was a litany of  alleged “tells” that she claimed Fauci had, and which she interpreted as proof positive that he was guilty as sin of whatever he was being accused of, and was being deceptive about it. Innocent until proven guilty…unless you fidget.

Perhaps before I engage in any further analysis of Dr. Glass’s “expertise” and motives, I should point out that she is really hard to take seriously, since, while throwing an honorable scientist like Dr. Fauci under the wheels of the MAGA deflection bus, she has described the body language of Donald Trump—arguably one of the most hostile, deceptive and insincere personalities in history—as “expressive, confident and affectionate,” noting that he has non-verbal style shifts from high-energy dominance to rare moments of strict control or vulnerability depending on the context.

Glass has opined that Trump is typically outspoken, open, and emotional in his body language during standard rallies, utilizing a wide range of vocal inflections. She sees this as positive high energy. Fact-checkers would say that it is hard to be “outspoken and open” when you are provably lying to the crowd with nearly every breath you take.

She has also claimed that Trump has “a controlled delivery” with an “evidence-driven demeanor”—perhaps it would seem so if all you are doing is looking at his tics and “tells”, and not listening to the  outrageous things he is saying that have no basis in fact. Dr. Glass has also extensively analyzed Trump’s handshakes, calling them intense signs of warmth, or as “hand hugs.” Other observers have described them as over the top, creepy, and a kind of arm wrestling to see who blinks first.

Where I can only agree with Glass is when she talks about his meetings with authoritarians like Xi Jinping. She interprets a sense of close proximity, back-pats, and smiles, and calls them “a mix of deliberate power moves and genuine mutual affection.” Bingo! Donald Trump does indeed love his autocrats and authoritarians. You won’t see him wasting any effusive love of this kind on democratic leaders.

Dr. Fauci during the Senate hearing

Compare these glowing views of the president’s body language traits with her scathing interpretation of Dr. Fauci’s discomfort before a Senate committee headed up by Rand Paul, a sworn enemy of his, and under hostile examination by other Republican conspiracy theorists. Her bias seemed to be showing when, in an interview, she talked about how open and sincere questioning by Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) had been, when, at one point, as you might recall, Moreno disrespectfully asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck he thought he was.” She might call that being open and sincere. I call it rude and inappropriate.

For her part, Lillian Glass interpreted all of Dr. Fauci’s “tells” as abjectly negative. The main thrust of her interpretation is that Dr. Fauci’s body language suggests “deception.” Glass points to signs of anxiety, facial expressions that she alleges reveal concealed emotions, the frequency of his blinking, swallowing or tightening of facial muscles. She claims Fauci’s posture during questioning became “defensive” (ya think?). That his voice changed under pressure—I keep remembering Glass with the dog. That his eye movements indicated discomfort. (He was, after all, being given the third degree by one of the GOP’s chief conspiracy theorists, who had the authority of the Senate behind him, no matter how outrageous his claims). That his smiles were “forced.” That his gestures signaled “evasiveness.” That his reactions to questions demonstrated “fear of exposure.” And that his exchanges with Rand Paul revealed “guilt rather than confidence.”

Just by looking at Dr. Fauci, Glass decided that he had “something to hide” regarding gain-of-function research, his congressional testimony, NIH funding of research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the true origins of COVID (which, so far, no one serious has been able to establish, but the spin doctor seems to have it all figured out). Graver still, in her media posts, she has explicitly described Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath” and a “megalomaniac and a narcissist”—terms more often employed by mental health specialists to describe Glass’s preferred Psychopath-in-Chief. 

Speech coach for the rich and famous

Furthermore, she is ill-equipped and hasn’t the credentials to make this call, since she is a body-language and behavioral analyst, not a psychoanalyst, and has never examined Dr. Fauci as a patient—nor could she. Indeed, her original training is more in the field of speech therapy and facial and cranial irregularities, specialties in which she skyrocketed to fame by setting up a Beverly Hills practice where she became the “king’s speech” coach to the rich and famous. So her saying this about Dr. Fauci is pretty much the same as any random person on the street calling him names.

Here’s the problem: The central weakness in Lillian Glass's criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci is that it attempts to transform inherently subjective observations about facial expressions and posture into proof of dishonesty while simultaneously adopting many of the political narratives promoted by Fauci's congressional critics. Whatever one thinks of Fauci's COVID-era decisions, body-language analysis is not evidence of deception, nor can it establish scientific misconduct. It is only slightly more than a party trick that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Proof of that is the fact that polygraphs—which depend on the body’s reactions to questioning— are inadmissible in courts of law because they are only scientifically considered to be fifty-four percent accurate at best, and open to interpretation depending on who is administering the test. Those odds aren’t much better than a coin toss.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Glass has made repeated public statements criticizing the handling of the COVID crisis by the team headed up by Dr. Fauci during the pandemic—a team, by the way, that received Presidential Commendations from then-President Trump for their “exceptional efforts” in combating the disease—and it is difficult to take her as being an “unbiased” observer.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. While Glass has always insisted that she is apolitical and that her body language interpretations are void of political prejudice, observers point out that her public comments on social media frequently lean into right-wing populist talking points, particularly regarding pandemic restrictions, cultural institutions, and public health officials. Glass has sharply and openly criticized standard public health measures, lockdowns, and Anthony Fauci personally, aligning closely with MAGA critiques of COVID-19 mandates. She has publicly called out celebrities like Julia Roberts for their praise of Fauci, framing it as a failure to recognize “toxic” (her favorite buzzword) institutional behavior.

While she avoids declaring whom she is voting for, her public commentary has frequently praised Trump’s cultural impact, while criticizing efforts to erase his name from historical venues. All of this while, as mentioned before, favorably characterizing Trump’s body language and delivery styles. She has, furthermore, routinely framed pandemic-era school closures, vaccine mandates, and masking rules as severe government overreach that destroyed businesses and personal lives, giving no credence to the idea of seeking to save lives through any means necessary in a once-in-a-century plague that nevertheless killed millions worldwide and a million in the US alone. The COVID pandemic was the kind of exceptional occurrence that, throughout history, has merited seemingly cruel general quarantines and exceptional public safety measures.

Communications experts claim that Glass’s insistence that her critiques are “not a political post” or partisan exercises, but rather objective assessments of human decency, communication, and systemic toxicity, ring hollow, since her choice of targets is predominantly liberal public figures or mainstream public health architects. This reveals no objectivity at all, but a consistently subjective anti-liberal, far-right populist alignment in spirit and practice.

Psychological and behavioral science professionals have long criticized Dr. Lillian Glass and similar high-profile self-help media commentators for promoting unproven body language “tells”. They point out that there is no empirical grounding for the concept of “toxic people”, and indicate that there are standing professional ethics rules that prohibit engaging in unsupported remote psychological analysis.

Many psychological and non-verbal communications researchers have, through their intensive studies, come to classify lie-detection through posture, eye movements, or touching the face as scientific misinformation or “junk science”. In all fairness, there are likely others, like Dr. Glass, who defend their stand with equal certainty. But empirical studies exist that tend to show that there is no single reliable non-verbal indicator or checklist of behaviors (such as micro-expressions or fidgeting—what Glass likes to call the “itchy-scratchies”—that proves a person is lying. Experts conclude that behavior depends on more than the “tells” of the moment, and relies heavily on individual baselines, cultural background, and individual context rather than any sort of universal “dictionary” of physical movement.

Some clinical psychologists have also specifically criticized the “toxic people” concept. These critics point out that terms like “toxic” or “toxicity” have no formal diagnostic utility or foundation in psychological science. They are usually, these experts say, an oversimplification in that they pigeonhole or label people as inherently toxic, which promotes a black-and-white view of human behavior that avoids addressing complex interpersonal dynamics or accountability. It tends to be a “feel-good” self-help gimmick that permits one or both parties in a relationship to lay all blame for the failure of that relationship on the other person by writing him or her off as “toxic”. That said, Dr. Glass’s body language star, Donald Trump, is clearly, in most of the world’s perception, and certainly in mine, for all it’s worth, the most toxic personality to reach global mega-power status since the eve of World War II.

Where Dr. Glass clearly falls through the cracks in professional ethics, however, is in her remote and un-credentialed analysis of Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath.”  Licensed mental health professionals are bound by ethical rules (such as the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule) forbidding the public diagnosis or psychological evaluation of public figures they have not personally examined. Media personalities like Dr. Glass who offer allegedly definitive psychological assessments of public figures like Dr. Fauci are in clear violation of this standard of empirical and clinical accountability.

But then again, since Dr. Glass is merely a bestselling, high-profile, self-help pundit rather than a mental health professional, perhaps the gold standard ethics of the psychiatric community do not apply. Instead, she is merely plying her millions of far-right fans with populist red meat that only has the subjective significance that she and her following want to give it, with no empirical evidence to prove it. And no apparent personal need on her part to be incumbered by the facts.