We are finally getting a clearer picture of what happened during COVID. Not because the people who locked us up, masked our faces and forced unproven chemicals into our bodies have suddenly become transparent, but because Anthony Fauci’s COVID-era diary is coming into public view.

This long document makes one thing painfully clear: the people who forced us to surrender our lives to their expertise did not have the expertise they claimed.

At best, they were guessing.

And when their guesses failed, they did not retreat. They didn’t come clean. They doubled down.

Our health, our freedoms, our bodies, our economy, our children’s education were all less important than their unchallenged status as the infallible elite.

Yes, Fauci’s diary shows his arrogance. Yes, he seems incapable of admitting error. Yes, he was willing to make “majestic leaps” ahead of the evidence while insisting the rest of us follow his orders.

But Fauci is merely a symptom of something more dangerous.

Government is at its most powerful and dictatorial precisely when it knows the least.

An unknown crisis arrives — and crisis always involves the unknown — and politicians panic. Bureaucrats come up with “answers.” They tell us foundational rules — individual liberty, open debate, fiscal restraint, bodily autonomy and just plain sense — must be suspended.

Then they spend money they do not have to keep the whole madness alive.

And with the media as cheerleader, they scare the hell out of people to make sure nobody asks uncomfortable questions.

Colorado did not merely watch this happen from the sidelines. We did it to ourselves.

Gov. Jared Polis and our local governments put you under house arrest. They closed businesses. They restricted worship. They suspended your right to peaceably assemble. They turned neighbors into hall monitors. They treated people trying to earn a living as dangers to society.

With the press as their enforcers, they canceled people who refused to mask or take their jab as “murderers,” costing many their livelihoods and personal relationships.

Workers were told their jobs were nonessential. You are nonessential!

Families were separated as they had to view their loved ones behind glass windows outside nursing homes.

Kids were told their smiles, their speech and their ability to see other people were somehow less important than obeying unseen adults in centers of governmental power who did not know what they were doing.

And in the cruelest act of all, they robbed children of school.

As his diaries prove, they knew young people were the least at risk of COVID, yet they injured our young the most.

“Remote learning” was no learning. It was cruel isolation.

For special-needs children like my son who has Down syndrome, it was punishment for a crime they didn’t commit. This crime wasn’t done by Fauci, but by feckless Colorado leaders.

These kids who learn through personal contact, social interaction, speech therapy, occupational therapy and the daily structure of being around other human beings were abandoned.

That lost time cannot be made back in a government program. This theft compounds over a lifetime.

The people who shut down our schools, our world, will say they were following the science. Fauci’s diary ought to make us ask: What science? Whose science?

Why isn’t the press doing with COVID what they did to Nixon after Watergate, ruthlessly asking what did you know and when did you know it?

Because this wasn’t just a mass injustice of government. It was a mass failure of the Fourth Estate.

If the nation’s top COVID bureaucrat was privately acknowledging uncertainty, failure and a lack of meaningful evidence, why did Colorado officials act as if disagreement itself was immoral?

They also used money we did not have.

The Colorado COVID response exploded government spending and pushed more people into government dependence. Medicaid enrollment in Colorado skyrocketed, and now the state faces the bill.

The inflation that followed the federal printing of money was not an act of God. The budget crisis coming to Colorado is not a mystery.

The next unknown crisis will come. And when it does, politicians will again tell us fear requires obedience.

They will again promise safety in exchange for freedom.

They will again insist there is no time for debate, evidence or restraint.

Colorado must remember what happened when we believed them.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.