Speaker 1 (00:00):
So COVID is in the news again, just in time
for a new booster or a new vaccine to be released,
they say mid September, just in time for the upcoming
presidential election. I guess we should call it the election variant.
So our Americans going to fall for this again? Are
enough Americans still fired up about the destruction that politicians
(00:24):
caused their lives, the businesses that were shut down, the
people who were denied the ability to say goodbye to
a loved one, That people who died of suicide or
overdoses because of the loneliness from government dictated lockdowns. Our
Americans going to take this again? How will we respond
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to this as a country and how far is Joe
Biden and the left willing to push it. We're going
to talk to Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute. He's
the founder and president. He's also the author of Liberty
or Lockdown. The Brownstone Institutes a nonprofit dedicated to finding
out what happened during COVID and dedicated to making sure
(01:08):
it never happens again. So stay tuned for Jeffrey Tucker. Well, Jeffrey,
it's an honor to have you on the show. You
start at the Brownstone Institute, which has been incredibly helpful
because we really haven't been getting the truth from most
of the media about COVID, and you guys have been
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working to provide that for the American people. So I'm
so glad that you started it and that it exists.
Can you believe that three and a half years later,
we still don't have any clarity about what happened to
us and why, or any of the basic facts about
what COVID is and what it does and who's at
risk and how do you avoid it and the relationship
(01:51):
of government policy to the infection rate. Like three and
a half years later, there's still not been a reckoning
over this. It's aishing. There still hasn't been a reckoning,
and it looks like we're about to, you know, get
back into the cycle of this. I got this alert
this morning from the Washington Post. Latest COVID variant threatens
to be the most adept at evading immunity. Very scary.
(02:14):
And then you know, you go through and you just
search COVID. It's in the headlines again, right, you know,
talking about how this new variant is spreading in the US,
rise in hospitalizations you know, the updated COVID shot likely
to be available just in time in mid September, you know,
and it almost makes you wonder, I mean, shouldn't they
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just call this the election variant? Yeah, there's something very
suspicious about the timing of all the stuff, since there's
no evidence whatsoever that there's something uniquely dangerous about this
new variant. There's just another variant and gets you know,
these respiratory viruses are always mutating, that's just the way
they do. Some some of these pathogens are stable and
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there are things against a witch sho can faccinate, but
others like this are constantly producing new variants. And our
immune system needs to be you know, constantly sort of
sustaining alert and upgraded through exposure. And it's this is
the way human beings have managed these sorts of things
since the beginning of time. There's nothing particularly unusual about
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the stars. Kobe two, if it was a new virus
four years ago, is now thoroughly endemic in the population,
and it's easy to manage through therapeutics and just good
health and that sort of thing. So there's no basis
for the hysteria at all. And I don't know about you,
But I you know, I think that this this all
this media generating of fear. It's not producing fear of
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the virus, it's producing fear of lockdowns. My phone has
been ringing off the hook with people asking me what
should I do? You know, I mean, we're going to
get locked down again. Can I leave the country safely?
You know what if I find myself in New York
and I can't get out? I mean, people are really scared.
I guess what worries me the most, and the biggest
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question that I continue to think about all this is
do Americans want to be free? Wow? That is a
big question. Well I don't even know how to answer that,
except to say that I think probably less so than
in previous generations. And that is a major problem that
definitely needs to be fixed. I'm not sure what led
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to the situation where everybody became so strangely compliant three
and a half years ago. I don't know it's civics
education or just spoiled through ridiculous levels of prosperity. We
have several generations now that never had to fight for anything.
So I'm not sure. And this is what worries me.
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And this is really why I started the brown Stone
Institute was to you know, figure this problem out and
to highlight the beauty of human freedom. And I've gained
a new appreciation for just how fragile it is. I
don't think I entirely understood that our fremes could be
so suddenly and quickly taken away by administrative state the
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way they did it. I never imagined I'd see anything
like that in my lifetime. So it's a genuine crisis
when you wrote the book about it, in a liberty
or lockdown, you know. But my fear too is that,
you know, I didn't get vaccinated. Every on the show,
I talked about it all the time because I think
that was one of the scariest and simultaneously you know,
dumbest moments of American history when that was being forced
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down the throats of Americans. And but what terrified me
the most, and it goes back to that question of
do Americans want to be free? There was you know,
polling by Rasmussen where nearly half of Democrats wanted to
put me and people like me who did get the
vaccine in some sort of government camp. And you can
really sort of go back in moments of history, and
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while obviously not making comparisons, but you can see how
people that are you know, quote unquote good people go
along with really bad things. And I think that that
scares me the most about where we are as a
society and where we could be heading. Yeah, I know
what you mean. When I was young and in college,
there's a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness
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of Crowds, which provides, you know, fascinating anecdotes from all
of history where people just went insane, and I always thought, wow,
look look at how crazy people used to be in
the past. That will never happen to us now because
we're too well educated and we have access to all
sorts of information. We'll never go through this. Unfortunately, we
did go through it, and it was extremely brutal, very cruel.
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The vaccine mandates, you know, eventually mutated into full scale segregation,
and I guess five cities and let me think this
would have been yeah, in late twenty twenty one and
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early twenty twenty two, So we had New York, Boston,
New Orleans, Chicago's you know, really just shut off their
their services, their public accommodations, commercial enterprises to the non vaccinated.
And they did this without any regard for the demographics
to the unvaccinated group. But you know, the largest single
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unvaccinated group in this country is members of the African
American community. So they, you know, in New York, were
excluded from libraries, theaters, restaurants, bars. It's it's astonishing. I
don't remember reading anything about that, but I looked at
the demographics and I thought, this is this is segregation,
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and and and and the New York Times loves it.
And we had you know, in those days too, there
was there was really no evidence that the vaccine was
capable of protecting people and certainly stopping the spread of
the virus. There was no evidence of that. In fact,
the euas offered for the vaccines, has never even claimed
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that they were going to do that. It's true that
Walinski and Fauci and the rest of these people, Rachel
Maddow and so on, all said this, but there was
no scientific evidence of this, and we did it anyway.
We just began to demonize, you know, the unvaccinated and
blame them for the perpetuation of the pandemic, even though
there was no evidence for that either. It was extraordinarily cruel,
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based on superstition and really a kind of unmitigated hatred
of the other. And this really happened in our times well,
and that's what it really was. It was it was
the othering of people, which we've seen throughout history, and
because there really wasn't any you know. And what was
strange it was being a rational person during all of
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this who didn't get caught up in the hysteria, who
was actually trying to look at the fat because from
a fact based rational standpoint, you could say, Okay, as
a young and healthy person, statistically, I'm just not at
risk of dying from COVID. COVID is clearly not preventing
or the vaccine is not preventing the spread of COVID.
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So therefore this is not a public health thing to
get vaccinated. I'm not protecting my neighbors by getting vaccinated.
I'm not personally at risk of the vaccine. Most vaccines
have five to ten years of safety data. This does
not MR and A is new to the market. You know,
they really use the fog of war to get it.
So considering all of that, why would I get something
(09:36):
that I don't need? That's untested, that's not going to
prevent the spread to other people. Yet if you didn't
get it, you were a monster. Yeah, and the unknown
safety profile is an interesting one. You know, how is
it that somebody people were willing to trust the CDC
and the FDA, you don't with this new technology, you know,
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with which we had had no prior experience, which hadn't
hadn't been tested. It's really astonishing that so many people
went along with us much as you know, mandating it
for for millions and millions of people, you know, and
let's not forget that. You know, the Biden administration initially
wanted to mandate it for every you know, medium sized
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and the large business in the country, and that was
quickly struck down. But that almost happened to us. But
even then, they're mandates on healthcare workers and on the
military and all well, I guess employees of government, you know,
they they were forced to get it, and most universities
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did this to their students, and now there's this really
epidemic of myocardias among students, which is you know, we're
completely silent about. We pretend like that's not happening. But
I had you know, Professor friends of mine who just said, look,
I'm not going to go along with this. I'm just
I'm leaving, and they left academia and students just said, look,
I'm not I'm not going back to school, I'm out
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of here. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do this.
That turns out to have been a very intelligent decision.
But in order to make that kind of decision, it
took a lot of personal courage, because you couldn't even
turn on the TV with that having people scream at you,
get vaccinated, get vaccinated. Your friends were yelling at you.
Everybody's yelling at your daily papers. I mean, the whole
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culture was demanding that everybody line up for their shots
without any evidence that there were going to do anything
to in the pandemic. And as you say, you know,
the demographics of this particular pathogen were so focused on
the elderly and infirm, and essentially certainly no you know
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that almost an invisible risk to young people, but even
working age adults, healthy adults were not ever in any
risk of medically significant consequences from this on. Just you know,
you're gonna get sick, and that certainly, I would include
myself in that I knew for sure that I was,
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you know, I would get COVID and that it was
going to be a bummer, you know. And that's sure
enough what happened. But you know, the idea that you
would need a vaccine or that you were willing to
take the risk, you know, with this new technology, it's
it's all crazy. And you know what's interesting about this too,
if you go back to twenty twenty and listen to
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what partisan democrats are saying in September and October about
the vaccine. They said, you're not gonna give this to me,
that's the Trump vaccine. There's no way I had to
take that. I don't want to have anything to do
with this shot. I don't know if it's what a
safety profile is. They were all saying this all over
the media, and then then the shot came out after
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the election, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, all these
same people flipped in the opposite direction and said, you're
you're you're a double and ruining public health by by
not lighting up for your shot. Amazing. Did you know
this too, that Fauci directly intervened and delaying the release
of the vaccines until after the election. People don't know that,
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but it's real true, it's a true story. Take a
quick commercial break back with Jeffrey Tucker. It's hard to
not look at the timeline and the sequencing of things
and not feel as if this was intentionally weaponized to
append a political election, you know, destroy candidate and to
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control a population of people. Yeah, and also implement a
wide range of course of policies. I'm pretty sure that
the intention was to segregate every city by vaccine status
and then give us a national vaccine passport which would
include all kinds of health information, and that that would
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be rolled into eventually a Chinese style social credit systems.
I think that was the goal. It didn't really work.
I mean, it's actually funny. In New York City or
actually the state in New York was one of the
places where they tried to play play around with this
digital vaccine passport and they never got it working, right.
Does Haveing spent you know, tens of billions of dollars
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on it. It really did flop. It was unable to
fortunate they're too incompetent, said, thank god, they're they're idiots.
It was so bad, you know, like if you got
if you got vaccinated in Connecticut. There was no way
for the New York app to take account to that.
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I mean, it really did only accommodate New York vaccination,
so nothing, and even then it just was flaky. It
was always crashing. So yeah, they finally have taken it offline,
but I think that was the intention. It didn't work.
But you know, I don't know if you've noticed this,
but I've felt now for several years, every once so
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I feel as if we've had a victory, you know,
And but I've learned not to get too co*cky about
that and go, we're winning. We're going to win this
great struggle because I feel like the bad guys in
this drama look at our victories as temporary setbacks ending. Yeah,
it's never ending. This struggle is going to go on
and on. I feel like they don't. They don't think
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everything went perfectly well, but they're waiting at and and
and ready to deploy it again. That's why you know
all the recent propaganda about you know, we've seen renewed
mask mandates and and now the FDA's approving another booster
and you know that and listeners should know this that
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the best vaccine specialists at the FDA, the real high
end serious scientists all resigned. They're gone. So you're left
now just with with bureaucrats are going to rubber stamp
anything that comes out from big pharma. And that's that's
why we got the RSV vaccine and and and all
these things. They over the over the counter birth control,
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all the stuff, and then yet another booster, yet another
you know, by variant, by valent YadA, YadA. All this
stuff is just going through as if it's nothing. These
are bureaucrats not paying any attention. They know that that
the big pharmaceutical companies pay their salary. They like to
be able to pay their mortgage and their second mortgage
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and the third mortgage, and so they're going along with
the stuff just for for career reasons. The science seems
to be just not even there anymore, and nobody's even
pretending it's it's all quite shocking. Well, and that's the
thing is, because now we're left in this atmosphere of distrust.
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And you know, I've always just been you know, like
my first couple of words when I was younger, it
was no, and then why So like I've always been
skeptical and like deeply distrustful of most things as it
you know, from birth right, this is just the way
God made me. But now it's like, I don't trust
anything that we're told. And now, you know, I went
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from previously being you know, if someone told me I
should get vaccinated for something, I would have been more
trusting of it, probably would have done it. Now I'm Mike,
I don't. Now I'm like, I don't want anything. Like
a nurse recently tried to get me to get the
flu vaccine about like you know, I like Mortal Kombat
at her like I was like, no, you know, so
now I don't trust any like I mean even like
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I mean, it would have to be I don't even
know at this point under what circ*mstance I would trust
a new vaccine. If I'm being perfectly honest, you can
be perfectly honest, And I understand your position, and I
find myself agreeing with it more and more, and and
what's what's fascinated to me, is it you know, when
I started Brownstone, people started to saying, oh, another anti
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vax tank, and I didn't even understand what that meant.
I've never met an anti vaccine. I didn't have any
anti vaccine feelings. I wasn't. I didn't think this vaccine
was necessary. I didn't. I didn't imagine really that would
be actually dangerous. But I didn't have any real biases
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about the whole thing. I was against the lockdowns, and
I knew that masking was dumb, and the plexi glass
and the dallasing with hands ader tires, you know, this
whole frenzy we went through. I was thought that was
all ridiculous. But I didn't have a particular antipathy towards
the vaccine industry. But nowadays, yeah, it's really different. I
read this whole book called, I'm sure we've heard of it,
called Turtles all the Way Down, which really examines the
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industry and detail and the history behind the vaccines, and
especially since nineteen d eighty six, since all these companies
have been indemnified, you know, against any liability for harms
from their vaccines. You know, we've just seen them proliferate
like crazy. It's as RFK says, it's it's a goal rush.
And now I've I've become gravely skeptical myself. I'm just
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not sure how many people join us in this attitude.
I'm certainly more now than before, but I'm not sure.
Part of me worries that there's enough Americans that are
not sufficiently incredulous towards these things that is going to
continue to incentivize these large pharmaceutical companies to keep cranking
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out the potions, you know, just just just to keep
their sales high and their stock price, you know, from tanking. Well,
I think what worries me is this growing schism and
in separation between the people in charge and the rest
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of America. And you know, for instance, you have former
head of the FDA who's now cashing in on the
fires board, who's on TV talking about how there's no
evidence this new variant is deadlier. However, you know it's
highly you know mutated and escaping vaccine immune systems, which,
to be honest, the other or the other the other
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variants seemed pretty adept at escaping vaccine immunitation, uh you know,
the immunity as well. Right, So, but you know, point
being is this dude's cashing in off of this pushing
fear on this new COVID variant just in time when
these vaccine manufacturers are going to be out with a
new booster, and you know, and who care, Like, these
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people just don't care about us, right, They don't care
about the safety of what they're pushing on us. Politicians
don't care about the wreckage and the damage that they
did to so many Americans, you know, because they were
celebrating with their families for Thanksgiving, Like doctor Burkes, did
you know they told you to stay at home, but
then they're hanging out with their families. They tell you
to stay at home, but then Obama's throwing ragers and
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Martha's vineyard and there's just this massive growing disconnect with
the people who are telling us what to do, who
are unscathed than the process and don't care about the
damage and the wreckage that they're leaving on the rest
of America. And like, I don't know how long that
can continue. And I think more people are waking up
to just how much bullsh*t it all is. It's creepy
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how the public discussion of all these topics that are
dominating this little session are is kind of been shut down.
I was really alarmed about the GOP debate the other
night that really none of these topics were really discussed
at all, and of course, you noticed that most of
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the advertisers that we're back in that debate were pharmac companies.
I mean, I think within the first ten minutes I
saw four ads for FDA approved drugs, and I said,
but it just wasn't a topic. I mean, you're Ronda
Santist tried to bring it up, but nobody else picked
up the thread. So the thing just sort of fizzled.
And at some point the one of the moderators asked
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Pence whether he feels that the Trump administration bears some
responsibility for the learning laws since the school closures began
under his administration. I set up. I was really excited.
I thought, oh, well, now we're going to finally get
some truth. Well you know what he did. He completely
ignored the question, completely ignored it, and they never returned
to it again. That was it. Now you mentioned Scott Godlieb.
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You know that guy is a piece of work. You know,
he goes on these these shows all the time, you know,
MSNBC and CNN and everything, and that guy rattles off
the most amazing just litany of gibberish about all the
new variants, and he's got all the names down. Pat
music X one being five in whatever that he sounds
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like this, this expert. But people don't understand about Godlieb.
You know, he was picked to be head of the
FDA in two thousand, I guess seventeen, and then left
immediately went to the Fiser board when the when Fauci
and Burkes and these people were leaning on Trump to
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sort of green light the lockdowns. And this would have
been the weekend of March fourteenth and fifteenth, use been
a Saturday and Sunday. When they were trying to figure
out just how severe the CDC edicts should be. They
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got Gottlieb on the phone and he was one of
the main influences behind the initial lockdowns. And I know
this because I think Jared Christner reports in his book,
and Godlieb said something to to to the to the
gang of people gathered there that if you think you're
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going too far, then that's probably about the right amount.
So the Godlib was massively influential. And shutting down your
churches and closing in small businesses and closing playgrounds and
the closure of the schools, and the capacity restrictions on
homes where I lived at the time, you couldn't have
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more than ten people, and and and how no matter
how big it was, so you know, weddings were off,
funerals were off, everything was off. God Leave himself had
a huge role in making all that happen and then
cashes in on all of it with a vaccine, just
to put a hind point on it. He certainly has
cashed in on all of it. And if you draw
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attention to the facts to him, he just blows up.
But yeah, there's a whole generation of sort of leaders
in industry and a media and in politics and in
academia that really need to be called to account for
what they did to us. But it is not happening.
We've just we just have this weird silence going on.
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And to your point about this disconnect between public opinion
and the ruling class sort of elites in this country,
it is growing wider by the day because everybody I know,
really everybody in this country and billions of people around
the world have lasting trauma, having grown out of the
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calamity of the last three and a half years, and
we all know about it. We're all seeking answers. We
want to know what were you thinking? You know, who
did this and why? What happened to our Bill of rights.
We have all these burning questions, we're not getting answers
to them, and meanwhile, all the sort of official molders
of the public mind are pretending like this never happened.
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There's also not been an accounting or truth telling about
the amount of damage that this is done to so
many lives, in the sense of people who died of
overdoses from depression or loneliness, suicides from depression and being
locked in people's homes, losing their jobs, not being able
to go and work, being denied a purpose in life.
You know, family members who died alone, funerals that were
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unattended because they were not a you know, family members
are not allowed to tend people who've lost businesses, you know,
people who've lost their livelihoods. It's like there just hasn't
been a full accounting, a real attempt to just truly
get to the bottom of the damage and the destruction
and the wreckage that these government policies, not COVID, but
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government policies have destroyed lives, the learning losses. You know,
a whole generation of high school students graduating, you know,
with with unable to really wouldn't count as literate by
any historical standard. I mean the number of families that
were just were separated from the travel restrictions, the divorces
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that took place, you know, over arguments about whether the
vaccinate to children. I mean, I know many cases of that.
You know, the whole vaccination question just broke up civic
groups and families and churches and bands, and the same
thing with masking. You know that that was a brutal
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period too. It's like, where's your mask, where's your mask? Well,
I don't think they really worked. Well, screw you. I mean,
it was the most divisive and culturally destructive period that
I've ever seen in my life. And everybody has a story.
There's I don't think there's any exceptions to this. People
have such sad stories to tell in the last three years,
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and you're right, there's just not been a serious reckoning,
and I you know, I don't entirely know what to
do about it. I really hope the debates the other
night we're going to get some honesty and truth about
this instead of the moderators just just just pretended like
the whole thing didn't really happen. And it's tremendously troubling.
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I have an article this morning I Brown's called the
Great Game of Let's pretend something like that, and it
really is, let's pretend that this never happened, that there's
no real crisis. And if you think about the things
that are vexing us right now in this country, like
this inflation, you know, twenty thirty percent in three years
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in grocery prices, and the housing inflation, and all the
things that are wiping that have wiped out middle class prosperity.
Those all trace to policies pursued in the name of
of COVID controls and the status of major cities in
this country, from Seattle to Portland, New York City, at
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Chicago and Boston, Hartford and so on. It's these cities
are falling apart. People are not going back to work,
Petty crime is taken over New York, and every major
city smells like weed, you know, because of all the
substances that people turn to just to get through things.
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I mean, it's it's it's maybe not quite apocalyptic, but
it's certainly headed that way. And yeah, we need some
honesty and truth about this. I really hoped beginning in
March twenty twenty that there would do that but in quickly,
and that everybody would apologize and would go on with
our lives and never do it again. That has not happened. Well,
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Amicron was the best thing that happened to this country
because I think it deprogrammed people who still thought they
could outrun and outrunnable virus. But to your point, you know,
we've talked a lot in the past sense and this
isn't the present sense. And you know, and with inflation
and the wreckage done to the economy that we're going
to be continuing to deal with for god knows how long,
the loss of freedom that you know, we may never
get back in this country. And also I just think
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the destruction of the soul of the country as well
as the soul of so many Americans. I mean, it
just seems like we have more broken people that we
have ever had before as a result of lockdowns and
the fee and the turning neighbors against neighbors and the
other ring of people. It just seems like we are
a broken nation with broken people. And it maybe we've
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always been, but it has definitely gotten worse since COVID
and since the government did this to our country. The
whole theme of the United States was believed all over
the world is this idea of freedom. And it was
instantiated in the idea of limited government with the Constitution
and guaranteed through the Bill of Rights. I mean, that
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is the theme of American history. That's our great contribution
to the world. Everybody looks in the United States for
what freedom is and what it feels like, and it's
built the greatest nation in history and so on. Then
we just just decided to get rid of it one day.
And look what it did. It just utterly You're exactly right.
It crushed the soul of this country. It robbed us
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of even things like, you know, our religious freedom. I
was talking to a east friend of mine the other
day in the Midwest, and we were talking about just
how shocking it was that for how long the churches closed,
and then the churches, you know, mask their parishioners, and
then you know that you know, even many many imposed
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vaccine restrictions. But he was talking about what it was
like and Easter of twenty twenty, all the churches were closing.
He just had some sense that he didn't go into
the priesthood to close his church to his parishioners on
Holy Week and Easter. He just he just felt like
that was not right, and so he went to his
bishop and he said, look, I'm going to open my church.
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And the bishop said, well, you can't do that. I've
absolutely forbid it. And and my priest friend friends said well,
you know what, I'm going to do it anyway, and
and you can you can just fire me if you
want to, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna do my religious duty.
And the bishop said, well, you were just you're just pretending,
(32:00):
not really gonna. You're not gonna let me just fire you.
And the priests said, look, just try me. I mean,
this is my vocation. There's my whole life. If I
don't celebrate Mass on Easter for my parishioners, what's my
life worth? And the priest and the bishop never gave
a permission, but then also stopped threatening him. So when
(32:21):
the time came, to avoid the media eyes and to
avoid a local government officials, he turned the lights extremely
low in the in his church and spread the word
quietly throughout his whole congregation that you can come celebrate
Holy Week services and Easter, but come in the back
(32:43):
interest and entrances so that the media cameras wouldn't be
able to see and park, you know, several blocks away
and scatter your cars out. And they did, and they
came in and they had really completely packed church for
that for those services. But he had to do it surreptitiously.
It's an extraordinary story because it seems simply incredible that
(33:07):
something like that would have happened in the United States,
a country that really gave this gift of religious liberty
to the world. You know, we are the greatest practitioners
of that. We put in our First Amendment and then
just one day, boom, it was gone. But it was
perfectly fine to exercise your first Amendment. If you're writing
(33:28):
burning buildings down in the streets, that was fine. But
God forbid you want to go to church, quick break,
stay with us. I actually don't know your politics, which
is probably you know, a good thing. But if you,
I mean, we all know where Joe Biden has stood
on lockdowns and vaccines, and you know, so we all
(33:49):
know his record. If you had assess some of the
Republican front runners, when you look at Trump, when you
look at to Santa's or you look at the vague.
How do you assess their response to COVID and you
know what, you might think they might handle something heading
(34:09):
down the pike if, if God forbid, they do this again.
I have big, big thoughts on that. So, speaking of Biden,
by the way, I really had every hope. Yes, I'm
very naive. I had very hope, every hope that after
the inauguration he would just say, what, we got the vaccine,
we went to this COVID thing, and now let's just
go back to Romo. He didn't. He went the opposite way.
(34:30):
He's the one who gave us the mask mandates, right,
remember this where you couldn't ride a buss to get
on the plane without it, and people are screaming at
you get that mask over here and knows it. Well, yeah,
but on the other hand, I have to breathe and
then you know, then he gave us the vaccine mandate.
So he made everything much worse. Now in terms of
(34:50):
the GOP people, you know, the p did not perform
very well, but among them all, and Vivac is an
interesting case because he's he's a good friend of mine,
by the way, and we were talking all the time
before he became president. And he talks, now, you know,
(35:11):
just a great game on all this stuff. However, his
book that's out there called A Nation of Victims is
not against these controls. I mean he was celebrating the
vaccines and he was not. He never really was against
the lockdowns that sort of thing. I think he's had
a change of heart, and I have to trust that
(35:33):
he's right about that. So now Desantists, of all the governors, well,
the best governor in the country, hands down, it was
CHRISTINEO of South Dakota and she's she was The population
in South Dakota is a little bit different than some
of these other you know, than like Georgia for camp
or even Florida for de Santist. Do you think, I mean,
(35:55):
does that have a role in it? Or am I no?
I mean she made that decision because she really didn't
believe that she as governor had the power to shut
down business as a church isn't that sort of thing.
And she was incredulous in the beginning, just and they
have you know, yeah, it's not a tremendously dense population,
but that real cities in normal life and that sort
(36:16):
she just wouldn't go along. Why she was allowed to
get away with that. You know, I have some sense.
I wonder if she were here, she would agree with
me that a large, large parts of this country just
hear the name South Dakota and go, who cares. You know,
It's just a state that doesn't matter a lot in
people's minds. So somehow she got away with it. The
(36:38):
very next state to open up was, of course, Georgia
with Kemp who started who got crucified by the Trump
administration particular. But and the other thing about the Georgia
case is that there are a lot of local lockdowns
in Georgia that he couldn't really control. But as a state,
(36:59):
he just he said, look, I'm sick of this, these
code regulations. The very next one was, of course, the Santis,
and the Santis has tremendous regrets about ever having gone
along with any lockdowns. And he's the one governor in
the country that actually apologized to his people forever having lockdown.
And he did. He did close some beaches, and he
(37:20):
did he did close some of the stories for a time.
I may be a few weeks and that sort of thing.
By I would say bye bye. Certainly, by May he
had lost all interest in lockdowns, and the spring break was,
you know, in Florida was full. And then he really
leaned in and started reading the scientific papers on his
(37:43):
own and coming to his own judgments. He got a
new group of advisors, many of whom are my friends,
and they really coached him on this idea of focused
protection and just encouraging people to just go about their lives,
but you know, if you're elderly, if you're actually vulnerable,
and then be careful in that sort of thing. So
he had over all the best policies, and he's the
(38:05):
most conversant in the issue. And also Florida today is
the only state in the country that has legislation against lockdown.
It's like, you know, there's a law and in Florida
that you cannot lockdown, and you cannot impose matt mask mandates,
you cannot impose vaccine mandates. So that's true, and it's
(38:29):
the only state for which that's true. And so I
think Descantists, among all of them, is the most scientifically literate,
the most passionate on the subject, and the one most
determined to prevent ever having a lockdown again. And so
of all the of all the people in the running
he's he's the one that that I think is most
trustworthy on the topic, despite some missteps in the early
(38:51):
early times. Now let me just speak to the Trump issue.
It's it's a little wartifying to me that he's never
really come to terms with his role in this whole thing.
He swears he did everything right it should it's obvious
even to his most strongest supporters that that that is
(39:12):
not true. And I really do think it's up to
Trump to give us a real accounting of exactly what happened.
You know, on March nine, twenty twenty, he was posting
this as a flu. It's gonna come, it's gonna go.
We're gonna be fine. We don't shut things down for
the flu. On the eleventh, he changed his mind, so
he sent out a tweet and said, we use all
(39:32):
the whole whole government response to battle and defeat this virus.
So he flipped on March tenth thereabout, and he's never
really explained to anybody what it is that happened that
caused him to change his mind and when precisely he
lost confidence that these sort of lockdowns were a good thing.
(39:56):
Deborah Burkes reports that after April first, he stopped talking
to her that he was actually angry, and and it
really took him several months, but even as late as
June and July, he was tweeting out that Sweden didn't
do it the right way. They should have locked down
to Christ. We know that's not true. By August, Scott
Atlas had arrived in Washington and they were hanging out,
(40:19):
you know, every day. They were watching movies together in
the evenings. They became best friends, eating meals together, and
Scott Outlas gave him a tutorial and virology and epidemiology
and talked him through the authentic science of this thing.
And Trump changed his mind completely. And that was when
he started telling everybody to open up. But it's all
(40:42):
very strange. He never got rid of the emergency declarations,
and he never issued any kind of executive order to
open up, and he never really got control of the
CDC and the NIH and Fauci's little regime. So it
was it was all a little bit mystifying, but I
would say it really ruined his last the last year
of the Trump presidency. And then let's also remember that
(41:06):
all the problems with mail in ballots began with the
COVID controls. Do you remember that? Yeah, So you know,
if you think the election was stolen, I mean, one
of the major contributing factors to that whole thing was
the mail in ballots and all the confusion over that
whole thing, well that was all unleashed as a result
of COVID controls. So you know, he bears some responsibility
(41:30):
for this himself. So I would just like to see
him speak honestly and openly. I hoped that Tucker Carlson
was going to do that the other night, but he didn't.
We've got to take a quick break more on the
COVID craziness. Yeah, there's not been a lot of accountability
yet with the Republican candidates of really getting the bottom
of this stuff, which is, you know, sad, because this
(41:52):
is probably one of the most defining moments, if not
theata fining moment in our lifetimes. You know, you've actually
you opened my eyes to Christy. I think I've been
tough on her, and it was ever since she cave
to the nc double A, initially on women's sports. I
think I kind of just like she lost me after that,
and so I think I probably have not given her
the recognition she deserves on COVID as a result of that.
(42:14):
So I'd probably been unfair. Yeah, she's she's good. Now,
people in South Dakota tell me that you can give
her too much credit. That actually, in fact, she faced
a tremendous amount of pressure from her own state legislature
to not lockdown and that, and I've seen these. She
was initially inclined to lockdown and go along with CDC,
(42:36):
and then the state legislature said there's no way you're
not gonna You're not gonna do that here in South Dakota.
So then she backed off. But still she was good.
She was good. She deserves a lot of credit. Before
we go, you had posted something I think it was
yesterday or something. I gave it a retweet because there
were so many people, like so many doctors that took
(42:56):
such personal hits to their reputations for telling the truth.
You know, Jay Batacharia, doctor Atlas, Martin Colder. I mean
they're colder for like, there was a long list of people,
Martin mccarrey who were truth tellers during all of this,
and he posted a column from doctor John E. Needs
of Stanford. He's a world renowned epidemiologist, he wrote, and
(43:17):
Harvey Risch. I mean, there's so many people that you know,
you could name that we're really just brave and truth
tellers and all of this. But doctor Johnny Needies wrote
this op ed in stat News at the very beginning,
right after the lockdowns. He totally reshaped my thinking on
all of this. He opened my eyes, and then since
then I looked at this as a totally different person.
(43:38):
He was kind enough to answer questions that I sent him.
You know, I did my best to get his word out,
you know, wrote op ed in the Hill, trying to
try trying to push this out to the public as
much as I could. But the sad thing is he
was right about everything from the very beginning. Licy, you
did this in in March and April of twenty twenty yep,
(43:59):
at the very beginning of all this. Because I read
I read his up ed and I said, you know what,
this guy is the old Because I worked in polling before,
and so I've worked in data. I've you know, this
is like my backgrounds in politics, but I've also I
worked as a vice president polling for a period of time,
so I you know, data is something that registers with me,
and his op ed just made so much sense, and
I read it and I said, this guy's the only
(44:20):
person that makes sense. Proceeded to ask him a billion questions.
He was kind enough to take the time to respond
to all my questions thoroughly. And this went on for
a while, and then I befriended other people, you know,
some of the names I've mentioned before of people that
were truth tellers and all this who also gave me
information and then so really from the beginning, but it
was because of him. I didn't know this stuff on
(44:40):
my own. It was solely because of doctor John E.
Needys and this op ed that he wrote in stat News.
But the point is, like all of this could have
been avoided. I mean, there were people out there who
are world renowned, right like not not even just it's
not like he's some you know, a side show out there.
I mean, this man is brilliant, and he warned us
(45:01):
from the beginning, and no one listened, or at least
not at first, when they should have. You know that
that that professional God bless you. I mean, that's that's
just great. I mean you should you deserve a metal
for that. No, but it was him. It's because of him.
You know, that article came out March seventeenth, and it's
a very powerful articles prophetic better read it. It's everything
(45:24):
he says. That article is right. He says, we don't
have the data to demonstrate that any of the stuff
isn't necessary, or that any of the means we're using
to control this virus are actually going to achieve their
ends and they're going to cause enormous amount of damage.
And you're right about his status as a scientist. You know,
he was, you know, one of the great scientists in
(45:45):
the country and a leading epidemiologist, and he had written
he had a huge publications record that was celebrated by
everybody in New York Times, Atlantic. I mean, it's just
a great a hero. And he said on Mark seventeenth
of the day after the initial a lockdown press conference
(46:06):
in Washington that this was a calamity, that we should
be stopping this. And I don't know why that article
didn't have a bigger impact than it did. We should
have everything should have stopped instantly after that article appeared.
I think that it was intentionally ignored. I think there
was a desire to push fear is what is this,
(46:28):
you know, because I remember I even got the White
House on record, and you know what, screw screw doctor
Debor Brooks. It was her. She was the one I
got her team on record saying that they were going
to do a representative sample, that they're going to do
a Sarah prevalence study to try to figure out how
deadly COVID actually was, because the problem was that we
were missing cases, you know, by like sixty five folds
(46:49):
of the fatality rate was totally skewed. So we were
operating off of a BS baseline from the beginning, which
was the point of doctor Edd's op ed, and they
said they were going to do it, and then like
they do it. No, Sore, there really wasn't even ever
a desire to from you know, and not you know,
for doctor Burkes and doctor Fauci and these people who
are supposed to these public health bureaucrats to ever actually
(47:11):
find the truth so that we are operating and making
good decisions off of a proper baseline. Ron De Santas
tells the story of getting calling up Debor Burks and
saying something to her like do you have it? Do
we know any of this stuff's actually gonna work. What
what actually is the goal? Are you trying to eradicate
this virus? Move? What's going on? And how do we
(47:32):
know any of these these great tools that you're telling
me to be are actually going to achieve their goal?
She said, she said, he says that She said to him, well,
we don't really know. It's a kind of a real
time science experiment. And after that the Santas said he
(47:52):
just began to kind of lose all faith and in
the in the deep State and their and their disease plans. Yeah,
and we shouldn't we shouldn't leave this without mentioning the
fact that there was no plan at all for what
to do when people got sick, you know, I mean,
we went through a whole year, the first year of
(48:15):
COVID when it was most wicked, without any recommendations coming
from NIHS CDC on what you should do if you're sick,
beyond take to beyond get getting ventilated, which you know
kills you, you know, eight or nine out of ten times, uh,
either from the ventilation itself or from the inevitable secondary
(48:36):
infections you get from ventilation. And the other one was
the Fauci's favorite drug called remdesivie, which is just you know,
also nicknamed run death is near so and and and
and the repurposed generic drugs were completely off the table.
I mean where I lived, there was no chance of
getting ivermectin. When I finally did get sick, and I
(48:58):
got really sick, this would have been in January of
twenty two, I could not get ivermected I finally had
to have a friend who drove from New York who
got ivermect him from India and brought it over to me.
This is in the United States of America, and I
had a doctor's prescription, but nobody would give it to me.
I mean, I went from pharmacy to pharmacy to pharmacy
(49:21):
and nobody would give it to me. So this really
happened in this country. I could talk to you forever
about this, you know, before we go. Is there anything
else you'd like to leave us with, I would say, Lisa,
we desperately need some not just a public reckoning and
a serious conversation about this, and I would even like
to have some apologies, right, but also we need serious changes.
(49:43):
The same people who did this before are still in
power now. The news the successor to what's your name
at CDC, you know is a devote is a devout
follower of Fauci. The new head of NIH is the
same thing. I mean, there's nothing has really changed, and
(50:04):
this is what we've got to fix this problem. We
need a dramatic reform so we can guarantee this will
never happen again, and we need a real reckoning. I
don't see how we move forward as a nation until
we have a really blunt public conversation about this and
some serious changes and the way the government operates to
(50:28):
make sure this never happens again. So thank you, Lisa
for doing your part to fight this for the last
three and a half years. I think it's just her
really QUI what you've done, and I'm glad you have
being on your podcast today. Well, same to you in
finding the Brownstone Institute. I read it often, and you
publish a lot of brilliant people and have a lot
of brilliant minds and a lot of truth tellers who
(50:49):
have been trying to tell us from the beginning that
this was all nonsense. So I appreciate you for starting
it and for working to get the truth out there. Well,
let's keep our chin up and keep going because I
think we can eventually win this. But even if we don't,
we're doing the right thing and we're in some sense.
(51:10):
Your voice are really really necessary, and I do believe
what Brownstone's doing is extremely important too, for the sake
of human liberty, for the sake of human dignity, for
the survival of civilization, because I tell you what, you
cannot have a free and civilized society under lockdowns. Well
said Jeffrey, Thanks so much for taking the time to
join the show. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed this
(51:31):
conversation and I appreciate you taking the time. Such a pleasure.
Thank you, Lisa. That was Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president
of the Brownstone Institute. Appreciate him taking the time to
join the show. Appreciate you at home for listening every
Monday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week.
I want to thank John Cassio, my producer, for putting
(51:52):
the show together. Until next time,
