August 28, 2023 • 51 mins
In this episode, Lisa interviews Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, about the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on American society. The conversation covers topics such as the lack of clarity and truth surrounding COVID-19, the fear generated by the media, erosion of personal freedoms, demonization of unvaccinated individuals, vaccine mandates, unknown safety profile of vaccines, and the impact on different demographics. They also discuss skepticism and distrust towards the COVID-19 vaccine, the disconnect between public opinion and the ruling class, the lasting trauma caused by the pandemic, and the need for accountability and truth-telling. The Truth with Lisa Boothe is part of the iHeartRadio Podcast Network - new episodes debut every Monday and Thursday.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So COVID is in the news again, just in time
for a new booster, 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
are Americans going to fall for this again? Are enough
(00:20):
Americans still fired up about the destruction that politicians 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. Are Americans
(00:42):
going to take this again? How will we respond 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 Institute's a nonprofit dedicated to finding out what
(01:05):
happened during COVID and dedicated to making sure it never
happens again. So stay tuned for Jeffrey Tucker. Well, Jeffrey,
it's an honor to have you on the show. You
started the Brownstone Institute, which has been incredibly helpful because
we really haven't been getting the truth from most of
(01:26):
the media about COVID, and you guys have been working
to provide that for the American people. So I'm so
glad that you started it and that it exists.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
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 then the
relationship of you know, government policy to the infection rate.
Three and a half years later, there's still not been
(01:58):
a reckoning over this.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Astonishing 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 evating immunity. Very scary. 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
(02:20):
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 just call
this the election variant?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, there's something very suspicious about the timing of all
this stuff, since there is 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 there are things against the witch
(02:58):
Shoe can vaccinate, 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 the SARS Kobe two, if it was
(03:20):
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, this, all this media generating a fear.
(03:40):
It's not producing fear of 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.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I guess what worries me the most, and the biggest
question that I continue to think about all this is
do Americans want to be free?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
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 to a situation where everybody
became so strangely compliant three and a half years ago.
(04:36):
I don't know if thee 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. And this is really
why I started the Brownstone Institute was to you know,
figure this problem out and to highlight the beauty of
(04:57):
human freedom. And I've gained a new appreciation for just
how fragile it is. I don't think I entirely understood
that our freedoms could be so suddenly and quickly taken
away by administrative state the way they did it. I
never imagined I'd see anything like that in my lifetime.
So it's a genuine crisis.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
When you wrote the book about it, you know, liberty
or lockdown, you know. But my fear too is that,
you know, I didn't get vaccinated ever. On the show,
I talk 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
down the throats of Americans. And but what terrified me
(05:38):
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
while obviously not making comparisons, but you can see how
(06:00):
well people that are you know, quote unquote good people
go along with really bad things. And I think that
scares me the most about where we are as a
society and where we could be heading.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, I know what you mean. When I was young
and in college, there's a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds, which provides, you know, fascinating
anecdotes from all of history where people just went insane,
and I always thought, Wow, 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
(06:31):
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. The vaccine mandates eventually mutated
into full scale segregation in I guess five cities in
(06:54):
let me think this would have been, yeah, in late
twenty twenty one and early twenty twenty two. So we
had New York, Boston, New Orleans, Chicago's you know, really
just shut off their services, their public accommodations, commercial enterprises
(07:15):
to the non vaccinated, and they did this without any
regard for the demographics to the unvaccinated group. But you know,
the largest single unvaccinated group in this country is members
of the African American community. So they, you know, in
New York forty were excluded from libraries, theaters, restaurants, bars.
(07:40):
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, 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, you know,
(08:02):
stopping the spread of the virus. There was no evidence
of that. In fact, the euas offered for the vaccines,
never even claimed that they were going to do that.
It's true that Woolenski 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,
(08:24):
the unvaccinated and blame them for the perpetuation of the pandemic,
even though there was no evidence for that either. It
was extraordinarily cruel based on superstition and really a kind
of unmitigated hatred of the other. And this really happened
in our times.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Well, and that's what it really 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
was being a rational person during all of this who
didn't get caught up in the hysteria, who was actually
trying to look at thet because from a fact based
(09:02):
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. So therefore this
is not a public health thing to get vaccinated. I'm
not protecting my neighbors by getting vaccinated. Not personally at
(09:23):
risk of the vaccine. Most vaccines have five to ten
years of safety data. This is not MR and A
is new to the market, you know, they really use
the fog of word to get it. So considering all
of that, why would I get something 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
(09:43):
a monster.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, and the unknown safety profile is an interesting one.
You know, how is it that so many people were
willing to trust the CDC and the FDA, you know,
with this new technology, you know, 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,
(10:08):
much less you know, mandating it for for millions and
millions of people, you know, and let's not forget the
you know, the Biden administration initially wanted to mandate it
for every you know, medium sized in the large business
in the country. That was quickly struck down. But that
almost happened to us. But even then, their mandates on
(10:28):
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 did this to their students,
and now there's this really epidemic of myocarditis among students,
which is you know, we're completely silent about we pretend
(10:49):
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 they left academia and students just said, look, I'm
not I'm not going back to school, I'm out of here.
I'm not gonna I'm not going to do this. That
turns out to have been a very intelligent decision. But
(11:09):
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 vaccinate, get vaccinate. Your friends are yelling at you,
everybody's yelling at your daily papers. I mean, the whole
culture was demanding that everybody line up for their shots
without any evidence that they were going to do anything
in the pandemic. H And as you say, you know,
(11:33):
the demographics of this particular pathogen were so focused on
the elderly and infirm and essentially certainly no you know,
that almost invisible risk to young people, but even working
age adults, healthy adults were not ever in any risk
(11:56):
of medically significant consequences from this on. Just yeah, you're
gonna get sick, and that certainly I would include myself
in that. I knew for sure that I was, 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,
(12:19):
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 what partisan
democrats are saying in September and October about the vaccine.
They said, you're not going to give this to me,
that's the Trump vaccine. There's no way I got to
take that. I don't want to have anything to do
(12:40):
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
the election, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, all these
same people flipped in the opposite direction. They said, you're
a devil and ruining public health by not lining up
for your shot. Amazing. Did you know this too, That
(13:03):
Fauci directly intervened and delayed the release of the vaccines
until after the election. People don't know that, but it's
really true. It's a true story.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
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 a candidate,
(13:32):
and to control a population of people.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, and also implement you know, 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 be rolled into
(13:57):
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 that stayed
in New York was one of the places where they
tried to play around with this digital vaccine passport, and
they never got it working right, just having spent tens
of billions of dollars on it. It really did flop.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
It was unable to Unfortunately, they're too incompetent, you real,
Thank god, they're idiots.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
I mean, it really did only accommodate New York vaccination,
so nothing, and even then it just was flaky. It
(14:50):
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 one why
I feel as if we've had a victory, you know,
and but I've learned not to get too cocky about
that and go, we're winning. We're going to win this
(15:10):
great struggle because I feel like the bad guys in
this drama look at our victories as temporary setbacks.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
It's never right.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, it's never ending. This struggle is going to go
on and on. I feel like they didn't. They don't
think everything went perfectly well, but they're waiting and ready
to deploy it again. That's why you know all the
recent propaganda about you know, we've seen renewed mask mandates
(15:40):
and and now the FDA is a proven another booster.
And you know that and listeners should know this that
the best vaccine specialists at the FDA, the real high
end serious science is 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
(16:02):
that's why we got there s fe vaccine and and
and all these things, the over the over the counter,
birth control, all the stuff. And then you get 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
(16:23):
that the big pharmaceutical companies pay their salary. They like
to be able to pay their mortgage and their second
mortgage and the third mortgage, and so they're going along
with the stuff just to just to 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.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Well, and that's the thing is because now we're left
in this atmosphere of distrust. 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
(17:06):
of those 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 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 Mike, I don't. Now I'm like, I
don't want anything. Like a nurse recently tried to get
(17:28):
me to get the flu vaccine about like you know,
I like Mortal Kombat, Hitor Like I was like, no,
you know, So now I don't trust any like I
mean even like I mean, it would have to be
I don't even know at this point under what circumstance
I would trust a new vaccine. If I'm being perfectly honest.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
You can be perfectly honest, and I I understand your position,
and I find myself agreeing with it more and more.
And what's what's fascinating to me is that, you know,
when I started Brownstone, people started saying, oh, another anti
vax and I didn't even understand what that meant. I've
never met an anti vaccine. I didn't have any anti
(18:08):
vaccine feelings. I didn't think this vaccine was necessary. I
didn't imagine really that would be actually dangerous. But I
didn't have any real biases about the whole thing. I
was against the lockdowns, and I knew that masking was dumb,
and the plexi glass and the dusting with hand saturnized,
you know, this whole frenzy we went through. I thought
(18:29):
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 industry in detail and the history behind the vaccines,
and especially since nineteen day six, since all these countries
(18:52):
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 a goal rush.
And now I've become gravely skeptical myself. I'm just not
sure how many people join us in this attitude. I'm
(19:13):
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 out
the potions, you know, just just just to keep their
(19:36):
sales high and their stock price, you know, from tanking.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Well, I think what worries me is this growing schism
and in separation between the people in charge and the
rest of America. And you know, for instance, you have
former head of the FDA who's now cashing in on
the Fizer board, who's on TV talking about how there's
(20:03):
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
variants seemed pretty adept at escaping vaccine immunation, uh, you
know immunity as well. Right, So, but you know point
being is this dude's cashing in off of this pushing
(20:25):
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 and who can like
these 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
(20:45):
were celebrating with their families for Thanksgiving, Like doctor Burks,
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
in 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
(21:07):
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 bullshit it all is.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
It's creepy how the public discussion of all these topics
that are dominating this little session 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
(21:38):
most of the advertisers that were backing that debate were
pharma companies. I mean, I think within the first ten minutes,
I saw four ads for FTA Proved Drugs and I thought,
h but it just wasn't a topic. I mean, your
Rond de Santis 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
(22:01):
moderators asked Pence whether he feels that the Trump administration
bears some responsibility for the learning loss 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
(22:24):
mentioned Scott Gottlieb. 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 New's X one, you know,
(22:44):
B and five in whatever. He sounds like 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 toenty seventeen and then left immediately went to
the piz Award when when Fauci and Burks and these
(23:08):
people were leaning on Trump to sort of green light
the lockdowns, and this would have been the weekend of
March fourteenth and fifteenth, because Saturday and Sunday, when they
were trying to figure out just how severe the CDC
(23:28):
edicts should be, they got Gottlieb on the phone and
he was one of the main influences behind the initial lockdowns.
And I know this because I think Jered Christian reports
in his book, and Gottlieb said something to the gang
of people gathered there that if you think you're going
(23:52):
too far, then that's probably about the right amount. So
Godleeb was massively influential and shutting down your churches and
closing small businesses and closing playgrounds, and the closure of
the schools, and the capacity restrictions on homes where I
(24:13):
lived at the time, you couldn't have more than ten
people and your house, no matter how big it was,
So you know, weddings were off, funerals were off, everything
was off. Godly himself had a huge role in making
all that happen.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
And then cash is in on all of it. With
the vaccine.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Just to put a hind point on it, he certainly
has cashed in on all of it. And if you
draw attention to the facts to him, he just blows up.
But yeah, there's a whole generation of sort of leaders
in industry and media and in politics and in academia
that really need to be called to account for what
(24:52):
they did to us. But it is not happening. We've
just we just have this weird silence going on. 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,
(25:14):
and really everybody in this country and billions of people
around the world, have lasting trauma, having grown out of
the 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
(25:35):
getting answers to them. And meanwhile, all the sort of
official molders of the public mind are pretending like this
never happened.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
There's also not been an accounting or truth telling about
the amount of damage that this has done to so
many lives, in the sense of people who died of
overdoses from depression or loneliness, suicides from depression, of being
locked in people's homes, losing their jobs, not being able
to go into work, being denied a purpose in life.
You know, family members who died alone, funerals that were
(26:09):
unattended because they were not 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
(26:31):
government policies have destroyed lives.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
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 that took place, you know,
(26:57):
over arguments about whether the vaccinates to children. I mean,
I know many cases of that. 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 period too. It's like, where's your mask?
(27:17):
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 this. People have such sad stories to tell
over the last three years, and You're right, there's just
(27:37):
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 the moderators just
just just pretended like the whole thing didn't really happen,
and it's tremendously troubling. I have an article this morning
(27:59):
on Brown 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 in grocery prices, in the housing inflation,
(28:23):
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 Chicago and Boston, Hartford and so on.
(28:46):
It's these cities are falling apart. People are not going
back to work, Petty crime has 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. I mean, it's it's it's maybe not
(29:07):
quite apocalyptic, but it 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 but in
quickly and that everybody would apologize and we'd go on
with our lives and never do it again. That has
not happened.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, Omicron was the best thing that happened to this
country because I think it deprogrammed people who still thought
they could outrun an outrunnable virus. But to your point,
you know, we've talked a lot in the past sense,
and this is in 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
(29:46):
I just think 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
(30:11):
maybe we've always been, but it has definitely gotten worse
since COVID and since the government did this to our country.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
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 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
(30:41):
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 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
(31:03):
talking about just how shocking it was that for how
long the church has closed, and then the churches, you know,
mask their parishioners, and then you know that you know,
even many many imposed vaccine restrictions. But he was talking
about what it was like in 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
(31:26):
church to his parishoners on Holy Week in Easter. 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 and the bishop said, well, you
can't do that. I absolutely forbid it. And my priest
friend friend said, well, you know what, I'm going to
do it anyway, and you can just fire me if
(31:51):
you want to, but I'm going to do my religious duty.
And the bishop said, well, you're just you're just pretending,
not really gonna. You're not gonna let me just fire you.
And the priest 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
(32:12):
life worth? And the priests and the bishop never gave
him permission, but then also stopped threatening him. So when
the time came, to avoid the media eyes and to
avoid local government officials, he turned the lights extremely low
in the in his church and spread the word quietly
(32:37):
throughout his whole congregation that you can come celebrate Holy
Week services and Easter, but come in the back interest
and entrants 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 had really completely packed church for that for
(32:59):
those services. But he had to do it surreptitiously. It's
an extraordinary story because it seems simply incredible that 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're the greatest practitioners of that.
We put it in our First Amendment, and then just
(33:20):
one day, boom, it was gone.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
But it was perfectly fine to exercise your First Amendment.
If you're writing 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 a good thing, but I mean, we
(33:43):
all know where Joe Biden has stood on lockdowns and vaccines,
and you know, so we all know his record. If
you had assess some of the Republican front runners, when
you look at Trump, when you look at Disanta's or
you look at vi Vague, how do you assess their
response to COVID and you know what, you might think
(34:07):
they might handle something heading down the pike if, if
God forbid, they do this again.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
I have 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, well, we got the vaccine,
we went to this COVID thing, and now let's just
go back to normal. He didn't. He went the opposite way.
He's the one who gave us the mask mandates, right,
remember those where you couldn't ride a bus or get
(34:35):
on the plane without it, and people are screaming at
you get that mask over here, and now I was well, yeah,
but on the other hand, I have to breathe. And
then you know, then he gave us the vaccine mandates.
So he made everything much worse. Now in terms of
the GP people, you know, the did not perform very well,
(34:57):
but among them all and Vivac is an interesting case
because 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, just a great game
on all this stuff. However, his book that's out there
(35:18):
called The 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 he's right about that. So now DeSantis,
(35:38):
of all the governors, well the best governor in the country,
hands down, it was Christino of South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
And she's she's the population in South Dakota is a
little bit different than some of these other you know,
than like Georgia for Kemp or even Florida for DeSantis.
Do you think, I mean, does that have a role
in it? Or am I no?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
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 is 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's real city is in normal life, and that
sort she just wouldn't go along. Why she was allowed
(36:19):
to get away with that, you know, I have some
sense I wonder if she were here, if she would
agree with me that a large large parts of this
country just hear the name South Dakota and go, hey,
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 very next state to open up was,
(36:39):
of course Georgia, with with Kemp who started who got
crucified by the Trump administration particularly. 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 he just he said, look, I'm
(37:01):
sick of this these code regulations. The very next one was,
of course DeSantis, and DeSantis 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 did he did close some of the stories
(37:22):
for a time, maybe a few weeks, and that sort
of thing. Bye, 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 own and coming to his own judgments.
(37:44):
He got a new group of advisors, many of whom
were 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, then be careful in that sort
of thing. So he had over all the best policies,
and he's the most conversant in the issue. And also,
(38:08):
Florida today is the only state in the country that
has legislation against lockdown. It's like, you know, there's a
law in Florida that you cannot lockdown and you cannot
impose mask mandates, you cannot impose a vaccine mandates. So
that's true. It's the only state forwards that's true. And
(38:30):
so I think descientists, 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 the of all the people in the running,
he's the one that I think is most trustworthy on
the topic, despite some missteps in the early early times.
(38:52):
Now let me just speak to the Trump issue. It's
a little vertifying 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 is not true,
(39:13):
and I really do think it's up to Trump to
give us a real accounting of exactly what happened. You know,
on March ninth, 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'll use all the whole
(39:33):
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 Burgh reports that after April first, he stopped talking
to her, that he was actually angry, 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, because
we know that's not true. By August, Scott Outless had
arrived in Washington and they were hanging out, you know,
(40:20):
every day, they were watching movies together in the evenings.
They became best friends, eating meals together, and Scott Outless
gave him a tutorial and urology 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 very strange.
(40:42):
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 year of the Trump presidency.
(41:03):
And then let's also remember that 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
(41:24):
was all unleashed as a result of COVID controls. So
you know, he bears some responsibility for this himself. So
I would just like to see him speak honestly and openly.
I hoped that Tucker Carlsoner was going to do that
the other night, but he didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I'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
is probably one of the most defining moments, if not
the defining moment in our lifetimes. You know, you've actually
you opened my eyes to Christine. Know. I think I've
(42:00):
been tough on her, and it was ever since she
cave to the NCAA 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.
So I've probably been unfair.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
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 that and I've
seen these she was initially inclined to lockdown and go
along with CDC, and then the state legislature said, there's
(42:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
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 such personal hits to their reputations for telling the truth.
You know, Jay Baticharia, doctor Atlas, Martin Colder, I mean
they're colder. For like, there was a long list of
people Martin McCarey who were truth tellers during all of this,
(43:09):
and he posted a column from doctor John E. Neides
of Stanford. He's a world renowned epidemiologist. He wrote in
Harvey Risch, I mean, there's so many people that you know,
you can name that were really just brave and truth
tellers and all of this. But doctor John E. Neides
wrote this up ed in stat News at the very beginning,
right after the lockdowns. He totally reshaped my thinking on
(43:32):
all of this. He opened my eyes and then since
then I looked at this as a totally different person.
He was kind enough to answer questions that I sent him.
You know, I did my best to get his word out,
you know, roteap ed in the hill, trying to try
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.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Uh LISSI you did this in March, in April of
twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Yep, at the very beginning of all this. Because I
read his I read his up ed and I said,
you know what, this guy's 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 pulling for
a period of time, so I you know, data is
something that registers with me. And his obed just made
so much sense. And I read it and I said,
(44:19):
this guy is the only 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
(44:39):
didn't know this stuff on my own. It was solely
because of doctor John Edie E. Needy's in this opbed
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 even just it's not like he's some you know,
side show out there. I mean, this man is brilliant
and he warned us from the beginning, and no one listened,
(45:04):
or at least not at first when they should have.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
You know, that ought that that professional God bless you.
I mean that's just great. I mean you should you
deserve a medal for that.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No, but it was him. It's because of him.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
You know. That article came out March seventeenth, and it's
a very powerful article. Is prophetic. You better go read it.
It's everything 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 as virus are actually going to
achieve their ends. And they're going to cause enormous amount
(45:37):
of damage. And you're right about his status as a scientist,
you know, he he was, you know, one of the
great scientists in the country and at a leading epidemiologist,
and he had written, he had a huge publications record
that was celebrated by everybody in New York Times, the Atlantic.
(45:58):
I mean, he's just a great now hero. And he
said on March seventeenth, the day after the initial uh
A lockdown press conference 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
(46:19):
article appeared.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
I think that it was intentionally ignored. I think there
was a desire to push fear is what is this?
You know, because I remember I even got the White
House on record, and you know what, screw it, 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
(46:40):
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 fold,
so the fatality rate was totally skewed. So we're operating
off of a BS baseline from the beginning, which was
the point of doctor E. Nei D's a ED and
they said they were going to do it, and then
like they do it. No, So there really wasn't even
(47:03):
ever a desire to from you know, and not you know,
for doctor Burke's and doctor Fauci and these people who
are supposed to these public health bureaucrats to ever actually
find the truth so that we are operating and making
good decisions off of a proper baseline.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Ron DeSantis tells the story of getting calling up Debora
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? I mean, what what's going on? And how
do we know any of these these great tools that
you're telling me to implement are actually going to achieve
their goal? She said, she said. He says that she
(47:40):
said to him, well, we don't really know. It's a
kind of a real time science experiment. And after that,
Desantas said, he 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
(48:03):
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 COVID, when it was most wicked,
without any recommendations coming from nih CDC on what you
should do if you're sick beyond take biband, get getting ventilated,
(48:26):
which you know kills you, you know, eight or nine
out of ten times, either from the ventilation itself or
from the inevitable secondary infections you get from ventilation. And
the other one was the Fauci's favorite drug called remdesivir,
which is just you know, also nicknamed run death is
Near so and and and the repurposed generic drugs were
(48:52):
completely off the table. I mean, where I lived, there
was no chance of getting iromactin. When I finally did
get sick, and I got really sick, this would have
been in January of twenty two, I could not get
I remced I finally had to have a friend who
drove from New York who got I remixed him from
India and brought it over to me. This is in
(49:14):
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 and nobody would
give it to me. So this really happened in this country.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I could talk to you forever about this, you know,
before we go. Is there anything else you'd like to
leave us.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
With, I would say, Liza, we desperately need some you know,
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. The same people who
did this before are still in power now. The successor
to what's her name at CDC, you know, is a
(49:54):
devote as a devout follower of Fauci. The new head
of NIH is the same thing. I mean, there's nothing
that's really changed, and 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
(50:14):
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 in the way
the government operates to 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
(50:34):
think it's just heroic what you've done, and I'm glad
you have me on your podcast today.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Well, let's just keep our ching up in keep going,
because I think we can eventually win this. But even
if we don't, we're doing the right thing. And in
some sense, your voice is 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,
(51:18):
for the survival of civilization. Because I tell you what
you cannot have a free and civilized society under lockdowns.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Well said Jeffrey, Thanks so much for taking the time
to join the show. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed
this conversation and I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
Such a pleasure. Thank you, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
That was Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president at 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 the show together. Until
next time.
So COVID is in the news again, just in time
for a new booster, 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
are Americans going to fall for this again? Are enough
(00:20):
Americans still fired up about the destruction that politicians 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. Are Americans
(00:42):
going to take this again? How will we respond 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 Institute's a nonprofit dedicated to finding out what
(01:05):
happened during COVID and dedicated to making sure it never
happens again. So stay tuned for Jeffrey Tucker. Well, Jeffrey,
it's an honor to have you on the show. You
started the Brownstone Institute, which has been incredibly helpful because
we really haven't been getting the truth from most of
(01:26):
the media about COVID, and you guys have been working
to provide that for the American people. So I'm so
glad that you started it and that it exists.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
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 then the
relationship of you know, government policy to the infection rate.
Three and a half years later, there's still not been
(01:58):
a reckoning over this.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
Astonishing 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 evating immunity. Very scary. 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
(02:20):
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 just call
this the election variant?
Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, there's something very suspicious about the timing of all
this stuff, since there is 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 there are things against the witch
(02:58):
Shoe can vaccinate, 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 the SARS Kobe two, if it was
(03:20):
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, this, all this media generating a fear.
(03:40):
It's not producing fear of 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.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
I guess what worries me the most, and the biggest
question that I continue to think about all this is
do Americans want to be free?
Speaker 2 (04:10):
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 to a situation where everybody
became so strangely compliant three and a half years ago.
(04:36):
I don't know if thee 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. And this is really
why I started the Brownstone Institute was to you know,
figure this problem out and to highlight the beauty of
(04:57):
human freedom. And I've gained a new appreciation for just
how fragile it is. I don't think I entirely understood
that our freedoms could be so suddenly and quickly taken
away by administrative state the way they did it. I
never imagined I'd see anything like that in my lifetime.
So it's a genuine crisis.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
When you wrote the book about it, you know, liberty
or lockdown, you know. But my fear too is that,
you know, I didn't get vaccinated ever. On the show,
I talk 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
down the throats of Americans. And but what terrified me
(05:38):
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
while obviously not making comparisons, but you can see how
(06:00):
well people that are you know, quote unquote good people
go along with really bad things. And I think that
scares me the most about where we are as a
society and where we could be heading.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, I know what you mean. When I was young
and in college, there's a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions
and the Madness of Crowds, which provides, you know, fascinating
anecdotes from all of history where people just went insane,
and I always thought, Wow, 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
(06:31):
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. The vaccine mandates eventually mutated
into full scale segregation in I guess five cities in
(06:54):
let me think this would have been, yeah, in late
twenty twenty one and early twenty twenty two. So we
had New York, Boston, New Orleans, Chicago's you know, really
just shut off their services, their public accommodations, commercial enterprises
(07:15):
to the non vaccinated, and they did this without any
regard for the demographics to the unvaccinated group. But you know,
the largest single unvaccinated group in this country is members
of the African American community. So they, you know, in
New York forty were excluded from libraries, theaters, restaurants, bars.
(07:40):
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, 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, you know,
(08:02):
stopping the spread of the virus. There was no evidence
of that. In fact, the euas offered for the vaccines,
never even claimed that they were going to do that.
It's true that Woolenski 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,
(08:24):
the unvaccinated and blame them for the perpetuation of the pandemic,
even though there was no evidence for that either. It
was extraordinarily cruel based on superstition and really a kind
of unmitigated hatred of the other. And this really happened
in our times.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
Well, and that's what it really 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
was being a rational person during all of this who
didn't get caught up in the hysteria, who was actually
trying to look at thet because from a fact based
(09:02):
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. So therefore this
is not a public health thing to get vaccinated. I'm
not protecting my neighbors by getting vaccinated. Not personally at
(09:23):
risk of the vaccine. Most vaccines have five to ten
years of safety data. This is not MR and A
is new to the market, you know, they really use
the fog of word to get it. So considering all
of that, why would I get something 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
(09:43):
a monster.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, and the unknown safety profile is an interesting one.
You know, how is it that so many people were
willing to trust the CDC and the FDA, you know,
with this new technology, you know, 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,
(10:08):
much less you know, mandating it for for millions and
millions of people, you know, and let's not forget the
you know, the Biden administration initially wanted to mandate it
for every you know, medium sized in the large business
in the country. That was quickly struck down. But that
almost happened to us. But even then, their mandates on
(10:28):
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 did this to their students,
and now there's this really epidemic of myocarditis among students,
which is you know, we're completely silent about we pretend
(10:49):
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 they left academia and students just said, look, I'm
not I'm not going back to school, I'm out of here.
I'm not gonna I'm not going to do this. That
turns out to have been a very intelligent decision. But
(11:09):
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 vaccinate, get vaccinate. Your friends are yelling at you,
everybody's yelling at your daily papers. I mean, the whole
culture was demanding that everybody line up for their shots
without any evidence that they were going to do anything
in the pandemic. H And as you say, you know,
(11:33):
the demographics of this particular pathogen were so focused on
the elderly and infirm and essentially certainly no you know,
that almost invisible risk to young people, but even working
age adults, healthy adults were not ever in any risk
(11:56):
of medically significant consequences from this on. Just yeah, you're
gonna get sick, and that certainly I would include myself
in that. I knew for sure that I was, 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,
(12:19):
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 what partisan
democrats are saying in September and October about the vaccine.
They said, you're not going to give this to me,
that's the Trump vaccine. There's no way I got to
take that. I don't want to have anything to do
(12:40):
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
the election, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, all these
same people flipped in the opposite direction. They said, you're
a devil and ruining public health by not lining up
for your shot. Amazing. Did you know this too, That
(13:03):
Fauci directly intervened and delayed the release of the vaccines
until after the election. People don't know that, but it's
really true. It's a true story.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
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 a candidate,
(13:32):
and to control a population of people.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
Yeah, and also implement you know, 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 be rolled into
(13:57):
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 that stayed
in New York was one of the places where they
tried to play around with this digital vaccine passport, and
they never got it working right, just having spent tens
of billions of dollars on it. It really did flop.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
It was unable to Unfortunately, they're too incompetent, you real,
Thank god, they're idiots.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
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.
I mean, it really did only accommodate New York vaccination,
so nothing, and even then it just was flaky. It
(14:50):
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 one why
I feel as if we've had a victory, you know,
and but I've learned not to get too cocky about
that and go, we're winning. We're going to win this
(15:10):
great struggle because I feel like the bad guys in
this drama look at our victories as temporary setbacks.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
It's never right.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Yeah, it's never ending. This struggle is going to go
on and on. I feel like they didn't. They don't
think everything went perfectly well, but they're waiting and ready
to deploy it again. That's why you know all the
recent propaganda about you know, we've seen renewed mask mandates
(15:40):
and and now the FDA is a proven another booster.
And you know that and listeners should know this that
the best vaccine specialists at the FDA, the real high
end serious science is 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
(16:02):
that's why we got there s fe vaccine and and
and all these things, the over the over the counter,
birth control, all the stuff. And then you get 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
(16:23):
that the big pharmaceutical companies pay their salary. They like
to be able to pay their mortgage and their second
mortgage and the third mortgage, and so they're going along
with the stuff just to just to 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.
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Well, and that's the thing is because now we're left
in this atmosphere of distrust. 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
(17:06):
of those 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 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 Mike, I don't. Now I'm like, I
don't want anything. Like a nurse recently tried to get
(17:28):
me to get the flu vaccine about like you know,
I like Mortal Kombat, Hitor Like I was like, no,
you know, So now I don't trust any like I
mean even like I mean, it would have to be
I don't even know at this point under what circumstance
I would trust a new vaccine. If I'm being perfectly honest.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
You can be perfectly honest, and I I understand your position,
and I find myself agreeing with it more and more.
And what's what's fascinating to me is that, you know,
when I started Brownstone, people started saying, oh, another anti
vax and I didn't even understand what that meant. I've
never met an anti vaccine. I didn't have any anti
(18:08):
vaccine feelings. I didn't think this vaccine was necessary. I
didn't imagine really that would be actually dangerous. But I
didn't have any real biases about the whole thing. I
was against the lockdowns, and I knew that masking was dumb,
and the plexi glass and the dusting with hand saturnized,
you know, this whole frenzy we went through. I thought
(18:29):
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 industry in detail and the history behind the vaccines,
and especially since nineteen day six, since all these countries
(18:52):
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 a goal rush.
And now I've become gravely skeptical myself. I'm just not
sure how many people join us in this attitude. I'm
(19:13):
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 out
the potions, you know, just just just to keep their
(19:36):
sales high and their stock price, you know, from tanking.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
Well, I think what worries me is this growing schism
and in separation between the people in charge and the
rest of America. And you know, for instance, you have
former head of the FDA who's now cashing in on
the Fizer board, who's on TV talking about how there's
(20:03):
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
variants seemed pretty adept at escaping vaccine immunation, uh, you
know immunity as well. Right, So, but you know point
being is this dude's cashing in off of this pushing
(20:25):
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 and who can like
these 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
(20:45):
were celebrating with their families for Thanksgiving, Like doctor Burks,
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
in 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
(21:07):
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 bullshit it all is.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
It's creepy how the public discussion of all these topics
that are dominating this little session 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
(21:38):
most of the advertisers that were backing that debate were
pharma companies. I mean, I think within the first ten minutes,
I saw four ads for FTA Proved Drugs and I thought,
h but it just wasn't a topic. I mean, your
Rond de Santis 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
(22:01):
moderators asked Pence whether he feels that the Trump administration
bears some responsibility for the learning loss 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
(22:24):
mentioned Scott Gottlieb. 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 New's X one, you know,
(22:44):
B and five in whatever. He sounds like 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 toenty seventeen and then left immediately went to
the piz Award when when Fauci and Burks and these
(23:08):
people were leaning on Trump to sort of green light
the lockdowns, and this would have been the weekend of
March fourteenth and fifteenth, because Saturday and Sunday, when they
were trying to figure out just how severe the CDC
(23:28):
edicts should be, they got Gottlieb on the phone and
he was one of the main influences behind the initial lockdowns.
And I know this because I think Jered Christian reports
in his book, and Gottlieb said something to the gang
of people gathered there that if you think you're going
(23:52):
too far, then that's probably about the right amount. So
Godleeb was massively influential and shutting down your churches and
closing small businesses and closing playgrounds, and the closure of
the schools, and the capacity restrictions on homes where I
(24:13):
lived at the time, you couldn't have more than ten
people and your house, no matter how big it was,
So you know, weddings were off, funerals were off, everything
was off. Godly himself had a huge role in making
all that happen.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
And then cash is in on all of it. With
the vaccine.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Just to put a hind point on it, he certainly
has cashed in on all of it. And if you
draw attention to the facts to him, he just blows up.
But yeah, there's a whole generation of sort of leaders
in industry and media and in politics and in academia
that really need to be called to account for what
(24:52):
they did to us. But it is not happening. We've
just we just have this weird silence going on. 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,
(25:14):
and really everybody in this country and billions of people
around the world, have lasting trauma, having grown out of
the 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
(25:35):
getting answers to them. And meanwhile, all the sort of
official molders of the public mind are pretending like this
never happened.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
There's also not been an accounting or truth telling about
the amount of damage that this has done to so
many lives, in the sense of people who died of
overdoses from depression or loneliness, suicides from depression, of being
locked in people's homes, losing their jobs, not being able
to go into work, being denied a purpose in life.
You know, family members who died alone, funerals that were
(26:09):
unattended because they were not 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
(26:31):
government policies have destroyed lives.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
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 that took place, you know,
(26:57):
over arguments about whether the vaccinates to children. I mean,
I know many cases of that. 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 period too. It's like, where's your mask?
(27:17):
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 this. People have such sad stories to tell
over the last three years, and You're right, there's just
(27:37):
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 the moderators just
just just pretended like the whole thing didn't really happen,
and it's tremendously troubling. I have an article this morning
(27:59):
on Brown 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 in grocery prices, in the housing inflation,
(28:23):
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 Chicago and Boston, Hartford and so on.
(28:46):
It's these cities are falling apart. People are not going
back to work, Petty crime has 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. I mean, it's it's it's maybe not
(29:07):
quite apocalyptic, but it 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 but in
quickly and that everybody would apologize and we'd go on
with our lives and never do it again. That has
not happened.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
Well, Omicron was the best thing that happened to this
country because I think it deprogrammed people who still thought
they could outrun an outrunnable virus. But to your point,
you know, we've talked a lot in the past sense,
and this is in 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
(29:46):
I just think 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
(30:11):
maybe we've always been, but it has definitely gotten worse
since COVID and since the government did this to our country.
Speaker 2 (30:19):
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 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
(30:41):
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 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
(31:03):
talking about just how shocking it was that for how
long the church has closed, and then the churches, you know,
mask their parishioners, and then you know that you know,
even many many imposed vaccine restrictions. But he was talking
about what it was like in 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
(31:26):
church to his parishoners on Holy Week in Easter. 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 and the bishop said, well, you
can't do that. I absolutely forbid it. And my priest
friend friend said, well, you know what, I'm going to
do it anyway, and you can just fire me if
(31:51):
you want to, but I'm going to do my religious duty.
And the bishop said, well, you're just you're just pretending,
not really gonna. You're not gonna let me just fire you.
And the priest 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
(32:12):
life worth? And the priests and the bishop never gave
him permission, but then also stopped threatening him. So when
the time came, to avoid the media eyes and to
avoid local government officials, he turned the lights extremely low
in the in his church and spread the word quietly
(32:37):
throughout his whole congregation that you can come celebrate Holy
Week services and Easter, but come in the back interest
and entrants 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 had really completely packed church for that for
(32:59):
those services. But he had to do it surreptitiously. It's
an extraordinary story because it seems simply incredible that 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're the greatest practitioners of that.
We put it in our First Amendment, and then just
(33:20):
one day, boom, it was gone.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
But it was perfectly fine to exercise your First Amendment.
If you're writing 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 a good thing, but I mean, we
(33:43):
all know where Joe Biden has stood on lockdowns and vaccines,
and you know, so we all know his record. If
you had assess some of the Republican front runners, when
you look at Trump, when you look at Disanta's or
you look at vi Vague, how do you assess their
response to COVID and you know what, you might think
(34:07):
they might handle something heading down the pike if, if
God forbid, they do this again.
Speaker 2 (34:13):
I have 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, well, we got the vaccine,
we went to this COVID thing, and now let's just
go back to normal. He didn't. He went the opposite way.
He's the one who gave us the mask mandates, right,
remember those where you couldn't ride a bus or get
(34:35):
on the plane without it, and people are screaming at
you get that mask over here, and now I was well, yeah,
but on the other hand, I have to breathe. And
then you know, then he gave us the vaccine mandates.
So he made everything much worse. Now in terms of
the GP people, you know, the did not perform very well,
(34:57):
but among them all and Vivac is an interesting case
because 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, just a great game
on all this stuff. However, his book that's out there
(35:18):
called The 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 he's right about that. So now DeSantis,
(35:38):
of all the governors, well the best governor in the country,
hands down, it was Christino of South Dakota.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
And she's she's the population in South Dakota is a
little bit different than some of these other you know,
than like Georgia for Kemp or even Florida for DeSantis.
Do you think, I mean, does that have a role
in it? Or am I no?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
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 is 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's real city is in normal life, and that
sort she just wouldn't go along. Why she was allowed
(36:19):
to get away with that, you know, I have some
sense I wonder if she were here, if she would
agree with me that a large large parts of this
country just hear the name South Dakota and go, hey,
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 very next state to open up was,
(36:39):
of course Georgia, with with Kemp who started who got
crucified by the Trump administration particularly. 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 he just he said, look, I'm
(37:01):
sick of this these code regulations. The very next one was,
of course DeSantis, and DeSantis 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 did he did close some of the stories
(37:22):
for a time, maybe a few weeks, and that sort
of thing. Bye, 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 own and coming to his own judgments.
(37:44):
He got a new group of advisors, many of whom
were 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, then be careful in that sort
of thing. So he had over all the best policies,
and he's the most conversant in the issue. And also,
(38:08):
Florida today is the only state in the country that
has legislation against lockdown. It's like, you know, there's a
law in Florida that you cannot lockdown and you cannot
impose mask mandates, you cannot impose a vaccine mandates. So
that's true. It's the only state forwards that's true. And
(38:30):
so I think descientists, 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 the of all the people in the running,
he's the one that I think is most trustworthy on
the topic, despite some missteps in the early early times.
(38:52):
Now let me just speak to the Trump issue. It's
a little vertifying 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 is not true,
(39:13):
and I really do think it's up to Trump to
give us a real accounting of exactly what happened. You know,
on March ninth, 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'll use all the whole
(39:33):
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 Burgh reports that after April first, he stopped talking
to her, that he was actually angry, 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, because
we know that's not true. By August, Scott Outless had
arrived in Washington and they were hanging out, you know,
(40:20):
every day, they were watching movies together in the evenings.
They became best friends, eating meals together, and Scott Outless
gave him a tutorial and urology 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 very strange.
(40:42):
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 year of the Trump presidency.
(41:03):
And then let's also remember that 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
(41:24):
was all unleashed as a result of COVID controls. So
you know, he bears some responsibility for this himself. So
I would just like to see him speak honestly and openly.
I hoped that Tucker Carlsoner was going to do that
the other night, but he didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
I'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
is probably one of the most defining moments, if not
the defining moment in our lifetimes. You know, you've actually
you opened my eyes to Christine. Know. I think I've
(42:00):
been tough on her, and it was ever since she
cave to the NCAA 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.
So I've probably been unfair.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
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 that and I've
seen these she was initially inclined to lockdown and go
along with CDC, and then the state legislature said, there's
(42:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
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 such personal hits to their reputations for telling the truth.
You know, Jay Baticharia, doctor Atlas, Martin Colder, I mean
they're colder. For like, there was a long list of
people Martin McCarey who were truth tellers during all of this,
(43:09):
and he posted a column from doctor John E. Neides
of Stanford. He's a world renowned epidemiologist. He wrote in
Harvey Risch, I mean, there's so many people that you know,
you can name that were really just brave and truth
tellers and all of this. But doctor John E. Neides
wrote this up ed in stat News at the very beginning,
right after the lockdowns. He totally reshaped my thinking on
(43:32):
all of this. He opened my eyes and then since
then I looked at this as a totally different person.
He was kind enough to answer questions that I sent him.
You know, I did my best to get his word out,
you know, roteap ed in the hill, trying to try
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.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Uh LISSI you did this in March, in April of
twenty twenty.
Speaker 1 (43:58):
Yep, at the very beginning of all this. Because I
read his I read his up ed and I said,
you know what, this guy's 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 pulling for
a period of time, so I you know, data is
something that registers with me. And his obed just made
so much sense. And I read it and I said,
(44:19):
this guy is the only 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
(44:39):
didn't know this stuff on my own. It was solely
because of doctor John Edie E. Needy's in this opbed
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 even just it's not like he's some you know,
side show out there. I mean, this man is brilliant
and he warned us from the beginning, and no one listened,
(45:04):
or at least not at first when they should have.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
You know, that ought that that professional God bless you.
I mean that's just great. I mean you should you
deserve a medal for that.
Speaker 1 (45:14):
No, but it was him. It's because of him.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
You know. That article came out March seventeenth, and it's
a very powerful article. Is prophetic. You better go read it.
It's everything 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 as virus are actually going to
achieve their ends. And they're going to cause enormous amount
(45:37):
of damage. And you're right about his status as a scientist,
you know, he he was, you know, one of the
great scientists in the country and at a leading epidemiologist,
and he had written, he had a huge publications record
that was celebrated by everybody in New York Times, the Atlantic.
(45:58):
I mean, he's just a great now hero. And he
said on March seventeenth, the day after the initial uh
A lockdown press conference 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
(46:19):
article appeared.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
I think that it was intentionally ignored. I think there
was a desire to push fear is what is this?
You know, because I remember I even got the White
House on record, and you know what, screw it, 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
(46:40):
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 fold,
so the fatality rate was totally skewed. So we're operating
off of a BS baseline from the beginning, which was
the point of doctor E. Nei D's a ED and
they said they were going to do it, and then
like they do it. No, So there really wasn't even
(47:03):
ever a desire to from you know, and not you know,
for doctor Burke's and doctor Fauci and these people who
are supposed to these public health bureaucrats to ever actually
find the truth so that we are operating and making
good decisions off of a proper baseline.
Speaker 2 (47:17):
Ron DeSantis tells the story of getting calling up Debora
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? I mean, what what's going on? And how
do we know any of these these great tools that
you're telling me to implement are actually going to achieve
their goal? She said, she said. He says that she
(47:40):
said to him, well, we don't really know. It's a
kind of a real time science experiment. And after that,
Desantas said, he 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
(48:03):
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 COVID, when it was most wicked,
without any recommendations coming from nih CDC on what you
should do if you're sick beyond take biband, get getting ventilated,
(48:26):
which you know kills you, you know, eight or nine
out of ten times, either from the ventilation itself or
from the inevitable secondary infections you get from ventilation. And
the other one was the Fauci's favorite drug called remdesivir,
which is just you know, also nicknamed run death is
Near so and and and the repurposed generic drugs were
(48:52):
completely off the table. I mean, where I lived, there
was no chance of getting iromactin. When I finally did
get sick, and I got really sick, this would have
been in January of twenty two, I could not get
I remced I finally had to have a friend who
drove from New York who got I remixed him from
India and brought it over to me. This is in
(49:14):
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 and nobody would
give it to me. So this really happened in this country.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I could talk to you forever about this, you know,
before we go. Is there anything else you'd like to
leave us.
Speaker 2 (49:30):
With, I would say, Liza, we desperately need some you know,
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. The same people who
did this before are still in power now. The successor
to what's her name at CDC, you know, is a
(49:54):
devote as a devout follower of Fauci. The new head
of NIH is the same thing. I mean, there's nothing
that's really changed, and 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
(50:14):
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 in the way
the government operates to 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
(50:34):
think it's just heroic what you've done, and I'm glad
you have me on your podcast today.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
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 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.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
Well, let's just keep our ching up in keep going,
because I think we can eventually win this. But even
if we don't, we're doing the right thing. And in
some sense, your voice is 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,
(51:18):
for the survival of civilization. Because I tell you what
you cannot have a free and civilized society under lockdowns.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
Well said Jeffrey, Thanks so much for taking the time
to join the show. I really appreciate it. I've enjoyed
this conversation and I appreciate you taking the time.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
Such a pleasure. Thank you, Lisa.
Speaker 1 (51:40):
That was Jeffrey Tucker, founder and president at 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 the show together. Until
next time.
Host
Lisa Boothe
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