July 29, 2026 • 18 mins
DREW HOLDEN REMEMBERS THE MEDIA LOVE AFFAIR WITH FAUCI In this great column by Drew Holden, who joins me at 1pm, he reminds you of just how slavish the devotion to Dr. Anthony “The Science” Fauci was. Just click through here and check out the obscene and fawning headlines that we now know were all part of chummy coverage full of burgeoning “friendships” between Fauci and the media who were supposed to be covering him with a dispassionate air.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I have a fantastic guest coming up next. We just
we're angry together off the air, so we're gonna be
angry on the air. But I have to clarify something
I was wrong. If you wanted to buy a long
gun or any of the guns now on the special
Democrats Hate Them list in Colorado, you've missed your window
to avoid the incredibly onerous new gun poll taxes that
(00:20):
go into effect on August first, because they go into
effect when you pick up the gun, and with our
already ridiculous three day waiting period, you have now missed
the window, and buying a gun in Colorado just got
a whole lot harder. We'll talk more about that later
when angry people figure out exactly how bad it is.
But here to another angry person who buy his own
(00:41):
account is the guy who tries to kind of you do,
keep it together, chill out, It's gonna be fine. That's
Drew Holden from the outstanding sub Stack Holden, Court and Drew,
welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
First of all, Mandy, that's my pleasure. Thanks so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So you have what turned out to be one of
the best columns of the week about doctor Anthony Fauci,
because you went back in time to remind us of
a few things, and you specifically honed in on the
and I've called it media malpractice. What happened during COVID
was nothing short of an abdication of the responsibility of
(01:19):
journalism by many, many, many, many media outlets. They took
whatever the government told them and just regurgitated it without question.
They called people who dared to question the government line
conspiracy theorists. We were going to murder our grandmothers. There
was so much disdain. Talking heads on news outlets said
that if people didn't get a vaccination, they shouldn't get
(01:42):
medical care. I mean, it was nuts, and you gathered
up a bunch of it in one column, And for
that I am grateful my pleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I won't say I was happy to do it right,
because my blood pressure has definitely not forgiven me for
just the level of anger and frustration I think.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
I have had but these last days. But I think
it's necessary.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I think it's important, and you know, I talk about
this all the time, but I feel we're starting to
forget just how bad some of this stuff was.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Well, some people have and I've been reminding my audience.
In the first hour, they let older people with dementia
die alone. They shut down church services, They arrested a
guy who was paddleboarding by himself. They shut down schools
in what we still don't know the kind of damage
that that did to the children who were out of
(02:30):
that environment for two years. I mean, the list of
atrocities that were committed in the name of protecting the
citizenry is way too long for my taste.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yes, I could not agree more.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I did you know it took me six parts of
a substack series, each of them like fifteen hundred to
three thousand words to even try and scratch and surface
on it. I mean, it is unthinkable the damage we
already know, right, It is almost impossible to comprehend just
how my damage has been done to people, to kids,
(03:02):
to families, to our social fabric.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
And we're only six years on.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
We're only going to learn more from here, and I
think that should fill everyone with a real sense of dread.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Not to mention, I got to tell you, like, I
have always thought of the United States of America as
a land full of people who were capable and strong
and not easily scared. You know, going back to that
Japanese comment after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, you know,
there's a gun behind every blade of grass. We were
(03:31):
the tough guys, and man, we all not only accepted
totalitarianism on a dime, many many, many people became totalitarians themselves.
But I want to talk specifically. I don't want to
let the time go away and the Rockies are going
to eat us here in a little bit. I want
to make sure we know what happened with the media
in this entire process, because the media at its finest
(03:56):
is consistently asking the questions to hold power to account,
regardless of party, regardless of whatever. That when the media
is doing its job the best, that is what they
are doing. And oh crap, they didn't do any of
it this time.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think we lose sight of
it sometimes because the media is such a punching bag
and such a talking point, you know, particularly for conservatives.
But these folks are constitutionally protected. They have all sorts
of special legal harvouts and allowances in order to bring
the American people the news that matters, and in order
to hold government and other powerful actors to account for
(04:34):
their misbehavior, for the appearance of their misbehavior, for all
sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That matter right.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And yet for many years during COVID, that switch that
defenders of democracy, that protectors of ordinary that you know,
afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, all of that
put to the side in order to push a narrative
about that Doctor Anthony Fauci wanted people to believe about
all things COVID. And I think to me, you know,
(05:01):
there's all sorts of bad things about the lockdown, about
I've seen that we need to get to the bottom up.
But so much of it is about the origins. It's
about how COVID came to be. It's about how millions
of people around the world died from a disease, and
it's about whether or not all of that could have
come from a lab in Wuhan, China, and whether or
(05:24):
not your taxpayer dollars could have helped not only fund
the lab but make what became COVID more dangerous, more transmissible.
And that, to me, it should have been the defining
media story of twenty twenty or twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
And instead the media fought tooth and nail to bury it.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I will say that when I look back now and
a texture just sent this in hindsight is always twenty twenty.
The public health officials did the very best they could
with the information they had in hand. I wonder if
you'll ever get tired about this topic. But the fact
is they didn't. We now know that in January of
twenty twenty, according to doctor Anthony Fauci's own personal government
(06:07):
created on his government equipment diary, that he knew that
the wet market lie was a lie. He knew it
was not likely. That they already understood at that point
that that was an unlikely story. How many resources were
diverted to cover that story up. How many scientists that
should have been looking at other things. We're spending time
trying to figure out a way to make it about
(06:28):
the wet market because doctor Anthony Fauci asked them to.
He didn't want it to come out because then he
would have had to answer questions that you just laid out,
are we funding gain a function research? Did we help
create a virus that then escape from a lab?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And it's not even just Fauci's diary.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Too many I think this is the other point that
gets lost a little bit in the multi year kind
of retrospective on all of this stuff. There was an
active debate online in medical communities, in scientific research communities
in twenty twenty about what you were urgens of COVID war,
and the media and Twitter and Facebook took their thumb
(07:06):
and pressed it heavily on the scale to say, Nope, sorry,
that entire side of this conversation. We are not going
to allow you to communicate in our direct messages on
Twitter about.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
We will not allow you to post, we will not
allow you to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
And the legacy media had a feedback loop with these
social media companies to say this is a conspiracy theory.
And then the companies took that and said, oh, it's
a conspiracy theory. We won't allow people to send it
across our platforms. We're going to cut back on misinformation
and disinformation, which fed into a feedback loop. And then
the media is reporting, well, look what the social media
companies are doing. They recognize this as a conspiracy theory.
(07:41):
Do everyone but Donald Trump and conservatives and Tom Cotton
understand that this is a conspiracy theory? And by wrapping
that bow around this very plausible, very colorable, very potential idea.
I think they crushed the search for truth about whether
or not it was the case.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But I think they were willing participants him crushing the
truth and a case in pruis. So here we have
Joe Biden bumbling around like mister magoo for four flipping
years when he's president, and the mainstream media is like, dude,
he's awesome, look at how virile he is. But now
every time Trump gets a bruise, it's like, oh my god,
(08:18):
look how elderly he is it his hand can say
he closes his eyes during a three hour funeral. They're
like he's dying, and I'm just like, shut up. And
I think that's what happened. They were very willing to
just step back and show no intellectual curiosity. That's the
worth that gets me, because these are not necessarily stupid people.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Yeah right, And I think that's the thing that really
kills me, Mandy, is that, like, I don't believe. I know,
there are a lot of people say, well, they did
this deliberately to cover up for China, or to cover
up for Biden, or to cover up price or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I actually don't think that that's the case.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Like, I actually think the media is so gullible when
it comes to an expert that they respect and in
some cases revere saying something that they forget how to
do their job. They forget what the merits of journalism
actually look like, and they are willing to set that
to the side when it confirms so conveniently and so
naturally to their narrative.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I'm talking to Drew Holden. He's got a great substack
called Holden Court. If you are already a subscriber in
mind at Mandy blog dot com, you can go ahead
and zip on over to Holden Court and subscribe over there.
You know, the point is about the expert class. There
is a a characteristic of the left, and that is
(09:31):
they love experts, like they always think if you are credentialed, degreed,
the more degrees you have, the more they're going to
give you credence. And so when you put doctor Fauci
up there, he's a scientist, he's a doctor, they immediately
just like, oh, yes, we have to listen to him.
But even then it's only as long as they feel
like it's on their side, because the same doctors on
(09:53):
the right who said, you know you look at the
way that the media treated the Brownstone Institute. They were
a group of doctor who consistently posted information that turned
out to all be true, right, I mean, they were
right about everything, but they were treated as parias. They
were the wrong kind of credentialed official because they didn't
tow the company line. So for me it feels even
(10:14):
more nefarious. It's like, just because they're telling you what
you want to hear, you've dropped any pretense of journalistic
integrity and digging in to find out if it's actually true.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, I think that's exactly what we still happen.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
And I think it's you know, you think about kind
of like the I talk a lot about the blinkered
media right where you have these newsrooms of people, all
of them, most of whom have master's degrees, I cost
a whole lot of money, and they respect all of
the types of people who went to the same types
of institution that they did, yeap, who are saying the
same things as them. It's almost like a culture thing,
more so in some cases than there's an educational thing.
(10:49):
And I think they latched onto this narrative that Fauci
and I think got so much of it, as so
many stories do these days. So much of it came
down to Trump, right, Yeah. The issue was that Fauci
wasn't just a doctor, he wasn't just the AIDS hero
or whatever. He wasn't just the one leading us through COVID.
It was that he was doing the right thing and
Trump was doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
He was trying to lead that monkey down the right road.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And so the idea that he
could be one wrong, I think just simply did not
occur to the media to investigate two More importantly, the
idea that he could have nefarious motives, right like trying
to prevent media from digging into his ties to a
lab and Ruhan doing breaking research into bat coronaviruses. That's
(11:34):
only a few miles when we first ot cases of
the wet market. The idea that any of that could
be could be part of the could be part of
his calculus. The media was just unbelievably resistant to look at.
And I think that's a byproduct of not having anyone
who doesn't think just like the standard operator at the
New York Times thinks about the way the world works.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Well, and then they became we now know from Fauci's diaries,
and somebody asked on the text line, I may have
missed it, but how did Auchi fel She's diaries come
to light? They were written on a government computer and
somebody foy at them, and and Ran Paul has an
entire website so you can go and read them all.
They read like a like a middle school girl. I
(12:15):
made this point earlier that in his in his diary
he talks about becoming friends with Jake Tapper. So you
have people and I as a talk show host, I
am friendly with politicians, but I would never be a
friend to a politician because I think it compromises my
ability to criticize when they need to be criticized. I
(12:38):
may like them, I may think they're really cool, and
if they were out of office, maybe we'd be pals.
But these journalists put no such barricades up. They sucked
up to him, they told, you know, texting him after
a TV performance to tell him how great he did.
I think there's another factor here that is probably just
as important, and that is doctor Fauci. This little nerve
(13:00):
scientists that nobody ever paid attention for. All of a
sudden and this is one of the headlines that you
put on your column today. There's a petition to make
doctor Anthony Fauci People Magazine Sexiest Nana Alive. That is intoxicating,
That is corrupting, That that entire, that entire fame wave
for somebody like him, he is you don't want to
(13:24):
give that up once you have it.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And I think you know, he at a moment of difficulty,
of the moment of crisis in our country, he became
just this towering presence across intellect apparently you know, sexiness
factors and all sort of and like the leading political thinker,
the leading medical thinker, the leading kind of therapist and comforter.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Science drew the science.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, and I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
I think that is like, we don't elevate people to
that role in a in a republic because it is
very danger to do so, because there's no way it
doesn't go to their head in a way that is
incredibly destructive to everything else around them.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So after reading your column, I read it yesterday, and
after I read it so today this morning, as the
hearing is going on, I'm trolling x to see what
all of these journalists have to say about these proceedings.
Let's just say it was quiet, Drew, it was quiet
on the home front. Jake Tapper, who apparently he and
Anthony Falcie their pals. They hang out, they go to dinner,
(14:28):
didn't have a single thought about the hearings while they
were going on, not a single one. He did give
us a list of Sylvester Saloon movies in case you
wanted that. So that's on Jake's saying, I haven't looked recently.
He may have posted something else, but even now there's
this eye roll of Oh, here we go again, Oh here,
(14:48):
we'll have to cover this again, the crazy right wingers.
Here's the thing about Senator rand Paul. Senator Ran Paul
has been entirely consistent this entire time, and yet now
he has enough evidence to prove that he is right.
Who among us would not have done what he did today?
(15:09):
Who among us would not have been just taken the
lap and said, I'm going to make you admit that
you were wrong and I was right, and I'm actually
here for it.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, And also to hopefully be able to actually hold
doctor Fauci accountable.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
I think the the other important reason for having this hearing,
for hauling Fauci's but in front of all that, like
in front of the US government and putting him too.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The question is that it's an untested legal.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Theory about whether or not you can challenge Biden's outgoing
pardon for doctor Fauci.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Well, the autopen pidon pardon.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Yeah, right, right right, thank you, the autopen, the autopen pardon.
But by forcing him back in from the committee, by
forcing this back into the public eye, I think it
helps gather evidence and energy and steam behind doing something
to hold Fauci accountable. And I think, you know what,
Tapper's not interested in that. I don't think Chuck Todd
(16:01):
is particularly interested in that. But I think there are tens,
tens and tens of millions of Americans who would love
to see the man who did so much harm to
this country held accountable.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Oh I've had people texting what about the careers that
were damaged of those who dared to question Fauci. How
about all the people that got fired from their companies
over the vaccine mandate? How about all the people in
the military who had to cycle out of the military
because they wouldn't get the vaccine there's so many things
that it baffles me that people want to not know
(16:34):
that you would just just say yeah, didn't matter. Because
here's the thing about pandemics. They happen like every hundred years,
they really do, and they're going to happen again, and
we're not going to be in any better position if
we can't have an honest conversation about what went wrong,
so we could put guardrails up so somebody like doctor
Anthony Fauci never has enough power again to do what
(16:56):
he did to this country.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Absolutely, absolutely, it's vital that we do that. The only
thing we can do now is do that and try
and hold him to account.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
That's but I don't even know what what what what
accountability is there? Can we claw back his retirement because
that would make me happy. God knows he got enough
prize money from the prizes he got his buddies to
nominate him for that part. Just gross.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, hopefully, hopefully.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I mean he makes an enormous amount of money on
the public dole and we were talking about it before
we started recording, but he makes almost a million dollars
I think in his pension that he gets from his
previous roles.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Like there has to be some way to prevent that
from happening.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Here's my thinking, and this is just me some aggressive
and kind of jerk. What if we suit him civilly?
What if I got my favorite restaurant owner who not
only lost his restaurant, but the loan he had attach
to his restaurant was his home. He lost his home too,
So why not a civil case?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:57):
I mean, again, not illegal ectual, but there should be
right And I think the only way any of these
things are possible is by keeping this in the public
eye as much and as long as possible until we
start to get inroads on those things.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Amen to that. Drew Holden is my guest, and he
has a phenomenal substack. It's Drew Holden, It's Holden Court
at substack, Drew Holden dot substack dot com. I put
a link today on my blog at Mandy blog dot
com so you can find it there. I highly recommend it.
Good to see Drew, and thanks again keep up the
great work man, because I your substack. I have like
(18:31):
four substacks that I read every day and yours is
one of them. Now, so you were in well fine company,
my friend.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Well thank you Mandy, I appreciate that I will keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
I have a couple more threads and columns and things
than the work, so I don't think there has been
a bigger story than this one, and so I'm there.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Should be, there, shouldn't be, all right, Dreeman, I'll talk
to you again soon. Thanks for coming today.
I have a fantastic guest coming up next. We just
we're angry together off the air, so we're gonna be
angry on the air. But I have to clarify something
I was wrong. If you wanted to buy a long
gun or any of the guns now on the special
Democrats Hate Them list in Colorado, you've missed your window
to avoid the incredibly onerous new gun poll taxes that
(00:20):
go into effect on August first, because they go into
effect when you pick up the gun, and with our
already ridiculous three day waiting period, you have now missed
the window, and buying a gun in Colorado just got
a whole lot harder. We'll talk more about that later
when angry people figure out exactly how bad it is.
But here to another angry person who buy his own
(00:41):
account is the guy who tries to kind of you do,
keep it together, chill out, It's gonna be fine. That's
Drew Holden from the outstanding sub Stack Holden, Court and Drew,
welcome back to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
First of all, Mandy, that's my pleasure. Thanks so much
for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
So you have what turned out to be one of
the best columns of the week about doctor Anthony Fauci,
because you went back in time to remind us of
a few things, and you specifically honed in on the
and I've called it media malpractice. What happened during COVID
was nothing short of an abdication of the responsibility of
(01:19):
journalism by many, many, many, many media outlets. They took
whatever the government told them and just regurgitated it without question.
They called people who dared to question the government line
conspiracy theorists. We were going to murder our grandmothers. There
was so much disdain. Talking heads on news outlets said
that if people didn't get a vaccination, they shouldn't get
(01:42):
medical care. I mean, it was nuts, and you gathered
up a bunch of it in one column, And for
that I am grateful my pleasure.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
I won't say I was happy to do it right,
because my blood pressure has definitely not forgiven me for
just the level of anger and frustration I think.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
I have had but these last days. But I think
it's necessary.
Speaker 3 (02:02):
I think it's important, and you know, I talk about
this all the time, but I feel we're starting to
forget just how bad some of this stuff was.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
Well, some people have and I've been reminding my audience.
In the first hour, they let older people with dementia
die alone. They shut down church services, They arrested a
guy who was paddleboarding by himself. They shut down schools
in what we still don't know the kind of damage
that that did to the children who were out of
(02:30):
that environment for two years. I mean, the list of
atrocities that were committed in the name of protecting the
citizenry is way too long for my taste.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yes, I could not agree more.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
I did you know it took me six parts of
a substack series, each of them like fifteen hundred to
three thousand words to even try and scratch and surface
on it. I mean, it is unthinkable the damage we
already know, right, It is almost impossible to comprehend just
how my damage has been done to people, to kids,
(03:02):
to families, to our social fabric.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
And we're only six years on.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
We're only going to learn more from here, and I
think that should fill everyone with a real sense of dread.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Not to mention, I got to tell you, like, I
have always thought of the United States of America as
a land full of people who were capable and strong
and not easily scared. You know, going back to that
Japanese comment after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, you know,
there's a gun behind every blade of grass. We were
(03:31):
the tough guys, and man, we all not only accepted
totalitarianism on a dime, many many, many people became totalitarians themselves.
But I want to talk specifically. I don't want to
let the time go away and the Rockies are going
to eat us here in a little bit. I want
to make sure we know what happened with the media
in this entire process, because the media at its finest
(03:56):
is consistently asking the questions to hold power to account,
regardless of party, regardless of whatever. That when the media
is doing its job the best, that is what they
are doing. And oh crap, they didn't do any of
it this time.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think we lose sight of
it sometimes because the media is such a punching bag
and such a talking point, you know, particularly for conservatives.
But these folks are constitutionally protected. They have all sorts
of special legal harvouts and allowances in order to bring
the American people the news that matters, and in order
to hold government and other powerful actors to account for
(04:34):
their misbehavior, for the appearance of their misbehavior, for all
sorts of things.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That matter right.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
And yet for many years during COVID, that switch that
defenders of democracy, that protectors of ordinary that you know,
afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, all of that
put to the side in order to push a narrative
about that Doctor Anthony Fauci wanted people to believe about
all things COVID. And I think to me, you know,
(05:01):
there's all sorts of bad things about the lockdown, about
I've seen that we need to get to the bottom up.
But so much of it is about the origins. It's
about how COVID came to be. It's about how millions
of people around the world died from a disease, and
it's about whether or not all of that could have
come from a lab in Wuhan, China, and whether or
(05:24):
not your taxpayer dollars could have helped not only fund
the lab but make what became COVID more dangerous, more transmissible.
And that, to me, it should have been the defining
media story of twenty twenty or twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
And instead the media fought tooth and nail to bury it.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I will say that when I look back now and
a texture just sent this in hindsight is always twenty twenty.
The public health officials did the very best they could
with the information they had in hand. I wonder if
you'll ever get tired about this topic. But the fact
is they didn't. We now know that in January of
twenty twenty, according to doctor Anthony Fauci's own personal government
(06:07):
created on his government equipment diary, that he knew that
the wet market lie was a lie. He knew it
was not likely. That they already understood at that point
that that was an unlikely story. How many resources were
diverted to cover that story up. How many scientists that
should have been looking at other things. We're spending time
trying to figure out a way to make it about
(06:28):
the wet market because doctor Anthony Fauci asked them to.
He didn't want it to come out because then he
would have had to answer questions that you just laid out,
are we funding gain a function research? Did we help
create a virus that then escape from a lab?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
And it's not even just Fauci's diary.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Too many I think this is the other point that
gets lost a little bit in the multi year kind
of retrospective on all of this stuff. There was an
active debate online in medical communities, in scientific research communities
in twenty twenty about what you were urgens of COVID war,
and the media and Twitter and Facebook took their thumb
(07:06):
and pressed it heavily on the scale to say, Nope, sorry,
that entire side of this conversation. We are not going
to allow you to communicate in our direct messages on
Twitter about.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
We will not allow you to post, we will not
allow you to talk about it.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
And the legacy media had a feedback loop with these
social media companies to say this is a conspiracy theory.
And then the companies took that and said, oh, it's
a conspiracy theory. We won't allow people to send it
across our platforms. We're going to cut back on misinformation
and disinformation, which fed into a feedback loop. And then
the media is reporting, well, look what the social media
companies are doing. They recognize this as a conspiracy theory.
(07:41):
Do everyone but Donald Trump and conservatives and Tom Cotton
understand that this is a conspiracy theory? And by wrapping
that bow around this very plausible, very colorable, very potential idea.
I think they crushed the search for truth about whether
or not it was the case.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
But I think they were willing participants him crushing the
truth and a case in pruis. So here we have
Joe Biden bumbling around like mister magoo for four flipping
years when he's president, and the mainstream media is like, dude,
he's awesome, look at how virile he is. But now
every time Trump gets a bruise, it's like, oh my god,
(08:18):
look how elderly he is it his hand can say
he closes his eyes during a three hour funeral. They're
like he's dying, and I'm just like, shut up. And
I think that's what happened. They were very willing to
just step back and show no intellectual curiosity. That's the
worth that gets me, because these are not necessarily stupid people.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
Yeah right, And I think that's the thing that really
kills me, Mandy, is that, like, I don't believe. I know,
there are a lot of people say, well, they did
this deliberately to cover up for China, or to cover
up for Biden, or to cover up price or whatever.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
I actually don't think that that's the case.
Speaker 3 (08:49):
Like, I actually think the media is so gullible when
it comes to an expert that they respect and in
some cases revere saying something that they forget how to
do their job. They forget what the merits of journalism
actually look like, and they are willing to set that
to the side when it confirms so conveniently and so
naturally to their narrative.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
I'm talking to Drew Holden. He's got a great substack
called Holden Court. If you are already a subscriber in
mind at Mandy blog dot com, you can go ahead
and zip on over to Holden Court and subscribe over there.
You know, the point is about the expert class. There
is a a characteristic of the left, and that is
(09:31):
they love experts, like they always think if you are credentialed, degreed,
the more degrees you have, the more they're going to
give you credence. And so when you put doctor Fauci
up there, he's a scientist, he's a doctor, they immediately
just like, oh, yes, we have to listen to him.
But even then it's only as long as they feel
like it's on their side, because the same doctors on
(09:53):
the right who said, you know you look at the
way that the media treated the Brownstone Institute. They were
a group of doctor who consistently posted information that turned
out to all be true, right, I mean, they were
right about everything, but they were treated as parias. They
were the wrong kind of credentialed official because they didn't
tow the company line. So for me it feels even
(10:14):
more nefarious. It's like, just because they're telling you what
you want to hear, you've dropped any pretense of journalistic
integrity and digging in to find out if it's actually true.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, I think that's exactly what we still happen.
Speaker 3 (10:27):
And I think it's you know, you think about kind
of like the I talk a lot about the blinkered
media right where you have these newsrooms of people, all
of them, most of whom have master's degrees, I cost
a whole lot of money, and they respect all of
the types of people who went to the same types
of institution that they did, yeap, who are saying the
same things as them. It's almost like a culture thing,
more so in some cases than there's an educational thing.
(10:49):
And I think they latched onto this narrative that Fauci
and I think got so much of it, as so
many stories do these days. So much of it came
down to Trump, right, Yeah. The issue was that Fauci
wasn't just a doctor, he wasn't just the AIDS hero
or whatever. He wasn't just the one leading us through COVID.
It was that he was doing the right thing and
Trump was doing the wrong thing.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
He was trying to lead that monkey down the right road.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, And so the idea that he
could be one wrong, I think just simply did not
occur to the media to investigate two More importantly, the
idea that he could have nefarious motives, right like trying
to prevent media from digging into his ties to a
lab and Ruhan doing breaking research into bat coronaviruses. That's
(11:34):
only a few miles when we first ot cases of
the wet market. The idea that any of that could
be could be part of the could be part of
his calculus. The media was just unbelievably resistant to look at.
And I think that's a byproduct of not having anyone
who doesn't think just like the standard operator at the
New York Times thinks about the way the world works.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Well, and then they became we now know from Fauci's diaries,
and somebody asked on the text line, I may have
missed it, but how did Auchi fel She's diaries come
to light? They were written on a government computer and
somebody foy at them, and and Ran Paul has an
entire website so you can go and read them all.
They read like a like a middle school girl. I
(12:15):
made this point earlier that in his in his diary
he talks about becoming friends with Jake Tapper. So you
have people and I as a talk show host, I
am friendly with politicians, but I would never be a
friend to a politician because I think it compromises my
ability to criticize when they need to be criticized. I
(12:38):
may like them, I may think they're really cool, and
if they were out of office, maybe we'd be pals.
But these journalists put no such barricades up. They sucked
up to him, they told, you know, texting him after
a TV performance to tell him how great he did.
I think there's another factor here that is probably just
as important, and that is doctor Fauci. This little nerve
(13:00):
scientists that nobody ever paid attention for. All of a
sudden and this is one of the headlines that you
put on your column today. There's a petition to make
doctor Anthony Fauci People Magazine Sexiest Nana Alive. That is intoxicating,
That is corrupting, That that entire, that entire fame wave
for somebody like him, he is you don't want to
(13:24):
give that up once you have it.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
I think that's exactly right.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
And I think you know, he at a moment of difficulty,
of the moment of crisis in our country, he became
just this towering presence across intellect apparently you know, sexiness
factors and all sort of and like the leading political thinker,
the leading medical thinker, the leading kind of therapist and comforter.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Science drew the science.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, and I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (13:53):
I think that is like, we don't elevate people to
that role in a in a republic because it is
very danger to do so, because there's no way it
doesn't go to their head in a way that is
incredibly destructive to everything else around them.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
So after reading your column, I read it yesterday, and
after I read it so today this morning, as the
hearing is going on, I'm trolling x to see what
all of these journalists have to say about these proceedings.
Let's just say it was quiet, Drew, it was quiet
on the home front. Jake Tapper, who apparently he and
Anthony Falcie their pals. They hang out, they go to dinner,
(14:28):
didn't have a single thought about the hearings while they
were going on, not a single one. He did give
us a list of Sylvester Saloon movies in case you
wanted that. So that's on Jake's saying, I haven't looked recently.
He may have posted something else, but even now there's
this eye roll of Oh, here we go again, Oh here,
(14:48):
we'll have to cover this again, the crazy right wingers.
Here's the thing about Senator rand Paul. Senator Ran Paul
has been entirely consistent this entire time, and yet now
he has enough evidence to prove that he is right.
Who among us would not have done what he did today?
(15:09):
Who among us would not have been just taken the
lap and said, I'm going to make you admit that
you were wrong and I was right, and I'm actually
here for it.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Yeah, And also to hopefully be able to actually hold
doctor Fauci accountable.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
I think the the other important reason for having this hearing,
for hauling Fauci's but in front of all that, like
in front of the US government and putting him too.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
The question is that it's an untested legal.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
Theory about whether or not you can challenge Biden's outgoing
pardon for doctor Fauci.
Speaker 1 (15:39):
Well, the autopen pidon pardon.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
Yeah, right, right right, thank you, the autopen, the autopen pardon.
But by forcing him back in from the committee, by
forcing this back into the public eye, I think it
helps gather evidence and energy and steam behind doing something
to hold Fauci accountable. And I think, you know what,
Tapper's not interested in that. I don't think Chuck Todd
(16:01):
is particularly interested in that. But I think there are tens,
tens and tens of millions of Americans who would love
to see the man who did so much harm to
this country held accountable.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Oh I've had people texting what about the careers that
were damaged of those who dared to question Fauci. How
about all the people that got fired from their companies
over the vaccine mandate? How about all the people in
the military who had to cycle out of the military
because they wouldn't get the vaccine there's so many things
that it baffles me that people want to not know
(16:34):
that you would just just say yeah, didn't matter. Because
here's the thing about pandemics. They happen like every hundred years,
they really do, and they're going to happen again, and
we're not going to be in any better position if
we can't have an honest conversation about what went wrong,
so we could put guardrails up so somebody like doctor
Anthony Fauci never has enough power again to do what
(16:56):
he did to this country.
Speaker 3 (16:58):
Absolutely, absolutely, it's vital that we do that. The only
thing we can do now is do that and try
and hold him to account.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
That's but I don't even know what what what what
accountability is there? Can we claw back his retirement because
that would make me happy. God knows he got enough
prize money from the prizes he got his buddies to
nominate him for that part. Just gross.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, hopefully, hopefully.
Speaker 3 (17:21):
I mean he makes an enormous amount of money on
the public dole and we were talking about it before
we started recording, but he makes almost a million dollars
I think in his pension that he gets from his
previous roles.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
Like there has to be some way to prevent that
from happening.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Here's my thinking, and this is just me some aggressive
and kind of jerk. What if we suit him civilly?
What if I got my favorite restaurant owner who not
only lost his restaurant, but the loan he had attach
to his restaurant was his home. He lost his home too,
So why not a civil case?
Speaker 2 (17:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:57):
I mean, again, not illegal ectual, but there should be
right And I think the only way any of these
things are possible is by keeping this in the public
eye as much and as long as possible until we
start to get inroads on those things.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Amen to that. Drew Holden is my guest, and he
has a phenomenal substack. It's Drew Holden, It's Holden Court
at substack, Drew Holden dot substack dot com. I put
a link today on my blog at Mandy blog dot
com so you can find it there. I highly recommend it.
Good to see Drew, and thanks again keep up the
great work man, because I your substack. I have like
(18:31):
four substacks that I read every day and yours is
one of them. Now, so you were in well fine company,
my friend.
Speaker 2 (18:37):
Well thank you Mandy, I appreciate that I will keep going.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
I have a couple more threads and columns and things
than the work, so I don't think there has been
a bigger story than this one, and so I'm there.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Should be, there, shouldn't be, all right, Dreeman, I'll talk
to you again soon. Thanks for coming today.
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