Bret Weinstein speaks with Senator Ron Johnson on the subject of corruption present in COVID policies and American politics in general. They question who the “puppet masters” are and review what RFK Jr.’s stance on vaccines could bring to the upcoming administration. Finally, Bret and Senator Johnson, notorious COVID dissidents, end their discussion by considering the possibility of Fauci receiving a pardon. Find Senator Ron Johnson on X: http://x.com/RonJohnsonWI*****Join DarkHorse on L...
People like you and me apparently don't know who it is.
We can see certain nodes that are visible, but we have no idea who they are.
I think a lot of them go to Davos.
I mean, if you had to try to round them up somewhere, I would start looking there.
Yeah, something is at Davos.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, Inside Rail.
I have the honor and privilege of sitting with Senator Ron Johnson this morning.
Many of you who are followers of the podcast will know that Ron Johnson has been the Tip of the spear in the medical freedom movement.
He has been digging into the malfeasance of COVID in a way that only he can with the powers that a senator has.
And I would say we know a tremendous amount more about what happened to us during the so-called pandemic than we would if you had not been doing what you've been doing.
So welcome to the podcast.
Thanks for having me on.
So, I'm not quite sure where to start because the opportunity of talking with you at this odd moment in history is tremendous.
You have a position with which to view the power structure that most of us have to guess at, and you also have been Cataloging and unearthing the many crimes of COVID in a most unique way.
So, can you tell me how it is?
Obviously, if you are in the Congress, you have to Play a delicate game where you balance your desire to see certain things happen with your need to be pragmatic.
And that does not seem to have limited you in terms of your pursuit of the truth regarding COVID. How did you end up there?
First of all, I don't play a very delicate game.
That's great.
I'm not a bomb bastard.
And first of all, don't overestimate the power of a member of Congress or a senator.
We have a platform.
We can provide a platform for others.
That's primarily what I've done.
But my background, just quick, I'm an accountant.
That's my educational training.
Ran a manufacturing plant for 30 years.
I eventually bought it and owned it.
Never thought I'd get involved in politics.
Always was interested in national and international affairs.
But it was really the Tea Party movement.
I still consider myself more Tea Party than the Republican Party.
I see the flaws in both.
Not a real fan of either, quite honestly.
I'm a fan of our Constitution, of what our founding fathers gave us, and what is our duty to preserve for future generations.
I ran in 2010 because we were mortgaging and children's future.
I ran because I knew Obamacare would not work, and it hasn't.
And I ran primarily on, you know, I would literally do parades in 2010 shouting freedom.
That's my platform, freedom.
I mean, that is the essential ingredient to this country.
It's what allowed, you know, our forebears to dream, inspire, and build and create this marvel of a country that it's our job to preserve.
So, again, when that's what you're fighting for and you realize more than a million Americans have died fighting for that same thing, People say, you're so courageous.
No, I'm just unbelievably frustrated, and I've got that platform, and so I've used it.
And my eyes were opened up during COVID, like millions of other Americans.
When I ran 2010, I literally ran, and my campaign consultant said, never say that again, but I ran defending big pharma.
So am I the only guy that wants a new drug, a new life-saving drug?
But then I saw the capture, the corruption, big pharma, of not only our federal health agencies, but also of the media and the social media.
And, yeah, that just started very early on in the process, you know, early in 2020 when they sabotaged early treatment, and it just followed all the way through.
Fascinating.
I have to ask, in passing, what did you manufacture?
Well, plastic sheet primarily for food, but mostly medical device packaging.
So I'm well aware of the medical device industry, of ISO certification standards for manufacturing.
But again, I made money the old-fashioned way, a couple cents a pound.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's very interesting.
I will just say one of the things that I really appreciate about what I would call the unity movement and what you've been doing is how open people are to partnering with those that ordinarily they would not find themselves in alignment with.
You've been very welcoming to me.
I grew up dyed-in-the-wool, liberal, Democrat.
But I will say that...
Which means you have art.
Right.
And that really...
So do I. So do we.
This is the beautiful discovery.
And in fact, I remember my first...
Maybe my first inkling of this was the recognition that the Tea Party, which ultimately got captured by some things that weren't terribly positive, was effectively the mirror image of the Occupy movement, which got captured by something that was not particularly productive.
And the reflection that people on both the left and the right We're being motivated by the pervasive corruption of our system to demand change.
And the fact that those two movements got captured is irrelevant.
It was the aligned motivation of these two groups that was really telling the deeper story.
So, first of all, I come from the private sector, and one of my first insights when I was elected as a senator is, you know, in politics, dividing people works.
In the private sector, you focus on areas of agreement.
You don't get very far in business arguing all the time.
Okay, you've got a product, I want to buy it, or vice versa, now we'll haggle over the price.
So that's a very destructive part of politics.
The other, I think, just absolute truism is, as Lord Acton said, power corrupts.
And so I view the root cause of our problem is literally government.
Government provides people the power that they are able to then corrupt.
And so, you know, the genius of our Falling Fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies and other regimes.
They knew if we didn't want to live in anarchy and chaos, we needed some government.
They didn't establish government to solve our problems.
They primarily established government to protect our freedoms.
Basic things.
Defend the nation, protect us, keep us safe.
Some basic rules of the road, but that's basically where government should have remained.
But we have so busted out of the constitutional constraints, For big government.
And again, when you have these agencies that regulate businesses, I mean, businesses aren't stupid.
They try and make sure that they can continue to survive, so they figure out a way to make that regulation work for them.
Then once they figure out, well, I'm able to do that, maybe I can actually get these agencies and help them write regulations that Benefit me, disadvantage my competitors, not particularly be kind to consumers, although I will defend businesses in general.
They want to be good to consumers.
I don't know if a business wants to create a product that harms their customers.
It's really bad for business to have airplanes fall in the sky.
So again, I generally come from the private sector thinking, you know, business isn't evil, but large businesses Can certainly be corrupted by the power they can seize by capturing these agencies.
I think that's really the lesson of COVID. I saw it with Big Pharma.
Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.
But that's really, I think, probably across the board in all these agencies.
There's always going to be large corporate interests.
They have the power, have the smarts.
To figure out how to capture those agencies and the revolving door of personnel between agencies and those businesses and stuff.
And that's where we are here in 2024. And to me, that's I am hoping.
Golly, Bobby Kennedy fully understands that.
And hopefully can help Donald Trump and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy figure out how to bust up that corruption within big business and government.
Fascinating.
There are a number of threads I want to pick up on there.
In hearing your description, it occurs to me, I'm a complex systems guy, and it occurs to me that business, as you describe it, is positive sum.
You're creating wealth.
That politics is zero sum, which explains many of its defects, and government is negative sum.
In a sense, it is the cost we pay, and it makes sense only to pay that cost where the benefit that it generates in the private sector is greater than the cost we spend to do it.
Which is something we've lost sight of.
Government has grown out of control and frankly many of us intuit that what was true and what Elon Musk proved about Twitter is true of government also.
That a large fraction of what's being done there isn't actually good for anyone.
It produces nothing.
You know, Twitter at best was a cryptic jobs program for a lot of people who it turns out were Entirely unnecessary to its functioning.
Is that where you see government?
Yeah, but also remember that the vast majority of people who are working in government, they're good people.
You know, they've got a job.
They have an assignment.
You know, same thing in business.
Again, you go back to just the basic dynamic that power corrupts.
And so any entity that provides people power, in some way, shape, or form, is going to get corrupted.
We're not angels.
And that's what our founders understood.
We're not angels.
And so you do need some controls.
You need some regulatory authority.
You need some form of government to rein in the non-angel portion of human behavior.
Beautiful.
All right, so let me pick up on a couple others of your themes here.
I've long hypothesized that when you look at something like our government, and I'm under no illusions about it, haven't been for decades.
This is, I think of it as a malignant entity, and I worry that conservatives sometimes Infer from the malignancy that government itself is bad, rather than we have a pathogenic version of it.
But when I look at it, I imagine there must be three groups of people in it.
There must be people who will do the right thing, irrespective of the cost to themselves and others.
Those people must be few and far between, although I think I'm sitting with one of them.
There must be people there who will do the expedient thing irrespective of the harm that it does to the public or to the Republic.
And then there must be a large number of people who would probably prefer to do the right thing but will do the expedient thing because the system only really allows that.
And so one of the things that I imagine for this administration is that it has to do the impossible.
It has to take a bunch of agencies that are working to the benefit of the people they're supposed to be regulating to take one case.
And it has to recapture them.
So the way to do that would surely be to get rid of the group of people who will do the expedient thing irrespective of the harm and to basically deliver an ultimatum to the people who would rather be living in a good system but will do whatever the system demands of them and get them to turn the ship of state around.
So I would agree with your description except you're leading out the fourth group.
And that's the group that is smart enough and corrupts the system.
I mean, they're not just doing the expedient thing because, you know, I mean, they literally have figured out how to capture that power to their own, to their advantage.
And again, I think what's even more dangerous in today's world is now we have, you know, it'd be bad enough that...
Power held within individual countries and nation states.
Probably more dangerous when it's being held in a superpower like the US. But now, go above and beyond that.
Now you have these international organizations.
I keep asking people, as we're talking about these things, who are they?
Who are the puppet masters?
It sure seems like, you know, trust the news initiative.
I mean, what happened in the pandemic?
It just seemed like this was well thought out.
They were holding, you know, events.
Event 201 is one example, but, you know, in Bobby Kennedy, his book, he, you know, points out a number of these things.
You know, you see Rick Bright and Anthony Fauci at the Milken Institute a couple weeks before 201, bemoaning the fact that we don't have a universal vaccine program.
We'll probably take a pandemic to enforce it on...
Well, they got their pandemic, you know, and they forced an mRNA, a completely experimental injection on the world population.
Again, I don't know why.
It made no sense to me.
I don't know.
My first thought always was, well, how do you treat this?
Which is why I hopped on the cart right away.
If hydroxychloroquine, great.
I mean, I don't care what it was, and there are literally a number of generic available Safe drugs that were being used successfully, but the powers would be.
I mean, they didn't allow it to happen.
They sabotaged early treatment.
I know I'm kind of veering into that specific example, but again, that's what opened up my eyes.
I kept asking, who's running the show here?
Who's pulling the strings?
Who are the puppet masters?
Yes, I had that same awakening moment.
Specifically, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't understand hydroxychloroquine right away.
It took me a little bit.
It took me about a month to learn how to pronounce it.
For whatever reason, the ivermectin story was more intuitive to me.
I think, frankly, the fact of Trump having jumped on hydroxychloroquine confused many of us.
And I'm embarrassed that I was confused by it.
But the hydroxychloroquine story was so obvious so early.
If you just scratched the surface, you discovered that this story didn't add up.
And I think the American public still has no idea, you know, in part because Among other things, they were very successful at making hydroxychloroquine, no, making ivermectin almost impossible to get.
So it became a pure abstraction, right?
If people had had access to it, then we would have a lot more stories of people who had discovered that it actually worked very well.
We would have discovered, the public would have discovered that actually You could predict that it would work very well.
And in fact, they did.
They knew that it worked on SARS-1.
They knew it worked generally across mRNA viruses.
And so it would be shocking if it didn't work on SARS-CoV-2.
So why did they let people die?
So I've got two stories to tell on that, okay?
Drugs-Cloroquine, early on, I heard the state senator out of Michigan.
I think it was one of the first stories.
I think the Henry Ford Institute ran a study that looked like it would work.
Of course, Trump I mentioned it and they shut it down.
But my concern about hydroxychloroquine is, will we have enough?
And do we have the manufacturing capability?
I know Peter Navarro was on the same wavelength as that.
So I contacted the CEO of Novartis.
They were one of the manufacturers of it.
They'd actually donated 30 million doses to the national stockpile Which wasn't being released.
So we first had a log jam there.
But I was talking to that CEO all the way through April, and he was really excited about this.
And they had all kinds of trials scheduled that they're going to get the results by, you know, mid-May or whatever.
At the end of April, he went dark.
It's like they turned the switch and said, no, no, no, no, we're not going to treat this illness.
We're going to wait until we have a vaccine.
Okay?
I'm now in touch with, because I've read in one of the substacks, which by the way is a great...
Platform.
Platform.
Okay.
I mean, you're getting detailed information.
But I read about an attorney who represented families of individuals who were in hospitals.
They were begging the hospitals to give Ivermectin.
And by the way, that's the one that works better throughout the course.
Hydroschloroquine really, I think, needs to be given pretty early on.
But regardless, and I know it absolutely works.
There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of stories where it absolutely works.
But, you know, they had to sue the hospitals.
Right.
And this attorney, these are these ad figures.
I'm hoping to have a hearing with this guy.
But basically, let's say he sued 200 families.
It's about the right numbers.
Half of the lawsuits he won, half he lost.
Of the hundred or so that he won, so the hospitals were forced to administer ivermectin and these other things, only two or three people died.
Of the hundred or so that he lost, they all died.
And I'm reading a book right now, you know, what the nurses saw.
And, you know, we had early on, I was talking to nurses and, you know, they were doing, you know, they were fulfilling their oath of advocating for the patients and they were completely shut down.
Of course, you know, the people that I gave a platform to, their careers were destroyed.
They are still being sued.
They're still being decertified.
They're still, you know, fighting that.
Let's face it, it didn't take many doctors and nurses to be destroyed, and I mean literally destroyed, where the rest of them who have, you know, two, three hundred thousand dollars of student loans outstanding, that want to take care of their family, that have put a dozen years into their training, that they want to be able to practice medicine to help people to just shut up and be quiet and try and get through this.
And that's, you know, basically what happened.
Well, I must tell you, I don't remember the exact numbers, but the piece of Pierre Corrie's book on the war on ivermectin that stopped me in my tracks was the description of the natural experiment of this lawyer who had sued, lost half his cases, those patients died, and then the pattern is unarguable.
The implication, which you state flat out, but still it's going to be hard for people to accept it, is that somebody Decided to let Americans die for their own reasons, whatever those reasons might have been.
And the way I see it now, after I sometimes say that I got a graduate education in COVID and a lot of other topics, virology and epidemiology along the way, but one of the things that I learned was that what you had was a disease It had a kind of severity to it.
It's an absolute tragedy for humanity, not because of the severity of the disease itself, but because of the fact that we are now apparently permanently stuck with it.
How many years of life will be lost to people being sick again and again with new variants of this disease we apparently will never be rid of?
But the The fact is, if medicine had been allowed to function the way medicine is supposed to function, without the coup that was staged by public health, for what reason we don't know, then what would have happened is we would have very quickly discovered that this disease was effectively entirely manageable in all but the most infirm patients.
This would have been a minor blip, certainly not a pandemic by any traditional definition, certainly not justifying of the injection of a absolutely radical Medical technology that hadn't been properly tested.
The thing is we knew that though early on.
Yeah, we did.
I held my second hearing.
First I had with Scott Gottlieb and found out we don't have, we don't do precursors, chemicals for drugs, and we don't have the active pharmaceutical ingredients.
That was a national security threat.
That was in February.
By May, I'd heard of John Ioannidis' study on the Princess Cruise.
That was a perfect crucible.
It was a perfect test case.
So, okay, I think some 700 passengers, and if you were elderly, you were vulnerable, as elderly always are vulnerable in flu and cold season, or if you had certain comorbidities.
Again, as people with comorbidities always are vulnerable when you have some kind of respiratory virus.
So, we knew it right there.
So, I held a hearing with John Ioannidis, just trying to calm everybody down.
So, this isn't Ebola.
I mean, it sure sounded like Ebola in China when they had moon suits and you had these doctors going in there and you see the picture of this young doctor and all of a sudden he's dead three days later.
You know, I mean, let's say we were all scared you know what was, okay?
That's no doubt about it, okay?
And I always think, was that PSYOPs on the part of China?
Set that aside.
So, we knew early on That this wasn't going to be Ebola, MERS, or SARS-1.
You had the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford.
They were predicting this early on, an infection fatality rate somewhat similar to maybe a bad flu season.
Okay, so yeah, get the hospitals ready.
Hospitals always have problems in flu season, so don't freak out about this.
So I held that hearing in May, and of course it wasn't covered at all because we were in full scare the out of people.
And that's what they did.
That's what they did.
And I'm still wondering, who are they?
I know who the tools are.
I know Fauci's one of the tools.
He may be one of the leading henchmen.
But there were plenty, you know, Bobby, in his book, I think he did the Wuhan cover-up, right?
Because I read a bunch of those.
So, you know, he just lays out, you know, what happened in Germany, also happened in Japan, and how the medical community participated.
And that's, to me, you know, my daughter was saved.
My daughter was born with a very serious congenital heart defect, transposition of the great arteries.
First day of life, a wonderful pediatric cardiologist came in, performed a procedure on her, saved her life.
Eight months later, when her heart was the size of a small plum, they rebaffled the upper chamber of her heart.
Her heart operates backwards today.
But she's 40 years old, couple kids through surrogacy, you know, she's led a perfectly normal life, just...
Wrote and produced a play in Los Angeles, had a six-week run.
I am so grateful to doctors and nurses and what we have developed in terms of medicine.
And maybe that's what hit me the hardest.
It's actually why I ran for the U.S. Senate when I heard President Obama denigrating doctors saying they'll take out a set of tonsils or amputated foot because they're greedy.
It was so offensive to me.
But fast forwarding to COVID, I'm saying, speak up.
Stick up for yourself.
This is actually what I wanted to say when I first started this filibuster.
The root cause, again, is government because doctors should be at the top of the treatment pyramid.
It is doctors have the responsibility of the patient.
Instead, doctors are now crushed at the bottom, and you've got the Fauci's of the world dictating.
And again, it's all this transfer from independent doctors into hired hands, Of hospital associations and, you know, those hospital associations are, you know, they're regulated by government.
And again, they've captured those regulatory agencies so that when they write the CARES Act, give us a little bump for putting people on ventilators.
For, okay, you want a remdesivir?
Great, that's, you know, $3,000.
What cut do we get out of that?
Oh, plus we get another 20%.
Oh, we get an extra 20% for calling somebody a COVID patient?
That guy just coming in here, going to die from his motorcycle accident, he had COVID. So all the financial incentives were there.
I mean, the corrupt financial incentives, again, of course, written by somebody.
Again, to my great shame, I voted.
I didn't want to.
I held my nose and voted for the first CARES Act because I knew we had to do something Significant and fast so that markets wouldn't collapse.
The only reason I did that, that CARES Act started out like $750 billion, and within a week or two, that was up over $2 trillion.
And I just, I mean, that was the last corporate relief package I voted for, though, because I saw the corruption of it.
But I didn't know.
Nobody knew.
Nobody knew.
And that's how this works.
Okay, you've got smart people that know how to insert The sense they want, and they've been doing it over decades, developing this power base so they could implement it Once they finally engineered their pandemic.
Well, I agree with you completely.
There is obviously a they.
People like you and me apparently don't know who it is.
We can see certain nodes that are visible, but we have no idea who they are.
I think a lot of them go to Davos.
I mean, if you had to try to round them up somewhere, I would start looking there.
Yeah, something is at Davos.
Something gamed medicine and it used various tools that, as you point out, had been sort of installed over time to do that.
One of them is the public health apparatus, which in theory provides a justification in order to protect people at the population level to intervene at the medical level, the level at which doctors and patients interface.
But the whole thing was done in a way that I mean, it absolutely captured medicine.
And I'm, as you are, quite disturbed that the doctors didn't stand up then.
I'm maybe even more disturbed they're not standing up now, because now it's quite clear.
But you know why?
They've seen their colleagues destroy.
And that hasn't eased much either.
I know.
On the other hand, you and I, I mean, you and I are old enough to remember The echo of Nuremberg, right?
The point is, this is a lesson that we actually explicitly wrote into the collective consciousness for this moment, right?
And by the way, during the pandemic, you couldn't mention the Nuremberg Code.
as they were trying to mandate this injection, a guy like me, my staff, do not, because I said it a couple times, stop it, quit.
If there's anything that should tell you that this is some moment in history where extreme and terrible things are afoot, it's that you can't discuss Nuremberg in the context where informed consent is obviously central and not on people's minds.
One thing that I think I've realized very late in this process is that one of the ways that doctors were gamed Was exactly those videos that came out of China.
That actually the virus was already circulating in North America much earlier than we thought.
But what doctors imagined, based on the information they were being given, was they imagined a terrifying virus with a high case fatality rate that was about to jump an ocean, couldn't be stopped, And that there was something known from their colleagues abroad about what to do about it.
And the thing, you know, watching people collapse, the moon suits, all of that had them work themselves into a frenzy before the cases that they were going to be allowed to understand were a manifestation of this phenomenon showed up in their offices.
So when those people did show up, They were worried for themselves.
They thought they were going to be on the front line of a battle.
Which, by the way, is why they put them on vents to encapsulate it.
I understand that.
I mean, you know, I would have wanted...
The reason they were banging pots and pans in New York for doctors and nurses is, God bless you people for having the courage and compassion to treat these folks.
Right.
So that...
That courage to treat those folks led them to behave in this triage mentality, which then caused an artificially high case fatality rate.
They killed a lot of people with ventilators, which they never should have put the people on, both because they were protecting themselves and because they thought it was the only way to save.
The book I'm reading, what the nurses saw, they're talking about the 30,000 ventilators that Cuomo You know, demanded in New York without any respiratory therapists to go along with them.
Right.
And, you know, as Pierre Corey talks about, I mean, that is the last step.
I mean, you want to avoid putting somebody on a ventilator because people don't get off them.
It's just so destructive.
You put a person on a ventilator without the incredibly skilled respiratory therapists you need, you blow up their lungs, you kill them.
And the problem is that I think a dispassionate analysis says that that was not an error.
That for whatever reason, we were led to believe that a disease with a high case fatality rate was headed our way, and then we were given an artificially high...
We got one, yeah.
Yeah.
And so the whole thing set in motion the panic that then overtook all of us, and it took A couple of years for us to work our way out of that, and we're still not completely done.
I mean, most of the public does not understand that the repurposed drugs actually work and could have managed the entire crisis, you know, almost perfectly.
You know, stepping back to how do we get here?
Yeah.
Again, I don't think it's necessarily diabolical.
I think it's just sort of the natural course of sort of economic development where you had, you know, Just a natural progression of one hospital buying another.
And another.
And another.
And again, without any kind of diabolical purpose, all of a sudden you've got these larger healthcare organizations that are hiring doctors who kind of nice, you know, eight hour, 12 hour shift and not having to worry about getting called at three o'clock in the morning.
You've actually got other doctors taking that shift and it's a lot easier lifestyle from that standpoint.
Not saying it's easy, but then all of a sudden you've got this structure and they Are the ones that are just smart enough to realize as this has evolved into this, this is how we can take advantage of it.
That's kind of, I guess, my assumption of what's happened here.
Again, I know I'm always accused of being a conspiracy theorist, but things just sort of naturally evolve, but there's always smart people that figure out Again, when you create something that large, that thing has power, and I go right back to Lord Acton, power corrupts.
And the whole point of a free market capitalist system and what government does need to do is keep things at a smaller level, diffuse, not allow those combinations that in the end result in monopolies or closer monopolies and give economic or any entity the kind of power To harm consumers, to harm our society.
I come from the plastics industry, where when I started my business in 1979, we probably had, especially plastics, probably had a couple hundred customers.
It's probably been whittled down to a couple dozen.
And that's happened in industry after industry after industry.
Again, the smart people, You know, I said I'd make my money the old-fashioned way, you know, a couple cents a pound.
I mean, the smart people do it on leverage.
You know, they borrow somebody else's money.
Of course, that's what bankers do.
They use fiat currency.
It's not even their money.
They loan it.
But again, so the financiers Know how to buy these businesses, borrow somebody else's money, turn them over, keep turning them over into larger and larger and larger entities until we end up with what I consider now the mess on our hands right now.
Well, I agree with you.
I want to be cautious.
I think I hear this in what you're saying.
It's not that there was nothing diabolical here.
It's that the structure that got gamed Yeah, and again, there may have been some diabolical thing, but there's not some master plan.
I don't think anybody's ever that smart.
But once it's there, I mean, wherever there are centers of power, there's always going to be somebody that's going to be smart enough, smarter than the rest of us, and go, ooh, I know how to turn this to my advantage.
Yeah, I know how to play that game.
And that's what I think happened, is a system that had Evolved for its own reasons, got played by somebody very effectively.
And actually, this reminds me of something else.
You, of course, are, maybe you knew Zev Zelenko?
I did, yeah.
Dr. Zelenko, a true hero, died of cancer during the pandemic, but he was a very early node.
He minced no words and Let us know just how dangerous the shots were.
I had the pleasure of one very long conversation with him before he died.
We were talking a little bit.
I was confused by the fact that the Israelis had So thoroughly vaccinated their population, which seemed very strange to me because this is a population that's very sensitive to anything that has the hint of genocide to it.
So I was shocked that they would have You know, blundered their way into those shots at that level.
And he told me, he said, you're misunderstanding their leadership.
And he told me something I didn't know, which is that Netanyahu had apparently destroyed a warehouse of hydroxychloroquine that they had at the ready at the beginning of the pandemic.
Which, so to me, there is...
There's the public, there's the business sector, which had its own defects and vulnerabilities, but then there is something diabolical, you know?
There are some folks who view us as, you know, pawns on the chessboard.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying there isn't evil in the world, okay?
But I think it's concentrated in few rather than in the many.
Well, I agree.
And this is one of the things that I think is so important about the unity movement and the medical freedom movement at the moment is that it really is people.
We've got this malignant governance structure that is, frankly, I think, unarguably doing Massive harm almost across the board.
And what we've learned to do, in part because social media accidentally provides us the tools to do it, is to bypass that layer.
And we've started talking to each other.
And in so doing, we're actually We are more informative than the news.
We provide actual information.
It's noisy.
We make mistakes.
But in decentralizing the process of sense-making, we're actually now out-competing these monoliths.
They don't know what to do about it.
So their first instinct, of course, is to silence us, to take people's licenses, to punish them, We're good to, you know, quietly drive them off of these platforms, but it's not working.
Right.
I thought it was interesting when Bobby decided to run for president, you know, he made the statement, this will be the first presidential election that will really be determined by podcasts.
Now, when he said that, I thought, well, that's a little fanciful.
It was correct.
Now, it didn't turn out for him, because he was the guy who used the podcast.
But in the end, with Donald Trump then going on Theo Vaughn and Joe Rogan, that type of thing, The public could see him unvarnished, and this is who he is, and they realize he doesn't look that evil.
So, again, from my standpoint, what I love about it, doing a lot of media, getting a five-minute hit, You know, the host talks about two and a half minutes, you talk about two and a half minutes, and you've got to condense everything to a sound bite versus coming onto a platform like this where you can actually discuss an issue.
You can do it thoughtfully.
You can do it in depth.
And I think this is, you know, we talked about substacks, the same thing.
Now you have, as opposed to, you know, information controlled by whether it's the New York Times or Washington Post or whatever, Now you have this explosion of people, and again, you have to be discerning.
I mean, there is misinformation on all sides, and you've got to be very careful.
You know, I've got a certain bias, and I look at something and, whoa, look at this, and I shoot that, I shoot it off to my staff.
Then my staff goes, this is...
This is bunk.
So I try to be very careful that way.
Because we all like that.
I remember...
This is a total aside.
You know, my kids went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so that was the home of The Onion.
And I'd never heard of The Onion.
And my daughter brought home one time, and this was during Clinton's presidency, and they had this article about Bill Clinton.
And I thought it was real.
I'm reading the same.
I can't...
This guy, you know, got to try...
No, Dad, that's parody.
Oh.
Right.
So it just shows you we are all prone to accept as truth what we're biased to accept when it may not necessarily be so.
But again, when you...
As Brandeis said, you know, the solution for...
Wrongful speech or false speech is more speech, not less.
100%.
And, you know, the fact that podcasts did change the landscape is incredibly hopeful.
And in fact, it is there.
Comparatively low production values that is their charm.
Because when somebody...
We got a poinsettia here.
I've got a paper cup.
I don't like those little cardboard things.
Yeah, well, I mean, you know, the fact is...
I think styrofoam would be better than this, personally.
You do?
Oh, I don't.
Only because it holds the heat better.
Yeah, it does.
It also holds a lot of other things.
But the...
Remember, I come from the plastics background, so...
Oh, that's right.
But now I'm listening to Casey Means and we've got our credit cards with the plastic.
I know.
I'm doing organic.
I'm giving up my Holstice donuts and doing all kinds of things.
Well, actually, this is...
The degree to which those of us who started out with a kind of reason from some part of the political spectrum have now found each other and found very little to disagree over is, I think, incredibly hopeful.
And so in some sense, you're discovering the wisdom of the precautionary principle when it comes to complex systems and, you know, chemistry.
And I will say, you know, from my standpoint, and I got to hope Bobby gets Confirmed.
I've unfortunately read Kim Strassel's an article in the Wall Street Journal today, you know, really ripping on him pretty hard.
And, you know, these groups just come out of the woodwork.
But if he does get confirmed, I hope his primary focus will be on bringing integrity back to scientific research.
Remember Eisenhower, In his farewell address, military industrial complex, we haven't heeded that warning.
But his second warning was government funding of research.
How that would produce a scientific and technological elite to drive policy, I would say, corrupt research.
And it has.
So you get Fauci out there for four decades, billions of dollars of research funding, he got the result he wanted.
Pharmaceutical companies, big ag, they pay for the research, they get the results they want.
Put that over to climate change.
People know this is the result that my funders want and they're going to give it to them.
That's going to be a tough task.
But if he concentrates on that, I think that's what he communicates to US senators.
I'm not going to go out and ban things.
First, we have to get the science.
Uncorrupted.
Bring integrity back to research, and then we'll look at the research.
And that's what Trump said on childhood vaccines.
We're going to look at the numbers.
We're going to look at the data.
But first, we have to get it.
Yes.
So this is...
I would say my top issue is that science is a very powerful process.
It can discover what is true.
It has the unique capability to self-correct.
But it is a very fragile process.
It is not in any way robust to market forces.
It needs to be insulated from market forces in order to do what it does correctly.
If you don't insulate it, what happens is exactly what we've got, which is a pseudoscientific apparatus that tells us what the funders want to hear.
And there's nothing more dangerous than that.
You're better off not knowing anything and going on intuition than being told something as if it was science that really isn't.
And then it's peer reviewed.
And then you realize how corrupt peer review is.
Right.
Which is not...
Anybody who's been through peer review knows how corrupt that...
That system is.
There's nothing in any way...
Let's put it this way.
I always say, peer review is not the same thing as review by your peers.
I'm in favor of review by your peers.
But the point is, that is not inherently an anonymous system in which you're...
Oftentimes, it's your competitive peers.
Right.
Who have a different theory of the case, who, oh, I've got to tank this research.
Right.
Doesn't align with mine.
In fact...
Or I'll steal your research.
I'll take this.
The joke in academia is it's peer preview, right?
They get to see it, and if they don't like it, they get to kill it, which of course, kill it or steal it, which means that young people who are learning this system can't afford to do anything that contradicts the received wisdom of their field, because in order to get into a permanent position, you've got to play by the effective rules.
And by the time people get there, they've just been so steeped in whatever wrong ideas are powerful that they can't escape them.
So we have field after field that's just stuck.
Yes, it should be Bobby's top priority.
And I do think Whatever, I don't know who we are exactly, but we have to get him confirmed.
It's actually essential to rescue the republic.
Why I'm hopeful about that is, as much as, again, there will probably be, in the history of this country, probably This will be the most number of forces probably coming in to tank that nomination.
Okay.
But, and this is where you always have to start in public policy.
You have to get the public on your side.
And both Bobby and Donald Trump, when it comes to chronic illness and looking at this, this is completely nonpartisan.
Yeah.
Completely nonpartisan.
I mean, I think one of the reasons I won a very narrow race in Wisconsin in 2022 is You know, I try to convey it to people.
This is the truth.
I mean, I gave platforms for the vaccine injured.
I talked about early treatment.
I gave platforms for McCulloch and for Pierre Corey.
And, you know, I think there were enough Democrats in Wisconsin that appreciated that and went to the ballot box.
So this, again, this is the public is behind this.
I think my colleagues see that.
It's interesting.
I'm kind of doing the unofficial whip count.
And whether it's Republican or Democrat, the conversation always starts.
Boy, I love a lot that Bobby's doing and talking about and advocating for, but...
And then there's a laundry list of things that concern him.
I think mainly because they have done everything they can to destroy him.
Because, again, what's at stake If we find the root cause, in my last event with Bobby and Casey Means, these nutritional experts, we had Dr. Chris Palmer, a psychiatrist, does a lot of work on nutrition and mental health.
And of all the excellent testimony, his little snippet where he said they don't want to discover the root cause.
Right.
Because let's say you discover that X chemical, X herbicide or pesticide or X vaccine If that is the cause, that disrupts a multi-billion dollar business model.
But again, we're talking billions.
When you look at COVID, that's when people say, well, this is all about billions of dollars pharma companies.
Understand the absurdity of that.
I mean, the pandemic cost us trillions.
And forget the cost.
I mean, the human life.
I mean, how many hundreds of thousands just in America lost their life because they didn't have access to early treatment?
Not to say how many have been damaged permanently because of the vaccines or lost their lives because of those vaccines.
So it's sick to think That a few individuals with an economic motive to...
And again, in our economic times, a few billion dollars just is not much.
It sounds like a lot, but it's not.
Not in the general scheme of things.
Again, that's what government should be protecting us against is, you know, those narrow economic interests They could put a couple billion bucks in somebody's pocket, but it's costing society trillions.
Well, this is the key failure, and it's actually what those of us, I think you and I would agree that liberty is, individual liberty is actually The key objective of the system.
I would argue it's the only value you can afford to maximize because it integrates all of the other values.
In order to be free, you've got to address these.
It is the essential ingredient.
It is the essential ingredient.
So, the concern that I have and that you've just described Is that a vast fraction of our economy is actually composed of things that destroy wealth but enlarge the slice that is owned by some industry or company and that that should not That should be something that we stamp out.
What we should want is a market in which you're free to do anything that generates wealth.
But anything that destroys net wealth should not be profitable.
So to change gears to a different subject, but address this point, I'm not just flat for my idea, but one thing that would be helpful on this is in our tax system.
Right now, you know, C-Corps, they're the big ones, they're about 5% of American businesses, 95% of businesses are passers, which means the business income passes through to the individual or is taxed at that level.
The result of all this is 75% of C-Corp income is never double taxed.
We dropped the tax rate, I think, way lower than we had to for C-Corps, put them at a huge economic advantage to pass-throughs.
Their tax rate now is what we call permanent, and pass-through is automatically going to get a tax increase in 2026. What I was arguing back in 2017, I call it a true Warren Buffet tax, is convert C-Corps to pass your enemies.
Tax all business income at the ownership level and make the owners pay the tax.
And do it once and be done with it.
What's happened with C-Corps is because you have 75% escaping the personal income tax, that's how Jeff Bezos, You just lock up all this money inside these C Corps, the stock value grows, you end up with the uber-wealthy that wouldn't be as uber-wealthy if they were forced to pay tax on that income at the progressive individual rates.
And again, I'd like to see a flat tax, but I actually support a progressive tax rate.
I think wealthy people can afford to pay a higher percentage.
So I know that's kind of veering into tax policy.
I'm hoping, you know, as we go through reconciliation and we avoid, and that's gotta be the number one goal, we can't have a massive tax increase on the American economy and the American public.
I hope we simplify and rationalize our tax code.
That would be one rationalization.
That would be fair.
I have long felt...
Who was it?
Forbes?
I can't remember who proposed the flat tax.
Well, I mean, there's the fair tax, flat tax.
There's all kinds of stuff.
We all talk about it, and then when we get the opportunity, they're not even discussing it.
So that's...
Well, I got an incentive finance so I can start talking to my colleagues and try and inspire them.
Come on, we always talk about it.
Wouldn't you like to be part of the process?
Let's talk to Scott Bessette as we talk about his confirmation.
I mean, wouldn't you like to be part of the process?
We didn't do it in 2017. Let's take our time and try and simplify and rationalize our tax code this time.
So that's the separation is...
Flat tax is very simple, but it is not the only simple tax structure you could come up with.
You could have a progressive tax in which there was just very little machinery to be gamed.
But anyway, let's leave that aside.
That'll be next podcast.
Okay, great.
Although most people could care less about taxes other than paying them.
Well, it's one of those things.
In terms of details of it.
Right, hearing about it.
So I wanna talk a little bit about the political landscape and where we're about to find ourselves as we have confirmation hearings and the like.
And I wanted to address two questions.
One is, I certainly voted for Trump.
I'm enthusiastic about him.
I literally believe there is not another human being who would have done what he did, and therefore any complaining about details of the man is beside the point.
He basically defeated the duopoly single-handedly, both parties, which is an amazing feat and a necessary one.
So I'm rooting for him, and I'm looking to be helpful.
I'm of course concerned that he's going to be handed a lot of ticking time bombs.
Well, it's going to be a big mess.
We didn't fund this fiscal year that we're in.
We've got a debt ceiling.
No, it's going to be a mess.
It's going to be a mess.
Are you hopeful that the puzzle is solvable?
I'm not the world's greatest optimist, I'll have to admit.
This is giving me hope.
I don't think Trump gets enough credit for A, realigning politics, where now the party I'm involved in, again, I view myself more Tea Party than Republican, but okay, you gotta pick a side.
So I think Republicans now really represent the working men and women of America.
100%.
And this coalition.
That again, I give both Bobby and Trump credit for.
Remember, Bobby called up both candidates.
One picked up the phone, one didn't.
And that was Trump.
And, you know, I've read what Trump said about Bobby and vice versa.
And yet they were able to...
Washington's a very collegial place.
Don't think we're fighting like cats and dogs.
That's the same thing.
And people realize at this level, it's like, it's politics, okay?
You say this kind of...
So they've set those differences aside, and they're focusing on this area of agreement.
And again, that gives me hope.
Because not only does it show how you solve a problem like you do in business, you know?
I don't care what your politics is.
You want to buy more product.
Good.
But it also demonstrates, because I think the greatest threat to this nation right now is how horribly divided we are.
On purpose, by the way.
Right.
That's what identity politics about.
Critical race theory.
I would say transgenderism.
I mean, I would say, what are we doing, okay?
But I think it demonstrates this is how you heal.
A very divided nation.
And that's what we need to do.
So, to me, as much as I support Bobby for doing what he needs to do, he just, he needs to be confirmed.
Again, read Kim Strassel's, she's coming after him, okay?
I try to convey to Kim, because I literally talked to Kim, okay?
I try to convey to Kim, just give him a chance, you know?
Because I just think it's so important what that represents.
It's like, yeah, they don't agree on everything.
Trump's going to say, no, you're not going to touch the liquid gold, okay?
You're not going to come anywhere near that policy-wise.
But we need people of goodwill coming together and start fixing these Mega problems we have, $36 trillion in debt.
Again, this administrative state that is, again, when government grows, our freedoms recede.
It is a direct relationship.
I remember when I first ran, I said, you know, under Ronald Reagan, for a brief moment in time, we were 72% free because our income tax rate was 28%.
There you go.
You're giving up liberty when you're paying 28%, okay?
And the same thing true with government.
So, listen, I'm optimistic from that standpoint.
If Trump can adhere to that, if...
Republican colleagues will give Bobby a pass on whatever he may have said that they disagree with and realize that what's more important is what that represents.
And again, I've talked enough to Bobby.
I don't think he's going in there and banning all this stuff and putting at risk all these industries that Kim Strassel writes about in today's column.
I think he's going to be thoughtful.
He's going to be very thoughtful, very intelligent.
One step at a time.
Okay, let's fix scientific research.
Let's see what the data is.
That's the only way to proceed.
Because in the end, what is our greatest weapon is truth.
Again, truth is hard to discern.
I think there is something called absolute truth, but trying to get there is difficult.
But that's what we need to pursue.
And it's powerful.
And it is truth that gets the public on your side.
So let me just say, I know Bobby pretty well.
I'm a huge fan.
I am embarrassed to say that the The slander campaign against him initially had me cautious and not knowing what to think about him until I spent some time talking to him in detail.
That takes about five minutes, really.
Well, it's five minutes before you know the story about him is just wrong.
But in my case, I'm in the fortunate position Of being a scientist, a biologist, and in a position to talk to this person who does not have a science degree about these topics where he represents a position that is effectively about biology.
And I find him...
Incredibly careful and insightful.
And every time I've heard him say something that sounds like it can't possibly be true, and I've gone and checked, it turns out that he's actually right in spite of the incredibleness of the claim.
So I am...
Great fan of Bobby's.
I believe that just like Trump was the only person who could defeat the duopoly, Bobby is the unique person who knows how the business structure works, he understands the law, and he understands the science very well.
And so we need to get him confirmed.
I think also the story, and you probably know it better than I, and I hope I don't get this wrong, but how he got involved with childhood vaccines.
He didn't want to.
He understood the danger, but he's giving these speeches on the environment, and the moms would show up, and they'd want to talk to him, and he kept him at arm's length for a certain period of time until one found his house.
Came to him with a stack of research, said, I'm not leaving until you read it.
To his credit, he did.
And because he can read science, he understands it.
His eyes were open.
He couldn't close his eyes.
And I think that's what's true of, I guess, our movement, is once your eyes are open, again, that's that truth.
I mean, once you understand the truth, you're not going to...
Close your eyes to it.
And he didn't turn his back on them.
Even though, you know, smart guy, he knew the thicket he was walking into.
And he did it.
Again, that's what...
I mean, just hearing that story is what I like.
You know, this is a person of courage, of political courage.
And then what he did, which I mean, obviously, you know, probably harmed his family relationship, obviously severed his...
From the party that is really...
His namesake, really, the Democratic Party.
That all takes political courage, which we don't have enough of in this country.
Political courage and an incredible kind of integrity.
So whatever you can say, I mean, he's lived a larger-than-life existence.
His errors have been larger than life.
He lost his father at the age of 14. Right.
So the extent that I loved it, you know, when he announced, if skeletons could vote, I'd win.
Very upfront.
Very genuine.
And there is a symbolic way in which the tragedy of his life, the loss of his father and his uncle, is our national tragedy.
It's still an open wound in many regards.
And so seeing him ascend at the point that he couldn't win the presidency, joining forces with Trump, there's something Poetic and important about the story.
And I do think I worry as you do that everything will be thrown at him to prevent him from being confirmed.
But I would point out if podcasts are able To rearrange the dynamics of our political landscape such that a win like the one that has just occurred can happen.
That's also the key to this question, right?
They can use their official channels to throw all kinds of slanders at Bobby, but the fact is it can't work if we can hold their feet to the fire out here in public in our, you know, low production values So it's hard when you're living history to understand where's the hinge point.
But if I were to predict, the first hinge point started with Elon Musk buying Twitter and saving free speech.
Then I think it really was, you know, Bobby Kennedy running for president, Donald Trump, the assassination attempt where he stands up and shows that, what did Zuckerberg say, that was the most badass thing he'd seen?
Yeah.
Okay, which, you know, I think rallied a bunch of people around Trump.
Bobby making that very difficult political decision to join forces with Trump.
I mean, these are all things that occurred in a pretty short period of time that I really do believe can be.
And I hope end up being a hinge point in history, you know, from a standpoint of a conservative who wants to really limit government the way our foreigners intended.
I mean, the fact that we'll have the bullhorn of Elon Musk.
And now all these other podcasters that are supportive of the effort.
I mean, I think we're all recognizing the government has, you know, gotten too big for its britches.
You know, I'm a numbers guy, right?
We spent $4.4 trillion in 2019. Last year, we spent $6.9 trillion.
55% increase while our population grew 2%.
Had we just grown spending by population plus inflation, which was massive, That'd be $5.7 trillion.
The amount of money that we've spent above that common sense growth baseline is $8.8 trillion in five years.
Now, again, there's going to be screams and gnashing of teeth as we try and cut, oh, I don't know, $2.5 trillion of that.
There shouldn't be.
So, hopefully, With that bullhorn that Elon Musk and others have, we can overcome all the sob stories because anytime you threaten a program, they're going to trot out a little child and the widow and we're going to starve these people.
No, we're not.
I mean, we're a very compassionate society.
We all want to help folks like that.
We have to be concerned about the fact that we're mortgaging our children's future and how that's going to destroy all of us.
Beautiful.
I wholeheartedly agree.
One last question before I let you go.
We have heard rumblings from I hesitate to say President Biden because, of course, I don't really believe that the power structure, you know, I see him at the moment as a preposterous figurehead.
But we have heard intimations of pardons, and in fact, a trial balloon came out, I think, last week that there was a pardon for Anthony Fauci being considered.
Now...
Personally, I believe pardons are very important.
There are some people that I really believe deserve to be freed from tyranny by a presidential pardon at the moment, Roger Ver being one such person, Julian Assange.
But the thing that I want to be clear on Is if Anthony Fauci were to get a pardon, or anyone else in a position where they have presided over the COVID debacle, I think it is important that we get clear in our minds that that shouldn't change our need to get to the bottom of Kobe.
This is not a personal story.
This is not a soap opera.
And while it is true that people need to be held to account, and in our country that means that they should face punishment when they've, you know, done harm, that even if that is off the table, It doesn't change our need to understand what happened to us so we can prevent it from happening in the future.
And so I think we should commit ourselves to pursuing the truth of Anthony Fauci, irrespective of whether or not he is outside of the range of punishment.
Am I seeing it correctly?
To give you comfort, I mean, the only...
Not the only.
I mean, I could turn my back on this country.
But the main reason I ran in 2022 for a third term, I mean, I said I was going to do two and...
I'd be happy to go home, trust me, was because nobody else was advocating for the vaccine injured.
And I knew if I won and we gained the majority, I would become chairman of the permanent subcommittee on investigations.
I was chairman of the full committee, but I didn't have as strong a subpoena power as I will have as chairman of the permanent subcommittee investigations.
As the ranking member, I've written over 60 oversight letters.
To the federal agencies, they've just basically given me their middle finger.
So, no, I am absolutely committed to uncovering and exposing the truth.
Now, if he gets a pardon, he has no Fifth Amendment rights.
So, he's got no excuse for not answering our questions.
I think, I've actually said this publicly, I think what Trump really needs is appoint a Secretary of Information Extraction My guess is the shredders, the disk drive erasers are working overdrive.
But in today's world, it's hard to erase records.
I mean, my staff found the famous emails with David Moran talking about, you know, I've got this gal who knows how to avoid FOIA requests.
You know, not from the federal health agencies.
One of the people...
On that email chain that did provide us the records.
So it's very dangerous for these individuals when they have, you know, we've sent out letters of, you know, preserve your records demands.
If those emails aren't around and we've got them from other sources, and again, I'm putting you on notice, we have emails from other sources.
So you better not destroy records, because that's a criminal act.
And that kind of stuff would be punished.
Do I think Anthony Fauci is a particularly evil man?
I do, because I've read Bobby's books.
Do I think he deserves jail time?
Yeah.
Is that my primary goal?
No, my primary goal is exposure and accountability.
Let's destroy whatever reputation he has, because he should have nothing but an awful reputation.
And so, to me, it's always been the same case.
In politics, exposure and accountability is the first punishment, and probably the most important, because it deters other people from...
That's the whole purpose of punishing, from my standpoint, is deter others from doing the same type of thing.
There's certainly a role for Actual punishment or else, I mean, like jail time, because that's a real deterrent as well.
But Anthony Fauci was 80 some years.
I don't care to see him in jail, but I want him fully exposed.
Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree.
And I would point out that the destruction of a man's reputation, especially somebody who has lived on that reputation, is It's not a punishment, and it's an organic one.
There's a reason that human beings are sensitive to this.
It's because it matters.
And in some sense, having to do something like create a prism to disincentivize is really the consequence of a large anonymous society in which many people don't really even have a reputation.
Reputation or not, there's every reason to get to the bottom of this.
And I agree with you.
If Anthony Fauci is actually innocent, great, let's figure that out.
Oh, he's not.
He sure doesn't look at WESA. I mean, look what he did in AIDS. I mean, he withheld Bactrim.
He just wouldn't say, yeah, use it.
Again, same thing.
He wanted a vaccine.
So don't allow a treatment that they knew worked.
So I don't know how many AIDS patients died When there was something that actually worked.
So again, he just repeated it.
I agree with you.
And this was one of the mind-blowing things about Bobby Kennedy's, not his most recent book, The Wuhan Cover-Up, but the one before, The Real Anthony Fauci, is the discovery of the fact that actually COVID was a rerun.
Many of us were learning this in real time, but the fact is he'd been through it once, and it's shocking the parallels.
And he escaped accountability for it, too.
I mean, there was at one point the AIDS community was outraged at the guy, and I don't know how he repaired that damage.
My guess is through grants, right?
I got billions of dollars, now I'll repair that damage by doling out grant money.
Yeah, he's a master of gaming the system.
Well, Senator Johnson, it's been a real pleasure, and I wish you the best of luck in the upcoming fights, and I'm happy to do anything I can to help you.
I know you're on the right track.
Well, listen, I appreciate the opportunity, and this is what is very helpful.
I mean, keep doing this.
Keep having on great guests like all these other podcasters do.
