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May 30, 2021 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:14:41
Tom Woods
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I love DellingPo.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPo.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I am actually.
I've got some real high-grade guestage here today.
None other than Tom Woods.
Tom, welcome to The Delling Pod.
James, it's wonderful to be on a podcast that I can actually stand to listen to, so it's great.
Oh, that's good.
That's pretty nice.
No, I'm flattered because...
There's a kind of hierarchy, I think, in pods.
Like, you know, who are those really big guys whose names have just eluded me, the biggest podcasters in America?
Well, like Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan.
Shows like that.
And who's the other famous one, the really famous one?
Dave Rubin has a huge show.
Yeah, Dave Rubin.
Okay, so those two.
So you would...
They'd be the bosses, wouldn't they?
So if you get on their podcast, you've made it.
And I would sort of never dare ask them to come on mine.
But you asked me to come on your podcast before you came on.
You were happy to come on mine, which I think was really nice.
I felt like I'd been really flattered.
Oh, no, look, for heaven's sake, I honestly think you have one of the best podcasts out there.
I love what you have to say.
I love that you're absolutely fearless.
I mean, you honestly do not care.
You just express your opinion.
No, I know it's bad, isn't it?
I mean, imagine being married to me or having me as your father, because I can tell you my my family don't like it at all.
I mean, I mean, no man is a hero to his valet and I'm sure it's the same to wives and wives and children, but it's like when I go on the march in London when I when I go to kind of to to protest against lockdowns and stuff or whatever.
I get high fives in the street.
People love me.
You know, it's like it's like being a rock star.
And then I get home and it's like being a turd that the dog left on the on the bathroom floor or something where it wasn't meant to, you know, that kind of thing.
That's that's the difference in in my with my people versus with my family.
Well, my two younger daughters are only now starting to figure out that their dad has a certain notoriety.
So they're still computing that a bit.
And actually my favorite memory so far involving them and my notoriety, such as it is, is that when I had the thousandth episode of the Tom Woods show, I did a big live event in Orlando, Florida, in person, and we had A huge audience for that.
And part of the event involved a roast of me.
And unbeknownst to me, my four older daughters had prepared their own roast of their dad.
I did not know about this in advance.
They wrote their own jokes.
No adult wrote them for them.
And they came up on stage and absolutely stole the show.
My now 11-year-old was only 7 then, and she was just devastating.
I mean, basically, she was joking primarily about my height, because I'm not the tallest fellow out there.
How tall are you?
I'm 5'6".
Oh, okay, okay.
Yeah, I mean, I'm 5'8", and unfortunately, you and I have both been cursed by the fact that since we were born, the sort of the subsequent generations seem to have got taller, don't they?
I mean, when I was when I was born, probably five foot eight would have been quite a reasonable height.
But now I'm a complete short ass.
And I'm sure it's the same in America, where everyone is tall, aren't they?
I mean, they will play, you will play American football and things and you're all huge.
Yeah, basketball and stuff.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But if that's the worst they can say about me, but it turns out it's not the worst they can say about me.
They've said much worse.
What is that thing, by the way?
I don't think we have roasting in the... I mean, I'm aware of the roasting tradition.
I've seen it on... What is it?
Isn't there a thing?
Does the president get roasted in that?
That White House dinner, or is that, we're making that up?
There may, well, what we have had is a comedian, a stand-up comedian attends and usually roasts a lot of the politicians in the audience, including the president.
Yeah.
But in a traditional roast, the object of the roast then goes to the podium and roasts everybody right back.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Where does that come from?
Honestly, I don't know.
I mean, it's been going on for... I mean, it was made famous, I think, in the U.S.
by Dean Martin because there were famous roasts involving him.
But so yeah, at my event, the idea was that every single person who came up to roast me also had to roast the other, they roasting the other roasters and me, they roasted every, everybody's roasting everybody.
And then it's my turn to show up there and just devastate everybody.
I was not really up to that task.
I had, I had a professional comedian roasting me.
Yeah.
It seems like it was not a fair fight, but honestly though, I like the tradition because all the barbs that you're getting are all given by people who obviously hold you in high regard.
They're given affectionately.
It's actually a very sweet tradition.
Yeah, it is.
Also, I would imagine That you're quite crappet.
I mean, you seem very nice.
Now, maybe that's just your persona that comes across in your podcast, but you seem very sweet, which wouldn't necessarily go with a short person.
You know, you should be full of bitterness and suppressed rage and stuff.
But is that an act or are you actually like that in real life?
Yeah, I'm not, it's not really a persona on my show.
The only way that it's a persona is that I watch my language on the show because I don't want little Johnny who's six learning new vocabulary words from old woods here.
I would feel bad about that.
And I want my pot.
I mean, as it is, I'm appealing to a niche audience.
I already have a limited number of people who would ever be interested, and I don't want to alienate them further by having them think they can't listen to the Tom Woods show in the car.
So maybe I'll let a bad word go here and there in real life.
But otherwise, it really is the real me.
I mean, oddly enough, fairly cheerful and pleasant in the midst of the apocalypse.
Well, we'll move on to the apocalypse in a moment.
But I just wanted to have this kind of, you know, fellow podcaster Bants come because I'm actually genuinely interested in this kind of stuff.
Me too.
The talking shop, the My natural, my default mode is potty mouth.
I really find it hard not to swear and occasionally I'm brought up short by people who've written to me and mostly in a very nice way and they've said exactly this.
They said, you've been red-pilling my children.
But the other day I was driving along in the car and they were just loving your show.
And then suddenly you started dropping all these F-bombs.
And for me, you know, F-bombs are really like punctuation, nothing more than that, a bit of color.
But I can see that if I heard somebody else say, well, I haven't got young children, but if I did have young children and they're listening to Tom Woods and he suddenly started cussing, I might feel that that wasn't his job in front of my children.
So, one has to remember these things.
You're absolutely right.
Well, from time to time, just to emphasize this, If I do say a bad word, we bleep it out on my own show.
Or even once I had a comedian on who was known for having an absolutely filthy mouth.
And I begin the episode by assuring everybody that he's going to be on his best behavior, not to worry.
And then I welcome him on the show.
And the very first thing he says is, Tom Woods, how the blankety blank are you?
First thing out of his mouth.
Well, I think people would have been disappointed if he if he hadn't done that, wouldn't they?
Right.
I mean, that's that's that's part of the deal.
And do you do you find do you get stuck?
Do you have to do you make your own lists of your dream guests or do you find that it all just kind of you've got an abundance of Well, there are some people I'd like to get who I think are just beyond my reach.
Oh, who?
Because I'm too small of a potato.
You know, like, I'm a moderate-sized potato, but I'm not quite... Well, how many have you got?
Hang on, wait a second.
You're quite... I mean, if you were a baked potato, you'd probably be too big for... I don't like my baked potatoes too big.
I don't know if I don't like baked potatoes at all, really.
But if I see them in front of me, I'd go for quite a small one.
You seem quite a big one.
Well, I think it may be because I have so many different platforms.
I mean, like you, I'm an author.
I've written a number of books.
A couple of them have been big bestsellers.
I have a secret to tell you about one of my books.
I'll tell you off the air.
Okay.
But in terms of my... I have a mailing list that's kind of notorious.
And I've got 80,000 names on it, and it's very hard to build an email list to have that many names.
Very hard.
Nobody wants to give up his email address to some schmo, but somehow I've managed to do it.
So I have that, and then I also have two mailing lists.
I have that one, I have one about entrepreneurship, I have the podcast, I have a YouTube channel.
So I just seem omnipresent to people.
Yeah, you do.
And you haven't got any other employers, have you?
This is just you.
You're a one-man show.
Oh, it's just me.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
No one can fire me.
It's the only way to be, Blood.
It really is.
Especially in this day and age.
And I'll say, sorry to interrupt, but I do have some sponsors, but if I lost all the sponsors, it wouldn't affect me at all.
I mean, I would be a little unhappy, but I've built up enough income streams that if one of them drops or two or three, I'm still okay.
It's taken me a long time to get to this point, but now that I'm here, I realize I'm glad I've been working on this, and I'm glad I'm not in academia anymore.
I'm glad I'm not at the mercy of some boss looking over my Twitter feed.
I'm glad I can just be all woods here.
How long... Academia!
How long are you in academia for?
Well, I taught at a two-year college for about seven years.
I taught there at first in New York.
I taught there at first because I thought, well, I'll teach here because the salary is really great, and I get a good travel allowance.
I like to go to conferences.
And I get to teach survey courses, which I enjoy, rather than super specific courses.
And I'll work here until I pay off my student loans, and then I'll go find a better job.
So after I did that, I actually got an offer to be in residence at the Mises Institute, where I would earn about the same, except the job description was, work on whatever you want.
We support you, so you just work on whatever you want.
I thought I'd be crazy not to take that deal.
And so while I was down there, I think I put out a book a year, and I would have been ashamed of myself if I hadn't.
My whole job is work on what makes you happy.
If I wasn't churning out books, that would have been an injustice to them.
And could you keep the royalties, whatever, from the book?
Yes, it's incredible!
I could work on whatever I wanted and keep the extra income.
Now, I've been pretty good about promoting the Mises Institute as much as possible and being a good spokesman and ambassador for them, but they've also been great to me.
They sound great.
I have to say, I'll tell you who I've really gone off recently.
I mean, this is going to kill my chance of ever getting a fellowship with them, but I think actually that was never going to happen anyway.
Kato.
They kind of suck, don't they?
What are they doing?
What are they doing?
They have been so... They have sucked.
I'll say this, okay?
Yeah.
Yeah, well they have, there are some, there's a handful of decent people there, which is more than I think they'd be willing to say.
Oh no, I love Pat Michaels, I love some of them, but it's the actual, yeah.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
But the overall direction, the general tenor that you get from them, it very much is of the vibe of, we want some kind of mainstream respectability in Washington DC.
And so that means we're going to write these policy papers and we'll pretend to our donors that these policy papers are making any difference, but they're all going in the trash, of course.
And I guess it's the executive vice president.
I don't know exactly what his role is, but he's one of the top people.
David Bowes, B-O-A-Z.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, this guy is such a clown.
So he's told Everybody at Cato, that they are not allowed to refer to me, interact with me, even like one of my tweets.
Not retweet it, James, that would be outrageous.
But they can't even like a Tom Woods tweet, because I used to host a cruise.
I was actually able to make a cruise profitable with Libertarians, and it was a ton of fun.
And people were told at Cato, in no uncertain terms, you are not allowed to go on the Tom Woods cruise.
I mean, absolute absurdity.
I don't want to have a blankety-blank measuring contest with this guy, but let's just say...
I've contributed a lot more to the libertarian world than he has, in terms of books and output.
And when I go speak, I fill the place.
Nobody in his right mind even crosses the street to hear David Bowes speak.
But man, have they spent their time coming after me.
When we had the financial crisis of 2008, I wrote a New York Times bestseller explaining why it was not quote-unquote capitalism that had caused this.
Well, what were they doing?
Heaven knows what.
I don't know, probably having the Fed chairman over for cocktails.
I don't know what's going on with them, but it's not my style at all.
Excellent.
Now that you see, there you are.
You've, you, you've, you've, you've no more Mr.
Nice guy.
That's right.
The thing is the problem about, about not, not preparing things is that because, because I was just, I, I knew I could just with you, especially, I could just free will where I want to.
And there's so much stuff I want to deal with.
And that would have segued neatly into one of my observations about this, this alleged coronavirus crisis, Which is that almost no group of individuals have disappointed me more outrageously than libertarians.
I agree so intensely with that.
Yeah.
And in the UK, it has not been good from what I know.
It's the think tanks.
I mean all those people who said I've only discovered this recently.
I mean, I've had I've done a kind of a doctoral study in the rabbit hole in the space of 18 months.
I think normally it takes 10 years probably, but I've done it in 18 months or maybe even 12 months.
And one of the things I've discovered is that in terms of the New World Order, in terms of the, you know, the sinister overlords who are controlling our lives, the think tanks are very much a part of that.
These so-called libertarians, these so-called believers in Mises and Hayek, suddenly seem to think big government is bloody great when it's locking us down and stuff, for no reason.
Yeah, when it's doing the worst possible thing.
And the major libertarian organizations in the US have not been particularly good.
The Libertarian Party would spend its time on social media talking about civil asset forfeiture or some Tone deaf comment like that, which, you know, I know there are problems with civil asset forfeiture.
We have to talk about this, but not in 2020.
I think we can set that aside for a minute.
Yeah.
And talk about the fact that we're all locked.
You know, I only wish I could be out somewhere where someone could pull me over and see some of my assets.
At least I could be out.
You know what I mean?
So, it's been very bad, but it's been great for the smaller libertarian organizations that aren't dependent on the whims of a billionaire donor, or who aren't craving respectability, to distinguish themselves.
The Mises Institute, of course, has been absolutely great, and there are others.
But, of course, for a libertarian... And here's the problem.
The problem is the blue-pilled libertarian.
I don't know, is that expression blue and red-pilled?
Totally.
I think everyone who listens to my show by now must know.
So they all know what that means.
All right, so the problem we have among a lot of libertarians is that they're basically blue-pilled.
Like, their view is that, you know, maybe the government is a little bit off the rails but, you know, it means well and it's made up of mostly decent people who just want what's best for the country and all this and that.
They honestly think That their role is to advise people who might be willing to listen to reason.
And what follows from that is they also believe in the so-called experts that the regime trots out.
So if somebody like me comes along and says, Dr. Fauci is obviously a quack who contradicts himself all the time and who can't, for some reason, can't seem to balance in his mind concern over COVID with every other concern a living human being might have.
This is a problem that embarrasses the blue-pilled libertarians because that makes me a conspiracy theorist.
No, no, no.
They would die a thousand deaths before contradicting or showing disrespect toward a Dr. Fauci.
They latch on to things like that.
They're embarrassed by libertarians like me.
And so for them to speak up against lockdowns, it's a metaphysical impossibility.
The lockdowns are recommended by all these institutions and individuals that they also admire.
So yeah, so they'll still write little articles about why price controls lead to shortages and a whole lot of other irrelevant stuff that doesn't matter at all.
But when it really comes down to it, when was the last time, let's say the Cato Institute, I'm just going to name names, why not?
It doesn't benefit me not to name names.
When was the last time they took a position on some major thing Yes, it's so true.
Yeah.
York Times would legitimately despise them for.
Oh, yes.
It's so true.
I don't think ever.
You know, and whereas I take positions all the time that I would be despised for because I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't.
Yeah.
That is surely the only, if I used to call myself a libertarian, although more of a sort of more as an adjective than as a noun.
You know, I have libertarian tendencies, or I used to say I'm a South Park conservative.
These labels are kind of awkward, aren't they?
Because if you mention the libertarian word, people start playing the more libertarian than thou game.
They start saying, what, so you don't want to have heroin dealers outside school gates?
What's your problem with the free market?
This kind of thing.
But yeah, generally, I think that this last 18 months has stopped me ever calling myself a libertarian again.
I mean, I think you're the last libertarian that I probably have any respect for, for that reason.
But the problem though is that a lot of conservatives did not exactly distinguish themselves very well in the United States over this either.
We have so-called Republican governors all over the U.S.
who went in for the so-called mitigation measures that were completely useless, and they kept their populations locked up on the basis of quote-unquote science.
We have a real dearth of people who were willing to stand up.
In fact, I just had on my show somebody I think has a very decent shot of being elected to the U.S.
Congress next year, who is currently in the Florida State Legislature, Anthony Sabatini.
Now, he was even more anti-lockdown than Governor Ron DeSantis.
Yes!
And he has been consistent and outspoken and outstanding on this.
And he told me that the establishment of the Republican Party just couldn't stand the sight of him.
So, you know, it's not like anybody has really distinguished himself all that well in this.
It's a handful of disorganized, demoralized people like you and me who have been holding the flag aloft.
Yeah, yeah.
It really has come... I wonder whether America has been as bad as it has over here.
Because, I mean, Tom, I'm almost literally the only person in the, what, conservative media who has who's stuck it out, speaking out against the lockdowns and against the quarantines and against the nonsense.
I mean, I'm not literally the only one, but I am one of very, very few.
And all the kind of, all the feisty, all the sort of outspoken right-wing commentators, they've all fled the field.
They've all just given up.
They don't want to move beyond the Overton window.
And the Overton window doesn't permit them to criticise.
Come away.
I don't know how to silence my phone.
Go.
Wife, answer.
Quickly.
By the way, that horrible... That... It's not even for me!
That horrible ringtone was put there by my children to punish me.
No!
Yes.
I know exactly who that call is as well.
Oh, shut up.
No.
Good, it's gone.
Yeah, so what are we talking about?
Oh yeah, about how lonely it is.
Has it been the same for you in the US?
Has it been a similar problem?
I mean, for example... It has not.
There are, I could say there's a handful of people I know who have disappointed me on this.
But by and large, thanks to the Mises Institute, and the American Institute for Economic Research.
I feel like I'm surrounded and plus I've met a lot of just individuals, just ordinary Americans who suddenly became data analysts because the data analysts weren't doing data analysis, you know.
So people have just had to step up and I've met some really wonderful people and of course you and I probably have gotten to know a number of people internationally.
There's great Nick Hudson in South Africa and Ivor Cummins in Ireland but in the United States it's true.
I've been able To surround myself, certainly with my subscribers and stuff, but also my acquaintances by people who see through it.
All you have to do is look at the charts.
And in fact, I'm going to give out a website.
I created because I was sick and tired of looking at these charts that seem to indicate that the what we laughingly call the mitigation measures don't seem to do anything.
Because if there are... One of the first series of charts I ever shared was taken from the state of Tennessee.
And there were four bordering counties.
And one of them had reduced indoor dining to 25%.
Indoor dining is supposed to be one of the great dangers of this whole thing.
One of the counties did that, the other ones didn't.
We have all four charts.
And so I would say, all right, now, If I compare Florida to California, they have a million excuses why that's not valid because they're so different.
Okay, all right, then I won't do that.
How about that?
I'll be a sport.
I'll take four counties from exactly the same state.
So these people are identical.
These people are interchangeable.
Show me which one of these four charts is of the place that limited indoor dining to 25% and basically ruined all those businesses.
And of course the answer is they have no idea because the charts all look the same.
So what I finally did was I put together, both from Europe and the United States, a series of charts and you have to pick out, for example, I'll give you a chart and I'll say, okay, here are all the Midwestern states of the United States and here are their hospitalization numbers or death numbers depicted on this chart, but I haven't labeled them.
Now, one of these states dropped all its state-level restrictions two months ago.
Can you pick it out on this chart?
Now, of course, it should be sticking out like a sore thumb, right?
If these mitigation measures were as essential as we've been told, it should be clear and obvious which state is not following them.
But, of course, they're all the same.
You can't pick it out.
And that's the point of the quiz.
You get a zero on the quiz, right?
If you're going by what Dr. Fauci tells you, you'll get a zero on this quiz.
So go have fun taking it.
I put it up at COVIDChartsQuiz.com and see how you do.
I'm glad that you're sort of putting out stuff like that because I think that people need these – There are so many killer metrics, I think, which once you're aware of them, it completely explodes the myth, the bullshit that we're being fed by.
I mean, one of my favorite ones is that if you look at the age-adjusted mortality figures for the UK, which go back as far as 1942, And obviously for which the most recent year is 2020, the last year for which we have full.
Don't dive COVID.
I could see you were about to dive COVID there.
The deaths for 2020 are about the same as 2009.
And every year preceding 2009, going right back to 1942, the death toll per capita of population age-adjusted for mortality is higher than this supposed plague year of plague years.
Now, what does that tell you?
People are not dying in droves.
It's manufactured.
And yet, amazingly, most of our populations still imagine that this is the big one and they should all be very afraid.
I read a poll some time ago.
There's been other similar studies in the US, but in the UK about comparing the likelihood of hospitalization in reality for COVID and the likelihood of hospitalization in the minds of people in the UK.
It's like a hundred scale full difference and bizarre.
Now in the US, we still have the, I think the public health establishment is somewhat in retreat right now in the US, which is a very encouraging thing.
Restrictions are being dropped left and right, but there are still those who think That if we have a baseball game with full attendance, that this is going to lead to a massive quote-unquote super spreader event.
And by the way, if I go the rest of my life never hearing the word super spreader again, it'll be too soon.
Yeah.
That's the biggest midwit word of all.
And then recently we had the most heavily attended boxing match.
Indoor boxing match.
73,000 spectators.
Nobody checked for vaccination status.
There's hardly any masking.
And this is all more than the magical two weeks ago.
And we were warned, oh, well, this is going to happen.
That's going to happen.
And of course, nothing happened.
So I personally think That the reason people were warning that Texas better not lift its mask requirement or whatever is not that they're afraid Texas will fail.
They're afraid Texas will succeed, which would lead anybody who still isn't brain dead to ask the question, did any of this do any good?
I mean, Texas just got rid of all of it and they're all fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, look, lots of people on this side of the pond are casting around the world as to where they might flee.
And a lot of the stories going around is, look, this is global.
We are stuffed.
But we do look across at your state, your home state, and we think, oh, what I wouldn't give to live in Florida.
Is it paradise right now?
The only thing holding us back is that there are some counties where mask wearing is still very widespread.
So I live in Osceola County, and I see mostly masked people pretty much everywhere I go.
However, there are different parts of Florida where that's not the case.
In Naples, Florida, there's very little masking at all.
And I assume I don't need to point out to you that the health consequences are no different.
The health outcomes in these places are no different from places where they are wearing masks.
I was up in the northern part of the state, which is called the Panhandle, and there I saw more than half the people in the grocery store not wearing masks.
More than half the people at the department stores not wearing masks.
Basically nobody, you know, foolish enough to wear masks outdoors.
So there are parts of the state where they've just They realize that it obviously makes no difference if I wear a mask or not.
It's so fascinating to me that the people who fell for this the most are the nominally best educated so-called people.
Yes.
That the average guy figured out pretty early on this was a whole lot of nonsense and that whether I do this or that doesn't seem to do anything.
We can all see that.
But I would say, yeah, the fact is that in Florida, I can go to a play, I can go to a... There's a band from like the 70s and 80s called Foreigner that just played in Orlando last week.
There's an actual concert they played in Orlando.
So that's as close as you can get anywhere to life resuming.
And then we get on the Twitter feed of Governor DeSantis.
He'll be at some big fair or festival with his kids, and they're very...
I would say ostentatiously unmasked.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he's taken his picture unmasked.
I think that's a sign and a symbol to everybody that we're not doing this stuff.
Now, one thing where he's been beaten by several other governors involves the masking of children.
Now, I thought I heard that over on your side that they had recently said, we don't need to mask children anymore.
We're not going to do that.
He's been a little slower on that, but I fear that that's coming.
We've got the much more terrifying prospect of children being injected with this experimental mRNA substance.
I can't call it a vaccine because it's not a vaccine.
And for a disease to which they have, what, 99.999999999% immunity, they're not going to be injured by it.
That I find very frightening, which is why I look across at Florida, Texas, South Dakota.
I mean, I think it was fantastic that DeSantis introduced this rule where he said that people aren't allowed to, the businesses aren't allowed to force people to take vaccines and things like that, didn't he?
He's been quite good on that front.
He did do that.
That's right.
Yeah.
But on the children thing, What's even more bizarre about it is that we've noted, as this has gone on, that schools obviously have not been major sources of spread and school teachers are not faring any worse than any other group.
But there's a study, I found out about this from Sunitra Gupta at Oxford, there's a study out of Scotland that's rather suggestive, whereby healthcare workers who have a child in the home, they did a study of this, and they found that if they have a child in the home, they're far less likely to have a problem with COVID.
And that this effect multiplies along with the number of additional children.
So not only are children not transmitting it to adults, but if anything, they might even be some kind of a block, at least according to this study.
So this is very interesting and yet we're acting like the kids are, because what's happening now in the U.S.
in some places is that the adults can take their masks off if they've been vaccinated, but since it's impossible for a seven-year-old to have been vaccinated, because the vaccine isn't approved for anybody under age 12, they have to keep the masks on, as if that seven-year-old kid is going to cause your death.
So Florida schools, for example, do the kids wear masks or not?
Well, what's been happening now is that on the basis of one school board or one county after another, is generally the consensus has been that in the fall, because my kids go to a private school, they just make their own decisions, mask wearing will be optional.
Which is, by the way, all I would ask for at this point.
And I think if mask wearing is optional, that means no one's going to wear them.
Yeah, well you would certainly hope so.
I would hope so, yeah.
Even kids appear to have become kind of habituated, even addicted to wearing masks.
It's just like...
It's what you do.
There could be some simply because their parents guilt them into it, but by and large, I mean, I do talk to some kids because my kids have lots of friends and I don't want to be a fanatic who does nothing other than talk about COVID, but they generally can't wait to rip these things off their faces.
They can't wait.
They hate it.
That's good.
Look, I've been, let me go right down the black hole here.
I am very pessimistic about what's happening in the world.
I think that these are the end days, that this is the kind of whatever you want to call them, the black nobility, the people who secretly control the world.
They're finally cashing in on what they've been planning for decades, if not centuries, and that we're seeing this in the deliberate destruction of small businesses, their replacement with this kind of corporate technocratic structure where we ordinary folk are treated like cattle.
I mean, this is where we're heading, biosecurity states and so on.
How far down the rabbit hole with me are you on that?
At this point, I honestly don't know what to conclude.
What I've started to say is, I am never going to criticize so-called conspiracy theorists again.
Never.
Because, first of all, they've been more right than the alleged experts on almost every front.
I mean, let's face it, that's been true.
And secondly, they're just trying to understand What explanation accounts for this madness around the world that has no rational basis?
I mean, as soon as you start arguing to me that we need to follow these mitigation measures, I just immediately write you off as an idiot at this point.
And so what the conspiracy theorists, so-called, are trying to do is say, well, given that we all know that these measures are stupid and pointless and don't accomplish anything, then there has to be something other than our well-being that accounts for the motivation for why they're doing it.
And so maybe it's not our well-being, it's theirs.
I don't see the flaw in that argument.
And I don't even necessarily think that it has to involve the proverbial smoke-filled room where people are expressly conspiring with one another.
That's not even necessary.
It can simply be There are people with the libido dominandi who just enjoy this.
They love being able to tell people, well, we're having another important press conference tomorrow and then we'll announce that 35% occupancy is the new rule that's come down from science.
There are some people who enjoy lording it over others.
We have this prejudice in our society where we think all the greedy people are in the private sector.
You know, we have the Monopoly game board with the guy running around, the short guy with the white mustache carrying sacks of money with dollar signs on them.
We think that's where all the greed is and the power hungriness.
But it's just it's the same species of people who are in government as in the private sector.
And in fact, I think it's the worst of us.
who wind up there because these are people who take pleasure in lording it over others.
And this has been a profound boon for them.
Now the silver lining, this is not really a silver lining, but the one thing that at least makes me slightly happy is the DeSantis phenomenon, because there's an annual conference in the US, the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, held in February in Washington DC every year, or the outskirts of DC.
It's in Maryland, isn't it, actually?
I think it's held on the Yeah, I think it's because the idea is they can't actually have it in DC for ideological reasons, which is great.
But this year, of course, they had it in Florida.
And DeSantis came out and gave a rousing speech, and he was given, naturally enough, a hero's welcome.
The week after that happened, Governor Abbott of Texas announced Texas was reopening 100%.
My theory is, He had been waffling back and forth for a year.
He realized when he watched, saw the reception DeSantis got, you can make political hay out of thumbing your nose at the Dr. Fauci's and all the lunatics.
You can actually make political hay out of it.
And I'm not going to let DeSantis get all that hay.
I want some hay.
And all of a sudden that happened.
And then one state after another started doing it.
So if they tried to pull this again, They would still probably get away with a good chunk of it.
But this time, more people want to be the Ron DeSantis, at least in the United States.
Yeah, I do worry about Ron DeSantis because I think like...
Like Bolsonaro, like the guy in charge of Belarus, was it Lukashenko, is it?
Is that his name?
Sounds right.
Plausible, isn't it?
I know I've heard that name.
So those guys, but then you've got John Magufuli, the guy in the president of Tanzania.
who was very principled in his opposition to this kind of vaccine tyranny.
Didn't want anything to know.
He famously tested, I think it was a guava, and the guava came up, or a similar fruit, came up, papaya maybe it was, the papaya came up positive for coronavirus.
He was demonstrating that his scientists were just spinning a line, that it was all nonsense.
Anyway, poor old John Magufuli, ended up getting offed.
He got magafoolied, as I call it.
He got hillaried.
Is that the word you use?
Hillaried?
Or clintoned?
Oh, it seems like that should be a verb, and yet I've never heard it used that way.
When you die entirely accidentally, having crossed... Maybe I'll start using that.
It's a pretty good word.
So poor old Magafoolie went.
Look, Big Pharma has a You don't want to cross Big Pharma.
I mean, obviously, I love Big Pharma.
I totally respect it, which is why I'm not going to get killed by it.
But you can see why somebody like DeSantis might be playing with fire.
And I just wonder, look, it seems to me at the moment that the battle for Western civilization is taking place between states like South Dakota, Florida and Texas versus the rest of the US, which has been taken over by this insane sort of CCP dominated, big tech owned, you know, criminal conspiracy.
Um, who's going to win?
Well, you know, I think back to the naive me of 20 years ago who would have thought, well, freedom will always win out.
Yeah, right.
It burns in the hearts of all Americans and all this.
No.
And I remember, I remember in the debates between Biden and Trump, there was a moment in which Trump said, people want to be free.
And Biden said, people want to be safe.
And I thought that sums it up.
That argument right there is what this is all about.
The thing is, they were safe!
That's the thing!
I mean, you already are safe, unless you're in a nursing home.
Almost half the deaths from this in the U.S.
have occurred in nursing homes, which is a place where the average person has a life expectancy of 18 months to begin with, even under ideal conditions.
So most people were safe to begin with.
I have several cases of children, high school age kids, my daughter knows.
Who were not allowed to go out and socialize for the past 14 months.
They were at zero risk.
And I mean, but you know, essentially zero risk.
And they were not allowed to go.
Even though they could drive to different places, they could drive to see their grandmother once in a while or see, well, whoever.
The driving in the car is far more dangerous to them.
No one even stops to think this.
And I don't know what to tell my daughter.
We're just marveling.
That this could have been done to kids.
That there are parents, even in Florida, where you do have access to a governor who's going to tell you the truth, they still did this to kids.
And also, 14 months to a child is the equivalent of 14 years to an adult.
Their development is really important.
To be denied human contact, peer group contact, Yeah, it's awful.
The things they missed out on, the irreplaceable, joyful moments that everyone else was allowed to have.
And I feel like older folks should have stood up more and said, look, when I was a kid, I was allowed to go to my prom and I was allowed to have all these wonderful, irreplaceable memories.
And I'm not going to be such a selfish SOB as to say, well, to keep me safe, even though none of these measures seem to do anything anyway, you have to be arbitrarily deprived of everything that gives you joy.
And I think, I don't remember if I said this when you were on my show, but I came to the conclusion that the rule of thumb that the public health establishment is following, it's not really science, it's just a rule of thumb, which is, if there's something out there that gives people joy and happiness, we should probably restrict or cancel that.
And if there's something, by contrast, that if we introduced it, it would lead to great inconvenience and pain, we should probably do that.
That explains what they're doing far more than mitigation measures or whatever.
It's just, and I was just talking the other day, I was in the dermatologist office.
So these people are, these are medical professionals.
And up at the desk where you sign in, they have two little cups and they each have pens in them.
And one says sanitized and one says used.
So you take the pen, you write your signature, and you put it in the used one.
So there, even at this stage, medical professionals are spreading the idea that the virus spreads through pens.
That if you sign your name, you're probably going to give somebody COVID.
Now, even our CDC, which has been... I don't want to say it's been medieval, because that is an insult to the Middle Ages.
They weren't that superstitious.
Even they've said, look, it's not spreading through surfaces, really.
All this deep cleaning is almost surely unnecessary.
And yet, 14 months in, my doctor's office is telling me that it might spread from a pen?
What is that?
I mean, again, that would make anyone into a conspiracy theorist.
What can account for this?
These are the highly educated scientific people, and they're still pushing ridiculous, childish nonsense like this?
I would have been so tempted to go in there and reach into the used pen and sort of suck the pen, except I suppose if it's a, if it's a dermatologist, you might catch leprosy or something, mightn't you?
So maybe, maybe not, or, or I don't know, something bad, but probably nothing as bad as you'd get from having the COVID vaccine.
I mean, have you seen some of those pictures of people's kind of legs turning like a leopard, you know, horrible spots and everything?
Really bad thing.
What they'll say is, well, you know, I don't need to tell you what they'll say.
They'll say, well, these are very rare and, you know, and the risk of COVID is much worse.
But for me, I don't feel like it is.
I mean, I'm not the youngest person in the world, I'll grant you, but I'm not in a nursing home either.
And I'm in good health.
I take care of myself and I don't have any comorbidities.
I think I'm going to be okay.
And they asked the... See, our CDC made this interesting move recently, I'm sure you know, where they said vaccinated people can do all these things.
They suddenly said, after telling us that you still need to mask and social distance, all of a sudden we got... Well, actually, you can go completely back to your pre-pandemic life.
But if you don't have the vaccine, Then you still have to mask and social distance and all that.
But then somebody asked the question, all right, well, how can I tell the difference between a vaccinated person and unvaccinated person?
I'm vaccinated, but I, you know, how do I know if I'm hanging around with an unvaccinated person?
And even the CDC came back with, well, if you're vaccinated, you're protected.
It's only the unvaccinated who needs to worry, so you shouldn't worry about this.
But that's not been the way people have been acting.
They act like, if every single solitary soul isn't vaccinated, I am personally in danger.
Yes.
You are not personally in danger from my decision not to vaccinate.
And incidentally, Thomas Massey, who's a US congressman here, who also had COVID, he says he's declining the vaccine.
He was pointing out the newspaper headlines about Senator Rand Paul, who says he's not, he also had COVID, so he's not going to get the vaccine.
He says, notice the completely inappropriate word they use in the headline, editorializing word, refuses the vaccine, when the correct impartial word is declines the vaccine.
Yes, good point.
Yeah.
Tell me, because I haven't had enough American guests on recently.
Is there any likelihood that states like Florida and Texas will secede?
Given how bad the situation, given your Supreme Court is over, it won't do the job that the Supreme Court was supposed to do.
It wouldn't acknowledge the stolen election.
You've had a coup.
Would you agree with me?
There has been a coup in America.
Are you with me on that or is that too extreme?
I just don't know enough to know for sure.
I can't say I would rule it out because I'm dealing with people who thought absolutely nothing of murdering a ton of Iraqis on the basis of nothing, so I cannot rule anything out that they would do.
But I don't know the evidence.
Okay, fine.
Fair enough.
But, okay, my secession question.
Is it going to happen?
Could it happen?
Well, first of all, it could happen.
I mean, I think we can say that there have been more surprising things in history than that.
Okay.
Secondly, there are excellent, we won't get, we do this in another episode, but there are excellent constitutional arguments in favor of secession.
Now, the Supreme Court declared in 1869, just through its own ipsa dixit, that you can't secede, but it made no arguments.
The arguments are entirely on the side of... I mean, for heaven's sake, the U.S.
Constitution refers to the United States in the plural, repeatedly, to emphasize that it's not a modern state like France or other places in the world, but it's a collection of states.
It's a collection of societies.
And so I absolutely believe in the right of secession.
Now the question is, Secession is a toxic word in the United States because everyone associates it with slavery.
But as you know, logically, there's no connection between slavery and secession.
That doesn't have to be.
I mean, there were Soviet republics that seceded and that had nothing to do with slavery, or Norway and Sweden had nothing to do with slavery.
There's nothing necessarily to do with slavery when one body withdraws from another in order to enhance its own self-government.
The issue is, Most Americans, or let's say a lot of Americans, seem incapable of entertaining an idea that is not approved for them by the New York Times.
And this idea is demonized.
This would be considered crazy because the New York Times has told us that the sorts of things we can debate are whether the top federal income tax rate should be 39.8 or 40.7 percent.
Like that kind of debate we can have.
But whether we should continue as one country, when it's obviously dysfunctional, and you obviously have people with completely irreconcilable worldviews stuck in it, fighting with each other all the time, it would seem like the sensible approach is to have a peaceful separation.
But that is not, it doesn't matter how sensible it is, it's not approved.
And all these people wearing masks outdoors are desperate for approval.
So it would have to get really, really bad for them to be willing to entertain an unapproved thought like that.
But it could, it could get that bad.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the grass is always blacker.
I look across at America, I mean, when I'm not looking enviously at Texas and Florida, and I'm thinking, you're Your president is just a disaster and his soon-to-be successor is even more disaster.
I mean, you know, give me senility any time over the kind of hard left of Kamala.
It's like the American economy is being dismantled.
I mean, the money printing that has gone on, the spending, the government spending, it's in trillions now, isn't it?
And these are mainly boondoggles to benefit the DC class.
It's all going to get siphoned off into their bank accounts.
So America is like a kind of kleptocracy run by, well, have I said enough?
I would, if I were somebody like you and I'm living in a free state like Florida, I'd be wanting to get away from that as much as possible.
Well, to get away from what exactly?
Well, the entity that is a federal system controlled from Washington.
Oh yeah, it's true.
Believe me, I favor the secession.
I favor this, absolutely.
But I'm just saying that, unfortunately, the S-word for most people is just not on their radar.
However, when Trump was elected, all of a sudden, some left liberals were willing to entertain the prospect of California secession.
Right.
So they don't have any principles.
It's not a matter of, we should encourage self-government.
It's, if I'm unhappy, I should be able to secede.
Actually, that's a great way to live.
Um so yeah of course I absolutely favor it and I want to encourage it at every possible turn.
I want to normalize the use of the word secession uh so that we can because until we can start using the word we can't we can't process the idea.
But incidentally this Harris you know at least Hillary Clinton you got the impression that she was smart and this is one of my friends put it this way she was smart but mean whereas with Kamala you get the impression she's dumb but mean.
Yeah.
Every unlikable quality, which is why she was a huge failure.
This has been forgotten.
She was a huge failure in the Democratic primary races.
She barely registered in the polls at all.
I mean, she had no support whatsoever.
She would almost certainly be, if she became president during the Biden term, she would have to be by far the least popular person ever to become president.
So we have that going for us.
Yeah, yeah, you do.
What about when they come for your guns?
I mean, just explain something to me.
How sort of inviolate is, say, Florida.
How much power has DeSantis to keep Florida a kind of mask-free, vaccine-free, gun-celebrating territory?
And what ability does the DC have to screw you over and just crush you?
Well, they don't follow any rules, so it's not as if we can say, well, constitutionally they can't do X. That hasn't stopped them.
But the fact that DeSantis and Abbott and others have gotten away with what they've gotten away with does still say something, even for an old cynic like me, about the resilience of the U.S.
federal system, that they've been able to do it.
Now, what really matters is not what's written on paper, whether the Constitution limits the federal government, this and that, because obviously these people don't care about a piece of paper.
What matters is what will the public let them get away with.
So people ask me, can the governor do so-and-so?
I'd say, well, yes, he can.
But the question is, which side do most people support?
If most people support the governor, it would be very, very hard.
Like, for example, the sheriff.
This is not well known outside the US.
But the sheriff, the local sheriff, has an enormous amount of authority.
If he says he's not enforcing something in his area, then that's the end.
It goes unenforced.
And now, yes, the U.S.
president could intervene and amass troops and send them into that area.
But the thing is, Democrat or Republican, in general, everybody loves the local sheriff in the U.S.
So you would be expending an enormous amount of political capital against a population that despises you.
So on the local level and on the state level, the governors and the sheriffs have a tremendous amount of power.
But because the U.S.
government is untethered from the Constitution, it's possible that they could just say, well, we're rolling in the tanks.
But it's a little hard for them to lecture the world on democracy when they're rolling in tanks against their own people.
Yeah.
The question becomes, can I afford to expend all this political capital in this campaign against DeSantis.
I mean, I think he's going to come out okay.
They raised the prospect of travel restrictions to Florida.
They raised that prospect, and then they denied it, which means they were considering it.
Yes, of course.
And DeSantis stood up and said, we will absolutely not allow that.
There will be free commerce and travel going in and out of Florida, no matter what they say.
I think there would have been enough people in Florida backing him that they would indeed have backed down.
And indeed, well, what happened?
They did back down.
I'm so glad that fighting spirit is there in America.
I imagine you get taught this in your history classes, don't you?
You learn all about the Minutemen and stuff, fighting the British colonial oppressors or whatever, however you like to... And that's in your DNA and the right to bear arms and having your well-ordered militia and stuff.
I mean, that's...
That's all that stands between you, I think, and oppression like we're getting over here.
Well, we need a lot more of it.
We need it to be revived and encouraged instead of demonized.
Because if you talk like that, if you talk too much about the American War for Independence and that great fighting spirit, you know, hey, that's domestic terrorist talk, man.
You better be careful.
There is a lot of madness and craziness here, even still.
But honestly, I think this is the place I would most want to be right now.
I mean, yeah, I know Belarus did not I can't believe that my wife is still not answering the call, which is for her, after all.
I know who it is.
They didn't really lock that.
But I don't want to live in Nicaragua.
I want to live in Belarus.
I want to live in an English speaking country where I have some connection with the history.
So I'm staying here and I don't see if there's anything better.
Yeah.
I can't believe that my wife is still not answering the call, which is for her after all.
I know it.
I know who it is.
It's just so annoying.
It's not.
It's now asking me to set up professional audio.
Yeah, that is the thing, isn't it?
It's not just what limited place in the world that you can find that is not where you're not going to be face Armageddon.
It's also where you'd actually bear to live.
People, I've got friends in Florida who send me the, who troll me with these photographs of these, these little short films they've made of people sitting outside in cafes, not in masks.
It's awful.
I mean, to watch.
What I don't understand are all the Europeans who continue to be worried about the Indian variant or this and that, and they're still consenting to all these lockdowns and shaming people who don't like them.
Are they just acting as if Florida doesn't exist?
I hope they're not trying to pretend that's all because of the vaccines, because this started months and months and months and months ago, where we were doing stuff like this.
I mean, the Super Bowl was way before hardly anyone was vaccinated, and there was no There was no super spreader as a result of the Super Bowl.
Are they just pretending this isn't happening?
I tell you what, Tom, it's been one of the most bizarre experiences of my life.
Looking around and looking at people who were at university with me, for example, people who were supposed to be the creme de la creme, the intellectual elite of this country.
And they can't answer basic questions like, given that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin stop you dying of COVID and just make it like any other survivable, you know, like a nasty cold.
Given that that is the case, why are we forcing people to take these vaccines with much dodgier safety records that haven't even come out of their experimental phase yet?
Also, if masks and quarantines are so important, how come Florida and Texas and South Dakota seem to have done perfectly okay?
These are questions which are not being answered and they ought to be answered.
I mean, how can you justify doing all the terrible things, all the freedom-sapping things, the life-destroying things they're doing, if you can't answer these basic questions?
Exactly.
And if I can jump in here, I want to give you three examples.
When the establishment here has been asked those questions.
Because once in a while, they do get asked about that.
And as I've said before, there have been times when I've thought deep down, well, maybe Fauci is smart enough that if I asked him, why is, you know, Texas doing fine after reopening, maybe he has some very sophisticated answer that would be convincing.
You know, I mean, he is a great expert in everything, so maybe.
But then when they actually do ask him, and you hear his answer, you realize, oh my gosh, they have no idea.
They have no idea what's going on.
So, for example, they did ask Fauci that.
Why is Texas doing so well?
We all predicted disaster.
And they're doing fine.
And his answer was, I don't really know.
Perhaps they're doing a lot of things outdoors.
I'm not kidding you.
That was his answer.
And apparently the American media is perfectly satisfied with that nonsensical answer.
So then, another example, Andy Slavitt, who is one of the great panickers who advises the White House, he was asked on MSNBC, which for your, in case you guys over there don't know, is the most left liberal network we've gotten.
But even they asked, well look, California and Florida are comparable, and they're especially comparable when you do, when you correct for age.
And yet California has been very locked down and Florida hasn't.
And so you think, all right, well, let's hear, how is Slavitt going to explain this?
And his answer was, there are some things about this virus that are a bit beyond our understanding.
So they admit they don't get it.
And then he goes on to say, but listen, here's what we know works.
Social distancing and whatever, lockdown, whatever.
But wait a minute, obviously we don't know that works, because you just got done saying, you yourself just got done saying, you don't know how to explain why California would be doing so poorly, when it should be doing great, according to you.
And then finally, so let's see, so we did Slavitt and Fauci, and then Michael Osterholm is another expert, and he really is an expert on influenza.
He's been studying it for 40 years.
Excuse me.
So then they asked Osterholm about this.
He predicted that Florida would be a house on fire.
He predicted this in October.
A house on fire within X number of weeks.
And of course, everything continued to improve in Florida.
In early January, he said the next six to 14 weeks are gonna be the worst of the pandemic.
After 14 weeks passed, the case numbers had fallen 76%.
They still listen to this guy.
They don't ask him, why are you wrong all the time?
But he did have the honesty to say, look, There is no reason that Iowa, fully open, should be doing so much better than Michigan, heavily locked down.
He said this a few weeks ago on Twitter.
He said, and anybody who says he has an explanation for that is lying to you.
So what I respected about that, and I hate to use the word respect in the same sentence with these people, was that he had the honesty to say We don't fully get it, okay?
Because if it really is true that staying isolated, this should, you know, get the R not figured out, then this shouldn't be happening.
And yet it is.
So we clearly don't fully get it.
And that James, that is what I've been asking them to say from the beginning, is just be honest with us, level with us and say, we don't fully understand this thing.
I mean, yeah, they give lip service.
They'll say, well, we don't, you know, there are aspects of it we don't get.
No, no, no, no, no.
I need to be, I need to be much more straightforward with me.
We do not understand how this thing works because the things we're recommending don't seem to make any difference.
And Osterholm is now more or less admitting that.
Yeah.
Yeah, Tom, I think, look, you're so good at this shit that I think we should do another podcast sometime.
But I wanted to ask you, if you're up for it, of course, I wanted to ask you a point we never followed up at the beginning.
Who are the big beasts that you feel incapable of getting on because you're not famous enough?
Who would you like?
Well, let's see.
I mean, well, obviously I'd like to get Trump on and ask him questions.
Do you think you'd be good?
I do because there are things I want to tell him.
Yeah.
You know, and, and, and I want to see looking back on it now and assuming you're not getting back into politics.
So you can even admit you made a mistake.
Do you think it was wrong to do the 15 days to flatten the curve?
You know, like I just like to get his thoughts on it.
Yeah.
Like, do you really, in your heart of hearts, now do you think it saved lives?
Stuff like that.
I'd like to get Scott Atlas on.
Now, I don't know if that's a name familiar.
Yeah, no, he'd be great.
Yeah.
And I don't think that's impossible because he's writing a book.
No, you get him.
Definitely.
OK, well, I mean, we have some of the same friends, which helps, because I was asking one of his colleagues, I said, you've got to tell Scott Atlas.
He needs to write a tell-all book naming names about what happened in the Trump White House and who did what and who was backstabbing whom.
And he said, well, I'm happy to tell you he's already writing it and it's going to be great.
And by the way, that's important because to have a book That will exist forever, be accessible forever, will help to tell the real story 100 years from now.
Of course.
So people can look and see, well, maybe it wasn't just they all social distanced and the thing went away.
Maybe there was more to it than that.
Yeah.
Just going back to that Trump thing.
I had a debate on my telegram group about this question.
A lot of people are disappointed in Trump.
They thought he had a plan.
They hoped that he was going to be our saviour.
And people are quite bitter about that.
But I think one of the things they're bitter about is that he did not... Who said this?
Peter McCulloch.
Have you seen the interview with Peter McCulloch?
Well, I've seen him.
I don't know if it's the interview, but I've heard him speak. - Okay.
So Peter McCulloch says, that Trump really should have pushed hydroxychloroquine harder.
You know, I mean, obviously he did.
He said it became known as the Trump drug, but he really should have fought Fauci harder because Fauci is clearly, as you recognized, he's cabal, he's a bad lot.
Why did Trump allow himself?
But then other people have countered, well, Trump was a kind of prisoner of his medical establishment.
He couldn't be.
And I don't know what the answer is.
Do you have a view on that?
Well, I just hate being told about, well, the president is hemmed in.
They never say that about a left-wing president.
He does whatever he wants.
He doesn't care.
He'll fire anybody who needs to be fired.
And what he wants to happen will happen.
It's only people who are at least nominally on our side, we have to get all these excuses about why they couldn't do the things that we obviously know they needed to do.
So I'm not sympathetic to that line of argument.
What I think he should have done is had a series of nationally, well because you can't guarantee that the network's going to carry him, but he should have produced roundtables with
Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and Scott Atlas and others, where they showed some of the charts I'm trying to show on my website, and where they review what's actually happening in a non-panicky way, and where they say, yeah, they had summer camps like normal in such and such state, and nothing happened.
There's no piles of dead kids.
There's no piles of dead camp counselors.
None of these things happened.
That should have been coming out all the time, because instead all we got was panic, panic, panic, panic.
And he could have done that.
He could have highlighted scientists who were defying the established narrative much, much more than he did.
I think you're so right.
I think you're so right.
For example, you're right, it wouldn't have been covered in the MSN.
But it would have enabled organizations like Breitbart, for example, to have covered this as pure news without fear of being, having, hanging over them the threat of being canceled by, you know, by the various big tech companies, which is what, you know, they're constantly after conservative media.
But that would have, yeah, Trump should have used his cachet to get the message out, shouldn't he?
Because I felt like those of us who were trying to get the message out were just, again, disorganized and scattered.
And he's got the White House, for heaven's sake.
He should be in the Rose Garden or wherever.
He should have Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford on.
He should Zoom in with Sunitra Gupta, who is a female scientist of color from outside the U.S.
That covers almost all bases.
I mean, all she needs to do is be paralyzed and she'd cover everything, right?
He should have been doing that because you cannot question the credentials of those people.
You just can't.
I think you're right.
I think you've actually sorted that one out.
Yeah.
And Trump would be, would be a good get for your show.
I hope he comes on it.
Um, Tom.
Yeah.
I mean, I, I highly doubt, you know, I don't think I could do, but that's what I mean about people, you know, he would, it's conceivable that a Joe Rogan could get him.
It's conceivable that he would do it.
It's conceivable that Sean Hannity could get him.
It's not conceivable that I could.
So I guess it's people like that, or maybe, um, Yeah, I'm trying to, I mean, there's a guy named Mike Rowe in the United States, and he has a show, he used to have a show called Dirty Jobs, and it would show him, for a day, doing a job that somebody has to do every day, and it's filthy and awful, and it would be an interesting show.
But since then, he's become really well-known as somebody who believes in individual responsibility and not demanding government assistance and this and that.
He's very sound on that.
He's been very, very good on the pandemic, and he has a huge, huge fan base.
But he's hard to get.
Is he?
Or Van Morrison!
I want to get Van Morrison on my show!
And I was told, and by the way, I think this is correct, I was told, I wrote to his publicist, because of course Van Morrison has written anti-lockdown songs.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I wanted to get him on the show.
And I was told he's not doing interviews.
This was probably four or five months ago, or even longer actually, before, it was just as the songs were coming out, I was told he's not doing interviews.
And sure enough, I scoured YouTube and everything, I couldn't find a single interview he had done.
So that may not have been a case of, I'm such a small potato that he may genuinely not have been doing that.
But if not, why not?
Talk about a missed opportunity.
Get on TV.
Be interviewed about this.
If you're going to be outspoken, be outspoken.
Well, it's funny, isn't it?
There's a handful of rock stars who've come out against the nonsense.
You've got Eric Clapton, who again probably wouldn't do an interview.
I mean, he's quite shy, isn't he?
So Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Morrissey.
Yep.
Would be great if you get him, but he's quite slippery.
Do you know, are you familiar with the Stone Roses, Ian Brown?
Oh no, I'm not.
Do they not get big in America?
They might be, but... 1989, 90?
Were you a child?
So you probably wouldn't remember.
Well, I'm 48.
Yeah, okay.
So, yeah, you are the right generation to be familiar with him.
But again, he's been absolutely outspoken, but he doesn't want to give interviews.
He doesn't want to... They're musicians.
They want to do their music thing, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to get, Thomas Sowell is on my dream list.
Yeah, so I almost got him.
I got the, they sent me a free copy of his book, which usually means he's going to come on.
Why else would they send me the book?
And then it just never happened.
And the thing is, I know his work inside and out.
I love him.
I could have, that could have been an outstanding interview, just because of how well I've read.
I haven't just read two of his newspaper columns.
So that was disappointing.
But he was already in his 80s by the time we reached out to him.
Yeah, but he's so wise, isn't he?
He's kind of my economics god.
I mean, basic economics is just so good.
But not to mention, just no matter what the subject is, as a writer, he's top-notch.
I would love to be as good as he is.
He's a top-notch writer.
It's clear and devastating.
I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of Thomas Sowell.
I wouldn't want him to be critiquing my book or something.
Oh, you'd get eaten alive.
Well, I won't get him, but I do hope you get him.
Is this a chance?
Well, I kind of dropped the idea.
I suppose I could take it up again.
I think you should.
I think you'd do a better job than I would because you know your economic stuff more than I do.
But yeah, that would be great.
Look, please come back on the show.
I'd love to.
Dear listeners, if you've enjoyed this, don't forget to support me on Patreon or Subscribestar.
I'm really bad at Plugging and monetizing my content.
Next time I'll ask you for tips on that, Tom, because I think you've got your head screwed on more than I have.
I actually am pretty decent when it comes to that, but I will say just flat out here that I support you on Patreon, and I don't support that many people, content creators.
Well, I support some, I suppose, but given how many of them there are out there, it's a very, very tiny percentage I support.
But it was because of your Heather MacDonald interview.
It was fearless, and it was things that can't be denied, but that are denied.
And I just thought to myself, anybody who could conduct an interview like that, That's good.
Well, thank you for that endorsement.
That's really good.
Tom, great to have you on the show.
And yeah, let's do it again.
Thank you, James.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
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