Alex Berenson and Joe Rogan debate COVID-19 vaccines, exposing suppressed data like Israel’s Delta-driven infections post-vaccination and CDC reports of 100,000–200,000 severe side effects per million doses, while questioning mandates targeting healthy adults. They critique pharmaceutical incentives, including Bourla’s Pfizer profits and lawsuits alleging corruption, comparing modern medicine’s flaws to historical public health successes like clean water. Shifting to climate policy, Berenson highlights CARB’s impractical EV mandates and China/India’s coal expansion, calling U.S. efforts futile. Election integrity tensions arise, with Rogan warning of polarization risks—January 6th sentencing extremes and distrust—while Berenson reaffirms vaccine skepticism amid fading public health consensus. [Automatically generated summary]
What bothers me, and I try to emphasize this as much as possible, and I even had to do this recently with some close family friends, you've got to take care of your health.
You have to take vitamins.
You have to eat right.
You have to.
If you don't do that, your body doesn't function well.
That includes your immune system.
It includes everything.
It includes, you know, inflammation.
It causes a host of diseases in your body.
You got to take care of yourself.
And that should be the most important message that everyone's putting out, not just podcasters, but the government, health officials.
Everyone should be saying that.
You should really supplement with vitamins.
You should really, you know, get your nutrient levels checked if you can.
Yeah, there's been some studies done recently that something really crazy, like 20 minutes of exercise twice a week improves your overall all-cause mortality score.
But I do, you know, I wrote about this on the Substack.
We were just talking before we started about when I didn't see you, but when you were in Vegas in July and I was in Vegas in July for, I was playing poker, that like, you know, gambling is, and I like to gamble.
I don't have a moral problem with it, but gambling destroys people too.
We tend to imitate our atmospheres and you see that in thought bubbles and I think that's another problem that we have with social media and there's these thought bubbles and People just you know you sort of gravitate towards them you stay in them and if you're busy You just sort of get affirmation from that thought bubble and you never think outside the box.
Well, let's talk about that, because you came on for your book that I've referenced many times, and it's called Tell Your Children, and I think it's important.
I think when we talk about these things that some people like to use recreationally, like even gambling, like you talked about, we have to be aware...
That there's consequences to these things too.
It's not an even ride.
It's not like every person is going to handle every situation well.
We had a podcast yesterday with Kurt Angle.
You know, Olympic gold medalist in wrestling and he was the WWE Champion.
Amazing guy.
And he had a real pill problem.
And he had a pill problem because he broke his neck like five times.
I mean, this is like a man whose mind is as strong as any fucking human who's ever walked the face of the earth.
If you can win the gold medal in the Olympics in wrestling, wrestling is one of the most competitive, grueling, insane physical contests that are in the Olympics.
It's like boxing and wrestling are two of the craziest.
I think for people who want to stop, that can be helpful to them.
I don't think anybody who goes to rehab unwillingly or even semi-willingly is going to get much out of it.
And I know this is a controversial perspective.
One of the things that, so before COVID, just before COVID, I was working on sort of a big book about, bigger than the cannabis book, sort of growing out of the cannabis book, about drug legalization and sort of addiction in general.
And the most disappointing thing that I found when I was doing this research is that when you try to do randomized trials, where you take 100 people and you say 50 of them, you're going to go to AA, the other 50 are not, and you look at their outcomes a year or five years later, there's no benefit to even going to AA, which I really thought worked.
The reason AA seems to work is that people go to it and stick with it, like you say, get something out of it.
But there are going to be a bunch of people who don't get anything out of it who are like, I don't need to give my volition to God.
This is a problem I'm going to fix.
I don't like the AA model.
And by the way, why do I have to sit in this room three hours a week?
So for every person who gets something out of it, there's somebody who doesn't get anything out of it.
The truth is people stop using drugs or stop gambling when they personally realize that it's become a crisis for them.
Sometimes, though, people are motivated by other people's feedback.
So is there a point of no return or is it – it's got to be variable for different people.
Like I think for some people, rehab is probably very beneficial.
Especially because they get a chance to talk to someone who made it out of it.
Who was telling us about this rehab guy that came in, cracked out of his mind?
It was Brian Simpson.
The guy, he was like a counselor or something like that, and then one night he just went off the wagon and came back to work in the morning, and everyone's like, hey, are we supposed to pretend that you're not cracked out of your mind right now?
Yeah, I mean, the classic example, and, you know, when people talk about how the Chinese export fentanyl to the United States, I guarantee you there are people in China who have not forgot the opium wars.
In the 19th century, the U.S. and Britain, and this is something we should be ashamed of forever, we basically forced opium to...
It's part of the pushback of all this stuff from people that have no stake in the game other than they're a human being.
Is that you're saying something that shatters their narrative.
They have a narrative they've established about what's good in the world, what's the right thing to do, and the direction we have to go, and these people are looking out for us, and these people are Nazis.
And when you have that, and something comes along and says, hey, there might be something afoot here.
You should pay attention.
Like, there's some data you should look at.
We have a long history of people lying about all kinds of things, you know, whether it's the Opium War, fucking everything throughout human history.
But for whatever it is, like, now we don't, hey, that's not, that's, oh, this conspiracy theorist.
Oh, this guy, this wacky guy with his fringe ideas.
He's an alt-right hero.
I'm like, oh, okay.
I get it.
I get it.
I wish the world was perfect, too.
I really do.
I wish there was a guy in the White House that was this amazing human being and a shining example of what's possible from just a person, a loving person who wants to take care of a nation because they really believe in them.
It's very strange because it seems to be a part of just our programming that we have...
We've kept since we were primates in, like, the jungles.
Like, there was always a leader.
Like, have you ever watched that Chimp Nation show?
An amazing show on Netflix.
These scientists were embedded in this chimpanzee group for 30 years.
And so the chimpanzees had become totally comfortable with human beings as long as they were 20 yards away.
So they never moved any closer than 20 yards.
If the chimp moves close to them, they back away.
You never have food.
It's a bunch of rules about what to do and what not to do.
But if you follow those rules, these chimps behave as if they're just chimps in the jungle.
So it's this incredible opportunity to watch their social hierarchies.
And it's just like people.
There's a leader.
There's always a leader.
There's always a leader!
And there's young people that are challenging the leader and the leader has to beat him down.
And it gets to a certain point in time and the leader can't do that anymore.
And he has to relinquish.
And it's all about the relationships they develop while they're leaders.
And those are the ones that can go on the longest.
That's the same thing with human beings.
It's like, goddammit, it's literally our programming, and we've surpassed it in our ability to communicate, in our ability to understand the variables and the amount of variables, but we still operate on this chimp hierarchy.
It's really crazy because if you watch that Chimp Empire show and you think of us, like you go, oh my god, this is what our problem is.
We always want to have a leader.
We always want to run things.
We always want to tell other people.
We get power out of telling other people what to do.
Some people just get their jollies.
You know that if you have a bad boss, and the boss yells at all the people in the warehouse, like, fuck.
If, like, the senators could go and meet with the advisors who are still around back in the 2000s, there was an issue with 4G. You know, I mean, there's got to be a way to do it where you have, like, more vibrant people representing whatever they're representing.
I mean, it's a good segue into a lot of things, but it's also a good segue into sort of COVID and pharma and those guys because they are masters at going to the edge of the line, going to the gray area.
Both of those things are like that's two ways of looking at the health care for a country.
Either we say the whole reason the system is in place is to make sure that everybody is healthy and if you get injured we can help you.
If you could do it that way, that would be wonderful.
The other way to do it is saying, we got to fucking get you on as much shit as possible because the more stuff we sell to you, the more money we make.
And if there's a reason to recommend it, we're going to recommend it because you want to make our reps happy, want to make the hospital happy, and unfortunately, that seems to be real too.
So with the drug companies, and I think this is true of doctors too, it's not that they want people to get better.
I do believe that, okay?
But once you've invested a billion or two billion dollars in a drug and you've brought it to market and it's gotten FDA approval, you're going to do whatever you can to protect it.
And that means generally exaggerating its benefits and if there are problems with it, doing everything you can to hide those problems.
And then there's real things that people thought were conspiracies.
Real things like incentives and that showed up during the pandemic as well.
They got paid per case for people that had COVID and they got paid per COVID deaths.
The whole thing was weird.
It's like if you financially incentivize the treatment of a pandemic disease I understand that hospitals have to make money, but isn't there a fear that...
You label something COVID death, you get more money.
That people would use that on things that weren't necessarily COVID, especially if there's no oversight.
This is going on until 2025. If you're a family member and you can get a family member who died to be classified as a COVID death, you get up to $9,000 for their funeral expenses.
You submit it to FEMA, they cut you a check.
And so, of course, those families want, you know, they want $9,000.
The whole thing is just so slippery because, yeah, if everything was perfect, you would say, maybe it would be good to help these people with a funeral.
I will give you—so an ophthalmologist called me a few weeks ago.
There's a drug—and the drug works, okay?
It's good for people if something called wet macular degeneration, okay?
It's something that older people get, and it can blind you.
So there's a drug—there's a couple drugs that actually work for it.
They block the flow of— They block blood vessel formation at the back of the eye.
They help you.
So these are administered, ophthalmologists administer them in their offices.
So a drug like that, the ophthalmologist actually buys and charges Medicare or the private insurer for.
Okay, what's happening, and I saw this with a different drug when I worked at the New York Times 15 years ago, so nothing ever changes.
These companies all play the same games, is that the companies that make this drug are giving doctors a rebate On the purchase price.
And the more you use, the bigger the rebate.
And this is a drug that costs thousands of dollars per person per year.
Okay?
It's dosed multiple times a year for a lot of these people.
So what all this adds up to is if you're an ophthalmologist who's using a lot of this, the company is cutting you a check for five or sometimes six figures, sometimes multiple times a year.
Okay?
Don't tell me that's not a bribe.
Because that's a bribe.
It may be legal.
They may have found a way to do this.
And he showed me the check that his ophthalmology practice had received, and it was huge.
And by the way, these doctors make a lot of money on their own just doing the procedure.
They don't need this, but it's a way for the drug company to get them to use this more.
Is there a way at this point or is it the system itself?
Is it just a function of that's how human beings behave when they have, you know, enough regulation where they can get away with some stuff and they just want to make more and more money and it just becomes that's what they're trying to do?
And I'm using this drug because I know it works and it's good for patients.
The problem is you're then having incentives to ignore the problem if there is one later.
And so in this case, the guy actually said to me, he's like, this is a good drug.
It does work.
He said, but sometimes if we dose it too many times, we can get, there can be sort of a paradoxical effect where it stops working.
If you're one of those doctors who's on the tit and getting that check every quarter or every six months or, you know, however frequently you get it, you're going to, it's going to be harder for you to see the problem because all of a sudden you have a financial incentive not to see it.
Well, I mean, one of the great disappointments for me in the last 10 years is realizing that if you had to choose between a sewer system and a medical system, you'd choose a sewer system.
And the beginning of it is they talk about the conditions that people lived in.
Because you never really think about it.
Like, what would it be like to live in a city before there were cars?
Well, guess what?
But nothing gets to you.
You're not getting fresh vegetables in the winter.
You're not getting vitamins.
There's massive malnutrition, starvation, extreme poverty, people living in squalor, terrible sanitation.
I mean, open outhouses for entire blocks of people and just crazy diseases.
And they all live on top of each other.
And again, malnutrition, no vitamin D, no sunlight exposure in the winter, etc., etc.
And a lot of those people get horrible diseases because of that, just like they did in the olden times, like we know about, when people dump shit in the streets.
The first few decades of the Industrial Revolution were terrible for human health.
People got crammed together, they got sicker, and then about 1850 they started to figure this stuff out.
For a hundred years, we did great, but it wasn't really medicine.
It was really more basic than that.
And so the last 50, 67 years we've spent more and more and more money on medicine Trying to continue that growth in life expectancy.
And it turns out there are limits to it.
There are just limits.
And we seem to be reaching them.
And the problem is, in the US anyway, we're now spending so much money and having so many unnecessary medical procedures of marginal value.
I'm not even talking about the cost.
I'm talking about value to people that we seem to have topped out.
And this is like a really depressing thing to realize, that ultimately, like once people get to be about 80, there's just not that much you can do for them.
One thing that I also found out that was fascinating was about the Spanish flu.
The Spanish flu killed so many people.
A shit ton of people.
But they said that what it killed people from is not actually the flu itself, but the side diseases that come with it, and that you could have cured those with antibiotics.
Yeah, they were fucking around with the coronavirus.
They were trying to make it more dangerous or trying to make a vaccine, a pan-coronavirus vaccine, and somebody slipped or somebody accidentally injected a ferret when they were supposed to inject a mouse, and it all started there.
By the way, if it came out of a cave, it came out of a cave when some idiot who shouldn't have been in the cave was poking around, swabbing a bat's asshole to try to, like, find a virus.
And also, there's a problem with that, because you literally have a thing where you have a cure for a thing, and if that thing gets out, then you can sell that cure.
If you're Dr. Evil, you're gonna fucking open the hatch.
I hate to take you off track, but when the nuclear bombs were first detonated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I think with some of the tests too, right after that is when people started seeing a lot of UFOs.
When you see all this UAP stuff and all these people that are whistleblowers and they're talking about crashed retrieval programs where they could recover crashed UFOs and back-engineer them, like, what's going on?
There have been places where large groups of people have seen it.
And there was a place in Brazil, Virginia, Brazil.
and there's a very interesting documentary about it called moment of contact and there was a crash there was a crazy lightning storm and there was a crash and they claimed that there was actual live beings and one of these guys took one of these beings to a hospital they refused that brought to another hospital I think they want to bring you to a third hospital the guy who is carrying this alien supposedly Supposedly.
But this is a fact.
This guy died of some incurable bacterial disease that they had no hope of fixing.
It just overcame his body and he was dead very quickly.
He was a young guy.
I think he was dead in less than two weeks.
And they were attributing that to him carrying this fucking alien.
They say that the United States Air Force flew a jet—and this is in the documentary—they said it flew a jet to Virginia, Brazil to recover whatever this thing was because they have a recover retrieval program.
And if I had a drone program that can do wild shit, Like go hypersonic speeds and hover dead still in midair and operated without any visible method of propulsion.
I would start talking about aliens too.
I'd be like, dude, they're here.
We don't even know what they are.
They're off-road vehicles.
Excuse me, off-world vehicles.
And then people would go, oh yeah, aliens are here.
But meanwhile, what it is is we have super sophisticated tech that your tax dollars have paid for without you having any idea it exists for your own protection.
Well, the same way we go to the Congo and film for Chimp Empire.
It's really not that much different.
The same way we go to butterfly habitats and study butterflies.
Like human beings are fascinated by some of the most primitive of creatures.
You know, a long thought instinct fox becomes a major news story amongst academics.
When people can go and travel to exotic places and especially biologists and study these animals, you know, like you ever read Sapolsky's work with the baboons?
Fascinating stuff.
Sapolsky, who's from Stanford, right?
Is he Stanford?
Just a brilliant guy who's done all this crazy work about toxoplasmosis.
Are you aware of that?
Toxoplasmosis is nuts.
It's one of the reasons why they tell women to not handle kitty litter.
Toxoplasmosis is a cat parasite that grows in a cat's gut and when it gets on rats it rewires the rats sexual reward system and make the rats sexually attracted to cat urine and it removes their fear of cats so that the cats devour the rats because the only way that that that parasite can reproduce is inside a cat's gut So the parasite reproduces inside the cat's gut,
comes out and cat shit, and then people get it.
And people get it from cat shit.
You might get it from an open wound, you might get it from handling it, but when people get it, it makes them more reckless.
He said there's a disproportionate number of motorcycle victims, crash victims that are toxoplasmosis infected.
At one point in time, France was like 50% of the people had toxoplasmosis.
Weird parasites and fucking monkeys and giraffes and everything.
There it is.
Toxoplasmosis is considered to be a leading cause of death attributed to foodborne illness in the United States.
More than 40 million men, women, and children in the U.S. carry the toxoplasma parasite, but very few have symptoms because the immune system usually keeps the parasite from causing illness.
But here's what I'm telling you, and I guess I'm going to be stuck beating this drum for I don't know how long.
We do not know what the long-term effects of the mRNA vaccines are.
I would go beyond borderline.
I would say it is immoral and unethical to keep using those right now.
If you're going to insist on giving people COVID vaccines, there are simpler, cheaper ones.
That don't have this question about what they do long term.
The mRNAs, at this point to me, they're a failed product and they basically should be withdrawn.
It will never happen.
There's far, far too much at stake for both the pharmaceutical industry and public health and the Democratic Party and the media to even consider allowing that to happen.
But the promise, Joe, the promise two and a half years ago was These vaccines are new.
They're going to revolutionize the treatment of respiratory viruses.
They're going to eliminate COVID. Don't let them tell you that's not what they said, because it is what they said.
Okay?
Not, there may be some symptom reduction.
It may reduce cases of serious illness.
No.
It was, these are so effective, we're going to get the herd immunity with them, and COVID is not going to be a problem ever again.
That was total horseshit, and we can't let them forget it.
There were 5 billion doses so far of the mRNAs made, okay?
About $100 billion sold by Pfizer.
No, a little bit more.
$110, $120 billion sold by Pfizer and Moderna combined, okay?
My best estimate, and I haven't been able to lock it down because the numbers are really hard to find, Two billion of those five billion doses were thrown away, unused.
The companies made somewhere between forty, fifty billion dollars on vaccine that just got tossed.
Well, can you though, if you put something out, and again, we're bringing this back to the obligation to your shareholders and how to run a corporation versus what's the right thing to do, right?
If you have something and you haven't been called out for it, and there seems to be, like, enough gaslighting going on in the media that it sort of obscures the reality of it, you're supposed to keep selling it.
And the flip side of that is it's so profitable on a per-unit basis because it takes a few cents to make and then you could sell it for $5 or $50 or $500.
So the per-unit profit Once you earn your nut back, it's phenomenal.
But I'm also suing the chief executive of Pfizer and one of the board members of Pfizer, all in the same suit.
So they've responded, and it's called a motion to dismiss.
They want the lawsuit gone.
One of the things they say in the lawsuit is, That I have been fundraising and I have a sub stack and I've been merchandising, which I haven't been merchandising.
This shirt is my own printed.
Borla is the CEO of Pfizer.
Fauci, we all know.
Gottlieb is on the Pfizer board and Slavitt is somebody else I'm suing.
But so Pfizer's lawyers, or Borla's lawyers, Albert Borla, the CEO of Pfizer, as I like to call him, the world's favorite veterinarian, because he's not a doctor.
He's a doctor of veterinary medicine, which is fine.
But Borla is trying to get this lawsuit dismissed and he's saying, Berenson's making all this money.
Listen, buddy, your company made $70 billion selling the vaccines and you personally had your salary double from $18 million to $33 million, almost double, from 2020 to 2022. So don't call me the grifter, my friend, when you're the one who's made more money than anyone can imagine on these vaccines.
But I know that this guy, Scott Gottlieb, who's...
Get this, Joe.
Scott Gottlieb, between 2017 and 2019, was the commissioner of the FDA. He quit the FDA and three months later, exactly three months, the minimum amount of time later, he joined the Pfizer board, where he's a senior board member, where they pay him about $400,000 a year.
I mean, we can find the tweet, but the exact words were, it doesn't stop infection or transmission.
Think of it at best as a therapeutic that needs to be diagnosed in advance of infection and has bad side effects, and we want to mandate it?
Insanity.
That was the entire tweet.
Every word of that is true.
Let me tell you what was really happening.
Okay, we can talk about the vaccines and the approval process and the hype around them and the hope around them in early 2021. And you can make a good case that, hey, there were people just trying to get out of the pandemic, all right?
By the summer of 2021, everything changed.
Everybody who knew where to look, which was really Israel, could see that the vaccines were not working for very long.
So these vaccines specifically, these mRNAs, cause a very focused immune response.
And what they do is they make your body make a specific version of the spike protein, which is, you know, the part of the coronavirus that attaches to your cells and gets the virus into your cells.
So the idea is your body makes a spike, Your body recognizes the spike as an invader.
It makes antibodies against the spike.
And then if you actually are hit with the coronavirus, if you're infected with it, you've got this great head start where your body's antibodies can attack the coronavirus and keep it from infecting any of your cells.
You don't get infected.
You beat it.
That's the basic theory of the vaccine.
The problem is the virus, quote-unquote, knows what's happening.
The virus...
The virus is going to mutate.
There are just going to be errors in its genome over time.
These mRNA viruses are notorious for this.
When they replicate, they make mistakes.
And some of those mistakes in the genome lead the virus to look a little bit differently, the spike to look a little bit different, and then the antibodies can't attach as well.
If you're a virus that's mutated and you have these different antibodies, you have an advantage.
The advantage is suddenly you can infect people again.
Guess what?
That version of the virus is going to take off and accelerate.
So that's a very natural process.
Here's one thing nobody sort of thinks about, which is We really stopped mass vaccinating people in late 2021, early 2022. The rate of variants slowed way down last year and into this year.
Omicron came, but since then there hasn't been another major variant class.
Because there was a conversation that I got in with a friend of mine at the very beginning of the pandemic and he was Trying to tell me that his doctor was telling him that it was the unvaccinated people that were causing variants.
So, I mean, that's why you give people the flu vaccine before flu season.
Ideally, you do not mass vaccinate during a pandemic.
But so, in the summer of 2021, everything went to shit from the point of view of the Biden administration, and to a lesser extent, the vaccine companies.
Okay, the vaccine companies were more aware that this was going to happen.
But remember, the Bidenites, and I can find you a clip of Fauci in May 2021 saying, this is over.
Like, I think we can eliminate this.
He said that on the record.
They were caught with their pants down, and their response was twofold.
One, we're going to try to get everyone boosted.
We're going to try to scare people into getting boosted or encourage people to get boosted, which they knew or should have known was only going to buy them a matter of months.
But they didn't care.
They just wanted to do something.
The other part, though, was even worse, and that was the mandates.
And here, this is unfortunately what I've concluded about the mandates.
You know what else was happening in August 2021?
Afghanistan collapsed, okay?
And I don't know if you remember, but I'm sure you can find it.
There's a picture of Joe Biden sitting alone in the Situation Room, looking at TVs, and he looks completely lost, okay?
We left Afghanistan in July.
By August, the Taliban was in Kabul, and Marines were getting killed, and Afghans were trying to get on airplanes.
It was terrible, okay?
Here's the thing about the mandates.
Let's just pretend the vaccines actually work for a long period of time.
And let's pretend that 90% of older people hadn't been vaccinated, which they had been.
So let's pretend that there was an actual justification for these mandates.
What were they, Joe?
They were workplace mandates.
The government couldn't directly make old people get vaccinated.
So they said, we're going to have workplace mandates.
Who is in the workforce?
Healthy adults under 65. So there was no possibility.
That the mandates could actually affect the population most at risk from COVID and get them vaccinated.
They were designed not to work, but to be something that the president could say he was doing at a time when he looked completely incompetent because of what had happened in Afghanistan.
So there was this theory that there was this young people for whom the vaccine hadn't been approved yet, but that was, of course, a complete lie because young people are not at high risk from COVID. The only exception to that is there's a small number of people who are seriously immunocompromised.
I'm talking about people who have chemotherapy, people who are really sick.
And those people don't necessarily have a strong immune response to the vaccine.
So you say, okay, our theory is we're going to make everybody get vaccinated to protect those people.
But they're definitely, what happened was during the clinical trials, which only lasted a couple of months, that's that period when the vaccines really worked.
There is this short period when you have a tremendous number of antibodies and you don't really get sick.
Not just ignoring, but I had intelligent people that I respect trying to convince me that I should get vaccinated right after I recovered from COVID. And I was like, well, I don't think that's scientific.
I think if you read the data, it shows you that you have a much higher level of immunity from recovering from it naturally.
That's the data.
I'm not encouraging people to go get COVID, but I'm saying that that was what the data said.
So like, well, you get even more protected if you get vaccinated.
I'm like, okay, but...
Is that more risks?
Like, what is the risk factor now?
Like, is it?
Because that's what I've heard.
There's like an elevated risk factor for adverse side effects if you've just recovered from COVID. Is that true?
And when those rules turned out to neither be accurate, scientific, or even beneficial, when those rules turned out to be bullshit and actually detrimental, nobody apologized.
So what I tweeted, and this one, this really landed, this has gotten 5 million views since last week.
It was showing the CDC's own calculations.
You'd have to give a million doses to save maybe, maybe one 12 to 17 year old.
But when you give those million doses, you have 100 to 200,000 Not 100 to 200, 100 to 200,000 severe side effects that are short-term following the vaccination.
Plus, and I didn't put this in it, you have another 50 to 300 cases of myocarditis.
So maybe you save one person with those million doses, but your side effects are so much worse, and those are going to include some deaths.
They are, because myocarditis can kill young people.
So what are we doing?
The rest of the world, practically Germany, Australia, Britain, most of the world, did not follow this path.
It's only basically the United States and a couple other countries like Canada that basically follow our recommendations that follow this path.
So these are the slides, but if you go back to the main...
Because remember, COVID isn't going to do that to most 12 to 17-year-olds.
It's more severe than the illness itself.
But the myocarditis aspect of it, those cases can kill.
No question about it.
Not that they frequently do, but they can.
So putting aside the fact that this is an expensive thing and when we were trying to mandate it, remember a lot of schools, high schools, colleges said you had to have this if you were going to go.
Putting aside the fact that you're taking away people's autonomy...
On a strictly cost-benefit basis, it makes zero sense to try to get kids and young adults and teenagers to take this and the rest of the world knows it.
Like, at what point in time do we just look at reality and stop being so fucking tribal?
Because I think if the people that had gotten vaccinated, the people that got talked into it, maybe some of them that regretted it, if they didn't have a stake in the game and they could just look at this thing for what it is, they would be like, what?
Right?
Like, as it is now, they'd be like, what are you talking about?
But they're already so invested in being team vaccine.
Isn't it interesting that team vaccine is also team Ukraine?
There's a lot of great ideas that come from both sides.
It's like the idea that there's only two sides is crazy because there's so much variability.
So much variability in the left and variability in the right.
When you're looking at the craziest fucking...
Militia guys on the right, and then you look at the craziest fucking Antifa people on the left.
Like, that's not representative of the right and the left.
It's representative of the worst aspects, the furthest out on the edges.
But if you are in agreement with anything that the right has to say, whether it's stuff about regulations, the economy, whatever the fuck it is, you are all of a sudden on the side of this goddamn militia.
Like, how did that happen?
You know, you're on team Michelle Obama's a man.
You're on team...
You know what I mean?
Like, you gotta go all the way with all this fucking kookiness that's on that side.
Like, oh, no.
I just think that, you know, maybe we should have free speech.
There was a poll that Gallup, I think it was Gallup, did of just a few weeks before that.
I think it was June.
70% of Democrats now essentially think the government should be able to ban, quote unquote, false speech on social media.
So, first of all, who's deciding what's true and what's false, okay?
And second of all, you want the government to do that?
The Democrats used to believe in free speech.
You know, liberals, the famous instance is when the ACLU in the late 70s, there were these Nazis, Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois, and the ACLU said, we're going to defend them.
We hate them, but we're going to defend their right to speak because that's the First Amendment.
That's America.
The left has just totally forgotten this.
They don't want to hear anything that they don't want to hear.
And you see, I don't know if you paid attention to this woman in Virginia, she's a Democrat running for the House of Delegates, like the Virginia State office.
And she was caught, I think it was about a week ago, she had essentially a porn site with her husband Oh yeah, I heard about that.
They're both, they've both disqualified themselves from political office.
Not because I have any problem with sex or anything like that, but because your judgment is so bad, okay?
You have two little kids.
Don't start talking about how you're going to take money so people can watch your husband fuck you up the ass, which is literally what that woman in Virginia...
When I say filthy, I mean filthy.
Interesting.
And don't start jerking off your, like, buddy, your first date buddy in the theater, the Beetlejuice Theater, with a pregnant woman directly behind you and kids around you.
Just don't do it, okay?
Neither of those women should be...
Holding political office.
I don't think that should be a controversial position, okay?
But if you're on the left, you know, this is the right of a married woman to have sex on camera with her husband, and God forbid we say anything about it.
And if you're on the right, you know, Lauren Boebert was just having a tough day or something.
No!
Why can't we just judge these things sort of apolitically as the crummy behavior that they are, and why can't we say to these two, Like, apologize and leave us alone.
You know, here's the most disgusting part of that.
That he and the president wouldn't recognize his daughter.
Okay?
That is disgusting.
Especially if you believe that, you know, like, there's all this evidence, you know, getting raised by a single mother is not, you know, it's not a good thing for your outcomes in life.
Yes, plenty of people overcome it.
Yes, we don't want to stigmatize.
But in general, it's better to have two parents involved.
The thing about him is just that he's such a hot wire.
I was like, you can't touch it.
It's just too much there.
You don't want to bring any attention.
If you were on the left, you wouldn't want to bring any attention to him and that laptop and those business dealings and all that stuff because like if that was the Trump family, oh my god, they'd be like, we told you!
Issue automatic tickets for drivers going at least 11 miles over the speed limit.
Cameras would be prioritizing areas surrounding schools, high-injury intersections, and known street racing corridors to reduce speeding and traffic fatalities.
But, if that's the case, those fucking street takeovers, that's bananas.
And how many times do you have to see on Instagram some dude standing around the circle and the guy's spinning around his car and hits one with the ass end and sends him flying through the air?
Jesus Christ, kids, get the fuck out of that circle.
Dude, there's so many of those where people don't know how to control high-performance cars and they just get on the gas and the thing spins around in a circle and slams into a telephone pole.
I think there's enough understanding now that the vast majority of people don't like that.
The vast majority.
And also the vast majority of people think that context is important and that humor is important and that fun is important and that I don't like when other people are telling me how I have to think and talk.
Like, you should be willing to let people – you want to call yourself a zur, that's great.
But you get mad at me that I won't use that made-up word.
Like, this is bonkers.
This is just bonkers.
You know, if you have makeup on and long hair and you're a girl and you tell me you're non-binary and I have to call you a zur, I'm like – I don't want to participate.
This is not my dance.
You can go fucking cosplay.
Do whatever you want.
I don't know.
Dress up like an angel.
I don't care.
But I don't like it when people start reinforcing their ideology on other people.
And that's part of what goes on whenever people have the ability to do it.
When people have the ability to tell other people what to say, how to think, they just do it, whether their way is right or not.
They don't want them to debate it.
They just want you to comply.
And they'll say things to you like, you should just be quiet and listen.
They'll say things like that, which is – that's an amazing thing to say.
Just be quiet and listen when woke people are educating you.
Oh, just be quiet and listen.
OK. Well, that would make it easier because as soon as I start talking, your argument is going to fall apart.
Because it was so kooky that I was like, I need to read this.
Because a lot of times, and guilty as charged, if you ever thought I did this, if you see me come on this podcast and just start talking about shit, I probably just read the headline.
Alright, what am I looking up again?
DEI. Right, right, right, right.
I got it in here.
I know I do.
Okay, here it is.
Jordan Peterson tweeted it.
And it was tweeting it.
He was, quote, tweeting Michael Sherman.
I'll text you, Jamie.
So all that stuff became, explain that to people, what DEI is and how it came to be and what it does and what its impact is.
So Michael Shermer says, Astonishing admission from the pioneer of research on implicit bias, bigotry, racism, same person Mazarian Banaji, my apologies, that DEI training programs don't work and even hurt.
Racist attitudes still exist, but much improved since 1960s, and most don't act on them anyway, and DEI now.
So, yeah, because when, you know, look, everybody has stray thoughts that, you know, may not be the best in the world, but if people aren't going to act on them and you make them sit in a conference room and tell them how terrible they are for three hours, they're going to wind up feeling...
Probably more aggravated than they were when they came in.
Yeah.
Nobody likes to be told they're awful all the time.
But to go back to where we started today, there's nothing that's worse for parenting than parents of young children using drugs.
Whether the drug is alcohol, cannabis, or meth, or heroin, it is terrible for parenting.
I mean, it leads to abuse, neglect, it leads to poverty, it leads to terrible outcomes.
And I don't know how you stop that, but one of the things when you consider whether you're gonna set up a world where drug use is sort of allowed, slash encouraged, slash commercialized, is the effect on young kids.
And, you know, as a person who believes That freedom is one of the most important things.
I also come from a perspective where I'm in a different place in life than I was when I was 20. And what would I be like when I was 20 if heroin was legal?
What would I be like if cocaine was legal?
What would I have done?
There's a reality that if you open the gates now, And you say, now all of these drugs are illegal, we're going to regulate them, and the way to stop fentanyl coming in in these tainted cocaine is to sell pure cocaine, and it'd actually be better for everybody.
But what I was about to say is if you did do that, you would undeniably have a certain amount of people that are going to get addicted that never would.
Certain amount of people that were going to lose their lives that never would.
Certain amount of violent actions, car accidents, people on meth and heroin and drugs and coke.
They're going to do wild shit.
People are super unpredictable when they're fucked up on drugs.
You're going to have real problems.
That That's also true, but would more people do it if it was legal?
I think you're right.
I think more people would try it, but eventually not.
But even with, you know, adults, we know that even with adults that have, you know, reasonable ways of approaching every other aspect of their life, some of them can't have a drink.
But it's just, there's no real, there's no one perfect answer.
There's no one thing we say, you know what, if we do this, we'll have zero deaths, and everyone's going to be peaceful, and the world's going to be a utopia.
That's a wild one that people want to be able to just fucking booze it up while they're driving.
unidentified
Drinking and driving here is viewed by some as downright undemocratic.
It's kind of getting communist when a fella can't get put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours a day, and then get in your truck and at least rain one or two beers.
Where you can't drink when you want to.
You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving.
Pretty soon we're going to be a communist country.
And there's an amazing-- there's something I've been meaning to write for the stack.
It's been like I started to write and I haven't had time.
But this is a non-COVID thing.
This is the kind of stuff I need to write more of.
So there's been a lot of research done recently on the unhappiness of adolescence and teenage girls especially.
And one of the things that's really interesting is if you look by political party, liberal kids are much, much more unhappy than conservative kids right now.
And if you look at the outcomes, that's not necessarily the case.
Lockdowns and COVID and their parents scaring them to death with climate change and they're just like a bunch of neurotic, like, kids who, you know, who don't have any, like, they don't have any fun.
See their five and suggest that we know that transportation causes 49 percent of the CO2, so that's why we're all working on energy transition.
All right, so what number you think it is?
Five.
Five?
How about you?
I didn't hear you, Mr. Ayer.
Seven.
Seven?
Do you have one, Mr. Boyd?
So we got a five, seven.
Price is right.
Eight.
I'm gonna hit the high end.
All right.
Well, I appreciate that and I don't mean to put you on ice.
I ask a lot of people that because all we hear is climate change, climate change, CO2, CO2. I heard a couple of you on the panel saying you're looking to change your vehicles to electric even though we don't have the electric grid.
And me as a farmer, I wouldn't be real happy about running out and replacing $300,000, $500,000, $1,000,000 pieces of equipment because someone wants to be electric.
The answer is 0.04%.
Not 1%, not half of a percent.
It's 0.04%.
It's gone up from 0.03 over the last couple of decades.
This is what we're being all contorted into doing, is this tiny change in CO2. If we get below 0.02, plant life starts dying.
So, let me ask Mr. Boyd, are a lot of your vehicles Tier 4 already?
Or the vehicles that you know about in the industry?
Yes.
All right.
So that's the cleanest burning diesel equipment you can get, right?
Yes, sir.
All right.
How about Mr. Dreher?
What do you think?
Yes.
Okay.
So why would anybody be anxious to go out and change out all those vehicles that you've been upgrading?
In my home state of California, CARB has eliminated lots of equipment.
Trucks, you know, we're going to be, we're down at least 70,000 truckers.
And all because they don't make a mandate for 2011 a newer vehicle.
And so it's going to be harder to get things from the ports, all this, all that.
So anyway, I just wanted to underline that as, you know, giddy about trying to make everything electric, especially in my home state when they're shutting down the power grid and taking out hydroelectric dams.
And they barely kept in place the nuclear power plant for an additional five years, which is 9% of our grid.
I don't know how we're going to do this.
I don't know how you guys are going to do this.
Construction on remote areas where there isn't power lines yet nearby or what have you in order to charge this stuff.
Look, I think there's an even more basic problem, okay?
The problem is the Chinese and the Indians, we can go to a post-industrial society and all live, you know, growing beets in the United States and Europe.
They're not going to stop building coal-fired plants.
They haven't stopped building them.
Maybe they will promise to stop building them.
Europe, basically, if you look at a graph, Europe is like...
A tiny fraction of the world's CO2 right now.
In the U.S., we still emit a lot, but the Chinese emit a lot more, and I think the Indians are on track to pass this if they haven't passed this already.
So we can destroy our own economies, and it won't make that much difference, unfortunately.
But I do think if I was an alien, I would be watching.
I think if I had to guess, if I had to put my chips on whether or not it's real or not real, I would think, yes, it's real.
I think most likely we've been observed, most likely we've been visited multiple times.
Why wouldn't they?
If they have the capability, we'd be fascinating.
Also, I think some of the stuff we're seeing is ours.
I think both of those things could be true at the same time.
And I think one of the ways that, again, I would obscure whether or not we have stuff like that is to start talking about aliens.
That just seems like common chess moves.
I'm like, oh, I see where you're going.
You know, if you just all of a sudden you got whistleblowers and all of a sudden you're telling me that all this stuff is real, like, okay.
Now I'm suspicious.
I was less suspicious when you were lying about it.
You know, when you were lying about it, I was like, oh, they're hiding the aliens.
They're hiding it, but now they're talking about it.
I'm like, oh, you guys probably are still hiding the aliens, but you probably back-engineered some shit or developed some stuff on some completely independent government-funded black ops branch of physics where they knew something about magnetic propulsion or something, and they've developed some unmanned drone that can go hypersonic speeds.
Well, if you want to go back to the old CIA documents, because there are documents that George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell have uncovered from the Freedom of Information Act, where they said there was four different races that were visiting us.
Yeah, and some of them are the classic greys, and some of them are what they call the tall whites.
They look like Nordic people, like really pale skin and long hair, and their ears are like flat to their head, and they have larger eyes than we do.
Well, that's a real question, too, because a lot of these alien abduction stories, they happen at night.
And when people are sleeping and dreaming, occasionally people get sleep paralysis.
That's a real factor.
And then dreams themselves.
People have lucid dreams.
They have dreams that appear that they're real.
They have, like, different levels of dreams.
Like some medications you take give you wild, vivid dreams.
Yes.
We know that, right?
So what is happening there?
Well, there's obviously some sort of neurochemicals that get released during sleep that appear to be, if not hallucinogenic, maybe they're definitely psychedelic.
What are they doing?
Are they connecting your consciousness with some other realm?
Like, what is going on?
And I can imagine if you were You know, you had one of these endogenous dumps of these naturally produced psychoactive substances and you're lying in bed, you would see fucking aliens over you.
But does that mean that the aliens aren't real?
I don't know that either.
Because that might be how they get to you.
Look at the bottom paragraph.
The ICIG office did nothing to look into the information they received from David Grush on UAP crash retrieval programs.
They have no information they can give to Congress.
If there was a crash retrieval program, I would imagine, I would say, shut the fuck up.
No, you can't look at it.
If there's some UFO that we have, and if we find out, look, how do you know how do those people working for you, whether or not someone's been taking money from Russia, or taking money from China, or taking money from Iran?
Maybe they don't know how to get it to work and then one person figured out how to get it to work.
That's the whole Bob Lazar lore.
The whole Bob Lazar lore was that they hired him to be a propulsions expert to go and back engineer this thing because they didn't know how it worked.
And then initially he was like, oh, that makes sense.
The reason why people keep seeing those, they're ours.
Okay.
And then very quickly as he examined the thing, he's like, what the fuck is this?
This thing designed to carry three foot tall people that operates on some sort of gravity generator from an element that we haven't even stabilized yet.
They never told me, don't write about this or do write about this.
I mean, sometimes they tell me, do write about this, but they never told me...
Don't do this.
It might offend the Democratic Party or whatever.
That's not how it worked.
And I remember going to Iraq for the paper and coming back and some guy sent me—I was in Las Vegas, actually, in 2003—and some guy, I think I was getting my shoes shined, the guy next to me getting his shoes shined, said, Oh, it must be hard to work for The New York Times when they tell you to make things up.
And I said, I was in Iraq and, like, I put my life on the line for that place and to get to the truth.
Like, you don't know what you're talking about.
And so that was really, like, a responsibility and a trust that I felt to try to get to the truth.
Oh, yeah, they were cynical, but they were more wrong then.
What happened was that Trump got elected.
Okay, Trump got elected and it broke the American media because they couldn't believe that the United States elected this guy instead of Hillary Clinton.
They all wanted Hillary Clinton, and especially younger female reporters at the paper.
I don't know if I said this to you some previous time I was here, but there's this famous Onion headline I'll never forget from 2015, Hillary Clinton tells Nation not to fuck it up for her.
And that's how it felt, right?
Like, I'm going to be elected whether you want me to be or not, right?
And he used their hate, and their hate got worse and worse, and they became openly partisan in a way they hadn't been, I don't know, in a hundred years.
It's like when you think you can just hit somebody because you saw it in a movie.
No, they're going to hit you back.
They might beat the fuck out of you.
They might wait for you after school one day and kick your ass.
They're not going to just take it.
Like people don't just – when you do something like that where you just try to silence your opponent and try to jail your opponent on what some people think are trumped up charges, no pun intended, that makes people furious.
It emboldens and empowers the other side unfortunately.
That's just how it goes.
You know, it's like what we're talking about, the DEI stuff.
It's like you force stuff down people's throats and they get angry at it.
It's like – but you see these power struggles and you see these power dynamics and it just doesn't take into account – it's like concentrating on short-term victory, right?
Short-term victory is win the election at all costs.
But it's not looking at the big picture of the future of the nation, right?
If you choose to bend the rules because it's like the rules are the reason why we're great.
It's a big part of why this is such an amazing place is the freedom of speech.
And if you're going to social media companies and you're the government and you're having them release or delete things that are accurate, that's not good for the nation.
It's not good for all of us.
It's not good for human beings as a whole.
It's not good for the country that you live in as a person doing that, making that decision.
But, I mean, look, my case, you know, there's two big cases.
There's my case and there's Missouri v.
Biden.
So Missouri, the state of Missouri and the state of Louisiana sued Missouri.
You know, over social media censorship.
And they did that in the Western District of Louisiana.
And they got a favorable ruling in July.
And then the Fifth Circuit, which is just one level below the Supreme Court, you know, it's several states in the South, basically upheld that ruling.
It was about 10 days ago.
And now the Biden administration has appealed to the Supreme Court.
And what the Fifth Circuit has said is we don't want...
I've seen your officials in the Biden administration, including the same people who I've sued, talking to social media companies and trying to pressure them.
They've gone too far.
And here's what's really interesting about this job.
So what the Biden administration says is...
We're not forcing anything.
We're not making explicit threats against anybody.
We're just saying this is what we think should be on your platforms and this is dangerous to let people talk about the problems with the vaccines because it discourages people from getting vaccinated.
That's dangerous to them.
We don't like that.
And, you know, famously, Biden said in July 2021, you're killing people.
Those are his words.
The platforms are killing people by allowing people like me to talk about problems or potential problems with the vaccines.
OK, now, from my point of view, I've basically been proven right in terms of most of the concerns that I raise.
Now, we could argue about that.
But the truth is, it doesn't matter.
Whether I was right or wrong.
I'm an American.
I have the right to express myself and Twitter was my platform to do that.
It was my biggest journalistic outlet.
So try and get Twitter to ban me.
It's one thing maybe if you, you know, If you just talk generally about what you want to see, but what's clear is that the Biden administration went way past that.
This is what really comes out when you read, and of course I've read the rulings in the Missouri v.
Biden case, and of course my own stuff, is that They pushed for months and months and really years until really 2021, 2022. They put a lot of pressure on these companies.
And the White House is powerful.
And the companies have a lot of interests beyond...
Me or other users and what we're allowed to say.
They have interests in Europe.
They have interests with Section 230, which is this provision that enables them not to get sued for the content that they carry.
And so at some point, even if you're not making an explicit threat of you better take this guy off or you're going to pay...
The companies hear that.
They hear what you're saying without you saying it.
And that's what the Fifth Circuit ruling basically says.
And that's my argument.
I mean, my argument goes past that, actually, because I have evidence that the White House explicitly, quote-unquote, asked why I was allowed to be on Twitter.
I mean, that's in black and white.
But the point is, and this is the analogy, because I think everybody gets this, when you get pulled over, And the cop says, can you get out of your car for me?
I really need you to get out.
Can you get out for me, please?
That's not really a question at some point.
That's a demand.
And so...
It is not right for the government to try to stifle me or anyone else that way.
And that's at the core of Berenson v.
Biden, and it's broadly at the core of Missouri v.
And during COVID. Because pre-COVID, I would have just been an ex-New York Times reporter and I wouldn't have had any audience at all.
That's what they don't like.
They don't like you because you have an audience they can't control.
They don't like me because I have a half million people on Twitter and more back then who would retweet me and really wanted to hear what I had to say.
And they couldn't control it and it was free to me.
They, and you know, these are documents that have come out.
They knew that people like me were the biggest problem because what they didn't, you know, if you're out there saying like, oh, the vaccine is going to make your foot fall off or whatever, stuff that's obviously untrue, people know that.
You know, they're going to disregard that.
But if you have me saying, look at the CDC's own statistics and make a judgment for yourself whether this makes sense.
It could be misleading, but you could take something out of context, or someone could be saying, you could be using a part of something, like you could say, this does this, but the reason why it cancels itself out is because there's also this, that, and that happening.
So you might say the one thing only, and that's misinformation.
The Pfizer and the Justice Department and Andy Slavitt, his lawyer, there are three separate motions to dismiss that came back about three weeks ago.
We now have to file our responses, which we do in October.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is going to hear the Missouri v.
Biden appeal, which is, of course, of great importance to my case, too, because If the Supreme Court says that some of the people in my case violated the First Amendment, obviously we're going to say to the judge in my case, look, look what the Supreme Court just ruled.
You know, this is a very powerful ruling from our point of view.
And they want engagement, so they want to show you stuff that you want to see, especially Facebook.
That's their model.
So if you're going to regulate these guys like telephone companies, basically what you're going to say is everything that everybody posts has to be allowed.
And I can see the arguments on both sides of that.
My case and the Missouri v.
Biden case are, to me, they're very different.
And the reason is we're not saying, hey, Facebook or Twitter, you have to carry everything.
We're saying the government can't tell you what to carry and not to carry.
The Texas case, the separate case, this third case, that says you guys have to carry everything.
Because then you have to decide, okay, are these social media platforms, are they a town hall that everyone should be able to participate in, or are they a private company that can dictate what's on their platform, especially if not doing so hurts their financial bottom line?
They bring you into a room full of guys smoking cigars and they show you a video of the angle of a presidential Kennedy assassination that you've never seen before.
Well, he's very, very, very famous and part of people's dissatisfaction with the current regime, right?
Especially people's dissatisfaction if you see Biden's state of decline.
Regardless of how you feel about the policies, most people aren't even engaged.
They don't even understand what's going on and whether or not it's beneficial to people and whether or not there are more jobs and whether or not the economy is moving.
Because there's arguments that it is moving in a good direction, right?
There's arguments that some of the policies work.
But they look at him as a figurehead and they say, this is bad.
And then they really believe because he said it so many times that the election was rigged.
They really believe it.
So a lot of them really believe it.
It's like I was in Aspen and this lady, she's like, I'm a big fan of yours, like this grandma lady.
I said, thank you.
And you know that Trump's our president.
I go, well, actually, he's not, because the president is Biden.
My line about this and I'm going to stick with this is that he lost unfair and square.
In other words, the media was against him.
What people are responding to is this idea that corporate America was against him, that everybody in power, including a lot of Republicans, I think, wanted him out.
They couldn't stand him anymore.
But that is different.
Then the election was manipulated and votes were taken.
It's when you are tallying mail-in votes, digital votes, all these different things, and they have projections for these places.
One of the things that Kyle Kingsbury showed me, or excuse me, Kyle Kalinske, Jesus.
Hi, Kyle Kingsbury.
Long time, buddy.
Kyle Kalinske showed me is that when we had him on during the election, and he accurately predicted, he said, yes, Trump is winning because these are the people that show up first.
But you're going to see the Democratic surge for the mail-ins when they count those.
And that's exactly what happened.
Because he's very politically aware.
He understands how it works.
I don't dispute any of that.
What I'm saying is...
It would be wonderful if we had a system where it was bulletproof.
It would be wonderful if we had a system where it was impossible to have anything other than zero percent election fraud.
I don't know if that's even realistic.
But we can bank on our phones.
We can bank on the internet.
There's like federal IDs that are connected to you and this idea that IDs for voting is somehow racist is so bananas.
And I don't think those people were in opposition to the police, and they were probably worried about the police's safety since they were vastly outnumbered.
Look, when your own vice president says it, you know, Mike Pence basically did everything Trump asked of him for four years, okay?
And he's come out and said Trump behaved in the wrong way.
I think you've got to acknowledge that.
But to go back to your point, there's a large group of people in the Republican Party for whom Trump is basically a god, and they will not acknowledge it.
He's the big booming figure that's at the head of the fucking pack.
And it's just, man, it's so polarizing for the country.
It's just, I wish there was two people that we respected.
Or even one!
Or one.
Just two people that, you know, like, hey, I don't agree with his policies about this and that, but I think he's a good person, and I think he's really got the best interests of the country in mind, and who knows?
Maybe their policies are correct.
Who knows?
Maybe his policies are correct.
Let's find out.
But instead, it's like...
Hell in a handbasket, no matter which way it goes.
And then, my God, what if Biden wins again and beats Trump?
And what if people just, like, don't believe it's real again?
And it gets worse than January 6th, right?
What if that happens?
What if Trump wins and people decide the government has been overcome by fascists and we have to wage war on the infrastructure and blow up fucking generators and kill the grid?
And thank you for having the courage to talk about this stuff.
I mean, it's amazing that a lot of the things that you got in trouble with early in the pandemic are now absolutely...
It's regarded as fact and discussed openly in mainstream circles, like Dr. Lena Wen was on CNN, which is the most mainstream thing out there, and she was saying that the estimates of COVID deaths was probably actually 30% of what was reported, which is a crazy thing.
When she said it, you could see the look on the people's face like, what the fuck is she saying?
Yeah.
There's a lot of discussion now about the lab leak.
It's commonplace to discuss it.
It's commonplace to discuss the pros and cons of gain-of-function research.
Most people are currently aware that cloth masks don't work at all.
This epidemiologist wrote, well, we have different rules about the new COVID boosters in other countries because we're sicker than other countries, so we have to give people more mRNA.
And it's like, so wait, your argument is our public health establishment and medical care is so bad that we are giving people advice that other countries aren't giving them.
Maybe we should listen to the other countries where things are going better for a change.
Maybe instead of trying to medicate our way out of every problem, we should just tell people, go for a walk.
I mean, this was one of the things about lockdowns way back in 2020, right?
This is a disease that hurts people who are obese or morbidly obese the most.
So maybe the solution is not to have them sit on their asses For another six months.