Dr. Scott Atlas argues COVID-19 lockdowns—backed by advisors like Fauci and Redfield—were a $6B+ failure, citing exaggerated fatality rates and ignored data, while Mike Duran warns October 7th’s Iran-Israel war risks a China-backed Middle East power vacuum. Lord Andrew Roberts debunks Churchill conspiracy theories, clarifying his ideological opposition to Hitler over Stalin, as Nazi Germany’s collapse required 80% of its casualties on the Eastern Front. Meanwhile, Megan Basham’s late-stage cancer battle, marked by prayer and clean margins by June 30th, underscores how faith and integrity often clash with public skepticism in today’s polarized world. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Scott Atlas, the doctor, obviously, and a author of A Plague Upon Our House, My Fight at the Trump White House to stop COVID from destroying America.
I have often talked about a passage in Winston Churchill's memoirs of his youth where he talked about going to a party filled with the leaders of Europe before World War I and going to another party after World War I with the leaders of Europe and how they were all different people because World War I had been such a disaster and the failure of leadership throughout Europe.
I truly believe that the response to the COVID epidemic was the greatest failure of Western leadership since World War I.
And I think one of the things we're seeing now is a lot of the people being thrown out and trying to cling to power as people basically wake up to what was done to them.
Dr. Scott Atlas was an advisor on the coronavirus task force in the Trump White House.
Hilariously, Wikipedia, when you look him up on Wikipedia, it accuses him of speaking misinformation about COVID and then lists his opinions, all of which turned out to be the exact truth.
So Wikipedia is still spreading the lies, trying to cling on to their power.
He is a senior fellow in health policy at Stanford University, Hoover Institution.
And as I say, he's the author of Plague Upon Our House, My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID from Destroying America.
Dr. Atlas, thank you for coming on.
It's nice to meet you.
Yeah, happy to be here.
I have to read this to you because it just made me laugh.
Atlas was selected by President Donald Trump as Wikipedia in August 2020 to serve as an advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
In that role, Atlas at times said misinformation about COVID-19, such as theories that face masks and social distancing were not effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus, which turned out to be exactly right, didn't it?
Right.
And we knew it then because there was plenty of data and in fact, randomized trials and solid studies showing that stuff.
But yeah, it's sort of shocking and to me a bit frightening that people use Wikipedia as a legitimate reference, but now it is ensconced, apparently, in our culture.
Yeah, yeah, I think it's disappearing a little bit with AI because AI gives you faster and better information, I think.
That's true.
So let's start with this.
Going back into this experience, you come into this task force.
When did you realize that things were going badly wrong?
Well, I realized that before I went in, because I didn't go in, I was called up by the White House and didn't start until July 31st, really, meaning basically August 1, 2020.
I had started looking at the pandemic sort of at the mid-February 2020.
So we're talking, you know, five, six months before I went into the White House and quickly realized, although I was, like everybody, sort of frightened at the statistics that first came out by the World Health Organization on the very high fatality rate, that the fatality rate was calculated incorrectly because they weren't considering everybody who was infected.
They were only considering people who were sick enough to go to a doctor.
And when you looked at the early data, even from the early cruise ship back in the Japanese cruise ship, you saw that it was grossly exaggerated, the fatality rate.
And of course, we had plenty of prior knowledge about not just viral respiratory infections, but coronavirus infections, because four of them are circulating in our society and are endemic, meaning they don't ever disappear and they come and go and they cause things like common cold or fluishness.
And so in March, I started to write about this because society was not only panicking, but the wrong remedies were being put in place, the lockdowns and school closures.
And these things were not just contrary to common sense, contrary to everything we knew about viral respiratory infections, contrary to the data on this virus.
So they weren't going to work.
to stop the spread or to stop people from dying.
But even more importantly, they were extremely destructive.
They were causing harm, known harms, known for 15 years about what lockdowns do to children, to businesses, to deaths from despair, alcoholism, spousal abuse, child abuse when people are shut down from work because businesses were closed.
And meanwhile, they weren't stopping the older people, the high-risk people from dying.
Yeah.
You know, so when you walked in to this task force and you're working with these people, what is the experience like?
I mean, you're saying these things from the start then.
What is happening?
Are you made to sit in the corner?
They're just not listening to you.
What happens?
Sure.
So I was called up mid-July 2020 by the Office of Personnel in the White House.
And this is because I had had some visibility with what I was writing.
I had a lot of millions of viewers actually on pieces I wrote saying, end the lockdowns.
The data is in.
We're destroying people.
And meanwhile, we're not protecting the high risk.
So people are still dying despite the harmful lockdowns and school closures.
And again, by summer, we had already seen, by the way, from school closures and the isolation of young people, one in four college-aged kids contemplated suicide.
We had a massive rise in depression, anxiety in teenagers.
Suicidal ideation in teenage girls was spiking.
We were destroying young people who, healthy young people had no serious risk from COVID.
So this was really a sinful, I hate to use the word sinful, but I can't think of a better word, abuse of our own children, non-thinking really by fools who were leading the advisory team to the president and to the governors, etc.
So this was Deborah Burks, who was running the White House coronavirus task force medical side, and her colleague, Anthony Fauci and Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC.
All three were doing this.
So I go in because I was called in to speak to the president to ask, would you even speak to the president?
Which, of course, my country, people are dying.
Of course, I would speak to the president.
And it wasn't political to me at all.
So I'm going in there, let's say mid-July.
I spent the day talking to the president, the vice president, Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, all the people you've heard of.
And they asked me questions.
I told them the answers.
They had seen what I wrote, what I was interviewing on TV about.
And they said, would you help the president?
Would you advise the president?
And I said, okay, absolutely.
But I just want to say, I'm not going to sign on to things that are wrong.
I'm not going to agree with things just because the president says agree, you know, if it's incorrect.
I'm not going to sign on to a group statement.
And Jared Kushner, to his credit, said, well, that's exactly why we want you.
So I said, okay, that's great.
And then he said, but they're going to destroy you once it becomes public.
So he meant the media.
This was in the height of the frenzy about Trump.
It was even worse than it is today, frankly.
This was a political campaign season, remember July 2020.
And so I said, Well, you know, I'm naive to politics.
I'm not a political person.
I said, Well, that doesn't sound very good to me.
So maybe I'll go home to California and see if I could advise from there.
And he said, Okay, and we'll try that.
So I went home.
And of course, in a matter of days, it was not working because things are being decided real time.
President Trump was being fed completely false, wrong information by people who didn't know what they were talking about, frankly.
That's Deborah Burks, Anthony Fauci, Robert Redfield.
And again, like people may not agree or may not think that sounds reasonable.
They didn't know what they were talking about because they have such credentials, but they didn't know what they were talking about.
This is one of the things that was exposed was the failure of the so-called credentialed class, the expert class.
So anyway, I went back and this is now July 31st.
And in the beginning, and I outline this in my book, but in the beginning, Jared Kushner said, okay, we need you to be in the task force too.
And I said, well, they're not going to listen to me.
You know, these are people that have been saying due these lockdowns, these completely wrong policies that are not working and they're killing people.
They're not going to listen to some outsider.
They're on TV all the time, et cetera.
And he said, well, no, it's very important.
You're going to be able to convince them.
I said, okay.
So he said, but in the beginning, I want you to just listen in on the meetings because Deborah Burks is going to go crazy and be threatened basically if you're there.
So I listened to some of the meetings and this was sort of insane what was going on.
And they were just really almost like a catch-22, if you've ever read the book Catch 22, this sort of circuitous logic, this bizarre, you know, comical if it weren't so serious kind of stuff.
It was really like dark comedy in a way.
And then finally, I was told, well, you have to go in there.
So I went in there.
And here's what I found.
Vice President Pence was running the task force, but he was sort of running it like just running a meeting like a bureaucrat.
And the medical side of the task force, we were about eight of us around the Oval Table, me, Fauci, Burks, and a few other people.
And then in the room at the periphery were other people, non-medical people, people with logistics.
And there was an overflow room.
And this is the situation room that they talk about.
And then there was a lot of people on video and audio.
So Pence would say to me, Well, Scott, what's the evidence about risk to children?
This is one example that I vividly remember.
So I came into the task force meetings with my briefcase filled with papers, with the scientific data, with the latest data.
I was up all night every night.
I had people on the outside sort of helping me when I would say, will you find all the data on this by state?
And there's a lot of problems with the data.
So I came in and I would answer with a five minutes or 10 minutes of the data, study after study, data after data, report after report.
And the bottom line on the children was, of course, healthy children had no significant risk from a serious illness or death from COVID.
That's a fact.
That was the data.
And it still is the data.
And then Pence turns to Fauci, no comment.
And he turns to Deborah Burks, who was again the person who wrote all the advice to the governors.
She was in charge of all the federal policy.
Her only comment was, you're an outlier to me.
No data.
In fact, not a single time of any of the meetings that I was at at the White House did Berks, Fauci, or Redfield have any scientific study or data with them, not once.
In fact, this was a big shock to me because I was used to, I've had a career in academic medicine.
You know, we have these meetings, we have journal clubs.
I mean, the first thing you do is you look at the study design, you discuss the paper.
If the study design is flawed, the conclusions are irrelevant.
If it's a bad study, it's done.
It doesn't matter what they say.
These people didn't even, they didn't even know the data.
They didn't have the studies.
They didn't know how to look or think about a, in a critical way, a scientific study.
I mean, it's shocking the low level of knowledge and critical thinking that was done at these meetings.
And of course, these people were in their positions.
They're bureaucrats.
They were in their positions for 30, 35, almost 40 years.
And they're, you know, that's something that, again, people wouldn't know unless you saw it.
These people are not living through and succeeding in multiple presidential administrations because of excellence.
They're there because they know how to navigate a highly politicized environment.
And how do they navigate it?
Well, they get friends in the agencies to back them up.
They have friends in the media.
They would call, they would say, oh, well, I want to talk to Sanjay later.
And I didn't know what they were talking about.
And it turned out it was Sanjay Gupta, CNN.
They talked to them by their first names.
They're friends in the media.
They're friends in the agencies.
They had entourages walking around with them.
Middle East Realities00:15:21
I had no one walking around with me in the White House.
They came in with three, four, five people.
They had a whole system set up to cover each other.
In fact, if I may go on, it turned out later, Berks wrote a book, and she admitted that during 2020, she had a pact with Redfield, the head of the CDC, and Anthony Fauci, that if any of them were fired by President Trump, they would all resign.
Okay, these are, so first of all, what does that mean?
They're there to cover their own positions to me.
That's the thinking of a bureaucrat.
That's not the thinking of somebody who wants to help the country, in my opinion.
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Michael Duran.
Whenever I listen to people discussing foreign policy, the one thing that seems to be missing is actually a sense of realism.
Everyone's got a position on right and wrong and ideals, and those are all, of course, very useful things to talk about.
But you can't accomplish the impossible and trying to accomplish the impossible usually makes things worse no matter what your ideals are.
After the 9-11 terrorist attacks by Islamists, for example, George W. Bush wanted to transform the Middle East into a bastion of democracy to stem the rise of Islamist violence, which was a great idea as long as you didn't actually try to do it or think you could do it.
I would like to transform myself into a Yankees center fielder, but I think it would just cause a lot more trouble than it would help anybody, especially the Yankees.
Mike Duran is a realist.
This is why I always like talking to him about the Middle East.
He is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute.
He specializes in Middle East security.
And ever since the horrible attacks of October 7th, he has been really one of the common sense, not common sense, the uncommon sense voices out there.
All he cares about are American interests.
And all he wants to know is where American interests lie and who we can work with to accomplish them.
Mike, it's always good to see you.
Thank you for coming on.
It's great to be here.
And great to hear you have to say all those nice things about me.
Yeah, it's not like real life.
This is not like real life.
Yeah.
So I keep seeing you, wherever I turn on the TV, that's why I actually threw away my television and says, whenever I turn on the TV, there you are talking about this.
And it really is true that everyone else is sort of talking out of their heads, but you have an actual sense of the people at play.
So let's just begin with this.
October 7th is now, what, two years ago?
One and a half years ago?
Coming up on two years.
This has been a very, very substantive war between essentially between Israel and Iran.
You've been looking at the Middle East all this time.
What is the state of play right now, as far as you're concerned?
Well, you just put your finger on the key issue, which is that we need to keep in mind, which is that October 7th was not the beginning of a Hamas-Israel war.
Of course, it was that, but to really understand what's going on is we need to see that for what it was, the beginning of an Iran-Israel war and an asymmetric war by Iran against the United States by extension.
That's the proper way of understanding it.
That's what the Iranians thought they were doing in opening this.
So if we want to see it from the Iranian point of view and they were the instigators, that's what happened.
We just had this, what's now called the 12-day war, which I think we should see this as a major Israeli counterattack in this larger Israel-Iran war.
And the Israelis won it pretty decisively, although it was not a knockout blow.
So Iran has been weakened significantly by what happened during the 12-day war, but it's like a boxer that took a big blow to the nose, dropped to its knees, but it's getting up again.
It's going to get up again.
It's going to shake itself off.
And the war is going to continue.
It's not over, but it's in its last stage.
All that the Iranians have left at this stage is they're still in power, and they have control of that over Iran.
And then they have the Houthis, but all of their other proxies have been not necessarily eliminated.
Assad was eliminated.
Hezbollah has been decimated.
Hamas totally decapitated.
And so they don't have much to, in terms of the kind of power that they have been projecting, they just have the Houthis.
So now Israel, I mean, one of the things that's so frustrating is you get all this kind of source, anonymous source stories in the news.
Trump is angry at Netanyahu because he's bombing everybody.
You know, why won't they stop the war in Gaza?
What is your feeling about what's happening now and whether or not the war in Gaza should or could be stopped?
The war in Gaza is not going to end until Israel wins.
And Israel winning means Hamas destroyed.
And that is what is going to happen.
I can't tell you how quickly it's going to happen.
I wouldn't have thought if you'd have asked me, a friend of mine just reminded me of this right after October 7th.
Was Israel going to win this war?
And I said, if win this war means destroying Hamas, then they have only a 15 or 20% chance of doing that.
I thought at some point there would be a ceasefire imposed by the United States on the Israelis, which would leave Hamas in power.
I no longer believe that that's going to happen.
I think things have changed so much since then.
The Israelis have prevailed.
They are going to eliminate Hamas from Gaza.
No politician in Israel can campaign on anything other than that.
There's a huge, you know, the Israelis are very divided.
They were divided before October 7th.
They've been divided throughout.
The anti-Netanyahu forces who are as insanely, or there's a BB derangement syndrome, which is the exact counterpart to the Trump derangement syndrome.
And it affects a huge segment of the Israeli elite and certainly the Israeli press.
And they have been using the war to try to take down Netanyahu.
That effort continues.
It's going to continue until Netanyahu is not there anymore.
And they're trying to, they would like to bring a ceasefire, go to elections, and bring down Netanyahu.
But the problem they have is that a ceasefire will leave Hamas in power, and they cannot win an election on saying they want Hamas to remain in power.
So any politician in Israel that says we should cut a deal with Hamas and leave it in power is not going to succeed.
Netanyahu is going to continue to campaign on that, and that's what's going to prevail in the end.
They could be doing a better job, a quicker job, but this is what's going to happen eventually.
So one of the things that's happening on the right is this kind of identitarian right.
That's what they call them, the bigots.
And they feel kind of excluded, I think, from the MAGA Trump administration, and they're looking to kind of amp their influence.
And they're saying the one thing they keep saying is that Israel is in charge of America.
Candace Owens called Israel the master of the world, I think she said.
She also said they're an occult nation because the Star of David is a hexagram.
And Tucker.
As a convert from Judaism to Christianity, do you get to remain part of the conspiracy or do you lose that ability?
No, it's wonderful.
First of all, this conspiracy, no one has ever called me and asked me to join.
I'm really ticked off about that because I would have joined a conspiracy to run the world instantaneously.
I was right there.
But no, the people who hate Jews still hate me.
And the people who hate everybody else hate me.
So I'm covered.
Oh, good.
But you're not actually part of the elders.
I know.
Pulling the strings?
It sucks.
I know.
Where are your checks?
Where's my checks?
I'm waiting for my call.
It seems to me that America does nothing but basically get in Israel's way, sometimes in ways that I approve of.
I think I'm interested in America's interests, and I don't want to see the Middle East go up in flames.
I don't think that helps us at all.
But why is it good for us?
Is what's happening now?
Is this good for the U.S.?
Oh, it's fantastic for the U.S.
And by the way, just a word on the bigots, anti-Semites.
I thought your show last week was fabulous on that, really.
I want to see more people calling these people out for what they are.
It's grotesque.
It's not American, and it's not MAGA, and it won't take us where we need to go.
Everything that you said, I just want to say, how do they say it?
I want to associate myself with your remarks.
The key here is that Israel is our best ally.
It's certainly our best ally in the Middle East.
It may be our best ally in the world.
Why?
Because the United States is pulling back.
The United States does have to focus resources on East Asia.
Something happened around about 2017, maybe, when I picked that date just out of the air.
But sometime in that timeframe, there was a revolution in American foreign policy that didn't get announced.
And the revolution was that the Pentagon leadership understood that we could lose a war over Taiwan.
We might go to war and we might lose.
And from the end of the Cold War until that day, the assumption was that the United States could win any war that it chose to get involved in.
It doesn't mean that we were necessarily wanted to expend the resources necessary, but we couldn't imagine a war in which we would fully devote ourselves and lose.
And now we know that that's possible.
The buildup, the Chinese buildup has been so great that we cannot necessarily prevail.
And so that's led to a change.
And there's a reordering going on and reprioritization.
And the Middle East got downgraded somewhat.
Now, there are voices out there that are saying we should just get the hell out of the Middle East entirely.
And that is not going to happen.
You cannot, the globalization, there's globalism and there's globalization.
Globalization is an aspect of the world today.
We don't have any control over it.
Globalism is the ideology that says this is a fantastic thing and we have to do more to advance it and so on.
And I think MAGA is against globalism, but it can't be against globalization.
Globalization is a fact.
Supply chains go across the world.
Energy goes across the world.
Trade cuts across the Middle East.
You can't play chess against China on three quadrants of the board and say, but I'm not going to move any of my pieces into this other quadrant, the Middle East.
The minute you do that, what's China going to do?
They're going to move right into that quadrant.
Which they're doing, by the way, very surreptitiously.
For example, they are giving targeting data to the Houthis.
Why?
Drew, there are two entities in the world that have built anti-ship ballistic missiles.
Do you want to guess who the two are?
China and us.
The Houthis.
The Houthis, of course.
Okay.
So all of these missiles the Houthis are sending against American naval assets and against global shipping.
This is a big, for the Chinese, this is a big test arena where they can collect data on how the U.S. military responds to these actions.
It also moves assets out of East Asia over into the Middle East, which is what they want to see.
An anti-ship ballistic missile has only one purpose in the world, and that's to take down an American aircraft carrier.
That's the purpose of it.
So the Chinese are playing in this arena.
There's lots of other ways the Chinese are playing.
I'll just give you that as one example.
We're not leaving the Middle East.
Donald Trump expressed that very clearly when the first major trip he made as president was to the Gulf, right?
And announced now we're up to $5 trillion in deals.
These are Trump numbers.
I don't think the real number is $5 trillion.
But he's expressing a real interest in what happens in the Gulf.
The Saudis and the Emiratis are developing massive AI projects.
AI is going to determine the future of the global economy, and it's going to determine the future of the military balance.
They have unlimited energy.
AI is a big energy user.
They have unlimited land to use for the plant.
And they have this other thing that we don't have, no regulation.
So they can do whatever they want.
So the AI systems that they build are going to be very important in determining the global balance.
The Middle East remains strategically important, but we have to prioritize toward East Asia.
We need allies on the ground who can whack our enemies and can work effectively with us.
There are only two American allies in the Middle East that have militaries that can project power beyond their borders.
That's Turkey and Israel.
That's it.
That's it.
The others have militaries.
The Saudis have a military.
The Jordanians have a military.
The Emiratis have a military, but they can't project power.
So if the United States is not going to create the stability in this area, which is vital to our interests, we have to have allies who will and allies who have capabilities.
The Israelis just showed the kind of capabilities they have.
We need them in order to have a Middle East that remains part of the American alliance system against the Chinese, or at least is not working against us against the Chinese.
Churchill's Dilemma: Stalin vs. Hitler00:11:42
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Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Lord Andrew Roberts, a tremendous historian, great historian.
He's the author of 20 books, including the award-winning bestseller, Churchill, Walking with Destiny.
His book on Napoleon, his biography of Napoleon, is literally one of my favorite history books and was incredibly helpful in helping me to understand modern Europe.
All of this is important because I've been talking a lot on my podcast about the lack of information, trustworthy information we are getting now in this country and how it makes it very difficult to use your other faculties like the faculty of reason if there's no content in it.
And we see the results of that in a lot of places, a lot of conspiracy theories, a lot of crazy ideas.
And among those crazy ideas has been the ones being put forward by Tucker Carlson, including his interview with the history buff Darrell Cooper, whom he called the best and most honest popular historian in the United States.
My own run-in with Darrell Cooper was when I was writing my book, Kingdom of Cain.
I included a quotation from him, even though I found his facts all over the place.
I was writing about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and he did have this interesting quote.
And I had to take it out because as I was doing the final edit, he came on with the kind of ignorance that I think is not natural, just arises from philosophical immorality, I guess is the best way to call it.
So I wanted to bring on an actual great popular historian and talk about World War II and Winston Churchill and his role in our history.
Andrew, thank you so much for coming on.
I'm a true fan, and I'm glad to meet you.
Well, it's a delight, Andrew.
Thank you very much for inviting me on the show.
I thought it was very interesting what you said about Nietzsche, because, of course, Mr. Cooper considers himself to be a neo-Nietzchian.
That's part of where his sort of philosophy of history, insofar as one can say that about a podcast who's never written a history book in his life like Mr. Cooper, should where he takes his sort of overall worldview from, I think.
It's very interesting.
The quotation I was using was this offhanded remark he made about similarities in the life of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, which was itself true, although it was surrounded by all kinds of mistakes in timing and so forth.
And I don't want you to have to make a career out of debunking this guy.
There are other things about this I want to talk about.
But I think we do have to talk about a little bit of this because Tucker turned him into one of the most popular podcasts on the air and gave him a lot of credibility.
His thesis was that Churchill was the main villain of the war because he was responsible for extending it from the mere invasion of Poland, Germany's invasion of Poland, which is a really interesting argument.
He left out the Rhineland, Austria, Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, parts of Lithuania, all those things that he had invaded before that.
But his idea basically was that Hitler was totally surprised when he invaded Poland and France and England declared war on him.
And Churchill then irrationally pursued attacks on civilian enclaves, hoping to get the U.S. involved.
And that was his entire war strategy.
So I'm wondering if you could just address the premise, if not the whole thing.
Yes, well, the premise, you mentioned about mistimings with regard to his views on Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.
And with regard to this central thesis of his argument against Churchill, the whole thing is based on a massive mistiming.
First of all, Winston Churchill was not even in the government when the Second World War broke out.
And he was not prime minister when Hitler invaded Luxembourg and Holland and Denmark.
Shortly afterwards, obviously, he also invaded France, by which time Winston Churchill was prime minister.
So to blame somebody for the escalation of World War II when he wasn't in the key deciding roles is just a straightforward error of fact.
What it's more interesting in, it seems to me, is why he's making these attacks, which I'm sure we'll come on to in the course of our conversation.
Yeah, I mean, he gets very quickly, as almost everyone that Tucker brings on does, to the evil Jews who had, according to him, had loaned Churchill as a group, I guess, is the way he put it, had loaned Churchill money and were manipulating to get him into office because he was a Zionist or at least was willing to pretend to be a Zionist.
Absolutely.
And needless to say, this is total, what we call in England, bulls.
The idea that Winston Churchill altered his views in any way because of anybody who lent him money is to fatally misunderstand the kind of person Winston Churchill was.
He was broke pretty much all his life.
Constantly spent more money than he earned, but he didn't care because what he tended to do was to write articles and books and so on and be able to pay off his debts.
He did take money from some people who were Jewish.
He also took a lot of money from people who weren't.
He was a Zionist.
He did believe in the state of Israel and so on.
But the idea that that somehow affected his politics is complete rubbish.
The fact is that the Jewish people who gave him money did so because he liked Jews.
He didn't like Jews and follow their Welten Schaung against Adolf Hitler because he was being given money.
So that's the first point.
The second point is that actually people such as Sir Henry Strakoch gave him money in their wills when they died.
That's how he got the large amount of money from Sir Henry Strakoch.
One could hardly accuse Strakoch therefore of trying to bribe him, considering the fact that he'd only get the money when Strakoch was dead.
That does make it a little difficult for him to manipulate the government.
I guess the narrative that Tucker Carlson is pushing, and I don't know if Darryl Cooper is pushing this, is basically the idea that we should have been fighting Stalin all along, that Churchill's choice to ally with Stalin, even though he knew what Stalin was as well.
Is that a mystery?
Is there some reason why he made the choice that it was Hitler who had to be fought, Hitler, who he repeatedly called a thug?
Yes, Hitler was in the position to completely dominate Europe, to take the hegemonic position in Europe that had hitherto in British history been the number one danger to Britain.
You know, always for the last 500 years, we've tried to ensure that the Channel ports should not fall under the control of a hegemonic European power.
That was why we fought against Philip II of Spain at the time of the Spanish Armada, against Louis XIV at the time of the wars of Spanish succession, against Napoleon, against the Kaiser in the First World War and so on.
You know, it's self-protection.
Stalin and Russia posed no threats to France and Belgium and so on.
Adolf Hitler did.
So that's the strategic side.
The other side is that Churchill recognized in Hitler a profoundly evil man who was placing race in the sort of position that Stalin also placed class, but he was wiping out the whole basis of European civilization and made it clear that he wanted to and he was in a position to.
The idea that we should have gone to war against Stalin, who was first of all, of course, on the other side of Europe and also the major threat to Hitler is ludicrous.
Stalin, if you work out actually what ultimately destroyed Hitler, it was the fact that for every five Germans who were killed in the Second World War, four died on the Eastern Front.
So the Russians killed 80% of German soldiers, not bombing them from the air.
That was done by the British and the Americans.
But when it came to actual stopping Hitler, you couldn't do it without Stalin, frankly.
Right.
So it was strategic in that regard.
I'm wondering, Churchill's purpose here was basically to save Europe, and he did need the help of the United States.
Is it fair to say that his entire strategy, I mean, I've heard the old story, I don't even know if the story is true of Churchill reacting to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by saying, ah, well, then we've won.
But was that in fact?
Yeah, he said that after he heard the news, he slept the sleep of the saved.
He knew from that moment on that it was going to be all right and they'd see their way through.
Now, of course, it wasn't.
The one question that can be asked about that is that, of course, Hitler didn't declare war on America until four days after Pearl Harbor.
He was under no obligation to do so.
But what Churchill spotted was that once the Roosevelt administration in the United States was in the war against Japan, it would only be a matter of time before it was also fighting the stronger of the two fascist enemies, which was always Germany.
Prayer and Risk00:15:43
Hey, everyone, it's Andrew Claven with this week's interview with the wonderful Megan Basham.
It has been too long since we have had Megan on the show.
She's obviously a daily wire writer, and she's one I admire immensely for her talent, but also for her integrity and her faith.
Her New York Times best-selling book, Shepherds for Sale, is an indictment of evangelical churches that have been taken over and corrupted by the left.
It's a book that had one contract canceled because it offended people in high places.
But it was picked up again by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, as is my publisher, Zondervan.
And you'll notice that one thing I didn't say was that the book had a contract canceled, even though Megan offered to change it.
And I didn't say that because that never happened.
She had the rock solid integrity and courage to stand up, even to have a book contract canceled.
Something's happened to me.
It's a horrible, horrible experience.
It's like going through a trap door.
But that kind of integrity is far rarer than you think.
And she and her faith and her courage have all been tested recently in a battle with cancer.
And as with all of us dealing with the things we're dealing with now, it's being tested again.
So I wanted to talk to her about all that.
Megan, it is great to see you.
It's been way too long.
It has been.
It's so good to be here between cancer and all the expanding we've been doing at Daily Wire.
I haven't been here in a while and I'm excited to be back.
It is nice to see you again.
And so we'll start out on a light-hearted note.
Let's talk about this cancer.
Right.
I mean, you came to faith under difficult circumstances.
You've written about this.
You went down a bad path.
You paid the price and you were lifted up by our Lord.
And you've taken on a big opponent, the church, and you've gotten on the bestseller list.
And then you get this diagnosis.
What, I mean, maybe it's a stupid question, but what is that experience like?
Yeah, it was a roller coaster ride in 2024.
So, you know, I went from, I think it was mid-August I got the call from my editor.
You know, you made the New York Times bestseller list and there was big celebration there, even though they slided me a little bit, Nander.
I'm just going to tell you, because my agent was looking at the sales numbers and going, you should be at number two or three on the hardcover list.
They didn't put me on the hardcover list.
They put me on the combined list, which was electronic and hardcover.
So I'd be a little further down, but I still made it.
Yeah, they couldn't deny you that.
Yeah.
And then flash forward to, you know, I've been having some digestive problems and I knew that I had issues and had just sort of fought with doctors for a while because of my age.
I specifically asked, could this be cancer?
Like way back in March of 2024, I had been to the emergency room with terrible bowel cramping.
And I asked them in the emergency room, they did a CT scan, could this be cancer?
Because my grandmother died of cancer, my aunt died of cancer.
So I've always been very aware of cancer.
And they said, no, no, we don't see anything on the CT that indicates that.
So, you know, flash forward to Thanksgiving last year.
And I kept pushing for the colonoscopy.
And they're like, well, you know, at this point, it'll be your birthday and then you can have a colonoscopy.
And I was like, is there any way to move that up?
And they're like, we don't see what you're describing wouldn't trigger, you know, moving it.
So anyway, God knew all that was going on.
And so when I finally did get the colonoscopy, I woke up, you know, out of that sort of haze to hear the doctor saying, ah, yeah, we found a large tumor.
Not only do we think it's cancer, we think it's advanced.
So, you know, then you, this was literally the day before Thanksgiving.
And in God's providence, some friends were with us for Thanksgiving who had been through a major cancer battle themselves.
Dear friends of ours, we've known them since we got, my husband and I got married.
They were the gentleman and this couple, they were roommates before we got married.
And he had been through Ewing sarcoma, I think stage three Ewing sarcoma, which is very rare for adults.
And they just held my hand through the whole weekend saying, here's what's going to happen.
This is what you need to do now.
Get registered with this, make these calls.
They were making calls going, we're going to find you, you know, the best oncologist in this area.
So, I mean, those are probably the hardest days I've ever faced in my life as we were waiting to find out when they say advanced, how advanced.
And in the back of my mind, I had a friend who I had lost the year before from stage four colon cancer.
Exact same thing.
Yeah, it's getting common with younger people.
It is.
She was only 42 years old, mom of three little babies.
And so, you know, my friend Ashley was in my mind and it was just more sleepless nights than I've ever had.
And I can tell you what I did.
I've always been a John MacArthur girl and I have never relied on that ministry, grace to you, more than I have.
And those few days between, because of course it was Thanksgiving, right?
So you're like, now I have to wait like a week to talk to anybody.
So I would put John MacArthur's messages on when I was going to sleep to try to get some sleep and just listen to them as I was trying to fall asleep.
And so, you know, when we did finally get to meet with the doctor, they said it is stage three, got all the scans.
And there's a big difference between stage three and stage four.
Like, you know, I was late stage three.
So they're going, you know, you're 60% chance that we can treat this and cure it.
If you get into stage four, which I was close to, you're now at a 15%.
So you just fall off a cliff.
So those were really dark days.
And then, you know, some reprieve when you find out, okay, it's late stage three, but it's stage three.
So that's good.
We're not quite stage four yet.
And then you just go through the fight of, okay, so now we're going to do chemo radiation and chemo and surgery.
And suddenly, like the psalms meant more to me than they have ever meant in my life.
And things that I didn't understand in scripture before, I suddenly got like there's, I can't remember which psalm it is in, but I think it was a psalm by David where he said, I said in my alarm, every man is a liar.
And I suddenly felt that with doctors because they would say conflicting things to me.
I didn't trust them.
And I was going in my alarm, I feel that all of you are liars and I trust nobody.
And so I really got these things in a new way And, you know, just kind of did the King Hezekiah thing for weeks where I just had my face to the wall and was in prayer constantly and suddenly reading.
I mean, and people were so great.
People sent me books of the Puritans and so many wonderful Bible studies.
And my friend Rosaria Butterfield drove me down a Vitamix because she felt that I needed to work on my health.
And so, you know, it was just kind of all of that, that processing and pleading with the Lord for my life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, I was meanwhile pleading with the Lord for your life.
And I kind of want to ask you about that because I'm sure all your friends were praying.
I'm sure your family was praying.
You're praying.
And we kind of hear nowadays these thoughts and prayers.
What a waste of time.
You know, what a foolish thing to do.
How do you feel about that?
I mean, how did you feel about it at the time when you didn't know what the result would be?
I mean, I can tell you that that's where the rubber meets the road on your belief in prayer.
And I mean, I'm a Calvinist.
I've always been kind of a, you know, not a very demonstrative Christian in church.
I'm not a hands-up kind of girl.
But when this happened, I definitely, my belief in prayer came to the fore because suddenly I was much more charismatic than I'd ever been.
You know, the first thing I did was James 5.
I called the elders and I'm like, I mean, it was literally like probably the first call I made was, can I come to the church?
And I want the elders to pray over me.
Because, you know, it says in James 5, if any of you is sick, call the elders and have be anointed with oil.
I have never in my life considered being anointed with oil.
But, you know, that Sunday when we went up, when we went to church and I saw one of the elders, you know, I kind of sheepishly went up and started to explain my situation.
And then I said, well, I would like the elders to pray over me.
And I don't know if James 5 is supposed to be a literal interpretation or, and he said, well, we have actually, you know, physically anointed with oil.
I'm like, great, I want that.
I want the physical anointing with oil package.
I don't want to leave, you know, anything out.
So we did that.
We went to the chapel and had the elders pray over me and anoint me with oil.
And we did that.
So, you know, for me, it really strengthened my belief in prayer.
You know, I would say, I mean, I've always been a prayerful person, but I don't know that I had the faith that, you know, God was listening to those prayers and answering those prayers in the same way I did when I was pleading for my life when I was saying, okay, Lord, I know that you can give me a reprieve here.
I know that there are models in scripture like Hezekiah, where you will say, okay, you know, you were under a death sentence and I'm going to pull that back.
And so that's what I was asking for.
So, you know, I don't know.
I didn't really have any doubts and thoughts and prayers in that moment.
I, in fact, suddenly was like, everyone pray over me.
If you want to pray over me, please feel free.
Yeah, really, really.
You know, and I remember you said at one point something like, you're not like Paul who says it doesn't matter whether I stay or go, you want to stay, which I thought was, I thought was great.
I mean, I thought like, you know, pretending that you're, you know, pious at some higher level is to me just an absolute waste of time since God knows exactly where you are.
And I think, you know, you might as well talk honestly with him.
So at this point, the treatment has been good, right?
You're in a good place.
I mean, and, but.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I, um, after going through all the treatment, you know, started in January, uh, finished on June 30th.
Um, and after that, we got clean margins.
So that's what you want when you go into surgery.
They, you know, you want to see that there's no cancer beyond where they've cut out.
And so I was responsive to treatment, not as much as we would have liked.
I didn't have a complete response.
And they, I still had a positive lymph node, which if you know cancer, you know, that puts you at a higher risk.
And I had some nerve and blood vessel invasion and that puts you at a higher risk.
So, you know, we're remaining prayerful because right now I have no evidence of disease and we're so incredibly thankful for that and praising God for that.
But, you know, I kind of looked at it this way that I went, it's like the thorn in the side.
I'm like, I'm not going to get just a clean escape where I forget about this thing.
It's going to stay with me and I'm going to be a little hobbled.
And that's going to require me to continue.
in prayer and leaning on the Lord because it's still there knowing, okay, I have a higher risk of recurrence.
So it keeps me conscious of my mortality.
Let's put it that way.
Well, I wanted to ask you that because, I mean, at my age, you are, you get conscious, you get real conscious of your mortality.
You know, that like any, you know, every Christmas could be your last.
You understand it.
And you're just, you know, that there's no, there's no reprieve because you're coming out of that straightaway, you know?
And it's like, so I'm wondering, someone your age, you know, what effect is that?
I know the effect it has on me.
It has good and bad effects.
It makes me, you know, a little bit more cautious than I've ever been.
But at the same time, it makes me very appreciative of every single second.
I'm wondering the effect it has on you.
Yeah, probably the same.
You know, it's strange.
I'll be totally fine and almost kind of forget about it.
And then my husband and I were in California for John MacArthur's Memorial.
And maybe it's because of that that it just came into my mind in a stronger way.
But like we were shopping and suddenly I almost had like, I'm not a panic person, like what felt like a panic attack in the middle of Nordstrom Rack.
You know, I just suddenly went, I'm shopping and a month from now, I could get my next scan and they could be told, oh, you're stage four.
And I will spend, you know, the remaining months of my life fighting that.
So those things come into your head.
And that's part of what keeps you preaching to yourself rather than listening to yourself.
And that's really the only way I can approach it because I am, as my surgical oncologist would put it, kind of a high anxiety patient.
So I can morbidly obsess on this easily.
And the only way I have felt to deal with that really is to, okay, I'm going to have to memorize passages.
And when it starts, I just have to start reciting them or I have to put on a message and start listening to it because I transparently can spiral pretty quickly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I love it when doctors say that.
You're the worrying sort.
Like if I'm talking to a doctor, yes.
If I'm talking to a baseball fan, no.
So one of the things, I mean, this kind of troubles me.
I almost never think about the afterlife.
I mean, you know, I believe in it, but as we say, help my own belief, you know, I also, how is your relationship to that concept changed or not changed or developed?
I mean, I do think, and it's weird because it's not all the time.
You know, you would love to think that you're so pious that you're, again, like you're like, Paul, whether I, you know, to live is Christ, to die is gain.
And you try to take hold of that.
But the reality is most of the time, I don't really want to gain through death, you know?
Thanks anyway.
Thanks anyway.
Right.
But I would experience through it like moments where, and it surprised me.
Like I would not have thought that being that high anxiety type of person that I would have been capable with that level of peace where I went, actually, it's going to be okay.
My kids, and part of it, you probably have felt this too, that it's, it's your own mortality, but then it's also thinking about your kids and going, I don't want to see my daughters get married without me.
I don't want to not be there.
I don't want to be there.
You know, I want to be there to guide them through proms and dates and having babies and like the things that I would miss out on.
And I would have to remind myself that whatever heaven offers is going to be so much greater than that.
And God's got my kids too.
So if in his perfect providence he takes me off the board at this moment, he also has a covering for my kids and I have to trust in that.
You know, because I did have a friend who lost his wife to cancer.
And I think she was frantically trying at the end to find a miracle cure.
And he warned me and he did say, she missed the last moments.
You know, she missed a lot of great conversations that she and I could have had.
She missed time with her grandkids and because she was chasing after that cure.
And he, it was actually a hard thing, I think, for him to say to me, you know, because you want to hear, all you want to hear from everybody is you're going to be fine.
You're going to be great.
You're going to beat this thing.
And that was not what he said to me.
He said, listen, if you get there, don't miss it.
And that was actually a really loving thing.
And so I have thought about that a lot that, you know, I've kind of stepped back a little bit from work and from all of the dreams and things I thought I would chase because I went, I don't want to miss, if these are my last few years, I don't want to have not spent them with the people who matter the most to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's everything.
It really is.
So we're now in this time, you know, it's a difficult time.
It really is.
Charlie's Christian Witness00:04:28
I mean, it's like, I think this Charlie Kirk thing has hit everybody hard.
You know, we were part of the business.
We knew him.
But I think it's really touched everybody because of the revelation that silence is not violence, words are not violence.
You know, I always, every time anybody wants to say that, I want to like punch them one and say, that is violence.
And now we see how horrific violence is horrific.
It is a terrible, terrible thing.
So it's so easy to get lost in anger.
It's so easy to get lost in grief.
It's so easy to get lost in fear.
Does any of this experience, this personal experience that you have come into this moment as a political moment?
And we've lost, you know, you've lost your main preacher as well.
So is there some way of translating the things that you're being shown in your personal challenge, some way of transferring that into the bigger challenge?
One of the things that's been interesting to me, you know, as somebody who writes so much about the evangelical world and Protestantism and Christianity, to sort of sit back and watch the reevaluation of Charlie Kirk, because a lot of the major evangelical Christian institutions that are kind of known for being, you know, intellectual publications or intellectual figures would not have openly associated with Charlie Kirk.
And that's just a fact, you know, and they would have considered him a polemicist, a bomb thrower, somebody who was too involved in the culture war.
And suddenly, for me, who's kind of part of the culture war too, in a pretty strong way with the Daily Wire, to sit back and watch their reevaluation, like I think it's been surprising to some of them to see the outpouring of love and affection for Charlie for his Christian witness, not just for, you know, his incredible political advocacy, but for his Christian witness.
And you're seeing some of them say, I didn't know.
I didn't know about that part of his life.
I didn't know how outspoken he was.
I don't know if you know Elisa Childer.
She has a great apologetics podcast, particularly for women.
And she came out, and this was such so humble and great of her to say this, to say, I turned down some speaking engagements with TPUSA because I didn't know if I wanted to be aligned with Charlie Kirk and his organization because I thought, you know, maybe they were just too hot politically.
And she, she said, I was wrong.
And I actually am now so inspired by him.
And I was wrong to not get involved with them.
And I would do it differently if I had the opportunity.
And all that told me was, you know what?
God's safeguarding your reputation because I've gone through that.
You know, this book came out and there was some fierce pushback because as you would expect, a lot of the people I wrote about didn't like it.
They didn't like being written about it.
Yeah, exactly.
And they have some pretty big levers they could pull too, you know, in order to sort of dismiss me as a muckraker.
And well, I was taken out of context or, you know, and like, for example, I heard two guys from one of these publications I'm referring to, the Gospel Coalition, do a whole interview where they were discussing my book and they both were like, it's not the sort of thing I'd want to give attention to.
And like, it was lowbrow.
And, but then throughout the interview, they both admitted they hadn't read it.
So it's not the sort of thing you or anyone else should give attention to, but we don't actually know what's in it.
This is just what we've heard about it.
And I mean, that happened a lot.
Members of my own family said, I tried to give it to my pastor.
He wouldn't read it because he'd heard negative things.
And that was painful for me.
And then I look at Charlie and I go, I know that he went through the exact same thing, that there were people who kept him at arm's length because they saw him that same way.
And now they're being forced in some cases, being, you know, a little bit drug kicking and screaming.
And in some gracious cases, like Elisa, you know, people openly saying, I had him wrong.
And so you go, okay, God had his reputation.
He didn't need to worry about that.
He just needed to speak truth.
He just, you know, needed to do what he thought was right.
And God was going to take care of how the world saw Charlie Kirk.
And I will be honest, before this week, I would not have expected this outpouring of love and respect and affection for him.
So that's been really uplifting.
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