Dave Smith and the hosts critique the 2020 pandemic response, citing Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump's admission that lockdown models were flawed, which caused tens of millions to lose jobs while hospitals remained unoverwhelmed. They highlight NYC data showing only 137 deaths involved healthy individuals, contrasting this with Dr. Fauci's shifting threat assessments and Tucker Carlson's constitutional challenges to governors like Phil Murphy. The episode further examines Joe Biden's cognitive struggles recalling FDR's war leadership and fumbling the War Production Board speech, alongside allegations of inappropriate behavior, ultimately arguing that elected officials ignore their oaths while media fails to protect civil liberties. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Keeping Sanity in a Big Government00:01:54
We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
Hey, what's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem, a fireside chat.
These are always a lot of fun, and the listeners and viewers always seem to enjoy them.
And I get to see Robbie the Fire, Bernstein's beautiful face, the king of the cocks.
How are you, sir?
I'm doing okay, man.
I got some fresh fire for my logs.
So, you know, I'm excited to be here.
How are you?
Very good.
I'm just, I'm glad to see that you're consistently able to get firewood because I know there's been shortages.
I had to take down one of the neighbor's trees, but desperate times, you know, it was an ugly tree anyways.
Yeah, there you go.
And, you know, I'm sure you left a stub and some roots.
You still got a little something going over there.
All right.
Well, it's good to know that you're keeping warm.
That's of the utmost importance.
It's good to know you're keeping your sanity, at least to some degree.
I know some people are struggling with that.
And yeah, this is still going.
And do your in-laws hate you yet?
Like, at least I'm at my parents' house, but are you starting to be treated like a freeloader at all?
No.
Well, first off, I'm not a freeloader, if you know what I mean.
So I think they're quite happy to have me.
I just insist on not being.
But no, I think my actual blood family would be more over me at this point.
They love me.
They're quite happy with me here.
My real family, I'm usually on an average visit to my mom's house by like the third hour.
She's like, all right, you guys should be going.
Leave the baby, but you guys should be going.
Why Libertarianism Seems Better Now00:03:59
Anyway, so there's been some changes in the situation with this national lockdown.
And there was Donald Trump held a very long press conference yesterday about the phases of reopening the economy.
I've also just been, you know, as all of us have, I've been reading a lot about this and thinking a lot about this.
And so there's some stuff for us to talk about that we hadn't discussed last time.
I will say, starting broad and then maybe getting a little bit more specific, it really is almost hilarious now to me looking back.
And this is the way things tend to work in general.
When there's a crisis, everybody goes, huh, libertarians are such a joke.
You know, libertarianism is dead.
This is proof that, you know, your ideology just doesn't work in reality when we have whatever the crisis is.
And then usually it takes years, but as more information comes out and more, you know, like more people know what actually happened, they go, ah, you know, the libertarians were kind of right.
Or at least if you look at it objectively, you'd go, oh, they were kind of right.
But of course, because we live in 2020 where everything happens at light speed, it seems like we're already there.
Everybody was, when this thing first broke out, it's like, ha, a pandemic.
Libertarianism is dead.
You can't possibly handle that.
And little by little, as everything's coming out, I don't mean to just sit here and like pat ourselves on the back, but it seems like we were pretty much right about everything.
And that actually now people are starting to wake up and realize that on every level, the government response to this has been terrible.
And they got so much of it wrong.
So much of the information that was used to justify this whole lockdown has just been wrong for whatever reason.
Not exactly clear what the reason is, but they were not right about it.
And now it's becoming more and more obvious to people, even when they start more and more information about the stimulus bill is getting into the average person's hands.
And now they're starting to see that it's like, oh, yeah, actually, what happened here was that the government relied on projections that were wrong.
Because of the fear of those projections, they put tens of millions of people out of work.
Now they use the situation to rape them, rob them, give out tons of corporate welfare.
And now they're just arresting people for being outside.
So, or, you know, gathering in a religious environment.
It's really, it's funny that just to the average layman, the libertarian answer to this stuff seems so much better now than it did a month ago.
Hey, listen, the banks have more money and they were able to get a lot of their bad debt off their balance sheet.
So that's what we needed as society.
Right.
Because that's the only way to deal with a pandemic.
Is when banks get their bad debt off the balance sheets.
That's what we all needed.
Everybody knows the big problem with libertarianism is in the event of a pandemic, the Federal Reserve can't drastically expand its balance sheet.
So what are you going to do without a Fed to expand its balance sheet?
Yeah, what would have happened to all that bad debt on the banks?
I mean, they've had to have kept it and gone under.
Can't have that.
One of the things that I've really been paying attention to, and I think that a lot of people have noticed this because this is the type of thing that even for people who aren't like, I don't know, who aren't us, it's hard to not pay attention to this type of stuff.
And it's a real, you know, like I've talked a lot about over the years, me and you have discussed in many different ways how a lot of times regular people, they may not have a worked out philosophy.
They may not have like, like the average person isn't like a Keynesian, you know, doesn't go, oh, I'm a Keynesian or I'm an Austrian or I'm a Chicago school.
When Justifications Keep Changing00:10:41
They don't even like think about that.
You know what I mean?
Like they don't have like a, I belong to this economic school of thought or, you know, this is not how most people operate because they have lives that they have to lead and they're human beings.
And unlike us, human beings exist in humanity and they have, they're thinking about their family and their job and their, you know, poker tournament on the weekend or whatever it is.
And sometimes they heard a college professor talk about the patriarchy once and they just went with that for their whole life.
Yes, there are some people there.
And even a lot of them haven't really thought through this stuff.
But people can smell bullshit when it's really obvious.
And one of the ways that I think people smell this is when justifications for government interventions or government programs or government action of any kind keep changing.
And I remember this, this was one of the reasons why everybody realized the war in Iraq was bullshit because they kept changing the reason we were at war.
It started with like Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction that he's planning on using and he was in bed.
You know, he planned 9-11 with Osama bin Laden.
And then all of the evidence, just that just got destroyed to the point that the Bush administration couldn't even claim that that was happening anymore.
And then it became like, well, he was a really brutal dictator.
And then it became like, well, we have to bring democracy to the Middle East.
And then it became like, you know, well, we can't allow, you know, terrorism to come into the country that was never there.
And then it was about Iranian influence.
And before you know it, you're like, wait a minute, this is, you've just abandoned the reason, you know, that you sold us this action to begin with.
And I'm sure that a lot of people are starting to realize that about these lockdowns, that this was sold with what is, whether or not you agree with it, what is a plausible reason for a shutdown, okay?
And it was very specific.
Nobody was like on any other note, every single elected official, every single reporter, all of them.
It was one specific reason that we shut down the United States of America's economy.
And that was to flatten the curve.
That was the reason.
Okay.
And the reasoning went like this.
It went, we're looking at these projections.
A lot of people are going to die.
Even with shutting down the economy, 200,000 people are going to die or something like that.
The hospital systems are going to be overwhelmed.
And so we have to shut down the economy just so we don't overwhelm the hospital systems and there aren't enough hospital beds for people and people are dying in stairwells and in parking lots and there's this nightmare scenario.
Now, feel however you feel about the damage of shutting down the economy.
If that were the realities that we were looking at, that people are dying in stairwells, you can certainly see there would be an argument to do whatever you can to make sure that doesn't happen.
I think most reasonable people would say, yeah, that's really, really bad.
So, you know, let's look.
However, they were wrong.
This is just a fact at this point.
They were wrong.
Even those people have all admitted their models were wrong.
We've been talking about this for a couple of weeks now.
They're just starting to admit it in these, in like Andrew Cuomo's press conferences and Trump's press conferences.
They're starting to acknowledge, oh yeah, all these models were wrong.
And the curve has been flattened and we've hit the apex and we're coming down.
So now the justification for the lockdowns is gone.
It's as gone as Saddam has weapons of mass destruction is gone.
It's just, it's not there anymore.
They can't even pretend that it exists.
They can't pretend that we're going to get to 200,000 deaths.
Even in New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus in America, or I guess in the world, there was never a shortage of hospital beds.
That didn't end up coming into, you know, the first couple podcasts that we were doing and the first couple podcasts I was doing with some other guests, I was talking about like certificate of need legislation and why there aren't more hospital beds and how the free market would have an answer for more hospital beds, because it seemed like that was what everyone was saying was the real crisis.
But that's not happening.
Even in the worst hit areas, the hospitals are not overwhelmed to that degree.
There's definitely been stress on some hospitals in New York, but not like that.
That's just not happening.
So the justification for the lockdown is over.
And just like with the war in Iraq now, the justification is changing.
And a whole bunch of people, including governors, the doctor of fucking, what's his name? Fauci, now he's saying we have to continue the lockdown until there's no new cases of the virus, which is just insane.
More insane than bringing democracy to Iraq.
It's actually crazier than that.
The idea that we would keep going with this until there's no new cases of corona.
And I think now people are starting to realize, like, where is that first justification, much like with the war in Iraq, if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction that he was planning on using, well, that's kind of a re, that's kind of a reason to go to war.
But if you're just talking about bringing democracy to a country that doesn't seem to want it, that's absurd.
And this is kind of the same thing.
Also, how would you even get to a point where you can establish zero new cases?
They're not great with the testing as it is.
That's like, that sounds like no game plan, no end in sight kind of approach.
Yes.
And that starts to become obvious to people.
You know, we were talking about right from the beginning that you're like, okay, fine, this virus might be bad and there might be a lot of problems with it, costs in terms of human life, in terms of everything, the medical industry, all of this stuff.
But there's also all of these costs to shutting down the economy, and we have to weigh these things out.
And now people are seeing the costs to the economy.
And if you're sitting there and telling them it's almost impossible to not weigh out costs, if you're telling them, well, if there's one new case, we have to continue this shutdown.
And you're like, wait, you're telling me one person getting sick from the coronavirus is worth tens of millions of people being unemployed and millions of businesses being closed?
That seems a little hard to believe.
I was thinking about this coming into the episode because I just don't really feel comfortable making any claims in regards to the health of it.
Like, I have no idea.
I really, I feel like even the doctors, it's clear at the end of this, they didn't fucking know.
But all of us kind of assessing our personal risk, you can't have what you can't afford in life.
And if government didn't step in and say, hey, we could afford to have everyone not go to work, I think most people would have gone to work.
And if the situation had gone out of hand, everyone would have been like, okay, I got to make sacrifices and not go to work because this is getting out of hand.
And they stepped in and said, no, we've got our models.
So we're going to make a decision for everybody so that it doesn't get to that point where it gets out of hand.
And it would seem, or, you know, hindsight's going to be 2020.
But if their modeling was completely inaccurate, they need to stop stepping in and going, hey, we can make better decisions than everyone can make for themselves individually.
Because individually, most of us probably would have just continued to go to work unless we were in the high-risk demographic.
And I'm sure, you know, we would have made equations.
If you found out someone in your work was sick, maybe that office would shut down for a couple.
You know what I mean?
I think all of us individually could have made better decisions for us that would have probably been better for the market as a whole than the government making this grand claim of, hey, we've got perfect models.
And if we don't step in, this thing's going to kill us all.
Yes, I agree.
And since you brought that up, there were some numbers that I wanted to go over because this is another thing because you brought up the people in the high-risk categories.
And this is another thing that I have not seen anywhere in terms of like mainstream corporate media world or in any of these briefings, these daily briefings that everybody seems to be relying on from their governors and from President Trump and his whole medical team, right?
This is like, this is how most people are relying.
This is one of the worst parts of the state is that people rely on politicians to be their leaders.
It's like worse than relying on used car salesmen to be your leaders.
Like this is not who you would want to look to in any, especially when the stakes are really high.
But I haven't heard any of them talk about this.
It reminds me of something we've discussed before.
But if you were around for like the early 90s, as I was, I was a little kid, but I do remember the AIDS scare and everybody, all the propaganda there, they had their projections and they had their models and everyone was going to get it.
You know, it was like, look to your left.
I got it.
I'm fine.
You know?
Yeah.
It turns out we all only know one guy who has it, Rob.
And no, but totally fine.
But in 1991, it was like, look to your left, look to your right.
They both have AIDS and they're going to die soon and you will too.
So there's nothing you can do about it.
And they would say these things like they would go, you know, a lot of people think this is just a disease that gay people and junkies have to be worried about.
But no, Mr. Straight White Man, this is your problem too.
And then the reality happened.
And it turned out that if you were saying, I mean, I guess it's not 100% that it's only a gay and junkie problem, but like pretty drastically disproportionately.
That's who has the problem.
I went to Jewish school and they didn't tell us about AIDS at all.
So it clearly wasn't a Jewish problem.
They caused it, you know, so they didn't have to tell us about it.
Like, we have the antidote.
We've had it from the very beginning.
We wouldn't have released it if we didn't have the antidote.
I mean, come on, it's just common sense.
But the truth is that as the numbers came out, it's like, oh, the projections were way off.
It was not nearly as bad as they said.
And yes, it really did drastically, disproportionately affect certain groups and certain behaviors and not others.
Now, the thing that I'm saying I haven't heard the president or any of his medical experts or any of these governors talk about is the fact that it's not like if you have underlying conditions, you're more likely to die from this.
It's that that's pretty much who's dying from this.
So in other words, if you're not a fat smoker and you're not gay, you'll be okay.
Well, if you don't have, listen, if you don't have, and this is, I'm reading from the New York City Department of Health here, and these numbers are a little bit old.
They're from April 14th.
The Real Numbers on Deaths00:03:02
So they're a few days old.
And this is before they adjusted, you know, they added like a few thousand people.
We'll get into that in a second.
But so what they define as underlying illness is diabetes, lung disease, cancer, immunodeficiency, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, kidney disease, and GI liver disease.
Okay.
I just want to go through some numbers here because they're actually, it's pretty staggering.
So at the time, they said there was just under 7,000 total deaths from COVID-19.
So it was 6,839 deaths.
Okay.
Try to keep in mind, 8.2, something like that, million people in New York City, 6,839 deaths.
Of those, the number of people without underlying conditions, 137.
Now, that's out of the close to 7,000 deaths, you have 137 people who have died without underlying conditions.
But then you also have to understand that just because a doctor says you don't have underlying conditions, that means you don't have one of these listed underlying conditions.
That does not mean by layman's terms, you're in perfect health.
We don't really know necessarily what the deal with those people were, okay?
But that's what the numbers were, at least as of a few days ago.
These were the latest numbers I could get.
All right, guys, let's take a quick second.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So just to understand, in a, in a, like, I know 137 people dying is tragic.
I'm not trying to downplay that.
And if that's someone you know and you love, your world is destroyed over that.
Best Way to Shop Online00:16:23
However, you have to actually look at data and try to assess this soberly.
And in a city of 8.2 million people, 137 is a statistical nothing.
This is less than a rounding error.
This is not a large number of people by any stretch of the imagination.
Chipotle at lunchtime.
That's it.
You just wipe out one line.
Chipotle has killed.
Way more people than 137 just from diarrhea related deaths alone.
Okay, and let me get just some other numbers here that I think I think this is what they like.
If you were looking to honest leaders, you would think this would come up, seeing as how they have all this time to fill.
They have a press conference every freaking day.
You think someone could measure this?
Okay um, of people zero to 17 years old, the total number of deaths have been three, three people.
This is in the epicenter of this virus in New York City.
All three with underlying conditions.
Okay, so what does that tell you?
That pretty much tells you, zero to 17.
You're not, there's not a problem here.
I mean, i'm sorry, more people die from, like sneeze related deaths than than this, and and I mean I like this is just, this is information that people should have.
That's it.
Three total deaths, zero to 17, all with underlying conditions.
Okay, now in the um, uh 18 to uh 44, uh years old, there's been 309 deaths uh, 25 of them without underlying conditions.
Again, a city of 8.2 million people, 25 people dying in this crisis, in the epicenter of this crisis.
So basically, zero to 45 if you don't have underlying conditions, I mean to be honest, even if you do have underlying conditions, you're this probably is not a threat to kill you.
That that's just the reality of the situation.
Um, it goes now.
Now here's another number.
This, this one, really struck uh, struck out uh, stuck out to me, 75 uh, and plus 75 and older category.
Okay now, this is.
This makes up just about half the deaths in New York City.
So that's the first number that that's interesting to to look at, right.
So in the epicenter in New York City, about half the deaths just a little under it's 47.7 percent of the deaths are people 75 and older.
Okay now, in this, the biggest single category of people 75 and older, there's a total of 3263 deaths.
The number of people 75 years and older without underlying conditions who have died is 27 people 27 people.
So think about that for a second.
If you're over 75 and don't have underlying conditions, you're probably going to be okay if you get this thing.
Just just saying, these are.
These are the numbers that we're starting to look at now on the crisis, that was worth kicking tens of millions of people, you know, out of work, shutting down millions of businesses, causing God knows how much mental health issues across this country.
These are the numbers.
Even really old people, if they don't have underlying conditions, are probably going to be fine.
It's very unlikely that you're going to die from this.
Now, just saying, the reason it seems why this is the biggest category is people 75 and older is just because you're more likely to have underlying conditions as you get older.
That seems to be the most logical, obvious answer.
So I don't buy into this.
And, you know, there is this kind of logic that I think some people use.
Some people are just trying to, you know, propagandize people for their own nefarious reasons.
And then there's some people who almost operate with this belief system that, well, even if I'm lying to people, I'm kind of scaring them into taking this seriously.
So it's like a just lie.
I don't buy into that bullshit.
And I don't think that anybody who listens to this show should.
You don't look to journalists to lie to you to convince you to maybe do the right thing.
I, for one, want to be treated like an adult and I want to get actual information.
I want to get like the truth of the matter.
And the truth of the matter is that this is a virus that is deadly for people with underlying health conditions.
That's that.
Now, I guess what you're pointing out, so even if it was a much higher rate of infection, it seems like the death rate is really only amongst people of underlying conditions.
So if we were being more intelligent about this, we would have had everyone with underlying health conditions being basically staying home or separating from those who are generally healthy.
But so you said it was 25 people between the ages of 22 and 44 or something that died that died without known pre-existing health conditions.
Yes.
And that's out of nowhere's what really distorts it because I mean, they'll make the argument that if we had them flat in the curve, so who knows what would have happened?
But I guess at that point, that's fairly good data because you would assume that more people got sick than we actually even knew about, and more people like didn't even show symptoms.
So it would that would seem to suggest the rate of infection is pretty low and the death rate for people without underlying conditions is pretty low.
Well, listen, you're right that we don't know what exactly numbers would be if we hadn't done what we've done.
And the only way to kind of try to think about that is to use these kind of projections.
But we've already seen that the projections are flawed and that they got the smartest people got the projections wrong because they were projecting with all of these measures hundreds of thousands of deaths and that's not happening.
They've changed their projections.
So you're right.
You're right that we don't know.
But as Tucker Carlson said this the other day, you know, the best numbers you can look at in this situation are the deaths because there's no projections or, you know, like guessing involved with people who are dead.
I mean, at least we agree that they are dead.
So yes, right.
Like we can all kind of generally agree whether someone is alive or dead.
So this is the best numbers that we can look at.
However, the other problem with that is, and a lot of people have been pointing this out, that here's the thing with people who have severe underlying conditions.
When you talk about what killed them, it's often not objective.
A lot of times you don't know exactly what killed somebody when they have several underlying conditions.
So, for example, somebody who's got hypertension or has diabetes, you know, and gets, you know, I don't know, pneumonia and gets the COVID.
And then they die.
And had a fruit punch.
And right.
And a Hawaiian punch in the mix, right?
And then they die.
Now, what ends up happening is the doctor makes their best guess over what they think was most likely to have killed them.
They can probably also bill more for COVID.
I'm saying that out of my ass, but I think they can bill.
I think they can bill more for it.
So it's probably, they're probably incentivized just to market off COVID.
I can't say that for a fact.
That's out of ass.
No, listen, I can't say that for a fact either, but they are following all of these guidelines, all of these legal guidelines within this.
So it's just, it at least makes you wonder how much for sure we know this.
And then just the other day in New York, they added a few more thousand COVID deaths for people that were never confirmed, who never confirmed had COVID.
But doctors are just guessing that most likely that is what they died.
Yeah, the governor's got to cover his ass a little bit too.
I'm sure he's calling up the hospitals like, hey, you got any bodies in that morgue that just no one claimed we can mark as COVID?
Question for you, though.
So all that Italy footage, was that just some good news propaganda?
Like, because that's what really sparked a lot of the hysteria is the doctors from there going, hey, guys, you got two weeks until it's like this.
And this is just death.
You know, I haven't in the last two weeks read up that much on the Italy situation.
It did seem to me like it was really bad in Italy, but we don't exactly know why it tore through Italy in a way that it's not tearing through here.
They do have an older population.
That might be part of it.
Again, there's a lot of, and this is the nature of a novel virus.
There's a lot of things that are unknown, even to the experts on this.
But we are starting to see how it is spreading around this country.
And particularly, I was just looking at the numbers from New York City.
But, you know, the curve has been flattened.
The healthcare system isn't overwhelmed.
And it sure does seem to me like it's time to end the goddamn lockdown.
Now, I also, I've heard some, you know, some people, because that's where my tone has kind of been shifting to over the last few episodes, although I'm more so there now than I have been before.
But I've heard some people like, finally, Dave's coming around.
I can't believe he was buying the propaganda at the beginning.
And look, I would just say, I always maintained that I was more worried about the response than I was about the virus.
But I don't, I'm not coming around to saying, oh, this was nothing.
I don't think it was nothing.
I think this was a scary, scary virus that is, look, even if they're projecting 60,000 deaths now, I mean, that's like, that's a bad flu season.
And we're doing that with a lockdown, you know, with social distancing, with people being really, really much more aware of spreading germs than they are with a normal flu.
So I do think this was like a particularly nasty virus.
The reality of the situation is just that the government did what they always do and fucked everything up.
I've fled New York convinced that people were going to start eating each other and then rapidly flipped off flip-flop back and forth between, I think we're all going to die and this is a hoax.
So, you know, I was flip-flop city on this one.
But here's what's still somewhat interesting about, I guess, trying to weed through and quantify, I guess, how deadly this thing was.
You could theoretically make the argument that we had to shut down for an extended period of time under like the risk of contagion.
Would it have been smarter if like in month one, when they flagged the first instance, if we had done like some sort of a more temporary complete lockdown or shutting down of the borders?
Like, you know what I mean?
Some sort of like math to contagion risk that I don't really see people talking about, where it's like if government was more decisive and quick and you know, like at first, we were like, Hey, why the fuck didn't they shut down China if they knew?
And they still say, I think, uh, well, actually, no, now they're saying like the virus more spread from Europe.
But I think you see what I'm saying.
It's like if we're assessing risk and going, Hey, there's a risk that we have to shut down the entire economy for contagions, then maybe when the first cases get flagged on these things, you don't let people into the country so that we don't end up where we are now.
Or you got to go the other way and go, All right, we're never shutting down the like the economy like this again because that turned out to be stupid.
So I want to see bodies first shut down second.
Well, you know, the thing is, and this is the thing that we're living through right now, is that even the supposed benefits of having an authoritarian state don't seem to you seem to only get the bad and none of the good.
So, even if you were like, hey, libertarians, here's the advantage of having a state.
We can, when we first see a few cases, we can shut this thing down.
And just like that, we got cops who will force that this is shut down.
And you guys have to rely on voluntarism and private property owners or something like that.
Even if that was the argument, well, look what every single state did.
They all downplayed it until it was too bad to the point where you had to have this massive shutdown based on faulty projections.
So even if you just want to look at the empirical evidence of what having these states did, I mean, everybody was downplaying it from Trump to Nancy Pelosi to Fauci, all of them.
And now they fucking pretend like they weren't.
By the way, Tom Woods had a great newsletter out.
Tom Woods, if you're not on his newsletter, you really should be.
It's freaking fantastic.
But so Fauci, what a fucking, by the way, that's another lesson coming out of all this.
This Fauci guy is full of shit.
Do not trust that guy.
He is one of the bad guys.
So Fauci said, and this is from Tom Woods' newsletter, and he put together like kind of a little timeline of it.
So Fauci on January, January 21st, he said, this is not a major threat to the people in the United States.
And this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about.
Like, okay, by the way, Tom makes this point, and I'm making this point too.
I'm not giving the guy shit for being wrong.
It happens.
People get things wrong.
I've gotten a bunch of things wrong before.
No, you know, whatever.
But that's where he was.
Now, one more time on February 18th.
Okay.
Fight for your lives.
It's all burning down.
No, no, February 18th.
I don't think people should be frightened.
The risk right now today currently is really relatively low for the American public.
That could change, but right now, don't worry about it.
Be more concerned about influenza, which is going into a second peak for the season than coronavirus.
People wearing masks now is just not relevant.
You don't need to be walking around with a mask right now.
Okay.
So that's Fauci.
No, whatever.
Just that's not why Fauci's a lying piece of shit.
It's not that he said that.
Fine, whatever.
I'll let that go.
Here's what's fucking okay.
Oh, by the way, one more.
February 29th.
No, right now at the moment, there's no need to change anything that you're doing on a day-to-day basis.
Right now, the risk is still low.
Again, this could change.
I've said this many times.
You got to watch out because although risk is low now, you don't need to change anything you're doing.
When you start to seek community spread, this could change.
Okay.
So that's where he was as of February 29th.
Then on Easter, he was being interviewed by Jake Tapper, and Tapper says this to him: okay, the New York Times reported today that you and other top officials wanted to recommend social distancing and physical distancing guidelines to President Trump as far back as the third week of February.
But the administration didn't announce such guidelines to the American public until March 16th, almost a month later.
Why?
Now, as Tom points out in his newsletter, which is really funny, he says, that's strange wording, isn't it?
Wanted to recommend.
Saying the New York Times is reporting that you wanted to recommend.
I mean, can't you make a recommendation if you want to?
But anyway, you just got the quotes from what Fauci said, right?
So this is Fauci's response to Jake Tapper.
Look at what a fucking piece of shit this guy is.
Dr. Fauci, you know, Jake, as I've said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint.
We make recommendations.
Often the recommendation is taken.
Sometimes it's not, but it is what it is.
And we are where we are right now.
So he's giving you the impression without saying it, but very clearly giving you the impression that basically, yeah, I recommended this to Donald Trump, but you know, he didn't take me up on my recommendation.
But hey, we're here now.
So just feeding into this narrative that it's Trump's fault for not acting earlier.
Meanwhile, the reality of the situation is that, yes, Donald Trump was downplaying it, but so was Fauci.
And Fauci was telling the American people not to social distance, not to change anything about your day-to-day activity, as was Nancy Pelosi and all of them.
Okay.
So it's fine.
I don't, you know, you can be wrong, but then to try intentionally to present yourself as if you were right all the all along and just say these vague things like, well, you know, you make recommendations and they're not always listened to, if you know what I mean.
No, I don't know what you mean.
What recommendations were you making?
Suspending Speedy Trials00:02:28
Yeah, did you know that people were going to die and you just kind of were like, hey, maybe, you know, I'm the guy in charge, but just a little soft recommendation.
Yeah, fuck that guy.
That guy's one of the bad guys.
I will say that one of the only people in the corporate press, and this is not a shock to me, but who's been really great is Tucker Carlson.
And I know on this show, I've had a love-hate relationship with Tucker Carlson.
He's so great on some issues.
And then there's some that kind of infuriate me.
And, you know, we've done segments challenging him and kind of criticizing some of his opinions on the show several times.
But I got to say, he has really been like one of the only people in the media who has been really interesting and thoughtful.
And even when I don't agree with all of his positions, you're at least like somebody's thinking critically here and not just going along with this craziness as so many people in the media seem to be, like the overwhelming majority of them.
And Tucker's show has been really interesting.
I mean, he's a guy I highly recommend watching.
He presents things that should be presented.
And he had, we're going to play this clip here.
He had the governor of New Jersey on his show the other day.
And it is so far the only time that I've seen one of these governors actually questioned the way you would think a journalist should question them in this situation, which is not just heaping praise on them or asking them the easiest possible questions, but actually giving them some pushback.
Now, I've said before on the show a few times that the creepiest thing I've heard so far in this in this whole COVID craziness is when the guy at the Cuomo press conference, it was one of the people in his cabinet, said that they're suspending the right to speedy trials, that we just can't give speedy trials right now because it's like too many people would end up getting off on a technicality.
So we're suspending speedy trials in New York.
And not one reporter gave them pushback.
This is said.
It's a constitutional right, isn't it?
Yeah, sure is.
And not one reporter goes, but isn't that a constitutionally enshrined right?
And they go like, yeah.
There's laws in the Constitution if everyone's afraid of a cold.
Maybe?
No, no, I've read the Constitution.
It's not that big.
No Pushback on Constitutional Rights00:09:45
Nothing about it.
I don't want these truths to be on whatever, unless you really need a handkerchief right now.
In which case, can you imagine like it was like Thomas Jefferson, like after signing the Declaration of Independence or something like that, or after writing it?
And someone was like, Yeah, but what about a cold?
He was like, a cold?
Well, this all goes out the window if there's a cold, obviously.
Holy shit, I never thought of a cold.
Just let me put a big asterisk over here.
You can keep your black slaves.
And if people are afraid of the cold, we suspend these words.
So the fact that reporters could hear that and not give pushback, and they just go, their justification was they go, well, you know, the problem is that too many people who are guilty would get off on a technicality.
And everyone's kind of like, yeah, you know, that's a good point.
And you're like, okay, but isn't the flip side to that that some people who are not guilty are now being held at like Rikers Island in the middle of a pandemic?
Like, is that not horrifying to anyone?
All right, let's take a quick moment.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Well, anyway, let's play the clip from Tucker Carlson and salute him for doing some actual real journalism when he had a governor on his show.
I wanted to play this small clip from it.
So you made that decision, and as I noted before, 15 congregants at a synagogue in New Jersey were arrested and charged for being in a synagogue together.
Now, the Bill of Rights, as you well know, protects Americans' right, enshrines their right to practice their religion as they see fit and to congregate together, to assemble peacefully.
By what authority did you nullify the Bill of Rights in issuing this order?
How do you have the power to work?
Do we work that?
That's above my peg, Ray Tucker.
So I wasn't thinking of the Bill of Rights when we did this.
We went to all, first of all, we looked at the data and science and it says people have to stay away from each other.
That's the best thing we could do to break the back of the curve of this virus that leads to lower hospitalizations and ultimately fake out.
And I'm not contesting that, though.
I think it's, I do, I do think there's a debate.
This is a rolling conversation because we're learning new things every day and nothing is settled at this point.
But I do want, since you are an elected official, a leader in the government, an executive, how do you have the authority to order something that so clearly contravenes the Bill of Rights of the United States, the U.S. Constitution?
Where do you get the authority to do that?
Well, here's the thing.
We know we need to stay away from each other, number one.
Number two, we do have broad authority within the state.
And number three, we would never do that without coordinating, discussing, and hashing it out with the leaders, the variety of the leaders of the face in New Jersey.
We are among, if not the most important thing.
I'm sure that we talk to every rabbi and priest, but there's a deeper question here.
And I'm just going to ask you one last time because I think it's important.
I'm sure you've thought about this.
You can't just, as the governor of a state, tell people who they can talk to, when and where, because the Constitution of the United States, upon which all this is based, prohibits you from doing that.
So you clearly decided that you could do it.
Did you consult an attorney about this?
Did you, I mean, because this is a legal question as well as a medical one, isn't it?
I don't go to the men's room without consulting an attorney.
So I guarantee you we'd do that.
But I'll give you an example that was not related in the synagogue.
I called up Cardinal Tobin, Cardinal Joe Tobin in Newark.
There are five or six archdioceses in New Jersey.
It was coming up to Easter and Holy Week in particular.
And I said, listen, I'm really concerned about drive-through Holy Communion because we had heard some stories about priests who okay.
We can uh we can just leave it there.
Unwitting.
Um, so I think you guys get what I wanted to uh play about that clip.
I just start with if he's calling his attorney to go into bathrooms, I think he's doing some gay shit.
Yeah, that sounds like he might be getting in trouble for what that last guy was doing.
Wasn't that a Jersey governor?
Was it?
I don't remember.
Someone, something off some dicks and gas stations.
I don't think that was Jersey, but I could be misremembering that.
But the other thing he says is crazy.
He goes, well, you know, we wouldn't do something like this without having a conversation.
So it's like, yeah, great.
You spoke to the other people in power and you decided you were going to abuse power.
That's not an answer.
Well, there's a few things that are just like really stand out about the interview.
And again, I really like just salute Tucker Carlson for doing that.
And the first thing that stands out to me is I go, man, every now and then, and I remember getting this feeling when you'd watch Ron Paul in Congress or something like that, or Thomas Massey, what he did with this spending bill.
You go, how are there not more?
How are you the one who's like raising this question?
There's one guy in the house who goes, hey, we should vote on a $2 trillion bill before we pass this, before we cram it down the American people's throats.
Like we should have a vote.
And you see this with Tucker Carlson with all of these governors holding daily press conferences.
How the hell are there not more people who would bring up this obvious point?
Excuse me, where do you get the authority to shut down a state?
Just please explain it to me.
Like I'm an idiot because I am.
So just explain it to an idiot.
Where you get the, because I can read the Bill of Rights and like, I see what that says.
So where are you getting your authority?
And as you can see from the interview, he, I mean, he doesn't answer the question, but he answers the question, doesn't he?
Well, I don't know.
We're doing it.
I don't know.
I wasn't thinking about the Bill of Rights.
I'm thinking about what I think is the right thing to do.
With the speedy rights of a trial, those people got nothing to worry about.
They'll show up in court.
Someone will tell them that it was against the Constitution.
They'll get right off.
So they don't have to worry about getting arrested.
Right, exactly.
Well, right.
So that's, and that's an interesting point that you're getting at there, too.
And I want to be clear here.
I'm not a constitutionalist, and I never am.
I've never been.
That's not something, if you listen to part of the problem, you hear me like railing about the Constitution or stuff like that.
I know there's some libertarians who are, and I think it's kind of silly, to be honest.
I think that the Constitution is a piece of paper.
And if you're counting on a piece of paper written in the late 1700s to protect your right, it's kind of seems to be fantastical thinking.
Like that is not based in reality.
This is just what someone wrote down.
And reality is what's happening, what's being enforced.
And as I think you're getting at, there's probably those people can't just go, you know, be count on being released because this violates the Constitution in the same way that you can't count on these states not being shut down or religious services not being shut down because it violates the Constitution.
But there is something useful about pointing out how blatantly these people who swear an oath to preserve, protect, and defend, you know, against enemies, foreign and domestic, the Constitution of the United States, how little they care about it.
I mean, it's not that understanding it would be above his pay grade.
That's not part of his job.
Yes.
Yes.
And it's not, this, again, isn't some like complex issue of interpretation of original intent of the Constitution.
This is clear as day.
You don't have the right to shut down religious services.
This is specifically enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
In which amendment was it?
Oh, yeah, the first.
The first one.
Like, this is so obvious.
And personally, my own view is I do, I agree with Lysander Spooner's take, which he basically, which he was like OG anarchist.
And he basically said that he goes, look, like none of us are subject to the Constitution because our signatures aren't on it.
We didn't agree to it.
We didn't sign it.
However, elected officials are subject to the Constitution because they actually did swear an oath to it.
So that is to some degree a legitimate contract.
And it's anyway, I just think it's something that, man, if that doesn't like, if that doesn't give you a little bit of concern that elected officials, executives, as Tucker put it, are just saying, yeah, well, I mean, you know, I'm not really thinking about the Bill of Rights.
Joe Biden and War II Implications00:05:17
That's that.
That's a really dangerous place to go as it'd be great if those Jews were doing a bris and then one of the cops called up.
He's like, they're not just here gathering, but I think, yeah, you got to come down here.
Imagine if you had never heard of a bris before and then you saw someone doing a bris.
Oh my God.
Because they called you into the synagogue and you were the officer and you're like, there's like a whole room of pedophiles.
Yeah, there's some things that like circumcision is a great one of those things that it's like, well, we just kind of take as a given.
It's like, yeah, people do that.
But if you actually just think it through, like if no one did that and then someone did that, you'd be like, this is a sick, sick person.
I mean, like, literally be like, they're like Jeffrey Dahmer level insane, evil.
Anyway, that's a whole nother discussion.
But I just, I thought that was so like awesome to see one of these governors and one of the bigger ones.
You know, New Jersey is the second hardest hit state after New York.
And to see them, it's like, oh, yeah, they have no answer for this.
And not only that, but they seem unprepared.
Like, it didn't seem to enter into his mind that that might be a question that somebody might go like, oh, well, I'm looking at this Constitution thing and where exactly do you derive this authority?
Seems like a pretty basic question for a journalist to ask.
Anyway, all right, listen, before we wrap up, how about we let's do a crazy bitch watch.
Hey, y'all crazy bitch!
Kinds of things that have to be done.
You know, there's a during World War II, you know, where Roosevelt came up with a thing that, you know, was totally different than the, it's called, he called the, you know, the World War II.
He had the War Production Board.
That's the guy who's running against Donald Trump.
He's in the middle.
The thing that's so amazing about that clip is just the expressions on Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper's faces as they're like, oh man, you are making it so hard for us to pretend that you're not senile.
Can you throw us a bone?
He like, first off, he can't just have someone hold up the one sentence he's trying to read.
He has to look down at his paper and then still, with the aid of notes that he's looking at, can't get the point that he wants to make out and just fumbles through it.
Like, what the hell is he saying?
Who knows?
Who knows what the hell that guy was trying to say right there?
Something about FDR and in World War II.
He struggled for the war.
He couldn't remember which war FDR led us into.
Anyway, it was just entertaining as all hell to watch Joe Biden.
I mean, how the hell could this guy possibly?
I think I was saying this, was it with maybe with Scott Horton on that episode?
But it's not just this is Joe Biden, the state of Joe Biden right now.
It's not just that like what people were saying for a while was like, man, I don't think this guy can handle getting on a debate stage with Donald Trump.
I mean this very sincerely.
I don't think Joe Biden can read his speech at the convention.
I mean, they usually go for a half hour.
Let's say they cut it down to 20 minutes, 15 minutes.
I don't think Joe Biden can deliver a 15-minute speech.
I don't think he's capable.
Biden Trump's over there.
You're currently debating the podium.
Also, I mean, these guys are going to get caught with their pants down.
They all endorsed him.
You could see that was the first time they had to.
I've never seen Obama less charismatic.
They had to cut his video up because he was clearly laughing in between takes or going, fuck, I need another cigarette before this next line.
Are you fucking, I'm going to say that?
He was, he was like doing shots like fucking, he's like, I am literally just throwing my political legacy away by looking at the American people with a straight face and telling them that I think we should put this senile man in the most powerful position.
The only part he said with conviction was, and he'll hire good people.
You don't have to worry about him because he's going to get good people around him.
You know, he's fucking bad shit, but the people around him.
That was my favorite part of the whole thing, too.
I mentioned that recently on the podcast because there is this like implication in there where he's like, well, all the people around him aren't going to all be senile.
I mean, what are the odds that we find anybody as in decline as Joe Biden for Joe Biden's cabinets?
And there's the new claim of that lady that he bent her over at a party or whatever, stuck his hands up her shirt.
And you know what makes me think that allegation is true?
Because usually I'm not the first to go true allegation that apparently he said after she said no, oh, come on, man.