Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Emily Auster's call for pandemic amnesty, arguing that lockdowns and mandates were criminal acts requiring prosecution rather than forgiveness. They detail how officials lied about transmission rates and vaccine efficacy to maintain power, citing specific abuses like LA beach closures and the demonization of school reopeners as evidence of a totalitarian regime. Rejecting the idea that critics got lucky, they insist that acknowledging these errors is essential to prevent future authoritarianism driven by fear, while promoting their upcoming comedy shows across Texas, Phoenix, and New Orleans. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Criticizing Libertarian Candidates00:14:16
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gash Digital Network.
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.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gash Digital Network.
Here's your host.
Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I'm Dave Smith.
He's Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
What the fuck is up, brother?
I'm doing good.
How about you, buddy?
Doing very good.
Can't complain in the process of moving, which is a little bit of a bitch.
But besides that, loving life.
You seem to be good about not having too much clutter.
What do you mean?
In my house?
Like, I mean, my apartment's nothing but clutter.
This is a storage unit of clutter.
But like, I was in your house once.
You got some kids' toys, but it seems like neat, orderly, and not a ton of crap.
I have a wife, Rob.
Right.
A wife.
That's really the difference here in how my home is kept.
Well, at the moment, my house is a bunch of boxes and shit all over the place.
So not so true at the moment.
But yes, I'm with you.
When I lived alone and when I was single and lived in an apartment, it was just crap everywhere.
You know, I was a mess.
That's the way of the world.
We're savages and women civilize us.
And in return for that, we protect and provide for them and tell them that they're being ridiculous every now and then.
I feel like this is my way of conquering territory to fill up every square inch of my apartment with random shit I don't need.
So in the same way that a dog pees on things, you fill it with clutter and then pee all over the clutter.
All right.
Well, everybody's got their own technique.
Makes me feel comfortable at home.
Well, listen, if you're happy, you're happy.
I can't argue with that.
There's a true libertarian impulse I have there.
I can't tell you how to live your life.
Speaking of libertarians, there was some big news this morning in the Libertarian Party.
The candidate for Senate out in Arizona, Mark Victor, dropped out of the race and endorsed Blake Masters.
As many of you, I'm sure, know, we just had him on the show.
It was a couple of weeks ago or something like that.
I had thrown my support behind Masters, I don't know, a month ago or something like that.
So I was happy to see that happen.
They had a conversation.
I think they spoke for about a half hour.
It's out in public if people want to watch it.
And Mark Victor was convinced that Blake Masters was good enough on a lot of the issues that really matter to get his support.
I think this is a big deal.
I think this was the right move.
I'm really, I'm grateful to Mark Victor for doing it.
I think it's a difficult thing to do.
It's hard when anytime you're running a campaign, I think you have like die-hard people who support your campaign.
People have contributed time and money to your campaign and things like that.
And it's hard.
You know, you're going to get some heat for things like this.
But I think if we're in this game of, if you're in like the game of political action and your goal is to advance liberty, then I think it's like doing the right thing is doing what will advance liberty the most and making the move that you think is best for that outcome.
And I think that probably wasn't easy for him to do, but I think he did the right thing.
So my hat, I tip my hat to Mark Victor.
As I've said before on the show, we don't have to get through the whole thing because I've already, you know, explained all of this on previous podcasts.
But I think that we, the Libertarian Party, needs to be smart in the you know, like how we leverage our position.
In this case, you have a neck and neck race with a libertarian candidate who is more than covering the spread, you know, like him throwing his support behind him.
He might well, because of this action, it's very likely, I would say, that Blake Masters is a United States senator instead of Mark Kelly being a United States senator.
And I don't think anybody, any serious person, can really argue that that's just not better from the libertarian perspective and better by a lot.
Now, exactly how much it'll be better, I mean, you know, time will tell.
You never know.
Politicians have a tendency of disappointing, but certainly there's even if there's a few issues, which are a few issues that I have with Blake Masters, but all of the things that he's bad on, Mark Kelly is worse on.
So it's just not even.
And then he's great on a whole bunch of things that Mark Kelly's terrible on.
So it's just there was this was a race where there was a substantial difference between the Republican and the Democrat.
That is not often the case.
And one of them was much, much better.
And I do think the Libertarian Party has to be smart about not, you know, if the if even if we're saying tons of great things, if the effect of what we're doing is much worse people getting control of government, then we're doing something wrong.
So this is, I think, was a really good move.
I also do want to say I will, I tweeted something to this effect earlier, but I will publicly apologize to Mark Victor for being a little unnecessarily rude to him.
That when I first saw those clips from his debate performance, I believe I called him a clown, and that was that was uncalled for.
And it's not true.
He's not a clown.
We got a show to do.
We got to be mean.
I mean, it's what keeps it fresh and entertaining.
And we're mean people when we're being funny.
So what do you think?
It is true.
Funny and mean are very related.
But anyway, I do apologize for that.
He's really not a clown.
He's a great guy.
And he does like really great legal work fighting to keep the state off people's backs.
And I think that shit is more important than anything we do.
So I give him all the credit in the world for that.
And I appreciate him doing the right thing here.
And that's why you have to avoid showing up to real events because you're like, shit, I was really mean to that person.
It's a lot more comfortable when you don't have to see him.
It is fucking.
I've had this experience before.
And it does kind of suck on like a human level because I'm like, especially the bigger and bigger I get, like, I just feel like more of like, you know, if my, if my words have some influence, then I want to try to use them in the best possible way.
And sometimes that means being really critical of somebody who's like one of the libertarian candidates or something like that.
And then, yeah, you do end up seeing them.
And it's just like, you know, it's like, I remember feeling this with Gary Johnson a lot.
Like, I did not at all, and I still do not at all dislike Gary Johnson.
I think Gary Johnson's like a really good dude and kind of like a cool guy.
He's a little bit of a goofball, but he's kind of just like cool.
Like he's like, oh, I started like an edibles company and I go hiking and stuff.
And like, you know what I mean?
Like he was a really good governor.
He was like a really good governor.
But at the same time, when he was like the standard bearer for libertarianism and he's up left and right, you got to just be like, no, dude, this isn't what we stand for.
We stand for this.
And then it's a little bit awkward.
Like, you know, I'd be hanging out with him in like the green room of Kennedy, Kennedy's show.
And I'd be like, I'm about to go out there and insult you.
See you in 10.
You know, it's just like, it's just kind of awkward, but it is the game.
And hopefully, you know, other people and myself too, we can all kind of be like, well, look, that is, yeah, other people are going to be critical of me.
I'm going to be critical of other people.
We're going to kind of do it when we think it's in the interest of this project of what we're all trying to do here and trying to accomplish.
And, you know, that's that.
But I will say that I will also apologize.
There was somebody else on Twitter who was saying that I. they felt that it was wrong.
So I tweeted something like, dear libertarian candidates, you are running on opposing wars and supporting sound money and you're against authoritarianism of all kinds or something like this.
And I said, you are not running on repealing age of consent laws.
Cool.
Got it?
And the person was like, oh, you're basically implying that he was saying repeal age of consent laws, but that wasn't really what he was saying.
But he was saying that like, well, there's a reasonable argument between whether the age of consent should be 17 or 19 and that could be democratically decided.
And look, I will say, okay, I apologize if it came off that I was implying that.
I think it was pretty obvious to the non-nitpicky people that I was just making the point.
Libertarian candidates, stop talking about age of consent.
There's just no benefit to it.
And it's not like, this isn't something like, there's just, there's a difference between what you're going to say in a fucking 30 second soundbite in a debate and what a chapter in a book might be on where you're going to get into all of the nuance of these things and make it clear what you don't mean and make it clear what you do mean.
It's, it was anyway, I don't want to knock Mark Victor anyway.
It's your autism to yourself.
It's an in-house activity.
If you got criticisms like that over you being funny, just it doesn't have to be on a public forum.
We don't have to broadcast how autistic we are.
Like, yes, you're right.
And yes, technically, but guess what?
It's annoying and no one gives a shit.
Yes, I listen, I agree.
But at the same time, I'm not even trying to knock this guy.
I'm not trying to knock Mark Victor because I think this almost like should be a moment of like coming together.
I think he did the right thing.
I understand there were like people who felt differently about what the strategic vision for this one is.
I think that libertarians, again, the LP, this is like I've said this before.
I'll say it one more time here and then we'll get into the episode because I've, you know, I've talked about this before, but if we're going to have this party and we have control of the third biggest political party in the country and we're in a situation where it's like, well, okay, we're obviously a long, long way from being able to just like outright win democratically and roll back the state at every level.
That's just not practical right now.
Now, hopefully that maybe one day that would be practical.
In order for that to happen, what probably needs to happen is, you know, this message is really spread in a compelling way and persuades a lot more people to support us.
I'm all for trying to do that.
That's a big part of what I try to do.
So given that, I kind of go, I think at the most local levels, we should find the most winnable races we can and target those races and put our resources into those races, particularly local political Offices that have nullifying powers.
So, things like sheriffs, mayors, city councilmen, school boards, things like that, like places where you actually have power to like roll back government policies or to nullify them, right?
Then, at the national level, it should all be about what I was talking about before, like spreading a message and galvanizing people and getting our numbers up as much as we can so that then all of these people, you know, as you make new libertarians, you introduce people who are open to these ideas, to these ideas, they can go kind of like fill into lots of different things, whether it's joining the free state project or just like homeschooling their kids or just like, you know,
going down to your school board meeting and giving them hell or running for local office or any of these things, joining the party, supporting candidates, any of those things.
And then in the middle gap, like the statewide elections or even, you know, even like congressional elections, but like that kind of middle area where it's not local, but it's kind of like a statewide or a like a gerrymander district-wide election.
I think basically the libertarians in order to use our, you know, in order to punch above our weight class, like in a lot of these rates, we may not be able to win.
There are guys who are polling at five, seven percent, but that is also, that is often the difference between which candidate will win.
And in that case, I think what we should be doing is kind of like picking and choosing and forcing the better outcome.
You know, extorting concessions where we can.
You know, in other words, if Thomas Massey is running against some Democrats, like, no, we should not run a libertarian against Thomas Massey to do what?
Pull some liberty voters away from Thomas Massey and end up with a Democrat.
That's insane to me.
On the other hand, if, you know, the examples I've given before, if like Tulsi Gabbard was running against Lindsey Graham, I say we should run and just attack Lindsey Graham the whole time.
Like just do our best to throw the election.
And then you can kind of create a thing where you're like, hey, Republicans, you better run good candidates or we're going to fuck you up.
And then you actually have some real power.
And now I think you actually have much more power than you would even have within the Republican Party or within the Democratic Party in terms of like influencing who they run because you can spoil it for them.
To me, Blake Masters qualified to be the guy not to run against or to throw our support behind is a guy who's, you know, been to Mises University and the Mises Institute multiple times,
was completely immersed in Rothbardian and Mississian literature, really was a hardcore libertarian, has gone in more of a MAGA direction since then, but is still coming on Ron Paul's show and my show and sitting down and talking to Mark Victor and giving us all a lot of assurances that he's really going to be like anti-war, pro-sound money, anti-authoritarianism in general.
He could be a bit better on China.
Quit Smoking With Fume00:02:30
Do not get me wrong.
That's an understatement.
He's not good on China.
He's had some rhetoric about other issues that I didn't really like.
I still place him as I think there's a chance that he might be one of the absolute best senators.
And I'd rather take that chance than see Mark Kelly become the next senator.
So anyway, thank you, Mark Victor.
I think he did the right thing.
Wasn't probably not an easy thing to do.
And I hope Blake Masters fucking wins.
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Okay.
The Cloth Mask Debate00:15:45
So what I wanted to talk about today, I know you had sent me this article, which I had seen was going quite viral and for obvious reasons.
It was a piece in the Atlantic.
It was written by Emily Auster, and the title is Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.
This is a real interesting piece here.
It is an unbelievable attempted coping mechanism.
And I thought we could go through this together and kind of give our thoughts.
She says the subtitle is We Need to Forgive One Another for What We Did and Said When We Were In the Dark About COVID.
You might as well have been living in Nazi Germany and been like, I just got captured in the moment with that guy yelling about the Jews.
I just got, I was in the moment.
I mean, it was fun.
They were rounding them up.
We were having a good time.
In the middle of the Nuremberg trials, you just go, I think what we need is amnesty right now.
You don't understand how fun it was in the moment.
I mean, when he was out there yelling, we all got captured.
Well, you'd be more like, look, we were in the dark about the Jews.
I mean, we didn't really know if the Jews were going to take over the world and destroy all of us.
Yada, yada, yada.
We had some policies.
Looking back at it in hindsight, yes, sure.
It wasn't the best thing that could have happened.
Yeah, it is.
It is interesting.
And it's somewhat of an admission, of course, to just be like, look, we're not going to all hold each other accountable for who got what right and who got what wrong.
I mean, sure, it was the biggest test in our lifetimes.
And it was like this thing that has altered the future of the country in a way that is probably irreversible at this point.
But I don't want to get caught up in the who's and the what's and the rights and the wrongs.
What are we going to do?
A whole scorecard here.
Meanwhile, people like us are, of course, much more likely to be like, no, let's do that scorecard thing.
Let's do the scorecard.
I'm quite fine.
I mean, don't get me wrong.
I don't want to just sit back and be like, I told you so.
I was right about this or right about that.
But it's like, yeah, when you get a lot more right than you get wrong, and other people get everything wrong, and then the people who got everything wrong are going, that's just all, let's not like focus on who got what right and who got what wrong.
It's like, maybe it would be beneficial to go over some of that stuff.
All right, so let's read from the article.
In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes.
We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself.
We had a family hand signal, which the person in front would use if someone was approaching on the trail, and we needed to put on our masks.
Once, when another child got too close to my then four-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her, social distancing.
These precautions were totally misguided.
In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking.
Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare.
Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn't have done anything anyway.
But the thing is, we didn't know.
All right, so let's start with that.
I will say that part, I can be a little bit sympathetic to.
It's still psychotic.
I can't.
In other words, you aggressively took precautionary actions without knowing that it was a good idea.
That's called being psychotic.
Yelling at someone over fresh air because you've so trained your kid to be fearful when you don't have an understanding that it's actually something to be fearful of is psychotic.
Yeah, it's okay.
When you put it like that, it does sound a little bit crazy.
But I'll just say, look, thinking that masks worked in April of 2020 or something like that.
It's like, okay, yeah, maybe you didn't realize, maybe you really hadn't seen enough data to know that outdoor transmission basically didn't exist or that the cloth masks weren't really working.
I can understand being misguided on that.
I don't really think this is the issue, though, that is really like animating everybody.
The point is that six months later, when we all knew that outdoor transmission was not a thing and we all knew that cloth masks were not doing anything, that not only were people still doing this, but they were, we had the government mandating these things and then this active campaign to demonize anybody who would dare point out that we know this is all bullshit.
So that's just what gets me like more animated than, you know, okay, you had your kids in a fucking handkerchief when you were hiking with them.
Like, you know, yes, it's stupid and goofy and you should feel a little embarrassed about it.
But yeah, whatever.
It's also not true that even by April, there wasn't enough of a, you know, if everyone had not been collectively losing their minds and just thinking this thing through clearly, you'd have been like, yeah, obviously outdoor transmission is going to be much less likely than indoor transition because it's an upper respiratory virus like every other one.
We panicked without knowing and government pretended like it knew and did draconian mandates that affected, I mean, there's irreparable, like irreparable damage because of the gestures that we took.
And to look back on that and just go, oh, well, no one knew.
I mean, you couldn't be more retarded.
Literally, it's like, well, who is saying different?
Because there were a lot of people saying different over the past couple of years.
And why aren't we holding the people that lied to us accountable?
That should be the conversation.
No, I completely agree with you.
And also just that this is, again, this is kind of like this really is a strong reasoning for libertarianism.
For it's almost like libertarianism is the like, like the do no harm part of the of the, what's it called?
The Hippocratic oath, you know, like that you'd go, you know, if you came in, if you went into a surgeon and he performed like, you know, some type of, you know, like shoulder surgery on you, and you were like, oh, no, but there was nothing wrong with my shoulder.
And he goes, well, we just didn't know at the time.
You'd be like, but why'd you start doing it if you didn't know?
Like, you don't just start taking these drastic measures because you don't know.
You know, there's like, cause there's consequences to them.
So you've got to be damn sure before you start closing schools and instituting lockdowns and shit like this.
Okay, let's keep reading.
I've been reflecting on this lack of knowledge thanks to a class I'm co-teaching at Brown University on COVID.
We've spent several lectures reliving the first year of the pandemic, discussing the many important choices we had to make under conditions of tremendous uncertainty.
Now, I also, the thing that bothers me here is like, there's jumping from April to the first year of the pandemic is where I have a lot less sympathy for people.
Like there, it is true that most of us, myself included, in March and April did not know nearly as much as we knew very shortly after that.
But you don't get a year.
Like it was so obvious.
All of the data had come out.
I remember in, it was either the last week in March or the first week in April, me and you podcasting.
And I was just reading the data on the deaths and the age ranges of the deaths.
And it had already been made clear, like, oh, children are not dying of this.
Middle-aged people are not dying of this.
I mean, you know, some, but so statistically speaking, so low.
It was like so clearly like, oh, okay, old, sick people are dying of this.
And yet no one, all of the establishment was acting like, oh, no, this is like kids are every bit as much at risk as adults are.
This was crazy.
And then this stuff was more and more, it became very obvious what was going on here.
There were two weeks where it was unknown and it was fun to panic.
And then there were death numbers that were distorted by the fact that Cuomo sent people into old age homes.
They killed people by putting them on ventilators because they didn't realize that that wasn't helpful.
So there were a couple of weeks, but then media went on a hysteria campaign to sell the shit out of this to make sure that Donald Trump couldn't get re-elected.
We went with the largest move towards socialism ever that we just sent checks to people's homes.
We're paying for it with the inflation now.
So for this lady to look back on and go, oh, we just didn't know.
No, we didn't just not know.
We had a government that was purposely putting out bad data from the outset of this.
This was sold by government putting out bad data that we all fell for and accepted and then continuously said more and more, hey, don't question this.
Yeah.
No, that's exactly.
And this lady's from Brown.
I didn't realize it was a lady from Brown.
I thought it was some dumb fucking report.
Oh, no, no, no.
This is intellectual right here.
Yeah, this is a professor at Brown University.
And this is what they've got to offer us.
Okay.
So back to the article.
Some of these choices turned out better than others.
To take an example close to my own work, there is an emerging, if not universal, consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long.
The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the cost to students, well-being, and educational progress were high.
The latest figures on learning loss are alarming.
But in spring and summer of 2020, we had only glimmers of information.
Reasonable people who cared about children and teachers advocated on both sides of the reopening debate.
So now all of a sudden, you're allowed to say, oh, so isn't this something, right?
So at the time, you fucking ruin the lives of millions of children.
Like fuck them over.
Go look into some of these numbers that she's talking about that are alarming.
And now the consensus is that they were closed for too long.
Well, I'm sorry, the consensus should be that they never should have been closed.
That is insane.
I'm no advocate of public school, but the fact is that they were just forced into public remote school, basically.
So it's an even worse version, perhaps.
But yeah, so at the time, you were an evil person who wanted to kill children if you had them open.
But now that we know that that evil person was completely right, and even you're going to say there's a consensus, if not universally accepted, there's certainly a consensus that that person was right.
So now our position is there were reasonable people on both sides.
And fuck that, man.
No, there weren't.
The people on the other side were not reasonable at the time and certainly aren't now.
Additionally, the data was manipulated and that it took a time until the Wall Street Journal printed that thing from the John Hopkins Journal, basically saying that the 400 kid deaths can't be accurate and no one would accept it.
And then the narrative on that finally changed when kids were getting sick for sick.
I think it was during the Delta variant.
And then Fauci finally said, well, that's with COVID.
Prior to that moment, right, it was conspiracy to go, hey, they're reporting non-COVID hospitalizations and non-COVID deaths as being COVID hospitalizations and deaths because you could be in the hospital with a broken arm or you could be in the hospital for any number of reasons and they're just marking it as being COVID.
And that was pure conspiracy talk.
And then all of a sudden, when he had to confront the fact that his policy was failing because the numbers were the same after vaccination, he went, no, kids are safe.
That's with COVID.
They admitted that that existed the entire time.
And the reason, Rob, just to be clear on this, is that this was after the vaccines had been out and widely distributed.
And so we had to.
Biden was in.
Omicron was running through.
And it didn't help them politically anymore to be like, all of these kids are going to the hospital, because then it would be like, oh, well, then all of these restrictions and the vaccines and all of this haven't done anything.
So then they went, oh, no, no, no, these numbers aren't.
But that had been the case all along and they knew it.
And they knew it the whole time.
Sadly, I'm not in a room to argue with this person, but she's putting up a fake argument.
My argument was government's been lying to us about this data the entire time.
They've taken control over a critical industry, which is our health.
And because they're offering us socialized medicine, there's drastic failures because what are they, what does the CDC make?
$40 billion a year?
Yeah.
So like, I mean, I talked about this on my end of year, misinformation spectacular, but they have to come up with information and make policies.
But the point is, they should have said, we don't know.
And they should have given us honest data.
And believe me, the marketplace would have figured this one out as there have been better ideas on social media this entire time.
But that's what I meant about kind of like this making the libertarian case.
It's that, look, this is why you allow people to, if you want to freak out and go wear a handkerchief on your hike, employ your kids for school.
Yeah, like you want to do any, okay, go ahead and do that, but let other people assess their own risk.
And in that situation, we know at least a lot more people wouldn't have done this crazy shit and way fewer lives would have been ruined.
So, you know, again, it's like a pandemic and you let the government lie to us on faulty numbers that were obviously faulty, that they were obviously lying about.
And now you're looking back and go, oh, well, we were all just wrong.
No, people in government should be responsible for lying to us.
And look, I would accept, you know, and obviously like the people in government and the people who profited to the tune of billions of dollars off of 2020 and 2021 and even part of 2022.
Yeah, you know, like there should be ramifications for these people.
People should go to jail over this.
But for someone like this, a college professor, I would accept and even be thrilled.
We would be reading this piece glowingly if she was like, look, the people who were arguing for freedom turned out to be right.
And the people who were arguing for government tyrannical policies turned out to be wrong.
And we just got to admit that at this point.
Now that we know more, we know that they were right about that.
And look, here's what they did know at the time.
And this is why they were making these arguments.
And it turns out their arguments were right.
I understand.
I remember saying this to Ari Shafir when we did the latest State of the Union.
I was trying to say, because I know, you know, when I'm talking, it's like Ari's podcast is Ari and is like his audience, I don't think, is particularly political.
And he's like a degenerate maniac.
And so he's got a lot of like liberals, lefty types listening to him.
And so I almost tried to like say, like, empathize with this audience when I said it.
And I go, look, I understand.
Like, I'm a person from the left.
Like, I like grew up as a Jewish kid with a single mom in Brooklyn, in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
I know the world.
These are these people are my people.
I know them.
You know what I mean?
I grew up with these with around all of these families.
Everyone was probably 90% Democrat, you know, like where I grew up, and then totally like open to like hard left positions.
Now, this was hard left of the 90s, not the hard left of 2022, but just saying, I kind of come out of that.
Like, I understand.
And I go, look, I know that kind of the average left liberal person kind of unconsciously prides themselves on being the sophisticated ones, the tolerant ones, the non-bigoted, pro-science people.
Luck vs Critical Thinking00:13:52
And then those right-wingers over there in their minds are the backward, you know, kind of like intolerant, religious, and anti-scientific rubes.
And we're the sophisticated one.
So I know it's got to be such a bitter pill to swallow that when it came down to the biggest scientific crisis in our lifetimes, you got everything wrong.
And those rubes were so much more right than you were.
I know that's a bitter pill to swallow, but you just have to swallow it.
You just have to, because there's like no argument left at this point.
Like lockdowns were wrong, and mask mandates were wrong, and closing schools were wrong, and banning church services were wrong.
My God, they closed playgrounds, they closed parks, they ran people off of beaches to go back into their home.
I mean, you think they closed down universities, they sent college kids who were living amongst themselves back home with their grandparents.
It's just insane.
So, and then I go, the vaccines were not what they told you to say.
The people saying you couldn't get it or spread it were wrong.
And then the people mandating it when it didn't even affect how much you spread the virus, they were wrong.
And then the people who, you know, go through everything is because you're just, you were wrong about all of this.
And the people opposing you on it were right.
And that's difficult.
I know that's a difficult thing to accept, but it's just there's no other.
And this is what's interesting about this article.
It's like acknowledging that without having the moment that you're supposed to have when you acknowledge that.
You can't just go, yeah, knowing now what we know now, we were wrong about everything.
You were right about everything.
So let's call it even.
No, this lady's an academic from Brown.
And so certainly we can't be wrong.
I mean, we're the academics from Brown.
So it's because nobody could have gotten this right.
Yeah.
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All right, let's continue on with the article.
Another example, when the vaccines came out, we lacked definitive data on the relative, Jesus Christ, efficacies of the Johnson and Johnson shot versus the.
Can we pause though?
Sure.
You still took it and the government still recommended it.
So why aren't you saying recommended it, mandated it in many cases, you know, forced people easily?
Safe and effective.
Yes.
That's what you told us.
Yes, safe and effective.
And you won't get it or give it.
That, I mean, literally said by Fauci, Biden, the head of the CDC, like all the most powerful people.
Okay.
You know, this article might as well, it views government with a godlike power.
And it's like, well, God gave me bad instructions, but my, if it comes from God, I'm supposed to listen to it.
So, you know, the government said that the Johnson and Johnson vaccine was a good idea.
So I'm an academic.
Of course I listen to government.
That's my role here.
That's almost our presumption here is that, well, we listen to government, which is our duty as academics and the government just got things wrong.
Well, here, this is another thing that I love here to take this line.
This misstep wasn't nefarious.
It was the result of uncertainty.
Now, that's quite an assertion to just make when we already know that there's billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars being poor being gained from these decisions by pharmaceutical companies.
We also know that there's tens of millions of dollars going into the pockets of people who are on the vaccine advisory board at the CDC.
Fauci himself said he wouldn't disclose the kickbacks, the royalties he was getting.
So like, why do you get to just decide?
Well, we all know it wasn't nefarious.
It was just a result of uncertainty.
Well, no, this isn't true.
This just straight up isn't true.
And in fact, the woman there who is on the COVID task force, the older woman, I'm blanking on her name right now, but she said publicly that they were really overselling it when they said that the vaccines would prevent the transmission of the virus and that she knew that that was, we really didn't have any reason to believe that.
That is not, that's not uncertainty.
That's at the very least lying about the level of certainty you have when you're uncertain.
So even if they were uncertain, okay.
And even if you're going to say this isn't like, it's not nefarious in the sense that they weren't intentionally choosing the wrong, you know what I mean, like policies.
It's still nefarious because in this moment of uncertainty, you claimed certainty.
You claimed safe and effective.
You claimed the virus stops with you.
You claimed you can't only the unvaccinated are dying.
You claimed that you can't transmit the virus to other people if you've been vaccinated.
And you didn't know that to be true.
And this has all come out, right?
There was another high up at Pfizer who was testifying in the European Parliament just a few weeks ago, who said that.
So, no, we never had any tests.
We never had any testing to demonstrate that it stopped the spread.
Wow.
Okay.
But you fucking said that.
And then you ruined people's lives for not wanting to take it.
You ruined people's lives for not wanting to take it.
And then you coerced other people who didn't want to take it into taking it.
So, no, that is that is by definition nefarious.
That's not just, oh, it was uncertain.
All right, I'll keep reading.
Obviously, some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims.
Remember when the public health community had to spend a lot of time and resources urging Americans not to inject themselves with bleach?
That was bad.
Misinformation was and remains a huge problem.
But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society.
Yeah, of course.
So there was misinformation.
And the example of that would be what?
Trump making the comment about bleach, one offhanded comment about that, but no, no talk of the misinformation coming from the CDC, from Fauci, from the NIH, from the FDA, from all of our political leaders or our corporate press pundits.
None of that.
That's not, you know.
All right.
Anyway, given the amount of uncertainty, almost every position was taken on every topic.
And on every topic, someone was eventually proved right and someone else was eventually proved wrong.
In some instances, the right people were right for the wrong reasons.
In other instances, they had a prescient understanding of the available information.
Okay.
Yeah, I don't know what to say.
The people, this is, I'm sorry, this is just so clear.
The people on the side of the COVID regime, of the lockdown regime, of the vaccine regime were wrong every step of the way.
And the people who opposed them were correct every step of the way.
And did some people oppose them for the wrong reasons?
I mean, okay, maybe, whatever.
Who really cares?
I'm sure, I'm sure, like during slavery, there was some guy who was like an abolitionist because he was trying to get laid.
You know what I mean?
That's not bad.
That's the best reasons being abolitionist.
He's still better than the person who was supporting slavery.
Makes sense.
The people who got it right for whatever reason may want to gloat.
Those who got it wrong for whatever reason may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn't accord with the facts.
All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet.
These discussions are heated, unpleasant, and ultimately unproductive.
In the face of so much uncertainty, getting something right had a hefty element of luck.
And similarly, getting something wrong wasn't a moral failing.
Treating pandemic choices as a scorecard on which some people racked up more points than others is preventing us from moving forward.
So isn't this just like, I'm sorry, this is just like, it's so goddamn rich to start off with you being like, you know, your example of how your own child was so paranoid and like, you know, driven to this state of like hypochondria, like that they're like screaming, get away from me, social distancing, and you're out there just looking like an idiot wearing a bandana and on a hike, worried about who's coming close to you.
And then you're going to go from that position go, the keeping score doesn't make sense.
We shouldn't keep score of who was right and who was ridiculous in this.
It's like, well, I don't know.
Yeah, no, I think there is benefit into looking into who got this right and who got it wrong.
Why shouldn't we?
Why should we not?
I mean, why should we not, if we're talking about the, let's say we're talking about another, a war that's being advocated for, should I not consider who believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and who didn't and whether I value their opinion going forward?
That shouldn't like that.
There's no point in keeping a scorecard over that.
There's no, of course, you were fine to keep the scorecard with the bleach thing, right?
That's okay.
We can still remember that.
That scorecard's okay.
So is it only the scorecards when you lose?
I mean, it's like, like, it's like if you were playing a baseball game and you were down 12 runs and you go, I think we should just tear up the scorecard.
I just don't think there's any point in keeping score of what happened in previous innings.
And it's like, it'd be one thing if the person who's way up was saying that.
But like, yeah, obviously the person who's getting blown out is going to feel that way.
It's just, I don't know.
It's nothing but unhelpful.
Well, then like, okay, but I mean, the people who got everything right were viciously demonized and in many cases had their lives ruined, were fired from their jobs, were ostracized by their communities, were kicked off of social media platforms, were discredited in the public.
Was that any mention of that here?
She also has no interest in truth, health, or safety, and that it wasn't luck.
Go back and listen to the episodes of Part of Your Problem or Run Your Mouth.
It was just a little bit of critical thinking.
It was actually a lot of looking at stats, looking at actual numbers.
If you listen, if you did not see through this, it's because you have a mental problem and that you're okay with being lied to.
It's that you're so playing on the team of the machine that you're willing to like just accept people lying.
It's the emperor wears no clothes.
Someone was pointing out he had no clothes and you just couldn't see it.
And now you're not even willing to wrap your head around the fact that there's holes in your thought process, but the holes in your thought process are fucking deadly.
We're talking about lost income.
We're talking about debt levels we can't sustain.
We're talking about childhood education.
Like there were huge mistakes that were made.
And for you just to say that the people that were right got lucky.
And so we should continue to keep power in the hands of the people that were wrong on everything.
I mean, that's like a deadly perspective.
Well, yeah, 100%.
It's a really important point.
Look, I'll say this.
And if you, if you do, if you're fair about this, if you go back, if you listen to our show or listen to your show, we were right so much more than the political establishment, both the corporate press and the medical, you know, political establishment.
And no, it was not because of luck.
It was not because of luck.
And it's also not because we're like super smart.
It was neither of those things.
It was because we were not idiots and we were willing to like critically look at the available information and what was going on here.
And it was because we have been libertarians, we are inoculated, no pun intended, against government and media propaganda.
That we're inoculated against blindly following the leaders and just always taking it as a given, as she does here in this article, just asserting as a given that there's nothing nefarious going on here.
And it couldn't possibly be motivated by anything other than just a whole bunch of people who want to get the truth out to people.
So it was just the mix of that.
That's not luck.
That's not luck.
Breaking The Doom Loop00:13:01
It's a mentality.
It's like, it's a mentality about trusting authority figures.
That's what it's about.
It's not, it was not luck.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, back to the article.
We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty.
We can leave out the willful purveyors of actual misinformation while forgiving the hard calls that people had no choice but to make with imperfect knowledge.
Los Angeles County closed its beaches in summer of 2020.
Ex post facto, this makes no sense.
This makes no more sense than my family's masked hiking trips.
But we need to learn from our mistakes and then let them go.
We need to forgive the attacks too.
Because I thought schools should reopen and argued that kids as a group were not at high risk.
I was called a teacher killer and a genocide.
It wasn't pleasant, but feelings were high.
And I certainly don't need to dissect and rehash that time for the rest of my days.
All right.
It's people whose lives were ruined by this, and there's tens of millions of them.
You're asking them to just let it go.
Maybe there should be a big fucking apology at the very least.
Maybe it shouldn't just be this kind of like cop-out, like, oh, some people got some things right, some people got some things wrong, blah, blah, blah.
Purveyors of misinformation aside.
And who are you talking about in those purveyors of misinformation?
Of course, you know, like, like, no, I'm sorry.
We had there, there are perhaps at some level, like after an apology, yeah, maybe for the sake of ever getting back to some sense of a healthy society or normalcy, that, yeah, you we can accept an apology and uh move on from the people who called us all types of heinous names for what we did.
But like just the lockdowns were one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the American people by their governments, where governors declared themselves through emergency fiat mini dictators, dictators of their states that could dictate everything.
I mean, literally, literally totalitarian dictators who could tell you how many people you were allowed to have in your living room.
whether or not you could have a funeral for a loved one, whether or not your job was essential or non-essential.
Totalitarianism.
No other word for it.
Americans every night watching their TV or every morning watching their TV to hear from their governor about what they were allowed to do today.
And like, no, that is like a crime against humanity.
And no, that shouldn't just be let go.
We shouldn't just go like, well, you didn't know.
You went, you became a totalitarian dictator, but you didn't know.
So all is forgiven.
No, there should be trials.
People should go to jail over this shit.
We put people in jail for nonsense in this country all the time.
So someone should go to jail for this shit.
Many people should.
Okay, moving on is crucial now because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve.
Student test scores have shown historic declines, more so in math than in reading, and more so for students who were disadvantaged at the start.
We need to collect data, experiment, and invest.
Is high dosage tutoring more or less cost effective than extended school years?
Why have some states recovered faster than others?
We should focus on questions like these because answering them is how we will help our children recover.
Yeah, I mean, whatever, get into like any of that stuff.
I mean, I guess I don't really disagree with the idea that we should figure out how to help students.
Obviously, we'll probably have disagreements.
Yeah, but maybe let's get people that aren't retarded and self-serving working on it.
The academic who is clearly not teaching kids well at $40,000 a year at an elite university when she can't simply assess data.
And she's very self-serving to turn around and go, yep, I'm still the academic and you guys should still listen to me and I should still be, you know, at the forefront of our society and the people who are listened to.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
All right.
To the article.
Many people have neglected their health care over the past several years, notably routine vaccination rates for children, for measles, et cetera, are way down.
Rather than debating the role that messaging about COVID vaccines had in this decline, we need to put all our energy into bringing these rates back up.
Oh, yeah, let's not debate over that COVID, over COVID messaging of that vaccine.
Can you believe, Rob, that people are saying this now?
After how insane, like just a year ago today, six months ago today, how insane the rhetoric of a year ago, me and you could not be served in a restaurant in basically any major city in the country.
But now it's like, let's just drop that.
Why are we even talking about that vaccine?
Let's talk about others.
Well, you know, we really should be talking about the messaging around the COVID vaccine because the CDC just recommended that it be added to the list of required vaccines for children to attend school.
There is not one study that shows a reduction in hospitalizations and death for children.
Not one.
And they're recommending it.
And they're probably going to recommend getting boosted every goddamn year or two for kids.
Hey, they had seven kids that successfully made it through that study.
Yeah, really.
Was it 14?
It was like some astonishingly low number.
Yeah, it's insane.
The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, but dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well.
So it's, it's, isn't this funny?
So it's all, it's, it's the standard saying.
So in other words, like one of the most wise sayings in the history of humanity, right?
Like that almost everyone universally agrees on that, you know, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Yeah, but no.
But no, it's actually not because we got a new, we got a new saying here, which is even better than those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
The new saying is dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop.
I got to say, that sounds like the greatest book ever, repetitive doom loop.
Not a bad metal bound.
Yeah, she should go write that book, Repetitive Doom Loop.
And it's about how if you study mistakes in history, you'll dwell on it and then repeat the mistakes.
I think that's a fascinating theory.
I'd like to read that history book.
She's basically wiggling around to say, let's just ignore the mistakes.
Let's just, let's just stop.
Let's stop.
A doom loop, Rob.
We wouldn't want a doom loop.
I don't want to live in a doom.
The people, Rob, who were pushing COVID hysteria are telling me they're concerned about a doom loop.
I could buy that one.
Yeah.
COVID, I wasn't sure of, but repetitive doom loop, that if we remove the people that made the COVID thing wrong, then we'll repeat the mistakes again.
So we got to leave them in charge to avoid the repetitive doom loop.
That makes sense.
Yes.
Now, we did through the largest propaganda campaign in human history, drive all of advanced civilization into an absolute state of terror where they were literally afraid to leave their house because they were afraid of a germ, but were just worried that acknowledging that could really freak people out.
I don't want to be in a doom loop.
Yeah, you don't want to be in a doom loop.
And she finishes the article with, let's acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty and then try to work together to build back and move forward.
Yeah, work together with her still in charge.
Work together with nobody who is wrong, getting a little check on their thing, saying that they were wrong so we don't listen to them in the future.
Yeah, I'd say I'll err on the side of let's learn the lessons of history, in this case, very recent history.
And the lessons of history here are that embracing government authoritarianism because of fear during a period where, yeah, a lot was unknown was a tragic mistake.
And that if we had just been a free country through all of this, we would be in such a better place.
That's the lesson.
And all of the people who criminally impose tyranny on the American people, many of whom profited quite handsomely off of it, should all face harsh consequences.
I think that you do that.
And then I actually think you would have a chance to move on, to move past this and have some type of, you know, coming together or something like that.
Anyway, that's the piece.
And it's been going super viral.
I just thought it was, it was an interesting way.
You know, it was this professor's attempt to like recap the last, you know, almost three years now and kind of save face.
But it gives us an opportunity to recap the last three years and from a slightly different and more correct point of view.
All right.
That's our episode for today.
Catch you guys next time.
Let's plug.
Let's plug.
Oh, yeah.
Plugs, plugs, plugs.
What do you got, Rob?
We'll start with the Poughkeepsie.
We got post-Thanksgiving, bring your leftovers, Thanksgiving party, meeting.
25th, Rob, BK Chris, myself, all three of us, we will be up at Laugh It Up in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Come on out there.
Tickets are moving.
So grab them now.
Comicdavesmith.com.
Got the ticket link up there.
And if you think, hey, I want to be with my family, you're going to be sick of them by then, anyways.
It's one hour of a Thanksgiving meal, and then you realize you got to get away from those people.
And who knows?
Yeah, maybe you could tell them like you saw these people on Comedy Central.
Just lie to your family about who we are and what we're all about.
And then maybe you can wake them up.
So, you know, bring them to the show.
All right.
I got this weekend.
I'm in Texas.
I'm in Fort Worth on Friday night, 10 p.m. late night show.
It's going to be a fucking party.
Saturday, I'm with Scott Hordon.
We're going to be doing a stand-up and a live podcast, Lessons of Empires from Star Wars.
And then Sunday, I'm at Texas AM.
And then I got upcoming dates in Phoenix and Tucson and Kansas City and Omaha, Nebraska.
Hopefully in New Orleans coming soon and one other date, and that'll be the whole year.
Hell yeah, brother.
All right.
Thanks for listening.
Oh, and New Year's Eve.
Me and Louis Jay Gomez out at the comedy store making our return.