Tom Woods and James Smith dissect the "Diary of a Psychosis," arguing that pandemic restrictions were a deliberate campaign causing mass harm through spying, prison overcrowding, and business destruction. They cite California's higher mortality despite strict rules versus Florida's success, Sweden's low death toll, and manipulated data by officials like Anthony Fauci. The discussion highlights the psychological toll on autistic children, the blacklisting of actor Clifton Duncan, and social media censorship of dissenters. Ultimately, Woods frames these policies as religious dogma that ignored evidence, contrasting this suffering with the relative safety libertarians faced during 9/11 and the 2008 crash. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Sinister Forces Running the World00:15:11
Fill her up.
You are listening to the gas human.
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 Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, James Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am particularly excited for this episode.
Just real quick before we start, don't forget this weekend in Chicago, me and Rob Bernstein doing some stand-up shows and a live part of the problem podcast.
And then the following week, we'll be in Key West, all leading up to the theater gig in Portland.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all the tickets for that.
All right.
Today's episode, we have the libertarian GOAT, Tom Woods, returning to the show.
I say this as I've said many times before, but for people who don't know who Tom Woods is, Tom is really the guy who made me a libertarian.
Ron Paul, of course, was I saw him with the Giuliani moment.
I got very interested in him and started Googling and YouTubing and all of this.
And I very shortly found Tom Woods.
And while Ron Paul is the guy who really kind of piqued my interest, Tom was the guy who really convinced me on this beautiful philosophy and changed my life and led me down this rabbit hole of where we all are today.
So I'm always eternally grateful to Tom.
Again, if you don't know who he is, Tom, first off, shame on you.
Figure that out.
But Tom has degrees from Harvard and Columbia.
I know you recently told Paul Godfrey that that's not something you care to have known anymore, but he was there when they were less worse than they are now.
But he's also a senior fellow at the Mises Institute, and that is something to always be proud of.
The greatest organization in the world.
He's written, is this your 13th or 14th?
13th book.
13th book.
A New York Times bestseller, of course, host of the Tom Woods Show, which is a phenomenal podcast with thousands of episodes covering every topic you could imagine.
But today we're here to talk about his new book, Diary of a Psychosis, How Public Health Disgraced Itself During the COVID Mania, or during COVID mania, I should say.
Okay, Tom.
So with all of that introduction that I just gave you, I want to say this, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart.
And this is saying somebody who you made a liberal, you were the one who convinced me on libertarianism.
And I love your podcast.
I love all your books.
This is my favorite of all of them.
It's just incredible.
And everybody listening to this, you have to get this book.
You have to.
And you can get it at diaryofcovid.com, correct?
That's the website.
I mean, get it anywhere, but diaryofcovid.com is the coolest place to go because I'll just leave it there.
There's some surprises for you there, but there's some juicy fun.
There is the best.
I have to say, I had no hand in it because I have no tech abilities whatsoever, but there is the best book promo video of all time there.
And if you want to have a video that cool for your book, contact me.
I'll put you in touch with our guy.
Well, okay, absolutely.
So there's you basically, I believe Real Dissent was the last book that you had put out in 2015.
And in the time since then, you've put out, I think, a trillion e-books.
It's something in that, in that ballpark, just e-book after e-book after e-book.
So you went back to a nice hardcover with this one.
Was that just because you thought this story was so important to be told?
I wanted it to have some permanence.
And yeah, I know that probably people could always look up an e-book using the Wayback Machine or something, but there's nothing quite like the old-fashioned analog phenomenon of a physical book in your hands, which I always have preferred.
And I just felt like I wanted there to be some permanent record of this thing.
Not that there haven't been other books on COVID, but I like mine because it is written kind of like in a diary format because I was chronicling it as it was happening.
So therefore, I've preserved a lot of the little details that normal people have long forgotten, but people like me who were psychotically focused on this one issue, I've preserved all those little details because I think the confluence of all those little details is the story.
I mean, yeah, there are terrible enormities throughout this ordeal, but all the little bits of craziness everywhere you turned to the point where even now you're in an elevator and it's still telling you only two people in the elevator.
I want to tear all these signs down.
I mean, are you that way when you see these things?
Yes.
And I mean, look, I think this is part of why I enjoyed this book so much.
It's it's an experience to read it.
And I think that particularly in the in this dying empire or whatever it is we're living through, there's like always some new crazy story.
And of course, there's the war in Ukraine and there's the war in Gaza and there's the crazy thing that Trump just said.
And there's the fact that our president, you know, is struggles to walk and speak words.
And there's always like some new thing happening.
But it's like we cannot just move on and forget what happened.
This was the craziest thing ever, all based off nonsense.
And reading the book, it's like an experience.
I mean, I genuinely reading the book, it's so satisfying.
And because you are, I mean, you're just like prosecuting a like a case against the entire COVID regime.
And I mean, it's like if this was a trial, the defendant would have stood up around page 100 and just been like, all right, just convict me already.
Like I can't listen to any more of this.
Just put me in jail.
And so it's very satisfying, but it's also infuriating.
And it's like, I mean, it, it's hard to describe.
It made me tense in my gut through half of it because I'm so, I'm just so damn angry about it.
I'm so angry about what these people did to so many people, you know, including myself.
And I, you know, you dedicate the book to your lovely wife, Jenna, and you say in it something that I kind of resonated with me that like, hey, you made these these times the best of my life, even though we were living through all this craziness.
And I feel that way too.
Like I, my life was fine.
It's not like I was ruined from it.
But I mean, just the fact that like my home city that I love was totally destroyed and still is not recovered to this day.
The fact that so many millions of Americans lives were ruined over this thing.
Yeah, it's like, how can you not be mad?
When I still see a random person, you know, wearing a mask on an airplane or something like that, you, I mean, I don't do it, but you do want to be like, are you still living like it's March of 2020?
What's wrong with you?
I know.
And of course, you know, they, they got rid of the masks on the planes and the Biden people were all upset about it, although they didn't really do that much to stop it.
But when they did, that judge did overturn that mandate.
The reason the Biden people, at least were ostensibly upset, is not that they actually thought we were all going to suddenly get sick and they're just deeply concerned about our well-being.
Any answer that involves their alleged deep concern for our well-being is always the wrong answer.
It was that they were afraid that nothing would happen.
And indeed, nothing did happen.
We have all the charts.
Nothing happened.
And so if nothing happens, then the problem becomes people start wondering, well, then why were we doing this?
Apparently we stopped doing it and there are no effects.
You know, one interesting thing aspect about all this is that ordinary laymen with no fancy degrees, but who just are smart enough to read a chart, for heaven's sake, really came to the fore during this.
Like a couple of years in even, they were still trying to claim that COVID is one of the top five killers of children.
I mean, this was like Harvard University, the CDC, and just an ordinary lay woman in Georgia, Kelly Croener, had to explain, no, these numbers are all wrong and they had to retract it.
But the point is, even without delving into the numbers, you had to know that was false.
If you were even remotely following this, you had to know that was false.
But I do want to tell you one lay person story, if you don't mind, that is so inspiring.
I mean, you think my book is satisfying, which I am grateful to you for saying.
This was profoundly satisfying.
An Ohio woman named Catherine Hewig went before the Ohio state legislature and she said to them, you all told us that all these measures you were implementing were crucial to our well-being, whether that was limiting retail occupancy or restaurant capacity or lockdowns or mask mandates or whatever it was.
And then by contrast, you told us that other things like families gathering together for Thanksgiving would be very bad for us.
Well, if these things are true, like if you're going to claim that we needed to transform our lives in this way and ruin some people's lives, decimate their savings, ruin their health, ruin their employment, ruin their business, whatever, then it better be really, really obvious on the charts when these things happen.
We should be able to tell based on the charts of how many people were in the ICU with COVID-like symptoms.
That better be really obvious.
So like the mask mandate going into effect, we better see some kind of plummeting in the numbers.
I mean, so it should be really obvious.
So because you've lectured us to this extent and told us that all these things were without a doubt very effective, I've brought with me a chart of ICU hospitalizations over a certain period, but I haven't labeled the part of the chart with the months on it.
And I haven't told you what exact span of time it is, but I will tell you that it includes the lockdowns, the masks, Thanksgiving.
So I'd like to know if any of the legislators here can tell me where on this chart Thanksgiving is, because presumably, quote unquote, you know, the famous two weeks, wait two weeks.
Two weeks later, there ought to be a big spike.
So could you please point that out to me on the chart?
Can you point out to me when the lockdowns occurred?
Can you point out?
And of course, nobody could identify anything.
None of it.
It's entirely random, which is the point, one of the main points of the book.
And the thing is, Dave, I understand why a lot of folks in our camp want to start the story at what I call chapter 37.
They want to go around and tell everybody about the sinister forces running the world.
And I couldn't agree more.
There are sinister forces running the world.
But the point is, there are literally billions of people in the world who still think that these measures did some good and that this was just a matter of public health officials around the world doing their best under challenging circumstances to try to improve our health and that there were some stupid anti-science people who defied them and made their lives difficult.
But in spite of that, blah, There are billions of people who think that, which is why you need to start a chapter one, which is none of it did anything.
Like none of it mattered, which is what I want to say to what I mutter under my breath, by the way, every time I see somebody walking by me wearing a mask.
And sometimes I even see it below the nose.
So like even according to your own logic, that's dumb and doesn't do anything.
But every time one of these people walks by me, under my breath, I'm saying that doesn't do anything.
That doesn't do anything.
And sometimes I want to be a little bit more confrontational, but my better half is there to say, look, Woods, you wrote your book.
You have your podcast.
You have many ample opportunities to reach the public.
Our walking through the mall is not one of those times.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, quite a fitting sponsor for this episode.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
There were aspects of the COVID restrictions that obviously I'm a libertarian.
We people like us, we had the benefit of our priors being correct in the situation.
So, you know, like if your starting point is that the government is a, you know, institutionalized gang and the corporate media is are their puppets, it's much easier to be like, yeah, no, I don't, I don't trust them.
And we could, and I would oppose all of the mandates from the very beginning, just on libertarian grounds.
But I would have thought, and I think, in fact, I did think at the beginning that like, yeah, putting on a mask probably would make it less likely to transmit this virus.
Yeah, I thought so too.
But then there have actually, as you've pointed to, there's been major studies done on this.
And we, of course, have the tests of areas where there were, there was higher mask compliance versus lower.
And it just turns out to not be the case.
Yeah.
Like if you if you compare demographically identical places so that they can't say, oh, well, there are many mitigating factors here that account for the difference between one place and another.
All right, what if I do two neighboring counties then?
These people are identical.
And you can't, you, you plot them against each other.
You cannot tell which is which.
And this just goes on again and again.
Even I have to track down the article, but even the Atlantic, which is, you know, occasionally it'll surprise you with a maverick kind of article, but it's pretty establishment.
And even in the Atlantic had to say that the CDC's mask studies were just embarrassing.
What they were trying to say was, look, we want to echo the official regime position, but you got to give us more than this.
So for instance, like one of those studies was they were looking at a couple of places in Kansas where they had differing mask policies.
Comparing Identical Neighboring Counties00:13:31
And they were showing that the more heavily masked place had better health outcomes.
And they showed you a little chart.
And, you know, I have to admit, Dave, it sure did show that.
But what they didn't show, and they didn't explain why they arbitrarily stopped at a particular day in October.
Well, wouldn't you know it?
If you follow the chart after they stopped the study, the exact opposite occurs and for much longer.
And do they come back and say, you know, we really misrepresented things by arbitrarily cutting the study off at that point?
I mean, we all know the answer to that.
And this was how so much of the science, which is like the creepiest two words in the English language now, was carried out.
That was obviously designed to mislead you.
There's no other explanation of that.
Obviously designed to mislead you.
Yeah, there's been so many examples like similar to that.
I mean, I saw the one, there was one chart that people were using that they were trying to prove the effectiveness of the vaccine because they would say that, look, after the vaccine comes out, the deaths from COVID in red areas are way higher than the deaths in blue areas.
And so look, this is clearly that the red America was hesitant to take this vaccine and blue America was lining up for as many as they could get.
And so this is why the deaths are higher in the red areas.
But then you just look at it and you go, okay, but wait a minute.
What was happening before that?
And you're like, oh yeah, when COVID first hit, it took out all the cities.
And so the blue areas had way higher deaths than the rural, more rural red areas.
And then it made its way out to the rural areas where there was much more natural immunity in the densely populated cities.
And that explains it all away.
There's no credit to the vaccine here.
So there was just so much science like this throughout the whole thing where they were manipulating things just to try to get back to the, you know, this circular kind of reasoning of like, this is the policy.
Now, how can we make the data fit that this policy runs?
Right, exactly.
We know what we want the outcome to be.
We want it to say that the shots accomplished X, Y, and Z.
So we're going to reason backward from that.
And incidentally, the book has a ton of facts in it, but there are really only two that you absolutely can win any argument with.
But it's fun to have a whole bunch of them because then, because to me, I would like to keep bludgeoning this thing until it's dead and then I've dismembered it.
And then I've dismembered the things that I've dismembered.
I mean, I want to just keep on going.
But there are two facts.
And one of them has to do with California, because California, with the on the vaccine thing, they had in Los Angeles County, of course, the mandate where you had the vaccine passport system implemented.
And that meant you can't go into restaurants, you can't do all these various things.
But then neighboring Orange County did not have that.
And again, you plot them against each other.
Orange County should be through the roof and LA County should be fine.
And you can't tell which is which.
You cannot tell which is which.
So in Canada, and I actually chronicle this in the book, we have a couple of officials saying what I think American officials were thinking, but not saying, which was, look, the point of these vaccine passport systems is not to make you safe, quote unquote.
It's to change your behavior.
It's to say to you, sure, you don't have to take the shot, but we're going to take away everything that makes your life meaningful and that gives you pleasure and allows you to socialize with people.
We're going to take all that away.
We just want to modify your behavior.
It's not making anybody safer.
So they more or less openly admitted that.
But the California thing is very important.
I actually went out there in 2021 with one of my daughters.
Long story, we took a trip out there.
And there were some things we could do.
And one of them was you could go see a drive-in movie because, you know, you could, you're in your car, right?
And that's kind of a novelty because we don't really do drive-in movies anymore.
So I thought, oh, this will be interesting.
But it said, by order of the Department of Health, no double features.
What does that mean?
Because twice zero is still zero, you know?
So totally crazy.
But California boasted of its fantastic results.
But the fact is, California is one of the youngest states in terms of the demographics.
And we all know Florida is where everybody goes to retire.
So when you correct for that, you find the numbers are really not all that different.
And in fact, when all was said and done, all this stuff has passed.
When you look now, you find that Florida had better all-cause mortality than California.
Now, that shouldn't be possible.
And if in March 2020, we had said to one of the hysterics, we're going to have a state that goes wild in terms of restrictions.
Like they had the last Disney property in the world to reopen, Disneyland, and it reopened at 15% capacity with the rule that you were not allowed to scream on the rides.
But that's kind of an involuntary thing.
So if we had said, look, we're going to have California doing that, and then Florida's not really going to do much of this stuff.
What do you think is going to happen?
Nobody in March of 2020 would have said, oh, Florida will wind up doing better.
Not one.
So that means they were wrong.
And yet they're still calling, you know, they're probably still calling him Ron Death Santis or whatever.
But, you know, like no one would have said, or my favorite interaction on Twitter about the beginning of 2022 was between was just some schmuck and me.
And the schmuck was saying, hey, look, everybody's boasting about Florida, but I've looked at their numbers and they look pretty average.
Now, my response to that was twofold.
Number one, they're way better than average.
I mean, in terms of number one being the worst state and 50 being the best.
So like number one, the most deaths, Florida was at 36, which is like not where it should be according to the moralizing version of events that when you're good and you follow the rules, everything's great.
And when you don't, you die and all that.
But secondly, I said to this guy back in March 2020, if I had described for you what Florida's policy was going to be, would you have warned us now, wait a minute, if you do that, your results are going to be very average?
And of course he would have said, no, of course not.
He would have said, you're going to be corpses all over the street.
So, you know, like they've all changed their point of view, but they won't admit it.
So the first thing is California, Florida.
We win on that.
And the other thing is Sweden.
I mean, if Sweden turns out to have the best all-cause mortality of any major country in Europe after all this, when they were screamed at in early 2020, screamed at for not locking down and you're going to have 96,000 deaths by June and it was 4,000, so off by a factor of 24.
And meanwhile, you have the state epidemiologist, Tegnel, saying, no, we're not doing this.
It's not going to do any good in the long run.
In the long run, our people will do better.
He had to wait three years to be vindicated, three years of being insulted, smeared, attacked.
I'm sure he had some sleepless nights, even doubting himself, is this the right policy?
And doggone it, that guy should be a hero.
Instead of making documentaries about Anthony Fauci, we should make a documentary about that guy.
Could you imagine an Anthony Fauci having the stones to withstand worldwide condemnation instead of the worldwide praise that he gets all the time for three years?
We need more people like that guy.
Yeah, 100%.
And, you know, when you say this, that was, what was it, 96 or 97,000?
I remember that was repeated so much by people that Sweden, because it's these projections that they come up with.
It's like the climate change type science.
It just never turns out to be right at all.
They're always telling, you know, they're always, there's this, this strange dynamic that is a real problem in science.
It's a real problem in like the American political class when they talk about kind of like their military capabilities.
And it's like, even though you guys have a lot of power, you don't have nearly what you think you have.
And scientists get way out ahead of themselves.
It's like, I'll see these charts where there's like, they're like, you know, happiness studies.
And they're like, this group of people is happier.
And you almost sit there and you go, wait a minute, how, how can you measure happiness?
And then it's like, oh, well, we ask people.
We ask people if they're happy.
And you're like, oh, but that's just like, that's nothing.
I know miserable people who will lie to themselves and lie to you.
And so there was, oh, but anyway, so these projections are, see, Sweden's going to have close to 100,000 dead this summer and it's freaking like 4,000.
And then even Donald Trump is lecturing them.
Oh, you guys, you're so stupid for not doing lockdowns.
You're going to have that.
And so look, I think kind of tying it back to the point you made before, there are a lot of people out there now who really do still kind of look at it like, yeah, there's a tacit admission that we kind of got some things wrong, but it was just, you know, it was a crazy situation.
People were doing the best they could.
And that's what I love about this book.
I don't want to give away too much of it because I want everyone to read it, but you chronologically go through the thing and you can't get to the summer of 2020 before you're like, oh, it's so obvious already.
It's all just so obvious.
This is none of this is working.
This isn't the case of like, oh, you're just doing the best you can.
This is if you're paying attention at all, you have to know this whole thing is bogus.
And yet it keeps going.
You're like, you know, you're almost like, is this the end of the book?
Is this where we wrap up here in the summer of 2020?
But no, it keeps going and keeps going and keeps going.
So no, it is simply not the case that these were just people with imperfect information trying to make the best decisions they could.
It was beyond the point where there was even an argument for any of these restrictions.
And they kept doubling down and doubling down.
I mean, Fauci was in Christmas 2022 was saying, don't have Christmas with your family.
After everything people had been through over the previous couple of years, he's still telling people in December of 2022 not to have Christmas.
It's just appalling.
Yeah, no kidding, no kidding.
Well, there was a state senator, Heidi Campbell in Tennessee, who she's a Democrat, and she wrote to me out of the blue for some reason.
She must have seen one of my newsletters or something, or I don't know what it was.
And she was telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for not going along with what the experts are telling us.
And I said, all right, well, tell me, what exactly are the experts telling us about why the things they're recommending don't seem to be making any difference?
That I look at different places that aren't doing it, like Sweden or Scandinavia at large, maybe one or 2% people masking.
And I went over there too.
And the only people masking were American tourists and Asian tourists.
I mean, that was about it.
Nobody, it didn't even occur to them to do it.
So I said to her, well, what explanation are the experts giving me that I should be satisfied with?
Because when I look at what they're saying, they can't explain it either.
And I shared with her what Andy Slavet said in, I think, 2021 on MSNBC when somebody finally asked him, even MSNBC got impatient, finally asked him, how come California and Florida, basically, when you adjust for age, they seem to be doing roughly the same.
That doesn't seem to make sense if what you're telling us is true, that we need to employ these mitigation measures.
If they're doing it to the hilt in California, why are the numbers the same?
He did not have some like expert answer.
In fact, at diaryofcovid.com in my little video, I have him being confronted like this.
And you're just embarrassed for the guy.
Because I remember sitting there, I was watching this.
I happen to have the guy.
I never watch MSNBC.
It was just like the fates somehow aligned in such a way that I was in front of a TV when this was happening.
And I thought, oh my gosh, stop everything you're doing, everybody.
Let's see what he says.
What does he say?
And his answer was, you know, there are a lot of things about this virus that just continue to surprise us that we think we understand, but that are just a little bit beyond our ability to understand.
That was his answer.
So his answer was, I don't know.
And so Heidi Campbell in Tennessee was trying to tell me that I should be satisfied with that answer.
I said, Heidi, he doesn't know either.
Okay.
You understand?
The experts actually don't know either.
I mean, it was Fauci was saying, oh, I don't, I don't know what I, how I feel about these full stadiums for college football.
You know, COVID's going to have a feast.
And then all the numbers fell.
You know, like they don't know what's going on.
They asked him, how come Texas is doing so well?
And his answer was, I'm not joking.
Quote.
Maybe they're doing things outdoors.
I remember that.
Yeah.
That's, you know, so they had no, so I said to her, you know, you're, you're telling me to go to the experts and listen to their answers, but the thing is that they don't have answers.
So can you at least tell me, like, what do you think their answers are?
Like, why are you satisfied?
Why are you not asking anything?
Why are you not asking why the experts aren't following their own pandemic advice that they had had up until 2020?
Like, why aren't you curious about that?
Like, were they not experts then?
And they're experts now.
I mean, and of course, I got no answer.
You never get an answer from these people.
Experts Don't Know What's Going On00:08:27
Yeah.
No, that's right.
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By the way, I meant to mention up top because you just reminded me when you said by, you know, like fate, you happened to be watching MSNBC at that moment.
But I do think I remember I texted you when the book first came out and I read the book and I texted you about a week later and I was like, hey, let's do an episode on this.
And I think you were like traveling that week or something like that.
And it's just, it really was like God was just like, no, we're going to do this almost to the week, four years later than when this whole craziness started.
Like it's a perfect timing to be here in March of 2024.
And it is, even as I was reading the book and as we talk about this now, it is such a strange feeling.
It's almost like, was that all a dream?
Did I actually imagine that everyone was so stupid?
And following the stupidity, even though it was so, I mean, I remember, so when I first started getting back out on the road and doing some comedy shows, because, you know, it's for a while, it was like they'd limit the capacity and stuff.
And so, you know, it's just not that much money to be made if you can only sell 25% of the tickets, you know?
Oh, and plus, I would guess for a stand-up comedian, there's more energy in the room, the more full the room is.
Oh, of course.
Oh, yeah.
So laughs.
Oh, and people being masked and stuff.
But then they would, when they finally started like opening things back up, and I'm sure you remember this time, Tom, and this was true in restaurants and stuff too.
They would literally, you'd have to wear your mask to your seat.
And then take it off.
And then, but the whole business is selling you booze and food.
So they can't like insist you keep your mask on.
So it's like, now you can take it off on planes that, you know, like they would just, they'd be like, okay, you can have a drink and then you could take your mask off, but you were supposed to put it back on in between sips or something, which is also, it's just, it was all so ridiculous where you were like, look, guys, either this is real or it's not.
Like, if this is real, then you say, yo, no drinks on the plane because you have to keep your mask on the whole time.
But you can't be like, well, I mean, it's a three hour flight.
We're not going to ask you to like not have a drink the whole time.
So like, yeah, just kind of have you might be killing everybody when you do this, but go ahead and do it like real quick.
It's just because who could survive three hours without a drink?
You got to have that.
Right.
Like, it's just, it's, it was all so absurd.
And, you know, it's, it's wild, but we can't forget it.
It's like these people did this to us.
And I could, you know, I could go on for, you know, 10 hours with, because, you know, I, I have an audience and stuff and I interact with a lot of people and I have family members and stuff with just individual stories of what happened to people and how their lives were ruined and stuff.
And so it's just, we can't forget that we did this.
There has to be some, I mean, look, obviously we don't have the power to like prosecute Anthony Fauci and all of the lockdown governors and stuff, but you can at least tell the story of it here, which you did really wonderfully.
Okay.
I wanted to, I wanted to ask you about Japan because that was another one of these really interesting things.
It was really interesting.
Yeah.
So, but before Japan, I just want to, you were talking about restaurants and stuff.
I remember going to a deli.
I was in Virginia, I think for a Mises caucus event.
And we went to, I went to this deli and this, they had a sign on the door.
Like it was like really like angry.
Like you, if you even think about coming in here without a mask, you know, forget it.
Like, I mean, it was, it wasn't like, you know, masks recommended or masks required.
It was like a screed.
And you walk in there and the tables or the seating is like two paces from the door.
So like they're this angry about how I might spend the next second and a half of my life.
And it also reminds me, speaking of comedy, that our friend Rob Schneider was touring during that time.
And I saw him in Florida in 2021 when you couldn't, in some other states, you couldn't even go to something like that.
So he walks on to the thing and like we all, you know, like we're supposed to be masked.
And he comes on to give his routine to do his stand-up.
And he says, the management has told me that once you're seated in your seat, you can take your mask off.
Now, I am sure the management did not tell him that because it makes no sense.
Although in restaurants, I guess it makes sense.
But the theater, you're supposed to keep the mask on.
And I, and we were looking around like, are people going to do it?
Because we, we all know he's lying, but we also know that nobody in the management has the stones to get up on that stair.
Wait a minute, everybody, put those masks back.
But yeah, but on the question of Japan.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
I'm sorry.
Listen, let's go to Japan.
But just literally, because you told me, and this just popped in my head, I just got such an awesome story about Rob Schneider.
And instead of just, I mean, we'll talk about some of the stories of people's lives being ruined and stuff like that.
But I will say my, my favorite moment throughout COVID was, I mean, I, you know, I had a kid and stuff.
We had some fragrance, my favorite moment relating to COVID restrictions and resistance.
So they banned, this was the 4th of July in 2020.
And so I was at my old house that I used to live at.
And it's where I used to live was, it was like right on the water and had this unbelievable view of, so it's in Jersey on the water and you have a view of New York City and it's just like unbelievable beauty.
You see Brooklyn and you can see Queens and you can see Manhattan and you see the Freedom Tower and all that.
And so and then you see Staten Island over here.
So you have this long view where you could kind of see all some three of the boroughs very well.
And so it's the 4th of July and Fauci decides to recommend no fireworks this year.
No fireworks.
The easiest activity to social distance at, it's outside.
Also, these people, you got to think this is July.
I mean, the people have been through the harshest of the lockdowns for months and months and months now, like everything taken away from you.
And then they decide to take away this one thing that isn't even, it's outside and there's no need to be close to anybody else.
You could all just watch the fireworks.
And they're like, no, but the technicians who have to work on the fireworks or something like that.
And so you're watching this.
And usually there's a big firework show, you know, in New York City.
And so there's not one this year, but there were thousands of just people lighting off fireworks.
And it was everywhere.
Like they're not the big ones that are really cool.
They're more just the ones people have, but everyone was doing it.
You're hearing popping from my backyard from a few blocks over this way and just all looking all through Brooklyn, all through Manhattan, all through Staten Island.
Everyone's just, and I just thought it was the most beautiful moment of like this peaceful resistance, a big middle finger, like you're not going to take this away from us.
And also because it was the 4th of July, you know, there's just this kind of like, this is still America, damn it.
Yeah.
This is what we do.
We do fireworks on the 4th of July.
So that's that.
It was just my favorite thing.
No, that is absolutely.
If only these people could live their whole lives the way they lived that July 4th.
Think of the country we'd have.
Rationalizing the 4th of July Mistake00:10:15
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All right, let's get back on the show.
All right.
So, okay, Japan.
So the Japan story is interesting because that was another place where they had a, you know, a lackluster lockdown.
They didn't really like, and they were being told they weren't testing enough.
The gold standard for testing, quote unquote, was South Korea that they were testing like crazy.
And in Japan, they felt like, well, but if we're testing like asymptomatic people, we're just wasting resources.
We're not going to do that.
And Japan ended up having, even though Japan, given its much older demographic, I mean, that's been a concern for people for a long time that their population is aging so much.
You would think Japan should just be a hellhole.
And yet, and the headlines, the headlines were, you know, because I think they declared like a state of emergency briefly.
And the headlines were too little, too late for Tokyo.
And I just couldn't get over the arrogance of this.
Like there was no question mark, like too little, too late.
Like, I guess we'll have to wait and see.
We don't have to wait and see.
We're the headline writers and we'll tell you they're going to get what's come to them.
And that was the attitude.
The attitude kind of was they're going to get what they deserve for not listening to the public health establishment, which is just looking out for their well-being.
And Japan did great.
I mean, I don't know what did they have, like 17 out of a thousand.
I forget what the exact number numbers were, but I mean, they did better than almost anybody.
And South Korea did well too.
And here's the point.
Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, who wrote the foreword to my book, uses the term policy invariance, which is a polite way of saying no matter what the blankety blank you do in this part of Asia, you get good results.
You do a lot, you get good results.
You do very little, you get good results.
So after Japan got the good results, then all the know-it-alls who told us that everyone was going to be dead, instead of having the shame to shut their mouths for a while, maybe retire to a monastery, whatever, they were on the scene ready with their explanation.
The reason Japan did well, they said, was masks.
Now, first of all, you can't come back with that when you knew they were wearing masks at the time you said they were all going to die.
So why didn't you say at the time the masks will save them?
This does kind of sound like an after-the-fact rationalization.
But secondly, I had a guy named Eric Topol on my show, T-O-P-O-L, a very, very widely published medical academic.
And he said the reason that Japan did so well was that the government issued masks to everybody.
They sent out 50 million masks to people.
And, you know, if only we could be, you know, you can already see the moral of the story.
If only we could.
But what he hadn't known, because he hadn't bothered to look into it, was that those masks the government of Japan distributed to its people were a laughing stock because they were all kids-sized.
They were too damn small for anybody to fit them on.
So everybody joked and laughed about them and threw them away.
And this guy in the U.S., he so knows how it's supposed to turn out.
It's supposed to be that the masks saved them that he's already concluded that without actually gathering any data.
So, and then it's what's also interesting is that by the end of 2020, when we've got all this data for how countries have been doing, you can plot Japan against South Korea.
South Korea was supposed to be the model, and yet their numbers go down at the same time, up at the same time, down again at the same time, and up again at the same time.
So if we're supposed to believe this moralizing view of things, then apparently people in Japan and South Korea at the same time obeyed the restrictions.
Then somehow they coordinated they were going to disobey at the same time.
Then they obeyed again and then disobeyed again.
Who the hell can possibly believe this?
Yeah, no, it's just, it just becomes clear the more you look into it that it's just the virus was going to do what the virus was going to do and that none of these policies mitigated it at all.
And, you know, the other, you know, as the other major like theme that kind of should be addressed during COVID, the whole time is that it's not.
So it's like on one hand, they were wrong about everything, like literally everything.
And the way people were demonized who did speak out against this.
And I know that you, you know, you were one of the louder voices speaking out against it from the very beginning and you made friends with a lot of the other experts who were speaking out against it, but it was vicious.
I mean, it was just, you know, from the very beginning, people who were against the lockdowns, you remember the line was like, you don't care if grandma dies as long as you can get your hair cut.
They picked haircut as if that was the only objection one could have to the lockdowns.
Like oh, my wife's grandfather had to die alone in a hospital and couldn't be surrounded by his loved ones while he died, like maybe that was my issue and not getting a haircut, you know.
And then it's like the all throughout the mass censorship uh, on on social media, and you know look, I mean at the end of it, like you're saying with all of it, even at this point right, with the vaccines, it's almost.
It was, it was so um, it was so dangerous at one point to say stuff like this, because I would be like i'll lose my youtube channel for sure if I said this.
I'll lose my twitter, i'll lose my, you know.
And then oh, there goes me.
That's kind of my career.
But now it's just so obvious.
It's like, oh yeah, a whole bunch of people were injured by this vaccine who never needed to take it at all.
This is just there's, it's just objectively true.
What exactly the numbers are, we don't know, but a lot of people were injured by this thing when they never should have taken it.
I mean, they were a 25 year old who had had covet twice already.
There is no scientific argument that they should be taking the vaccine and that, you know, they're a 25 year old who's had Covid twice already and now we're in the Omicron variant and they're telling them to take a booster.
It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever and that person gets injured by it.
It's just, it's.
The level of evil is just off the charts.
Well, it is.
It was like a religious dogma.
And, in fact, um Martin Koldorf of Harvard Medical School, who was recently dismissed from his post uh, who is a brilliant biostatistician, said, well, I didn't get my religious exemption uh, and I, but I wasn't surprised, because the way I worded it was, um, i've already had this, i've recovered from it, I have a strong immune system.
I'm not, I have stronger immunity than anybody else um, or people with the vaccine, and I don't need or want this.
So to force it on me is an act of religious dogma and I wish to uh have a religious exemption from this dogma.
And they said yeah, they didn't, they didn't really, they didn't really accept that.
And you know, you see you were mentioning about uh, you know people, people did suffer during this time from these restrictions, but that if you complained about it well, what's the matter with you?
Don't you understand?
It's a pandemic, and all this and that and, and the thing is the way people suffered uh varied uh widely.
I mean, some people had their businesses destroyed.
Uh, like you know I, I know somebody who had a business where uh, she had a business with with children um, riding horses, and they would have birthday parties and stuff.
And I mean children, you're not going to get covet, you know a horseback ride, a birthday party, you know, but all the parents were panicked by all the propaganda, so that was ruined, you know.
So things like that all the way to to suicides, suicides of young people, and like we all know that there are people who they ate more, they drank more, they fell into uh depression.
I mean, if you say to a depressed person you you, you need social distancing, that's like a death sentence to these people.
There was just no thought of of this.
Just oh, yeah and talk about all.
Yeah, I mean to tell somebody to live completely isolated.
I mean to tell somebody who's suffering with any type of mental illness to live isolated.
It's the absolute worst.
Look, it's the worst punishment in maximum security prisons.
Yeah, even murderers don't want to be put in solitary confinement.
That's the worst thing you can do to somebody.
They did it to mass amounts of people.
I'm literally just remembering this.
And this is why I said the book makes me so emotional.
Like I literally could start crying talking about this.
But I remember seeing this long post on Twitter by this guy who had an autistic son.
They had him in a special needs school.
And this is like between the age three and four.
And he said he was making real progress.
Yeah.
And they shut the thing down and he totally reverted.
And like, I don't know if any of you, like, I have kids with autism in my family.
And like that, those, geez, never cried on a podcast before.
Those, those years are so crucial.
Like that's, if you don't get it, then you never get it.
And this is like the difference between whether this kid is going to develop language or not.
It's the difference between whether they'll ever be able to live on their own or not.
And like they shut these special needs schools down.
It's the, it's just so profoundly evil, you know, like, and, and all, and they were wrong.
They weren't even right to do it, you know?
Shutting Down Special Needs Schools00:10:41
Yeah.
It's like, even if they, you know, like, obviously from the libertarian perspective, our thing would be like, well, that's their people's choice, you know, even if doing this was going to save a whole lot of lives, it would still be that person's choice whether or not they want to give up their life, you know?
Right.
But it wasn't even saving lives.
Yeah, well, it didn't even do anything.
It wasn't doing anything.
You're just ruining them.
Yeah.
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All right, let's get back on the show.
All right.
So let me, let me ask you this, Tom.
Can I go ahead?
I'll tell one more story.
And I know you know this story because I texted you about it and I appreciate your help with it.
But there was a there, well, there is.
He's not gone.
There's a Broadway actor, Clifton Duncan.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
So Clifton Duncan, I actually saw him on Broadway twice in 2018, never knowing that we were going to have this crazy dystopia and I would actually wind up interacting with him.
It's so funny because people who know Tom know Tom, Tom loves the theater.
And it's just so funny that you're here in New York City at Broadway.
There's this superstar who you're seeing.
And who would think he was going to be at the Mises Institute giving a speech?
Yes, he gave a speech at the Mises Institute.
He's been on the Tom Woods show three times.
Absolutely crazy.
So his name is Clifton Duncan and he was in this play and I loved him.
And he was just absolutely great.
And everything was going his way.
You know, he had been an elite.
He'd been trained in an elite program.
He had been off Broadway, on Broadway, on television, everything going his way.
And then COVID hit and they demanded the shots.
And he said, it's irrational.
Don't want it.
Don't need it.
So not doing it on principle.
And that meant his management abandoned him.
He was blacklisted.
He couldn't get employed.
And you know how most actors, the story goes, that you wait tables till you get your big break?
He got his big break and now he's waiting tables.
I mean, it is, they just, they took away that.
I mean, that's a kind of death.
They took away from him the thing that gives his life meaning.
So, and I think for a while it crushed him to the point where he just, he didn't understand how, what's the rest of my life going to be now?
And even, even, you know, and I even, I said to him, were you ever tempted though?
Was there ever part of you that said, all right, look, you guys win.
I, I surrender.
I got to just do it.
He said, well, yeah, maybe a little bit, but, but then I thought, I don't think I want to work with these people who would just sit back and let this happen to me and not care.
And I, I just, and the conformity, or people would cheer him on privately.
And, and he, you know, that doesn't help me any.
Well, he, he's bouncing back.
So this actually has a happy-ish ending, which is he came up with the idea of writing and acting in a one-man show about the life and ideas of the great Thomas Sowell.
And so I asked you, would you mind retweeting my tweet publicizing his crowdfunding campaign for this?
He was asking for $10,000 so he could take a few months off and devote himself to writing this play.
He raised 100,000, Dave.
And so it goes to show them.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isn't that great?
And the thing is, like the big names didn't really come out for him.
Like Daily Caller didn't even know what was going on.
You know, Daily Wire apparently was unaware of what was going on.
Blaze TV, I don't think said anything about it.
Although Matt Kibbe just interviewed him.
So that's at least something.
Breitbart didn't say a word.
Like, I don't know how these people are completely out of it.
He should follow you and me on Twitter.
And they don't know what the news is.
But without those names, enough people knew what had happened to him that they said, this is just wrong.
And you've come up with a brilliant idea for a play.
So that's great.
But I ended up writing because there isn't such a book.
And I had a lot of people writing to me because I had an email newsletter.
So all people have to do is click reply and they can just get right into my inbox.
And so I had people telling me about their families were breaking apart because half of them thought one thing and half the other.
And it was just awful.
But they would tell me these stories about things that were happening to them because they knew they'd have a sympathetic ear because they knew how frustrated I was with it.
And I finally decided, what if I take the, with their permission, obviously, but what if I take these stories and collect them into a book of their own talking about the thing, the unmentionables, the people who, that actually would have been a pretty good title now that I think about it.
My initial, so I came up with a, I, I, at diaryofcovid.com, I give this book away.
So you get diary of psychosis.
And as a bonus, I give away this collection.
There's always, if you're not familiar, you're always going to get something with Tom.
If you purchase anything from Tom Woods, there's always going to be some bonus.
And there's a lot of people.
This is the bonus this time.
This is the bonus.
And so initially, I was going to call this book COVID Stories.
And I was telling Michael Malice all about it.
And he said to me, Tom, that is a terrible title.
You've got to think of something better.
Okay.
So I came up with collateral damage.
And the subject line is victims of the lockdown regime tell their stories.
Finally, they can tell their stories.
And so I felt like, yeah, look, I can't turn back the, I can't get in a time machine and fix everything.
And I can't undo all the injustices, but I at least gave people a vehicle through which they could share what had been done so that justice might at some point be done or at the very least that they could have what all human beings need, which is empathy.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
No, that's right.
Just there, there is real power, even nothing else, just your story being told.
And like, that's a kind of beautiful thing to be able to give that to somebody that it's like nobody here, like nobody is really like hearing this.
And now you, you're in a position to like be like, okay, here, I'm going to put this in front of an audience and let it be known.
Cause it really is like, um, you know, no one throughout all of COVID, there's been, there's a spotlight on the governors, on the, you know, whoever the head of the CDC is.
There's the people in the corporate press.
There's Fauci, you know, there's, and then there's, of course, people who are criticizing all of those guys, but it's like these people, like there's just never a spotlight on them.
Even the voices railing against the lockdowns and the vaccine mandates and stuff typically are more people like me and you who weren't ruined by this.
You know what I mean?
Like we were, we were inconvenienced and part of our lives had to change.
Like, you know, no one could kind of get away from it, but we weren't ruined.
We're kind of fine, you know?
But it's like these people who actually were ruined, there's almost never any attention given to them.
So I just think, I think that's wonderful.
And I do, I, I look forward to reading.
I have not read that one yet because I really, I just, it makes me so goddamn angry that it's just, it's, it's like, I got to like, I got to sit down when I'm like in a hotel, not with my wife and kids.
So I'm just being angry alone because I'm just going to ruin my house if I, if I read it here.
Well, you know, Dave, maybe you've heard me say this, but I, I, I just said it.
It was on the Ron Paul Liberty report this week.
And I, and I was thinking that, uh, and I think I've told you this before, but it's so true.
If we think about the three things that occurred in the 21st century where you had a large number of people saying, I would not want to be a libertarian during this crisis.
Yes.
It turns out that being a libertarian would have been vastly better.
So 9-11 was one.
Can't be a libertarian now because we got to go, you know, fight the war on terror.
20-year catastrophe wars.
Yes, right.
Yeah.
That accomplishes nothing.
Then the 2008 crash, you know, that like that, we would have been vastly better off, you know, listening to David Stockman.
And then this COVID thing.
People say, well, you wouldn't want to be a libertarian during a pandemic now, would you?
I mean, oh, I'm so glad I'm not a libertarian.
I think it was the New York Times who ran a piece that said there's no libertarians in a pandemic.
It's like all of a sudden they remember us.
Like they like, when do you even discuss libertarianism in the New York Times?
All of a sudden now, just because you think you have an opportunity to be like, ah, I see how stupid you are.
We have to do lockdowns.
Yeah.
And then turns out, no, actually, you know.
So it turns out that even in the three hardest cases, it was better to be a libertarian in all three of them.
And then just stated differently, right?
It's in all of those hardest cases, the worst thing is statists.
Yes.
Because they exploit these crises to do the worst things that they could never do under normal circumstances, right?
Like you could never do a lockdown if there wasn't some emergency that people are scared of.
And so, yeah, that's right.
Libertarians, we win again.
I mean, not any, you know, not in the sense of achieving any type of political power, but in the sense of just being right about stuff, we do win again.
Look, Tom, like I said at the beginning of the show, I mean, you've had a huge impact on my life.
And this goes back well before I ever met you.
And so not only are you a person who's really helped educate me in so many different areas, change the way I look at the world, but you've really also become one of my most cherished friendships is with you.
And so I just really appreciate you, the thinker and the person.