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Oct. 13, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
06:04
The Tyranny of Experts...
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How the tyranny of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe.
Okay, so I was telling you that when I see the word experts in a New York Times piece, I assume they're fools.
A fool is a person who knows a lot, or may know a lot.
They're fools who know nothing.
But they reach foolish conclusions.
And that's all that matters.
How much you know is irrelevant if your conclusion is destructive.
So you were saying?
Absolutely.
I mean, that's really the story.
Sean, can I have my guest back?
Oh, okay.
I'm not hearing him.
Hello, Dennis?
Okay, now I'm hearing you.
All right.
Dennis, this is really the story of the pandemic.
Panic is the role of very few characters.
The director of the World Health Organization and, of course, now famous Dr. Anthony Fauci, who just happened to be in the right place.
At the right time.
They had expertise, just as Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College London had some expertise in modeling, but it was his model that told us that we were dealing with about a 3.5% infection fatality rate.
World Health Organization jumped on that.
Anthony Fauci jumped on that.
And then he happened to have the ear of the president of the United States.
The president, of course, has inherited him from the sort of career deep state that you have when you come into Washington, D.C. He's the only one, you know, basically his only advisor.
And he's the one that told President Trump we're going to have two and a half million deaths unless we lock down the country.
That's the tyranny of experts in which two or three people with very narrow expertise were giving advice about what the president should do for a country of 330 million people.
Something that we don't want to have happen again.
Oh, it's going to happen again.
There was an article, I forgot where, but in a mainstream source that this lockdown is a dress rehearsal for the Green New Deal.
I find that at least plausible.
At the very least, if this wasn't planned, at the very least, people who have designed for control of the global economy certainly now know what it takes to get Americans to comply.
Beforehand, you might have thought, well, if we had been told we had to stay inside for our own good, we would have all rebelled.
But instead, we were told we need to stay inside and lock down and stay out of worship services.
For the good of our fellow human beings, the good of our fellow Americans who are more vulnerable than us.
And so we're sort of hoisted our own moral guitars, our own concern for other people during the lockdowns.
Unfortunately, it was used against us.
Well, that will be done with global warming.
As I said from the beginning, this involves hundreds of thousands of lives, which is a tragedy.
Or in the world, a million lives, whatever the total is.
Right.
We are told that global warming is an existential threat to life.
If we lock down for a million lives, why wouldn't we lock down for six billion lives?
That's the exact argument I think that we can at least anticipate.
It's one of the reasons I think we need to learn what's happening in this case.
Climate change and the pandemic, we were taking advice based on predictive computer models that we had no reason to believe in the beginning.
It's one thing if a meteor hits the planet, we have to have some kind of emergency measures.
At least we know we're addressing something that real and present danger.
In the case of the pandemic, we reacted based upon projections that were based entirely upon...
Computer models and so even President Trump unfortunately is still saying well We 200,000 may have been lost, but we saved two million lives We probably didn't save two million lives that was based entirely on those we now know bogus computer models And we're gonna be playing the same game with climate.
That is exactly right.
The book is the price of panic How the tyranny of experts turned a pandemic into a catastrophe and There are three authors, Douglas Axe, William Briggs, Jay Richards, and my guest is Jay Richards.
One final question.
Where do you live?
I live in Washington, D.C. I was locked down here in the D.C. area during the entire pandemic.
My co-author, Doug Axe, is in California, and my third co-author, who's from Manhattan, was stranded in Taiwan for the entire duration.
So we all stayed locked down, and we used the lockdown to write a book about the lockdown.
What is it now in Washington?
Can you go into a restaurant?
You can go into a restaurant wearing masks.
The general rule is you can wear masks, except you don't have to wear it when you're eating, though we've recently been told that you need to wear a mask between bites.
So I don't know exactly how that's going to work.
Well, I know Gavin Newsom said that.
Did anybody else say that?
That's generally the word actually here at the moment, though I can tell you that it's enforced.
It's sporadically, depending upon which part of the city.
Wait, wait.
You mean it is enforced at all?
You're not currently chewing?
Where is your mask?
It happens.
It absolutely happens.
But at the moment, it depends.
You know, if you're in D.C. versus you're in the suburbs, it varies some.
And my impression is that honestly, Dennis, it depends if you're in...
Frankly, a really white, upper-middle-class area, it's enforced with great zeal.
If you're in a kind of normal, more middle-class part of the city or part of the area, it's actually much more rational.
That's the dynamic I'm certainly noticing here in the D.C. area.
Well, listen, Jay, congratulations on your book.
Thanks so much, Dennis.
Thanks for having me.
You're welcome.
The Price of Panic, How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe.
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