Tonight resolved that the pandemic is more panic than play.
Instead, and part of our opening statement, let's look at the evidence.
This pandemic has been used as a pretext, as a premise for a power grab by governors, by mayors, by town managers even, all across America in ways that have never happened in American history, that are unprecedented, that are unparalleled.
Our constitutional forefounders determined way back in the late 1700s that our country did not have any exception for national emergencies from constitutional liberties.
There is no reference to pandemics or viruses or public health crises or declaration of emergencies in the Constitution.
There's nothing in there that says that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution or the Second or the Fourth or the Fifth or the Sixth or that any of the Bill of Rights or that any other aspect of the Constitution can simply be discarded with a politician declaring that we are now in a case of a public health crisis.
And our founders were far more in the founding family and the founding generations were far more familiar with the issues of pandemics and plagues and viruses than we even are today.
And yet they chose not to form any exception or exemption, as a federal court determined today in Austin, Texas.
Though ironically, only for Planned Parenthood so far.
So apparently essential services includes abortion, but doesn't include church, doesn't include the right to purchase a gun for your own defense, doesn't purchase, doesn't include the right to have free assembly, either in church or for political purposes.
Doesn't include the right to privacy under the Fourth Amendment unless it's for an abortion.
Doesn't include the right to your business or your property under the Fifth Amendment unless, of course, it's Planned Parenthood.
So the court's decision was right on the Constitution, but those principles of essential services should be extended and applied to all constitutionally protected liberties, not just the ones the left celebrates.
But that isn't the only issue with this pandemic that is more panic than play.
For example, if we examine the data behind the pandemic, we find that not only is it being used as a pretext for a political power grab that's beyond the constitutional constraints and is unprecedented in American legal history, but in addition to that, it is being used, of course, to crush the economy and facilitate Wall Street bailouts of an unprecedented portion, with the Fed committing to printing trillions of dollars to help their friends on Wall Street and corporate America, while ordinary Americans go to record levels of unemployment,
At the same time, it endangers the re-election bid of President Trump, who had done such a good job rebuilding the economy over the past three years, only to see it ripped away from him under this pandemic panic.
But it goes beyond that.
Let's look at the actual data in the pandemic data itself.
So according to the various models that originally came out of places like Imperial College in the UK and other places that were relied upon in the West, this pandemic was going to be completely unique.
This virus was going to be unlike any virus in modern history.
So for example, if we look at and contextualize the information by history, we find that in fact most viruses in the modern medical era, in the last century or so, does not have a wide infection rate over a compressed timetable.
On average, what will happen is that a virus will expand at a rate of the worst version of a virus, the Spanish flu, in 1918.
Over a three-month time period, its highest infection rate in any region exposed was approximately 10% of the population.
It then had resurgences in multiple years so that it reached about a 30% infection rate amongst the areas it was able to attack.
But even the Spanish flu, even in 1918, even with all of the limitations at the time on medical care, even with some of the worst sanitation standards you could have of a modern industrial city, even with people crowding into one another in ways that are completely unparalleled to the United States even with people crowding into one another in ways that are completely unparalleled to the United States today, that you might find in some place like India or some other foreign country where you have that degree of urban density within an apartment complex or block, like you might find in Wuhan, but you will not find it in the modern United States,
Even under those circumstances, what happened?
The infection rate was about 10%.
So how is it that these people were now estimating that the infection rate of this virus, to become a contagion, to become a plague-like pandemic, they were predicting was going to have a 60, 70, 80 percent infection rate.
Something that has never happened in the modern history of viruses.
That was the first very questionable assumption that they took.
But it wasn't the only one.
The next questionable assumption that they took was that those who are asymptomatic, that means these are people who get the virus.
In fact, we probably don't recognize it or realize it, but we carry these viruses with us, all kinds of viruses with us all the time, that simply do not infect us.
As one doctor pointed out in Germany, the fact that we have a virus does not mean we have, the fact we have been infected with a virus does not mean we are yet diseased, because we can be asymptomatic like many people are.
And what does that mean?
Well, historically, someone who is asymptomatic has an extremely low rate of spreading the infection because they never get the symptoms that would communicate that disease to others.
Here, however, the supposed experts were predicting that half of the people who are asymptomatic would in fact be spreading this disease.
They were predicting a rate of exposure from asymptomatic people 50 times higher than ever been seen in any other comparable virus.
So that was the second questionable assumption.
The first one was that it would have this extraordinary infection rate that had no basis in history.
Secondly, that it would have a degree of asymptomatic people spreading that infection to others and communicating it to others that had no predicate in history.
And further, third, that it would have a mortality rate, and that it would have a hospitalization rate, and that it would have an intensive care unit rate that paralleled something like SARS or some of the more dangerous swine flu, more dangerous pernicious flus and viruses.
So all of these assumptions were based on, were purely speculation in many cases, completely ahistorical in context, and often based on early data from China that, as a doctor in Germany explained, did not consist with anything connected to history.
But that wasn't it.
That wasn't all.
What happened next was the media hysteria to promote the most frightening context of the virus.
To make the virus seem more threatening than it actually likely is.
This is by doing several tricks of the trade.
For example, most people do not know that 97% of the people who get the flu each year, the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, estimates never get the flu.
I mean, they get the flu, but they never get tested for the flu.
So what happened early was they compared the mortality rate of the coronavirus amongst those who had tested for the virus to the mortality rate for the flu amongst those that they thought had the flu, but not amongst those who had tested for the flu.
So, for example, amongst those who get the flu, often the rate varies year by year, but often about 10% of the people who are tested to have the flu die from the flu.
By contrast, with the coronavirus, the number has estimated anywhere from 0.2% to 4.5%, depending on the country and the location and the timing and the circumstances.
But in any circumstance, that's actually less than the mortality rate compared to the flu.
If we're using the same standard.
So in the end they were assuming that there wasn't going to be this exponential testing range that would reach people who are asymptomatic or simply had mild symptoms about the virus compared to the flu, when in fact they knew, based on the nature of flu-like viruses, that there were likely millions of people who already had the virus around the world who simply were not going to die from it or need severe hospital care.
So that was an area where they misled people from the get-go.
So they tell people, one, it's going to infect people at a rate that's never been heard of, but they deny you access to the historical context for you to know that.
Then second, they tell you that not only that, they tell you that the asymptomatic population is going to spread it at a rate that's completely unheard of, but there again they deny you the context to know that.
And then third, they tell you that it has a mortality rate 30 times higher than the flu, when in fact they're using different methodological standards to assess that.
So once you get past that, you're seeing a media that is attempting to hype and trying to create hysteria and trying to create a panic over this pandemic.
And what is the purpose of that?
Who profits from that?
That'll be some of the issues we examine in this show as we go forward tonight and throughout the week.
Which different economic regimes might profit?
Which different parts of our own economy might profit?
Who profits?
Who suffers?
Who gains?
Who suffers the pain?
That's going to be part of the analysis as to part of the motivation for the press and some politicians to be misleading the public about the scope and scale and the severity of this pandemic and often asserting remedies that are neither proportionate nor narrowly tailored nor necessary to that as is required by the Constitution of the United States of America.
But it goes even further and deeper than that.
As you dig into the data, you start to discover that this virus, like many other viruses, fits a bell curve.
When it first comes out as a new virus, it attacks the most vulnerable populations, has an exponential rate of growth, and then that exponential rate of growth starts to cut as it hits a sort of a wall, starts to come down.
It sort of goes up fast, then it flatlines, and then it goes down fast.
And this is happening almost throughout the entire history of viruses.
Not only that, this is happening all across the world in countries employing completely different reactions to the virus, which suggests that it isn't the quarantine that's leading to these reductions, but is rather the nature of the virus itself and the various degrees of immunities the population has.
Here, two key pieces of data were withheld from the American public.
For example, in this context, we have the live example of the Diamond Princess.
That's a cruise ship that was quarantined for three weeks off the coast of Japan.
There, you had these people locked in to a perfect Petri dish for spreading the disease.
This was a place where you're recycling the air.
They were eating food from chefs they later determined were contaminated.
They were living and sleeping in sheets cleaned by people they later determined were contaminated.
It was a disproportionately elderly and vulnerable and susceptible population to this virus and disease.
And so what did they end up finding out and discovering?
Well, even though they're on that ship for three weeks with recycled infected air, eating food from chefs who themselves were infected, sleeping on sheets from people who cleaned them that were in fact infected, and living next to and being in close, confined, cabined quarters in continuous contact With other infected people, 83% of the people never got the disease or the virus.
And that was over a three-week compressed time period.
This was an early key data signal that, in fact, this virus was more like traditional viruses, while likely more dangerous than the flu because it's a novel virus, because it likely has a higher mortality rate, at least initially, until we develop immunities and vaccines, including herd immunity.
So it's going to be more vicious than the flu, but by no means is it the next play to justify and merit, even in theory, the complete collapse of the American economy and the complete suspension of American constitutional liberties in a way that has never happened before.
Today in America, literally three-quarters of the country live in a town, city, county, or state where they are practically under house arrest.
Where they are deprived of their right of public assembly for either political or church purposes.
Where they are effectively denied their ability or their right to purchase a gun in their own defense.
Where they are denied their right to privacy against various forms of invasion of that privacy and waivers of medical privacy that are occurring on a regular basis.
Who are denied their opportunity of their business, their profession or their property without due process of law and without just compensation under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution and other forms of deprivation that are happening routinely and regularly while criminal inmates are being released from prison and jails and, not only that, police are publicly announcing their stand-down orders that they're not going to arrest people for a wide range of crimes.
It's one thing to actually do that.
It's another thing to advertise to the criminals, here's the litany of crimes you can commit this week with no consequence.
Yet that is the dystopian America that we face.
That is why this show is called The American Countdown.
This is a tick-tock on the clock of the American economy.
This is a tick-tock on the clock of the American constitutional system.
This is a tick-tock on the clock of Trump's re-election capabilities.
This is a tick-tock on the clock of America itself, as it's been defined for over 200 years.
Will it be sustained?
Will it be maintained?
We are seconds away from midnight before we know whether that will happen.
And that is the opening statement tonight as to why the pandemic is more panic than plague, to why the threat to our constitutional liberties, our economy, President Trump's re-election, all, and the definition of America itself, all depend upon the reaction to this pandemic, not the threat of the virus itself.
which is itself a threat, but by no means the scale, scope and severity as the press has led us to believe, nor can it merit, warrant or justify the degree to which it threatens our constitutional liberties, our fundamental economy and the American ideal of what America means and stands for.
Let's look at just let's shift now to the evidence after the opening statement section of the show.
And as part of shifting to that evidence, later on we'll be going to Mike Cernovich.
So we'll be interviewing him and he was one of the top people who was on the front lines of this issue from the very beginning, warning of the risk of the virus given that China had shut down some of its supply chains, a fact it would not have done unless this virus was a real threat.
But he was also one of the first people to recognize the other threat of overreaction, the other threat of Politicians seizing power in manners that threaten our core constitutional liberties and becoming petty tyrants.
He was also one of the first people on the front edge of recognizing the economic trauma and harm being disproportionate and disparate to the remedy being sought.
And he was one of the first people to start pointing out that data didn't support what the modelers were claiming was going to be the next play.
That this was a serious virus, had to be treated as a serious virus, had to be treated as flu-like and more serious and more severe than the flu.
But by no means did it justify or warrant the degree of politician power-grabbing or Wall Street bailouts or corporate money shifts or economic collapse that was occurring in our everyday life, particularly given how the data was not conforming to the apocalyptic estimates that were being projected.
Let's just use one example of that data point.
Let's look at the daily death summary from the number one city that's been hit by this pandemic in America, and that's New York City, Gotham.
So let's look at this sheet, which has the daily data summary of all of the deaths as of March 30th, 2020, as of 4.30 p.m.
as reported by New York City.
First of all, what you notice the total number of deaths as 914.
Now that sounds scary and terrifying and horrifying.
But here's what's not being reported by the press.
How many of those deaths were in people that had no underlying conditions? 14.
We can zoom in on that.
You can see that's the stat that's the most significant and consequential stat in assessing the threat, the mortality rate that this virus poses and propels.
So let's talk about what kind of underlying illnesses they're talking about when they say only 14 people have died that had no underlying conditions in New York and all the rest Basically, that's a rate of, let's see, 98.5% or so, all had not only underlying conditions, but they're not just any kind of underlying conditions.
Those conditions include lung disease, cancer, immunodeficiency, heart disease, hypertension, kidney disease, liver disease.
In other words, they had a bunch of comorbidity conditions, or what are often caused, or often the cause of death.
So what's happening in New York, like what is happening in Italy, like what is happening in Spain, is not only are we getting exaggerated estimates from various modelers who made improper assumptions that were ahistorical and not rooted in the data, but beyond that, we're not getting honest information about precisely what the mortality rate is right now as it's occurring.
So what's happening is people in Italy and Spain and in New York, if you die and you happen to have also had the virus, You are being listed as dying from the virus and of the virus.
When in fact, in other contexts, when they've done other medical studies and surveys, they call this excess deaths.
So they try to look at those deaths that are actually caused by a specific disease and not merely the reflection of underlying conditions that might have been the true cause of death.
In other words, we're panicking over what was really happening in many of these cases is people's cause of death is changed on their death certificate.
Not the fact that they died, not the fact that they were going to die with or without the coronavirus, but that they simply the cause of that death is changing in their death certificate.
Now, by the way, New York is saying that they haven't made a final determination about whether coronavirus is the real cause of these deaths.
And that's why they're being very forthright and forthcoming and saying, by the way, almost all of these deaths are with people who may have, their death may have been caused by something else.
So that's why the relevant statistic you would want to look at from an evidentiary perspective, is you would want to look at the underlying mortality rate in general.
In other words, how much has our mortality rate in the United States gone up?
How much has it gone up in New York City?
Here, the media has done a great job of highlighting numbers that sound scary.
So they talk about, wow, 200,000 people might die in the United States from coronavirus.
Now, included in that is often data of people who may have died of other things that they're just attributing to coronavirus, speculatively.
But on top of that, they're not putting it into context.
In the United States, over 3 million people die each year.
About 40,000, depending on the year, die in automobile accidents.
People die of a wide range of things.
People die of cancer, people die of heart disease.
Those daily death rates make coronavirus look like small change.
But because that context is being removed from the public discussion, from the public debate, from the public square, people don't know how to evaluate and assess the meaning of the big scary charts that they're being given.
And that's why when they see daily data, this kind of summary is not being printed.
So even though it's given out for the world to see, you're not going to see it on NBC or ABC or CBS or anyplace else.
You're not going to see that 99% of the deaths are happening with people who have other severe, deathly diseases, whose life expectancy was very short, who may have actually already died of another disease, may have died of a heart attack and happened to have a virus, but the virus wasn't the cause of that heart attack, had no causative relationship or role with it.
It's so bad that you have people like a young nurse in Spain who committed suicide because she was diagnosed with the virus.
And yet, had that nurse been given proper information and education, she would have known that her risk of dying from that disease, given her age and lack of preconditions of deadly diseases, was tiny, was minuscule, was remote.
And yet that's what's happening.
So constantly we're being given false information.
To give you another example of this, a little sort of data nerd decided to do a study and looked at all the available data, looked at the data coming out of the Diamond Princess, looked at the data coming out of Wuhan.
And here there's been an interesting combination.
Initially, when China was reporting data that showed this as an exponential rate of growth and a dangerous disease, what happened?
Well, the modelers took it all for granted and said it was absolutely true and there was complete reliability and transparency in the numbers from China.
This included data from the WHO studies, US doctors who ended up belatedly being allowed into China.
But as soon as the data from China started to show a different pattern, as soon as that data started showing that this disease was not quite the plague that the modelers and doom and gloomers had forecast, all of a sudden data from China became completely unreliable.
Well if data from China is unreliable then all the models are unreliable because they rely exclusively and entirely on the data from China in the early data set for their bad estimates.
In fact the fact just as the fact that China turned off its chain of supply and its large parts of its manufacturing economy was a key signal that this disease was uniquely dangerous for in ways comparison to the Uh, by comparing it to the flu.
In the same manner, when they turned back on all of their economy, when they started turning back on all of their supply chains, when they started allowing free travel from Wuhan, that means that China figured out something about this disease that was significant that meant that the models were wrong.
And yet by then, the politicians saw an opportunity for an extraordinary power grab.
The media saw an opportunity to build such a hysteria that it would constrict President Trump's ability to act on his initial instincts to reopen the economy and not treat this as like the plague, but just like a severe flu that might be twice or three times as bad as a severe flu.
But treat it like that kind of disease, not the second coming of the Black Plague, not the second coming of the Spanish flu.
And even if you're going to treat it like the second coming of the Spanish flu, use the remedies they did then.
Because back then, if you go and study, and there's a National Geographic study on this, they went into detail about what the cities did.
This is, again, the evidentiary part of the issue.
If you dig into the evidence, the evidence simply does not support the premise that this pandemic is more plague than panic.
What the evidence supports, almost uniformly, is that this pandemic is more panic than plague.
And the evidence of that, additional evidence of that, is present not only in the history, but also in how cities responded in America to the Spanish flu.
All they did for the most part was limit mass gatherings, things you already had to get a license to do, like a concert or a parade or things of that nature.
They shut down schools because of the unique threat the disease presented to young people, which by the way this disease is quite the opposite in that respect, and shutting down the schools may actually create additional exposure and risk.
But other than that, they took no other, they limited some business hours, advised certain degrees of social distancing, but what they did not do was any sort of mass public house arrest.
What they did not do is close down churches.
What they did not do is force people to stay at home.
What they did not do is shut down public rallies and public association for political or religious purposes.
What they did not do is suspend your civil liberty to purchase a gun for your own defense.
What they did not do is free the jails and prisons of their inmates, particularly sex offenders and dangerous criminals.
Even murderers, alleged murderers, are now being released from jail at the risk they may get the coronavirus.
On top of that, they did not do is suspend the economy, take away people's jobs, take away people's occupations, take away people's professions and property without either due process or just compensation.
They didn't do any of that.
And yet they achieved the flatten the curve lecture that we've been receiving from our various health experts.
They achieved that without doing any of that back in 1918.
And that was a time period when our medical systems were far less sophisticated than they are today.
When we had completely unsanitary conditions in our cities.
When people were completely densely compacted in neighborhoods to a degree they are not today.
And yet they were able to achieve what we're purportedly set to achieve here.
So it was another example, another illustration, another demonstration where the removal of historical context.
The removal of context of contemporary data has led to a public hysteria.
A contagion of fear that has infected our public to permit our politicians to seize and steal power in a way that they're not entitled to.
You have the mayor of Los Angeles threatening to shut off people's electricity and utilities if they do not comply.
You have the city of Los Angeles bragging about how they are spying on their own citizens through their own phones to see who they affiliate with, who they associate with, who they travel with.
You have politicians saying you cannot go to a church gathering or you can be subject to arrest, as a pastor was today in Florida, where they were going to actually originally raid the church during his service and arrest him for what?
Unlawful church services.
Unlawful assembly.
That's never happened in the history of the American Constitutional Republic, yet it happened today in America.
That's why it is tick-tock on the clock, and we are within seconds of the end of a doomsday clock for the American experiment, for the American economy, for President Trump's re-election, but beyond that, for preserving any degree of First Amendment or other constitutional liberties in this country.
Let us turn to just a few more little pieces of evidence before we shift to another section of the discussion of the cross-examination section of tonight's show.
Let's look at what's really happening in Italy.
Just as in New York, in Italy they're recording all the deaths as coronavirus deaths, but there's other context being ignored.
For example, Italy was never going to be a good example of what was, in terms of a predictive example, of what was going to happen in the United States.
Now why is that?
That's because Italy has a disproportionately elderly population and where this virus has been most impactful is in northern Italy where you have a lot of older Italians who have lung damage from a combination of a high smoking rate and a high air pollution rate.
Similar to Wuhan where you have large numbers of the people over 65 in China who smoke cigarettes actively and also suffer from various degrees of air pollution worse than many parts of the world.
So that combination of an elderly population with very susceptible and vulnerable lungs from enhanced and damaged by smoking and air pollution Living in a society that has a lot of close, continuous contact in confined quarters between generations made it a perfect petri dish, like the Diamond Princess, for spreading the disease, just like Wuhan was a perfect petri dish for spreading the disease, just like the Diamond Princess, just like this cruise ship, just like Lombardi.
So those examples were never going to present a particularly analogous context for us to be able to meaningfully evaluate it.
As just one example, for years they have been studying and investigating the impact of influenza on the excess mortality in all ages in Italy during between 2014 and 2017.
This is because more than 68,000 deaths attributable to flu epidemics were estimated during this time period in Italy.
And many of those deaths they considered excess deaths.
Now what does that mean?
It means these are deaths that would not have otherwise happened but for the flu.
And they go in and explain this unusual pattern in Italy that's four to five times higher death rate from the flu.
In the United States, particularly impactful in Northern Italy, these kind of data and information not being shared.
Media is hiding.
Media is withholding.
So when we come back on the bottom half of the hour, well, we'll get into a conversation and discussion with Mike Cernovich to discuss what's really happening in the world today in this pandemic.
Welcome back to American Countdown as we discuss the tick tock on the clock of America's future, America's economy, America's freedom, all under imminent risk under the America's freedom, all under imminent risk under the panic reaction to this pandemic.
Partially caused by the pandemic itself, but also largely caused by the press hysteria that has surrounded it.
So we're going to go and interview someone that has been on the cutting edge of this on both sides.
And that's Mike Cernovich.
Mike Cernovich is a lawyer, constitutional lawyer.
I knew him from reading his days when he was a law blogger about various constitutional law issues and a briefer on those issues.
He was a graduate of Pepperdine Law School in Malibu, where I used to live for a long time.
Then Mike sort of went out and branched out into a wide range of areas of public influence, created a self-made platform in the self-made American tradition of economy and politics and success, a true American success story at multiple levels and multiple layers.
You can find him at www.cernovich.com or at Cernovich on Twitter.
You can read his books like Guerrilla Mindset, Or you can watch one of his films that's currently trending and popular on Amazon Prime and elsewhere called Hoaxed.
It's a particularly apt film for the contemporary environment we find ourselves in.
It puts some context.
It's not just from a political right or political left perspective.
It shows how the press's prejudice and bias can adversely impact our public understanding of policy in order to have informed discussion and debate and dialogue in a wide range of contexts.
Mike was one of the first people to recognize the risk that the virus presented because of his following a wide range and diverse set of sources.
In addition, he was also one of the first to recognize that the risk of politicians trying to use this as a pretext to seize power.
Also was one of the first people to recognize the dangers this would inflict on working class Americans economically.
Also one of the first people to recognize that the data was not fully supporting the plague hypothesis.
That was coming out of some of the doom and gloom promoters who are using that plague hypothesis to justify this this power grab by politicians and to justify this Wall Street economic shifting where Wall Street was using it as a fig leaf to create corporate bailouts of unprecedented and unparalleled kind we hadn't seen since the last financial crisis of 2009.
So let's bring Mike in and let's get into the cross-examination section of this show and discuss further the issues that are implicated there.
Hey Mike how are you?
Always a pleasure, Rob.
Great intro.
And I like that you've contextualized how we're in a truly complex place where there was a real problem with coronavirus, but this is being used as an opportunity to take away the rights of people, churches, I read there's a pastor was arrested for holding a church service, mandatory lockdown orders, gun shops being shut down.
So I feel like a little lonely because There's a lot of people who either think coronavirus is going to kill everybody or it's going to kill nobody.
And I'm over here thinking, no, we can we can do more than one thing at a time.
We can walk into a gun at the same time.
It's quite frustrating.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I remember you were one of the first people to warn of the significance of this virus.
I was talking to some people that had connections to the Chinese supply chain, and so I became concerned enough that I ended up skipping CPAC over concerns over how serious this was.
And it was clear that the United States had not fully meaningfully addressed it in a Spanish flu-like context.
But then I became even more concerned when I saw the governmental reaction that it was being used as this pretext for politicians asserting powers that, as you know, as a constitutional lawyer, we've never seen before.
We've never had mass house arrest in America.
We've never had like there's this now this myth out there that quarantines are somehow the right to have mass house arrest.
Quarantines constitutionally were about a sick person and isolating that sick person from causing public harm, not presuming everybody could become sick and use that as a premise or a predicate for it.
I know you mentioned what's been issuing in California and trying to shut down churches that come Easter Sunday that you're willing to engage in civil disobedience and go to church just to challenge this.
I think this almost has to happen when we're seeing pastors in Florida arrested as happened today.
I have potential clients contacting me about threats they've been receiving if they simply organize their church.
People have been threatened.
One person went to church in a state in the middle part of the country.
And they were then doxxed by people on Facebook and they were threatened with burning down their church, burning down their homes, with threats of that their kids were going to be reported to CDC and that various forms of child care centers were going to take people's kids away from them.
We've seen misinformation suppression on the guise that it's misinformation, but in many contexts, it's people simply pointing out a different opinion than the state has or than different parts of the press has.
So from your perspective, I mean, you help produce, direct, create a film like Hoaxed, which goes into the framework for how this can come about.
Can you talk about how the press took a legitimate concern like coronavirus Sure, the hoax angle definitely is everywhere you look.
One of the things that frustrates me is we're now being told every day that the U.S.
for purposes far beyond the scope and scale that the Constitution would permit for this kind of virus. - Sure, the hoax angle definitely is everywhere you look.
One of the things that frustrates me is we're now being told every day that the U.S. has the largest number of coronavirus cases.
Well, what do we base that on?
Well, China.
Wait a minute.
So we're repeating Chinese propaganda.
There's a tweet that I'd unearthed from January 6, 2020, New York Times reporter, one of the chief correspondents in China, and she said, oh, yeah, China's never going to cover up the coronavirus like they covered up SARS.
This is New York Times.
And then we had the WHO on January 14th, I believe, saying, oh, you can't even get this from human contact.
Nothing is going to happen.
And I'm over here thinking, okay, I know this isn't true, because I know factories are shut down completely in China.
And then the media went from comparing it to nothing, saying it was nothing, to now saying we have to give up all of our freedoms, and that they want to ban people from social media.
For example, Jair Bolsonaro, all he did was said, I'm going to go out into public.
I don't think we should shut down our country.
He didn't say that was safe.
He just said, this is what I'm going to do.
That got deleted from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, like that.
So I'm watching overnight where people I respected and people who I guess they talked good game, willfully compliant, just compliant all of this, and then trying to shut down anyone else So for example, I mentioned, you know, church, going to church, and then people, I delete the tweet because people are trying to say that I was incurring others to do it.
But you read that I never said anybody should do it, right?
And I never said I'd go to a full church, it could have been a church with two other people.
There's, I'm a lawyer, I can think of a lot of ways To do it in a manner that if you arrest me, we're gonna be in court for a long time together.
As if I'm just gonna go into some, you know, 100 group of people.
And then people were saying, well, don't even come to my church, use it as a stunt.
And I'm at a point that I don't even recognize my country.
I don't know what country I live in where propaganda from China, blaming our US military for unleashing Wuhan, Posted by China's chief diplomat is allowed on Twitter.
But then if you question any kind of narrative reporting on China, you're banned.
I've never been, I'm 42, never been a hysterical type, never been a type, oh, you know, they're coming to get you, I always thought that kind of, I grew up in gun show culture, where like every election was martial law, I'm like, oh God, not this.
Not this again, Bill Clinton's gonna declare, you know, I've never been that type.
And I'm looking and I don't recognize the United States of America right now.
I mean that's what I've been explaining to people is that this is really worse than martial law.
I mean because martial law just declares the right of the local politician to do certain things.
Here they're actually exercising that right.
You have complete house arrest for most people.
We had a town manager today come out and say he was going to put people on electronic detection so that they could be barred from going Outside of their home or monitor at all times.
The mayor of LA is talking about monitoring people by their phone and checking their associations and affiliations and travel movements.
You literally have to have your papers in order to access certain parts of the country.
In order to go across some state lines.
Like today I flew into the Austin airport and I had to have my papers to show I did not come in from a particular location.
If I did, I wouldn't have been allowed to do anything.
I wouldn't have been allowed to affiliate politically, associate religiously, express myself, pursue my profession, business, or occupation.
None of it.
And like you, I have never witnessed anything like this, and I never thought this day would come, and definitely not come this fast, to where, if you would have told me six weeks ago, they're gonna arrest a pastor for unlawful assembly, I would say, no, that's okay.
I get it.
You know, there may be some day that's a worst case scenario and so forth.
But in the end, we really live in a world that the best predictor of this kind of world has been if you've been watching and listening to someone like Alex Jones, who's been saying this is what people in power want to do.
And whenever they get the opportunity to do it, they will do it.
And we're seeing it live.
We're seeing a dystopian version and vision live in terms of the deprivation of constitutional liberties.
Now, as someone who's a constitutional lawyer yourself, as someone who studied it, reviewed it, blogged on it, commented on it in multiple contexts, the Constitution seems clear that this is not supposed to happen, in the same way that an Austin judge today said Planned Parenthood can continue to exist because the Supreme Court has called it a constitutional liberty and there is no national emergency exception to the Constitution.
But I think, as we both know, from the history of these kind of crises, like Korematsu in the World War II, where they locked up all the Japanese, Under a perceived sense of threat.
These are citizens of America, the United States.
Apologized about half a century later.
But during these time periods of crisis, sadly the courts tend to turn a blind eye.
What do you think the courts will do when people bring challenges, not from Planned Parenthood's behalf, but on free religious expression, free churches, free public rallies, free political movement, the right to compensation, or due process of law before they lose their business?
What's your thought?
Do you think some courts will be able to stand up and step up to the occasion?
Or are we going to see a repeat and repetition of what happened in Korematsu?
Well, with good lawyering, absolutely some judges will stand up against because, you know, if we were doing this as lawyers and, you know, everybody learns this.
Although if you go on Twitter, there's people who are the Solicitor General of the U.S.
who are defending this without doing any kind of analysis.
The analysis is, for example, church, you have a free exercise of religion.
Because it's an enumerated right, compelling state interest applies.
So any law restricting going to church has to be narrowly tailored to a compelling state interest, right?
It has to be both.
So the compelling state interest, part of that prong would likely be met public health, you know, coronavirus or something.
I think a judge would find that.
But the blanket kind of statements I'm seeing, and this included in the county that I live in, they said five people, even in the same family, can't gather together.
Until a lawyer was like, wait, wait, wait, you know, you can't do that.
So what we're, what we're getting right now are these broad edicts, which you can't do.
You can't just say no one can go to church on Easter.
That's not, you'd have to narrowly tailor it.
You would have to say, well, if you go, you know, you have to register thermometers or something.
You can't do a blanket rule like that because it's a enumerated constitutional right.
So that's where I think some judges who are courageous are going to strike it down.
They're going to say this is a blanket statement.
For example, Virginia is a great case.
June 12th.
You can't just say you can't go to church until June.
You can't, right?
That's so not narrowly tailored and time and scope is much too broad.
It's potentially indefinitely.
That's clearly unconstitutional under any kind of, you would fail a law school exam if you didn't at least go through the steps of that stuff.
So one thing, and you know, you and I have talked about this before is you'd mentioned that I was a law blogger and everything.
And I remember where there were like law bloggers who were honest.
And then Trump gets elected and I see these same people.
I don't want to name any names, but one example was a criminal defense lawyer who perpetuated that fake story that Michael Cohen had more damaging info on Trump but Cohen had already pled guilty and every criminal defense lawyer knows that you wouldn't be pleading guilty by now.
That's just not how the law works.
So the public is being willfully misinformed about the law from people who should have some kind of integrity but unfortunately they just don't.
Exactly.
I think one of the other things that we've been talking about it in context, both the impact on the economy, talking about the impact on civil society, and also talking about the degree to which the data showing something bad, something worse than the flu, but not something that's necessarily the next plague to warrant the kind of severe consequences taking place.
And I think we understand that in the context of that within the constitutional review context, you get into what is narrowly tailored to the problem.
And that's like just what you're talking about.
Like, for example, clearly the press can get together and sit a few seats apart from each other to do a Rose Garden press conference.
Or, and you've been inside that press room and seen how dirty and ugly.
I mean, if you talk about a place that was made for disease spread, it's the White House press room.
But the aside from that aspect, you know, they're able to get together.
They're able to sit apart from one another.
Why couldn't a church do the same thing?
And particularly whether it's narrowly tailored to the potential cause or consequence.
And that's where information about the real mortality rate, the real degree of risk comes into play, because it's that balancing of protecting the right of someone's First Amendment expression against the potential risk to the public, and we need to be able to assess just how dangerous and lethal the disease is, under what context it is dangerous, against the make sure we can find other remedies beyond complete bans on constitutional rights.
One of the things that's fascinating is you've been one of the few people Who's been willing to look at the data and when the data came back different than some of the worst plague predictors were forecasting saying we have to include that into the analysis.
One of the fascinating things to me is we went from a place where the press was dismissive of the risk and trying to understate it to all of a sudden now that they see political opportunity in it exaggerating it and overstating it and driving such fear that you see someone like the nurse in Spain kill herself Because she gets the virus not realizing that she still had a great chance to live is just one illustration.
What's your sense of what the press, I mean the film Hoax does a great job of documenting how these things happen and how they repeat and how they reoccur.
It was more like a film that predicted the future as much as it explained the past.
What's from your experience in the film, how do you explain how the media and the press has been successful at convincing people that something wasn't really a risk to something is the worst risk ever?
They went from spreading Chinese propaganda, which is ignore the elephant in the room, ignore the panda bear in the room, nothing is wrong, to now doing Chinese propaganda on the country to terrify people, to make people afraid.
everybody, you need to pay attention to this.
Losing my mind, pay attention.
The way you would shake a friend who maybe is a drug addict or something, get it together, bro.
And then you go, okay, now that you're paying attention, here's the real risk factors.
There's all this poor morbidity.
We probably should just isolate grandma and grandpa, have Uber Eats or something deliver food to them.
There's all these different things we could do.
For example, a friend of mine, his wife's co-worker died of heart disease, but because he had tested positive for coronavirus, that's counted as coronavirus.
And I'm out here like this is the truth.
So what's happening is you're you people are dying.
We do need to protect old people.
We need to find some kind of way.
I think we have the infrastructure.
I think they're all we could do Meals on Wheels.
You know, instead of this $2 trillion or $6 trillion bailout, whatever it is at this point, we could have just said, hey, look, if you're over 65, stay home.
We're going to quote unquote nationalized, but not really.
It would just be some kind of contract.
And the government will give $5 per delivery of food to old people, right?
We could have done that for a lot less than a trillion dollars and kept the economy moving.
Because when you look at the actual data, sure, a friend of mine was 44.
He was on a respirator.
There are risks.
But you don't want to overwhelm the health care system.
He got treatment.
He got healthy.
So the way you do it, If you would just say, hey, look, we're going to make sure the elderly are staying home.
They're being taken care of.
Somebody's checking in on them.
Somebody's bringing food for the rest of you people.
Wash your hands.
Don't be, you know, making out in the streets and being just filthy, you know, degenerate or whatever.
And the economy would still be fine.
Everything would be going along.
But now we're told That everybody has to stay in.
And moreover, if you even leave now, you're some kind of criminal that that's where we are now.
And I see these pictures, by the way, the White House briefing room.
This is a closed space as poor ventilation, social distancing just does not work there.
I can promise you that everybody I can tell you soup do not see is what happens.
You're going through a gate through Secret Service.
Front checkpoint, everybody's touching the same stuff.
You're touching the same plastic containers.
You're putting your things through the same conveyor belt.
You're walking through the same pathway.
And then you're going to this room with no ventilation, breathing in each other's air.
You can, for the show, say, oh, look, we're-- that's hogwash.
I've been there.
It's absolute nonsense.
And so the press is OK with that.
But then if I said, Well, hey, you know, how about for church for Easter Sunday, we just mandate that, you know, you leave two spaces in between every pew, and you do more services, but you do them shorter, right?
Bang them out half an hour, 50 people come in, everybody's got to leave that.
And that again, goes to the naily, narrowly teared requirement of shutting down churches, is that if I can think of this off the top of my head, just while we're riffing on each other, Then you can't tell me that these laws are constitutional, because you can easily come up with solutions.
Exactly.
There's so many ways to have a narrow, narrowly tailored remedy, particularly if we look at historical context.
What's fascinating to me is, back during the Spanish Flu, we did the target population, which then was young, so we closed down schools and colleges.
Now the population happens to be old.
We went to do particular protections for that population, the most vulnerable population.
On top of that, we banned public gatherings, we encouraged social distancing, we limited business hours in such a way that we were going to maximize the ability of people to attend without being in big crowds, and that's it.
Well, we did none of the cities, and all of them managed to flatten the curve of the Spanish flu.
And that was during a time period where our medicine was terrible, our city sanitation was awful, our means of separating people in their public housing and where they lived was far less practicable and manageable than it is today, particularly in places like New York and major cities.
And yet we had great success limiting the scope and scale and the spread of the disease without shutting down our economy.
The other factor that has struck out to me is two components of what's happening economically to the country.
And you're also one of the first people to point this out.
And it's been a little unsettling to me to recognize the degree to which people that have political influence in the way that either you or I, and you have a bigger platform than I, but people that have a serious and significant platform, how few of them are well connected to working class experience or working class people today in the country.
Because I started hearing from people all over the place about, I don't know how I'm going to pay rent.
I don't know how I'm going to pay a hospital bill.
I don't know how I'm going to take care of my kid.
I don't know how I'm going to pay the grocery bill in two weeks.
I don't know how I'm going to pay the car bill.
I don't know how I'm going to pay the utility bill.
And these were concerns happening last week.
And I knew that as long as this extended, as you documented, this was going to be disastrous for people.
They can't just turn on and turn off their lives the way so many in the press and the political and the professional classes can.
And then you compound that, that when we have a serious need for a targeted, another narrowly tailored economic relief effort, almost all of the money goes to corporations in Wall Street.
And the Fed is printing cash like it's nobody's business.
And when a congressman like Thomas Massey points out, well, maybe we should at least vote on it.
He gets demonized and is threatened with expulsion from the House.
This is the same sort of panic driven legislation that you and I both lived through during the 2009, 2008 financial crisis where everybody went on board.
Here you have 96 to nothing.
Even people like Bernie Sanders on the left and Josh Hawley on the right completely, or Ted Cruz on the right, completely capitulate.
Now, interestingly enough, Rand Paul couldn't be there to vote because he had the coronavirus.
It was a little bit interesting the way things worked out there.
Sure, that will have its own conspiracy theories in time.
But it's shocking the degree to which not only is the relief, just as our response, is to overly broad restrict people's constitutional liberties in the name of stopping a pandemic.
Our response to this problem of economic harm that that response has caused is disproportionately to the people who least need it and disproportionately not given to those who most need it.
So, to what degree has your connection and understanding of working class culture and people allowed you to have the kind of diverse sources of information and life experience to present a deeper truth to the public than the press or the politicians have?
Yeah, there should have been two bills.
One, immediate relief to people.
Everybody would have had their money by now.
They could have done that.
They could have passed this bill on the early March.
Everybody by now, basically, they would just say, we're going to give everybody $1,500 or $2,500, whatever it is.
And then if there are guys who have done a little bit better, then you just know that it's a clawback.
So if, you know, you got a check or maybe I got a check or somebody got a check, Then they would say, well, come on guys, you know, get real here.
This is for people making $60,000 a year.
You know, this is for people who are, you know, they really need it.
So everybody would have got the check.
Boom.
One, you know, one lump sum right there.
And then afterwards you have what's called a clawback provision, which would be if you made over a certain amount of money, you're going to have to pay that back for taxes.
You could have done that without bailing out anyone.
Everybody would have their check right now.
And there's a reason they didn't do it that way.
Because in this big omnibus bill that they passed, NPR got $75 million.
I don't know why that wasn't talked about more.
Trump likes to rail about the fake news or whatever.
Public Broadcasting, $75 million.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, $25 million.
They still fired all their people.
That's why they did it.
You know, this is a classic sales line.
You go to the car dealership.
Yeah, you know, not sure I want that car.
Well, if you leave, there's somebody coming in, checking up on it and can't shut up.
Yes, you can.
You can get another car.
You can order it.
Get out of here.
So anytime someone's trying to rush you the way they're trying to rush you is, you know, they're running games.
So Congress ran great game on everybody.
And I'm glad you brought up Massey because Nancy Pelosi banned remote voting.
Because she didn't want her members to have their names on it.
So she wanted to do something called unanimous consent, which is everybody just say yes, everybody says yes, but it doesn't get logged in the way that other votes do where you have to put your name.
You know, they have these little cards, you have to put your card in there and you have to do it.
So people said, well, let's do it remotely.
She goes, can't do it remotely.
So then Massie says, all right, then, I mean, then we got to do it in the House.
Now he's persona non grata.
Trump's attacking him.
Everybody's attacking him.
But that's garbage.
That's exactly.
We come back after the break.
break.
We're going to talk more with Mike about what happens when politicians monopolize the purse strings and what Trump should do moving forward.
Welcome
back to American Countdown and we're having a conversation discussion with lawyer, novelist, writer, mindset, author, film producer, documentarian Mike Cernovich.
the Part of this discussion and conversation and question, and you can find Mike's stuff at Cernovich.com, also at Cernovich on Twitter.
Highly recommend the film Hoaxed, which is particularly apt for what we are facing and dealing with today.
We're dealing with how the media creates stories, how they create narratives, how they decontextualize relevant and pertinent facts.
And it doesn't matter whether you're on the political left or on the political right, the film has application across the board.
There are people in there talking from the Black Lives Matters to people across the political spectrum, independent, libertarian, left, right, you name it.
It's about how the media and how the media architects a narrative and story framework that often misleads and conceals more than it explains and articulates.
It's the kind of narrative that would not work in a real courtroom if facing true cross-examination and meaningful evidentiary standards and had to apply the rules in a consistent manner as that goes.
But back to Mike and let's talk about what the president should do.
You were one of the first people to mention that if the president had gone on top of this back when he should have.
Taking it seriously early, we're not here, period.
Now it's also true, as you've mentioned, is that if the Chinese government hadn't lied to us and lied to the world with the complicity of the WHO, with the complicity of the press, we're probably not here at all anyway.
Nobody in the world is likely here.
They knew about the disease, they hid the disease.
Not only that, they knew about the problem creating the disease.
They've been identifying these related problems coming from the food markets, the wet markets as they call them, from that region for a long period of time.
And in that context, I see what the president is up to next is two different things.
One is short term.
What should he do about the pandemic?
What should he do about the economy?
There's already some ships have sailed in terms of the bailout being targeted to the wrong people.
But what should he do moving forward in that regard in terms of fiscal monetary policy?
He apparently has a couple of trillion he gets to play with that from the Fed that he gets to control.
It's not crystal clear how much that's going to be under his control versus Mnuchin.
And I don't know if Goldman Sachs guys are the best guys to guide us at this time, but it is what it is.
It seems like the president has good instincts that once he realized that he had misread the virus, he wanted to get ahead of it then, a little late, but hey, better late than never, and recognize the economy was having too much harm and wanted to sort of pause it at some level or at least reopen parts of the country, make it a more narrowly tailored set of public policies rather than this broad bazooka style effect on our economy.
But it appears to me, one of the things you've been pointing out all the way back to when he let General Flynn go, Is that he has been isolating himself and surrounding himself with people who do not support his agenda, do not agree with him, do not back him.
I don't think anybody has any doubt that as sensible and nice and I think well-meaning as someone like Fauci and Borks are, they probably voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
So they're not going to have Trump's best interest and just the nature of that position.
If I'm a public health official, all my risk is if I underestimate the virus, not if I overestimate it.
Nobody's going to punish me and fire me if I overestimate it.
I'm going to get crucified, maybe prosecuted, if I underestimate it.
And so in that context, the president's not, I don't think, getting the best advice and the best guidance.
He's made some mistakes along the way, both in the bailout bill and in late response.
What do you think he should do now in the short term as we move forward?
Then we can talk later about what some of the long term things to do.
to do vis-a-vis China, vis-a-vis migration, vis-a-vis changing supply chains, and how this really presents an opportunity if Trump seizes it.
But let's go first.
What do you think he should do in the short term?
Well, in the short term, I've seen him doing things that he wanted to do on immigration that he couldn't have done before because all the air is, you know, all the oxygen is So there's some stuff that he's doing that, just for the record, I'm kind of a softie on deportations and, you know, it makes people mad when I say it, but that's just always been kind of my perspective on it.
But they're realizing that their average now deportation is like 96 minutes.
And that article is like buried.
The only reason I found that is because I follow, you know, lefty, far left, every kind of account.
And even there, it's only like one little sliver of the day.
Everybody else is too busy fighting over the mic, the MyPillow guy.
So he can do a lot of things that maybe would have not, he might gotten more scrutiny for in the past.
The economy stuff though, I still unfortunately haven't found a solution, man.
I've been saying this, rent's due April 1st.
The coffee shop I go to, they let someone go already.
I'm like, what are you going to do about rent?
He's like, you know, I don't know.
Subway, these big, because people think Subway's a big corporation.
Subway's are franchise owned.
How many subway, regular guys like you and me, you work hard, maybe you can afford to buy one for a little bit of passive income, but you're only getting sometimes $18,000 to $22,000 on a subway store.
People think you're getting rich.
And no, no, you're just creating other businesses that can generate some kind of passive income.
So the average Subway franchisee is like, you know, $18,000-$22,000.
So what's that guy going to do?
Go bankrupt or just say, well, you know, I'm just not going to pay.
Nobody can pay it.
There was a number of restaurants like that who are going to do it.
I did a poll earlier today, over 10,000 people answered.
10% said they're just not going to pay their mortgage or their rent.
That might not sound like much, but that's massive.
Our system can maybe take a 3% default rate.
Maybe.
There's no way in the world that can handle a 10% default rate.
So right now, the best thing Trump can do is what he does best is Listen to his bass when they yell loud enough and then stay in that kind of OODA loop and just realize we're gonna have to wait till April 1st or April 2nd and then get a Picture of the economic battlefield and how bad it's really gonna be there might be 50 million people out of work What do you do?
Well, I don't know we could do infrastructure.
We still have terrible.
You know, my Wi-Fi is garbage, dude I travel all over the world and You land you get a little SIM card and Unlimited data, 20 bucks, lasts you a whole month, and you have better reception in Budapest, Hungary, Thailand.
I've had better reception in Thailand than in many, many parts of America.
So maybe he does a massive infrastructure, which is what he should have done in the first place, a massive infrastructure bill, get our fiber optics installed, but then the problem is the 5G stuff and He's not in a position that I would envy, that's for sure.
No doubt about it.
And what do you think long term?
This could be a paradigm shift in particularly revealing how, as you've been talking about, how dependent we are for core supplies from China.
Things like our basic medicines, things like our basic antibodies.
As people are discovering a lot of the masks, other things like that, completely dependent on China, in ways we were, and of course we're now finding that a lot of those supplies are inadequate.
So independent of the supply chain question and problem, independent of the virus problem that can come with that degree of global interaction and interdependency, you have things like them shipping a bunch of masks that don't work to Czechoslovakia and other countries, or the Czech Republic and certain countries.
So, what do you think long term?
I mean, there's people, I think people like Steve Bannon, who's still much, I think, overhyping it now and underestimating the scale and scope of the impact.
But putting that aside, I think part of the reason is Bannon truly believes that this will present a unique opportunity for things like a restart with China, where basically we restore U.S.
domestic manufacturing, we deleverage from the global economy, and particularly the massive shifting of jobs to China.
On the other hand, I see an economic system that is very fragile.
As you've been noting, much of the economy has been built, the stock market has been built on corporate buybacks, leverage from corporate debt to keep pension funds afloat in ways that people don't even realize how that impacts purchasing power and credit access in the everyday economy.
Once that bubble bursts, it can have a cascading effect.
They'll make 2009 look more like 1929.
And we have all of these risks out there, which I think a lot of people underestimate, particularly within the professional and pundit and press class, because they really don't understand the core of American economics and the everyday experience of working-class Americans.
In that context, and those people, there's some of those people that are saying that China will benefit from this.
We'll be shutting down our economy for months on end, while they can tune up their manufacturing, replace us in the international supply chain, basically lend us money to buy their products, in the same way we did to Europe after World War II.
So I see completely conflicting, contrasting, competing visions of how this pandemic will ultimately result in a paradigm shift.
What do you think Trump can do long term to make that the most beneficial for the American people?
Yeah, he had an executive order on bringing back domestic manufacturing he's talked about.
The best thing he can do is purge all these free traders, whatever that scam is, doesn't work.
This hasn't been done yet.
You're just like, okay, you're with AEI, you're gone.
You're gone.
You're with Heritage, you're gone.
You people are all idiots.
You don't know anything.
You're all gone.
You destroy the country.
Kick them all out of the house, so to speak.
You know, he's got Mnuchin in there.
Who's Mnuchin looking out for?
The person making $15 an hour?
I mean, come on, let's be real here.
So Trump has made some bad decisions.
Now, Bannon's thinking is that if there's enough rubble, but there'll be a lot of rubble, then we can rebuild completely dependent on China.
I don't know that America has that spirit anymore to actually do that.
What I'm seeing is quite frankly disappointing.
Things can change quickly, I do know that.
But I'm seeing a lot of capitulation.
I'm seeing a lot of people saying, sure, you tell me I can't go to church.
I'm not going to say that maybe, why can't I go to church with 10 people and social distance the way the press press corps does in D.C.
Not seeing anything like that.
So I don't know that there is going to be this renewal of the American spirit.
This might be more like when the, you know, the barbarians started invading Rome a little bit.
Well, Rome didn't fall in a day or even fall in 50 years or 100 years.
But this could potentially be a bad blow for America.
China steps up as a world manufacturer.
Because remember, they're back in business.
We're not.
We're gone until June, maybe.
Who knows?
And what are we doing?
Nothing.
Just losing jobs, printing more and more money.
So I'm not seeing that spirit that we need.
But the flip side to that is Trump is providing good morale.
We've got to look at the data whenever we can.
And the data says that his press conferences are bigger than Monday Night Football, his approval rating is at a record high, and the media's, they've been the only people where their reputations declined, right?
Everybody else is rising to the occasion, so Trump is doing a great job providing morale, leadership, but policy-wise, there are a lot of things that he needs to do.
I think this is going to be a fascinating test on a subject that you've talked a lot about, which is mindset.
I think Trump really believes he can keep and improve confidence in the economy no matter what happens, and he thinks he can boost confidence when we come back on, and that that will be enough, and that he's sort of a master of mindset and of creating that mindset in the public.
And I think, hopefully, he will expand on this.
He did a good job of including gun purchases as an essential item.
Really, all constitutional liberties should be included as essential activities.
If you're engaging in any constitutionally protected activity, that should be seen as essential.
The Fed should define it as that.
Give it to all the cities, counties, and states, so they're under massive political pressure to reverse course on those areas.
And that would create a perfect opportunity and a good, perfect storm to support litigation, if necessary, if there are any wayward or rogue politicians who did it.
But in the end, it's going to come back to his capacity to adjust on the fly, to rely on his instincts, and to see whether mindset can matter even over all of this institutional opposition and difficult structural issues that he faces, given that the policy responses to date have often been inadequate and sometimes off course.
And I agree with you, I think the biggest key is, Ordinary, everyday American people.
I think people forget, those who answer Paul Revere's call, it's ordinary people, it's good people, resisting what bad people want to do, that give us hope for the future.
And I think that's one of the things that you have done, Mike, in your own personal life and personal example.
And could you tell people where they can find films like Hoaxed, other things like that, that really, one, a lot of folks are sitting at home, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily right now, so looking for good things to watch.
But this, I think, is particularly informative, engaging, not only entertaining, that helps explain the past, but predict the future and give sort of informative guidance about how they can do simple, basic, everyday things that can hopefully change the narrative to make their lives and other lives better.
Yeah, well now more than ever, you can never give in to despair.
Despair is, you know, maybe I'm rediscovering Christianity just based on the evil that you see in this world now, but despair is a very demonic emotion.
We're seeing that with suicides.
There was a German finance minister who committed suicide over coronavirus, or so they say.
Other people have different theories about it, but I tend to believe that people do, you know, especially men in their 50s, that's a very high suicide risk just at any kind of time.
So right now the media, they want you to despair.
They're yelling at Trump.
Remember they said he's giving people false hope?
Hope!
Have they never read the literature, the idea, the literature that came when people were in the Holocaust, where they said if they had nothing to live for, right?
Wiesenthal, if they had nothing to live for, that they would have died, that the only thing that would keep them moving, and this, I'm not comparing this to concentration camps, of course, because I can just see, you know, that trying to spin up.
But in the most dire times, the only thing that can get people through that is hope, hope for the human condition, hope and belief in God, hope and the belief that knowing that other people love you and value you and want you to make it and they'll be there for you, and also the realization that I don't know if this should make people feel better, but everybody's kind of screwed, really.
It doesn't matter who you are, right?
We're just all kind of screwed.
So I'm telling people that, you know, I get a lot of stories that are really sad.
I'm like, look, man, just lean into it.
I'm screwed.
I don't know anybody.
I don't care where you are.
I don't know anybody who's not screwed right now.
People see in businesses 40% overnight.
Everybody's hurting.
And I think that people should lean, you know, lean into that and talk to each other.
And know too that they are trying to make you feel despair.
Hope always wins over despair.
Exactly.
It's a good lesson from the movie Hoax.
It's a good lesson from your book Gorilla Mindset.
It's also a good lesson from a book I used to read when I was 12 years old after my father passed away when I was young.
A book called Art of the Deal, which said always plan.
My favorite part of the book was plan for the worst.
Hope for the best.
And if you live with hope, then that's how you thrive and survive and succeed.
So thanks a lot, Mike, for coming on.
Thanks a lot for participating.
And people can find you at Cernovich.com, also find you at Cernovich on Twitter, and you can find the film Hoax.
I know on Amazon Prime, that's where I got it.
Where else can people find that film if they want to see it or download it?
Yeah, it's on iTunes, Amazon, Hulu.
It's actually everywhere by now.
Much to my pleasant surprise, there haven't been mass calls To ban it, which I think the reason is because when we made it, we made it so, like, lefty friendly that anybody who would try to, you're just like, oh, come on.
Black Lives Matter is in there, like, presented in their best face, and we just treat everybody fairly.
We're even critical of some of our friends who were said, go at me, you know, you could present some critical commentary about me too.
So we made it that way.
So, so far, it's everywhere.
You never want to be taken down.
And I did want to plug this book, Man's Search for Meaning.
This is a book I was trying to think about where, you know, it's about a person where, you know, he was in the death camps.
And, you know, how do you find meaning when you're going through a suffering that is incomprehensible to the modern age?
Solzhenitsyn has written other things and you really have to just look beyond yourself You have to realize that everything you're going through is spiritually going to build you to a better person.
Suffering is going to happen.
Everybody's suffering.
I don't know anybody.
I woke up three in the morning.
I usually sleep like a dream.
Everybody's suffering right now.
You cannot let the despair mongers, cannot let the demons get into your ear.
Fantastic.
ever let you despair hold on to hope it's going to get better it might not be better april 1st but it's going to be better because of people like us and trump and even some liberals are trying to help out so together i think we're going to push through it fantastic thanks a lot mike as we review this and discuss this is sort of in detail what mike was talking about
it goes back to an old lesson that nelson mandela taught which is that once he learned that he was the captain of his own soul that he was the master of his own fate that he could seize power even while being imprisoned physically The Medgar Evers said something similar when he was during the Civil Rights Movement and he was being routinely and regularly threatened.
And what he said was, when they asked him why he wasn't afraid to die, he said, most men die a thousand deaths every day.
I'm only going to die once.
As a kid, I found that extraordinary and wanted to imitate it and reflect it the rest of my life.
So for ordinary everyday people, there are means we can all take in our individual lives to make a difference, to resist this degree of the state trying to deprive us of our constitutional liberties, to the degree to which our politicians want to suppress economic growth or development or redirect it to the privileged few and the politically connected.
We can take action, substantive action, meaningful action, real action that can make a difference.
As we shift into this next stage of the discussion after cross-examination, we're going to do jury questions.
We're going to allow you to call in and ask the questions that you want.
And for the bottom, large part of the bottom half of the hour, you'll get one minute to ask your question, to frame it.
So think about it.
Think about what you want to ask.
Think about what you want to inquire about.
It's an opportunity to get any question you want answered.
And we can discuss it and debate it as best we can.
The number is going to be 1-512-646-1776.
be 1-512-646-1776.
So that's area code for domestically. This is if you're within the United States. Area code 512-646-1776.
If you're international, anywhere in the world today, because many of you in Canada, in places like Australia, places in Western Europe, in the UK, all around the world, you're being suppressed of your ancient liberties, you're having your economy removed from you, underneath you.
And are facing these same risks and the same questions and same issues.
And that number is 877-789-2539.
That's 877-789-2539.
is 877-789-2539.
That's 877-789-2539.
And we look forward to your calls and inquiries.
As usual, there are ways in which what we're witnessing today is not a surprise.
What we're witnessing today is something that extraordinarily, it's a surprise and a shock at a certain level that most Americans would go along with it.
But it's been forecast and predicted by film and by TV shows of a wide kind for quite a while.
For example, take the ever prescient Simpsons.
Let's show one of the clips the Simpsons had for how can a government seize power in a way that the public will be completely compliant with and accept and not question or challenge.
So let's go to that clip from the Simpsons episode some years ago that forecast where we are today.
I'd like to call to order this secret conclave of America's media empires.
We're here to come up with the next phony baloney crisis to put Americans back where they belong in dark rooms, glued to their televisions, too terrified to skip the commercials.
Well, I think... NBC, you are here to listen and not speak.
I think we should go with the good old-fashioned public health care.
Yeah.
A new disease.
No one's immune.
It's like the summer of the shark, except instead of a shark, it's an epidemic.
And instead of summer, it's all the time.
Now I hate to be the guy who derails what everybody else loves.
He loves being that guy.
But Janice, we do have standards.
This can't be a made-up disease.
The only moral thing to do is release a deadly virus into the general public.
We do have something we've been holding on to, but it hasn't been tested.
Get over here, NBC.
We certainly believe in testing, but I... Oh!
Wow!
Wow!
Oh yeah!
So, we've got our deadly disease.
Now, we just have to blame it on something that's in every household.
Something that people are a little bit afraid of already.
House Cat Flu is coming, people!
The Center for Disease Disinformation predicts with some degree of probability that the House Cat Flu might spread in the following hypothetical outbreak pattern.
So, Petter, beware.
That warm body on your lap just might be ready to destroy your tender fiddles.
Springfielders are advised to stay tuned for more information if they experience any of the following symptoms.
Mild thirst, occasional hunger, tiredness at night.
That is the world in which we reside today in many ways.
Once again the Simpsons have forecast the future and just by understanding the nature of power and how that power can be misused and abused under the guise of a public health crisis.
The same sort of concern about how in which the government will misappropriate its power in this context was also forecast and foreshadowed frequently in the show X-Files.
So as they talked about the way you control the disease is you control the information.
Much as what we've seen, we've seen them control information about the contextual history of viruses, showing us a different data path than what was projected by the modelers.
Equally, we've also seen them remove the data about the fact that most of the people who are dying are people who had very short life expectancies or may have died of something other than the coronavirus.
That's the only 14 people from New York who had no pre-existing conditions who died of the virus.
Meaning the virus is not a risk to most Americans.
Meaning there's ways in which they don't have to panic and we don't have to remove their civil liberties or suspend them and we don't have to shut down our economy to achieve it or attain the outcome and desired result.
In the same sense, the X-Files predicted and forecast which kind of agencies would be involved, how those agencies would be involved.
But let's just go to one of those clips about how if we control the disease, the way we control the disease is we control the information, just like The Simpsons forecast some years ago.
I don't care who you are or what your business is.
I want you out of here right now.
Not until I get some answers.
You're in violation of federal statutes.
I'm a federal agent, sir.
Who are you on the phone to?
To my partner who needs to know if the men he's pursuing are infected.
That information is unavailable.
Well then I want to see charts and I want access to the infirmary.
you see what I let you see come in Thank you for seeing me at this late hour, sir.
What is it, Agent Mulder?
This case we've been assigned, I believe we've been misled.
Possibly deceived.
Deceived?
By whom?
Whoever originated the case.
What is the accusation, Agent Mowden?
That Agent Skelly and I were sent on this manhunt without knowledge of the existence or nature of a contagion?
What is the exact nature of the contagion?
It's deadly.
It kills within 36 hours.
One escaped convict was infected.
He's dead now.
The other man may be infected.
He's on the loose.
Does anyone know how it's communicated?
Whether it's a virus or bacteria?
We just know that over a dozen men have died from it, and it appears to be highly contagious.
Then you don't know much, Agent Moore.
Why weren't we told the truth?
We didn't know the truth.
What we knew would only have slowed you down.
But innocent people could be infected.
What you knew could have prevented that.
Oh.
In 1988, there was an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in Sacramento, California.
The truth would have caused panic.
Panic would have caused lives.
We controlled the disease by controlling the information.
You can't protect the public by lying to them.
It's done every day.
Done every day.
We control the disease by controlling the information.
Don't believe that's happening here in the United States?
Well, looking aside from the issue of all the data that you have not received, data about, for example, parts of Italy that have the disease and have the rate of disease, a lot of that disease coming from people who are not residents of the area, so it may be connected to migration patterns, including major Wuhan migration, working in factories in northern Italy, so they can claim that the product was made in Italy when really it's made by Chinese immigrant workers on behalf of a Chinese-owned company.
You haven't seen data and information about the history of Italy's flu epidemics and why they were particularly susceptible in a way that was not reflective of the United States or would be predictive of it.
You haven't seen data and information about how the history of viruses showed that this was not going to have the infection rate or the contagion rate or the spread rate amongst asymptomatic people.
As was wrongly and incorrectly forecast by some of the key models and some of the key experts in press.
You haven't seen data and information about how the mortality rate within cities and regions is actually either staying the same or in some cases going down.
It's going up in some places, like Northern Italy, but it's actually flatlined or below it in large parts of the United States.
You haven't seen that information.
But it's not just the lack of information and the information that's withheld from you, there's also materially false information.
Let's look at this clip from CBS which claims to be about how badly this is impacting American and New York City hospitals.
I don't care who you are or what your business is, I want you out of here right now.
And so you see here, you see this, they're showing this important footage.
It's one of the most advanced hospitals in Europe.
So what you see at the top is you see CBS claiming this is about New York, and on the bottom it claims it's from what it actually shows, it's Sky News, it's from Italy.
It's from someplace other than New York City or the United States.
So it's meant to create this scary image of all these sick individuals in this compressed hospital environment.
But in fact, the truth is they're showing something that's not happening yet in the United States, may not even happen in the United States, though it does often happen in the flu context.
You'll see multiple stories over the years in which the flu leads to war-like conditions in hospitals across the country when it reaches a peak problem.
This is because there's always been an overcapacity question or problem in this regard.
So when we come back on the bottom half of the hour, we'll take your questions as the jury.
Whatever questions you have.
Whether this pandemic is more panic than plague.
Whether or not the political response is reasonable or unconstitutional.
Whether or not the economic shutdown is justified or dangerous.
You have your questions.
You ask them.
We'll answer on the bottom half of the hour when we come back.
Welcome back to American Countdown.
As we go to you, the jury, for your questions, for your inquiries, for what you think about tonight's discussion, whether this pandemic is more panic than plague.
Let's first go to Mike in Spain.
How are you?
Good, thank you, sir.
Hi.
Yeah, I'm currently stuck in Spain.
Obviously, I'm from the UK, originally.
I lived in Spain for a couple of years, never seen anything like this.
We've got the army on the streets here, lots of things stopped and reported, you can't go to the shop to buy cigarettes, the police are stopping you constantly, not to produce identification.
There's obviously a lot more going on here than we've been told.
So basically you have no practical rights.
You're living, I mean, it's not meaningfully different than Berlin 1975, it sounds like.
Yeah, basically.
I mean, they tell you to go to the supermarket or to the pharmacy.
These are the two things that you're allowed to leave the house for.
Well, basically, you've got to carry your identification with you.
And I've had to start taking a large shopping bag with me to identify the fact that I am actually going to the supermarket.
And I'm still being stopped two or three times per time I leave the house by the Spanish police, the Guardia Civil, and the local police.
Yeah?
Questioning where I am going, which supermarket I am visiting.
I'm to go directly there.
I have friends who have dogs.
You can't go 100 metres from the house with a dog.
You have to stay within 100 meters of your home, I think.
Wow, that is incredible.
Thanks, Mike, for that.
It shows the dystopian world we have come to exist in, in a place where things that people never thought they would see, that many of our great-grandfathers and grandparents, that people are saying, hey, let's protect grandma and grandpa.
Well, they fought a war and risked their lives in order to live in a country that would never see this day.
And that's true for many people all around the world and all of Europe.
So the fact that we're seeing it today, this dystopian system in society where you'll be checked for your papers when you walk outside of your home, and that you're only permitted to go to the supermarket or the pharmacist and no place else.
You're only allowed to go to the state-supported place.
You can't have any unlawful assembly, unlawful association, whether it even be for religious or political purposes.
We're seeing something extraordinary.
Now one thing that's fortunate is that our sponsor provides an opportunity.
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There was a joke going around about what that would look like.
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Would it be limited to vegetarian food only?
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You don't have to agree with all their perspectives, but it's an important source so that you can decide what information is important and you can decide whether that information influences your perception of events.
You don't have to agree with it, but that power should be yours, not anyone else.
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At least so far.
It's as good a reason to buy and stock up now as any other because who knows what rights are taken away from us tomorrow.
Who knows what sites we're allowed to see and read and not tomorrow, because we live in a dangerous tick-tock clock time, where the clock is ticking closer and closer and closer to midnight of the American dream, of the American constitutional system, of the American Constitutional Republic, of the American economy, of Trump's re-election, of the future of our country, and the idea and ideals it has upheld, and many people have lived and died for, for 200 years.
So let's go to another member of the jury and talk to Mark in Tennessee.
You have one minute, go ahead, ask your question.
Hey, Robert, you're doing a great job.
This big issue comes down to, can Trump, if he gains a little bit of wisdom and listens to you again, open up the country and force places like New York, Connecticut, California, to lift all those restrictions and go to, as you said, the constitutionally approved businesses?
Doesn't he have that power?
There's no doubt that he can.
And the question is, will he?
I think his instincts, deeply, the President's instincts.
I've had the privilege to meet him and the privilege to watch him over a long period of time and appreciated his public thanks to me and the comments that I made and support.
And he supported those in talking about the importance of reopening the economy.
And I think he recognizes that.
I think he realized that.
I think he, if he could set his timetable, it would already be reopened.
And it would definitely be reopened by Easter.
But all the people around him are telling him, Mr. President, if you do this, two million Americans are going to die on your watch.
If you do this, then you're going to be known as the greatest murdering president of Americans in history.
You already have people like Nancy Pelosi threatening and saying that they're going to use potentially impeachment or other review authorities to challenge and question and contest what he's done to date.
So what he's facing is this huge pushback from all the politicians, from all the people in the administrative class that surround him, who do not share his instincts, who do not share his agenda, who do not share his passion for the country, who do not share his instincts by any measurement.
And so what everyone may say about President Trump, by no question, he has some of the best political instincts in the history of this country.
And he made clear what those instincts were when he made his response to me and to other people and saying that he wanted the economy reopened quicker rather than later.
I think as a businessman, he understands what this means for the ordinary worker.
He understands what this means for the ordinary American business.
And I think he wants to make a difference.
But as you know, the problem is the people that surround him, the people that are pushing him in a different direction, the people that are trying to push back against him, the people that are trying to prevent him and preclude him from taking meaningful action.
So thank you, Mark, for your question.
Let's go to the next member of the jury.
Let's go to Jimmy from Washington.
Yes, sir.
Thank you for taking my call.
Absolutely.
My question is, my local city council behind closed doors just gave the mayor emergency powers, and one of the first things he did was ban all carry and even conceal carry weapons from the general public, except for police and military personnel in line of duty.
How can we protest or combat that when we're on lockdown like this?
That's extraordinary.
So you're seeing it across the country.
The president has now said that gun stores are essential businesses.
So that at least removed that threat from the near short term, which a lot of cities, counties, and states were doing.
In fact, it was so bad in LA that the mayor in LA had committed to effectively not only shutting down gun stores on the grounds they were not essential businesses, but he was going to send the sheriff door to door to arrest them if they were still operating.
And if that didn't work, then he was going to take the next step up.
And that next step up was he was going to cut off their utilities, their heat, their water, so maybe they'll die while they're working inside.
I mean, it's that kind of extreme action by these politicians.
There's been the NRA and other people associated with Second Amendment rights, including me and other lawyers in the country, said we were going to be bringing suits soon.
Uh, and that led the president to correctly take action to protect gun stores across the country by saying they're essential infrastructure under the emergency guidelines issued by the president and the White House.
And that has effectively reopened those gun stores across the country.
But that opens up to your question, because as the mayor of New Orleans threatened to do, as mayors in Illinois and Indiana threatened to do, what the politicians have said was that their next step was that they were going to start banning guns or they were going to shut down or furlough or lay off some number of workers in the background department.
What that means is before you can purchase a gun, you have to pass a background check.
And many of the critics of these background checks long warned that the government would misuse this not only to have a surveillance system in place to know who owns what, where, and come and take it when and where they want to.
But on top of that, a second step in which they can effectively delay your purchase of a gun potentially interminably by simply never like having a Brazil-like, in the movie Brazil, not the country Brazil, a Brazil-like system of bureaucratic ineptitude that leads to you never being able to actually get your gun that you a Brazil-like system of bureaucratic ineptitude that leads to you never being able to actually get Well, now they're reaching in, as you're talking about here, a third step.
So there are people who have reached out to me, and I am working with a bunch of lawyers across the country, including a legal organization that I helped start called Free America Law Center that you can find at freeamericalawcenter.com.
And you can ask there and inquire there for anybody who has questions about lawsuits and legal actions in that regard.
They're coordinating the response to this issue.
So they're going to be involved in going at lawsuits all across the country against cities, against counties, against states, against mayors, against town managers.
And things like what you described, Jimmy, are completely inappropriate.
They're completely unconstitutional.
And we're going to be taking legal action to try to vindicate people's rights all across the country.
It may be an uphill battle initially with courts who may be blind and deaf to the problem as they live in this panic pandemic environment.
But we're hopeful that ultimately the Constitution will win out as it has for most of the last 200 years.
Thank you, Jimmy.
Let's go to John in Florida.
Hey, Robert.
Pleasure speaking with you.
God bless America, brother.
Yes, sir.
I have a comment.
This is an important comment that I gotta get out, and I strongly have this in my heart.
Everybody's forgotten about Soleimani, and there's no way in the world that we assassinated somebody that was as popular as that individual was, where millions and millions came out for a week straight, if not more, and had processions for this individual.
We killed this guy, this Iranian, Felemani.
I honestly believe in my heart one of his sleeper cells, or a sleeper cell, went ahead to Wuhan because they knew that people were going to be going everywhere from the Chinese New Year, unleashed the bioweapon there, now here it is going everywhere, and now starts The blame game, because Iran at the end of the day would be smart enough to use this as a proxy war to get China and America to share with each other and point each other down.
And one final thing.
Everybody keeps on saying the same thing.
Oh, the flu killed this many people.
It don't matter.
If this is a bioweapon and it killed one individual, It's a whole game changer.
It's not a flu.
It don't matter.
It was a weapon.
It killed a human being.
And guess what?
It's killing thousands.
A weapon is killing thousands of people.
Not a natural phenomena.
A weapon.
People need to realize this is a weapon and we're being attacked.
And that's it, brother.
God bless America.
And everybody remember, the world is filled with kings and queens that will blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
Thank you, sir.
I mean, I think that whatever the origins of this disease are, and there's always going to be questions and controversies, simply because the Chinese government routinely and repeatedly and flagrantly lied about what was happening.
So the concerns and suspicions arise from the fact that, for example, as Yahoo is reporting today about a story that, in fact, back in 2018, you had U.S.
customs and border officials picking up Chinese scientists who are carrying flu viruses and other diseases around with them in their luggage.
There's been concerns about the degree of security of these biolabs.
There is, of course, a biolab very close to the wet market in Wuhan.
In addition, there's concerns.
So that by itself is going to raise concerns.
You have exploration and experimentation in biolab behaviors that unless clear security is protected, you have all kinds of risk.
You have risk from it simply getting out.
You have risk from someone in there selling it on the black market.
You have someone, you have risk of someone trying to actually deliberately contaminate it.
You have risk that governments will experiment on their own populations in ways that go AWOL.
And we have to remember, as MKUltra exposed and other projects that were exposed in the 1970s that were going on for 30-40 years, the governments around the world have had a long and notorious and ugly history of this kind of experimentation on their own populace.
This is not something that is radically new or a departure.
And we cannot simply completely foreclose it as a possibility when we investigate.
Like the investigation Congress should be launching is not an investigation into President Trump for how he has tried to respond and handle this within the best capacity that he can.
They should be launching an investigation into how this happened in China in the first place.
How did a disease that even if it had no connection to the biological labs, and there is an implicit allegation in a recent class action suit filed here in the United States against the government of China, that this virus was released because of commercial activity by China, including that the Chinese government was at some levels complicit in its disclosure and complicit in its cover-up.
We have no question they were complicit in the cover-up.
As of January 14th, They had the World Health Organization telling everybody that this disease was not even communicable between humans.
They didn't even admit that otherwise until January 21st.
So within either six weeks, eight weeks, four weeks, however long it actually was since China had real knowledge of the virus, which various whistleblower doctors were trying to expose within China, the fact that they covered it up.
In such a way, is always going to lead to sincere and serious inquiry about the degree to which they were complicit in it being unleashed in the first place.
Because we know that if China had done their duty, if China had done their job, this disease wouldn't be here today.
That we know without doubt.
If they hadn't lied, they hadn't covered it up, we wouldn't be here.
We're here because of that.
So at a minimum, China is responsible for this disease spreading around the world, whether or not they created it or not, even if they had nothing to do with its initial release, which is something that needs to be thoroughly and fully investigated, given this is China, given the nature of allegations in the past, documented investigations in the past, questions in the past about how they're handling bioweapons, how they're handling these investigations.
Not only that, you have a situation and a circumstance where China has known for better than a decade that its wet markets are a petri dish for virus spread.
This has been an issue that's raised in articles from the National Institutes of Health across the entire globe, including within China itself, that said these wet markets that sell bats, that sell all kinds of strange animals, that still sell dogs, that sell all kinds of things for consumption.
And I've been to China, I've been to Hong Kong, and I've seen those markets.
There are crazy markets in terms of what gets consumed there.
They've known that's been a problem for a long time and yet have not taken remedy.
And because they have not taken remedy, it has led some to believe that in fact they want to use it as an easy pretext to release and test a virus on its own population and populations around the world.
These are why these concerns are raised.
Now, do we have enough evidence to support that at this stage?
No, we do not.
Does that mean that no such evidence exists?
No, it does not.
So we need to fully investigate but at a minimum hold China accountable and responsible for what they have done.
They have chosen to have this virus spread by the way in which they chose to cover it up and be complicit in that from its inception.
That alone warrants further investigation.
That alone warrants real consequence.
The West and America and the ordinary American should not bear the brunt of the price and the burden for China's crimes.
And let's go to one more question from the jury.
Let's go to, I think it's Christopher in Rhode Island.
Hey, what's going on?
How are you?
Pretty good.
How you doing?
Doing good.
Okay, so my question is, do you think that Trump's being compartmentalized and that they're avoiding giving him information about this, accurate information about this?
Yeah, that's why he's kind of going along with things.
I think there's no doubt about it whatsoever.
Though what's happened is the President, and that was really sort of released and revealed today.
Because just a couple of days ago, people like Dr. Birx, people like Dr. Fauci, raising questions.
Fauci actually issued an article that was published in the New England Journals of Medicine that raised questions about whether the mortality rate was like what the models were saying.
Dr. Birx raised questions about it as well last week.
When the Imperial College modelers, they came out and said there's going to be 2.2 million people die in America and 500,000 die in the UK.
Well, just earlier last week, they admitted that, well, maybe that number's actually closer to 20,000.
Maybe, in fact, which would mean, if you looked at it proportionally to the United States, that means that number's only down to 80,000, which is like a severe flu season.
And then they came out and said, actually, some of the other people at Imperial College looked better at the assumptions of the data, the model, and said, actually, it may be more like 5,000 in the UK, which would mean something like 20,000, 25,000 in the United States, which wouldn't even be a typical flu season.
We already have that many people dead in the United States from the flu.
So that would raise serious questions.
But that information is clearly not being given to the President because the President and those key people around him are talking about 2 million people dead.
Talking about, well, if we even have the best possible success.
Maybe it'll be several hundred thousand.
But that's not even what the doom and gloom people are even predicting now.
They've admitted they were wrong in their original assumptions.
This disease does not spread like some unusual virus.
It spreads like every other virus.
It does not infect 75-80% of a population.
It does not have asymptomatic people spreading it at a 50% rate.
Those two key assumptions were wrong.
The mortality rate was wrong.
The hospitalization rate was wrong.
The ICU rate was wrong.
All of it was wrong.
That's why the hospitals are supposed to be over capacity all across America right now.
But they're not.
Does that mean that we don't have a hospital capacity problem?
No, we do have a hospital capacity problem.
We've been having a hospital capacity problem for the de facto death panels that many of our private insurance companies have been imposing on the American people for decades.
For example, people like the mayor of New York and the governor of New York have put hospitals off, not funded hospitals, removed hospitals for years in New York.
So this is consequently on them for the fact of hospital capacity question, not because of the virus that we necessarily have any particular hospital capacity problem.
So your question is exactly right.
One, I think the people around the president are giving him bad advice.
And that's why he relies upon you, the public.
That's why, like, sometimes you'll see people say, hey, don't say anything that could be interpreted as bad towards the president.
Don't say anything that could be interpreted in a negative light towards the president.
So let's move to our closing argument tonight and go right to that.
Don't be afraid to second guess or question any policy that's being announced by the White House.
The president relies upon you for your feedback.
Because the people around him, as our caller and our juror talked about, are giving him compartmentalized information that does not disclose or disgorge the full truth, the honest truth, the complete truth.
It is your willingness, readiness, and ability to communicate, to get self-informed, to get self-educated, to support the kind of places that provide that to you, to make it a reality, to also be active in the public debate, to be active in the public square, to be active in the public dialogue.
Because your voice Can make the biggest difference of all.
This is still fundamentally a democracy and President Trump, probably more than almost any president in our lifetimes, believes deeply in those little d democratic principles and relies upon and trusts you to respond to him, to give him information, to give him feedback from you the American people, in case the people giving him compartmentalized information are giving him misleading information by the way in which they are Constricting the scope and contour of the information they give them.
So you can make a real and meaningful difference.
Don't forget that.
Don't forfeit that.
Even though we face the tick tock of the clock of American doom, if we don't take action now, you can take action now.
You can take action in a wide way of means.
You can take action by supporting independent political media sources for information, separate from the establishment press.
You can do so by purchasing your product from places that you like, that support what you believe in.
You can do so by being active in your local community, by supporting various legal actions or other political actions that can help resist oppression by getting information out there.
Just getting the The link to this broadcast to as many people as you can.
That helps!
It's little acts that help change the world.
It's those little acts like what the old saying that the fly of the butterfly's wings can help change the world because it just impacts weather patterns in that particular instance.
But your actions as an ordinary everyday individual can be the trigger that sets off a chain of events that can help change the world for the better.
That's how American democracy functions.
That's how President Trump relies upon and depends upon you, the juror, the ordinary American person, the ordinary American civilian, the citizen of the world that believes in protecting these fundamental ancient liberties and freedoms against the assault and attack they currently experience.
You can help change the world by just every little action you can possibly think of.
How you can be more informed yourself.
How you can help others become more informed.
How you can take political engagement, political action to participate in the public square, public debate, and public dialogue.
To how you can make sure you can take concrete actions where appropriate.
Maybe you can be someone that challenges the legal action, engages in appropriate civil disobedience, exposes some corrupt politician.
Like one of our callers did in explaining how a local politician is trying to take away people's Second Amendment rights under the guise of it being somehow fighting a virus.
How does taking away someone's Second Amendment rights fight a virus?
That is an example and illustration to where grassroots journalism, independent crowdfunded organizations and independent media sources can help revolutionize the way we see the world, can help revolutionize how the world actually acts and functions.
And that includes the most powerful man in the world.