May 11, 2020 - American Countdown - Barnes
01:46:57
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| The British are coming! | |
| The British are coming! | |
| You are about to see Mark Twain's great debate at one small class prayer. | |
| America first! | |
| Welcome to American Countdown on May 11th, 2020. | |
| Day 30, 40, 50, 60, or 70 of lockdown, depending on where you are in the world today. | |
| Many parts of the United States remain under functional lockdown. | |
| The governor of Pennsylvania promising more draconian consequences to anyone who contested or challenged it. | |
| Tonight, we'll be discussing Resolve, that the Georgia shooting case is more about media race bait than it is about murderous racial bias. | |
| We'll get into that later in the episode, including with tonight's show with Stefan Molyneux, who's done a full evaluation of the case, as have I, from the available accessible evidence. | |
| But first, let's start with the COVID-19 update of today. | |
| We can start with a chart, chart number one, from the confirmed COVID daily deaths in Sweden, where they are doing it by the date of death. | |
| Because a lot of the data that you're getting is often days or weeks after the actual death, just like a lot of the test results you're getting are days or a week after the original test. | |
| So there's this sort of time lag. | |
| And what it shows is if you look at from the date of death, you'll see that Sweden experienced the same comparable outcome as every other country, even though Sweden did not experience, did not utilize a shutdown. | |
| So Sweden had initially sort of an endless exponential growth, and then as we and some others forecast, including a mathematician from Israel, Professor Levitt, it starts to do an S-curve, not an exponential rise. | |
| It starts to flatline out, and then it starts a steady decline, which is precisely what is happening in Sweden. | |
| Indeed, Sweden is experiencing a better outcome in terms of excess deaths than almost every other country in Europe and the United States. | |
| So how is it that they've been able to achieve that without any of the shutdown policies or politics going into force? | |
| Some have suggested they've simply done social distancing on their own accord, but the mobility evidence and tracking from phone activities and other activities show that in fact has not occurred. | |
| Their social activities have remained relatively constant and way above that in which the other shutdown countries have employed. | |
| They have not experienced the degree of social isolation, the degree of suicide risk, the degree of lost employment, the degree of lost purpose that much of the rest of the Western world that employed shutdowns have done. | |
| And yet they have achieved comparable or often better outcomes than those countries. | |
| So once again we're seeing more evidence that the shutdown is actually more negative than positive. | |
| It's not only is the cure is worse than the disease, in many cases it is inflating the effects of the disease. | |
| Indeed, if we look at chart number two, there was an expansive study done by a mathematician, someone who knows statistics, who started mapping out, let's compare the U.S. | |
| states by those states that refused to shut down and had the lowest level of social distancing versus those that had the most. | |
| And what they found in the ranking is that the more social distancing you had, the worse the COVID outcome in terms of deaths per million population. | |
| Indeed, there was no substantial benefit from the shutdown shown by any of the data. | |
| And we now have enough data over enough time to be able to compare shutdown states versus states that did not. | |
| Also states that did a lot of social distancing and those that did not. | |
| Indeed, they tracked through Google Mobility, they tracked each state in the country and compared to their data, compared to the COVID data. | |
| So you knew who was social distancing and who wasn't. | |
| Places like South Dakota and Arkansas generally were not doing much social distancing, whereas the more liberal jurisdictions, Vermont, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, we're doing a lot of social distancing. | |
| What was noticeable is that the more social distancing you did, generally the worse outcome you had, not the better outcome that you had. | |
| Indeed, if we look at chart number four, we see the same variance. | |
| We see that areas that did very little social distancing had very few deaths. | |
| Those are the little red dots on the chart. | |
| Whereas, in fact, the ones that had some of the worst outcomes were areas that did the most social distancing in that regard. | |
| So there is no causative evidence that, in fact, social distancing achieves any degree of lockdown benefit. | |
| Indeed, if you look at the map of the entire country in chart number six, you find that this was almost entirely a small outbreak in urban northern cities. | |
| Detroit, Chicago, and New York City and its connected areas in the Acela Corridor. | |
| That's where you have a problem here, a little bit here and here. | |
| The rest of the country had very low COVID rates ever. | |
| So why was all of the green shut down? | |
| There was no reason for all the green shut down. | |
| Why is large parts of the green still shut down? | |
| No reason whatsoever. | |
| We have a little problem here, almost no problem throughout here. | |
| So why are these places being shut down when in fact there's no even correlational evidence that a shutdown has had or social distancing achieves any meaningful impact on the spread and transmission of COVID-19? | |
| Indeed, if we look at quote number seven, we'll see that in fact internal documents and records related to those promoting the shutdown admitted this was likely to be the case. | |
| As they studied, as this study reports, the results suggest that the effectiveness of pandemic mitigation strategies will erode rapidly As the cumulative illness rate prior to implementation climbs above 1% of the population in an affected area. | |
| What they're saying is if the infection has already infected a certain region, shutdowns not going to have any or any other mitigation effect is not likely to achieve any real meaningful benefit. | |
| So they knew this in advance of these and they knew that in fact was already the case in the places that were employing a shutdown. | |
| So there was simply no empirical basis for it according to many of the studies and surveys that were used to justify this in the first instance. | |
| If we look at the chart number eight, we see another chart that shows the relationship between the degree of COVID deaths versus how many people were distanced from home. | |
| And we find that, in fact, the more you were at home, the higher the probabilities you had a higher rate of death. | |
| The less your state or region was at home, the lower rate of deaths from COVID. | |
| By contrast, if we look at chart number nine, we see the employment-to-population ratio may actually drop below 50% for the first time in American history. | |
| In other words, fewer than half of Americans in the labor market, available in the labor market participation rate, may drop below 50%. | |
| Utterly unprecedented. | |
| Unprecedented by Depression-era standards. | |
| That's where we are in terms of the economic consequences of the shutdown that has been employed. | |
| Indeed, that's leading to, if we look at chart 14, we see additional data that talks about whether or not the fact that there has been a constant decline in the amount of not only the fatality rate, but also the in-hospital rate and the hospitalization rate related to COVID. | |
| This is not constantly being reported, because instead they're reporting gross numbers of people that get COVID rather than, or tested for COVID, rather than the death rate decline, rather than the hospitalization rate decline, rather than the ventilator rate decline, rather than the ICU rate decline. | |
| That's the relevant pertinent chart. | |
| This decline happened before the shutdown could even have an impact or effect on it, and it's continued across jurisdictions. | |
| By contrast, we're seeing charts like this from the New York Times, which are materially misleading. | |
| The chart seems to suggest that there's this debacle through the rest of the United States with this massive rise of new cases. | |
| What they're not telling you is that that's a reflection of a massive rise in new testing. | |
| Let's look at chart number 16 and we see a more accurate rate. | |
| In chart 16 we'll see the rate of testing has gone way up, whereas cases relative to it has declined. | |
| The same is true if we look at across the rest of the U.S. | |
| The amount of testing has skyrocketed. | |
| The ratio of people testing positive has actually flatlined and began to decline. | |
| That's the chart and the evidence that they're not showing here. | |
| Meanwhile, they're pushing out various forms of political propaganda about 1984 Orwellian strategies to put into place. | |
| If we look at this quote from sufficient from chart number 17, we see in the British government internal documentation saying that a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened. | |
| The people need to feel sufficiently personally threatened for this shutdown policies and pandemic politics to work that is coordinating our governors as if they're kings, as if they're colonial governors. | |
| And here they are in their own internal documents saying we really need to push the threat level because not enough people feel sufficiently personally threatened from the virus in order to forfeit more of their civil rights and civil liberties. | |
| Meanwhile, if we look at chart number 20, we'll see the total deaths in the U.S. | |
| from an excess death perspective by prior year standards shows that, in fact, we are generally at or below that rate. | |
| We're not seeing a rate in which people are. | |
| If you look at it in terms of total excess deaths across the country, we aren't experiencing many excess deaths actually at all in the United States. | |
| If you look at it nationwide, COVID-19 is not causing a spike in death from what is being talked about or discussed. | |
| Meanwhile, if we look at chart 21, one thing that has happened and that we have found out is that multiple governors compelled people that had COVID-19, who were elderly, to go into nursing homes and compelled the nursing homes to take them. | |
| Even though those folks would be in a closed quarters, in a confined environment, not allowed outdoors, not allowed windows open, not allowed basically a perfect petri dish for the spread of and transmission of this virus to its most vulnerable population, elderly people, often who have multiple comorbid conditions. | |
| So effectively, well, almost half of all of those who have experienced death in the United States from COVID-19 solely resided in nursing homes. | |
| It is because of the governors in many of the key states, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, who forced New Jersey, who forced them to do so. | |
| And why is that? | |
| Well, we start off with the fact that people in nursing homes are towards the end of their lives. | |
| On average, they have a six-month life expectancy. | |
| If we look at chart number 21, we see that for most people who enter a nursing home, they're not expected to live past three months in many cases, definitely not expected to live in six months. | |
| So these forced nursing home policies essentially accelerated their death. | |
| It became almost like a de facto death panel, is what these governor's policies did. | |
| By forcing COVID-19 patients into those nursing homes, and by forcing the nursing homes to take them, and then by forcing those nursing homes to stay in a locked-in condition, they effectively created a perfect storm to kill off a bunch of elderly people early, who are the most vulnerable people around. | |
| Now, we also know of Bill Gates' prominent role in pushing the pandemic politics involved. | |
| Well, let's take a trip down memory lane to remember what Bill Gates' ideas were about death penalties. | |
| See how he discusses whether we should really be spending any money at all on people in their last three to six months of life. | |
| Whether this virus just magically seems to work and its policies reflecting it in response to it seem to magically work in a certain way that parallels Bill Gates' own politics. | |
| Let's take a look at video clip number 11 and listen to what he says about the last three months of life. | |
| Maybe we could spend more money on school teachers instead and see what he says and even uses the phrase death panels. | |
| See what he has to say and guess what his political position is and whether this might explain some of these politicians following Bill Gates oriented policies in forcing people to go back to nursing homes, accelerating the deaths in those nursing homes functioning as a de facto Death panel. | |
| Let's take a look at video clip number 11. | |
| The proportion of GDP that goes to health care, is that over allocated? | |
| Well, the U.S. | |
| spends 17% of GDP on health care, and you drop down to number two, which is Switzerland at 12%. | |
| And so you say, well, hey, what do we get for that? | |
| Well, we get nothing. | |
| The health outcomes, which are complicated The health outcomes are basically slightly worse, both in terms of averages and the inequity. | |
| Our bottom quartile is very ugly compared to all other rich countries' bottom quartile. | |
| Our upper quartile is somewhat better. | |
| But that's how you get the inequity. | |
| So we're spending at a huge rate, which if it wasn't increasing faster than inflation, it's increasing as a percentage of the economy, then okay, you can probably afford it. | |
| But as it continues to grow, It squeezes, unless people say, yes, I would like to be taxed a lot more, and most states have these super majorities that are required to do that, and it's not like, and it's not clearly a good thing either, but unless, so as long as you're dealing with a finite amount, as the medical cost goes up, and that shows up both in state budgets as so-called | |
| state Medicaid spending, and it shows up in the federal budget as Medicare, and they're part of Medicaid, it squeezes out everything else. | |
| So right now what you see is it's squeezing higher education. | |
| You're raising tuitions at the University of California as rapidly as they can, and so the access that used to be available to the middle class or whatever is just rapidly going away. | |
| That's a trade-off society is making because of very, very high medical costs. | |
| And a lack of willingness to say, you know, is spending a million dollars on that last three months of life for that patient, would it be better not to lay off those ten teachers and to make that trade off in medical costs? | |
| But that's called the death panel, and you're not supposed to have that discussion. | |
| Of course they're making... But that's an interesting thing you just said, which is just the last three months in life for one person or something, because we haven't had a discussion of how to allocate that money, it means we lay off three teachers to do so. | |
| I mean, in other words, we haven't had this type of allocation. | |
| We're making that trade-off because of huge medical costs that are not examined to see which ones actually have no benefit whatsoever. | |
| And because of pension generosity, we will be laying off over 100,000 teachers, which, you know, I'm very much against that. | |
| And the whole AFP will agree with me on that. | |
| So there's Bill Gates talking about death panels and clearly celebrating those death panels. | |
| And now we have policies that effectively created de facto death penalties, death panels in our nursing homes. | |
| Indeed, if we look at chart 25, we see the order from the New York Governor Cuomo's Department of Health requiring that nursing homes take them, requiring hospitals discharge elderly people that were nursing home residents that had been tested positive for COVID-19, ordering them back to the nursing homes and then ordering the nursing homes to take them. | |
| And then ordering those nursing homes on lockdown. | |
| If we look at chart 26, we see the same order from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, requiring the same thing. | |
| Again, requiring that if you have COVID-19, you're a nursing home resident, being discharged from the hospital, being sent back to the nursing home, requiring the nursing home to take them, and then imposing a shutdown policy on the nursing home that was going to facilitate the indoor transmission of this indoor transmission-oriented virus. | |
| We look at chart 27, we see the same order from the Michigan Governor's Department of Health and the same set of policies and procedures paralleling it. | |
| Indeed, so to what degree did these de facto death panels reflect the institutional politics and preferences of Bill Gates in the same way that the models that propagated these pandemic policies in the first instance were heavily backed by Bill Gates, both from Imperial College by the now discredited Neil Ferguson in a report that's likely to be withdrawn from peer review, as well as IHME out of the University of Washington by Professor Murray, an institution that was mostly created by Bill Gates' funding. | |
| Now we're seeing death panels effectively instituted in nursing homes by the public policies, by those politicians most closely hewing to Bill Gates' preferred policy priorities, when Bill Gates himself is on record suggesting death panels is a good idea for the vulnerable elderly toward the end of life. | |
| Now if we go back and look at the overall model accuracy, and a reminder of how inaccurate they were, we look at chart 28, we see what the forecast was for deaths in Sweden between April and through May. | |
| And it showed these dramatic three alternatives, depending on whether they used the shutdown or not. | |
| They didn't use the shutdown, so they expected this massive red exponential spike that was going to lead to 20,000 or more deaths, conservatively, by the end of May. | |
| Similar data when we look at other models that were projected. | |
| If we look at chart 29, same thing as if there was no shutdown, they expected this massive death rate through April and May. | |
| And then if we look at chart number 30, we see what actually happened in Sweden. | |
| We see this very low flat rate of actual total deaths on a daily basis. | |
| The disaster and debacle they predicted for Sweden never occurred, just as it never occurred for Florida, just as it never occurred for states that either shut down later. | |
| Never shut down in the states, just as it never occurred in other parts of the world that refuse shutdown policies. | |
| Meanwhile, those countries that have allowed a broader range of medications to be utilized, including chloroquine and various forms of chloroquine, hydroxychloroquine in particular, such as Paraguay and Portugal, if we look at chart 31, we see these countries experienced a decline in the death rate compared we see these countries experienced a decline in the death rate compared to those jurisdictions throughout Europe, the United States That did not allow hydrochloric chlorine to be used in the same way that Portugal and Paraguay did. | |
| Does that suggest in fact that those alternative medications may have worked better than the ones being pushed and propagated in the Western world? | |
| Also, if we look at chart 23, we see the overall stats for deaths in the United States. | |
| And we see that, in fact, that death rate continues to decline, decline, decline, decline. | |
| In fact, it is now all the way down to 1% or so in increase of death growth rate. | |
| So this prediction of endless exponential rate that was predicted at the beginning here, that would just go up like that. | |
| Instead, it went up early, flattened, and then down, down, down, down, down. | |
| And that happened no matter the jurisdiction, whether social distancing was occurring or not, whether shutdown happens or not. | |
| Indeed, we're seeing more excess deaths from some of those other regions that are now connected to the failure to seek treatment for cancer, the failure to seek treatment for strokes, the failure to seek treatment for heart disease, and the social isolation triggering a potential suicide spike in the country. | |
| It is also useful in this context to go back a little bit down memory lane if we look at quote a chart number 32 from a quote of Anthony Fauci and how he routinely misinterpreted and misunderstood the AIDS virus for which he became initially famous. | |
| In a similar, for example, there was a theory of casual contact hypothesis, appeared in the May 1983 issue of the Journal of American Medical Association, sparked increased coverage of AIDS. | |
| In this issue of Journal of American Medical Association, an editorial by one Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, fueled fear by speculating on the likelihood of transmitting AIDS through, quote, routine casual contact. | |
| So here you had Fauci suggesting that AIDS could be communicated and transmitted through routine casual contact years after it had developed, a theory that turned out to be patently and completely false, but bred fear and hysteria throughout parts of the country. | |
| Indeed, the effects of these policies are being discussed in a wider range of publications in a study in South Africa. | |
| They noted for South African nations, and South Africa in particular, a continued lockdown is, quote, not only damaging the economy, it promises a humanitarian disaster that will dwarf COVID-19 by its severe impact on the health and well-being of millions of South Africans. | |
| As the report goes into detail to go through, it talks about how more than 4 million Africans have now been put at risk of severe extreme starvation and death that may result from it due to the Western world shutdown policies being instituted in the Western world. | |
| In the same way, an article in The Spectator goes into detail about the 10 reasons to end the lockdown now, talking about the groupthink that has consumed the Western political decision-making and press world, how the politicians appear uninterested in alternative viewpoints, even as the factual and empirical evidence continues to refute their original assumptions. | |
| Indeed, as the article goes on to state, it has now become a matter of faith that lockdown is vital, but it is a faith without facts. | |
| Indeed, even if one could understand why the lockdown was imposed, it's rapidly become apparent that it was never thought through. | |
| As the article details, you cannot understand the significance of the virus by simply looking at raw death figures, given the way in which the raw death figures have been manipulated, given they're not being compared to relevant policies and areas and regions that have instituted or not instituted particular mitigation effects. | |
| In the same vein, it goes on to note that there's no evidence the lockdown is working, that the policy response has been driven by poor modeling, that the lockdown directly harms those most likely to be affected by it by forcing people indoors, like the nursing home disaster that has occurred. | |
| The lockdown is not sustainable by any historic precedent or means. | |
| The lockdown directly harms many who are completely un-at-risk, not-at-risk from the virus. | |
| The health service has not been overwhelmed and in fact all kinds of doctors and nurses are being furloughed and hospital rooms so empty that nurses are doing TikTok videos routinely. | |
| The virus is almost certainly not a constant threat given the history of viruses and evidence that this virus tails off rather quickly. | |
| Indeed, that further evidence shows that mounting deaths and mental harm may result from the shutdown itself, as reported in the Washington Examiner today. | |
| Any cost-benefit analysis, like the kind that should have been instituted at the inception, but that politicians continue to refuse to use while they seize and grab power in their power-mad-mindness that has effectively seized the minds of so many political actors today. | |
| That indeed more, a new study from San Diego State University suggests that indeed there's going to be a thousand more people that are going to die from suicide and other form of physical and mental health due to alcohol abuse, due to drug-related abuse, due to opiate overdoses, as well as suicide than will, in fact, that number could easily be 150,000, which will be more than those estimated to be excess deaths from COVID-19. | |
| In the same vein, in terms of questioning whether or not the testing mechanisms recommended by the World Health Organization are truly adequate and accurate as to how many people actually have COVID-19, given the large number of asymptomatic people that are showing up in a wide range of data, particularly most recently from a study of the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt, where most of the people tested were not symptomatic. | |
| Same with many of the meatpacking plants, same with many prisons, where they're showing up with positive tests but not in fact having any symptoms. | |
| Well, some questions are whether or not the testing itself is accurate, a question that arose initially in some of the South Korean reports. | |
| Well, the president of Tanzania didn't trust the methods that were being employed by the World Health Organization. | |
| So he sent samples of sheep, goats, bunnies, trees, fruits, and even coral oil for testing, for COVID testing, telling them that it was a human tissue that was to be tested. | |
| Well, what came back? | |
| Well, for many of it, it came back inconclusive, which by itself was unsettling to him. | |
| But in particular, it came back positive for a goat. | |
| And as the joke went, obviously he needed to put the goat in social isolation as quickly as possible. | |
| But the fact that there could be fruit testing positive raised serious concerns about the quality of the testing and how exactly how accurate it may be. | |
| Also, given the high rate of asymptomatic people, it may be those are people that are simply getting false positives from the testing. | |
| In the same vein, additional decode information from the Imperial College model was released, and the people who studied the code determined that it was so badly inadequate in terms of how it was structured from a statistical, mathematical, and computer science perspective that it could never be relied upon for almost any kind of algorithmic model. | |
| Indeed, as this headline from The Telegraph reads, it is the chilling truth that the decision to impose lockdown was based on crude mathematical guesswork From a model they now recognize has very little validity at all. | |
| Meanwhile, various sheriffs and political officials continue to push back against the rogue governors who have decided they are colonial-era governors and should have the same power like they are royal politicians issuing royal edicts from prior to the American constitutional experiment even starting. | |
| Well, in Michigan, the Chiawassee Sheriff says he will not enforce the governor's orders amid a dispute about a local barber who's continuing to do his barber activities despite the order of the governor. | |
| The civil disobedience rate continues to rise in the general populace. | |
| The refusal of sheriffs to enforce rogue governor's laws and police officers in the same vein, refusal to enforce those laws and stand up for the Constitution, which they took an oath to, also continues to rise throughout the United States. | |
| Meanwhile, there is additional evidence of what we were talking about before, that herd immunity can be achieved earlier than expected because this virus only impacts a certain group of susceptible people who are the most likely to spread the virus and most likely to have severe consequences from the virus. | |
| But then once it gets through that population, once it reaches the rest of the population, it tends to run into a wall and it tends to have a precipitous decline like most viruses in the last century's history. | |
| That they tend to disappear on their own accord. | |
| Most do not come back a second time in the same strain. | |
| And if they do come back, they come back as a weakened strain, often a different strain, that is often outside of the capacity of a vaccine to even deal with, but that kills at a much lower rate. | |
| It's the nature of the survival of viruses. | |
| They survive better if they change their nature so that they are less deadly and more infectious. | |
| That's how the virus itself can continue its own existence. | |
| Well, more scientific evidence that that's the case. | |
| Indeed, an article about why herd immunity to COVID-19 is reached much earlier than thought. | |
| As they're looking at the data, first of all, they note that Ferguson previewed that 81% of both the United States and United Kingdom would become infected within a two-month period during the epidemic. | |
| That turned out to be way wrong by a large number. | |
| Indeed, that was completely ahistorical. | |
| Even the Spanish flu that came back three different times only infected a third of the people over a three-year time period. | |
| Yet somehow we were supposed to get 81% of an infection rate and a high fatality rate at the same time? | |
| When historically, the higher the infection rate, the lower the mortality rate? | |
| Well, now the evidence suggests just the opposite. | |
| From the prevalence of antibodies, what they're discovering is this. | |
| A recent paper that was published there is in the process of being published shows that there's a major variation between individuals in their susceptibility to the infection and their propensity to infect others. | |
| So what we were talking about over a month ago on this show Is that once you get through that most vulnerable susceptible population it's you the susceptibility rate starts to change and the infection or spread rate starts to equally change and the severity of the virus starts to change leading to a precipitous decline in the spread of the virus is now being confirmed by additional and further studies and surveys. | |
| Indeed, when we come back, we'll turn to another virus, the virus of politics that is intending to induce people to respond with race bait policies rather than racial bigotry being the explanation for the course of events. | |
| We'll be back with Stefan Molyneux to go into further about the shooting in Georgia, what happened and what really is behind the propagation of it. | |
| We'll be back with Stefan Molyneux to go into further about the shooting in Georgia. | |
| Welcome back to American Countdown. | |
| The, uh, We'll be up pretty soon with Stefan Molyneux to discuss the Georgia shooting case. | |
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| In this context, if we talk and we move now and shift now to the Georgia shooting case, there's the official institutional narrative that is being propagated out there. | |
| And that official institutional narrative is that an African-American man was jogging down the street in Georgia when two white people decided to just pull up and shoot him. | |
| That was the initial or original narrative being propagated by large parts of the press and by various politically motivated actors. | |
| As someone who has done a lot of civil rights cases, who's done a lot of criminal defense cases, who comes from a pre-existing perception that events often can be explained by racial bias or bigotry in the decision making of police, prosecutors or the public. | |
| I come at this from a somewhat unique filter, but particularly in the last decade, as our upcoming guests can discuss. | |
| Stefan Molyneux has detailed on his show, Free Domain, that you can find on YouTube, you can find on the web, you can find in podcasts. | |
| Some of our politicized cases have been the most problematic cases. | |
| Cases that when you dig into the facts, they do not support the initial narrative. | |
| I've been curious about this because I have a lot of civil rights cases that do have compelling narrative. | |
| And yet somehow the press doesn't want to pick up on those cases. | |
| Many of the same political actors don't want to discuss those cases. | |
| Cases where pregnant mothers woke up with dead babies in their arm because the jail decided to ignore their cries for help. | |
| People who are carried around and treated like a garbage bag rather than a human being because of their treatment as perception that they were simply a black male defendant who didn't deserve human treatment. | |
| Yet at the same time, we've seen cases from Ferguson to Florida, where a case has been propagated with one story narrative, but the facts at trial prove a very different story narrative. | |
| We're seeing evidence of that here in the Georgia shooting case as well. | |
| Stephon did a show this weekend that goes into some of that detail. | |
| As some of the reasons to be suspect of the media narrative and some reason to believe that the people are being wrongfully prosecuted here, wrongfully punished here, are those who are being treated as white nationalists and white supremacists when there's no evidence of that at all. | |
| Indeed, this simply appears to be a case of a person caught committing a crime who reacted in a panic mode that triggered a confrontation that where he may have led to his own death by the way in which he was dealing with it. | |
| So tonight we're going to discuss the Georgia shooting case and whether it's a case of murderous racial bias or a case of media race bait for political purposes. | |
| Stefan, how are you? | |
| It looks like Stefan is frozen momentarily, but we'll see if we can get him connected here in a second. | |
| To give you some further background as to what took place here, when you look at the full evidence, and if you try to go to YouTube and you try to find the slow motion version of the tape, if you try to go to look up the full video footage, you often will not find it. | |
| Instead, what you will find is a media interpretation where they've selectively edited large aspects of the tape. | |
| What appears to have happened from the existing evidence, and we don't know all the evidence, and more evidence may come forward that may favor one side or the other in this case, but it appears that what happened was that, in fact, the person who was shot was on the day in question and in prior evenings had traveled miles the person who was shot was on the day in question and in prior evenings had traveled miles away from his home and appears to have been | |
| There are video footage of him being in a home that was under construction on nights before the robbery occurred. | |
| The person who that home was being built for had apparently reported that he had had copper and other items stolen from the home. | |
| On the day of this all happening, it appears that the individual that ended up being subject to this entire case was casing out the property again. | |
| It appears that while he was casing out the property, someone from across the street witnessed it and called 911. | |
| It appears he somehow got notice or word of that because he suddenly started to take off running. | |
| And it was when he was running down the street that apparently the father and son that end up in the confrontation with him saw him, got in their truck, and went after him. | |
| They were calling out for him to stop, and at one point it appeared that he had stopped. | |
| But then he turns around, and if you review the entire videotape, and at a trial, this is a tape that would be shown repeatedly in slow motion, probably 20-25 times to a potential jury. | |
| What happens is in that tape, of the full incident, he starts to come, he's jogging down the street, he will go to the right by the side of the truck, he'll make a sudden swerve as he's approaching the truck, he'll go right beside the truck, then he'll suddenly take a 90 degree turn and attack the person holding the gun. | |
| So we see it there, he goes past the truck, and then he takes a sudden swerve to the left, to attack the person holding the gun. | |
| And that's what precipitates the entire conflict. | |
| He tries to grab the gun away from the individual. | |
| He continues to punch and punch and assault the individual. | |
| And he keeps pulling the barrel away from him, but in the process is pulling it toward himself, while the individual with the gun is actually trying to pull the gun down and away from him. | |
| In that process the gun is fired three times. | |
| According to the forensic evidence, it is as consistent with the forensic evidence that the individual never actually deliberately pulled the trigger that had the gun. | |
| But that instead, the act of pulling the gun up and away, while the individual with the gun is trying to pull the gun down and away from him, triggered the gun going off, and that created the shots that occurred. | |
| They could not conclude from the forensic evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that there was any gun ever pointed at him deliberately, that the trigger was ever deliberately pulled at him, or any of that ever, in fact, occurred. | |
| So that is part of the, so when you review the evidence, the other aspect is that even if he did pull the trigger, in the context of someone trying to pull a gun away from you, can create a self-defense because there is a no-retreat provision in Georgia. | |
| You don't, you're not under the obligation to retreat when you're confronted in that situation. | |
| So the media narrative was one narrative. | |
| The actual facts from the video footage and the forensic evidence and the review of the evidence that's been released tells a very different narrative. | |
| So we're going to discuss it more now with Stephan. | |
| Stephan, are you with us? | |
| I am, Robert. | |
| How are you doing tonight? | |
| Good. | |
| I thought you did a great job on the video. | |
| I remember years ago, I looked at this, all these cases I just presumed were true. | |
| Back to Ferguson, back to Florida, back to Zimmerman, all the way through to Rice. | |
| Because I came from a perspective of civil rights, criminal defense, I've done a lot of these cases where you get out of control cops, out of control citizens, people who presume things about people, sometimes based on understandable stereotypes, sometimes based on just bias. | |
| And I was constantly shocked. | |
| And in part, it was your videos that went through each of those cases and how bad all of those cases were factually. | |
| And then I started seeing it from a political context. | |
| And it dawned on me finally. | |
| I was like, why is it that cases that I have, which where we have really good evidence that something really went wrong, can't get any press coverage or public political coverage? | |
| But these cases with terrible facts, you know, with like the guy in Baton Rouge who had like a 36 different prior arrests. | |
| I mean, it was like the reverse Rosa Parks strategy. | |
| Instead of put Rosa Parks in the front of the bus, we're going to take the most dangerous criminal and worst bum and we're going to put him in the front of the bus to challenge the bus policies. | |
| There's a reason why civil rights chose Rosa Parks. | |
| And then it dawned on me, the only way you achieve divisiveness, the only way you achieve political propaganda from something like this, is if people on the facts side of the equation disagree. | |
| Is if you have a bad factual case that can feed racial hysteria, but actually be factually false. | |
| Because a case where people see that's an actually bad case, on the facts, you're going to have unity. | |
| 90-95% will agree that nobody supports the Klan. | |
| If it's that kind of activity, They're willing to go to judgment right away, and yet, if they want political effectiveness, they need divisiveness. | |
| If they want divisiveness, they need a case so that facts don't actually support the propaganda that they're pitching. | |
| And we're seeing more and more examples of this. | |
| When you first heard of this case, did you filter it through, okay, we've been through four versions of this, and it may be the same thing again? | |
| Or was it, maybe this one is actually legit, and we'll find out? | |
| What was your initial read? | |
| Well, so there were a couple of things that had my warning flares go off. | |
| So, you've probably heard that there's something called the Surgery Channel. | |
| Now, this godforsaken backwaters of the cable network is something that no sane human being should be interested in watching. | |
| You know, like, if you're a surgeon, maybe it's instructional. | |
| Violence, shootings, people actually being blown apart. | |
| That's not something that you should see outside of a movie. | |
| Most of the people who see that kind of stuff, soldiers, cops, paramedics, you know, they're all trained for that stuff. | |
| So they kind of get a little cold in a good way. | |
| So they don't get this big emotional response. | |
| So when I saw the footage, I was like, man, this is gonna send people through the roof who haven't been through this kind of stuff before. | |
| Because it's horrible. | |
| It's horrible to watch this altercation. | |
| It's horrible to watch The young men stagger and fall onto the ground and people get hit because they don't have experience, they don't have training and they just react so strongly. | |
| So I was very much concerned about that. | |
| Also, it's an election year and every single time there's a big significant election, of course, a presidential election, you get the race hustlers out, you get the divisiveness up because the Democrats want to capture the black vote in particular and There are activists like Candace Owens with her Blexit movement who are really trying to draw blacks away from the Democrats and try and give them another alternative. | |
| Trump presided prior to COVID over the biggest economic expansion for blacks in the history of America. | |
| So, you know, when you go from receiving government money to paying taxes, you tend to become just a little bit more conservative and free market. | |
| I think ginning up this kind of racial hostility and hysteria is kind of important at the moment. | |
| You had the collapse of the Flynn investigation, as you and I talked about, and you got a news tightening around Obama when it looks as to who started this whole investigation into a competing political rival. | |
| In 2016. | |
| So all of these things together was like, there's going to be more. | |
| And you know, you've got to you've got to give it at least 24 hours. | |
| Everybody who rushes out of the gate is gonna get it wrong. | |
| And I've actually been tracking the story now for three or four days, which, you know, obviously doesn't make me any kind of expert. | |
| But it really is the same thing as we saw before with Trayvon Martin, the same thing we saw with Mike Brown, a bunch of other people, even Freddie Gray, to some degree. | |
| We've got to stop running up this hysteria flag and actually start listening to the facts so that we can all get together and try and stop bad things like this from happening again. | |
| But that's not just by calling people racists or KKK or white supremacists or all criminals. | |
| We've got to just take a deep breath and look at the facts. | |
| That's the whole point of having a civilization, wouldn't you say? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| The other thing that surprises me about all this to some degree is that if the races were reversed, if he had succeeded, like let's say Aubrey was able to get the gun away, and let's say he'd shot both of them. | |
| There might even be a fair self-defense argument there, depending on the circumstance. | |
| It's like if that situation had occurred, we have a very different political reaction, yet we shouldn't. | |
| Uh, based on, just because the color of the individuals may flip, we shouldn't have a different reaction to what the facts are. | |
| And one of the things that concerned me in this whole context was, right away when I was seeing clips of the video, I was like, well why can't I see the whole video? | |
| And then I saw the press was selectively editing, like it wasn't until your video that went into detail about what the prosecutor reported that I realized half of the facts are not even being out there. | |
| When I started to discuss with people, the prosecutor identifies one of his reasons for not prosecuting. | |
| Is that there is a substantial probability, not a guarantee, but at least beyond reasonable doubt standards in the sense of what the defense has to prove, that it's just beyond reasonable doubt being the opposite, that in fact the shooter never ever pulled the trigger. | |
| That he didn't point at him and pull the trigger. | |
| It's just as likely that the act of pulling the gun and the way he was pulling it, given the forensic evidence and the way in which the shots came in, that he may have effectively shot himself. | |
| Uh, and obviously not intending to, but when you grab someone else with a loaded shotgun, uh, there's a risk that that occurs. | |
| When I was spread, that most people had no clue that evidence even existed, that that was even a possibility. | |
| They all had bought into the story that, and at least, and you can confirm for me, I didn't see any evidence on the videotapes that they ever actually pointed the gun at, pointed the gun at him ever. | |
| And the, as far as I could tell. | |
| So here's the thing, right? | |
| This doesn't mean the cops are always right. | |
| But a cop who's going to go into a high risk situation and you got to remember the dad, right? | |
| Gregory was a multi decade law enforcement professional. | |
| I mean, he was a cop. | |
| I've seen him referred to as a detective as a senior investigator. | |
| This guy knew the street and how to work the law to his advantage. | |
| So he obviously felt that he had Sufficient cause to execute a citizen's arrest, right? | |
| So the you know, he knew that he had reasonable belief that a felony had occurred, which was theft from inside the house that was under construction. | |
| And then he saw the suspect flee. | |
| And I believe that they chased him because they didn't want him to throw stuff away. | |
| Because again, this is a guy who had investigated The young man before. | |
| He knew him intimately. | |
| He knew his history. | |
| He knew about the gun charge in 2013. | |
| He knew about the shoplifting of the television in 2018. | |
| He knew the history of this young man and he was following him, I think, with the hopes of, you know, maybe just figuring out where he went and also to make sure he didn't throw anything away because he knew that in 2013 he'd thrown the gun away when he was being chased by the police. | |
| So he knew he knew how to do that. | |
| So I think that they were chasing him to just see where he went, make sure he didn't throw anything out. | |
| And he had a clear path to get past them, right? | |
| So as the truck was parked and you got Travis on the left and the young man runs past on the right. | |
| And then he just makes that fateful decision. | |
| And life comes down to these, I guess in this case, a relatively short life comes down. | |
| He just decided to fight rather than flee or rather than reason or rather than stand or rather than run to a neighbor and say, hey, these crazy white guys are chasing me. | |
| Or anything like that. | |
| He just decided to attack a man with a weapon, and that is just a terrible, terrible idea. | |
| He knew the cops were on the way, because he saw the guy out front of the house saying, you know, hey, he's tall and one-on-one, there's a guy running past me, you gotta send the cops! | |
| And, you know, he was pretty certain the cops were on the way. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Of course, what Gregory and Travis McMichael said to Aubrey, I don't know. | |
| We'll probably never know because, you know, it's going to be a trial. | |
| But, you know, one of the witnesses, of course, is dead. | |
| But if they're saying, hey, stop, we want to talk to you, that's perfectly legal. | |
| They've got weapons on them. | |
| That's perfectly legal. | |
| And what's not legal, of course, is just deciding to rush and grapple a shotgun away from a young man, Travis. | |
| And that's where it happened. | |
| So people are saying, well, he was shot because he was trespassing. | |
| He was shot because he was white in a black neighborhood. | |
| He was shot because he was jogging. | |
| None of that is true. | |
| And anybody who says that has really got to check themselves before they wreck society. | |
| He was shot, or he got shot, because he decided to get into a wrestle for a shotgun with a man. | |
| And that's why he got shot. | |
| And it's not causal. | |
| There's the choice that you make. | |
| There's nothing causal about trespassing that means you get shot. | |
| It's like there's a couple of dominoes in the middle there, people, and I really wish people would remember that. | |
| Exactly, the extraordinary aspect is how much context they've stripped out, the media has, and the people propagandizing this case. | |
| Even to where people on the right are pushing various narratives that don't have empirical evidence. | |
| They're basically destroying McMichael's life and lifetime, and destroying their chances of a defense, unless they go through a real meaningful void year, better than what happened like in the Roger Stone case. | |
| They get real meaningful jury selection, because the other aspect of this that was completely stripped of context, as soon as I heard the story, I was like the probability he was jogging miles away from his home and on a street without sidewalks not near a park in mid-afternoon didn't sound like a likely true story. | |
| And then we're getting and then we looked in the background it turned out it looks like he had been casing out properties at least he was behaving in a manner consistent with the way a burglar would case out properties. | |
| Often you case out of properties you don't steal anything at that time you come back later you case it out initially during the day you come back at night to get what you want. | |
| Apparently the homeowner of that property has reported that copper was stolen from the home. | |
| That's one of the things that's like abandoned properties. | |
| He may have got the idea if that's what he was doing. | |
| Abandoned properties that they targeted to strip the copper out. | |
| It's a particular problem in communities that have a lot of drug addiction and the rest because it's a quick way to get easy cash. | |
| And once the context is He's, he hears a, he sees someone calling 9-1-1 and we know he must have had some response to it because that's when he takes off running. | |
| Apparently the 9-1-1 call, the person saying stop, stop, that's on the 9-1-1 call and someone responds to that. | |
| And I think the other thing people are forgetting is how broad the Georgia law is. | |
| Whether people agree or disagree with it, the Georgia law allows a private citizen who has reasonable suspicion, that's all they have to have, of a felony when the felon is escaping to execute a citizen's arrest. | |
| So they had all the authority and then the open and carry law requires that they be open carrying. | |
| Not hiding the gun, not anything else. | |
| They appear to be complying consistently with the law in terms of what's on the videotape. | |
| Consistently with the law in terms of what the forensic evidence showed. | |
| And when you have a background that this wasn't a kid randomly jogging that they just thought might look like a burglar, which was the media narrative, even Fox News, what they chose to highlight in their headline was unarmed black jogger. | |
| I was like, well, those are three interesting choices. | |
| One, he probably wasn't jogging. | |
| That probably wasn't, you know, technically correct. | |
| I guess he's jogging when he attacks them. | |
| But it's not like he was a random jogger they decided to hop and take a look at. | |
| It wasn't a situation like that. | |
| He wasn't armed once he's going for a gun legally. | |
| Legally, if you're wrestling for a gun, you present as much a risk as the person who has the gun because you may get the gun. | |
| Not only that, you may cause the gun to go off and kill the other person. | |
| That's what, I mean, you'll see it in movies and TV shows often. | |
| Now, that's not as often, like, why somebody thinks they can get a shotgun without getting hurt is a different story. | |
| But that was particularly, if this was a handgun, that could end up going either direction. | |
| So that you're technically considered, there's other legal cases like this, you're considered armed when you wrestle someone else for a gun where you're trying to possess it. | |
| Where it is, at least theoretically, just as likely to kill that person as you. | |
| And then, of course, a third, his race, I don't think, had anything to do with it. | |
| I think if he was a white kid running down the street, they were going to pull out after him. | |
| Because someone was screaming, stop, stop, stop. | |
| They had heard of robberies at that house. | |
| This was an ex-law enforcement officer. | |
| And I thought a critical fact you identified, that almost nobody else has reported on, is the fact that this is an investigator who likely knew him. | |
| That he had apparently been on a prior case. | |
| Definitely knew him. | |
| Yeah, I mean, the reports are that he had investigated Arbery. | |
| In the past. | |
| And that is really important. | |
| And the idea that a cop with more than three decades experience in handling street situations, and I'm pretty sure that there weren't a huge amount of complaints, if any, lodged against Gregory, because I'm sure the media would have dug those up by now. | |
| So guys seems to be clean as a whistle. | |
| Is he really, if he wants to go and kill someone, is he really going to call the cops? | |
| Is he going to wait till there's some Infiltration into a house and then he's going to wait until or the son is going to wait until the young man is grabbing at the shotgun, at which point it's probably 50-50. | |
| In fact, the advantage probably goes to the young Aubrey because he's younger and more fit and so on. | |
| So that's just not how people go around killing someone. | |
| You don't try and provoke someone into grabbing your gun and then say, oh, wow, now I can kill him. | |
| Oh, and by the way, I already called the police and they're on their way and I'm letting him run past. | |
| I mean, this is it's an unforeseen circumstance. | |
| And that's what bothers me so much, Robert. | |
| When people even talk about unarmed, you know, it's all well and good from the safety of your computer tapping away on your keyboard to say, oh, but the kid was unarmed. | |
| Oh, but the kid didn't steal anything. | |
| It's like nobody knows that at the time. | |
| Nobody knows that at the time. | |
| And so this idea that we, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say, oh, yes, why don't we just get rid of all the courts? | |
| Because, you know, if everybody turns out to be not guilty, everybody who turns out to be not guilty, let's just not arrest anyone. | |
| Because, you know, you can just find out after the fact somehow and send the message back through time. | |
| They didn't know whether he'd stolen anything or not. | |
| That's what the reasonable suspicion part is. | |
| They didn't know whether he was armed or not. | |
| They do know. | |
| That Travis's gun had been stolen from a truck parked out front of his house six or so weeks before, six or seven weeks before the altercation, and that's kind of suspicious. | |
| I mean, what are the odds that the son of the investigator who investigated you, miles and miles and miles away, A year and a half ago, two years ago, that that guy's gun just happens to go missing when this young man is seen on video since October 2019 prowling around the neighborhood. | |
| They had a good reason to believe that he might be in possession of that gun and that there was danger afoot. | |
| Plus, of course, the elder man, he knew that there had been a gun charge in the young man's life before. | |
| So these old things, I don't know, this after-the-fact stuff drives me crazy because you just don't have that knowledge at the time and you have to make the best decision you can. | |
| And the other irony with that, which we'll come back to with Estefan, is if they'd actually pointed guns at him all the way through, this likely may have never occurred. | |
| That in fact, it was their assumption that in fact they could resolve the matter without anything like that. | |
| It may have been what led Aubrey to do what he did. | |
| So when we come back, we'll ask one or two more questions with Estefan about the case, about its impact, about its import, and about how we can change things moving forward. | |
| So come back right after the break. | |
| Back with Stefan Molyneux discussing the Georgia shooting case. | |
| One of the two things that stood out to me was the lack of context and the key components of who triggered the confrontation. | |
| When you're going through this and looking at this, what evidence and information did you look at to really piece together what had truly happened in the case? | |
| Well, of course, the first thing, and this is an amazing example of just how, as Scott Adams says, two people can watch the same movie and be in completely different stories. | |
| Because I think an objective person looks and says, well, this is a bad situation, you do have the young man darting around and attacking the guy with the shotgun, that's not good at all, and then he's defending himself, the gun goes off, he gets shot, like what a bad decision, tragic situation, and there are other people who are like, You know, young black man hunted down by white supremacists and killed in cold blood. | |
| And it's like, man, I don't know how people are going to live together unless we can start to agree on facts. | |
| Because if we can't agree on facts, all that's left is bullying, emotional pressure, manipulation, propaganda, and cultural collapse. | |
| So this is why I've been spending some time on this. | |
| It seems like a really, really important thing. | |
| What blew me away, though, Robert, was when I really found out and dug into and found out that Gregory McMichael had already investigated Ahmed Ahmaud Arbery in the past. | |
| That, to me, gives you a whole history. | |
| I'm sure that these two guys knew each other. | |
| I'm sure that they, you know, they sat across the table, they looked into each other's eyes. | |
| And so I think that when Ahmaud Arbery was, the window rolled down from the cab and this guy is like, hey, stop, we want to talk to you. | |
| It's like, oh my gosh, it's that guy from the police station who investigated me two years ago, a year and a half ago, whatever it was, right? | |
| And like, what terrible odds, what terrible luck. | |
| And now there's no point running because he knows who I am. | |
| So I can't get away. | |
| And so you can see stuff, you know, it's on the street. | |
| Maybe he dumped it. | |
| Maybe he stole nothing. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Maybe you're right. | |
| He was just casing out the place. | |
| But he knew he had run, and there was no point running any further because he'd been made, right? | |
| He'd been identified by the guy who'd investigated him. | |
| Or maybe, maybe Gregory McMichael said, Oh, I know you. | |
| You're Armando Aubrey. | |
| We saw you. | |
| You got to stop. | |
| We got to talk to you. | |
| And then I think he's like, well, if this is my third time down, so to speak, right, you got 2013, you got 2018, I'm not going to jail 2020. | |
| And I think he made that fateful decision. | |
| And so to me, the key is the history between the two men, because it's always portrayed as just, you know, strangers or happenstance and so on. | |
| But I think those relationships went back. | |
| And I think there was some frustration on the part of Gregory McMichael, that he hadn't been able to have the court system deal with Aubrey. | |
| And now he's got to deal with this fallout of the Court system not punishing a briefer violating his parole from 2013 by stealing in 2018. | |
| And so I think there was a lot of frustration, a lot of high tension, and he knew the law. | |
| And I think that as the D.A. | |
| did, and as the senior legal counsel did, and the cops who investigated it all, and as the autopsy confirmed, I think that he did rightly feel that he had enough circumstances to make A citizen's arrest. | |
| Now, once that determination had been made, then the initiation of force on the part of Arbery, in that sense, sealed his doom. | |
| But that was the result of choice. | |
| That was not the result of race, and that was not the result of a mere trespassing situation. | |
| Could you explain some of what your research found in terms of the, because the other part of the context they're removing is Aubrey's history. | |
| That what is out there in terms of mental health, in terms of criminal record, in terms of not facing justice, and might explain the context of what McMichael is thinking. | |
| Okay, so the mental health stuff is really dicey because some people say that he, the DA said I think that he had mental health issues. | |
| Other people have not said that to be the case. | |
| The DA, I'll read you something that the DA had written. | |
| He said, this family are not strangers to the local criminal justice system. | |
| From the best we can tell, Ahmad's older brother has gone to prison in the past and is currently in the Glynn jail without bond awaiting new felony prosecution. | |
| It also appears a cousin has been prosecuted by the D.A. | |
| Johnson's office. | |
| Ahmad, the deceased, had a juvenile and adult felony record. | |
| So this is all occurring under D.A. | |
| Barnhill in the same area where the elder McMichael had had his multi-decade career. | |
| As a cop. | |
| So this is a family that is known to the police. | |
| Of course, you know, the fact that his brother is in Glynn Jail doesn't of course mean that Ahmad was any kind of bad guy intrinsically, but it does mean that the family is kind of known as a whole. | |
| And I think also what happened as well was there was some frustration with the police because the police say, hey, you know, there wasn't a string of break-ins. | |
| Oh, there wasn't a string of robberies as the elder McMichael asserted after he was questioned by the police after the shooting. | |
| But only one of them had been reported, which was the aforementioned theft of Travis's gun in January, January 1st. | |
| So I think there was a frustration and I think that what Gregory McMichael said was when his neighbors said, hey, we're getting stolen from and they would go to him as the cop, right, or the ex-cop and say, what should we do? | |
| And he'd say, listen, we got to catch him in the act. | |
| It's not just enough to get him on film, because it could be grainy. | |
| He'd just deny he was there. | |
| He might have someone invent an alibi. | |
| We've got to catch him in the act. | |
| And I think when then they did catch him in the act, I think tensions and fevers ran pretty high because there was a long history. | |
| I think that Gregory and Travis McMichael had suspected Aubrey of taking the gun from the car. | |
| They, of course, have seen him on video. | |
| And those videos just got released today, the nighttime videos. | |
| of aubrey inside the uh mostly finished house again looking for stuff i would imagine i mean it can't be curiosity if you've always already been there several times since october of 2019 so i think if you look at that deep history it didn't come out of nowhere i think they wanted to catch him in the act so that something could be done otherwise it's just a misdemeanor and the police probably aren't even going to bother doing anything about it but if you catch him in the act you got him in a felony then you can get him put away you can keep your neighborhood safe i I think that was the thinking. | |
| And I think that's one of the reasons why they followed him. | |
| And that's what I said before, why they were looking in case he'd thrown anything away. | |
| And if you understand that history, that it wasn't just like, oh, look, here's some guy jogging down the street. | |
| Let's shoot him. | |
| I mean, that's not anything close to what happened. | |
| You know, these trees have deep roots. | |
| And if you don't see most of these stories, like the iceberg, you know that most of it is underwater and it's all underreported by the by the media who just want you to focus on that terrible shooting moment without looking at all of the backstory that really helps put it in context. | |
| But of course, you know, context cools tempers rather than inflames them, which seems to be what the media is driving for. | |
| Exactly, and I thought one of the other key facts that you highlighted was the degree of distance. | |
| When you combine that they have knowledge of him, they likely know what neighborhood he lives in or at least lived in recently, and the original story of him just jogging through his own neighborhood didn't seem to jive with where he actually lived. | |
| Can you go into what you did with that? | |
| Yeah, so it wasn't as far as I had initially thought, right? | |
| So I'd initially thought it was, you know, 10 miles or so. | |
| I did get some information from a local resident about some significant closer distance. | |
| It could have just been a couple of miles. | |
| But, you know, the cargo shorts, the lack of sweating, and the fact that, you know, when he first went into the house that was in the process of being renovated or was being built, when he went, he was just walking. | |
| up the street. | |
| He walked up the street. | |
| He ambled in. | |
| He didn't run. | |
| He wasn't jogging and sort of leaning over and catching his breath, as I sort of want to do when I jog these days. | |
| And so calling him a jogger when the only video that we can see, other than the shooting video, the only video that we can see is him kind of ambling up to this house and then going inside. | |
| And then, of course, the only time he's running is after he's basically caught or seen inside. | |
| He comes out, sees the guy on the phone to 911. | |
| And so just calling him a jogger, it's just one of these manipulative words. | |
| It's on par with putting out the picture of 12-year-old Trayvon Martin in the George Zimmerman situation and, you know, Mike Brown, the gentle giant and aspiring rapper and so on. | |
| I mean, it really has become such a cliche, such an internet meme, that whenever these kinds of things happen, you know, the whites are racist and the blacks are noble victims and so on. | |
| It's like, You know, and what you don't hear, of course, you don't hear things like, just a day or two ago, there was a sniper, a black guy who took aim at two elderly white people, a father and a mother who were visiting a grave and shot him. | |
| And that's deliberate, that's targeted. | |
| That isn't something, well, you know, it was a citizen's arrest, maybe went wrong. | |
| And you know, there's lots of complications. | |
| And that's a guy sighting down a sniper. | |
| rifle and blowing two elderly white guys away. | |
| It's a black guy shooting it. | |
| Now, of course, the media isn't going to want to talk about that. | |
| Although if you're going to look at racial targeting and unprovoked attacks, come on. | |
| I mean, these elderly, these people, I think they were in their 80s. | |
| They weren't exactly sprinting at 20 miles an hour from a truck. | |
| I mean, they were standing over a grave in a graveyard. | |
| They got blown away. | |
| That doesn't fit the narratives. | |
| You're not going to hear anything about that. | |
| They're just going to focus on this stuff and ginning up this kind of discontent. | |
| It's the devil's business. | |
| But sadly, it seems to pay very well. | |
| Well, the way I've always put it is that there's no benefit to dependency unless you continue to be dependent. | |
| And so the degree to which they can create people in a constant state of fear, believe that other people out there want to hurt them and harm them, and that only the Democratic Party in this instance will protect them from this harm, That as long as that continues to be the narrative, they have political viability by just selling dependency. | |
| Whereas if you tell people actually the world isn't out to hurt you, you yourself have the power to achieve a meaningful difference. | |
| If you have the Martin Luther King speeches of the 60s, then all of a sudden your power dissipates. | |
| Because why do I need to vote Democrat if I'm not in fact threatened? | |
| If I can in fact achieve my own success? | |
| And I think that the narrative reinforces that aspect. | |
| What's your thoughts on that? | |
| Well, when it comes to assessing rational fears, I mean, I'm sure you know as well as I do that white-on-black violence is far less common than black-on-white violence. | |
| Of course, black-on-black violence and white-on-white violence are the most common, but where these sort of circles overlap, so to speak, on average, the white man or woman has more to fear from the black man or woman than vice versa. | |
| And again, it's a minority of cases, of course, but that's the statistics and they're pretty short. | |
| Alan West, of course, pointed out some years ago that, you know, blacks kill each other more in six months than the entire Klan and lynching movement did in 80 plus years. | |
| And so when it comes to where do the risks exist within the black community? | |
| Well, they exist from crime, they exist from poverty, they exist from other blacks and sexual assault on black girls is almost an epidemic in the black community. | |
| I've seen studies where between 40 and 60 percent of black women report that they were raped as children by black men before they reach the age of 18. | |
| There are, you know, there are huge problems in the black community, there are huge problems in the white community, and a lot of those problems overlap. | |
| A lot of those problems that have to do with welfare dependency, that have to do with single motherhood, that have to do with drug abuse and drug use, the opioid crisis, the opioid epidemic, these are all things that reasonable people need to sit down across from each other and discuss in a sane way But trying to have sensible discussions about both American problems, Canadian problems, within and between the races, it's kind of like trying to do math with someone screaming random numbers in your ear. | |
| Every time we get close to having a rational discussion about problems and solutions and how everyone can work together, The media starts ginning up all of these stories, cranking up everyone's adrenaline, the fight or flight mechanism kicks in and then it just becomes marching and screaming and no justice, no peace and it's just like every time we try to get together to have sensible conversations about significant problems, this cherry bomb is rolled into the potential picnic and we just all end up heading for the hills. | |
| Well, exactly. | |
| If you go through American history, whenever biracial populism has started to reach success, as people recognize their common interest across social and cultural class differences, and recognize that they actually had more in common than they had difference, is when you see the political establishment and the press start to push divisive propaganda to try to find the points of difference rather than the points of commonality. | |
| And I think that often explains a lot of the politics that have taken place. | |
| And what's extraordinary is that these cases have, almost like the old show Chicago, when we had the yellow press, when they would propagate crimes for their own particularized purposes, they've now just taken on a racial and political hue. | |
| Do you think that will change at all as more of these cases fall apart on their evidentiary merit? | |
| As we go through them, are we just bound to repeat them because the press at least and the partisans have political success with them? | |
| Oh, it's a tough question, man. | |
| I gotta tell you, I've had very little sleep over the last couple of days, because without the internet, this would already have been a massive catastrophe, right? | |
| Because what happens is, they're building these bombs in real time, and we have to disassemble these bombs in real time. | |
| And, you know, I pushed back real hard on Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. | |
| That video and podcast got millions of views and really helped to diffuse the situation. | |
| I'm not trying to brag, you know, it's just that these things have happened. | |
| And having covered these situations repeatedly over the last 15 years, Robert, I do find that it is really, really, really important to challenge people. | |
| You know, I've been doing like Matrix Ninja moves on Twitter and other places just to try and push back against some of this narrative. | |
| Ask the essential questions. | |
| You know, do you know that they weren't brandishing their weapons? | |
| Do you know that they had a legal right, according to the DA and senior legal attorney, to perform a citizen's arrest? | |
| Do you know that, unfortunately, Arbery was the one who attacked Travis? | |
| Do you know that nobody even knows who pulled the trigger? | |
| Do you know these things? | |
| And so these elaborate death traps of divisiveness are being constructed and you can see the wires snaking across people's brains and firing up their fight-or-flight adrenal responses and so on. | |
| And we've got to get out there. | |
| That's why I'm so happy and I really, really appreciate the chance to talk to you and this wonderful audience. | |
| We've got to get out there with the facts. | |
| We've got to get ahead of this red tide that they're all trying to drown us in. | |
| So I won't say that I think it's going to happen of its own accord, otherwise I would have gotten some sleep over the last couple of days, but I will say That if people of good conscience, black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, don't really care, all people of good conscience and good will, let's get together and talk about the facts. | |
| Let's push back against this horrendous divisiveness that literally is going to tear America and a lot of the West apart if we let it happen. | |
| So, I think we can do it, but man, it's not going to be easy, because you know, as you know, on social media, I guess this channel of all places, I mean, they're supposedly like the authoritative voices and so on, the legitimate news, but they're all pushed to the top. | |
| Other people tend to be Exactly. | |
| pushed down so that the media can get their death grip on the divisiveness that they're sowing within the culture. | |
| So, you know, if you're a little further away or a little further down, you just got to be a little brighter and yell a little louder. | |
| But I think we can get the message across. | |
| Exactly. | |
| I mean, I don't think you have to have a background in empirical philosophy as you do or as a legal background as I do, though I think our contributions uniquely help people filter information without the race colored glasses, take those off and look at it from an evidence based perspective and look at the there's a father take those off and look at it from an evidence based perspective and look at the there's a father and son here whose life may be stripped from them based on | |
| That's also intended to create racial, incite racial conflicts and maybe even ultimately race riots. | |
| For example, if this case were to go to trial, I believe a fair jury would conclude not guilty. | |
| They want another situation as we've had in the past, where they want people to misperceive it. | |
| And I think they deliberately want African American men to feel futile and weak, rather than strong and independent. | |
| I don't think they have a meaningful civil rights supporting bone in their body. | |
| by their course of conduct. | |
| They don't support good cases. | |
| They don't support empowerment. | |
| They support dependence. | |
| And that's not the sign of respect either for the African-American community or the inherent capability of power within the African community if it was exercised with knowledge that they could assert the same degree of power as the rest of us. | |
| So I think it's a battle for all of us in the human race against those with an anti-human agenda. | |
| Where can people find? | |
| I know freedomain.com. | |
| I'm a member. | |
| I'm a subscriber. | |
| I recommend everybody else be a member and subscriber. | |
| Great podcast, great videos, great informative information in an accessible actionable format with an empirical philosophical basis. | |
| My brother is an analytical philosophy professor. | |
| So some of your conversations in his might occasionally slip over my head, but as a general rule you do fantastic informative information for people to have. | |
| Where can they help get that information on a move forward basis? | |
| Well, of course, you can go to the best places to go is to freedomain.com. | |
| There you can subscribe to the podcast. | |
| I'm on YouTube. | |
| I'm on Facebook. | |
| I'm on Twitter, of course, Steemit and a wide variety of other places. | |
| So you can also subscribe to a newsletter there that I put out from time to time. | |
| And I really, really do appreciate the chance to have a conversation about this. | |
| I did have other plans for the week, but I think this is taking a little bit of precedence. | |
| It's like the ER doctor when there's a bus crash, you know, like get a coffee and get typing, for me at least. | |
| So I really do appreciate the time to be on the show and thanks for your invitation. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Thanks for being on, Stefan. | |
| You do valuable, critical, essential work in a time period where the world has gone a little insane. | |
| It's necessary to have a few voices of sanity. | |
| Thanks for being with us. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Bye. | |
| There's no question as you dig into this case, from my perspective, a sort of triplicate filtered approach of criminal defense, of civil rights, of knowledge of how these political narratives in the court of public opinion are often falsified or exaggerated to serve the objective or agenda of someone other than who was the person or family that was a participant on either side of the case, how those cases develop. | |
| If we take a look at the sort of slow motion video, if we show clip number four, We can see, and this is a video that if you try to get access to on YouTube or other places, you often can't. | |
| You get stuck in this sort of spiral of death, if you will, that where it just keeps saying it's loading and it never loads. | |
| So let's take a look at video clip number four. | |
| We'll see a slow motion version of what happened the day of the Georgia shooting. | |
| Friends, I'm sure most of you have seen the shooting video from Georgia that TMZ released involving an unarmed black man. | |
| When I watched it, I had no idea what was going on. | |
| And reading the comments, it seemed like I was the only one. | |
| But I still had the question, what happened? | |
| Now, I'm also aware that asking questions in today's society is a grievous sin. | |
| It's not allowed. | |
| Unfortunately, I do ask questions, and I'm not trying to draw any conclusions today. | |
| I'm just... I want to share some of the questions that I had. | |
| Like, who's this guy in the car, and why is he recording? | |
| Why is Mr. Arbery running down the street, and when he comes across the guys in the pickup truck, why does it look like they're waiting for him? | |
| There's something that's going on, and it started well before the beginning of the video. | |
| At this moment, we can see that the driver got out and it looks like Mr. Arbery is responding by going from the left side of the road to the right shoulder. | |
| Once Mr. Arbery passes the truck, he immediately turns left and within a second, he's contacted the driver. | |
| Why would anyone run at someone else that has a gun? | |
| And why does Mr. McMichael have a gun to begin with? | |
| I think Mr. McMichael claimed that he had been robbed, possibly by Mr. Arbery. | |
| So trying to stop him isn't necessarily illegal, and even having a gun out in the open isn't necessarily illegal in Georgia. | |
| It depends on how you carry it and the circumstances. | |
| But again, I don't know what even happened. | |
| For all I know, that car that was videotaping was, you know, trying to box Mr. Arbery in, and maybe he felt like, um, charging Mr. McMichael was his only way of, you know, defending himself. | |
| Who knows? | |
| Just as Mr. Arbery disappears from the camera view, he's within two steps of Mr. McMichael. | |
| We don't know what each of them was thinking, but they had less than a second to think about it before the shot was fired at this moment. | |
| It's clear Mr. McMichael is moving backwards here. | |
| That could be a big deal to a jury, and even though Mr. Arbery was initially unarmed, if he did grab the gun, which it appears he did, at that moment he may not be considered unarmed. | |
| At the moment the first shot was fired, we can't see because the view is blocked by the truck. | |
| It's also interesting to me that it looks like this other guy is on the phone. | |
| If he called 911, that could help their defense. | |
| On the other hand, if he called more friends to come help catch this guy, that's going to hurt them. | |
| If you only looked at the video, you could conclude that Mr. Iberi is the aggressor. | |
| But again, looking at the bigger picture, the things that aren't in the video, this might not have been the case. | |
| In either case, was Mr. McMichael justified in using deadly force? | |
| The way that people typically answer that question is by using their emotions and what their friends have to say on social media. | |
| A good example is the shooting that involved Officer Betty Shelby, and if you had watched that video and listened to her statements afterwards, it should have been clear to a lot of people that she was not going to be convicted. | |
| Thanks for taking the time to listen to me think this through. | |
| I welcome any discussion, just keep in mind in making this I had to edit out about two-thirds of my comments just for the sake of time. | |
| Social media is just not the best way to discuss heavy issues such as this. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | |
| By the way, it does look like there was a 9-1-1, there were multiple 9-1-1 calls apparently involved in the case. | |
| We don't have all the records of all of them, but we have records of some. | |
| Let's take a look at video clip number 7. | |
| About the case on National News. | |
| It looks like murder. | |
| It looks like vigilante behavior that should be charged and criminalized. | |
| And it looks like the Arbery family has been dealt a very sore hand of injustice. | |
| We've been working very quietly trying to lift this story up because we wanted to be respectful of the family and recognize that there was a process moving, but the process moved too slowly. | |
| Governor Brian Kemp said Georgians deserve the truth about the case. | |
| Presidential candidate Joe Biden weighed in saying it was, quote, clear Arbery was killed in cold blood. | |
| A Brunswick attorney who is representing Greg and Travis McMichael defended the father and son, though, who he says are not racist and were acting in self-defense. | |
| The GBI is now investigating the case alongside a special prosecutor after two district attorneys recused themselves. | |
| And tomorrow would have been Ahmad's 26th birthday. | |
| He was born on Mother's Day 1994, right? | |
| His loved ones are organizing a way to honor his life and protest his death, asking people to go outside and run or walk 2.23 miles tomorrow using the hashtag IRunWithMaud. | |
| Well there they didn't go into detail of the 911 call that has in fact been received but it shows that it is consistent with the father calling in and saying that in fact and he's calling saying stop stop stop we just want to talk in essence so if you look at the when you looked at the video in slow motion what you see is someone who is further away from the truck He decides to continue to run toward the truck. | |
| He didn't have to, he chose to. | |
| He could go left, he could go right, he could go the other direction. | |
| He starts running toward the truck and when he sees the father in the back of the truck and the son to the left of the truck, he suddenly makes a sudden turn to the right before he goes up past the passenger side of the truck. | |
| At that point he is passing them. | |
| There's no evidence that either one of the people are pointing a gun at him at that point. | |
| As he swerves past the truck, you see at the end of this part of the video, you'll see him suddenly turn, make a 90 degree turn, and attack the son that has the gun. | |
| There's still no evidence any gun was pointed at him, and instead he decided to attack, and then you hear the first shot going off. | |
| Throughout the rest of the physical conflict and confrontation, see there's the sudden turn and almost sneak attack. | |
| So that's the beginning of it. | |
| So he decides he could have kept going. | |
| There's no evidence that he could have been stopped from continuing to go. | |
| They were outside of the truck at that point. | |
| He could have gone in different directions. | |
| He chooses not to. | |
| Instead, he makes a sudden, it's like he decided to go past him. | |
| And so he's thinking, it looks like both the son and the father are thinking, OK, he's just going to keep on jogging or he's going to stop and talk to us. | |
| Instead, he makes a sudden turn to attack him physically. | |
| If arguably, if either one had pointed their guns at him from the get-go, that this wouldn't have necessarily happened. | |
| It's because they're not pointing their gun at him that he may believe he has an opportunity to get the gun from one of them. | |
| So he makes a sudden swerge to attack, crosses the front of the truck. | |
| We see the beginning of that conflict, and then we see parts of it as it spins out. | |
| And throughout the process of what we're seeing as it spins out, We're seeing him trying to grab the gun all the way through. | |
| At different points he will throw punches. | |
| We do not see the son throwing any punches at him. | |
| We see him moving backwards, moving backwards, moving backwards, and moving backwards. | |
| We see him trying to pull the gun down and away. | |
| And he just kept pulling at the gun, pulling at the gun up with the barrel towards him. | |
| And that's where apparently the fatal shot happens. | |
| And so there's no evidence. | |
| Does that look like someone, you know, pointing a gun at someone and then shooting them in cold blood? | |
| There's just no evidence of that, frankly. | |
| The evidence is instead him pulling at the gun, pulling at the gun, and that is why when they forensically reviewed it, the evidence is consistent with The idea that the gun went off because of the Arbery pulling at the gun, and there may have been no effort to pull the trigger at all, that because in fact the son was trying to pull the gun down and away from Arbery so it could no longer be pointed at him, and just kept away from him. | |
| And that is in fact what the forensic evidence supported. | |
| But now, after the prosecutor cleared them, the forensic investigation cleared them, the political storm develops, and now you have a father and son accused of murder. | |
| And you have a racialized, politicized narrative that cannot ultimately meet justice when the facts do not support that racialized, politicized narrative from the press. | |
| Notice what facts the press chose to highlight about both the son, not about the son and the father, but instead about Arbery. | |
| They ignore the context of the criminal history. | |
| They ignore the fact that 9-11 calls happened that day. | |
| They ignore that he may have been the one to cause the gun to go off. | |
| They ignore the fact that he triggered confrontation and conflict. | |
| They ignore his various criminal photos, mugshot photos. | |
| Instead, they talk about, oh, he was born on Mother's Day. | |
| Instead, they talk about, they show photos of his from high school or from tuxedo or from younger photos that show promising positive portraits. | |
| These deliberate choices are manipulative choices, not meant to get to the truth, not meant to get to the facts, but instead meant to incite racial controversy and conflict in the United States. | |
| It's not intended to heal people, but divide people. | |
| When we come back, we'll discuss a little bit more about this case and some other aspects of the news coming in, and we'll take your calls from you, the jury, to tune in as well. | |
| So come back for the last half, the last segment, bottom half of the hour, and we'll talk to you. | |
| Welcome back to American Countdown. | |
| In this segment, we'll take your calls from you, the jury, about this or any other matter that are on your mind. | |
| You can call in at 877-789-2539. | |
| That's 877-789-2539. | |
| at 877-789-2539. | |
| That's 877-789-2539. | |
| Or if calling internationally, area code 512-646-1776. | |
| That's 512-646-1776. | |
| And we'll answer your questions to the best of our ability. | |
| Try to have it in about a minute so we can have a meaningful answer for you. | |
| In the same context that we've had this storyline developed that looks like it's intended to distract us from the actual news of the day and devour the news. | |
| The father and son simply for being the convenient politicized victims of a media narrative intended to use them as the sin goats for the country's sins instead of the innocent people they in fact may be legally for what they have been accused of and for what they've been demonized for. | |
| In the same context, we continue to have the pandemic motivated politics, which also ignored the actual evidence in the case of what was happening across the country and around the globe. | |
| One of the first people to identify this was a mathematician and a well-recognized professor from Israel, Michael Levitt, who did a recent interview detailing what some of the problems were and some of the perils were, both from a scientific perspective and from an empirical evidentiary basis of the pandemic-driven shutdown politics. | |
| Let's take a look at some aspects of that interview in video clip number nine. | |
| Policy that so many European countries and States in America have introduced? | |
| I think it is a huge mistake. | |
| I think we need smart lockdown. | |
| If we were to do this again, we would probably insist on face masks, hand sanitizers, and some kind of payment that did not involve touching right from the very beginning. | |
| This would slow down new outbreaks. | |
| I think the For example, they've found, as I understand, that children, even if they're infected, never infect adults. | |
| So why do we not have children at school? | |
| Why do we not have people working? | |
| England is reaching, England, France, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, are all reaching levels of saturation that are going to be very, very close to herd immunity. | |
| So basically, I think that's a good thing. | |
| I think the policy of herd immunity is the right policy. | |
| I think Britain was on exactly the right track before they were fed wrong numbers and they made a huge mistake. | |
| I see the standout winners as Germany and Sweden. | |
| They didn't practice too much lockdown. | |
| They got enough people sick to get some herd immunity. | |
| The standout losers are countries like Austria, Australia, Israel, That actually had very, very strict lockdown, but didn't have many cases. | |
| So they have damaged their economies, caused massive social damage, damaged the educational year of their children, but not obtained any herd immunity. | |
| I think in many ways, the European countries are fine. | |
| They didn't need to have lockdown. | |
| But they will have all reached a high enough level of infection not to have to worry about further future attacks of coronavirus. | |
| The United States seems to be heading that way. | |
| They're certainly that way in New York City, but they still have a long way to go. | |
| What you're saying is that you believe success as we are currently measuring it, which is as few cases as possible and as small a spread of the virus as possible, is actually failure. | |
| I think if you really control your epidemic, for example, California has now had lockdown for six weeks and once another four weeks, they have so far less than 100 deaths. | |
| That means they don't have more, let's say, 100,000 people. | |
| That is not enough to give them significant herd immunity. | |
| They didn't need to do all that lockdown. | |
| The lockdown, I think, is particularly hurtful in countries that don't have good social infrastructure. | |
| Countries like the United States and Israel, many, many people have been really, really hurt, especially young people. | |
| You know, I think that everybody panicked. | |
| They were fed incorrect numbers by epidemiologists. | |
| And, you know, this, I think, led to a situation. | |
| There's no doubt in my mind that when we come to look back on this, the damage done by lockdown will exceed any saving of lives by a huge factor. | |
| One very easy way to see this is that, and again, I'm getting into sensitive territory here, but economists have a very simple way of looking at death. | |
| They don't count people. | |
| They come to the conclusion that if you're 20 and you die, that's a greater loss than if you're 85 and you die. | |
| And it's a hard issue. | |
| But in some ways, you know, are we valuing the potential of future life of the 20 year old? | |
| Are we valuing the loss of a more senior person now? | |
| by what's called DALY, Disability Adjusted Life Years, where basically if somebody is in their 80s, has Alzheimer's disease, and then dies from pneumonia, perhaps due to Corona, that is less of a loss than if a 15 year old is riding his motorcycle, his bike, and gets run over. | |
| So this is an important way of looking at the death. | |
| It's also, you know, right now we know that the number of excess deaths in Europe is around 130,000 up till yesterday. | |
| This is for all of Europe. | |
| This is for a population of around 330 million people. | |
| So an excess of 100,000 for this whole year is actually not that much. | |
| In some of the worst flu epidemics, we get to those kinds of numbers, sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. | |
| Now, I'm not saying flu is like coronavirus. | |
| I'm just simply saying That the burden of death of flu is like coronavirus, especially when we correct for the fact that people who die from coronavirus are older, on average, than people who die from flu. | |
| Flu kills young people. | |
| It kills two or three times more people under 65 than does coronavirus. | |
| If we put those facts into the situation, we find that the burden of death from coronavirus, I'm fairly sure, Will in Europe, where we have good numbers, be less than that of a very great flu? | |
| Another factor which has not been considered, are all the cancer patients who aren't being treated? | |
| Are all the heart cardiology patients who aren't being treated? | |
| I've heard estimates of tens of thousands of people who are basically going to be dying because of a lack of that treatment. | |
| And generally again, the age group who die of cancer are younger Then the age group would die of coronavirus. | |
| There's one very easy way to sort of summarize coronavirus. | |
| I put an article in the medium in response to an article by the pretty famous British statistician Sir David Spiegelhauser, Cambridge, and he had said that the numbers coming from Ferguson suggested that we had to lose about one year of people. | |
| Turns out, in fact, that I immediately wrote an article in the same medium and replied to him, saying that in fact the answer was actually one month, not one year. | |
| So basically, my feeling is, and it's been supported by the numbers, that the amount of excess death you need to reach saturation, I'm not going to call it herd immunity, where the virus by itself stops, is on the order of four weeks of excess death. | |
| Now to give you some idea, in the European area, Where there is good monitoring by a website called Euromomo, which I ran out of Denmark, it covers about 300 million people. | |
| Every week in Europe, in that area, there's around 50,000 natural deaths. | |
| So four weeks, we'll hear about 200,000 extra deaths in that year. | |
| And it looks like coronavirus in Europe, where there is no doubt that it's the most severely hit area in all the world, will probably reach Around 200,000 or four weeks worth. | |
| So what happens if what you're saying is there's a sort of, there seems to be a statistical observation, which is around four weeks of excess death, and then the pandemic seems to peter out or begin to flatten out. | |
| What does that mean policy wise for these European countries then? | |
| So if we could protect the old people perfectly, Then the death rates would be very, very low. | |
| So for example, in Europe, I said there were about 140,000 excess deaths in the last, I think, nine weeks. | |
| The number of those excess deaths who are younger than 65 is about 10%. | |
| So basically, 13,000 of the 130,000 deaths are actually under 65 years old. | |
| of the 130,000 deaths are actually under 65 years old. | |
| So, and if we had simply been able to protect our elderly people, then the death rate would have been much, much less. | |
| Remember, the key thing is, is to have as much infection for as little possible death, and also do whatever you can to keep the hospitals full, but not overflowing. | |
| It's a difficult calculation. | |
| It's one which a country like Sweden can do, where essentially there's no political concerns. | |
| The trouble is, is that in Israel, that I know well, in the United States, everything is political. | |
| And therefore nobody could say something like this. | |
| They would say, ah, but you're not valuing debt. | |
| So the thing that should have been done is for the media to stress to people that every day somebody dies. | |
| And these people are essentially in the same age band who die from Corona. | |
| They have other diseases. | |
| I've become a huge fan of Twitter. | |
| I'd never used Twitter before. | |
| And for me, Twitter is the best discussion forum I have seen since I was a student at the Cambridge Laboratory of Necrobiology, which is a 26 Nobel Prize winner lab, the best lab in the world. | |
| The Twitter discussion is phenomenal. | |
| And I'm getting documents from Italy showing that many of the COVID deaths were either dead before they were tested or else they had up to three other conditions. | |
| So there's nothing wrong with this. | |
| People die for all sorts of reasons. | |
| But the news should be stressing this, and maybe they should be counting it as a 0.1 COVID death. | |
| Countries seem to be racing to have as many COVID deaths as they could. | |
| And this is a huge mistake. | |
| In the flu season, no one cares about these people. | |
| I mean, the total number of COVID deaths in Europe will be very similar to a severe flu season. | |
| And, you know, this is serious. | |
| Flu is a serious disease. | |
| But maybe we should just shut down the economy during the flu season. | |
| I mean, we need people. | |
| People should have been made to understand it. | |
| Unfortunately, I think in Britain, they started out wanting to go for herd immunity without too much lockdown. | |
| There was then a scary paper which is likely to be retracted, which influenced Italy as well. | |
| Could we just spend a moment on that paper, Professor? | |
| I know you had some specific queries about Neil Ferguson's paper. | |
| We had him on the show last week. | |
| So what did you think he got wrong in those models and predictions? | |
| So his work was on modelling. | |
| In the paper that I saw, and of course these are preprints, Initially he found, so I was following China very carefully, and around the 10th of February he had his first paper that I saw, and in there he was getting a case fatality ratio of around 15%, whereas all my observations were saying that it was around 3 or 4%. | |
| So I was suspicious. | |
| I looked at the paper very carefully, and in a footnote to a table it said, assuming exponential growth for six days, At 15% a day. | |
| Now, I had looked at China and never, ever seen exponential growth that wasn't decaying rapidly. | |
| So I was suspicious. | |
| My numbers were about 10% less. | |
| No, one tenth, not 10% less. | |
| 10% all. | |
| So what he went through, Professor Levitt, and he was the first one to forecast, as we learned in our discussion with Scott Adams, | |
| If someone is able to and capable of repeatedly accurately forecasting the near short term future, especially when everyone else is saying that they're wrong and no one else is forecasting it, then that is someone to particularly pay attention to in that context. | |
| Professor Levitt was such a successful professor, a Nobel laureate provider winner, supported his work from Israel. | |
| And what it showed was, in fact, he could forecast what was going to happen within a region or country that experienced the virus from the time of its first death to it would have sort of exponential growth in the first 30 days. | |
| Then it would flatten. | |
| Then it would decline precipitously to where you had a growth rate like you do in the United States of about 1 percent a day. | |
| And that is in fact what he forecast for China, that's what happened. | |
| He forecasted for Iran, that's what happened. | |
| He forecasted for Italy, that's what happened. | |
| He forecasted for the United States and Israel, that's what happened. | |
| And it happened regardless, independent of any intervention or mitigation measurement taken. | |
| It was the nature of the virus itself that he had deduced and discovered simply from studying its growth, from studying it statistically, from observational data. | |
| That observational data was ignored though. | |
| When, in fact, the Imperial College put out its early reports, he was able to rebut them, noting that their footnotes assumed facts that were specifically refuted by the actual observed data. | |
| Yet, no one paid attention because they didn't want to. | |
| Bill Gates didn't back his worker research. | |
| He did Imperial College. | |
| He did IHME. | |
| He did, in fact, have connections and correlations with people like Birx and Fauci. | |
| He also goes through and documents how the way in which deaths are being calculated is very different from the traditional way that flu deaths are calculated, and that if we used analogous standards, we'd come up with the same kind of excess death rates to a severe flu season. | |
| If you looked at the data in Europe or the United States, that's what you would find. | |
| You would find the excess death data not only demographically looks like a flu season, in fact it looks even more like a severe flu season in the way it's disproportionately impacting those at the very end of life. | |
| A fact that may have been precipitated, as he notes, by our disparate policies. | |
| He said a smart policy, a smart, quote unquote, lockdown policy would be to target protection of the vulnerable elderly with other medical conditions while getting herd immunity for the rest of the population who's not meaningfully at risk. | |
| And as we've discovered, because of the nature of susceptibility and its relationship to both getting infected and spreading the infection, correlating to a lower rate of the disease transmitting once it gets past the first 30 day time period, that meant we could achieve herd immunity with a much lower number much earlier than they said. | |
| Instead we did just the opposite. | |
| We put the most vulnerable elderly in the equivalent of death panels by forcing those with COVID-19 and with the virus to go to nursing homes and then those nursing homes to be locked down, while in fact we had young people locked at home so they didn't develop the necessary immunity that could protect a reoccurrence of the virus down the road. | |
| That dated information, however, was ignored because it did not conform to the desired expectations and policy objectives of the Bill Gates of the world. | |
| And that is why we're here now. | |
| So let's go to some of your calls from you, the jury. | |
| Let's hear from Paul from Maryland. | |
| Good evening, everyone. | |
| Good evening, sir. | |
| Yes, the numbers are important. | |
| You're absolutely right. | |
| And if I'm not mistaken, here in America, The, uh, the obligation was given to the governors to report those numbers to each person in the state to keep it accurate, correct? | |
| Yes. | |
| I mean, without question, we're supposed to be getting accurate, honest numbers, accurate, honest information, so we can know whether to agree or disagree with the governor's decisions. | |
| And so we can know whether or not to take legal action in accord therewith. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| You're right. | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Okay. | |
| So before I get into this, I just want to ask one simple question. | |
| It has nothing to do with the, well, it does have to do with the actual thing that I'm about to say about this COVID thing. | |
| And I also want to know this. | |
| Now, if I'm not mistaken, the original education system, Because I heard the guy speaking about how children's education is very important. | |
| And it is. | |
| The Lesser Education Act was something that was definitely fought against here by William Donald Schaefer and people who stood up against it because we wanted kids to be intelligent. | |
| I was one of those kids. | |
| Blessed by it. | |
| Now, is reading, writing, and arithmetic the three major points of education? | |
| At least originally they were. | |
| In addition, the ideas also would be that we would instruct some aspects of history and the rest. | |
| But yeah, no question, for functionality. | |
| I'm gonna cut you off. | |
| No, go ahead. | |
| If I was choosing to be governor, correct, wouldn't I need to know reading, writing, and arithmetic? | |
| Yes, you should. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, there was, within the last two weeks, the TV's had a special on the TV, you know, like, here's your governor, he's speaking out about the virus. | |
| I don't call it what they're saying, because I know what the word is, the six letters, you add the letters up in the alphabet with the equal of two. | |
| So I call it the U is a dirty, because if U is a dirty, you're going to die. | |
| When he was asked about the numbers, he said, and he joked, he laughed, he said, I don't know how to do math too well. | |
| They just give me the numbers and I tell them to y'all, wait a minute, hold up. | |
| You're our governor, and if I'm not mistaken, isn't he not the head of the Governor's Association? | |
| I believe you're correct, yes. | |
| Yeah, so why would we have someone who has a lesser education to be our governor? | |
| No doubt. | |
| In fact, we're going to show another clip about someone else today when they were asked the basic information about the R.O. | |
| rate. | |
| Because what's extraordinary, I have no doubt that if any of these governors or mayors or county officials that have made these decisions to shut down civil society, suspend the Constitution, deprive people of a meaningful economy, an economy that's necessary because it's how we feed ourselves, how we clothe ourselves, how we house ourselves and around the world. | |
| That's why the starvation rate is dramatically rising into the millions of people Globally and is predicted to be as many as 130 million people at risk of death from starvation, extreme starvation, because of the shutdown. | |
| I have no doubt that none of these people could withstand a minute or two of meaningful cross-examination. | |
| That they don't have a factual basis for their conclusions. | |
| They're operating off of a coordinated political script. | |
| A media scare campaign, and that's what in fact they're doing. | |
| It's a reflection of the disproportionate and disparate influence of Bill Gates. | |
| If you go back and look at what Birx or Fauci or other public health officials, even Imperial College, were saying in January, even large parts of February, they were not pushing the panic button. | |
| They were trying to, in fact, were often suggesting that this would not be more than a severe flu. | |
| That's what Fauci's own published article in the New England Journal of Medicine said. | |
| And yet suddenly in mid-March, they're in this sudden reversal. | |
| They're preaching panic. | |
| They're preaching pandemic panic. | |
| They're preaching shutdowns. | |
| They're preaching extreme draconian remedies that have no basis in the medical literature, no predicate in our medical history or scientific background or basis. | |
| And in fact, have been proven out to be useless repeatedly by the statistical observations and documentation and studies and surveys that have been done. | |
| So why are we here? | |
| Well, there's only one explanation that I can see that's most persuasive. | |
| There's one man that ties the Imperial College whose model was used, the IHME whose model was used, and those public health officials who relied upon it, including the people at the World Health Organization. | |
| He's the number two contributor to the World Health Organization. | |
| He's one of the top contributors to Imperial College in the United Kingdom. | |
| He helped create the IHME in the first place. | |
| He launched a major propaganda campaign in support of these policies. | |
| He has allies and associations and relationships to both Fauci and Birx and people in the public health world. | |
| He's been described as having a monopoly over public health philanthropy. | |
| And that man is Bill Gates. | |
| So the most logical explanation is that they're just operating off of Bill Gates' instructed script. | |
| And it's extraordinarily circumstantial that we in effect impose the kind of death panels on nursing homes that Bill Gates appeared to call for all the way back earlier in the decade. | |
| So that reflects the why it is they suddenly can't seem to learn math. | |
| But the problem that our caller identifies is not unique to Baltimore. | |
| Let's take a look at video clip number one, when a politician is answered to ask something as basic as what the R0 rate is and how it correlates, and they can't seem to give a meaningful answer. | |
| Let's take a look at video clip number one. | |
| Because the experts tell me it's not possible to say with certainty what that is. | |
| The rate of transmission of the virus in Scotland, the R number that you have become used to hearing us talk about, is still too high for any significant change to be safe at this stage. | |
| Can you tell us that number? | |
| Well, I think several times now, Chris, I've said to you I can't tell you that number because the experts tell me it's not possible to say with certainty. | |
| In other words, that the number that she's relying upon, which is the rate of transmission of the virus, she doesn't even understand what it's really predicated upon, or how it's changed, or how it's mutated of its own form, or how it's working in the current context. | |
| That's the kind of world in which we reside. | |
| In which we either get fake news, in the case of the Georgia shooting, where critical context is removed, Or we get a different version of fake news by politicians who don't know reading, writing, and arithmetic in the way a third grader should, and explaining the basis of their policies, and articulating what the empirical basis of what they're doing is, how much it's changed, what even the terms mean, they don't appear to know. | |
| That's how a mathematician in Israel can figure out and predict and forecast things related to this virus around the world in ways that all of our shutdown-supporting politicians and press can't seem to explain the very basics of. | |
| That's how we got here. | |
| We got here by people trying to spread ill-informed information. | |
| And they're here and they want to continue that by censoring and suppressing independent platforms like this one and suppressing independent information around the world. | |
| So share the link. |
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