Richard Spencer contrasts the "Junta virus" with COVID-19, arguing that pandemic mandates like mask-wearing triggered social breakdown rather than care. He critiques Nancy Pelosi's "hug your Asian friend" event as a politicizing turning point and details his radicalization after being asked to show a vaccine card at a pizza place. Spencer notes the irony of conservatives desiring 1950s compliance while rejecting mass deportations, concluding that modern skepticism over autism claims has made defeating a virus harder than fighting a foreign army. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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The Ridiculousness of 202000:08:28
It feels like only yesterday that we were all wearing masks and kids were wearing masks to school, and these experts were all over the television, and people were doing dances for Dr. Fauci on TikTok, and nurses were the new heroes.
They've always been my heroes.
But for the rest of the country, nurses were appreciated.
And on the other hand, it seems like it was like 50 years ago as well, because the world has moved on.
Even liberals, when you talk to them, they don't think that the COVID response was accurate.
Maybe it was a reasonable mistake.
But everyone sort of looks back at that time as that was so weird.
We're way past BLM.
We're way past wokeness, at least as a kind of flamboyant expression of silliness in the public discourse.
The liberals have moved on.
We're past a lot of the conspiracy theories.
There's a A molecule was 666 in the ingredients of the vaccine, and therefore you shouldn't take it.
All of that stuff was being promoted by the right.
We seem to have moved past that to new crazy conspiracy theories that they believe in.
We're past QAnon, which was a virus of that point that spread over the internet during COVID time when we were all locked up.
So it seems like a long time ago, yet it wasn't that long ago, and it might come back.
But what are Basil, what are some of your memories of this time?
Well, first of all, let me lay the found work by flexing a little bit and saying that I'm pure blooded.
I made it through that whole thing without getting the jab.
Not everyone can say that.
I was boosted multiple times.
I'm sure you were.
Let me get the video.
Anyway, don't derail me.
But speaking of looking back at COVID, actually, today, this morning, I was up in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Don't ask me why.
And in their downtown Main Street, they have a statue of a nurse with a mask on.
I remember I just saw it this morning.
I was like, that's so odd to see in 2026.
And what it makes me think of, thinking back to COVID and the discrepancy between COVID's lethality and the junta virus' lethality, whatever we're calling it.
I remember having a conversation with my sister, who's like kind of a lib.
And she was like in support of like the lockdowns and things like that.
And I was like, I was like, this seems so ridiculous for something that is not that much more deadly than the cold or the flu or whatever.
What would you be doing?
What would the proper reaction be if it was something that was like 10 times more deadly?
And I asked her that.
She's like, well, I guess we would just do the same thing.
I was like, does that not seem crazy to you that we would do the reaction would be no different with the lethality of something as the flu or something that was hypothetically 10 times more deadly?
And with the whole, the premise of what's going on now is that this is much more deadly.
Whether it's able to spread or whatever, it's like, so what?
You want to just run it back again?
You want to just do the same thing over and over again?
I don't know.
I don't think we can run it back, even if we wanted to, because COVID ruined it.
COVID did ruin it.
And I say this as a COVID believer.
I was there, I volunteered for the police force while we were soldering COVID infected people into their homes.
And I was like, it's for the public good.
While I was shutting them in.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I was a COVID believer.
But even then, I mean, I think people were sort of on board for maybe a couple of weeks.
But it's a bigger issue.
Whether we overreacted and whether we should have just done herd immunity immediately, or maybe not quite immediately, but once we started to get some idea of the fatality rate, et cetera, we should have just done herd immunity.
I think that's a reasonable position to hold, and it was wrong.
But you have to put yourself in the position of public health officials.
And in December and January of 2019 and then 2020, I mean, The kind of reaction that was on social media, you would see images of Chinese people like wigging out and smashing windows and as if they were infected and it was like the rage virus or something like that.
And so I understand why people overreact, sort of better to overreact than underreact.
But they weren't able to recalibrate.
And I can even remember in 2022 attending a Zoom school board meeting where they were still talking about.
Masking being like three days a week or semi-voluntary.
And even I, as a COVID believer, was at a point where I'm like, guys, please, can we please just try to learn something from this experience and not pretend like this is December 2019 or something?
Like, you have to adjust.
But anyway, I didn't speak up actually because I didn't want to make a.
Uh uh, let's see.
Excuse me, I don't want to make a.
Uh, I didn't want to turn make crit.
Another scandal.
Other people were speaking up and I just let them talk.
Let the cowboys talk.
February, march of 2020.
I was in my mom's room and she has she has a tv in her room and we were watching the news and they were showing um, they were digging up plots like mass burial plots because the, the morgues or something were overrun, or something to that effect.
I remember physically or like being overcome with uh, I didn't cry or weep or something, but something like tightened in me.
It was like very emotionally evocative.
And now thinking back, it's like, it's so duplicitous in how like overly propagandistic it was.
There was no way that you could see that in that time period of February, March of 2020 and not be like, what's happening?
Something very serious is happening.
And like those images being beamed through your screen to you, it's like, there's no, it's not surprising how crazy people went.
But the thing about COVID was that it was so.
Quickly politicized.
The politicization of it switched early on, if you remember.
No, that is very interesting, actually.
It was like, go after the right wing.
Exactly.
First, the right wing was overreacting.
And Nancy Pelosi literally did a hug your Asian friend benefit in February.
Yeah.
Wow.
And then immediately flipped.
And because of that politicization of it, it became intractable in every way.
Right.
It became intractable if you were Covid skeptical, became intractable if you were a Covid believer.
And I think hopefully, what we can really and probably is too much to ask.
But if this Junta virus continues to go the way it goes, it probably will similarly be incredibly politicized.
But I think, like with Trump in power now, the whole warp speed thing is kind of a very awkward subject.
Thankfully we're Democrats again so I can say, Donald Trump and operation Warp speed, but it's like that's not something he like.
He touts it as an accomplishment, but it's something he, like, begrudgingly touts as an accomplishment.
It's one of those things where it's like, if you want the Epstein files, I don't want your support.
I did the Warp Speed, Operation Warp Speed was a great success.
It's like, try it again, motherfucker.
Let's see.
Let's roll the dice.
Like, I don't know.
Well, another thing just to point out remember when Mike Pence was debating Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris said, you know, I'm pro science, I'm pro vaccine, but I ain't taking that Trump vaccine.
Like, no child.
It's true.
I mean, I'm not even exaggerating her response, which gets to this bigger picture that at least concerns me as a fascistic totalitarian thinker, which is that.
Masks as Social Signals00:03:55
You can't, like, there has to be some sort of obedience on behalf of the public.
You know, maybe you're late in paying your parking tickets or you owe taxes or whatever, but you ultimately obey.
And there seems to be something really problematic, and it's deeper than maybe.
We even appreciated where there's no like public spiritedness or good faith effort, but there's really no obedience on the part of the public.
And it does show some sort of social breakdown that might be occurring when people just say no to things.
Like, for instance, let me say this on behalf of fellow liberals and democratic leftists, you know, wearing the mask, look.
If we look back on it, maybe we should have just not even bothered to wear a mask at all at any time.
It was not effective enough to, in a cost benefit analysis, to justify the just pain and annoyance and et cetera of mask wearing.
I can even agree with people on that.
But the mask, it wasn't just about that.
It was a signal that you were pro social.
Now it's, Ironic and contradictory because that was the most antisocial time that we were going through.
And wearing a mask where you can't, you can see their eyes and their eyebrows, you can't really see their facial expression.
You're not, you had a difficult time, at least I did, connecting with people on an emotional level because of the mask.
So, on a surface level, it was antisocial.
But on a deeper level, it was a pro social signal because you were basically saying, I care about you.
I'm not probably not going to die.
I'm healthy and I'm 30 years old, but I care about your grandmother.
I care about your sick uncle, blah, blah, blah.
So it was a kind of like, I'm public spirited, I'm pro social signal.
The right refusing to wear it, yelling at people at Target, like it was a shocking display of antisocial behavior on the right.
I understand what you're getting at.
Yeah.
It feels very much to me like how.
The person who puts the sign outside of their front door that says in this house we believe in science no humans illegal etc.
I have that that is also a signal a pro social signal However, in reality that pro social signal is an excuse to be incredibly anti social to the people around them in the same way that you're mentioning this the mask is a signal of Pro socialness in the abstract,
but in the concrete immediate is a very anti social thing that separates you from the people around you and from speaking for me the whole reason I became a Whatever the fuck I became of the anti-left Marxist.
The thing that radicalized me was an afternoon at work.
I went to go get a slice of pizza at the thing for lunch.
And they said, let me see your vaccine card.
And I was like, what?
It was the first day of it.
I was like, I don't have that.
And I looked behind me and everyone just kind of averted their gaze, not because I'm a fat, brown, ugly person, but just because it was an awkward thing.
And it's like, I had to stand outside the door and wait for my slice of pizza.
And that was a BCAD type of moment where I was a changed person because of that intrusion.
And you know, one more thing I'll say about this thing about the refusal to obey.
Vaccine Cards and Awkward Silence00:06:00
The only reason that that works is because of blacks.
And it's so funny that right-wingers were able to kind of piggyback off of blacks' lack of obeisance to the state in order to frame it as a libertarian.
They're correct.
Yes, it is a pro-liberty, anti-status type of position, but it could only work in this society where we have a 14% of the population that is naturally disobedient to the state, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that was able to kind of the same reason why the Democrats can't ban menthol cigarettes.
As a menthol cigarette enjoyer myself, I piggyback off of the disobedience of the black community for that reason.
Right.
A couple of thoughts here, though.
But let's say we're being invaded by not a virus, but foreign armies.
And the government just announces to you we are rationing goods, we are sheltering in place in homes.
If you have ammunition and weapons, you need to give a listing of it to your local police officer.
So they might want to use it or they could know where it is if your home gets taken over by an army and so on.
This is a bit far fetched, but certainly possible, more than possible.
And again, would right wingers react in this way where nothing can get done and the state?
Has no power over anything.
The state can't defend itself.
Arguably, a virus can be more deadly than a foreign army.
A foreign army can be shot and defeated.
The virus, less so.
It's harder to defeat a virus.
And thus, again, just speaking as a statist myself, there's actually something profoundly problematic about these people who I don't think would obey in any situation.
And they'd learn on the internet that.
The armies aren't real, and that it's a liberal plot to take your guns or to secretly kill you through a vaccine or whatever.
And just that, if in the 1950s, for instance, with my um, I was talking with my mother, she was born, she's a true baby boomer, born in the my mother and father, true baby boomers, born in the years right after the second world war.
When there were measles vaccines, they just lined up, they vaccinated in Louisiana for my mom.
Um, and Mississippi for my dad's deep red, you know, it wasn't red at that time.
If you understand, it was we're Dixie Crab, yeah, yeah, family tradition to be democratic, we believe in liberties, certain state liberties, and rats.
Um, but uh, both of them, there's a new vaccine out, and you're in third grade, okay, we're lining up just literally.
Total compliance.
And there's just this odd thing.
And I think there are all these ironies going on here.
And I'll just do two and then I'll let you guys talk.
But this odd thing of like the conservatives want to go back to the 1950s when everyone got along and we were one nation.
Well, okay, but like you wouldn't fit in in the 1950s because in the 1950s, people of both parties lined up to get vaccinated when they were told and no one complained.
Another thing, so much of right wing, you know, thought, nationalism is about being infected.
By the outside world, you know, like the illegal immigrants, they're destroying our country.
You know, we've heard this over and over again.
You get this just gift where all of the liberals now agree with you in your xenophobic closed border nationalist philosophy, and yet you reject it.
You're like, no, we don't want to accept this political gift that no one could have.
Ever imagined before where we're going to just shut down the borders and immigration, kick people out.
Papers, please.
Hey, you over there, that funny looking person trying to get a pizza.
Papers, please.
Oh, you left your papers at home on your way, sir.
Like, I mean, I'm sorry, but it's like they have this dream of the 1950s, and then when they're given an opportunity to react, they're the ones not complying.
I do find this very troublesome, and I do find it at the very least highly ironic.
Well, because your parents and my grandparents, et cetera, whatever, my grandparents were born here, they had never seen an autistic child before.
Right.
So that's another thing that leads into this this type of pharmaceutical skepticism, vaccine skepticism that underlies this, where it's like there was no Jenny McCarthy to say, or RFK to say, they're making your kids autistic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's like, How could you know in the 50s where you're that you're going to need 30 vaccines before you're two years old, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So it's I I understand what you're saying, but I still think that it was something that was so incredibly heavy-handed that I I like American liberty.
I like the American libertarian type of ethos because it lets me be a faggot and lets all types of things happen.
Heavy-Handed Liberty Loss00:00:17
So I'm still, you know, I am.
An anti COVID vaccine mandate, mass deportations, Democrat, whatever that is.