When Covid fanatic Dr. Peter Hotez went on Joe Rogan's show last week to trash-talk Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as an anti-vaxxer kook, he may not have expected what would happen next: Rogan gave him the opportunity to put his knowledge up against RFK, with $100K going to the charity of Hotez's choice. Since then the pot has grown to $1.5 million, but Hotez continues to slink away from the opportunity. Why? Also today - most view the Trump indictment as political. Putin proves another claim to be bogus - there was a deal last year for peace. US/UK squashed it.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With us today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host.
Daniel, good to see you today.
Happy Monday, Dr. Paul.
How are you?
Very good.
Good.
It's a holiday for some people.
Not for us.
Worth recognizing the debate that has gone on for a few years.
But I suspect that the day today will not ease things out and smooth things over because one reason why I don't expect these announcements about race and all will be smoothed out is because I don't even like to identify people in races.
I think rights and privileges are all individual.
So when you have whites against blacks and blacks against all this stuff, it's only there for gimmickry.
But okay, people will take that being too cynical, but I think that that's generally the case.
But today we wanted to talk about cynicism and medicine.
You know, we've talked a whole lot about lockdown and vaccinations, and we were delighted to see Robert Kennedy get into the presidential race.
And we are happy to have Joe Rogan on a side where we think he's searching for truth.
Yes.
You know, in a different format than I might do, but he searches.
I believe he searches for truth too.
But it turns out that, you know, the pro-vaccinators are sort of on the defensive.
I would say that, you know, essentially, Fauci has lost.
I mean, he's around.
He's still making money.
He's still ripping people off.
He's still trying to snow people.
But history, I cannot see how history will look at him favorably.
But there was another doctor involved.
I think we mentioned this other doctor at one time.
In a way, I had never heard, but he must have been a friend of Fauci's because they sort of took this vehement approach to anybody who would want to have a debate.
And it's the debate that we want to talk about.
The talk that we want to talk about a little bit is this Dr. Peter Hotez.
And he has a strong opinion about debates.
He says, oh, that's below our dignity.
We write intellectual papers and we do science.
We work on the truth.
Could anything be further from the truth than that attitude?
But anyway, people now have found out that he is not so straightforward.
He's been challenged by Rogan and others.
And there's this thing on that.
He's been challenged.
I guess Rogan maybe started it.
Okay, if you're so smart, why don't you debate Robert Kennedy?
You make fun of the guy.
Maybe you're doing that because his voice has a difficulty.
Anyway, they figured that they would move on this.
And of course, Ortez, the doctor, who doesn't, what would you expect?
He doesn't even believe in debates.
He believes, he says, I'll write a paper on this and explain what the facts are, and we'll work on the truth.
But anyway, that's a big issue, and it's delightful because it's a breaking out.
Even though we tried to have a breaking out a couple years ago and tell people what was happening.
And it's always been the problem, you know, whether it's a Republican or Democrat, is finding the people that they can trust.
And politics enters in so much of that, politics and money raising and all that nonsense.
But right now, though, this is a big story on Peter Hotez, the doctor who claims that he is the expert, but he's above reproach and doesn't have to grubble with a debate with a Robert candidate.
Yeah.
It's really fascinating.
It happened over the weekend, you know, kind of broke out over the weekend.
Hotez, you know, we talked about Hotez a lot during COVID because he had Greg Abbott's ear, our own governor, and I think he influenced Abbott to shut the state down and do all kinds of stupid things.
He had his ear.
He was the most hysterical.
He made Fauci look like a calm person.
The most hysterical, pro-mask, pro-vax, pro-isolation, pro-lockdown, everything.
Of course, he never suffered from it.
But here he is.
He's back in the limelight.
He was on Joe Rogan's show.
We can put up that first, pardon me, that first clip.
And this is from Zero Heads.
Double-talking vaccine scientist refuses to debate RFK Jr. despite $1.5 million charity pot.
In fact, that went up to $2.6 million.
And if you put the next one on, so here he was on Rogan, and we're going to listen to it in just a second.
Joe Rogan first challenged Peter Hotez to debate RFK on the science of vaccines in 2019, but he declined.
And here's what he said at the time.
He's an attorney and he's very clever and he knows how to do arguments in court.
And what am I?
I'm a scientist.
And let's listen to this clip.
Now, let's listen to a minute and three seconds of Rogan talking to Hotez about RFK.
And this is where Hotez is trash-talking RFK Jr.
This is how it started.
So that's a minute and three seconds of this approximately.
Now I know that Robert Kennedy Jr. is, he's a big one.
He's a big one.
And he seems like a very intelligent guy.
How could he not be aware of the science behind this?
And what is he getting wrong?
What he's getting wrong is just about everything.
You know, he's formed an organization called Children's Health Defense.
And he had a press conference about it.
I think it was September, October of last year.
It is probably one of the best organized anti-vaccine groups out there.
Now, he's doing other things other than vaccines.
He's doing a lot of things about environmental health and things like that.
I don't know any part of that business.
I've only followed what he does with vaccines.
But it's all nonsense.
Why is he doing this about vaccines?
I don't know.
What's his motive?
I mean, you have to ask him.
What's his motivation?
Would he be a guy that you would want to have a debate with or have a discussion with?
But again, I mean, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a debate because it's like debating, I don't know, it's like debating a Holocaust denier, whether the Holocaust exists.
I mean, not that this rises.
I understand what you're saying, but if you're, again, I want to bring this up.
Basically, debating RFK Jr. about vaccines is like debating a Holocaust denier.
That was really goofy stuff, wasn't it?
Well, that's unbelievable, but that's how a demagogue operates.
Think, oh, all you have to mention is get this one word in and appear like you're really intellectual, and you will shift the debate.
But I don't think it's going to be that easy because that was only the beginning of the pressure put on him to debate Robert.
And if we put the next clip on, so after that, he had a little hissy fit, if you can put this on, Dr. Hotez did.
And he was so mad that Spotify is allowing Joe Rogan to be on its, you know, as one of its podcasters.
Spotify has stopped even sort of trying to stem Joe Rogan's vaccine information.
It's really true, just awful.
And from all the online attacks I'm receiving after this absurd podcast, it's clear many actually believe this nonsense.
And so Joe Rogan responded, Peter, if you claim what RFK Jr. is saying is misinformation, I'm offering you $100,000 to the charity of your choice if you're willing to debate him on my show with no time limit.
To which Robert F. Kennedy responded, Peter, let's finally have the respectful, congenial, informative debate that the American people deserve.
And of course, Hotiz declined, saying, as you say, I'm a scientist.
I don't debate.
Right.
You know, this whole idea of debating, they used that early on that you can't debate these things.
You have to have somebody establish the truth.
You can't do it in science and medicine.
But I've told the story before that one of the things I remember during my residency a long time ago at the University of Pittsburgh, one of the procedures that we followed was two residents that might be in the same class, and the teachers would pick subjects and assign one subject to one doctor and one to the other.
It had nothing to do with your personal beliefs because we were still studying and understanding.
It wasn't political at all.
But it was a test in training to find out everything you know about drug A versus everything about drug B and try to figure out who's right.
It was a debate.
And we looked forward to it.
It was sort of exciting.
And yet now he's saying, oh, he's a scientist.
But we were literally trained to seek the truth in medicine.
And that's all it's been.
So often in medicine, so many advancements have been by private doctors that have had a little bit more freedom of debate and the use of other medications and treatments than it is sometimes in the university, more so now than ever before.
Yeah.
Well, my guess is one reason he doesn't want to debate RFK Jr. is that Hotez has a long, long record of being just flat out wrong, laughably wrong, about everything related to COVID.
And here's a short clip that someone put together of everything wrong he did.
And we can listen to this whole clip.
It's about a minute long, but it's worth just looking at how many falsehoods he can make in one sentence.
And I love how he starts out.
You'll love this first part, Dr. Paul.
What's really interesting about the conservative sites is because you really don't know what they're thinking until you know, until you've talked to people.
And for them, you know, one of the big issues has been they create this straw man.
The straw man is around vaccine mandates.
They're obsessed that people are just going to, again, this comes out of this health freedom, medical freedom nonsense that accelerated in 2015.
They're convinced that, you know, either the U.S. government or the National Guard or soldiers in blue helmeted UN helmets are going to hold everybody down and vaccinate them.
And so there's this obsession with mandates.
And I say, look, right now no one's talking about mandates.
These vaccines will stop asymptomatic transmission.
Protection is not long-lasting with natural infection a lot of the time.
It was more with the original SARS back in 2003, but not as much with this one for reasons that we don't understand.
So vaccine immunity is probably going to be better and more durable.
I'm thinking that most people, I think vaccine acceptance is going to increase as people see the benefits of getting in.
Here early on, he claimed these conservatives are interested in this medical freedom garbage.
That says pretty much everything you need to say about it.
Well, you know, another thing that, you know, in the old days when I went into medicine and studied, we were taught, of course, that you get permission.
Because patients, they need an explanation, you know, on the pros here and the cons here, and we get permission and they sign things and the patient says, no, I'm leaving.
They have them sign.
They're going away from the advice.
But it was getting permission from the patient.
And he's saying, well, no, we want mandates.
It's exactly on one.
One is a voluntary society and the other is an authoritarian society.
I imagine in all political things, I imagine he'd come down on the authoritarian side, you know, just because he's doing this in medicine, which should be a much more knowledgeable voluntary arrangement.
You never force it on people.
And it's more and more of that now because of the government intrusion.
And they control it, and then there's a lot of money involved and government, medical managed care.
So we're a long way from that.
And I finished medical school before Medicare and Medicaid.
Actually practiced medicine a short time when that didn't exist.
And I don't remember medicine being a disaster back then, where people were out on the streets.
But right now, where are the people that need medical care in San Francisco?
Because half of those people are more sick, you know, and they're out on the street starving.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we're ready to move on to the next one then.
Right.
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Politically Motivated Truth?00:05:51
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Dr. Paul, let's move on and talk about a follow-up to what we talked about last week, which is we kind of thought that the whole indictment let backfire on Biden and his people.
It looks like it did.
And I don't think it took a genius to figure it out because there's a limit.
And I think we're trying to put us in a position where we understand where the limits are.
Sometimes they come slowly and the nonsense lasts too long.
I think there's a breakthrough for the searching of truth right now because on the polling, it definitely has shifted.
And, you know, when people recognize, you know, right now, and this isn't just the Republican polling that occurred to show there's been strong support for saying that this whole thing about the indictment was politically motivated.
So I think that's a broad place.
So I think when truth is necessary, it takes a while and it takes some people.
I don't think that the demagogues who created the problems are going to give us the answer, but the people will, like the parents will, or the victims will, and they'll probably say, this is enough of this.
And I think for some people that might be sort of in the middle between the two parties will maybe respond to this.
And so it's favoring truth over politics.
And right now there's been a lot of politics and there will be, but there is a time when I think people start saying, hey, there's a limit to this.
I mean, we're looking like fools on what we're doing.
And they shift their gears and decide that there's been a lot of political motivation on what's going on.
How can you, what bothers me, or it gets me interested, is you know the position I have.
Trump, I have nothing against him except he doesn't appoint the right people and his economic policy aren't very good.
But he's one that has done, you know, he's the one that's been punished.
And I don't think one individual has ever had that many charges, ever thrown even real criminals.
But, you know, every day there's another case against them.
And I think that when people say, you know, it's amazing that he can stand up to this.
And I think it is too, because one after the other.
But it's not just about politics, but politics certainly is most of it.
And I think the more we get the evidence out, the better it is.
But anyway, I give this a plus as far as getting to the truth, although there's still a lot of political shenanigans that there'll be room for us to criticize.
Yeah, absolutely.
Let's put that next clip up because this is from our good friend Jonathan Turley, who, of course, as usual, has been very good on this topic.
Harvard poll.
55% of the public view the Trump indictment as politically motivated.
Surprise, surprise.
We warned that they would backfire Dr. Paul and they didn't listen.
Let's go to the next one.
This is from Turley's article.
He says, it's a new Harvard Harris poll.
And Turley says, it's bad news for Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Justice Department.
The poll shows that 55% of Americans, not Republicans, Americans, believe Trump's indictment is politically motivated, and 56% believe that it constitutes election interference.
The poll captures a level of distrust for the government, for the Justice Department, and further demonstrates what Turley described yesterday as a failure of Garland at midpoint of his tenure.
If you go to the next clip, we will see the actual poll.
If you look up here, Dr. Paul, at this, you can see the chart.
That one on the left, do you think that it's valid or is it politically motivated?
And that red is politically motivated.
Do you consider it to be an election interference by the Justice Department on the right?
And the blue is they do indeed consider it, and that is massive.
So, if they were looking to score points on this, if they were looking to undermine Trump, which as you say, we have a lot of problems with, but he does seem to have the right enemies, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Well, you know, there's a bit of momentum here, and the momentum is moving in Trump's favor.
And there's 44% still see this, the fair application of the law.
I wonder where these 44%, which means to me that there's going to be a further shift.
There's going to be more.
I think that number is bound to go down because more and more exposure.
And as much as I can complain about, you know, the bipartisanship of Congress doing all the bad stuff together, there is enough bipartisanship in looking into some of the scandals.
And I think with Republicans in charge of the House, there's a good chance that there's going to be more and more exposures.
Yeah, more and more.
And it may backfire.
Ukraine's Near Miss00:04:09
Well, let's move on to our third story of the day.
And that is from our friends at antiwar.com.
We can put that first one up.
Because some African leaders went to, first they went to Ukraine and then they went over to Russia.
And what's really interesting is what happened when they arrived in Russia is that President Putin pulled out a document and he showed it to them saying, this is a draft treaty on Ukrainian neutrality.
It was drawn up during the negotiations in Istanbul in March of 2022.
So just a month after the operation, the military operations started.
They went to Istanbul, they had a discussion, they drew up an agreement.
It was initialed by the Kiev side.
And it actually dovetails exactly what Naftali Bennett said, the former Israeli prime minister.
He said, they had a deal in Istanbul.
I've seen it.
But what happened is the U.S., we can leave that up actually.
I'm just going to finish that part.
The U.S. came in and squashed it.
And this is what Putin told the African leaders.
As you know, a string of talks between Russia and Ukraine took place in Turkey so as to work out both the confidence-building measures you mentioned and to draw up the text of the agreement.
And if we go to that next clip, what they're talking about, and if you remember, Dr. Paul, when this whole operation started, Russia moved very quickly into Kiev, and then all of a sudden they pulled back.
And that was apparently a confidence-building measure.
The treaty was called Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine, and it required Ukraine to enshrine permanent neutrality in its constitution.
The U.S., Britain, Russia, China, and France were listed as guarantors.
It was a draft treaty.
It wasn't finalized.
There were more details to work out.
But as the anti-war.com article points out, what Putin claims here, that there was an agreement, reflects an article published in Foreign Affairs last year citing multiple senior U.S. officials who said Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed on this peace deal in April of 22.
It would have had a promise, Ukrainian promise not to join NATO in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to pre-invasion lines.
And go to the next one, because there's a lot of words, Dr. Paul.
I apologize.
But this one point is very important.
The Russian Defense Ministry announced it would drastically reduce military activity near the northern cities of Kiev and Chernohiev, which led to a full Russian withdrawal from the north.
And then Putin said after the withdrawal, Ukraine abandoned the treaty.
Quote, after we pulled our troops away from Kiev, as we promised to do, the Kiev authorities tossed their commitments into the dustbin of history.
They abandoned everything.
And what happened in the interim is that Boris Johnson went down to Ukraine, to Kiev, and said, if you sign this treaty, you guys are on your own.
You're cut loose.
Yes, and it's very clearly.
It was in the midst of this, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson visits Kiev on April 9th of 2022, right in the middle of all this, a few days after Russia completed its withdrawal, according to a report from the Ukrainian paper.
Johnson urged state attorney Blinken, Secretary to State Attorney Anthony Blinken, outlined the position earlier this month and said the U.S. would continue building up Ukraine's military rather than push for peace.
We, this is my word, we cannot tolerate peace breaking out again.
What a tragedy.
It was.
Hundreds of thousands are died because of these two people, these two countries doing the fighting to the last Ukrainian.
But the other thing that's important is that it also debunks that whole sort of thing from the mainstream media at first that, oh, Russia couldn't take Kiev and they pulled back.
No, they voluntarily, as a sign of goodwill, pulled back.
And they were this close to an agreement that would have saved Ukraine and would have saved a lot of Russian lives as well.
Solar Power Generator Reminder00:02:02
So I think it just speaks to the cynicism of the people who, the neocons who run the government here and in the UK.
They want this war against Russia and they're going to fight it to the last Ukrainian.
And the real difficulty we have, and others who would like to see a different foreign policy, is that the weapon they use is this demagoguing about we're the unpatriotic, the un-American people, we're the warmongers and we're the ones who don't care about our soldiers.
And they tend to win that battle too often, but lately it's starting to shift and that attitude has to change if we expect to win.
Yeah, absolutely.
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Entrapment Penalties00:03:54
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Dr. Paul, my final comment is going to be a reminder to all the young people out there.
Put that last clip on.
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Dr. Paul, back to you.
Okay, I want to mention in closing about a story that was just recently come out on a Zero Hedge, and it really annoys me.
It's the issue of entrapment.
It's been around for a long time.
And I got to thinking, how often have we ever seen the government agents, you know, whether it's the CIA, the FBI, the IRS, or some other group entrapping somebody, encourage them and works with them, bribes them, do all these things.
You just don't read the stories.
And I think they're more vicious than the people who do it because they're committing the crime.
And I think when they're caught in entrapment, they ought to receive the same penalty as the people that they entrap.
But that isn't the case.
Matter of fact, I don't think they get punished very often.
But the FBI groom developmentally challenged 60-year-old to become a terrorist, then arrested him.
And it's a detailed, a bit complicated.
Dollars were engaged, no big money.
And all of a sudden, they got enough evidence.
And then they arrested him.
I don't think they have him in prison, but here they make him the monster.
And he wouldn't have even existed without the FBI doing this to him.
So that to me is a tragedy.
And we should have a tough law on this one, that when you entrap somebody, you get punished for the same disease you got somebody else to commit.
And you yourself ought to be fined on top of it all.
But unfortunately, sometimes they're seen as heroes because they're going in and they're infiltrating and they find out stuff.
Yeah, like January 6th.
Because if they're doing something wrong, well, it'll come out in the evidence in the trial.
Yeah, J6 trial.
We got to see all that film and realize exactly what the FBI was doing.
That is criminal, criminal, criminal when our government creates the crimes and participates in it.
But a lot of people would make the case that government basically is a criminal operation.
And when they take money from one group and give it to another, as some have said for many, many years, that is theft.
I mean, you can't do it yourself.
Why can't you send the government to do all your dirty work for you?
That to me is a real tragedy.
But the only thing that we can combat that with is just trying to expose the truth to the best of our abilities.
Absolutely.
I'm all done, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.