Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Why couldn't we get enough masks? | ||
Why couldn't we get enough ventilators? | ||
Why weren't there the perception that there weren't enough hospital beds? | ||
How come the morgues couldn't keep up? | ||
And so on and so on. | ||
How come we couldn't be prepared for this? | ||
And no matter how you look at it, at every area, it was a failure of government. | ||
unidentified
|
(upbeat music) | |
I'm Dave Rubin and this is the Rubin Report Reminder, everybody. | ||
Lockdown is more fun with friends and ad-free video and podcasts, so please consider joining us at RubinReport.com. | ||
And joining me today is the Editorial Director at the American Institute for Economic Research, Jeffrey Tucker. | ||
Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
It's good to be here, Dave. | ||
Nice to see you again. | ||
Good to see you again. | ||
I'm sorry we're not doing this in person, but we are social distancing like everybody else. | ||
So I guess my first question to you is, well, just how you doing? | ||
How you doing in a time of social distancing and lockdown? | ||
Well, I'm going to give the same answer anybody would, which is, I can't believe that this is the world we live in. | ||
I never would have imagined this even three weeks ago. | ||
But somehow, we're faring. | ||
We're not starving. | ||
We're not dying. | ||
We're talking to people. | ||
And, you know, I wrote a book called The Market Loves You, and all I can say is the market, although bludgeoned and truncated and it's never been attacked like this before, maybe in the history of the world, it's still somehow working. | ||
So I'm very, very grateful for that. | ||
Yeah, that seems like the right start to this, because throughout the last month or so, you're one of the few people, I would say, that is making some consistent sense to me, at least on Twitter, and I think you're a pretty great classical liberal thinker, which is why I wanted to have you here, because I want to talk about stimulus, and I want to talk about markets, and I want to talk about the Constitution, and free speech, and right to assembly, and all of those things that I know you and I and my audience All love. | ||
So why don't we start with this, which is just going off what you just said there. | ||
We seem to be more resilient, perhaps, than we thought. | ||
I mean, I think if you had said to people six months ago, hey, do you know that in March and April you're going to be shut down, locked in your house? | ||
Along with virtually the rest of the world for now going on five weeks, and it could be months after that. | ||
I think people would have thought, oh, there's going to be violence. | ||
Oh, there's going to be looting. | ||
There's going to be crime. | ||
All of these things. | ||
And yet, as you started us with, we're doing okay. | ||
And the markets actually haven't completely tanked. | ||
We're going up and down, but everything is kind of working. | ||
Oh Dave, I could tell you such inspiring stories. | ||
I just want to cry when I think about it. | ||
You know, when I go to the grocery store, which is, you know, one of the things you can do now, it's access to real life, and I go in there and I first of all make sure to thank every single worker there for all that they're doing. | ||
But I like to talk to the managers about how they decide what they're going to do that day? | ||
Was there a run on chicken yesterday? | ||
What'd you do about that? | ||
Was there a run on sausage? | ||
What'd you do about the salads over here in the deli section? | ||
How are you getting toilet paper? | ||
How are you rationing it, given that there's restrictions on price movements? | ||
How has this changed your life? | ||
And all I hear is stories of heroism and brilliance and And it's not just individual brilliance, it's institutional brilliance, and it's the brilliance of the market economy. | ||
It's still working despite everything, despite being clobbered in ways that were unimaginable just a few months ago. | ||
And if I can say so, Dave, this brings to mind a real paradox of the times we're living through right now. | ||
This shutdown has presumed the adaptability of society, the capacity of society to make this radical turn, to go from one life to the other life, practically overnight, to adopt a seemingly impossible pose. | ||
And yet, the government edicts that have come down have presumed the impossibility of society to adapt to the presence of pandemic disease. | ||
Do you think that adaptability is unique to capitalism because of the way it allows so many people to be in the market and innovate and move as things need to be moved? | ||
Yeah, it's embedded in the essence of a free society, where people learn to be intelligent, and learn to control their world, and learn to cooperate with people, and create these market signals that tell us about prices, and interest, and all these things. | ||
I think, you know, at the end of this, if you're not a libertarian, you're not paying attention, because the markets work. | ||
And it's only not worked when it's been hobbled. | ||
And it has been hobbled. | ||
It was hobbled before this crisis, actually. | ||
We can talk about all the specific ways in which that's true. | ||
I blame... | ||
I don't blame coronavirus for your suffering right now. | ||
I mean, viruses have always been with us and always will be, and society had developed ways to deal with viruses. | ||
Medical professionals, especially, have learned how to deal with viruses, and it's a challenge for any society under any conditions. | ||
But what you want above all else is freedom and adaptability and to decentralize decision-making. | ||
In the U.S., Dave, for some reason, we took A completely different direction. | ||
Fortunately, we haven't shut down the stock market. | ||
We haven't shut down essential stores. | ||
And it's thanks to that that we're eating today, you know, that we're sleeping today, that we're able to get by. | ||
So it's not that we owe the fact that we're surviving through this. | ||
It's 100% the element of freedom that remains in the system. | ||
But Jeffrey, I keep reading all these brilliant think pieces saying how this shows the failure of libertarianism and limited government because this, if ever, this is the moment we need big government to do things. | ||
And the very people who have been calling Trump Hitler for four years are now demanding that he do more with his power. | ||
Am I not understanding things properly? | ||
What am I missing here? | ||
unidentified
|
Dave, I think you and I share the same frustration. | |
The response of the left has been alarming to me to an extent that I find indescribable, because I think last time I was on your show, I myself was warning about the danger of the authoritarianism of Trump, and we can get to that. | ||
I think he's made some bad decisions here, and they stem from his- Let's explore all of it, for sure. | ||
Yeah, and they extend from his own nationalism and his own illiberalism, really, which I think is seriously problematic. | ||
But my God, day after day, to see these howling press people, you know, like all have decided that the narrative is that Trump is Some sort of Bastiat figure, you know, who's just not doing anything, and that people are dying because of him, you know. | ||
It's a real shock, and I don't want to say I'm grateful for him, because I think he's made his errors, but day to day, I'm sure you feel the same way. | ||
My God, if the Trump administration went along with what CNN, MSNBC, I'm sorry to say, Unspeakable New York Times, a venue that I've always adored and always heard and always loved. | ||
And to see what they did, what they Helped? | ||
Enabled? | ||
I just don't know. | ||
If there's any such thing as moral culpability, I think, I'm so sorry to say it again, it breaks my heart, I think the New York Times is morally culpable for what's happened to this country today. | ||
And I, you know, I listen to The Daily Podcast and I saw the hysteria being ramped up and the demands for crackdowns and the call for a medieval response to this and the demands for, I don't know what you would call it, but fascist, communist, you know, social distancing policies. | ||
And it's been grim and shocking. | ||
And you've been shocked? | ||
I've been shocked. | ||
I don't know what to say. | ||
So it's so interesting that you're as concerned about the media element as I am, because it seems to me that we're fighting two viruses right now. | ||
We all know about the coronavirus and how to fight that, but the misinformation virus that is now permeating throughout the media, and it's New York Times, and it's Vox, and it's CNN, and the list goes on and on, is making it almost impossible for any of us to have what I would say is a sane conversation, because we're all dealing with different sets of information. | ||
How concerned, generally, are you about that? | ||
Tremendously. | ||
I actually, I summarized this, you know, we've all been talking to friends on what's happening, but I summarized it the other day, that this, I really blame some, you know, hucksters, scientists, fake scientists, accompanied by howling media, anti-Trump media, you know, combined with a panicked | ||
political class. | ||
And it was a kind of a perfect storm. | ||
Those three elements came together and led to a level of wreckage that's unspeakable | ||
and an unconscionable moral and ethical crisis. | ||
And I have to tell you, because, you know, for years, people have told me about the evil of the mainstream media. | ||
And I've never really wanted to go there, you know. | ||
I'm a big believer in press freedom, and I never wanted to be one of those people to trash the New York Times. | ||
Actually, I love the New York Times. | ||
I always have. | ||
But I feel like I've gotten a real wake-up call here, a real shock. | ||
I don't know how you can be in the mainstream press today. | ||
And be salivating over the clicks and the views and the amount of ad bias that you're generating from this, while watching freedom just go down the drain. | ||
It's been a shock to me. | ||
I can't even describe to you how horrifying it's been to me. | ||
And to tell you the truth, I've really turned it off. | ||
I've had to. | ||
Yeah, I think. | ||
Well, we know that people are turning it off in tremendous numbers and watching things like this instead. | ||
So as a liberty-minded person, as you said, if people don't come out of this more libertarian, something will have gone wrong. | ||
What are the What are the proper approaches for a liberty-minded government? | ||
So say a libertarian or classical liberal set of ideas that could get us through something like this. | ||
What should we have done sort of at the beginning? | ||
What should we have done as we're going through it right now? | ||
And what should we be looking at for the future if you want to keep people as free as possible while also dealing with something that we've never dealt with before? | ||
Dave, if I were gonna summarize my position in a sentence, it would be something like this. | ||
The medical professionals and the medical industry, free of all restrictions, should have been allowed to deal with this virus from the very beginning, without the intervention of politicians. | ||
Period. | ||
I mean, that, I think, is the answer. | ||
So basically, just get rid of red tape, just let them do their thing, no more regulations on experimental treatments, that kind of stuff. | ||
Yeah, and not only that, but, you know, if you think about it, Dave, a lot of this flatten-the-curve analysis that led to the crackdowns and the mandatory social distancing and the universal house imprisonment that we're dealing with right now was due to the perception that the medical industry was unscalable in the event of emergency. | ||
Now, that's very interesting. | ||
People need to be asking the question, if it's true, why was an industry unable to scale? | ||
Industries specialize in scaling. | ||
You know, when people buy more of your product, as an industry, you're excited to offer more of that product or service to them. | ||
What makes the medical industry unique in that respect? | ||
Why couldn't we get enough masks? | ||
Why couldn't we get enough ventilators? | ||
Why weren't there the perception that there weren't enough hospital beds? | ||
How come the morgues couldn't keep up? | ||
And so on and so on. | ||
How come we couldn't be prepared for this? | ||
And no matter how you look at it, at every area, It was a failure of government. | ||
It was that the system was heavily regulated. | ||
The Strategic Medical Reserve disincentivized hospitals from gathering their own supplies. | ||
The tariffs on masks seriously inhibited them. | ||
And this is very personal to me because I have friends in New York who are nurses and doctors who were sharing masks and they can't get enough and the tariffs seriously injured that and the hospitals didn't have enough supplies on hand | ||
because they assumed that it was all there, the federal government was putting it all together. | ||
But then of course they opened the warehouse and the hash validators don't work, | ||
you know, the supplies weren't there 'cause they had previously been depleted. | ||
Every area, all you see is government irrationality, the inability of hospitals to scale, | ||
the panic of the political class to force everybody into their homes, | ||
which is definitely where you should not be, whether you have respiratory disease, | ||
the answer is to get outside as everybody understands. | ||
You don't want to put old people with young people because that causes endless amounts of infections. | ||
You actually want to isolate and separate the people who are vulnerable to this disease, which are the old and frail. | ||
The last thing you want to do is close the schools because COVID, as we know now, is actually not fatal for young, healthy people. | ||
So at every single area, Dave, the government has done the wrong thing. | ||
And I don't know how long or how detailed we want to get here, but the testing fiasco was the great, I would say, beginning of all this stuff, because China had already gone through a trial run of this stuff. | ||
You know, we had this benefit of this. | ||
We saw this coming, and the CDC and the FDA stopped, and this is a matter of record, really stopped private researchers from developing the test and distributing the test from the very beginning of this crisis. | ||
That was a catastrophic thing, and that led to what I've called an epistemic crisis. | ||
We didn't know. | ||
We didn't know who had it, whether I had it, whether you had it, what we should do about it, how it was transmitted, who is vulnerable to the fatalities, what the case fatality rate is. | ||
We didn't know anything. | ||
So we replaced knowledge that we could have used with power and panic. | ||
And here we are today. | ||
So is one of the inherent problems that we have fighting, the bad ideas that would encroach on our rights, that even if you lay out to people, well, here's all the things that government has done wrong all the way, and here's why it can never work properly. | ||
That they always say, well, that just means we need more government. | ||
That just means we need to give it more money so it can be bigger, so that we can put more studies out there to make sure it knows how to do these things. | ||
And that answer always sort of sounds easy and right for people that aren't really thinking. | ||
It's much harder to say to people, oh, the government actually should have been scaled way back on this so we could have let the professionals deal with it. | ||
That sort of sounds scary to people. | ||
Especially at a time right now where we feel like the future is just up in the air right now. | ||
Yeah, and I think this speaks to a little bit of something, a principle that's animated your career and your life, which you had a passion some years ago, a realization that people don't Appreciate freedom. | ||
They don't have confidence in freedom. | ||
That freedom was being attacked fundamentally and philosophically by both the left and on the right too. | ||
And I think you worried about that. | ||
You actually asked yourself A very important question. | ||
What happens in the event of a crisis where we need freedom more than ever, and yet we don't have the intellectual foundations in place, where there's not a cultural love of this thing we call freedom, or much less an understanding of it? | ||
What happens then? | ||
And I think that was a very interesting perception that you had. | ||
You know, several years ago, that you really dedicated yourself really hard to this problem and tried your best to do something about it. | ||
But I think what we're seeing right now are the results of a culture that's forgotten the meaning of freedom. | ||
And if you lose that, what do you replace it with? | ||
You replace it with the police state. | ||
Yeah, something not good. | ||
With chaos. | ||
So, right now, as we sit here all sort of trapped in our houses trying to figure out what to do, how concerned are you about some of those basic freedoms that we're talking about? | ||
I mean, right now, the right to assembly, for example. | ||
We cannot assemble together. | ||
You can't get ten people in a room to do anything. | ||
We had our bizarre mayor, being nice, de Blasio in New York City, say that if he found temples or churches that were having any gatherings, they could be permanently closed. | ||
Now again, I'm all for the six-foot social distancing, if that's what the professionals are telling us, but the idea that we could permanently close these things and we can't assemble, or our right to free speech in that we know that even right now, big tech is removing blog posts that run counter-knowledge. | ||
That's not necessarily the government stepping in and doing it, but just if we look at just some of our key freedoms, assembly and speech being the two at the moment, How concerned are you that we're just gonna sort of put them aside throughout this and then it'll be six months later and we'll go, oh, we had those things? | ||
Yeah, I think anything is possible right now, Dave, and anybody who says otherwise hasn't been paying attention over the last couple of weeks. | ||
There's no chance. | ||
So I looked, before we met up just now, I looked back at what I wrote January 27th, because I wrote an article warning that the quarantine power could be used and explained why this is a very, very bad idea. | ||
But even in that article, I imagine something like this, that the government would set up quarantine areas, which in fact they have done, and they would come knocking on your door and grab people out of it, maybe one family at a time, and put them in the quarantine area, or that they would target | ||
Maybe neighborhoods and around everybody up and put in paddy wagons, put them in the quarantine area. | ||
But even January 27th, I never imagined that governments of the world would put everybody under what amounts to house arrest. | ||
So the fact that this has happened, I would say at this point anything's possible. | ||
I worried because we put out a book last week called Coronavirus and Economic Crisis. | ||
A book put out by American Institute for Economic Research, and I put it on Amazon. | ||
And I gotta tell you, I was worried. | ||
I was worried that Amazon would take it down. | ||
So I printed, separately, lots of copies, independently, with an independent publisher, and started making it available on the website, just in case we face massive censorship. | ||
I actually, if I were going to describe it, I would say we're like that close, that close. | ||
And once you get rid of, and it's very interesting to me that you use this word Right. | ||
You've been using this repeatedly. | ||
A right to assemble, a right to associate, a right to speak. | ||
A right is not something that's contingent. | ||
It's something that you actually possess. | ||
It's not granted to you by the government. | ||
It's something you own by virtue of your humanity. | ||
It's hard to talk about rights in these times, and we don't apparently. | ||
have the right to our own property because the government can shut down our business on grounds that it's unessential, right? | ||
We apparently don't have the right even to leave our homes. | ||
So once you take that away, I mean, Dave, I don't want to be alarmist about this or anything, but look, from a philosophical or intellectual point of view, we are living the practical reality of what comes very close to being a | ||
totalitarian state right now. Now, fortunately, thank you political leaders, you're letting | ||
the grocery stores work. | ||
Fortunately, they're private. Thank you for letting us have pharmacies. | ||
You know, they're private entities, too. | ||
So we're grateful for the little bit of private markets that are left. | ||
But the attack on everybody else and the attack on our rights is shocking. | ||
And the social consequences of this are unspeakable, really. | ||
I mean, people are not going to comply. | ||
They're not complying now. | ||
I'm sure you know this. | ||
In fact, you've probably attended them. | ||
But there are speakeasies all over New York City popping up where you can go to dinner and gather more than five, more than ten, even thirty people, you know? | ||
And they're drinking, they're having dinner together. | ||
They're in defiance of the law. | ||
My friends of mine in Manhattan sit in their penthouses and every night after nightfall, | ||
people rush out into the streets with noisemakers just to illustrate that they believe in freedom, you know? | ||
And for God's sake, do we not believe in freedom anymore? | ||
The politicians presume that we're like pieces on a chessboard, they can just move around. | ||
But you know what? | ||
That's not true. | ||
That is not the human mind. | ||
We are not inanimate objects. | ||
We are not birds in cages. | ||
We will live free, one way or the other. | ||
So what would you say, so of course I'm with you, but what would you say to the people that would say, All of those people, your friends that are going out onto the streets at night and the people that are getting together at speakeasies and going out more than they have to go out and the rest of it and exercising their rights and freedom, those are the people who are going to keep this thing spreading because people don't know when to rein in their own personal responsibility and do something so that society doesn't crumble. | ||
Something like that. | ||
At the height of the Enlightenment, where we discovered this idea of human freedom, there was also disease. | ||
We didn't have very clean water. | ||
There were annual viruses that came along and killed people, and there were pandemics and so on, but they still somehow came to believe that human beings have the right to speak | ||
and associate and trade. | ||
And we work around it. And part of the belief in freedom is the confidence that society has | ||
the intelligence to deal with things like viruses that come along. And the existence of disease | ||
does not disable the whole of modernity. | ||
It just doesn't. | ||
We can't think this way. | ||
Modernity was forced at the time, and there were diseases. | ||
And even back to the Black Death in Venice in the 13th century, when it was still dangerous, they still kept trade going. | ||
There was some towns would come up with the restrictions and that sort of thing, but But the idea of violating people's rights, fundamental rights, to live and choose and speak and everything was even unthinkable 500 years ago. | ||
I mean, our response we've done here is pre-modern, it's medieval, it's 11th and 12th century style stuff, except with 21st century technology. | ||
And we're not responding to these things scientifically, even the slightest bit. | ||
The response by the political class, and I mean from about March 15th onward, was nothing short of mystical, superstitious. | ||
It was a panicked response. | ||
Let's just throw everybody in a cage of their own creation and punish anybody for coming out of it. | ||
And I just, I totally forgive people who are going to these PQs. | ||
You could say that's prudent, you know, they shouldn't be doing that. | ||
But for God's sake, people exercising their fundamental rights, I'd say we need more of that, not less of that right now. | ||
Do you think that's partly just human nature that so many people just operate purely in fear? | ||
So, you know, like a month ago when we had that two-day window where suddenly everything shut down out of nowhere. | ||
You know, they announced the entire NBA season was cancelled, and then they cancelled all these public events, and everything sort of happened within a two-day thing, that there becomes this odd rush to cancel Because you don't want to be the one guy who's going against the crowd, right? | ||
You don't want to be the one guy who says, no, we're not going to cancel our season, we're not going to cancel all of our things, we're going to wait it out a little bit, knowing that the risk that you take of being just destroyed by the media and everything else on the other side is probably worse than just going along with the crowd, with the wave. | ||
Yeah, I understand your point. | ||
I have my doubts that there was any public support for this, actually, at all. | ||
Now, it's entirely up to private venues whether or not they want to, you know, have these gatherings or accept the liability associated with NBA games or South by Southwest, you know, and that sort of thing. | ||
Southwest didn't choose to cancel that conference. | ||
That was a governmental decision. | ||
So I'm looking at this, and I'm not saying whether that was Maybe South by Southwest should have canceled. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I think about this a lot. | ||
I'm not actually sure about that, because that's mostly all young people there who are actually not in any great danger from COVID. | ||
So I'm not sure about that. | ||
And it's hard to do counterfactuals here. | ||
But with this much, Dave, I know, and I think you know too, politicians, by which I mean governors, mayors, senators and congressmen and so on are not owners of | ||
anything. Their main job is to get elected again. That's it. So they don't really have | ||
a financial or economic stake. They don't have skin in the game apart from | ||
the desire to get voters to vote for them again. | ||
And there was a sudden panic on the part of political leaders at all levels, really, that if anybody died while they were in office that they would somehow be blamed for this, unless they just bludgeoned people, you know, and ruined people's lives. | ||
So they somehow believed there was less risk To steal people's property and arrest people in their homes than it was to be blamed for public death. | ||
And that gets us back to a problem that began this discussion, the role of the media here. | ||
Because what they're really fearing, ultimately, is this cancel culture, you know, the Twitter mobs. | ||
and the New York Times editorial page and the media culture, | ||
that's lost all rationality and clarity. | ||
They're afraid of being denounced and dragged through the mud | ||
and drawn and quartered and so on by the press. | ||
So I ultimately-- | ||
Doesn't that feel like a perfect storm to you? | ||
Doesn't that feel like a perfect storm of just of the end of the media that we've all been seeing? | ||
And as you said before, you didn't even want to see it, but that so many of us have seen the end of mainstream | ||
media. | ||
We've watched our academic and political institutions crumble. | ||
And then something like this comes in. | ||
And just takes the last remaining foundation of it, and then adds fear to it, and you take just fearful people who don't even understand what their rights are, as you alluded to earlier, and then you really have the perfect storm to control everybody. | ||
I like this phrase, the perfect storm, and I think it's the best description to explain what's happened to us, really. | ||
It wasn't really a conspiracy from the top. | ||
But, of course, you know there's conspiracy theories. | ||
We'll never stop them. | ||
They've been generated by the day, and I totally forgive that. | ||
People want to understand what has happened to their freedoms, what's happened to their rights, why did the world go dark suddenly? | ||
And people assume there's some central plan. | ||
I don't believe that, actually. | ||
I think it was just this combination of factors. | ||
And I've been wanting to kind of write about this for a while, but yeah, it is a perfect storm. | ||
It was howling media, panicked politicians. | ||
And just this onslaught, you know, combined with a lack of information, what I've described as an epidemic crisis that led to a complete panic. | ||
But we're going to be spending the next 10 years trying to figure this out, you know, like exactly how did this happen? | ||
Let me just draw attention to one thing, Dave, and I'm not sure you're really with me on this New York Times call that I'm a part of. | ||
I probably you're not you left it long ago, but I I have been listening to | ||
Daily for a long time and I and I'm an admirer I'm a friends with Michael Barbaro and and I like I think | ||
these reporters are fantastic And I I want this to be a good paper, but of course I want | ||
it to be too Yeah, well, let me just be very clear on that. I | ||
I want it to be. | ||
Every time, even in the last few days, where I've had to go after New York Times people, just in the last few days, they did a piece on misinformation in the age of corona, and they included my name in a chart about a tweet that went viral. | ||
And then I tweeted about it, I tweeted about it, and I didn't even tag the author. | ||
I had never even heard of him before. | ||
But then he tweets back at me, And says that I wasn't even mentioned in the article, even though my name was in the chart in the middle of the article. | ||
He said that doesn't count as a mention. | ||
And it's like, you guys, with all your doublespeak and nonsense, my name is in the chart in the article. | ||
Like, I want them to be good. | ||
I don't like it when people come up to me on the street and say, Dave, you're one of the few people I trust. | ||
I go, oh man, we're in a lot of trouble. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
They just have to be a little less horrible, but they seemingly can't do it. | ||
So I'm with you on that, although maybe I never thought they were as wonderful as you did. | ||
It's been heartbreaking for me because I think, and I have to look back at the days here, because everything's a fog, you know? | ||
It's a fog of Corona, as they say. | ||
But I think it might have been early March when the New York Times Daily Podcast, which is listened to by millions and millions of people, I mean, it's, Beautiful podcast, beautifully produced, fantastic venue. | ||
They have on this reporter, a disease reporter, and he comes on the air and begins to raise public panic. Now there was no panic in those days, | ||
but and you'd think the New York Times would be like a responsive venue. Usually they're trying to diminish the | ||
panic, you know, they're trying to like calm everybody down. | ||
That's usually the ethos. | ||
This was the opposite. He was going we're all gonna die. Oh my god, you better carry | ||
Purell with you everywhere and spray every single surface with hydrogen peroxide and | ||
And if we want to get rid of this, we're all going to have to drop in place wherever you happen to be and live there for two months, or else who's going to wipe out the whole of humanity? | ||
This is a guy who was saying this stuff, and he has this authoritative voice. | ||
and he's very compelling and everything. | ||
I listened about the third podcast with this guy. | ||
Now you get three times to take over a, what amounts to a 25 minute show, | ||
three times in two weeks. | ||
You better be good. | ||
Well, I looked up the guy's background. | ||
Is he an epidemiologist? | ||
Was he trained in medicine? | ||
No. | ||
Does he know anything about viruses? | ||
No. | ||
He, Dave, this gentleman has a degree in rhetoric from Berkeley University. | ||
I was going to guess creative writing. | ||
Rhetoric is even better. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So he's 66 years old. | ||
So I'm thinking about this. | ||
What's his expertise? | ||
He's got a great voice for radio and he's some sort of totalitarian. | ||
I don't know what else to say, but they gave this guy this basically what amounts to an hour and a half over the course of two weeks to spout off totalitarian blather and BS to their audience. | ||
How much of that How much of that do you think is just that the New York Times in this case, because that's who we happen to be talking about, but we can talk about it within a broader media lens, is that they've invested so much time in a Russia collusion hoax. | ||
They've invested so much time in impeachment and all of these things that did not work That in many ways, as Bill Maher said about a year ago, he would be all for the economy tanking if that's what it takes to take out Trump. | ||
That they now see a little blood in the water here and they go, oh, if we have to destroy the entire country to make sure this guy doesn't win in November, we'll kind of do it because we got nothing left. | ||
I mean, this is the one that they, you know, it's one we couldn't have thought of and it's the one that they have left. | ||
Well, I'm stunned that you brought up this idea, and I have to admit that it hasn't been entirely out of my mind. | ||
I have actually considered this too. | ||
It's such a perverse thought, I think we'd need Sigmund Freud himself to take care of this one. | ||
The timing is very interesting. | ||
I mean, we had the Russia thing, then we had the Ukraine impeachment thing, we have the daily fanaticism, apparently the tireless fanaticism, I don't know what else to call it, you know, to every single day run 18 articles accusing Trump of ghastly pathology and anybody who supports him as being just vermin who needs to be exterminated. | ||
I mean, that's been the ethos for the New York Times with very few exceptions. | ||
There are a few exceptions, but that's been the ethos. | ||
So I wonder sometimes, too, if that explains, maybe that doesn't explain everything that's happened to us, but it explains the strange lust Yeah, a lot. | ||
This burning passion, like irrational desire to bring the economy down, to accuse Trump of something. | ||
You know, like in Batman, it's like some people just want to see the world burn. | ||
You know that line? | ||
I love that line from the Joker. | ||
That's Heath Ledger's Joker, yeah. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
So, look, I've thought of this, too, and it's an extremely disturbing thought because, well, let's just say, if they imagined that this was just going to be a political thing to take down Trump, what they've done is they've dismantled civilization, however temporarily, itself. | ||
And I don't think anybody could have imagined this. | ||
And I've not talked to Michael about this since then. | ||
I hope, I would love to meet up with him because I think he's a dear man and very charming. | ||
But I wonder if even he is startled about what he's unleashed. | ||
And by the way, I'm not sure that Michael himself is responsible for who his guests are, you know? | ||
I mean, like, you pick your guests, but you have full control of the program. | ||
Michael is just the host of the program, so I'm not sure Michael bears any moral culpability for what happened to the New York Times, but... Right, so I don't listen to the... | ||
I don't listen to the podcast, but it's sort of like, if you think about it, it's a New York Times podcast. | ||
We hate Trump. | ||
We've tried to get Trump every other way. | ||
Why not bring on someone that, as you said, is not a medical expert or anything else, but a rhetorical, a language expert? | ||
Let's make everyone crazy, because that fits everything else we're doing. | ||
But I wanted to jump to something that you said before, because I think this is really interesting. | ||
You said, I don't like dealing in counterfactuals. | ||
And I think one part of this is how hindsight is 20-20 and everyone pretends to be an expert today when they were ignoring things way back when. | ||
So I checked and there was no mention of coronavirus at any of the Democratic debates until the last one that they had, which was only Bernie and Biden alone on March 25th. | ||
And that's when coronavirus was brought up and there was no audience and everything else. | ||
They had debates On February 7th, February 19th, and February 25th. | ||
Now we've got the media running around and all the Democratic politicians, Pelosi and Schumer and everybody, running around saying Trump should have done something in January, we all knew it, blah blah blah. | ||
It not only didn't come up in any of their debates, but he did try for a China travel ban. | ||
What do you make of that part of this? | ||
That we just sort of look at the people in charge and we pick sort of randomly who and when they should have done this or that, knowing that nobody else did anything either. | ||
I mean, it didn't come up once. | ||
Why didn't it come up in the debate on February 19th, the one right before the February 25th one? | ||
If everyone was talking about it, you'd think six days before. | ||
Nothing. | ||
Strange, huh? | ||
Yeah, but that is a great scoop, actually, Dave. | ||
I'd never even thought of that before. | ||
I mean, I wrote my first article on this topic January 27th. | ||
You know, I mean, like, I could have written about anything else, but I was watching what was going on in China. | ||
I knew that quarantines might be coming, so I decided to lean in, and I discussed this in great detail, actually, in January 27th, and the idea that this wouldn't even be brought up. | ||
Two weeks later, two and a half weeks later, three weeks later, and democratic debate is actually, that's extremely telling. | ||
And everybody looks back at Trump and says, oh, Lou, you're an idiot. | ||
You didn't prepare properly for this. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So they have this hindsight thing, which is fine. | ||
I mean, like, we're not omniscient figures, you know, right? | ||
We don't know what's going, you know, this, we're all, Russ Dutat wrote this beautiful article again in the New York Times today. | ||
So they run good stuff. | ||
Beautiful article about, How few people really are experts about this at all. | ||
But you would think that early on that they would have consulted. | ||
That's what bothers me most about this. | ||
And then it just drives me crazy, actually. | ||
That once they realized that coronavirus was a thing, why weren't they calling epidemiologists and experts and medical professionals and people with specializations in dealing with pandemic diseases and asking them what they think? | ||
Why weren't they calling John Onidas or Newt Witkowski from Rockefeller University? | ||
Or why didn't they pay any attention to the 800 medical professionals, epidemiologists, and biostatisticians that signed a letter put out by Yale University begging our nation's leaders and political people to not shut down the economy? | ||
To not pursue this locked-in strategy. | ||
Why wasn't the press even slightly interested in the fact that 800 medical professionals associated with Yale University wrote a public letter begging America's political leaders to not do exactly what they did? | ||
Where has been the press throughout this? | ||
Why has it been you, Reason Magazine, American Institute for Economic Research, | ||
and just a handful of other venues that have been left to report | ||
unidentified
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what medical professionals are saying. | |
I mean, can you imagine? | ||
I mean, I think about a guy like Newt Witkowski, okay? | ||
So it's like 35 years of researching viruses, their transmission, the policy response to them, how they work, what you should do. | ||
I mean, this is a serious guy. | ||
He's one of the heads of the Human Genome Project. | ||
This is his life. | ||
And he lives in New York. | ||
And this whole world unfolds before his eyes, and the whole world's collapsing around. | ||
His phone didn't ring. | ||
He didn't get a single email. | ||
Nobody asked him. | ||
And finally, you know, just desperate and shocked and horrified. | ||
You know, how do you spend your life as a professional in this area? | ||
And then when the critical moment in your life comes along where civilization could use your expertise, Everyone completely ignores you, and you're just some dude sitting alone. | ||
And you have to wait for an independent filmmaker to come along and do an interview with you. | ||
Same thing happened with John Onidas, who had an article in 2005 about fake science that took over the world. | ||
He was like a media star. | ||
He's exposed fake science his whole life. | ||
He's a specialist in biostatistics, and he had a lot to say about this stuff. | ||
Nobody asked him. | ||
You know, we destroyed the world without ever consulting the actual medical professionals about this. | ||
Not the New York Times. | ||
Nobody cared about the actual specialists in this field who were pleading and begging and trying to find somebody to talk to and get their message out, to the point that Yale University actually had to distribute this open letter from 800 medical professionals, which was subsequently completely ignored by the mainstream press. | ||
It's a disgrace. | ||
We're gonna be dealing with this for years. | ||
And I think that there's gonna be hell to pay on the part of the mainstream press for what they've done, what they've done to the world. | ||
The missed opportunities, the morally egregious abuse of their power over the public mind in the last month. | ||
It just, it sickens me more than anything I've seen in my life. | ||
And I like a free press. | ||
I believe in press freedom. | ||
I believe in all these things. | ||
I think it can and does work. | ||
But this is an abuse, to cheer on the end of our rights and liberties like this, so cavalierly. | ||
And if you're right, as you are just asking the questions, and I'm asking the questions too, was this all driven by a pathological hatred of Trump? | ||
Is this it? | ||
Is that what drove it all? | ||
I don't know. | ||
But if that's true, somebody needs to be held accountable. | ||
You know, it's so interesting listening to you because there's a sort of undercurrent of you're a non-alarmist when it comes to COVID itself. | ||
And you're trying to figure out how we can be free. | ||
And actually, in the last five minutes, what really animates your sort of fear factor, your fear senses, is everything else related to it. | ||
And I think that is where a lot of people are at. | ||
We're at least confused as to the real, depth of the fear we should have related to the virus | ||
itself. | ||
And most people are trying their best to do the best they can and not go outside and the | ||
rest of it. | ||
But that's not really where the fear is. | ||
I actually think that the fear is what you're talking about right now, that it seems like | ||
every sense-making machine that we've had is no longer functioning or is trying to manipulate | ||
We're seeing through it in a very clear way and that is freaking scary and especially for people Who may be not my audience that's sort of seen this for a while, or the younger internet audience, but if you're a boomer, not to pile on the boomers all the time, but if you're the type of person that really isn't that checked into this stuff, but now you're really starting to see it, and you're seeing that the future of your life, your retirement, savings, all of these things are gonna change drastically. | ||
The world that you thought existed doesn't exist anymore. | ||
That's, I think, much scarier than actually getting sick at the moment. | ||
That's a real flip that you wouldn't hear on mainstream media. | ||
No, but you are exactly right. | ||
And I knew that this was true from, I would say, probably the first week of March, | ||
that the most terrifying thing was not the virus. | ||
You know, we deal with annual new flu strains every year, and we have for 150,000 years, actually. | ||
We have medical professionals to deal with this. | ||
We have therapies. | ||
We have ways to deal with it. | ||
I mean, we have tests. | ||
We have vaccines. | ||
We have Herd immunity strategies. | ||
We know what we're doing and dealing with disease when it comes to dealing with a totalitarian state apparatus that's taking away your rights and liberties as cheered on by a howling, deeply ignorant media apparatus. | ||
That's what's really scary. | ||
I was writing this morning, Dave, if I can just quickly tell you about this, and I'm sure we all have stories, but I have an accountant here at the American Institute for Economic Research who's hounding me for my receipts from March, and I'm busy. | ||
I couldn't get to it until this morning. | ||
I'm busy. | ||
But then you know what it's like to go through your receipts. | ||
You've been through that. | ||
You've been there before. | ||
So now the receipts date from March 1st. | ||
So I got to see every Amtrak I took, every restaurant I ate at, the hotels I stayed at, the taxi cabs I took. | ||
Various things. | ||
The glassware I bought for the house and so on. | ||
So I had to relive this month, you know, through my receipts. | ||
And it was horrifying. | ||
I mean, like, I really had a sense that this is the old world and this is the new world. | ||
But one day I seized on was March 12th, because I was in the city going to a television interview. | ||
And I was there with my friend Talid Brown. | ||
And the city was starting to panic. | ||
It was very interesting, and we got there about 10.30, and my interview wasn't really till four, so I had about four hours to kill. | ||
So I went to my favorite Irish pub, and we sat down, and there were, instead of open tables, there was suddenly paper on the tablecloth. | ||
This is the time when people knew that something was coming, but they didn't know what it was. | ||
They knew for sure by this point that there was a virus, and probably it was in New York, but that's not What was really in the air? | ||
What was in the air was the fear of the response, you know? | ||
Like, we can deal with viruses, you know, don't sneeze on me, don't cough on me, maybe set my phone down over there, I'll pick it up, you know, we can deal with that. | ||
Okay, I caught the virus, gosh, I'm gonna be down a couple of days and so on. | ||
We can deal with that. | ||
But the idea of suddenly wearing the Amtrak clothes? | ||
Uh, we didn't know what was going to happen with the streets shut down, the cops arresting people in bars. | ||
I mean, we didn't know what was going to happen. | ||
And Talid and I sat there between 1030 and 11. | ||
I tell you, Dave, what was very interesting. | ||
I hope to write about this, but the bars were packed. | ||
They were packed, not because people thought life was normal, but they just were certain that life was about to become really unnormal, and they were drinking. | ||
They were just gathered around and drinking themselves silly. | ||
I said to the person who was waiting on us, I said, have you ever seen this kind of drinking at 11 a.m.? | ||
She goes, I've been here five years. | ||
unidentified
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I've never seen anything like this. | |
People just drinking themselves silly out of fear, not of the virus so much. | ||
Yeah, of the other thing. | ||
Of the public panic and the political response. | ||
And those hours that went by between 11 and 4 when I finally did my interview were terrifying because I just didn't know if we could even get the next train out. | ||
And after the interview, we rushed to Penn Station just as fast as we could. | ||
And when we got on that Amtrak, we were both just breathing a sigh of relief. | ||
And even then, I wasn't sure if the train was going to move. | ||
So when it started moving, and I looked at Lee and I said, you know, I know it's a two-hour trip, but when that train stops at Hudson, that's when my heart is going to stop racing, because this is terrifying. | ||
Yeah, and there's so many versions of this. | ||
One of the things that I've been thinking about personally is my grandmother-in-law is 85, lives alone in New Jersey. | ||
None of her children or grandchildren live in Jersey. | ||
So we've been having food delivered to her and I have a friend that lives about 30 miles away who's dropped off some stuff. | ||
But the idea that What if the states close their borders? | ||
What if you can't get food to somebody? | ||
All of these things that we thought these things would never be possible in an American contest. | ||
The fact that all of us right now are eating home all the time and just hoping that Amazon can keep delivering things. | ||
I actually, it's the weird thing because the silver lining is I think maybe we did need a shock to our system to understand really what is freedom and what is What is being independent and not so reliant on the system? | ||
So I am enthused about that, but I'm also worried that a lot of people haven't ever thought about it before, and then now they're going to suddenly think about it, and then who knows which way they'll go. | ||
Because they might just put their hands up and say, no, just help me government. | ||
Please do everything for me. | ||
I'm just completely incapable of doing anything. | ||
I wonder what the response is going to be, and I think that's partly your job and partly my job in the days and weeks and months coming, if ideas matter at all, getting out the message of freedom and liberty and prosperity and safety through those things. | ||
I can't imagine more important work than that right now. | ||
It's going to require voices like yours to get that message out there, to help people understand and make sense of what's happened. | ||
Because philosophy doesn't just come automatically. | ||
People need to be able to hear a body of ideas and connect it with their own experience. | ||
And if we do this right, we can make a difference, I believe. | ||
because the reality is all around us, but it needs interpretation, it needs understanding, | ||
it needs a body of thought to connect it. | ||
And we're all struggling with that messaging. | ||
I mean, my messaging is like, why didn't they leave it to the medical industry | ||
and to society itself to handle instead of having the politicians take over? | ||
Because it's the politicians and the regulators that have ruined the world. | ||
They've took a bad thing, which is a virus, but actually not the first virus and not the last one, | ||
and turned it into a calamity for civilization. | ||
That's not a good thing. | ||
And I hope that coming out of this, We're going to put massive restrictions on the political class. | ||
I mean, I don't mean just a constitution you look at because it's framed on your wall. | ||
I mean something that's really binding, that makes something like this impossible. | ||
So the court system actually works. | ||
So if a mayor tries to lock you in your home again, the courts will say no. | ||
And then suddenly he's out of power. | ||
That's the kind of system we need. | ||
We need massive deregulation. | ||
In the medical world and in the labor markets, in every area. | ||
You mean you don't think it's a great idea that my, you don't think it's a great idea that my mayor here, Eric Garcetti here in Los Angeles, is asking us to snitch on our neighbors if they're doing something they're not supposed to do? | ||
And we might get a reward for it. | ||
You think that's a problem? | ||
Me, my dog Clyde and I, we've been out taking walks and we're hunting down people because we're trying to get some of that reward money. | ||
Is that a problem? | ||
You know, I hope that people reflect on basic humane values going forward, like decency towards each other and freedom, and that that inner moral sense that we all have will prevail over our desire to destroy each other. | ||
I really do hope so. | ||
Jeffrey, I think that's the right way to end an interview. | ||
You truly are one of, like, the clear, sane voices, and I think it's really shining right now, so I'm thrilled that I can help amplify you at a time like this, and just stay safe and sane, and I look forward to actually doing this in studio, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. | ||
And then we'll go to a bar at 11 a.m. | ||
and get wasted and commiserate over, you know, the rights that we lost. | ||
How does that sound? | ||
That sounds great, Dave, and it's wonderful to count you as a friend. | ||
We all need each other right now, both friendship but also philosophical allies. | ||
Let's go forward here with moral conviction and intellectual integrity and ignore the chaos around us and just do what we know is right. | ||
I think that's the best hope we have. |