Senator Rand Paul confronts Dr. Anthony Fauci's authoritarianism, citing higher Biden-era death tolls and criticizing the dismissal of experts supporting the Greater Barrington Declaration. He exposes media distortions regarding vaccination rates and viral lethality while urging conservatives to abandon censored tech platforms like Twitter for alternatives like Rumble. Paul opposes federal regulation of big tech, advocating instead for traditional media liability protection, and frames federalism as a vital shield against parallel societies, allowing states to diverge on issues like marijuana laws to preserve individual liberty. [Automatically generated summary]
They said yesterday, 75% of the people dying have four comorbidities, meaning they're pretty sick people, and that many of them are dying with COVID as an incidental finding.
All right, he came in, he lost his arm, his leg, and his ear was cut off from an automobile accident, and he also tested positive from COVID, but he died from internal bleeding, but he also had COVID.
But see, when they're waking up to it, and when you have CNN doctors saying cloth masks are nothing more than facial decoration, guess what?
Maybe, yeah, they are, I think, understanding that there are more deaths under Biden
than there were under Trump, that they got some explaining to do,
and their best way is to explain this as something we're gonna have to live with.
by mandate. You've advocated that your infallible opinion be dictated by law.
I've always been pro-vaccine. I'm just simply against authoritarianism and against mandates.
The anger that's developed with you, Dr. Fauci, is that you don't want to give us advice.
You want to tell us what to do. You think you are the science and that anybody responds to you.
How dare you!
How dare you criticize science!
As if you somehow are science.
That kind of arrogance, that hubris is really, that's where the anger's coming towards you.
If you were one doctor among hundreds of doctors in the government who gave advice, I don't think anybody, people might object to your advice, but there wouldn't be such a degree of anger.
But you are so certain that you're right that you're not willing to hear anyone else.
Three epidemiologists, of which you are not even an epidemiologist, but three epidemiologists prominent in their field.
Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard.
You maligned them.
You spoke openly with Dr. Collins and you did not disagree that let's paint them as fringe.
You went after them and said we will do a public takedown, not in Science or Nature or Lancet, in Wired, in The Nation, a left-wing publication.
You've engaged in base politics.
You wonder why there's so much anger?
You're not an objective scientist.
You've lost that long ago.
And so many of the things that people want, it's like, they want to know why you're forcing their children to be vaccinated when 95% of people at risk have been vaccinated.
Over 95% of people over 65, it's a huge voluntary success, and yet you won't rest until you force every child to get this.
So yes, there's a great deal of dissatisfaction with you, and many people want you to go, but nobody wishes you violence.
Now, I think he deserves everything he gets and then some, to tell you the truth.
I mean, we've probably never had a government bureaucrat have this much power over our lives and this much disdain for our individual liberty.
And really, when you've got a government bureaucrat, a government doctor who believes and will tell you that, I am the science, and any criticism of him is basically seen as criticizing science, can you imagine the arrogance?
Today, he went one step further and he says, If you have the temerity to question him over him going after these epidemiologists that wrote the Greater Barrington Declaration, if you have the temerity to do that, you're now guilty of fomenting violence against him.
It's a terrible sort of accusation to make.
I reminded him that, look, I was there on the ball field when a Bernie Sanders supporter almost killed Steve Scalise.
A staff member was shot less than 10 feet from me, but none of us blamed Bernie Sanders for that.
None of us really said, oh, you can blame a left-wing politician for some crazy supporter of theirs, and yet that's what he did today, and the left-wing media lapped it up.
So knowing that the left-wing media, which is basically all the mainstream media, isn't gonna frame any of this in an honest way, it does seem that the narrative is collapsing for the people that are paying attention.
That a lot of the stuff that you've been talking about for quite some time is starting to bubble up.
You know, they're sort of admitting, you get the vaccine, it doesn't quite work the way it was promised.
The masks don't work like promised.
The lockdowns don't work like promised.
Are you feeling that there is an actual momentum shift?
And what do you think that'll look like at a national level?
You may have seen this in the last year or two, that some people suspected that the death count was inflated, that many people were dying with COVID and not from COVID.
Wow!
The Biden administration has woken up to this fact, and we're getting regular pronouncements from them day to day.
They said yesterday 75% of the people dying have four comorbidities, meaning they're pretty sick people, and that many of them are dying with COVID as an incidental finding.
All right, he came in, he lost his arm, his leg, and his ear was cut off from an automobile accident, and he also tested positive from COVID, but he died from internal bleeding, but he also had COVID.
But see, when they're waking up to it, and when you have CNN doctors saying, Cloth masks are nothing more than facial decoration.
Guess what?
Maybe, yeah, they are, I think, understanding that there are more deaths under Biden than there were under Trump, that they got some explaining to do, and their best way is to explain this as something we're going to have to live with.
If it's trickling up to him, it would have to be mashed and made for edentulous food that you feed to the elderly.
I mean, I don't think he's in charge of a whole lot of things.
I would say that he's indirectly responsible for it because he did say over and over again he was going to not lock the economy down, he was going to lock the virus down.
And now more people have died under his watch.
He did blame President Trump.
He says he's responsible for these 200,000 people dying.
It was a ridiculous statement and no honest politician should have been allowed to get away with it.
And the media should have gone at him and said, that's not fair.
And yet the media bought into it.
And it was the narrative that the virus was Trump's fault.
But now if the virus goes on and seems to be really uncontrollable and the deaths mount, now it's sort of, well, you need to accept it.
Really, the cloth masks don't work.
They're trying to find a way to get back to normal because guess what?
The blame's attaching to them.
But almost all of the things that you see are from government planning, government policy, and socialism.
They're in charge of the testing.
They're the ones that are mandating how we do the test.
So everybody's got to get a test.
So if your five-year-old's got COVID, and you really wouldn't know it, but you test them and they've got COVID, now you've got to test the whole class.
Then you've got to test all their siblings.
Then you've got to test all their parents.
So this thing sort of spreads out, its tentacles spread through society, and the government will say, oh, we're not for lockdowns, but we are for testing everybody.
If you test everybody, inevitably it leads to a lockdown.
So this is a real problem.
Most of the people in the hearing today with Fauci are like, oh, why can't the government make more tests?
I'm like, why the hell are we ordering so many tests?
This is about ordering too many tests, and it's about testing people who are not sick.
People who are not sick should not quarantine, and people who are not sick shouldn't be taking tests or medicines.
We should leave them the hell alone, but that's our real problem.
And who gave us all this advice?
Fauci.
You know, so Biden's taking Fauci's advice, but Fauci is the problem.
I mean, if we don't have room for him in prison, I mean, stepping down would probably be okay.
But no, he's a menace in the sense that he really is careless and callous towards our liberty.
His first impulse is always an authoritarian one, but he also ignores the science.
So by conservative estimates, over a hundred million Americans have gotten this.
62 million on the official website have gotten COVID.
But the NIH has studies that say five people, for every person diagnosed, is at least five people undiagnosed.
Let's say it's only one or two.
We still get to well over 100 million.
Maybe half of America has been infected.
If you don't count them, then you think we're woefully short on vaccines, then you mandate it on children.
But the other thing there, you know, you would never know this by watching CNN or any of these other networks that are full of fake news.
If you look at how many people have been infected naturally and you say, well, how many people have gotten the vaccine?
95% of people over 65 have been vaccinated.
It's even higher if you go above 75.
The voluntary vaccine has been an enormous success, but if you watch CNN you think, oh gosh, nobody's been vaccinated.
The truth is the opposite.
Almost everybody that's at risk for this disease has been vaccinated.
The children are getting it naturally, whether you vaccinate them or not.
Now adults are getting it, whether you vaccinate them or not.
Really, we're headed towards where there's going to be enough immunity within the community, and I think the devolving nature of this is towards a cold.
We have four other coronaviruses that cause a cold.
This is going to become the fifth coronavirus.
The sooner the better, and then we also at the same time will have some people dying, the vulnerable people.
Let's try to save them by getting government obstacles out of the way so we can have more monoclonals again and more of the new pills.
But also let's repurpose some of the things that we have out there that lessen inflammation.
I wanna shift a little bit to the big tech thing, and I know you're on a time crunch here, but just one or two more things on this.
First off, obviously you've been talking about libertarianism and individual rights and the Constitution, all of that old school stuff for years and years and years, and your dad before you.
Are you sort of shocked how this COVID thing has unmasked so many of your colleagues, people that you maybe had political disagreements with, but that just went so all in on just government, government, government?
I guess I'm not very excited about having some snot-nosed punk over at Facebook or over at Twitter or over at YouTube decide they're going to judge the science.
You know, it took a little bit of effort to get to medical school, it took a little bit of effort to get to one of the better medical schools in the country, and I got some kid who's lucky if he has a journalism major, who's lucky if he ever took a science class, doesn't know what organic chemistry is, telling me that I'm promulgating misinformation.
So it's really insulting.
But also on another level, on a very personal level, these people despise us.
We are the deplorables to them.
We are the people who live and fly over country, and we are the people they would look down their nose at us with contempt.
So why do we give them our content?
This is what makes me mad about conservatives and libertarians.
They're all complaining, saying, oh, I hate the big tech and we should break them up.
No, that's a big government solution.
Quit using them.
If we all quit using them, we are 40% strong, at least.
We're maybe closer to 50% of the country.
If we quit using Twitter, we can topple them instantaneously.
Just my shift to rumble, I think, is having an effect.
But I'm one of maybe 10 or 20 prominent conservatives and libertarians up here.
What if we all did it?
You know, I think we really could have an effect.
And the thing is, is I don't want people to make money off my content who look at me with contempt and say, Oh, we don't like this.
We don't like that.
You can't publish this.
Oh, you said this on the Senate floor.
Sorry, we're not going to let you say that on YouTube.
So yeah, I don't want to be associated with closed minded people.
So, to that point, you officially have announced that you're moving all of your content to Rumble, but it wasn't just that.
You did something kind of snarky.
You basically said, I'll only use YouTube to attack the policies of YouTube, which I thought was a pretty beautiful thing.
I should just say, for full transparency's sake, that everyone knows that Locals, my company, merged with Rumble, so I have some interest in Rumble, obviously.
Do you think, is there anything the government should be doing related to any of this?
This is where the libertarian conservative divide always goes.
We've discussed it once or twice before, but is there any room for the government at any level, break them up, anything?
I'll listen, but I'm always sort of hesitant to believe the solution is the government.
I'm also a big believer in unintended consequences.
The more you look carefully at a subject when the government gets involved, the unintended happens.
One of the arguments Big Tech says for not taking away liability Is that if you take away liability protection that big tech enjoys, what they'll do is become more censorious.
They will censor more people because they don't want to be sued.
And there is some argument for saying, you know, Dave Rubin called Rand Paul this on Facebook.
Let's sue Facebook.
Well, that's ridiculous.
I mean, we're calling each other names.
Either quit using them, don't listen to them, turn them off, or call the other guy worse name.
If we get involved with lawsuits and people say, well, what about the old-fashioned, the established media?
And here's my answer.
Give them liability protection too, instead of taking away, and this is sort of an outlier position, but instead of taking away liability protection, give it to the newspapers and to the broadcast media as well.
And I would go one step further.
I would also let newspapers and television Organize, the bad word for this is collude, but I would let them organize to try to set the prices for their content for YouTube and Facebook.
The big complaint from old media is they take our content, we hire reporters and writers, and we put all this money and effort into writing up the news, and then it's stolen from us and used on by the big tech people who don't pay us for our content.
Well, let all the newspapers in the country get together and negotiate as one entity with Facebook.
So there are ways around some of this that are creative thinking to try to equalize the playing field, but I've never been for, oh, so-and-so has less regulations than this company.
You want to equalize them?
Let's lower the regulations.
Let's don't increase the regulations.
You know what I mean?
Let's try to lower the burden to equalize opportunity and access to markets.
So last thought, just tying the COVID thing and the big tech thing together.
I mean, do you really sense that the future of America is just going to be sort of parallel societies?
Red states will operate one way and say people like us will operate on alternate platforms that will not be the mainstream platforms, that everything is sort of spread, you know, splitting.
And I would argue maybe that was the genius of federalism in the first place and it's all OK.
If you want to live in the Bible Belt and it's less accepting and in a small community in Oklahoma for that lifestyle, you live there.
And I think some of that is good because then we can have sort of freedom of choice of lifestyle and everything else.
And we already have it a little bit with like marijuana and things like that.
In the more accepting states, it's allowed.
The other states, it's not yet allowed.
And so people can kind of gravitate.
And the smaller the denomination of government, the more freedom you can have because, you know, if it's a whole state, it's expensive to leave the state.
But if it's just your town, you know, remember when we had dry towns?
It was actually dangerous, not that I ever did this, but you had to drive to the other town and then back, you know, because, of course, some people would open their bottle on the way back, of course, you know, and that was a problem.
But you had communities, and I know you never did that either, but you had communities that sort of made these decisions and people could choose to live in the community they wanted to, and probably the smaller the denomination or the smaller the size of the government, the better.