Senator Rand Paul celebrates his 62% Kentucky re-election victory, attributing urban losses to tribalism and government worker blocs like the 87,000 IRS agents in Northern Virginia. He criticizes Democrats for ignoring gain-of-function research risks, specifically the lack of investigation into Wuhan lab origins despite concerns over chimeric animals and absent native bat hosts. Paul condemns vaccine mandates and lockdowns, citing a mere 0.3% mortality rate versus higher risks from experimental viruses, while advocating for a Republican leadership focused on avoiding foreign entanglements like the Ukraine conflict. Ultimately, his message underscores the urgent need to prioritize national security over unchecked scientific experimentation. [Automatically generated summary]
How long do you think that can hold when people look at the map and they see basically an 80 to 90% seemingly red map, and then they see the population centers that are blue, the tension between those two areas?
Well, something's got to give, but we're basically just about evenly divided.
I mean, it's hard to believe you can have an election in Georgia and there's an almost even amount, I mean, almost exactly even amount of people on either side of the divide.
And I think people are voting more just which tribe they think they belong to.
People say, oh, it's about candidate quality.
Well, frankly, Dr. Oz was a great candidate.
I've seen him campaign.
He's a great retail campaigner.
He was on daytime TV, for goodness, for a decade or more.
He's very good with people and very likable, very intelligent, can answer all the questions.
And so I don't think he was defeated because he wasn't quality of candidate.
I think it's that we're in sort of these separate camps.
And they are different camps.
But frankly, it's interesting when I meet people, almost anybody who's working is in our camp.
I mean, so it's interesting.
You go into a machine shop and 10 guys have grease on their hands.
They're as Republican as you come.
And they're not very considerate of people who don't work.
In fact, they're disdainful of people who don't work.
But we also have a labor force participation where 38% of our country doesn't work.
So that's a huge block of voters there.
There's also a huge block of government voters.
In fact, I think the 87,000 IRS agents is more about politics than it is about harassing us.
Sure, they'll harass us.
That's a given and I don't want them, but I think it's really about 87,000 more voters in Virginia.
Maybe not all of them in Virginia, but a lot of them would be in Northern Virginia.
Well, and also because they're employed for a long time for government, there's a tendency to say, well, you know, deficit's kind of a problem, but then again, they pay me really well.
So, uh, so you see how government workers gradually kind of shift over to the Democrat party.
And most of the three counties, you know, just on the other side of the Potomac River are very, are very Democrat, but they're all federal government workers.
So if you grow the federal government, you make it harder to, for a Republican to win Is that your biggest frustration, as probably the most libertarian senator that we have?
That people just, in the end of the day, despite candidate quality or anything else, they kind of just want more stuff, sadly.
It's obviously not ideal, but I'm going to try hard to convince the Democrats.
I sent, I don't know if you read Nicholas Wade's article in Medium.
This came out about a year ago and it was the article that awoke everybody.
I hadn't even paid much attention to the lab leak until I read his article.
It's like a 40-50 page article.
No one would touch it.
None of the mainstream media would.
He printed it on Medium, which is a self-publication, but it's incredibly well done.
He's written for Nature, Science, New York Times, Science Writer, and he writes this And it's just an amazing reveal of how the science points towards this coming from the lab and that there has been a cover-up.
So anyway, I sent that article to leading Democrats on Homeland Security that has the oversight to investigate this with the hope that maybe one of them will read it and go, my God, we should investigate this or this could happen again.
But I think some of it is it became very public, the squabble with Dr. Fauci, and he became the paragon of government.
And the Democrats love government, so they don't want to be attacking government.
But really, the look into the virus's origins isn't an attack of Biden.
In fact, most of this happened under the Trump administration, frankly, and under the maybe Obama administration.
Letting go of gain-of-function, letting gain-of-function research get started again, really there was a pause, and I think they were disobeying the pause, but then really it happened under the Trump administration.
I don't think Trump had any idea it was going on, but it did happen during his administration, so it really isn't pointing fingers at one president or the other.
It's really about getting to the bottom of this so this doesn't happen again.
So even if you had the Senate and you were in charge of the committee that was, you know, putting Fauci out there and dealing with all of that, it's not like much happens after, right?
I think that's one of the things people are always confused about.
Like, we have these hearings and then does anything ever actually come of it?
If we make DNA synthesizers, and you can create a virus out of just the particles of it.
So it really is there, and a virus can't survive without a host, but really they can create life now.
We can create any virus we want to, and they can put it together, put the parts together, and then all it has to do is enter into a cell and it's alive.
It takes over the cell and uses the cell to be alive.
But we create them out of nothing, and all you need is the map.
And so we should be regulating that, the machines that do it, the machines that help them to recombine the virus, and maybe some of the animals.
So we have these bizarre things, these hybrid animals that are chimeric animals.
They have mice that have human lungs.
So what you do is you put a batch of virus in there that doesn't infect humans really
well and you put it in and almost all of it dies but a little bit of it lives and then
you run it through again and again, serial passage until it adapts to the human lungs.
You're like, oh, hey, we made this virus that doesn't infect humans.
We select it out by pushing evolution.
Evolution could randomly, something switches and becomes infected human.
It's unlikely, but it can happen.
This way you force it to evolve by continuing to run it through human lungs that are in mice.
You can force it to evolve in a direction to make it more adaptable to humans.
And that's what people think.
This thing came out of the lab and boom, it was incredibly infectious to humans.
And the thing that one of the strongest arguments is it won't infect bats.
We can't find an animal that is a native host to this.
And they think almost all the coronaviruses come from bats.
Well, how did this thing get so distant from bats so quickly without us seeing it somewhere else in the population for a year smoldering?
Nobody has antibodies to this till, boom, 2020, and then everybody gets it.
I never favored the lockdowns and I didn't vote for any of the money.
I didn't vote for one penny of the COVID money because I always thought the choice was, the Republicans said, well, For shutting down the economy, we have to give people money.
We can't just do that.
And I said, well, maybe we could reconsider shutting down the economy.
So I never was in favor of the lockdowns.
And I had hoped that maybe Trump would do it temporarily.
But Trump succumbed.
As much as he was portrayed as a strong character, he never fired Fauci.
And his people kept saying, if you fire him, you'll lose the election.
Well, he lost the election and didn't fire Fauci.
Maybe he should have fired Fauci early on.
And Fauci, Birx, They were all big government people with decisions every day.
They had a different opinion.
Almost none of it was based on science.
And still to this day, they won't acknowledge that natural immunity works.
If you've had the infection, you have some protection.
This isn't to deny vaccines.
They both work.
Vaccines work, and so does natural immunity.
And actually, the combination of it is why people aren't as afraid of this disease anymore.
But it's also why, as they start to mandate COVID vaccines on children, that we should say, well, Hey, my kid already had COVID.
Does he really need a COVID vaccine?
Shouldn't I get that choice?
And the question I keep asking, if my kid's already had COVID, what is the chance that he goes to the hospital and dies with a second bout of COVID?
it's probably zero. In fact, I haven't seen a case where a kid had COVID unless the child is very,
very sick from some other disease. And almost all the children that died under 18 were very,
very sick and sadly were dying from some other disease.
There was nobody, there were no like healthy children like, oh, my, you know, healthy 10-year-olds
playing in the yard gets COVID and Didn't happen.
And so we shouldn't be forcing the vaccine on them, particularly because there are some side effects to the vaccine for children, particularly boys between the ages of 16 and 24, which just happened to be a lot of the kids in our military.
The young men in our military are at risk for heart inflammation, and that risk exceeds easily their risk for any kind of problem from COVID.
And then of course, Dr. Aladipo in Florida, the Surgeon General, puts out that report and then Twitter censors it, which is a whole other thing about censorship, but I know you're tight on time, so let me just ask you one other thing.
So as we're taping this on Tuesday, supposedly Trump may make some sort of announcement tonight.
Obviously the big thing right now in the Republican Party is which way is this thing gonna go?
Is it gonna be a Trump party or perhaps a DeSantis party?
I know you founded the Liberty Caucus, right, with Ron DeSantis?
I knew him something from the congressional baseball game.
He was a good baseball player.
He played at Yale, and I can remember him coming to one of the early practices and hitting home run during practice, which is, you know, for a bunch of old guys out there playing, it was pretty impressive.
So he was a good player, but he ended up having shoulder surgery at that time and didn't really play on the team, and then he ran for governor.
So I don't know him real well, but I have met him.
I've been impressed with what he's done.
The other thing is, it is about who you hire in your administration.
The fact that he's put forward this public health doctor who is telling it like it is and telling the truth and is not just an apologist for big government and unafraid, such that he's got big tech alarmed, I'm pretty impressed with that.
I'm not asking you for who do you like more, but in terms of do you want them, if it's going to happen, to battle it out publicly, or would you rather it sort of be dealt with privately?
Because there's just so many fights, it seems like, right now in the Republican Party.