Remembering Pope Francis’ Life and Legacy, Reality of Trump’s Tariff Policies, and Media Lies, with Kevin O’Leary and David Zweig | Ep. 1053

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Speaker 9 Welcome Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 9 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Monday.
We begin today with news from the Vatican. Pope Francis dead at age 88.

Speaker 9 It was kind of shocking to wake up to, even though we knew he was not in good health, he had had double pneumonia and been hospitalized for some five weeks in mid-February. I mean,

Speaker 9 we knew he wasn't doing that well, but it seemed like he was past the worst of it and maybe was getting a little better or at least on the road toward getting a little better.

Speaker 9 And then Cardinal Kevin Farrell somberly came out this morning and stated at 7.35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned. to the house of the father.

Speaker 9 There's no official cause of death released as of now, but as i said he's been suffering from these chronic lung issues and then beginning in february he was in the hospital for some 38 days with these respiratory issues amazingly you've seen this maybe by now yesterday just yesterday he appeared um

Speaker 9 in in his wheelchair in like the back of the popemobile i don't know what that is I'm not exactly sure, the vehicle, on Easter Sunday.

Speaker 10 Look at that.

Speaker 9 It's kind of amazing in St. Peter's Square.
And one of the last people to meet with Pope Francis was Vice President J.D.

Speaker 10 Vance, pretty incredibly.

Speaker 9 The Vice President had a brief meeting with the pontiff yesterday where the pair exchanged Easter greetings and gifts. Mr.
Vance telling Pope Francis he prays for him daily. Watch.

Speaker 11 I know you've not been feeling great, but it's good to see you in better health. Pray for you every day.

Speaker 8 God bless you.

Speaker 1 happy Easter.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 9 Pretty extraordinary.

Speaker 9 This pope was elected pope in March of 2013 after the shock resignation of Pope Benedict. Nope, no popes resign.
They just don't do it.

Speaker 9 The first pope, Benedict, sorry, no, Francis from Latin America, first ever.

Speaker 10 Can you believe that, given how Catholic Latin America is?

Speaker 9 He was our first pope from there. And Pope Francis immediately jolted energy and enthusiasm into the church.
He was a Jesuit. He was a little bit more progressive.

Speaker 9 And this got a lot of people excited. Many people thought the church had gone too hardcore, though we stood by some traditional things like an all-male papacy and celibacy,

Speaker 9 among other things. The church's stance on abortion, which people are kidding themselves if they want the Catholic Church to amend.

Speaker 9 But this is what we hear from young progressives within the Catholic Church. Okay, good luck with that.

Speaker 9 Maybe we could get,

Speaker 9 you know, I guess you can still have priests who come to the church married, like you can become a priest after having been married, that is, at least, and having like children, but you cannot enter the priesthood and then get married.

Speaker 9 That's just, anyway, here's Pope Francis' first appearance as Pope on the balcony of the Vatican.

Speaker 9 Wow, it's always a sight to behold, right? He was born Jorge Moreo Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, where his mother hoped he would become a doctor.

Speaker 9 But just before his 17th birthday, he paused in front of the basilica of St. Joseph and later recounted he, quote, felt like someone grabbed me from the inside and took him into the confessional.

Speaker 9 Right there, he said, I knew I had to be a priest. His mother evidently was upset.
He would not become a doctor, but he said, quote, I'm going to study the medicine of the soul. Can you imagine?

Speaker 9 And then he went on to become the pope. It's incredible.

Speaker 9 Pope Francis moved the church in a leftward direction, no question, and away from some of the more divisive issues within the church.

Speaker 9 As I mentioned, he did not focus that much on abortion, but he didn't change the stance.

Speaker 9 Homosexuality, shifting its emphasis to to global problems like climate change, poverty, and he was very big on migration.

Speaker 9 He clashed with President Trump over Trump's immigration policy, saying before the 16 election that a person who thinks only about building walls and not of building bridges is not Christian.

Speaker 9 This is why he was controversial amongst, in particular, a lot of Christians here in America who tend to be more conservative.

Speaker 9 The Trump campaign responded by pointing out that the Vatican is surrounded by walls.

Speaker 9 We saw that exact thing happen a couple of weeks ago, where once again he was ripping on Trump's policies when it comes to immigration.

Speaker 9 And once again, we had Tom Homan coming out and saying, my response as a lifelong Catholic to this Pope is that the Vatican has walls. Why is that?

Speaker 9 Ahead of the 2024 election, the Pope declined to say whether people should vote for Trump or Harris, merely urging people to choose the lesser evil according to their conscience.

Speaker 9 But in a letter to U.S. bishops in February, Pope Francis wrote that mass deportation, quote, damages the dignity of many men and women and of entire families and places them in a state of

Speaker 9 particular vulnerability and defenselessness, unquote. Now, look, this is the problem because

Speaker 9 not only is that the church's official stance, but the church has been participating.

Speaker 9 in getting immigrants here and then finding them housing and helping them stay here, irrespective of the fact that they're here illegally. And Pope Francis didn't have to deal with that.

Speaker 9 You know, and it's caused a lot of us in the Catholic Church to wonder what exactly we're donating toward on Sunday. It really does.

Speaker 9 It's one thing if you want to help support your priests, make sure that they're well taken care of, make sure your church is well taken care of, make sure it's got flowers on the altar for Easter Mass.

Speaker 9 But funding illegals coming into the country, they're not all upstanding Catholics.

Speaker 9 And, you know, a lot of us who are Catholic but lean right

Speaker 9 felt this tug of war going on between the Pope's messaging and

Speaker 9 what he wanted us to believe were, you know, deep Catholic teachings and what we understand as Americans who are watching our citizens murdered in the streets by these people to be true.

Speaker 9 Anyway, look, it's... On a day like this,

Speaker 9 you pray, you pray for the loss of the Pope and for a very, obviously holy man who was the leader of the Catholic Church, who had enormous challenges on him and pressures on him.

Speaker 9 And, you know, the church is very political too, especially at the top. It's just such a really interesting organization.

Speaker 9 And then also you look at the messaging and you try to understand

Speaker 9 how he could so misunderstand somebody who is our leader here, our political leader here.

Speaker 9 And the reason President Trump is so devoted to getting rid of these people who Pope Francis just looked at as vulnerable and defenseless. Well, you know who is vulnerable and defenseless?

Speaker 9 Lake and Riley. You know, it's like,

Speaker 9 I wish I could have gotten to talk to the pontiff about it. I really do.
I wish I could have had an interview with him where we talked about things like that.

Speaker 9 I'm sure he would have had nothing but empathy for those killed by these illegals. But that's the problem in part with the Catholic Church and its approach toward this issue.

Speaker 9 No church is going to satisfy its constituents across the board. This one didn't.
Pope Francis didn't, but unquestionably a good, decent, honorable, holy, loving man.

Speaker 9 And President Trump, for his part, was very gracious in the wake of the news today, posting on True Social. Rest in peace, Pope Francis.
May God bless him and all who loved him.

Speaker 9 Now a public viewing for Pope Francis could take place as early as Wednesday, and then a conclave. This is such a big deal.

Speaker 9 Whenever this happens, I don't know if for our younger viewers, you may not have seen it, but I will never forget when we were on the air at Fox and Shepherd Smith said that

Speaker 9 he said, he said the Pope had died when the Pope hadn't died. That was it.
I guess I will forget because my details are somewhat fuzzy. But we were waiting.

Speaker 9 It was like the Pope was sick and we were waiting to see if he had died.

Speaker 9 Anyway, he got that wrong and it turned out to be a big, turned out to be a huge deal. We covered these things at Fox News.
like they were presidential elections.

Speaker 9 And so they're going to go through this process now, the conclave, where they choose his successor. The 120 120 cardinals will gather.

Speaker 9 They say this typically begins between 15 and 20 days after the papal office becomes vacant. So call it two weeks from now or thereabouts, we can expect to see

Speaker 9 that they had to actually have a good write-up today in the Daily Mail about it.

Speaker 9 120 cardinals behind closed doors. If you saw the movie Conclave, you know, where the Pope turns out to be intersex, spoiler alert,

Speaker 9 then you have seen a refresher.

Speaker 9 But this article pointing out some differences. In real life, you will not have

Speaker 9 somebody coming out and briefing the media while the process is underway. And in real life, anybody who did that would face excommunication for that offense.

Speaker 9 You're not allowed to talk to the outside world while the cardinals are in the conclave.

Speaker 9 Nor are they allowed to make pacts with the other cardinals who are voting.

Speaker 9 Nor, they say would a dead pope ever be allowed to be swarmed over by priests, nuns, and officials, nor laid out in his pajamas.

Speaker 9 They say in the real world,

Speaker 9 the chamberlain of the Holy Roman Church declares a pope to be dead in the presence of the papal master of ceremonies and a handful of other members of the papal household.

Speaker 9 Nine days of mourning are then declared in which the body of the late pope will lie in state in St. Peter's Basilica.

Speaker 9 It will be at least 15 days before the conclave.

Speaker 9 And

Speaker 9 then the cardinals are no longer physically locked in a building until they've made their decision, but they will stay at a guest house within the Vatican's walls known as St.

Speaker 9 Martha's House, where they'll have the services of cooks and housekeepers plus two doctors, one of whom is a surgeon. And, you know, many of these are old guys.

Speaker 9 And then they will walk daily in their blue cassocks and red sashes to the papal palace or the Sistine Chapel, where the voting will actually take place. They will not be allowed to read newspapers.

Speaker 9 It's like being a sequestered jury. Access radio, TV, or the internet.

Speaker 9 They'll not be allowed to send or receive any kind of messaging to or from the outside world. And they could be there for some time.
The longest in history lasted 34 months. Good gracious.

Speaker 9 Back in 1271.

Speaker 9 In modern times, none has lasted longer than the five days it took in 1922. The conclave to elect Pope Francis lasted just two days.
This is from this daily mailpiece.

Speaker 9 No firm procedure for the multiple ballots, which are likely to be held. The Conclave will determine its own procedure.
If a candidate receives two-thirds of

Speaker 9 the majority of the votes, that should be it.

Speaker 9 And then when they have the next pontiff, they will blow white smoke up the chimney. Black smoke indicates no decision has been made.

Speaker 9 Good luck to them. This is a big decision.
We've never had an American pope, but I'm voting for Cardinal Dolan. I hope they get behind him.

Speaker 9 It'd be great to have, we had one from the Americas, this pope, Latin America. We haven't had an American.
Would be amazing if we did.

Speaker 9 And Cardinal Dolan is just the best man you could ever hope for for the job. An inspirational leader,

Speaker 9 brilliant.

Speaker 9 It's just, I mean, all the knowledge you could ever want in a church leader and a man of the people, somebody who can inspire working class and elites alike, somebody who knows how to talk to people in a language they can understand, and just an all-around dear man.

Speaker 9 He's, you know, we've got Catholic Radio on SiriusXM. He's, he does a show.

Speaker 9 Every Christmas, he has one, and I was on it a couple years ago. Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a Pope who had a Sirius XM radio show?

Speaker 9 It'd be fantastic for Sirius. They'd be so psyched.

Speaker 9 In any event, prayers.

Speaker 9 With all of the men who will make this new decision and with the one who becomes the next pontiff. It's a big responsibility.

Speaker 9 On the subject of illegal immigration, I'm going to bring in my guest in a minute, but I just want to start with this.

Speaker 9 What an incredibly frustrating series of events that we have been through legally over the past six weeks since Trump started implementing his reforms and the ACLU became his co-president in

Speaker 9 batting them down one by one. It is one step forward, two steps backward for the Trump administration when it comes to fulfilling the people's wishes to deport not a few, not some,

Speaker 10 but all,

Speaker 10 all

Speaker 9 of the illegal immigrants in the United States right now. That's what the people want.
Harry Enton took this on late last week on CNN, you know, their data guy. Let me just show you the numbers, okay?

Speaker 9 Look at SOT 15.

Speaker 12 Deport all undocumented immigrants. Voters favoring the government trying to deport all 11 million of them.

Speaker 12 Back in 2016, just 38% of voters wanted the government to try to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants. Compare it to where we are in 2025, 56% the majority.

Speaker 12 The American people have come a long way on this issue, much closer to Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 And I think that's a big part of the reason why Americans are increasingly saying the country is on the right track when it comes to immigration policy and why Donald Trump's net approval rating on that issue is in the positive.

Speaker 9 Okay, so it's a clear majority who want all of them gone.

Speaker 10 All of them.

Speaker 9 Not just the ones who committed additional crimes, but all of them. They want all illegal immigrants in the United States to be deported.
Now, that number, how many is that?

Speaker 9 It was said in 2020 or so to be about 10 million, between 10 and 11 million. That was 2020 when Trump left office.
How many have come in in the four years since?

Speaker 9 You go to the Center for Migration Studies, they'll say it's only 1.7 million that were added so that we're only up to 11.7 million bull

Speaker 9 bull that's that grossly underestimates the millions who swarmed into this country under biden it he was letting in 300 000 a month 300 000 a month people

Speaker 9 it's estimated by House Republicans and Customs and Border Patrol, which is in a position to know, to be closer to 8 million under Joe Biden, eight.

Speaker 10 Okay,

Speaker 9 10 in 2020 plus eight under Joe Biden gives us almost 20 million, 18 million total in the country. Illegals.

Speaker 9 You don't think that has an effect on the American economy?

Speaker 9 So Trump's got to get rid of 18 million people. That's what a clear majority of Americans want.
18 million. How are we doing? You've seen Tom Homan out there doing his level best.

Speaker 9 ICE is out there doing their level best and they're doing yeoman's work at the southern border. The trickle back into the country has been stopped.
It's all been stopped.

Speaker 9 It's been stopped as much as you can stop without having an airtight wall, which he's also said he's going to work on. But in any event, they're doing a great job now stopping the flow.

Speaker 9 But how are we doing on the deportations, on the removals of those already here? Well, in February, for the month of February,

Speaker 9 Trump deported just over 11,000.

Speaker 9 You've never had an administration more devoted to rounding them up and shipping them out. He is doing everything within his power.
He has expanded his

Speaker 9 rights of removal when you encounter somebody at the border, like immediate removal. He's expanded that to basically cover all of the United States.
He's using the Alien Enemies Act.

Speaker 9 He, as you know, has been getting hit by the courts left and right for not providing these people enough due process.

Speaker 9 And even with Trump's,

Speaker 9 you could call it, you know, cut corners,

Speaker 9 he's only gotten 11,000 out in February. I haven't seen the March numbers, but you can assume it's around there.
So let's say it's double if you add March in there.

Speaker 9 So let's say it's 22,000 that we've gotten out, but I think it slowed down in March.

Speaker 9 All these sanctuary cities trying not to work with Tom Homan.

Speaker 9 You've got these whistleblowers calling up the illegals, saying Homan's coming. We saw some of that.
And keep in mind, Tom Homan said that they were going to start with the worst first.

Speaker 9 And that means those who have committed additional crimes beyond illegal entry are overstaying their visa. Well, how many of those are there out of that, call it 18 million?

Speaker 9 ICE told Congress last year it was about not quite half a million, 435,000 illegals who have criminal convictions who are not yet in U.S. custody.

Speaker 9 All right, so we're starting with the worst of the worst, worst first, 435,000 here illegally. And maybe this, since Trump took office, we've gotten out, what, let's call it 22, 25,000.

Speaker 9 If you round up for the couple of weeks of January and April that we have going here, let's just call it 25,000.

Speaker 9 That doesn't even get us down to 400, 100,000 of the illegals who are still running around who have also committed crimes. And you haven't even cracked a million of the 18 million.

Speaker 9 This is not a rip on Trump. He's trying.
Tom Holman is trying. Tom Holman's jumping up and down saying, I need more money because I don't have the resources to do this.

Speaker 9 And on top of that, I don't have the facilities to store them.

Speaker 9 Even the numbers he's getting, there's no place to put them. Just today, we have this long article about how now the ACLU is complaining that the ICE facilities aren't nice enough, that

Speaker 9 some female migrants are having to sleep on maps, mats, on concrete floors. Okay.

Speaker 9 They're complaining that some of the lunch tables don't have enough seats. I mean, really?

Speaker 9 Then get them out. Go home.
You know where they have seats and mattresses? Back in your home countries. Get out.

Speaker 9 Okay, but it's all on us. It's all on Trump.
It's all on Tom Homan.

Speaker 9 It's all on them to find them all, overcome the sanctuary cities' objections, overcome these mayors who are undermining them, overcome the whistleblowers, whatever you call them, the leakers who are telling illegal groups when Homan's groups are coming.

Speaker 9 And now, biggest and most importantly, overcome the ACLU.

Speaker 9 which at every turn is going into court and challenging the deportations, saying you can't expand expedited removal. You can't use the Alien Enemies Act.
And they just had a a huge victory.

Speaker 9 Late Friday night into Saturday at 1 a.m., the Supreme Court in a 7-2 ruling unsigned, but we know that it was Thomas and Alito who were in the dissent

Speaker 9 stopped him from deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act.

Speaker 9 And buses that were seen leaving the ICE detention centers, said to be full of Venezuelans, had to stop and turn around and put them back in there.

Speaker 9 We're only at maybe 25,000 deported out of 18 million.

Speaker 9 And now you've got these courts saying that they want due process that looks like it's going to be akin to the due process you get when you're charged criminally.

Speaker 9 How much due process do we have to give each one of these people individually, individually?

Speaker 9 No due process afforded American citizens as 18 million of them came in, as some half a million committed crimes against us, stealing from us, raping our women, murdering us, along with our children, child molestation.

Speaker 9 Did they have due process? Did the American people have any due process at all? No.

Speaker 9 Now, for each one, we have to have due process before we deport them to El Salvador or anywhere else. And it's starting to look like

Speaker 9 just a peppercorn will not be enough to steal a phrase from another area of law consideration.

Speaker 9 It's starting to look like we're actually really going to have to provide hearings in each case, allow these people.

Speaker 9 They're upset. Their notices that they could challenge it weren't in English.
Who?

Speaker 9 That's your problem. Like, now, what are we going to have to have a translator for every single language? If we got, like, somebody in there who only speaks Arabic, we got to make sure it...

Speaker 9 English is the official language of the United States. You don't understand your language? Too effing bad.

Speaker 9 So the Supreme Court for now has shut down the use of the

Speaker 9 Alien Enemies Act. And the ACLU does nothing but file challenges to every single attempt to deport these people.

Speaker 9 And Pam Bondi's got up to her neck, up to her chin now in ACLU legal filings, not to mention the offense that Trump is trying to play legally with things like trying to get, you know, open anti-Semitism to stop on campuses like Harvard.

Speaker 9 Okay, that's where we are today. Here to help us unpack this and much, much more is Kevin O'Leary.
He's chairman of O'Leary Ventures and Beanstalks, and you probably know him as Mr.

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Speaker 9 So, Kevin, it's not exactly a legal debate I'm looking for with you.

Speaker 9 It's, I want to talk about the frustration of this scenario as I've just laid it out and what, how we're ever supposed to get ahead on any of this.

Speaker 9 You know, when the beatdown against everything they try to do is constant and there are so many enabling judges who will work with the ACLU, same as enabling media who will work with his left-wing critics on the tariffs, which I know you defended him on.

Speaker 9 It's just at every turn, these same establishment types that got us into this mess are doing their level best to keep us there.

Speaker 11 Due process, that's what everybody calls it.

Speaker 11 I think the bigger picture, though, is to go back to the mandate that came out of the election and that data that you pointed to earlier, 56% of people want this issue dealt with.

Speaker 11 It's one of the reasons that Trump got his second term. was illegal immigration.
And so I anticipate this will twist and turn through the courts.

Speaker 11 Some good decisions will be made, some bad. It depends which side of the equation you're on.

Speaker 11 I've come to the realization now as I deal with all kinds of issues around the administration that 50% of the people I deal with internationally too have what I call or has been termed Trump derangement syndrome.

Speaker 11 And what I mean by this is it's kind of useless to litigate why he's back in the White House.

Speaker 11 As I point out to people saying, look,

Speaker 11 I don't shill for politicians, Trump included. I shill for policy.
And I have to deal with the policy. So why do we have to keep reiterating why Trump's in office?

Speaker 11 I don't care at this point because he is. And now we deal with the outcome.
Now we deal with the policy. Now we deal with the environment we're in.

Speaker 11 And we want to move forward, particularly for me as an investor. I care about the policy coming out of the White House.
So tariffs is a big deal for me, obviously. I invest internationally.

Speaker 11 And so the narrative I want to have in foreign countries is, look, forget about Trump. He's not leaving the White House.
He's going to finish off his second term. Get over it.

Speaker 11 Let's deal with the policy. That's how I look at it.
And that tends to be working. It's almost like I have to bring psychiatrists with me.
People really get crazy with the Trump stuff.

Speaker 9 You know,

Speaker 9 if the shoe were on the other foot, you know, and the Trump administration or Trump's supporters were using lawfare to stop the Joe Biden agenda on green energy at every turn, we'd be getting all these discussions about how if the Supreme Court gave them a decision, Trump, they're illegitimate, right?

Speaker 9 But now, now suddenly they're fine with these courts and probably even this Supreme Court because they've gotten these late night rulings saying, okay, we're going to stop it.

Speaker 9 I don't think, I think we do have to abide by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling.
I think that's very clear. You cannot delegitimize the U.S.
Supreme Court.

Speaker 9 There's a rule of law in this country, and it must be upheld. But we're heading toward a serious crisis, Kevin, where 56% of the country wants all of these illegals out.

Speaker 9 And when we're only some 20,000 into the deportations,

Speaker 9 it's basically been shut down. The main tool for deporting most of them, the most dangerous, has been shut down.

Speaker 9 And that's what's going to push us toward a crisis where the executive branch doesn't listen to the Article III courts.

Speaker 11 Yeah, but there's other ways to deal. I mean, your numbers are,

Speaker 11 let's round it out. Let's say it's 20 million total illegal immigrants, of which 500,000 have been charged with crimes.
Everybody would agree that they should go first.

Speaker 11 And I think that's where the focus will be. There's a really interesting narrative, Megan, going on right now in small business in America, where 62% of jobs are created.

Speaker 11 These are companies' 500 to 500 employees. Many of these illegal immigrants that have not broken the law are employed in these businesses, particularly in agriculture.
And

Speaker 11 those business owners are asking, is there any other way to deal with this where we can legitimize their residency here because they're actually productive in terms of being workers for some jobs a lot of Americans don't want?

Speaker 11 You've heard that narrative. These are the people that are not been charged with any other crimes.

Speaker 11 They came into the country illegally, yes, but they actually found jobs that are being paid by American companies.

Speaker 11 This is a difficult situation because if you just took 18 or call it 20 million people, including the 500,000 that have done crimes, and they should, everybody agrees they should be gone.

Speaker 11 I mean, they're here illegally and they break the game.

Speaker 10 Not everybody.

Speaker 11 Well, I mean, most voters think that's a double whammy. That's almost three strikes and you're out.
I think the Trump administration will focus really hard on those 500,000.

Speaker 11 And one way or another, they'll be gone because because they are illegal and they did break the law.

Speaker 11 So they're either going to end up serving time in an American prison when they're caught, or they're going to go somewhere else back to their native homeland. We'll see how that works out.

Speaker 11 But the dilemma for the rest of them is...

Speaker 11 Is there a process by which they can apply legally if they have a sponsor? Now,

Speaker 11 this same issue occurred in Europe years ago when they brought workers in into places like France, where they found a way to give them employment because they were willing to sponsor them.

Speaker 11 I don't know if we're going to get to that place here because you made the numbers very clear. If Trump got to a million deportations a month, he still wouldn't get it all done before his term's over.

Speaker 10 Think about it.

Speaker 9 And there's zero chance of getting to even 100,000, never mind about that.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's even realistic. I mean, you'd have to take the commercial airlines into account.
You'd need to be booking seats on every aircraft in America.

Speaker 11 I just don't see that happening. So, however, I do see the half a million that have broken the law, and he has got a clear mandate from the voter.
And by the way, I think this is a bipartisan issue.

Speaker 11 I don't think there's a lot of Democrats saying, yeah, this is a murderer that came in illegally. Let's keep them here.
That doesn't even make any sense.

Speaker 9 That's what they're fighting over right now. He started with the worst.
He's starting with the ones he understands to be in gangs. And the left is trying to pick every single one whose

Speaker 9 gang affiliation they question. Oh, was he really in the gang? Oh, you didn't have all the proof that he was in the gang.
He's here illegally. He can be deported.
Like, I don't even know.

Speaker 9 We're wasting time trying to argue about the extra crime because it's better. It sounds better.
We don't have to prove any of that. You're here illegally.
You can be deported. Goodbye.
That's it.

Speaker 11 Yeah, you're making, look, that point is probably

Speaker 11 on a bipartisan basis by a majority of, you know, if you check 10 people, you're going to get six of them saying, I agree with this.

Speaker 11 How it gets worked out, I mean, the administration is, it's not just Trump, the whole administration has to do battle, but you cannot go against the Supreme Court. I mean,

Speaker 11 I mean, there's no way we can ignore that ultimate decision.

Speaker 9 You ignore the Supreme Court, you become a Democrat. You become AOC.

Speaker 9 We can't. That's, we can't let them, you know, make us become the things that we can't stand, the ridiculous morons who have been talking about packing the court and delegitimizing the court.

Speaker 9 That's not going to fly. We have to, we on the right must abide by the U.S.

Speaker 9 Supreme Court rulings, period, while being extremely critical and doing what we can to find the right legal cases to make sure the right cases get tested.

Speaker 10 That's just the way it's an issue that Trump is dealing with.

Speaker 11 It's an issue, but it's not the only one that people are concerned about right now. As we talk, the market's down a thousand points.
There's a lot of volatility in people's net worth. Why?

Speaker 11 Ripping through. There's a lot of stuff on his plate right now.

Speaker 9 Can we talk about the tariffs, Kevin? I don't understand them. I never purported to understand them.

Speaker 9 I hear, of course, all of the Trump-deranged people tell me he's an idiot. He's doing it all wrong, market volatility.
Then I hear his defenders say he's playing the long game. It's chess.

Speaker 9 You don't get it. Like, I don't know.
I will tell you this.

Speaker 9 A dear friend of mine who is at a very important hedge fund, who I really do trust, said that everything is so unpredictable that people are at their wit's end who are in the market.

Speaker 9 And that's one of the reasons reasons why we're seeing such volatility. Like they can't stand the uncertainty and the unpredictability.

Speaker 9 And that dovetails with what Maria Bartaromo was asking Trump about face to face. So can you speak to that, the uncertainty, and where are we with the tariffs?

Speaker 9 Have we settled in a good place right now? Is we're in like a pause for almost everyone but China and renegotiating?

Speaker 10 Yeah,

Speaker 11 I think what you're going to see from a pragmatic point of view, again, leaving out Trump derangement syndrome syndrome and just saying, where are we at with the current policy on tariffs?

Speaker 11 If you look at the big blocks, which is the European Union, Switzerland and England, which are not part of that union, but also trading partners, Canada and Mexico, that's about 70%

Speaker 11 of

Speaker 11 what Trump is looking at.

Speaker 11 And what he's saying, if you leave out all the bombastic statements, and I always say this about Trump, you got to forget about the noise, you got to focus on the signal, signal because if you don't understand that after 12 years of trump you never will so the noise is all the volatility in the market the signal is this what he wants and what his administration wants luttnik wants and bergam wants and all the rest of them working on this stuff is reciprocal tariffs including zero so if you think about this

Speaker 11 Take car parts in Germany. I always use that example.
They had outrageous tariffs on car parts going into Germany. And American companies want to compete on the componentry of all kinds of cars.

Speaker 11 And they can't because they have some crazy tariff. So Trump is saying, I'm going to throw on the same crazy tariff on car parts from Germany coming into the United States.
Right away,

Speaker 11 rational minds would say, well, that's not going to work for both of us. It's kind of dumb.
Why don't we take that down to 10% or zero?

Speaker 11 And then we're going to end up, this is why I'm an optimist, with these giant trading partners at zero tariffs so we'll open up the border to mexico and canada and have free trade there eventually after this gets worked out because there'll be no tariffs in either direction it's no one it's no one nobody's benefit the case in canada right now there's an election on the 28th so it's very close after that gets done they'll be negotiating germany and England and lots of other ones have already stated openly, I'm willing to go to zero to get a deal done.

Speaker 11 So all of these things will get worked out. And during this period, lots of volatility because it's not just tariffs today.
It's Trump beating up on the Fed.

Speaker 11 And this is an old game that's been going on for every administration, including bipartisanly.

Speaker 11 The executive always beats up on the Fed because the Fed is independent and you can't jawbone them into making decisions about interest rates.

Speaker 11 The Fed is worried that these tariffs stay on too long, particularly with China, and they're inflationary. Inflation right now is still north of 2%.

Speaker 11 So if I were the Fed, I wouldn't drop rates rates either because I'm going to look like an idiot in 90 days when inflation is going up because of tariffs, not down. So that's a different issue.

Speaker 11 That adds volatility. But my point is, all the tariffs are going to get worked out except for China.
China is a different deal.

Speaker 11 We are really getting to the point, and everybody realizes this now, that we are in an economic war with China. They want to become the supreme economy.

Speaker 11 They want to do it by stealing IP from everybody, including American IP, lots of that. They don't play by the rules of the World Trade Organization, and they haven't since 2000.

Speaker 11 They just don't give a shit. And everybody's figured that out.
And the only way to change their behavior is to show consequence. And we haven't ever done that.

Speaker 11 Well, this administration has decided there are consequences to stealing IP and not playing by the rules and not giving access to the markets and using our capital markets by not playing by the rules of GAAP.

Speaker 11 And all of these things are coming to a head. I mean, I hate to use this analogy, but it's a good one.
This is like squeezing a teenage pimple. That's what's going on here.

Speaker 11 And they're going to keep squeezing until the acne is gone. And it's going to get ugly, but it's going to get resolved because China can't afford not to have access to the world's largest economy.

Speaker 11 They just can't. Otherwise, everybody would be unemployed there.
But it's sort of a nasty situation. But I'm frankly happy that we're finally doing this.
As a guy, I've said this countless times.

Speaker 11 I do business in China and I've been royally screwed. And I'm tired of it.
I'm just sick of it. And I speak for millions of entrepreneurs that have been screwed in China for 20 years.

Speaker 10 We're done.

Speaker 11 Fix it. I'm okay with this volatility.
I'd like to get it fixed. I want the other tariffs to get worked out because there's a lot of trade going on there.
It's going to happen.

Speaker 11 But China, squeeze the pimple.

Speaker 9 There was a gal who was on

Speaker 9 Shark Tank not long ago, and you did not invest, but she had an idea for a silicone placemat for like a baby's crib. I mean, not crib, high chair.

Speaker 9 And she wound up getting this project off the ground, and she has her product made in China, and the New York Times's daily podcast called The Daily featured her last Monday. We pulled a soot.

Speaker 9 She's trying to be there. They're using her as their real life witness on how bad these Chinese tariffs are hurting Americans.
Here it is. Take a listen.

Speaker 10 I shudder to ask this.

Speaker 13 What happens to the tariff costs you would bear once the tariffs go from 104 to 145%?

Speaker 15 $229,000.

Speaker 13 Just the tariff you would pay on $158,000 worth of product.

Speaker 9 And we would have to come up with that in the 30 to 40 days it takes for the product to get to the U.S.

Speaker 10 Wow.

Speaker 15 And I can't get any more loans. I'm fully leveraged.
I have my house on the line already. I can't get more loans.

Speaker 13 Yeah. I mean, that's-I can't come up with that kind of money.

Speaker 15 That's an astonishing number.

Speaker 8 I'm not okay.

Speaker 9 I'm scared for my friends. I'm scared for myself.
Like, they don't understand. This is certain death for us.

Speaker 9 That's Beth Bennicke, founder and CEO of Busy Baby. So, what do you make of that?

Speaker 11 I'm familiar with the deal. I'm familiar with the situation.

Speaker 11 I've probably had that

Speaker 11 podcast said to me 2,000 times already as a member of investors on Shark Tank.

Speaker 11 But we also have stories of hundreds of companies that have been on Shark Tank that also manufactured their product in China.

Speaker 11 As soon as it gets to 5 million in sales domestically, the same factories that are making it there knock it off and sell it at a 40% discount because they never have to recoup the R ⁇ D that the company put into making the product in the first place.

Speaker 11 And they get wiped out a different way. They get wiped out by China, not even, they just totally ignore the IP and they can't go back and litigate.

Speaker 11 The crazy thing, Megan, is Chinese companies use the American legal system to sue American companies after they've knocked them off. Why is that okay?

Speaker 10 Then they go to the next one.

Speaker 9 So in other words, you are over here as an American company. You come up with a design.
You do all this R ⁇ D to make sure it's a safe product, it's an effective product, and then

Speaker 9 you bring it to market here and in China. And in China, here you'd be protected by certain copyright laws or whatever you're using to protect your IP.
But over there, you don't have that protection.

Speaker 9 So they just knock it off and they start selling it for cheap. That's what you're saying, that there's no respect for your IP.

Speaker 11 Well, it's worse. Maybe when they're young, they're taught, this is completely fair to do this.

Speaker 11 You steal, you cheat, It's part of the psyche of how you build your economy. It doesn't matter that it wasn't your idea or that you spent millions of dollars in R ⁇ D to create it.

Speaker 11 They simply don't give a shit. And that is what we have to fix.
Because if they want to play with the big boys, including trading in Europe and everything else, stealing everybody's IP

Speaker 11 and then selling it back into those markets and flooding the markets with the exact same product at usually a 30 to 40% discount with no consequences is going to end up in a very bad place for everybody because they can't sustain that forever either.

Speaker 11 And they're look, everybody wants to do business in China. I want to do business in China.

Speaker 11 All I'm asking for, and I don't think I'm being unrealistic in this request, is give me a level playing field.

Speaker 11 Let me use their courts to litigate trade disputes and resolve them, just like they use ours.

Speaker 10 Can you not do that?

Speaker 11 No, you can't. And I mean, just to

Speaker 11 give you a sense of how crazy it's gotten, there's a law on the books that says for Chinese companies, when they want to raise capital in America, they can go to the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, form a company, issue shares to Americans that aren't real shares.

Speaker 11 They're shadow shares. And what's incredible about this, they don't even comply with GAAP.

Speaker 11 And so what this law said was, it was Rick Scott who originally got the momentum, the senator out of Florida on this deal, and said, Look, we'll give them three years to comply. That's a long time.

Speaker 11 And then they can stay listed on the exchange. And while Gensler was the head of the SEC, he didn't enforce this law.

Speaker 11 But a new guy, a new sheriff's in town named Paul Atkins, just got confirmed last week. And he has made a public statement saying, Okay, I've had enough of this too.

Speaker 11 Every Chinese company that is listed right now that is not complying with GAAP, I'm going to delist them.

Speaker 11 That could be as much as $800 billion of market cap. Wow.

Speaker 11 That should happen because why is it fair for an American company to have to pay for compliance and be compliant with all the regulators here in America to stay listed, which costs millions of dollars in some case, and they're competing with a Chinese company right next door to them that doesn't have to?

Speaker 11 Why is that okay? Under what scenario is that fair? And I think that's the kind of question that people like me are raising their hand and saying, enough. Let's fix this problem once and for all.

Speaker 11 And yes, there's going to be stories of that poor woman's situation, but these tariffs are not going to be forever. This is a game of chicken.

Speaker 11 Two economies colliding with each other, one cheating and stealing, one not. At some point, you got to resolve the issue.

Speaker 11 And I think at some time in the near future, Qi is going to call Trump and say, okay,

Speaker 11 where do you want to meet?

Speaker 10 You want to go to Geneva?

Speaker 10 Because I mean,

Speaker 9 whenever you hear somebody talk about this who knows China, who knows Xi, knows Chinese culture, they say he'll never call, never. Like they, he cannot lose face.

Speaker 9 I mean, any communist country leader would be this way, and that includes him, that they just can't. He can't lose face.
That's the last thing he'll do.

Speaker 9 And now Trump has to find a way of going to him. But, you know, Trump's kind of like that himself as well.

Speaker 11 Well, I can assure you within the Communist Party of China, there is a bunch of narrative going on about how long do they want to do this?

Speaker 11 Because the only reason you stay in power in a communist society as a supreme leader is everybody's fed.

Speaker 11 They can take care of their families and they have jobs in factories.

Speaker 11 Now, what you could do, even though they're not making rubber mats anymore because they're all sitting on the water, no one's going to buy them, you can't, there aren't enough markets big enough to replace the American consumer.

Speaker 11 There just aren't.

Speaker 11 So at the end of the day, you got to start asking yourself, okay, if I'm chi, do I print money so that I can pay these workers and then have hyperinflation where a loaf of bread, you know, goes up a thousand percent the venezuelan model or do i work something out with trump so all this stuff we've made can get back into the market including that woman's you know rubber bib i mean somebody's got to buy that there's not enough people around the world to buy that except you got to have the 39 of the consumers are sitting in america that's who got to sell the product that's why i would think at some point because i'm a pragmatic guy again i look at the policy i know there's a lot of politics here but if i'm chi i'm thinking okay how do I safe face on this deal?

Speaker 11 What do I do here to get things going again so the stuff on the boats gets to America with no tariffs on it?

Speaker 11 All the Europeans have made, the guys in England right now today are saying, okay, let's drop our tariffs on agriculture so we can start shipping grain in both directions, whatever they want out of ag.

Speaker 11 German car parts, we talked about that. All of these guys are working this out.
Qi has to do that too. Now, Is it going to take two weeks? Is it going to take two months?

Speaker 11 I don't know, but I guarantee you, there's no scenario where Qi can outlast

Speaker 11 the American consumer, because that's really what you're talking about, Megan. At the end of the day, can he really cut himself off from the largest consumer market on earth? No.

Speaker 11 And so I'm on the camp that says, okay, let's see how long this game of chicken lasts. But would I like to resolve this thing once and for all?

Speaker 11 Let me speak on behalf of millions of investors and entrepreneurs in America. Yes, I want to do business in China.
I'm willing to compete with Chinese on a level playing field.

Speaker 11 And I want to open the markets up. Yes.
I have nothing against the Chinese people. I don't like their government.
I don't like their policy.

Speaker 11 And if you're not going to change the government, then let's cut a deal to have a reciprocal tariffs or no tariffs, but definitely access to the markets and definitely got to play by the rules.

Speaker 11 I would like to raise money in Hong Kong. I would like to approach their markets.
I don't want to have my IP stolen. I don't want a 51% Chinese partner.
We don't force that on Chinese companies here.

Speaker 11 But I'm telling you, it's time to clean this mess up once and for all. And yeah, it's uncomfortable and the ebb and flow and the volatility.
But I say to everybody, chillax.

Speaker 11 Let this administration get this thing done and let's move on because the last 20 administrations never dealt with it. This one is, you may hate Trump.
You may have Trump derangement syndrome.

Speaker 11 I feel you're paying for that. I don't care.
because that's not what matters. It's the policy.

Speaker 9 Okay, let me ask you about the tariffs and the effect on some of our international friends.

Speaker 9 Up in Canada,

Speaker 9 we were all watching Pierre Polyev, who's a conservative, who was the guy eating the apple in that great clip where he was just stone cold against the liberal journalist trying to get him with the gotcha questions.

Speaker 9 And I think we were all kind of rooting for him.

Speaker 9 And then came the tariffs, and suddenly he was losing a race he was winning and now is like something like 20 points behind in the polls to the liberal.

Speaker 9 And so it looks like, and some are directly stating that it's the tariff war we're having against Canada that's going to lead to Justin Trudeau 2.0 when they elect their new prime minister instead of doing what they need, which is putting Pierre Polyev at the top.

Speaker 9 Are you Canadian? Do you have dual citizenship? You've got some connection with Canada.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I have multiple citizenships, but I'll tell you,

Speaker 11 I'm in a very interesting situation because I invest in Canada too, and I'm very close to the polls there.

Speaker 11 I get private polls every day because I have a massive project in Alberta, the world's largest data center being built there. So it really matters to me how this goes.

Speaker 11 Let me give you some data you'll find interesting that I don't think your listeners have had any information about.

Speaker 11 The first polls opened in Canada, early polling, two days ago. And

Speaker 11 all of the electric, they're all

Speaker 11 uh electric canada has an official uh uh department for elections and they also hire a lot of uh volunteers

Speaker 11 in the history of canada never

Speaker 11 ever have they ever seen such turnout ever since the beginning of the confederation something's going on nobody knows what it means there are lineups up in Toronto, Canada, the largest city, fourth largest city in North America, around city blocks of people voting early.

Speaker 11 Now, this may

Speaker 11 look just like the American election did three weeks before when everybody said the seven swing states were going to go

Speaker 11 to Harris.

Speaker 11 Didn't happen.

Speaker 11 There may be a highly motivated group of people who are so pissed with what happened to them over the last decade.

Speaker 11 Basically, 25% of the Canadian population is now living on or below the poverty line based on the failed mandate of Trudeau. In the last five years,

Speaker 11 Trudeau's advisor was Mark Carney. So, Mark Carney comes in with blood on his hands, and he has tried to tell every Canadian over the last 36 hours: don't look at my track record.

Speaker 11 Please don't look at that. Look at the shiny bead south of the border named Donald Trump.
Only I can save you. I can save you from that horrible

Speaker 11 shiny bead. Don't look at me.
Don't look at my party. Don't worry that I left all of the old people that killed you in the last 10 years still in their seats.

Speaker 11 Freeland, the finance minister, she's still there. She's still in the cabinet.
All of those people, they're still there. They killed the Canadians.
Look at Trump. Don't look at my track record.

Speaker 11 And please, when you're voting, remember, only I can save you. And I think the Canadian people, based on what I've heard, we'll see,

Speaker 11 are calling bullshit.

Speaker 9 The actual date of the election is 428. Carney's up by six points.
He has erased what was a 20-point lead by Polyev. That's a very interesting theory.

Speaker 9 I can't wait to find out whether that's actually what's happening. It would be a miracle to see conservative leadership there again.

Speaker 10 Well, you said this. Kevin O'Leary.

Speaker 11 Before the Trump election, you said the same thing.

Speaker 9 But his odds weren't quite as long. I mean, I don't know, but you may be right.
I don't know Canada that well, but I'm certainly hoping you're right. It's a pleasure to see you.

Speaker 10 Thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 11 22% down to six in basically 36 hours. I think the trend is going to be a very tight race, but I smell something going on.
And I think it's people calling bullshit, and they don't want more liberals.

Speaker 11 They're done.

Speaker 9 Yeah, they should be. Because, my God, you think about what was happening with the

Speaker 9 the swim meet up there,

Speaker 9 the otters where they have 50-year-old men pretending to be women swimming against and changing in the same locker room as 12 year old girls.

Speaker 9 Like somebody needs to take Canada by the helm and it needs to be a strong right-leaning leader. Kevin, talk to you soon.
Thanks so much for being here. Don't go away.

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Speaker 9 It's been five years,

Speaker 9 I mean, actually five years, since schools closed in an effort to curb the spread of COVID, a policy that had devastating ramifications that are still being felt to this day.

Speaker 9 Well, my next guest, David Zweig, has a new book out tomorrow that is a thorough account of the faulty decision-making process behind the school closures. It's right here.

Speaker 9 I have it in hand, and the book is called An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and a story of bad decisions. A story of bad decisions.
Man, that's perfectly put.

Speaker 9 David's here to break it all down for us. Welcome back to the show.
David, so one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you was you're the guy.

Speaker 9 Like you are, if I think back on the whole COVID misadventure, who were like, there's a couple, only a couple of people who all along were like, that's bullshit. No, that's not true.

Speaker 9 No, I've done the underlying research and they're wrong about that too. And for me, you were number one.
Alex Berenson was another. He was great.

Speaker 9 I'm sure I'm missing one or two, but like for me, you were it. And so I know, like, we, we don't like going back over COVID.
People don't like it. I think it just brings up too many triggers.

Speaker 9 It's like, I wish I hadn't gotten that vaccine. Some people feel like I wish they hadn't gotten it for their kids.
They wish they had fought harder against the nonsense.

Speaker 9 You know, we all kind of feel like we're human lab rats now walking around with weird stuff inside of us thanks to these fucking Fauci. Sorry.

Speaker 9 So that we do need, but we do need an accounting of what was done. And even Team Trump just last week changed the COVID.gov website, the one that YouTube's referring everybody to.

Speaker 9 It's supposed to be like, oh, that's where like Fauci and Deborah Burks are going to give us all of their nonsense. Now it's officially Team Trump saying it was a lab leak.
That's obvious.

Speaker 9 They're saying all this stuff, which is going to send everybody who depended on that into a meltdown.

Speaker 9 But that's kind of what you're doing here, which is like, now that the dust has settled, let's just count the score and let's figure out how we made so many terrible decisions and maybe how we can not do that the next time.

Speaker 9 So let's just start with this. Of all the terrible decisions, and there's so very many, what was the worst one? What stands out?

Speaker 10 Well, my entire book is focused on, or at least it's the launch point, on the long-term school closures and then sort of all the decisions that followed in the wake of that.

Speaker 10 The mask mandates, barriers on desks, six feet of distancing, all this kind of.

Speaker 9 That's the picture on the front. I want to show that to the audience again.

Speaker 9 I don't, did your kid ever get subjected to this where they have these weird little barriers on the desks that did absolutely nothing? But my kids had this too.

Speaker 10 Nothing at all. I mean,

Speaker 10 and these have opaque sides. So the kid, it was like horseblinders.

Speaker 9 So you can't see anybody next to you. Yep.
They had that too. And you launched a podcast called Silent Lunches, right? A substacks?

Speaker 10 Right. Yep.
Yeah. Substacks.

Speaker 9 Called Silent Lunches because they had to sit here like during the lunch period and not speak to anybody lest their breath infects somebody. That's right.

Speaker 10 You could eat, but you weren't allowed to talk. So we had children.

Speaker 10 Meanwhile, at the same time. Adults, you know, right down the block from the school were dining at a restaurant.
You could go to a bar. I mean,

Speaker 10 alcohol kills the virus. Right.
I mean, yeah, but yet children weren't allowed allowed to speak during lunch.

Speaker 10 In New York City, some of the schools, the kids were sitting in the winter on the concrete outside. Yeah.
I mean, this is a good sort of launch into discussing this.

Speaker 10 When we talk about it, you sort of kind of laugh looking back. This was so radical, so absurd.
The idea that children, that's if they were in school, but millions of them.

Speaker 10 were not even allowed, didn't set foot into a school building for over a year. Healthy kids, we barred healthy children from school while at the same time, malls were open, bars, restaurants, casinos.

Speaker 10 Adults who were actually at higher risk than children, they could carry on, but kids were barred from school. I mean, kids in California, they weren't, except for the governor's children.

Speaker 10 They were in school, in private school. Of course.
But everyone else. This is such a wild, wild circumstance that I don't think it's been fully reckoned with, how insane that is.

Speaker 10 And at the time it seemed insane, but a lot of people went along with it. And the reason I wanted to write the book was, and this is years of research, was to try to create a historical record.

Speaker 10 And the book is not a cataloging of these are all the harms that happen to kids. I touch on that, of course.
It's important. The book is like an anatomy of decision making.

Speaker 10 How is it that such an insane decision like that and all the ones that followed after, how did that happen?

Speaker 10 and that's what the book does i try to kind of pull the curtain back and show this is how politicians this is how health officials this is how the legacy media made its decisions to create a culture where something like that actually happened school closures caused real damage real damage and Look, they damaged all kids across all stratospheres, all classes, all whatever.

Speaker 9 But the kids who were at the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale got hurt the most.

Speaker 9 Their parents didn't have private tutors.

Speaker 9 They weren't already at these toity, you know, private schools where their learning level and the challenges and the opportunities were probably advanced to begin with.

Speaker 9 So some loss would only bring them down to average. They were already struggling just to hit average, and they haven't made it back.

Speaker 9 That's clear from everybody who's taken an honest look at it.

Speaker 9 You reveal in this book that loss. I mean, like all of it may have originated with the idea of a 14-year-old girl.

Speaker 10 That's right. So I go back and show the CDC created these guidebooks or playbooks for how to handle a pandemic.
And there are a series of them, but two of them in particular were very, very important.

Speaker 10 One of them came out in 2007, and then there was a revision in 2017. These books were mentioned by officials from the CDC at the beginning of the pandemic.

Speaker 10 So there's no ambiguity that these were very important and influential. These are the guidebook on here's what you do when a pandemic comes.

Speaker 10 And one of the astonishing things about these books is they were built on these models. And people hear the word model, and they might not know what that means.

Speaker 10 A study is something that actually happened. A model is a prediction.
It's, you know, you see a graph where the lines are going to do this over time. It's based on various inputs.

Speaker 10 The researchers get to decide whatever inputs they want go in. So you plug the things in, and then out comes your model saying whatever it is you want it to say.

Speaker 10 If you don't like what it says, well, you'll just change the inputs until they show what you want it to show. One of the people who

Speaker 10 was involved in creating some of the models in these guidebooks by the CDC, his daughter did a science experiment in school where she talked about it was supposed to simulate the flow of a transmission of a disease within a school.

Speaker 10 And like, all this stuff was made up. Like, and I go through details showing how, and even beyond her, this guy's daughter, even beyond Robert Glass,

Speaker 10 beyond her, his daughter, were

Speaker 10 more

Speaker 10 August people at places like Imperial College of London and IHME, these like very, very esteemed institutions, public health institutions. Their models were deeply flawed.

Speaker 10 And because I'm a crazy person, I actually go in and read all of the models and I'm reading the supplement, you know, 35 pages in in tiny print and one of the things i found was they had had this figure something like 35 percent of of transmission they thought or something to that effect was coming from schools and i'm like where did this number come from so i look through there's a citation i'm like oh that's interesting then that citation goes to another citation you go eight layers deep and there in the supplement it says this number was chosen arbitrarily oh my gosh so people need to understand remember at the beginning of the pandemic megan they had the um flatten the curve meme.

Speaker 10 Everyone, they show, if everyone just follows our orders, then it'll go down. And then you don't have to worry about the hospitals being overwhelmed.

Speaker 10 And they had all these models saying 2 million people will die within the next X number of months if you don't do exactly what we're told. And they show you the graph.

Speaker 10 So a regular person, oh my God, look what happens with the cases if we don't listen. But if we follow directions, then this will happen.
And part of those directions was closing schools.

Speaker 10 In part, this was based on made-up figures.

Speaker 9 Well, Deborah Burks kind of admits that, doesn't she, in her book?

Speaker 10 She, one thing she does admit, she sort of touches on that. One thing she does admit is that the 15 days, she never had an intention of stopping there.

Speaker 10 She purposefully didn't tell the president or the American people. And she admits this, can't admit it.

Speaker 9 That was to get us on the hook.

Speaker 10 Yeah, let me just like reel them in once they're already locked into it. You know, it's like the frog in the pot.
They're not going to, oh, we'll just go on.

Speaker 10 So that 15 days, people may forget, 15 days to slow the spread. 15 days to slow the spread.
Then they added another 30 days on right at the end. And it was if the and

Speaker 9 same with the gatherings.

Speaker 10 Yes, we can touch on this. I mean, but

Speaker 10 a huge part of my book is about the media. It's really a work of media criticism.
Imagine this. The entire like master switch for our country is shut down.
We have 15 days.

Speaker 10 Everyone's like, okay, let's let's all do this together. This is scaring your virus.
At the end of 15 days, they're like, we're going to make it 30 more days.

Speaker 10 Where was any of the questioning from the media? Where were it was crickets? They just were, let's keep going.

Speaker 10 There were some, but yes, it was very few.

Speaker 9 Not mainstream. No.

Speaker 10 And that's a large part of my book was this sort of conjunction between the media and the health establishment and how the media, which normally supposed to be skeptical.

Speaker 10 And normally, particularly when you think of the liberal media, of which I used to count myself a part of, where their entire thing was

Speaker 10 throughout time, what's the media, what's a journalist's job?

Speaker 10 It's to be skeptical of those in power, the government, the Defense Department, the church, you know, all these large institutions, big businesses. Yet that evaporated

Speaker 10 in the pandemic. So you had this circumstance where you had these bogus models that we were told, if you do these things, it's going to affect cases in such and such manner.

Speaker 10 And everyone's like, oh, well, that looks official.

Speaker 10 It's from these fancy colleges deborah burke she's wearing a nice silk scarf she looks like she's smart i'll listen to her she looks so school market yeah fauci is telling us this you know oh we'll listen to them but no one bothered to really investigate what was the underlying information what was the underlying data that fed into these various models that's well

Speaker 9 became a star that's that's really because you you started publishing articles after having done that and those of us who just knew instinctively that this is this you're not right started paying attention and then you know you if you find a real data hound it's a gift a couple of things i wanted to follow up on on what you just said why why

Speaker 9 wasn't the media more skeptical of these claims

Speaker 10 so

Speaker 10 i spend a lot of time on this and in the book and what i believe that i show persuasively is that unfortunately this all comes down to tribalism that political tribalism we had such an and i shouldn't use past tense had we have such an acrimonious political environment in our country.

Speaker 10 And the fact of the matter is, most of the legacy or, you know, prestige media outlets are

Speaker 10 left-leaning. Almost everyone there, most of the people within public health also share that political persuasion.

Speaker 10 And what I show is that time and again, there's a zillion examples of this, that it was this sort of what I call like Newtonian physics with every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.

Speaker 10 When Trump said,

Speaker 10 open the schools, that was it. He basically ensured that they would be closed.

Speaker 9 You write about the American Academy of Pediatrics. By the way, the book is called An Abundance of Caution by David Zweig, spelled Z-W-E-I-G.

Speaker 9 You write about the American Academy of Pediatrics and its recommendation that schools be opened.

Speaker 9 It was July of 2020, and it was saying, when we get back to September, these schools need to open. That's what's best for children.
And then...

Speaker 10 That's right. So the American Academy of Pediatrics comes out with this guidance early on saying, no matter what, let's get kids in school.

Speaker 10 And on top of that, they said, don't worry about six feet of distancing. If you can do it, great.
But if you can't, let's just get the kids in school. This is the most important thing.

Speaker 10 It was unambiguous what they meant. Shortly thereafter, Trump tweets and all caps with like a million exclamation points, as is his way,

Speaker 10 schools need to open in the fall. Within days, the American Academy of Pediatrics reversed its guidance.
It was so stark. It was so crazy, the reversal that even NPR had reported on it at the time.

Speaker 10 Gone was any mention of, you know, don't worry about distancing. That was out.
Gone was the idea of no matter what, gets kids in school. That was out.

Speaker 10 Instead, the new statement was listen to the experts. Oh, God.
And on top of that, something that was missing in the earlier guidance, we need money and lots of it if you want to open these schools.

Speaker 10 And here's the last thing that's interesting about the revised statement. It's not what's in the statement, but it's who authored the statement.

Speaker 10 And it wasn't the American Academy of Pediatrics by itself. It was co-authored with the two largest teachers' unions in the country.

Speaker 9 Is there a bigger villain in the COVID story than those teachers' unions?

Speaker 10 I think public health and the media are the bigger villains because ultimately the teachers' unions couldn't have made this outlandish list of demands that they did in so many places without having the cover of the media and public health saying these things.

Speaker 10 And I recount recount all sorts of stuff in the book.

Speaker 9 In other words, there are hacks who behaved like hacks, but there should have been a higher,

Speaker 9 an establishment that was devoted to a higher purpose that didn't buy into it and enable it.

Speaker 10 Had Anthony Fauci and everyone else within the public health establishment said, hold on, none of this stuff is true that they're demanding.

Speaker 10 I have a whole long section in there about these claims about needing HEPA filters and HVAC upgrades. All of these, no one was challenging that.

Speaker 10 And believe me, Anthony Fauci was in front of a camera every single day, gave a zillion interviews, and tons of public health pundits.

Speaker 10 You know, there was this one emergency medicine physician who I talk about in the book quite a bit.

Speaker 10 She gave hundreds of interviews constantly on the speed dial at the New York Times and other places, even though she had no particular expertise in infectious diseases or any of these interventions.

Speaker 10 She was now an expert. She was on speed dial.

Speaker 10 None of these people said a word that this is completely bogus. And the

Speaker 10 most important part that I mentioned in the sort of chronology is that in late April and early May,

Speaker 10 many, many countries throughout Europe, 22 countries began to reopen their schools. Millions of children.
We're not talking about like a little school somewhere in Tibet, you know, with 12 kids.

Speaker 10 Millions of children were going back to school in Europe. And later that month in May, the education ministers met from in the EU.

Speaker 10 and in that meeting they announced we have observed no negative impact from opening schools here.

Speaker 10 A month later, same meeting, same announcement.

Speaker 10 Here it is, yet a whole, another month later, we haven't noticed any, we haven't observed any negative impact of opening schools, millions of children, 22 different countries.

Speaker 10 No one. in the American media reported on this.
I did, ultimately. But when this initially happened, I was so astonished.

Speaker 10 I kept re-clicking the link for the, you know, for the video because I was like, how can this be? How is it possible that no media outlets, this is, this wasn't in a blog.

Speaker 10 This wasn't, you know, some random or obscure medical journal. This is the meeting at the EU.
And they said, millions of kids are back in school and nothing has happened. It's fine.
This was ignored.

Speaker 10 To me, this is kind of one of the original sins that I point out that happened. Once we ignored that or waved it away, and we can go through this, Megan, the various excuses they gave.

Speaker 10 Well, that's Europe. That's different.
That doesn't count. And they gave this list of reasons, which were all made up.
None of them were. And it makes no sense anyway.

Speaker 9 I mean, the United States of America, for the most part, has way more land and way more expansive facilities than

Speaker 9 France does, where they're on top of each other.

Speaker 10 No one in Europe or very few. This was not the norm.
They didn't have HEPA filters in all their schools. I've spent enough time in Europe.
I know people.

Speaker 10 The schools there are not all these glistening oasis

Speaker 10 of HEPA filtered air. Many kids weren't wearing masks.

Speaker 10 In fact, the ECDC, that's like Europe's version of the CDC, recommended against kids in primary schools wearing masks, where in the U.S., they wanted kids as young as two years old to wear masks all day.

Speaker 10 They weren't doing distancing. In many instances, it was three feet or like what they would say, one meter, or no distancing required at all.

Speaker 10 A list of things that we kept being told by these public health experts. Well, don't look at Europe.
It's almost like a magician. Look away.
Don't look there.

Speaker 10 That's because, and then they would list the things. They controlled the virus.
They did all these things.

Speaker 9 I still am struggling to figure out why, because if you look at, take wokeism, you know, Europe is as woke as we are.

Speaker 10 They're gone.

Speaker 9 And truly, like the UK is gone. So is France.
Italy. I mean, Ireland, gone.
Italy's not as bad.

Speaker 9 So I was thinking maybe it's just this knee-jerk safetyism that we've embraced here in the United States now. Your safe spaces, your trigger warnings, you can't discuss certain things.

Speaker 9 You can't say certain terms. But they're just as bad as we are over there when it comes to that stuff.

Speaker 9 So they're, I think, just as sort of safety conscious, and I mean that in the most negative sense possible, as we are. So, I don't get it.

Speaker 9 Why, why over there were their authorities still willing to look objectively at data? And over here, ours weren't. And also, the entire media establishment wasn't either.

Speaker 10 Right.

Speaker 10 I mean, one of the things to your point that's really important is this was so coded politically within our country that opening schools or wanting to go to work or go to the beach even or a child playing at a playground, that was coded as right wing.

Speaker 10 And to want to, you know, and it was virtuous and left-wing if you stayed home.

Speaker 9 It's part of Trump derangement syndrome, is what you're saying.

Speaker 10 It's, it was TDS. Yeah.
Because those countries, which are far more progressive than the United States, they sent their kids back to school.

Speaker 10 And then you have other countries with more conservative governments where they were doing the reverse.

Speaker 10 There was no correlation between the political leaning of a particular government in their countries and with whether things were open or locked down. There was no correlation.

Speaker 10 So the idea, but in America, people were living within such a bubble of our own sort of world here that anyone who went against Trump was virtuous and anyone who agreed with him was this.

Speaker 10 horrible monster. What are you, some right, right-wing, you know, asshole, you're trying to do your own research.
So you had this situation that was so divisive in America.

Speaker 10 And again, it comes down to, we go back to that American Academy of Pediatrics reversal,

Speaker 10 where it was so clear that what was happening was this had to be a sort of reaction against Trump.

Speaker 10 And one of the things that I talk about in the book is that after I started writing my articles, which were some of the only articles in sort of what we might consider legacy media or mainstream.

Speaker 10 New York magazine. That was shocking.

Speaker 9 It was like, what am I actually getting value out of New York magazine?

Speaker 10 Later in the Atlantic and other places

Speaker 10 and in Wired, which is, you know, ostensibly non-political. No, they are left and it's very annoying.
Right. So, okay.
Somehow

Speaker 10 I've managed to get my contrarian pieces in these publications. And people have asked me why and how did that happen? Because I've had other journalists who sort of shared some of my views.

Speaker 10 How did you do it? I said, because I provided evidence. Like, I think that's what it comes down to.

Speaker 10 But one of the things that I talk about is once these articles started coming out, I started getting emails from doctors around the country and regular people too, and former CDC officials.

Speaker 10 And these were doctors, not just necessarily some random pediatrician in a suburb somewhere. We're talking about people at elite university hospitals, at some of our top institutions.

Speaker 10 And they would write me and say, I want you to know I agree with you. I think what's going on is crazy.
There's no evidence of closing schools is going to be beneficial.

Speaker 10 This is terrible, having little toddlers wearing masks, whatever it was. He said, I want to agree with you, but this all has to be off the record.
I can't talk about it publicly.

Speaker 10 And I, you know, and I was like, why? How is this happening? Because one, they knew it was the environment was so clear. People aren't stupid that they self-censored.

Speaker 10 And number two, they were overtly censored. Many people were admonished by their superiors, some administrator at the hospital saying, don't ever talk about this again.

Speaker 10 And I have a couple stories of that where people spoke out. So there was this environment where no one, no one could be seen, including, you know, a university hospital as an institution.

Speaker 10 None of them could be seen as agreeing with Trump.

Speaker 9 It makes perfect sense because you look at what happened with the Great Barrington Declaration in the spring of 21

Speaker 9 in Jay Bhattacharia, now the head of NIH. Praise God.

Speaker 10 I was there with Jay

Speaker 9 Brown. And Martin Koldorf.
And I'm forgetting the name of the female. Yeah, Senator Greg, right.
From our top, top universities, they come out with this. what happened immediately?

Speaker 9 Immediately, they got smeared by Fauci and Collins, like immediately as fringe.

Speaker 9 There was absolutely nothing fringe about them. They were as establishment and respected as a doctor can get in the United States.
And I'm sure that they were the example.

Speaker 10 They were maligned.

Speaker 9 Everybody else is looking. If you can do that to them,

Speaker 10 you can do that to me. From Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford.
Oh, if they're maligned, if they're called fringe, I'm, I don't stand a chance against this.

Speaker 10 So there was no way that, and look, I'm sympathetic toward, if this is someone how they're making their living,

Speaker 10 taking care of their family, they've spent the last 20 years studying

Speaker 10 in order to work in medicine. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea that they didn't want to get fired.

Speaker 9 Because Fauci had his hands in everything.

Speaker 9 Fauci had, he controlled all the money. I didn't think, I didn't realize that before COVID, that how many of these university research programs are funded by his group.

Speaker 10 By NIAD and NIH more broadly. That's right.

Speaker 10 When you control the purse strings, but I would say, Megan, even beyond the sort of any sort of explicit thread of withholding funding, people, we're social creatures.

Speaker 10 And most people are not really inclined to be in the out group.

Speaker 10 And I talk about this in the book, is that if you think about medicine, it self-selects generally for a certain type of person, a really hard worker, someone who's smart.

Speaker 10 These are great traits in a doctor, hard worker and smart, but it also selects for rule followers. It doesn't select for iconoclasts.

Speaker 10 You go in, you do your residency, you have to listen to the attending. You're not going to start challenging them.
They got there by following the rules.

Speaker 10 These are people who their general nature is not to be an outcast. So they don't want to be cast out of that social group.

Speaker 10 And I would argue the same thing is within the sort of prestige media outlets. How do you get to the New York Times? Well, you got straight A's in school growing up.
Then you went to Brown.

Speaker 10 Then maybe you went to Columbia Journalism School. And now you're at the Times.
I'm not saying every reporter there is like this.

Speaker 10 There certainly are plenty who are excellent reporters and who who are doing important independent work there.

Speaker 10 But nevertheless, the broader type of person who gets into an institution like that is the same type of person who's going to get into, you know, Columbia University, you know, medical center and these types of places.

Speaker 10 It self-selects for people who got to where they are, became successful by being part of an in-group.

Speaker 10 So you have these two institutions, health and media, that were controlling the narrative within our country, yet the people within those institutions were a certain type of personality.

Speaker 10 And I'm not saying this was nefarious, even. This is just kind of a human nature.

Speaker 10 And then you had the small group of them who were coming to me off the record saying, hey, I don't like what's going on. This is wrong, but I can't say anything about it.

Speaker 10 So it's really important for people listening and watching this. program to understand and hopefully they'll read my book and get a deeper understanding.

Speaker 10 The book is called An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and a story of bad decisions by david zwai keep going hopefully they'll have an understanding of how what i try to show is how narratives get created and it's sort of the the like how how do the gears turn within our society and like how is it you know it's almost like plato's cave like who's looking at the shadows who's creating those shadows and how do you actually get out of the cave and a lot of the book is about evidence that's the way that we really can arm ourselves to be aware sort of like a media literacy that you can even bring to your doctor.

Speaker 10 I suspect you, Megan, when you go to the doctor, they're not like, here's what you need to do. And you're like, yes, doctor, you know, this isn't

Speaker 10 right. This isn't 1955, where you just do what people say.
And this doesn't mean that we should ignore what quote experts say.

Speaker 10 It doesn't mean that we should dismiss it out of hand, but it does mean that you should bring your own skepticism with you and you need to think about evidence.

Speaker 10 Ultimately, my book really, I think, is about kind of what we might call like epistemology. It's like, how do you know what is true?

Speaker 10 How do you know that this thing is true and over and over again in our country and we still do this now and is every topic under the sun but what i show what happened in the pandemic with such horrible consequence is that the experts repeatedly told us things without providing any evidence behind what they were telling us and then the media regurgitated the same information without providing evidence.

Speaker 10 And within philosophy, that's called what's known as a logical fallacy. This is, it's an argument from authority.
Just because a person is saying something doesn't mean it's true.

Speaker 10 And they never pushed back and said, well, wait a minute. I know you're saying that they need HEPA filters and we can't open a school until they get the HEPA filter.

Speaker 10 What's the evidence behind this claim? What is the evidence for this? No one bothered to push back.

Speaker 9 A couple of things on it.

Speaker 9 I feel like there's another element to the journalistic failures, and I think it has to do with elitism.

Speaker 9 I think it has to do with the fact that like you look up and down that lineup on CNN and MSNBC, and all those people are millionaires or close to it. And they were enjoying the pandemic.

Speaker 9 Their kids were home. They had a tutor or they had some private school that was basically taking care of them.
They knew they'd be fine. Their lives were easier.
They got to go to work via Zoom.

Speaker 9 They got to be out east in the Hamptons with all their friends. They got to start drinking wine at 1 p.m.
instead of 4 p.m., which is a big sacrifice to wait.

Speaker 9 And they didn't want it to get back to normal.

Speaker 10 I think one of the most important and remarkable things that happened in the pandemic that we need to reckon with as a society is that this was one of the most classist, you know, class-based policy endeavors that had ever occurred in America.

Speaker 10 It's quite remarkable. The people who made the rules coincidentally fared the best during the pandemic.
So you have what, you know, what people today might call the laptop class.

Speaker 10 Who do you think works at the CDC, the NIH?

Speaker 10 Who are these people on television and working at these elite media outlets? By and large, these people are making six-figure salaries or seven-figure.

Speaker 10 Their lives are very different from the people, millions and millions of people in our country who their policies and their guidelines were affecting.

Speaker 10 And that includes, I mean, there were kids who were sitting in a parking lot of a Taco Bell to try to get Wi-Fi signal so they could do their, you know, fake remote learning.

Speaker 10 There are children who are in homes that are unsafe. One of the crazy things that happened was there was a drop in

Speaker 10 claims of child abuse early on. And you might think, oh, that's great.
Child abuse went down. It's so heartbreaking.

Speaker 10 What they found was it's not that it went down, it's that teachers and educators are the most important line of defense for a child who is in danger danger at home.

Speaker 10 Now those kids had no one to talk to and some of them were left home with a monster. You had kids who didn't have their final year.

Speaker 10 This was their chance to get into college. Maybe they were a football player.
Maybe there was someone who was a wonderful actor or an artist. All those things were canceled.

Speaker 10 You're not going to get recruited for the football season to play in a college and get recruited there if there is no season. So all these things were happening to kids around the country.

Speaker 10 And I haven't even mentioned learning loss, which obviously is the most overt that people rightfully so are continuing to talk about.

Speaker 10 There are so many things that were affecting, and it's not a small number, millions and millions of kids, including we can touch on kids who have learning disabilities.

Speaker 10 And it's something like 7 million of them, I think, get an IEP, which is like a special program that they're required to get by law. And some of these things require them to have physical therapy.

Speaker 10 You can't do that through a computer screen. Children with severe severe autism, children with all sorts of physical and variety of neurological challenges and disabilities.

Speaker 10 These kids, unless you lived in a very wealthy family, they were screwed and they still haven't come back from it.

Speaker 9 And that's why it's so infuriating when you saw those Chicago public teachers,

Speaker 9 union teachers dancing, using the dance to try to show us how inappropriate it was to send them back into schools. Like these are totally able-bodied, mostly young females.

Speaker 10 Like the TikTok videos of everyone.

Speaker 9 Yes, just dancing about to try to show they're upset about having to do their damn jobs. And that's why I really think, like, they're right up there.
I agree with you, Fauci and Burks.

Speaker 9 They're up higher. Fauci's number one.

Speaker 9 And by the way, to your point about the fact that these people at the CDC, they weren't going into the office. I was at FDA last Thursday with Marty McCarry and we were walking around.

Speaker 9 It's a huge complex. It's in Maryland.
It's not in DC. And even to this day, it's largely empty.
And

Speaker 9 he's right now saying, everybody, get back in here. It's 2025.
It's been five years. They peaced out thanks to COVID.
They were never made to come back in. They were all loving it.

Speaker 9 There was a built-in incentive to say, it's not safe. We need to keep this rolling in the name of safety because they were loving it.

Speaker 9 These teachers, they don't usually get to teach from home or do the stupid Zooms. That's easier.
They're in their pajamas.

Speaker 10 I think, yeah, I don't know. It's in the mind of all the teachers.
Some of them definitely appear to have taken advantage.

Speaker 10 Others, I think, genuinely were frightened by a media that, you know, if it bleeds, it leads. And I talk about this in the book.
The American media was unique in its

Speaker 10 dialing the knob up to 11 for hysteria over this. And there was some research out of Dartmouth where they sort of do like a content like tone analysis.
And the U.S.

Speaker 10 was off the charts in the way we covered this phenomenon that was happening.

Speaker 10 Whereas, and I talk about this, there was an article in the New York Times that came out on the very, that was like hysterical about if schools open, this is what could happen.

Speaker 10 You know, and there's like, you know, flames, you know, practically shooting out of, out of the, the, the screen.

Speaker 10 If you're reading the article, on the very same day, an article came out in what's known as the BMJ. It's the British Medical Journal.

Speaker 10 And the title was something like, Kids are not super spreaders, open the schools.

Speaker 10 The dichotomy on this one day of these two articles couldn't be more stark and more emblematic of the difference of how we were experiencing the pandemic here in America versus other places.

Speaker 10 It's not to say that they were flawless outside the United States, but there was something uniquely hysterical about the response in America.

Speaker 10 We are a country that was ill-equipped to function under duress. And I understand

Speaker 10 why

Speaker 10 people felt that Trump had poisoned the well to such a degree that ultimately they had to react in this manner. But those are reasons, not excuses.

Speaker 10 That is not like the idea that someone, he was so odious to them, such TDS, as you were saying, that it didn't, I mean, Trump could say, I love puppies and vanilla ice cream.

Speaker 10 And they would say, I hate puppies. I hate vanilla.
That's right. It didn't matter.
So he created, there was such an environment created that all of these people were terrified.

Speaker 10 Only a very small portion had the courage, like Martin Kaldorf and others, to come out and say, you know what? Trump is right. He's right on something.

Speaker 10 He may be, you know, even a broken clock is right twice a day, even if you disagree with him on everything. But they couldn't do it.

Speaker 10 The media just couldn't bring itself to possibly agree with this man. They would agree on something that he was so clearly right that millions of kids in school in Europe, it didn't matter.

Speaker 9 They were too busy pumping stories. Like two teachers have already died of COVID thanks to the reopening of the schools.
Meanwhile, then it would come out.

Speaker 9 They died of COVID that they got in their communities before the school had even opened. Like you're trying to suggest the children gave it to them.

Speaker 9 But that's how stories were being styled and presented by places like CNN. That was a CNNer.

Speaker 10 across the media.

Speaker 9 I mean, the New York Times is still, I mentioned that website that Trump has got up now that COVID.gov.

Speaker 9 And they're still, even after the New York Times wrote that ridiculous, we were misled on COVID a couple of weeks ago, like a month ago, saying, oh, the authorities, they misled us.

Speaker 9 They had this long column on it.

Speaker 9 Even though they're now coming to terms with they were misled,

Speaker 9 they're writing an article about that website being like, oh, there are a lot of experts, a lot of experts who still believe this was natural origin.

Speaker 9 They believe that this did not come from a lab. Like they can't let go of their little darlings, David.

Speaker 10 They can't let it go. And the idea that

Speaker 10 they were misled, but your job as a journalist is to ask questions.

Speaker 9 To not be misled. And when it happens, to let it be infrequent.

Speaker 10 To not allow,

Speaker 10 to simply quote an expert, so to speak, an expert on something without asking them, well, wait, what's the evidence behind that claim?

Speaker 10 Or if you don't ask them, then go report it out yourself and dig into it. And that's what I started doing from the beginning.
I was like, I thought it was so strange.

Speaker 10 We kept being told all these things. School is dangerous.
The kids, they might spread it to everyone. And all these various claims.
I'm like, well, wait a minute. Is that true?

Speaker 10 And I couldn't speak to people in the United States. So I started talking to experts in Europe.
And I'm like, let me find someone, anyone who knows what's going on.

Speaker 10 And I I was like, well, wait a minute. This is all bullshit.
Everything they're saying is made up. I know there might be some listeners or viewers who are thinking that I'm overstating things.

Speaker 10 They might think that like this is hyperbole.

Speaker 10 If you, I'm telling you, if you read the book, it's, it's deeply destabilizing, but I hope also really instructive to see how wildly off so much of the information we were given was.

Speaker 10 And it's easy for the media to make these claims. Trump's, you know, Trump said plenty of crazy things himself where he, oh, the virus is just going to go away.

Speaker 10 And, you know, and there was, they, they misquoted him about the bleach thing and whatever else. There are plenty of crazy things.
It's not hard to find something from Trump or from QAnon or whatever.

Speaker 10 And that's where the media kind of dug its hooks in. But what, but what no one was doing was looking, of course, with the mirror at themselves.

Speaker 10 And it's much more upsetting when the experts, I don't listen to QAnon. I don't take my, you know, guidance on how to conduct myself or what's happening, but I used to listen to the CDC.

Speaker 10 I used to listen to the NIH. And what I show is that these people deeply, deeply let us down.

Speaker 9 I will defend Trump on that. It's just going to go away because I have a doctor who is an infectious disease doctor.
That's just my primary care physician happens to be.

Speaker 9 And he's one of the most respected infectious disease doctors in the country. And that's what he said in the beginning, too.

Speaker 9 The history of this kind of disease suggested that when you got to the warmer weather, it would kill the virus.

Speaker 10 Seasonality.

Speaker 9 Yeah. And that's what a lot of people believed.
And I think that's what Trump was advised early on. Obviously, Trump wasn't just making that up.
He was getting that from doctors.

Speaker 9 And then, of course, things changed. But I remember when he said it being like, that dovetails exactly with what my doctor said.
And I didn't, I didn't think. anything of it.

Speaker 9 You know, now in retrospect, it's used against him by his detractors. But at the time, it dovetailed very well with a lot of what we knew.
All right, stand by. There's more to go.

Speaker 9 Again, it's called an abundance of caution with the yellow tape. It's actually quite well done by David Zweig.
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Speaker 9 I'm Megan Kelly, host of the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM.

Speaker 9 It's your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations with the most interesting and important political, legal, and cultural figures today.

Speaker 9 You can catch the Megan Kelly Show on Triumph, a SiriusXM channel featuring lots of hosts you may know and probably love. Great people like Dr.

Speaker 9 Laura, Flynn Beck, Nancy Grace, Dave Ramsey, and yours truly, Megan Kelly. You can stream the Megan Kelly Show on SiriusXM at home or anywhere you are, no car required.
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Speaker 9 My guest today, David Zweig, the author of An Abundance of Caution, a new book. It's not really about COVID exactly.

Speaker 9 It's about how deeply we were betrayed by our public health officials and the media. And it's got all the lessons so that we can fight them better the next time.

Speaker 9 I mean, there were some of us who were fighting them and some people who fought them at every turn, but it was very hard because part of half the battle was trying to figure out what was true and you just stayed to an evidence-based approach.

Speaker 9 Now, the problem in doing that is that you had a whole government apparatus that didn't like your information.

Speaker 9 And even when you, David Zweig, were citing the CDC's own studies like on masking and how it didn't do anything in schools that they didn't listen. They buried the studies.
They moved on.

Speaker 9 They tried to diminish people like you.

Speaker 9 And I was mentioning during the break, the great movie Contagion, which I really enjoyed with Gwyneth Peltrow and Matt Damon, which was made years ago, but clearly they used the CDC's blueprint for what they would do in a pandemic, was really telling.

Speaker 9 And they even had this like sort of citizen journalist played by Jude Law. Now, he wasn't like you or Alex Berenson.
This guy wound up hawking supplements and trying to make money off of the pandemic.

Speaker 9 But they did sort of use him as like the one detractor, the one lone voice pushing back. And in that movie, it's very interesting because he's, they demonize him, right?

Speaker 9 Like you shouldn't believe the doubting Thomas

Speaker 9 because he's he's a he's a hack who's trying to make money off of you. He's got some angle.
He's the one person you shouldn't listen to, right? You should listen to the authorities.

Speaker 16 The studies show that there is no proof that Frasythia works.

Speaker 17 Who conducted the studies? What defines works against what strain of the virus?

Speaker 16 Did you know about the studies when we met the last time? We can get in a lot of trouble.

Speaker 17 You really think this Dr. Hextall CDC person is Jesus in a lab coat? The government rushed the trials.
The lawyers indemnified the drug companies.

Speaker 17 Maybe it causes autism or narcolepsy or cancer 10 years from now.

Speaker 10 Who knows?

Speaker 17 The swine flu vaccine killed people back in 1976. Nerve disease.
So we're all guinea pigs. Starting from today, just wait.
They'll start listing side effects like the credits at the end of a movie.

Speaker 9 And that's what they try to do to Alex Barrington. That's what they try to do to you.
They try to do to Tucker, right?

Speaker 9 Like try to just ignore or in some cases actively diminish or fringe or ban on Twitter. In Alex's case, right?

Speaker 9 They didn't like these contrary voices or the great Barrington people, like fringe, try to tramp down on them so that people looking for good information either couldn't find it it had been stifled it had been censored or had like a sense of worry in taking it in from the outliers because we've been told this is a fringe person this is the this is the weird Jude Law character I'm not supposed to listen to I I had um I had written one of the articles um challenging one crazy rule or another which all of my work, none of it's been retracted as far as I'm aware, there's no giant corrections in any of them.

Speaker 10 This doesn't mean I don't make mistakes, but directionally, everything I wrote was true. And one of the articles, I remember my wife was talking with a friend of hers about it.

Speaker 10 And I think at this point, I started writing for the free press, or maybe it was on my own sub stack, but I had written for the Atlantic and the New York Times and New York, plenty of these types of contrarian pieces.

Speaker 10 And she said, well, where's the article? Where's it coming out? And my wife said, it may have been in my sub stack or the free press.

Speaker 10 She said, well, if it's not in the Atlantic, then I don't believe it. And she she said, but it's David.
You know him. He's the same reporter.
He wrote other things.

Speaker 10 And she was like, yeah, I'm not interested.

Speaker 10 So to have that like imprimatur of these certain institutions meant everything. Yeah.
And

Speaker 10 this, the problem is the idea that like most, I think, regular people, at least some of them, or on, particularly on the left, saw these things are like, it made intuitive sense.

Speaker 10 It's like, well, of course, if you close schools, all those snot-nose kids, that's going to help. Or mask, I think maybe having something in front of my face might.

Speaker 10 The problem is, and I give all these like crazy examples through history, our intuitions are often wrong. And that happens, especially within medicine.
That's why we need randomized studies.

Speaker 10 That's why we need actual like a structured, what's known as evidence-based medicine.

Speaker 10 But instead, during the pandemic, over and over, we were just told it's basic physics that masks work, but that's not how human beings work.

Speaker 10 A child might pull it off. It doesn't doesn't stay glued to your face.
They were using studies done on mannequins where the masks were glued to their face.

Speaker 10 And this is the stuff that the CDC and other people were citing as evidence that everyone needs to wear a mask. Our intuitions are wrong all the time, but yet we didn't actually look at science.

Speaker 10 We were told we're just following the science. There was no following the science.

Speaker 9 It's bad enough when we are seriously hurting children, when we're not being allowed to say goodbye to our loved ones who are dying in nursing homes alone and isolated.

Speaker 9 And then came like the final insult, which was the deceptions around the vaccine and the total unwillingness to discuss the actual side effects that were happening to people, including most importantly to me, the myocarditis, because that was killing young people.

Speaker 9 That was hurting young people.

Speaker 9 You know, everybody's life matters, but there's a different value in somebody who's 90 versus somebody who's 15.

Speaker 9 And they were seeing actual myocarditis heart infections happen to teenage boys as a a result of the vaccines. And you were basically not allowed to talk about it.

Speaker 9 Even now, even now, YouTube's going to slap a warning video on this video because I said that. And it's a fact.
And yet they still, still want to bill it as though it's somehow misinformation.

Speaker 9 I always thought that if there's something that wrong with the vaccines, the vaccine makers will come back and fix it. They'll own it and they'll fix it.

Speaker 9 These are the biggest, most rich vaccine or drug companies in the world. I never anticipated that they would just deny, deny, deny, deny, and let people suffer and even die.

Speaker 10 I mean, I was, I believe, the first journalist in a mainstream publication to interview Jeror Movorak, who was the Israeli physician who initially found the signal of myocarditis in young males.

Speaker 10 And, you know, again, this is just completely radioactive. Like you can't, it doesn't mean that the vaccines weren't necessarily beneficial for old people and those who are vulnerable.

Speaker 10 I'm not making that statement. I'm not talking about that one way or the other.

Speaker 10 What is true is that there is this effect from the vaccine, particularly for young males, not exclusively to them, but they were affected far more than any other group.

Speaker 10 And there's reasons for that we don't need to get into. And this was essentially ignored and kind of like buried by the CDC when the signal came out.
And I give examples of that.

Speaker 10 I mean, the thing that's interesting is setting that aside, how these sort of danger signals were buried, teachers were prioritized for vaccines in much of the country and many locations.

Speaker 10 Yet they still didn't go back to school in many locations, even after that. So they were put ahead of sometimes more vulnerable people.
And you can look this up. This isn't me making this up.

Speaker 10 This isn't a conspiracy theory. You can see the different levels of sort of priority that the CDC and various health governing bodies put out.
They prioritize teachers in many locations.

Speaker 10 Okay, I got it. You want to to be protected? And they still didn't go back to school.

Speaker 10 But meanwhile, and this goes back to what we talked about in the very beginning, how class-based the whole entire pandemic response was.

Speaker 9 I only have a minute left, so I got to interrupt you. Final thoughts on Fauci and what his legacy and all this should be?

Speaker 10 Well, he's pardoned. So

Speaker 10 there's that.

Speaker 10 I don't suggest that there was criminal behavior. I don't know enough about those angles.

Speaker 10 What I would say is Fauci was sort the the the figurehead he was the face of the response um in in our country and anthony fauci along with many many others overstated evidence over and over again and they said kids couldn't go back to school until it was safe with a contrived list of reasons and that there was never any support behind them and not only was there not support for them we had an enormous amount of evidence right across the atlantic showing millions of children in school without consequence without doing any of this stuff.

Speaker 9 He funded EcoHealth Alliance, which very well may have been behind the research that caused the pandemic.

Speaker 9 He appears to have lied repeatedly to Congress while under oath. That's why he needed a pardon.
And yeah, he's villain number one in my view. But there's so many to choose from.

Speaker 9 Don't forget to buy this book. It's called An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.
David Zweig, Z-W-E-I-G. Great to see you.

Speaker 10 Thanks, Megan.

Speaker 10 Okay.

Speaker 9 Tomorrow on the show, Steve Bannon and Nancy Grace. There's a combo.

Speaker 9 Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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