Ep 313 | New Year, New Cabinet: Meet the Trump Appointees | Guests: Various

Summary

Kibbe on Liberty - Episode 313: New Year, New Cabinet: Meet the Trump Appointees

Release Date: January 1, 2025

---

Introduction to the Anti-Authoritarian Coalition

Dave Smith opens the discussion by reflecting on the emergence of a broad anti-authoritarian coalition in response to what he terms the "lockdown authoritarianism" during the COVID-19 pandemic. He laments the delayed rise of this movement, which he attributes to government overreach through lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, vaccine mandates, and surveillance by agencies like CISA and the CIA.

"They violated all of those principles. And out of that has come this beautiful anti-authoritarian coalition."
[00:17] Dave Smith

Smith highlights that this coalition includes not only libertarians but also former left-leaning individuals who have grown disillusioned with the current Democratic Party, perceiving it as authoritarian rather than liberal.

Shift in Political Allegiances and Influential Figures

Smith discusses the surprising alliance forming between libertarian thinkers and influential figures traditionally associated with the left. He mentions personalities like Elon Musk, RFK Jr., and former Democrats such as Tulsi Gabbard Jr., who have begun to criticize the Biden-Harris administration's strict measures.

"They are producing some really interesting ads under the MAHA banner. That is again, quite fascinating."
[06:00] Dave Smith

He also references comedians like Russell Brand, Rob Schneider, and Bill Maher, who have transitioned into voices opposing COVID authoritarianism and supporting free speech.

Strategies for Dismantling the Administrative State

Vivek Ramaswamy introduces the concept of the "deep state," criticizing the growth of government and the establishment of unfirable agencies with their own agendas.

"It is inevitable. If you grow the government and you create these constituencies that want to feather their own nests at the expense of the public, it becomes an intractable problem."
[07:39] Vivek Ramaswamy

Ron DeSantis responds by emphasizing his libertarian roots and outlining his plan to reduce government overreach without needing new legislation. He argues that the President has the constitutional authority to reorganize or shut down federal agencies, citing 5 U.S.C. 3302 as a legal basis for setting HR policies and eliminating redundant departments.

"We do not need new laws to get this done. We need a new president with the actual will to get it done."
[08:16] Ron DeSantis

DeSantis also proposes an eight-year term limit for federal bureaucrats to ensure turnover and prevent agencies from becoming entrenched "leviathans."

"An agency in Washington D.C. anyone that could be moved to a different area outside of Washington D.C. across the country will do it and will make the people move and many of them won't want to."
[11:46] Ron DeSantis

Impact of the Pandemic Industrial Complex

Dave Smith announces a new investigative series titled "The COVID Up," produced in cooperation with BlazeTV, aiming to uncover the extent of government overreach during the pandemic.

"The truth is out. It strikes me that you sort of..."
[16:34] Dave Smith

Discussion on Censorship and the First Amendment

The conversation shifts to the role of censorship during the pandemic, with Tulsi Gabbard and Rand Paul critiquing the government’s influence over social media and public discourse. They argue that the government's attempts to control information and suppress dissenting voices have led to increased authoritarianism.

"If we had had an actual functioning First Amendment during the pandemic, a lot of the harms that we saw to people, to a lot of people, that would have been avoided."
[44:05] Rand Paul

Jay Bhattacharya adds that the Great Barrington Declaration exposed the lack of scientific consensus and challenged the lockdown strategies, leading to a smear campaign against its proponents.

"The Great Barrington Declaration... told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown."
[35:13] Jay Bhattacharya

Technological Control and Financial Freedom

Tulsi Gabbard raises concerns about government control over emerging technologies like cryptocurrency. She points out that attempts by governments to regulate or ban decentralized systems like Bitcoin push these technologies into the shadows, undermining financial freedom.

"Don't they just push it underground? Don't they just create a gray market, a black market?"
[26:42] Tulsi Gabbard

Matt Kibbe expands on this by discussing the importance of decentralized blockchain technology in preventing governmental overreach.

"The idea of that to have this decentralized type of blockchain concept... makes a lot of sense."
[27:02] Matt Kibbe

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The episode concludes with a call to action against government overreach and censorship. The guests emphasize the need for transparency, decentralization, and adherence to constitutional principles to preserve liberty and prevent the rise of a pervasive administrative state.

---

Notable Quotes

• "Anti freedom, anti human dignity, anti democracy, anti fill in the blank, anything that we cherish as Americans."
  [00:17] Dave Smith

• "We have three branches of government in the Constitution, not four."
  [08:16] Ron DeSantis

• "If you had had an actual functioning First Amendment during the pandemic, a lot of the harms... would have been avoided."
  [44:05] Rand Paul

• "The Great Barrington Declaration... told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in favor of lockdown."
  [35:13] Jay Bhattacharya

---

Key Takeaways

1. Emergence of a Diverse Anti-Authoritarian Coalition: The pandemic-induced government measures have galvanized a wide spectrum of individuals from libertarian circles to former leftists to oppose what they perceive as authoritarianism.

2. Strategic Dismantling of Government Agencies: Political figures like Ron DeSantis propose leveraging existing constitutional powers to reorganize or eliminate federal agencies, emphasizing minimal reliance on new legislation.

3. Censorship and First Amendment Concerns: The discussion highlights how governmental attempts to control information during crises can erode civil liberties and stifle dissenting voices, underscoring the importance of a robust First Amendment.

4. Decentralization as a Bulwark Against Authoritarianism: Emphasizing technologies like blockchain and decentralized financial systems as essential tools for maintaining financial freedom and preventing governmental overreach.

5. Call for Continued Vigilance: The guests collectively stress the need for ongoing resistance against authoritarian tendencies and the preservation of constitutional liberties to ensure a free and open society.

---

This episode of Kibbe on Liberty provides a comprehensive exploration of the current political climate, the rise of anti-authoritarian sentiments, and the strategic approaches proposed to safeguard American liberties against expanding governmental power. The discussion is enriched with insights from political strategists, economists, and public figures who advocate for a return to constitutional principles and decentralized governance.

Transcript

[Matt Kibbe]

Foreign.

[Dave Smith]

Welcome to Kibby Liberty. I have also spoken quite a bit about this. This long waited for, eagerly anticipated by me. It took way too long to get here coalition that has emerged out of what I have been calling lockdown authoritarianism. I wanted that coalition to emerge the day after they started imposing lockdowns, the day after they did the stay at home orders, the day after they started doing vaccine mandates and the day that cisa, part of Homeland Security started telling you that you were essential or non essential. The day that we discovered that the Department of Defense and Homeland Security and probably the CIA was sorting through your tweets and your Facebook posts to determine whether or not you were spreading misinformation about COVID about vaccines, all that stuff. I wanted that libertarian uprising to happen the day it started, but it didn't. And you've heard me ranting about this for the longest time. It didn't happen. But along the way I think a lot of people, including people that were perhaps open to some of those measures as an emergency, have discovered that the government and all of these agencies and this entire ecosystem that I call the pandemic Industrial complex is profoundly antithetical to the American experiment. Anti freedom, anti human dignity, anti democracy, anti fill in the blank, anything that we cherish as Americans. They violated all of those principles. And out of that has come this beautiful anti authoritarian coalition. Some of us libertarians, many of us libertarians have been there for quite some time. Not all of us, but many of us. But more importantly, you're seeing a lot of really interesting, important, influential voices coming from the former left. People that thought that liberalism actually meant liberalism when in fact it turns out, particularly in today's Democratic Party, that liberalism means, means the opposite of that. It means authoritarianism, it means do as you're told. It means speak when spoken to. It means get in line. And I think a lot of people have been red pilled and discovered that you know what, that's not what I thought it was. And from this comes the new resistance as they call themselves the Maha Movement. There's any other number of monikers, people that come from self identified, from the left and by the way people from the right as well. But I want to focus a little bit on the left because I think it's an interesting dynamic. One of these guys, Elon Musk, openly describes himself this way. Another one of these guys, RFK Jr. You probably know the list. There's a bunch of other tech bros that maybe you don't know that were former Democrats or at least formerly agnostic about politics that that are reacting to some of the more insane strictures of the Biden Harris administration. Tulsi Gabbard Jr. Tulsi Gabbard Jr that's funny.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

She is not a junior.

[Dave Smith]

RFK is a junior. And a bunch of Brett Weinstein, another really interesting influencer who was originally canceled by the woke left and and suddenly.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Realized that he was part of a.

[Dave Smith]

Community that wanted authoritarianism more than they wanted freedom of speech. But I've also documented a lot of these comedians that I think were on the tip of the spear, the cutting edge of this. Russell Brand, Rob Schneider, who's been on this show, Dave Chappelle, a number of of these guys. I guess Kill Tony now falls in that category. The much demonized and perhaps purposely misunderstood Kill Tony. Even Bill Maher is someone who I used to spar with back in my Tea Party days. I would go on his show and he loved to set me up for failure by arguing out of the block that the only reason I was angry about Barack Obama was because he was a black man. And today maybe that Bill Maher still exists, but today he has been willing to push against Covid authoritarianism. He's been willing to push against the speech police. And even recently he's been willing, not willing to demonize Elon Musk now that Elon Musk is not on the appropriate team. So you have this coalition emerging and these are the disaffected political operatives from the Democratic Party. Both RFK Jr. And Tulsi Gabbard were demonized and literally choked off by the Democratic machine. Maybe we'll talk about that more in a second. Comedians who were censored or just reacted to the idea that they couldn't speak their mind. Jimmy Dore is a great example of someone that, that realized that he wasn't allowed to question vaccine efficacy and was demonized for it and censored and on and on and on. So this coalition has emerged and they would argue that they are independent of the Trump campaign, independent of Trump winning reelection. They've all sort of gathered behind him at this point, starting with rfk. And that brought an onslaught of other people. I should mention Nicole Shanahan, who was his vice presidential candidate, a very influential philanthropist on the left who is also having a red pill moment. She's, I would argue, in some ways the intellectual leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Hell hath no fury like a Democrat scorned. And she has been producing some really interesting ads under the MAHA banner. That is again, quite fascinating. So you have this anti authoritarian movement and think about where they're at. They're coming from the left. They're coming from a position of perhaps thinking that the government and government programs and government authority can be channeled for good purposes. And, and maybe it just got off the rails and maybe it's Corporate captured as RFK Jr talks about all the time. But I think they're also starting to realize, defined by the issues that they care about, that government is fundamentally a corrupting force that is undermining almost everything they care about.

[Vivek Ramaswamy]

I want to start talking about the deep state. You have laid out a very ambitious agenda of eliminating a lot of Alphabet agencies that we don't even know what they do. We know that they're unfirable and that they have their own agendas. I would say as a libertarian who has studied public choice theory, it is inevitable. If you grow the government and you create these constituencies that want to feather their own nests at the expense of the public, it becomes an intractable problem.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Like, yep, so.

[Vivek Ramaswamy]

So what do we do about that?

[Ron DeSantis]

So, I mean, the first thing I want to say is just by way of introduction to how you got to know me as well. I used to call myself a libertarian, actually, as recently as maybe 10, 15 years ago, certainly when I was in college. And you all will agree with probably 80 to 90% of what I have to say, it will not be 100%. But I think the Republican Party is a vehicle for advancing many of those ideas. And the top of those ideas that I think we're going to share in common is that we have three branches of government in the Constitution, not four. That the people we elect to run the government should be the ones who actually run the government. That's a simple principle. We start from there. We fought an American revolution over that one idea that the people we elect to run the government run the government. So how do we actually get to that state of affairs? Because that's not where we are today. I think it requires a deep understanding of the law as it already exists. The first thing I'll leave with you is we do not need new laws to get this done. We need a new president with the actual will to get it done. One of the reasons I'm in this race is I think I have a better statutory and constitutional understanding of how to legally do this without asking Congress for permission or forgiveness. Because Congress has already over the years given us the legal toolkit to do it. Yeah, I bore you guys to sleep if I name all the laws. But 5 U.S.C. 3302 is. It's a law that says the U.S. president gets to set the HR policies of the federal government. Right now, there's this guy in the Office of Personnel Management, opm, they call it three letter Alphabet soup. Permeates the federal government that people bow down to like it's an authority in the HR Department of the Federal Department, federal government. What we actually need is a president with a spine to say that, you know what? If I'm the CEO of a company and somebody works for me and I can't fire them, that means they don't work for me. Means I work for them because I'm responsible for what they do without having any authority to actually change it turns out our law works the same way. The US President has sole authority to set the HR policies of the federal government. When an agency should not exist, we go down the list. The U.S. department of Education, the FBI, the IRS, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the ATF will go straight down the list when those agencies should not exist. I will not make you a false promise. I don't, I don't think you should believe any politician who does to say that will reform that agency once it's come into existence. It's a creature of its own. It's its own leviathan. You cannot tame that beast, but you can kill it. You can shut it down. And I think that is, again, something that the US President is constitutionally empowered to do. You just need the will and the fortitude to actually do it. It's not going to happen with an outside, with a thank you, with an insider. I'm 37. I'm the first millennial ever to run for US president. As a Republican, I've never run for office before. I'm an outsider. I think it will take an outsider to get that job and see it through, but it has to be an outsider that has an understanding of the law and the Constitution. And that's probably. If there's one thing I do when I leave office in January 2033, there's a lot else we can talk about. We will again have three branches of government in this country, not four. That's why I'm in this.

[Vivek Ramaswamy]

All right, well, that's definitely music to my ears. And I have a follow up question before I pull Kyle into this conversation. One of the things that, if you're objectively looking at what Trump did, right and wrong, one of the things that they did was put better people in agencies and do a lot of dismantling of regulation and other onerous programs, but they did it administratively as opposed to getting authorizing legislation that made it permanent. And I bet to a single line item, the Biden administration came in and just undid everything that Trump did that was correct and things that he did that weren't correct. My question is, as president, you come in and you take this aggressive stance, but ultimately you're going to need Congress to unauthorize all of these civil service rules that create this permanent, unfiable bureaucracy.

[Ron DeSantis]

So my view on this is a little different. And this is why I think we're going to be successful. My answer is no, I don't. And the reason why is take, take the President. There's existing laws on the books that have been underutilized by US Presidents who lacked a spine and hid behind their cowardice, claiming that these civil service protections stop them. So let me give you some facts you probably haven't heard before, but I've spent the last three years of my life living, eating, breathing this. So allow me to share a little bit of the learnings. The civil service protections are only protections against political firings of somebody who sits in an agency at the individual level on their own terms. They do not apply to mass firings. Mass firings only require 60 day notice. So shutting down the US Department of Education or the FBI, the civil service protections do not get in the way of that. The 1977 Presidential Reorganization act gives the President the ability to reorganize redundant agencies or to shut down agencies if it promotes the economy. We're growing at less than 1% GDP growth this year when we've grown at over 4% for most of our national history, especially in the period before we left the gold standard. So a big part of what stands in the way is the administrative state. Absolutely. It would promote the economy to save. I just learned from you the $11 billion a year we spend through the FBI or the $85 billion a year we spend through the U.S. department of Education. That's something the U.S. president is already empowered to do. One thing that one mistake they make is they send budget requests to Congress that say, hey, we shall spend. Back in the day, it used to say we may spend. The executive used to ask Congress for permission to spend. Now they've gotten lazy presidents in the administrative state. They presidents take the language given to them by the deep state. The deep states change the may to shall, so it says, you shall spend. So then a president comes in, Reagan to Trump, doesn't matter. They'll say, I want to shut this down the deep state comes back and says, oh no, you can't do it because Congress required you to spend it. So all budget requests that go in under my watch go back to asking for permission to say that we may spend it, not that we shall spend it. So I actually think that this is a bit of a myth that we have to go through the congressional sausage making process that isn't going to work because that process is bought by the very people who benefit from the existence of that administrative state, which makes Congress a dead end. But the good news, it starts with the Constitution that we set into motion 250 years ago that said we the people elect the representatives who actually make the laws and run the government, not the unelected federal bureaucracy. And so what I'll say is in setting these policies, to give you an example of how we're going to do this, on that statutory authority, we will set a norm. If I can't collect a paycheck from the US taxpayer for more than eight years, which I think is a good thing, then neither will most of those federal bureaucrats either. We have an eight year norm that for most positions you're out after eight years, just like the US President. An agency in Washington D.C. anyone that could be moved to a different area outside of Washington D.C. across the country will do it and will make the people move and many of them won't want to. So that's how you automatically thin out, through voluntary terminations. Agencies that shouldn't exist will actually shut them down, not the false promise of reforming it. And I will do that without having to go through Congress because I have a deep understanding of the Constitution and the laws as they already exist. And I think that's what's gonna take an outsider, but an outsider who understands the Constitution. This is not as hard as we make it out to be. It's hard for all the reasons you and I were talking about, but it's not hard for legal reasons. That's just an excuse that leaders make to hide behind their own lack of courage to actually see it through.

[Dave Smith]

Regular viewers of Kibbe on Liberty already know how obsessed I have been with the pandemic industrial complex and all of the stupid, authoritarian and downright evil things that the government did to us during COVID 19. Well, I'm proud to announce a new investigative series that looks to get to the bottom of all of that. It's called the COVID up and I'm producing it in cooperation with BlazeTV. The only place you're going to see this is BlazeTV. So go to fauci coverup.com kibbe and use the code FAUCILIDE for $30 off your annual subscription. Do it now. The truth is out. It strikes me that you sort of.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Lived through sort of a somewhat mysterious transformation of the Democratic Party. I'm old enough to remember when Bernie Sanders was catching fire primarily, but not exclusively because of his principled anti war stance, criticizing forever wars. I still remember a hearing where that was brought together by Rand Paul. And Bernie gave this. This principled argument against endless wars. And I'm like, I may be a Bernie bro now. Now I think he's changed, but I also think that. That you live through this Democratic Party transformation that happened quite quickly from when he was running to when you were running. And I rewatched your. Your glorious takedown of Kamala Harris from the. What year was that? 20.

[Kamala Harris]

That was 2020.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

2020.

[Kamala Harris]

That was either early 2020 or towards the end of 2019.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

And I have a theory, but retell the story about what happened like that was your moment. And then suddenly Google started playing games. Is it the same debate?

[Kamala Harris]

It was not the same debate, but the very first debate which was held in Miami, the first Democratic presidential primary debate. I don't remember what month it was, but it was around May, June, maybe the middle of 2019. And, you know, I mean, I didn't go in with rose colored glasses about my own position in this field of. What was it? 22. I think at its height of people.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

More people were running than were registered to vote.

[Kamala Harris]

Yeah, almost. And so, you know, they pulled names out of a hat. They had two debates, one on one night, then there would be one the next night. Ten people on each stage. And so my name got pulled for the first night. This was the opportunity that I would have to introduce myself to the American people and to try to get across my reason for offering to serve as president and commander in chief. And I intended to make the most of it. The hope was that people would see me and hear what I had to say and then go and say, gosh, I want to. I want to know more about her. That was. That's what everybody would hope for, but especially someone like me, who most people in the country had no idea who I was. They never heard my name before. And I certainly had the least amount of money from a campaign standpoint to be able to introduce myself to. To the entire country. And so this was that opportunity. And you only get to make a first impression once. And so I had my tech team we were ready so that when hopefully people would put my name into their search engine that my website would pop up instead of whatever trash Google wanted to push to the top of page one. And so thankfully after that first debate, I think I had six, six and a half minutes or seven minutes of total talking time, but I was the most searched candidate of the night. It's like awesome. That's what I hoped for. But then I heard from my team that Google had suspended our ad account. That allowed me to put my website there at the top of page one. When people searched with no explanation at all. It was, our account was suspended for an undetermined period of time and it consumed that, that peak period of interest that came after that first debate. And then magic, they weren't answering calls, emails, we couldn't get through to a live person at all. And then magically it was restored one day. And so, you know, I mean, that.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Was a big problem after the peak.

[Kamala Harris]

Of course, of course. And so, you know, ultimately I ended up filing a lawsuit against Google for election interference. I wasn't under the illusion that we had any good shot at winning this, going up against a multibillion dollar corporation, but I did it to prove the point and to make the point that if this big tech monopoly can do this and interfere in a presidential election campaign of a sitting member of Congress, just imagine how else they are interfering in our election. And of course since then we have seen evidence of many, many ways in which they are doing this and favoring their friends in the Democratic Party leadership. And that's where when people ask me like who are, who are the Democrat elite? And I, I make a distinction in my book in referencing the Democrat elite versus Democrats because I know a lot of Democrats, people who are still Democrats, who hate what the Democratic Party has become. And so the Democrat elite is not only the Nancy Pelosi's and Chuck Schumers of the world and the Barack Obama's and the Hillary Clintons or the George Soros is, it is their friends in big tech. It is their friends in the mainstream propaganda media. It is their friends in these groups that are this, this cabal. And it is a cabal of warmongers and it is a cabal of people who are ultimately their end state is total control and power and to take away and undermine our liberty so that we only see what they want us to see. We're only allowed to say what they allow us to say and they will have access to every part of our lives.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

It really is kind of Us versus them. And I can be really sad about everything that's happened for the last five years, but I can also see this trend.

[Kamala Harris]

And what's the us versus them?

[Tulsi Gabbard]

You're referring to the DC machine.

[Kamala Harris]

Yes, I agree. Versus the people.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Versus the people. And I think that there's a lot of reasons why we could be pessimistic about that. The last four years have just been devastating for my sense of hope for this country. But I still see this bubbling up. And when I see this insane infrastructure of them trying to censor Joe on Twitter because he told a joke about the war, I'm like, that's pretty desperate. They must be afraid that we actually have tools to figure this stuff out. And it's like whack a mole, where somebody rises up and then. And then Google pulls your AdWords and like, we got her. But then they keep coming.

[Kamala Harris]

So I think, I agree, though, I think that's an important point just to underline here is that even with all of the frustration that goes with this increased censorship and increased, you know, Big Brother, big government overreach is. We know that it is coming from a place of fear. And that should be an empowering feeling. Yeah, that reminds us. Yeah, they're afraid of us. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do with that power? Not what they want us to. Don't stay home. Don't sit back. Don't put your head in the sand.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Not too long ago, the Chinese government banned the mining of bitcoin somewhat laughably, because they were concerned about the impact on global warming of using so much energy. And I suspect they had other reasons for banning bitcoin because it gave people financial freedom in what is otherwise an insanely authoritarian social credit system. Now, the Biden administration has made similar noises about worrying about bitcoin mining. But the response to the Chinese government banning it was a very quick adjustment by the bitcoin miners. And they moved many of their operations to the United States and other places. So the Chinese government's trying to stop this very freedom based thing and it just pushed it somewhere else. The general question I'm going to ask is if that our government or the European Commission, or, God help us, the Global Central Bank, I forget the name of what it's called. If they continue to not respond to market evolution and they try to punish these emerging crypto markets, don't they just push it underground? Don't they just create a gray market, a black market? I'm thinking of other wars that the government has Declared the war on drugs and other things, but they can't destroy it. But they could make it less transparent, certainly less legal by definition if they try to stomp it out. And I think that's the argument I'm hearing from you is like, let's create simple transparent rules so that these things can flourish in an honest way.

[Matt Kibbe]

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, so that's the. I mean the genius of what the anonymous fellow. Well, I mean the pseudonymous. Pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto came up with who ever all was behind all that was to come up with ideas.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Do you know who it is?

[Matt Kibbe]

Because we're dying to know different right now. I have no. I mean there are various folks speculation, but it's probably not one person, I'm sure. But anyway. But the idea of that to have this decentralized type of blockchain concept where it's kind of out in the open because there is this whole. What's called blockchain. So all of the transactions are available there to look at. And the US actually the law enforcement folks, federal law forks, have used the ability through the blockchain for transactions to track down criminal behavior. Like if ransom was paid famously, where there was one of these attacks on. It was a pipeline company a couple years ago. And so the payment in bitcoin was able to be traced and recuperated to a large extent. So that's pretty incredible. And if that were paid in cash to kidnappers or something like that, it'd be gone to be very, very difficult to trace, even if you had the serial numbers on the bills and whatnot. Anyway, I think this ability to have this technology thrive in a society like ours and I could see why an authoritarian regime would not want to have this at all. And that's why it's no coincidence that the Chinese central bank is experimenting with its own digital currency and is moving full force with that. That would be a great way to control people. If Matt Kibbe gets out of line like the former CEO of Ant and just think with one press of a button at the central bank, they could wipe out, confiscate all of your assets so that they don't even have to know where you live, that's a pretty sobering thought. That's why to have something that is not controlled by any particular entity is not centralized, is a trustless type of product where you have all the different miners, the validators who are validating various transactions and then appending them to the blockchain makes a lot of sense. Obviously, ether the Consensus there is to go a different direction. But anyway, so we'll see how all this shakes out.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Yeah, it's not just the Chinese government. I think the United States and many central governments are wanting to create their own digital currencies and it is sort of the final step in the Chinese social credit system. Right. Because they're already able to debank people, which is similar to that, but to actually monitor, control every financial transaction you make. How many Cokes am I drinking and is that really good for me?

[Matt Kibbe]

Well, the US has also done that. The FDIC famously under the the Obama administration, started their operation Choke Point where they were going after the types of businesses that they found distasteful. So whether it be gun manufacturers or gun stores and those sorts of things, the examiners would go to the various banks and say, you know, we think it's not, it was not really good for your reputation or a safe and sound banking practice to do business with these sorts of people that got exposed and then there was a big explosion, justifiably so because these are legitimate businesses that are operating within the law. And how can it be that the government will then clamp down on them that way? Created a backlash where the FDIC stepped back from it. But you never know. The bank regulators have so much discretion through their examiners to kind of raise their eyebrow or whatever. And then the bank officers, the stories out there, the anecdotes are legion on this. They have to step back and follow.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

It's easier to comply than to fight.

[Matt Kibbe]

It is. But you can get shut down too pretty quickly in the banking realm. That's why in other industries and financial services there's lots of tussle like the SEC on the same sorts of pretexts. Can't really shut down a broker. So there's a lot of much more litigation, I'd say, on the SEC side than overall on the banking side.

[Dave Smith]

The Free Life Portrait of an Artist is the new documentary by Free the People, the story of Cuban born artist Carlos Luna who fled socialism under Castro to find his free life in America. You can watch it [e-mail] C I V L.com throughout the month of December for free [e-mail] check it out.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Going back to the early days of the pandemic when I don't understand what's going on, as an economist I use two basic frames to try to better understand what might happen. And one is sort of Hayek's understanding of, of decentralized knowledge and how the local knowledge of time and place percolates up. And this is how we figure out complex problems in the face of radical uncertainty. And to replace that process with a really smart guy at NIH that's going to sort of decide for us. To me, it sets off alarms before I even what's going on. And the other piece is sort of a public choice, Jim Buchanan kind of piece, where even if you trusted that the people in charge knew the proper path to move forward, which is very difficult, if not impossible to find, you wouldn't trust them with that much power. And so I look at this whole debacle and this idea that we're harvesting and manipulating viruses as a classic case of fatal conceit, as Hayek would use the phrase, because they didn't know enough. And even if they did know enough, they would have these sort of perverse bureaucratic incentives to do things that weren't necessarily in the public health.

[Dave Smith]

And I think.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

I think those two frames now, two years later, look pretty damn smart. But the question I have is the reaction of Fauci and Collins. And I definitely want to get into the infamous emails. When you guys released the Great Barrington Declaration, we now know that there was an orchestrated campaign to smear you guys. And it seems like, was it, you know, were they covering something up or were they just so conceited that they knew that they had the plan? But retell the story about what these very important guys said about you fringe epidemiologists.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Sure. So I gotta say, I now have business card that says fringe epidemiologist on it. Let me tell the story.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

You might as well own it.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Yeah. So I'm kind of proud of the term now. When we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, this is October of 2020 four days after we wrote it, the head of the NIH, Francis Collins National Institute, Francis Collins, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling the three primary authors meeting. And Martin Koldorff, you called it the three of us fringe epidemiologists. I mean, it's. Well, whatever. I'll just leave that aside. Right.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Well, Stanford, Harvard, Stockton, fringe institution.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

The thing is, that's why he wrote that email. Right. He wrote that and then he called for a devastating published takedown of the premises of the Declaration. He wrote that email because the institutions from which we wrote, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, threatened him and his lockdown strategy. It threatened his underling, Tony Fauci's strategy. Right. When we wrote the Declaration, almost hundreds of thousands of regular people signed on to it. People sent in from around the world. They sent us translations of the documents, a page document. You can go look it online, see if you think find it controversial. They sent US translations into 30 different languages. Almost immediately, we got tens of thousands of scientists and epidemiologists signing on. What the great branch of Declaration did, the reason why it was important is not actually the ideas in it. The ideas in it are as old as the hills. The reason it was important is because it told the world that there was not actually a scientific consensus in faith favor of lockdown. And the lockdown strategy we adopted, and that's why Tony Fauci and Francis Collins acted the way they did. That was the threat. It undermined the illusion that there was a consensus around this lockdown and they couldn't abide that. This goes back to your point about Hayek and decentralized. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine what Hayek would have made of the interchange between Rand Paul and Tony Fauci in the Senate, where very famously, Tony Fauci's response to Rand Paul was, look, if you're criticizing me, you're not simply criticizing a man, you are criticizing science itself or something very close to that. I mean, in a sense, it's like this la science, c'est moi, like the Louis XIV kind of moment. For a science bureaucrat, the arrogance is almost unbelievable. And the Great Barrington Declaration, what it did is it punctured that arrogance because it said, look, there are a lot of prominent, well known, completely reasonable, not actually fringe scientists who don't like the strategy you've adopted, who think that the strategy you've adopted was an enormous mistake. And that's why you saw this smearing campaign. And they're very effective at that. I started getting calls from reporters asking me why I wanted to let the virus rip. I never said those words. I never even thought those words. It's not in the Great Barrington Declaration. It's a piece of propaganda designed to destroy the credibility of anyone who says it. Because my primary goal is to save life, right? Protect vulnerable populations. The key tenet of the plan of the Great Barrington is focused protection of the old. How is that letting the virus rip? I mean, and then there's this sort of demonization of the idea of herd immunity, as if it's some sort of weird conspiracy theory or strategy, when in fact it's just a biological fact. This pandemic ends when there's sufficient immunity in the population. It's not. Now, what we know is that that kind of immunity doesn't protect you from getting the disease over again. What it does It'll be more like the other coronaviruses, where you. You can get them over again, but you don't get severely ill. So I think that idea that herd immunity is a strategy, they use that as a propaganda tool in favor of lockdown. As if somehow the endpoint of lockdown strategies is also herd immunity.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Yeah. So it's interesting that you're quoting Louis xiv, because in Hayek's critique of this mindset, the counter revolution of science, he. He has this devastating, uncharacteristically sort of snide takedown of a French philosopher aristocrat named Henri de St. Simon. And St. Simon had. And he's considered sort of the founding father of socialism, even though one of his students coined the word. But he had this idea that you would create something called the Council of Newton after Sir Isaac Newton, and he would actually create temples to Sir Isaac Newton. And they were going to find engineers and scientists and put them on this council and basically give them the power to reorganize society from the top down. I remembered that watching this almost religiosity of I am the science Anthony Fauci, and you can buy prayer candles to Anthony Fauci on Amazon. And it just got really weird.

[Dave Smith]

Weird.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

I'm like.

[Dave Smith]

But I think it was ultimately like.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

A propaganda campaign if you.

[Dave Smith]

You can't question that faith in the.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Science, otherwise you're a monster. You want to let it rip. You don't care about people.

[Dave Smith]

And one of the first things you.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Dealt with was this. This ridiculous argument that you can either focus on public health or you can worry about the economy and dollars. And that would be an awful thing because, you know, that's. Obviously these things are intimately intertwined. You're a public health economist. What are the consequences of shutting down the economy just in terms of public health?

[Jay Bhattacharya]

I mean, that dichotomy between lives versus dollars was always a lie. From the very, very beginning. The question was on both sides of the lockdown equation was lives. Right. In principle, before, the idea is that lockdowns would save lives. People prevent people from getting Covid, although now we know that they didn't do all that well at that. And as economists, I would have expected economists to speak up and say, well, look, that's too simple. Yeah, you may save some Covid lives. We as economists maybe don't know exactly how many. But on the other side, we know for certain that if you lock down a society, try to shut down its economy, suppress the freedom of billions of people to go about their lives, you will kill People, People will die as a consequence of it. It was always lies versus lies. It was never dollars versus lies. And yet that simplistic sort of comparison between lies and dollars, it silenced so many economists from speaking up with what we normally would do, which is say, look, there's some cost to this strategy you're proposing.

[Rand Paul]

Okay, the next argument was that the government needs to have the right to censor. There's a very striking. One of the justices made a very striking sort of hypothetical case. Well, what if there's a social media fad of kids jumping off of buildings of increasingly higher heights? And you know, of course it's terrible. Kids shouldn't be jumping off buildings. Shouldn't the government have the right to tell. Force social media companies to not allow.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

That to be shown.

[Rand Paul]

Now, of course, the thing is, the government absolutely has the bully pulpit. The president or the CDC or whoever can say, you know, it's really dumb to jump off buildings. Don't jump off buildings. It's really dumb to like show people jumping off buildings if it makes other people jump off buildings. Don't do that.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Right.

[Rand Paul]

They absolutely have the pulpit right to say that. They can go to social media companies and say, you know, government scientists have found that putting videos of jumping off buildings makes people. More people want to jump off buildings. I don't know. Or better, they can go tell the public at large, parents, tell your kids not to jump off buildings. You know, it's really dumb for them do that. You'd be really smart to like, not have them do that. They have a tremendous number of tools. But censorship of possible.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

They don't even have to tell parents that.

[Rand Paul]

Yeah, I mean, every parent looks to the government for exactly how to raise their kids. Math. Did you not know that?

[Dave Smith]

That's the new.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

That's the new. That's the new math.

[Rand Paul]

Yeah. But the point is that they have.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

A wide array of tools sort of come perfectly legal.

[Rand Paul]

What they can't do, according to what I believe the First Amendment says, is they can't go and tell coerced social media companies or force social media companies to censor people that are. That are jumping off things. If the social media companies want to put it. I personally think if a social media company does that, that social media company will. Should suffer in the market.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Right.

[Rand Paul]

There should be other social media companies saying, look, we're not going to do these horrible things to your kids. And you kind of started to see that pushback against Facebook and other social media companies.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

It's hard to imagine a social media Company that would tolerate that to the extent that they could stop it, Correct?

[Rand Paul]

Yeah. It's just bad for business. Why would you want to do that if it's narrowly good for business in the short run, Certainly bad for business in the long run. So I think that is a straw man argument. But in the Supreme Court hearing, that was an argument that was seriously made by the government. There was an astonishing moment. At one point, one of the justices actually said out loud, well, if what you're saying is that the American First Amendment hinders the action of the government as if it were a new discovery, I mean, of course.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

Or as if that was a bad thing.

[Jay Bhattacharya]

Well, that's the thing.

[Rand Paul]

It's like the whole point is that Congress shall make no law means the government is supposed to be hindered. They're not supposed to do these things because it violates our fundamental civil liberties. And I'd go further than that. I'd say that if we had had an actual functioning First Amendment during the pandemic, a lot of the harms that we saw to people, to a lot of people, that would have been avoided. Many people that are now dead would be alive. The government was the number one source of misinformation during the pandemic. It put forward very destructive ideas like two weeks to slow the spread. Lockdown will save us from COVID The infection fatality rate is tremendously high. When it's not, there's no real stratification of risk. We're all equally at risk. There's no immunity after Covid recovery. The lockdowns of are not all that harmful to the economy. School closures are not that harmful to kids. Mask mandates are going to save us from COVID Vaccines will stop the spread of COVID vaccine. There are no such things as vaccine injuries. You can go item after item after item. And it's the government that was the primary source of misinformation. People structured their lives around this government misinformation. And had there been a functioning First Amendment, there would have been more effective pushback against these government misinformation. The whole premise of a lot of the questioning by the Supreme Court justices was that the government got it right and they're protecting people from misinformation, when in fact exactly the opposite is true. And of course, that's the point of the First Amendment is to protect the people from the government when it gets.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

It wrong, which they do sometimes, hopefully.

[Rand Paul]

I got it long. I could go on longer with the list.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

We've had multiple conversations about this, about the about the arrogance and hypocrisy of the Fauci's of the world that actually think they know better than the entire scientific process itself.

[Dave Smith]

Thanks for watching. If you liked the conversation, make sure to like the video, subscribe and also ring the bell for notifications. And if you want to know more about Free the people, go to freethepeople.org.