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Kibbe on Liberty
Ep 332 | The Pandemic Is Being Memory Holed | Guest: David Zweig
01:05:08
Matt Kibbe talks to David Zweig, author of “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions,” who argues that the media wants to hide its own culpability in pushing for lockdowns and censorship of dissenting ideas.
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- [00:00]
Matt Kibbe
Welcome to Kibbe on Liberty. This week I'm talking with investigative journalist David Zweig about the colossal failure of the expert class during lockdowns and specifically the dynamics that led to endless lockdowns of schools and why journalists were complicit in this crisis. Check it. Welcome to Kibby on Liberty. David, good to see you.
- [00:59]
David Zweig
Good to see you again.
- [01:00]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. And we were at my favorite dive bar last night, the big board for one of your book parties. How many have you done so far?
- [01:10]
David Zweig
I've done three big public ones. New York, Berkeley and here. D.C. had a couple other smaller private parties. Might go to Atlanta, might go to la.
- [01:21]
Matt Kibbe
Are you going to go to any havens of red state America or are you just going to stick to the.
- [01:28]
David Zweig
I feel like there's more emotional, like more enthusiasm for people in the blue pockets who suffered, particularly with school closures versus going somewhere where they were like everything was okay.
- [01:43]
Matt Kibbe
You talked about this last night and as you probably don't know, and viewers of this show have heard me talk about this thing for five plus years now, like I started talking about it in March of 2020 from the perspective of an economist thinking about the practical implications of, of shutting everything down. And I almost knew from day one, you can't possibly mean that because that would be a human catastrophe beyond imagination if everybody stayed home. Of course they didn't mean that. They meant that the laptop class would stay home. But the thing that I've been. Well, I've been wrestling with many things five years in now, but one is the general disinterest of a lot of Americans in what the hell happened? Like they don't want to talk about it anymore. And you mentioned this last night, why?
- [02:35]
David Zweig
Yeah, it's really well put. I think that probably the people who tend to be the most influential in our culture, those groups, when you think about the legacy media, Democratic establishment, public health establishment, medical establishment, they tend to lean toward the left. And they also tended to be the ones who perpetrated what most people, including them now, I think were some pretty bad policy choices during the pandemic. And specifically what my book is focused on are school closures. Though obviously the book kind of fans out from there to the broader policies that were put in place. And I think people generally are not inclined to go back and revisit their failures. So to the extent that there is kind of any talk or acknowledgement within, like the media, for example, about the pandemic, it's framed in such a way that's pretty exculpatory. You know, conveniently so we can talk about this. But much of this sort of apologia, if there is one, is framed as, look, this was regrettable, but. And then a series of excuses, primarily being we didn't know. We did the best we could. It was chaotic, fog of war, Trump was president. He's horrible. You know, whatever it may be, a lot of it is sort of framed within that. Whereas think about the vast amount of sort of revisiting and books and discussion about, I don't know, 9, 11, the Iraq war, you know, any number of other major events within our culture, those are revisited extensively. Why? Because you can pick the villains pretty easily. And by picking the villains, I mean the people who are generally not within that establishment class, the pandemic. This is the one major event I can recall where they're the villain and they know it, at least on a subconscious level, and therefore they're not really inclined to get into it.
- [04:52]
Matt Kibbe
You started this journey, I think your first piece was in May of 2020, early May, arguing and wired that we should reopen the schools. And you got a lot of blowback for that. But when did you, and you generally, like, you come from a community on the left, you live in a community that is very left. When did you start to think something is wrong with the government response?
- [05:22]
David Zweig
Yeah, pretty early on. Not immediately. Immediately. I sort of went along with everything, didn't question it too much. I didn't do it blindly. But I also had no reason in my mind because I didn't know enough to assume it was wrong either. I was just like, I don't know what's happening. They're telling me to do this. All right, I guess I'll go along with this until we learn more information. Very quickly, though, I felt like I wasn't seeing enough evidence behind what was going on in the media. It felt very hysterical. Some of the coverage, again, I want to be clear, like, I. I sort of bought into everything they were saying. Initially, it seemed like there were a lot of unknowns, but shortly thereafter, I started poking around. I have a background in doing a lot of science journalism, reading a lot of academic studies, talking to scholars. So I'm used to doing that stuff. And my sort of disposition generally is to be skeptical of everything. I tend to lean toward the left, or I used to, at least, but I've always been an independent and kind of someone who's kind of tends to be alienated or off on my own thing. I've never been like a democratic establishment type person, so I Started looking pretty early and it seemed pretty clear. Gosh, certainly in April, I started wondering really deeply about, wait a minute, this doesn't seem right. And there were a couple moments it was that we were told 15 days and then immediately they added another 30. I'm like, that's weird. And then I've recounted this a lot. But a real turning point for me was toward the end of April, and I live right outside New York City. Cases in New York had fallen like 50%. And remember that the objective we were told was everyone, or as you noted, not everyone, but most people, if you can, the laptop class, stay home. The objective is we need to, you know, blunt the circulation of virus, prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. We're going to flatten the curve. Well, we achieved that goal that the cases had gone down, but the schools didn't reopen. And that to me was, you know, when. Kind of like when the football was pulled away from Charlie Brown, you know.
- [07:44]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [07:45]
David Zweig
And I was like, this seemed really wrong.
- [07:48]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [07:49]
David Zweig
And there wasn't any real investigation as far as I was observing, or real questioning. Hey, wait a minute. We were told something. We were told, do this. And then we're trying to achieve this goal. And we did those things. And then it just, you know, the proverbial goalpost was moved. And that really set me on my path where I was like, I need to find out what's going on. And where I shifted from finding out for myself to saying, you know, I kept wondering, well, where's the media on this? And finally I was like, well, I am the media. I guess I gotta try to get this out there.
- [08:23]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. I was thinking when you were describing your Persona kind of stubbornly independent, it reminds me of how Matt Taibbi describes the journalist mindset, at least when he was coming up through the ranks, that you guys are supposed to be contrarian. You're not supposed to be team players. You're kind of a holes when it comes to, like, you're a dog with a bone that says that doesn't make sense. I'm going to figure out what's going on. And there's been a cultural shift. And your book documents this very well. Where too many journalists today feel like they're on a team instead of that independent mind street that is skeptical of everything and everybody, particularly big things. Things big government, big business, the education, industrial complex, whatever you want to call these things. When did that happen or do you think that's happened? Like that cultural shift in media?
- [09:23]
David Zweig
Yeah. It's hard to tell. People do talk about kind of years ago how the media used to be a bit more objective. I'm 50, so it's hard for me to speak from personal experience, but it does seem as though certainly was still flawed. But if you think back, it seemed like journalism used to be have at least some strain within it of more for lack of a better term, but kind of like a blue collar vibe. You think of like the Daily News, you know, back in the 60s and 70s or something. Even like a Norman Mailer, you know, a guy who's kind of a tough guy, you know, boxing and whatnot. Like there used to be more of, I believe, if not ideological diversity, at least a kind of scrappy sort of vibe to it to a lot of these kind of gumshoe reporters. And now it seems as though, and certainly within the more prestigious legacy media, it's kind of all the same people. They are on the same team and they've explained explicitly said this, as I'm sure you've seen over the last number of years. This isn't even a secret. There was a whole thing, you know, kind of once Trump won, I think it broke a lot of people's brains. And they, you know, it was the hashtag resistance. And it's like we can no longer just objectively report on things. We must like push back. And I think on one hand that's actually correct. Like you don't want to not, not, not that it's correct to not report objectively, but that they should call people out. Because journalism did have this sort of genteel component to it as well. Certainly at like a presidential politics level, there was a certain amount of like, let's not talk about this or that regardless of the political party. It was just kind of like this, a little bit of like obsequiousness, you know, toward people in power. So in that regard, I think that's correct to push back harder on some of that. But the idea that they viewed themselves as this like advocacy machine, it then kind of went off the rails, I think after a while where then it was just, and there's no way to know how much of this is sort of deliberate versus like the noble lie versus kind of just a subconscious behavior. There's so much, so much motivated reasoning going on. And as someone who's written for a lot of the legacy media outlets, I can tell you from dealing with a lot of different editors, not all of them are like this for sure, but and the higher up, the kind of apparatus, to some extent it's, you Know, everyone has their own biases. You do? I do. And they were just so pronounced, you know, about which stories were acceptable, which were not acceptable. And if you were going to. To write about something that was challenging the establishment view that was put through, you know, sieve of, you know, it's just like, really, really tightly checked. Whereas if you were putting something out that was supportive of some establishment view that could kind of just sail right through, that's deeply problematic.
- [12:32]
Matt Kibbe
I mean, maybe those. Those biases and, you know, maybe they're ideological or sort of class bias biases. I'm sure they've always been there. But you tell the story of a New York Times piece that you wrote where they excised the entire section about. You read the endnotes, the data on school notes.
- [12:52]
David Zweig
Yeah. Very impressed you got there. Yeah. I wrote a piece on what they were called pod schools for the New York Times. This is where once schools close down wealth, generally, not exclusively, but generally wealthier, parents would gather together, and you'd have six or eight kids from different families. And then all the parents would hire a teacher to be like, an independent teacher for these six or eight kids. And they would have class in someone's living room or some other.
- [13:22]
Matt Kibbe
We made a documentary called Sick Year about six of those moms.
- [13:26]
David Zweig
Oh, you did? Amazing.
- [13:28]
Matt Kibbe
Fascinating. Dynamic.
- [13:29]
David Zweig
Oh, that's awesome. Okay, so I thought the pod school thing was fat. I'm like, wow, this is like, you know, very American ingenuity. It's like, oh, they close schools. Boom. All these pod schools are popping up now. I thought it was fascinating, so I wrote a pretty big piece on it for the New York Times. They sent a photographer to show up at an event and all this stuff. But one of the things that was important to me was if I'm going to write about this, we should include a section on, well, should the schools be closed at all? Like, why are we even doing this? Like, that type of context is something I criticize when it's missing all the time. So I felt obligated. I was like, we can't just talk about pod schools as this. Like, whoa, look at this quirky phenomenon that's happening. We should be like, look at this quirky phenomenon that's happening. And, well, should this even be happening at all? So I did have a fair amount of content, a few paragraphs that. There were a couple pediatricians who had recently published something I forget. Their journal was like, JAMA Pediatrics or Pediatrics or some prominent pediatric medical journal. And they had published something saying the kids are not a great risk. Opening schools is not going to be some supercharger type of event. The teachers are not at elevated risk. All of this stuff. So I interviewed the physicians who had written this piece that had come. Come out and I had a lot of that, you know, the data they cite and blah, blah, blah. And it was just completely black, barred from the piece. They just took all of it out. So that was, that was a real.
- [15:00]
Matt Kibbe
Moment when maybe you already said this. When was that piece?
- [15:04]
David Zweig
I think this was summer of 2020. So the schools had already been shut for, you know, the entire spring and things were a bit sort of. Sort of unknown and nebulous, you know, about where things are headed in the fall. And one of the things were these pod schools popping up. But when people think about. And look, I should add, editors have every right and indeed it is their job to edit things and cut stuff out and someone can make the argument, well, yes, that stuff's important, but it didn't really belong in this piece. We need to keep this tightly finished, focused on this topic. Like, so I should add that in. Nevertheless, I think it's. It's quite telling that even just. And this wasn't my opinion these. I was like, hey, let's just add this in to add some framing. The New York Times certainly adds all sorts of context and framing and other pieces. Not like everything is like super narrow.
- [15:58]
Matt Kibbe
Right.
- [15:58]
David Zweig
So while they. That certainly was within their mandate and their right to. To, you know, shape a piece, I mean, this seemed.
- [16:05]
Matt Kibbe
Well, kudos for. Actually, it sounds like a sympathetic piece to pod parents who wanted to find an alternative to.
- [16:13]
David Zweig
I think it largely was, and that's how I view it that, look, people were put in the circumstance. That's your job as a parent, is to try to figure out how do I help my kid. There was a fair amount of blowback to the piece because people immediately were mad that wealthier parents were doing this. I should add there were some parents who were not wealthy who were like just scraping the money together. They didn't care because they knew how horrible and damaging school closures would be for their kid. But by and large, it was wealthier parents because you're paying whatever it was, 20 grand, 40 grand or something to do this. But the idea that parents were supposed to just like sit back and take it and not try to like figure something out for their kid was absurd. Of course parents were going to do this. And then there was a smaller section of voices who said, well, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be mad at those parents, but what about questioning them being put into this circumstance to begin with? But there was a lot of pushback against the parents who wanted to do this, which I thought was unfair.
- [17:24]
Unknown Host
Thank you for joining me today on Kibbe on Liberty and for being part of our fiercely independent audience. Every week, my organization, Free the People, partners with BlazeTV to bring you this show. My guests bring smart perspectives on everything from current events to timeless philosophical debates. If you like what you hear, go to freethepeople.org kol and support Kibbe on Liberty so we can continue to produce these honest conversations with interesting people. Now, let's get back to it.
- [17:54]
Matt Kibbe
You know, you know, the way that innovation works is that there's, there's that first tranche of people that try that. And of course they would, they would be of means that could afford to experiment with that stuff. But it became far more mainstream by the time, you know, lockdowns of schools ended. A lot of parents were finding ways to just collaborate in their neighborhood. So it's, I wouldn't call it a wealthy thing per se, once it took hold. And again, out of necessity, you have to do that. This is a fundamental piece of your thesis in the book is an abundance of caution. Yes, an abundance of caution now everywhere, American schools, the virus and a story of bad decisions. And by the way, this is about far more than locking down schools, but it's sort of the focal point where you build out for broader institutional failures. But your point, and I'm thinking about now, disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo who would have those daily briefings, by the way, my theory as to why Trump platform Fauci is that Andrew Cuomo was getting better ratings. And so then Trump started having daily briefings. And then Fauci steps up to the podium and it, and it just becomes a very negative competition between these two guys. But he kept talking about the science like, I'm just following the data, I'm just following the science. Very self righteous about it. If he was actually following the data on schools, when did we know that locking down schools did not protect children?
- [19:40]
David Zweig
There's not a bright line because different people could argue it different ways. We knew even in February that children were at extraordinarily low risk from the virus. Something the risk on par with any number of other risks that children face day to day. So it wasn't zero, but nothing outlandish compared to other threats that children face in their life. More kids die drowning in a year than they did from COVID a year more Kids, you know, many, many more die in, in motor vehicle accidents and so on.
- [20:14]
Matt Kibbe
So if you're doing risk assessments. Correct, it never really made sense.
- [20:18]
David Zweig
No, this doesn't register. More kids died of the flu in, in according to CDC estimates, in several seasons in like the 10 years or so leading up to the pandemic than died of COVID in an individual year. I know this is sort of like a radioactive thing to, to cite, but it's just true. And I have the endnotes in my book. It's from the CDC estimates, so people can argue with the CDC if they want. But yes, the risk assessment is poor. So we knew early that it was low then the other sort of argument was that, well, maybe kids aren't at risk, but teachers are. And I would say that that was a. Not the best conjecture, but like defensible, I think early, once it was non defensible was when, number one, Sweden never closed their lower schools, nor did Iceland. That doesn't get a lot of attention. But. And Sweden put out a study in the spring saying, look, we've looked at it. Teachers in these schools that never closed are at no higher risk than the average professional. And indeed there are other professionals, I think like pizza baker or something and taxi driver who are at noticeably higher risk of infection than the teachers. That's number one. And number two to me, one of the kind of like real milestones was at the end of April, beginning of May, Europe began reopening its schools. 22 countries began reopening their schools. We're talking about millions of kids, millions back in school in a whole variety of different geographic areas, demographic areas, population densities. It ran the gamut. They all started opening. And the ministers of the EU met in May virtually and they said, we've observed no negative consequences of schools reopening. And that to me, I think in the book, I refer to it as like a record scratch moment where it's like, okay, we're done, we're done here, folks. Before maybe it was debatable. You know, there are different experts could, could argue about it. We're not sure. We now have empirical evidence that's different than conjecture. It's different than like a projection from modeling this actually happened. We're no longer forward looking about what will happen. We can now look backward and see what already happened. They opened schools. It wasn't a tiny schoolhouse somewhere. We're talking about millions of kids and nothing happened. They met a second time in June and had the same determination. This was for all intents and purposes Completely ignored by the legacy media. This should have been splashed across the front pages of every newspaper and running as the thing on, on cable news. And it wasn't. And it should have been mentioned by public health professionals, but it wasn't. And in the rare instance where it was mentioned by the public health professionals or the media, it was dismissed. And when I say it, I don't mean the meeting because that was like basically never mentioned. I just mean the fact that some schools were open there. Any number of a long list of reasons was put forth to defend it, but they were all contrived. Again, we're talking about, about one of the things that I think is so fascinating that I talk about a lot in the book is this sort of chasm between theory and reality. And like I realize I'm a bit of an empiricist that empirical evidence should trump almost everything. There are some circumstances where what we're observing can be deceiving. But by and large the idea that we conducted policy in our country, policy that you know, for your audience I think would be a particular interest policy that really was a bit tyrannical, that deeply, deeply infringed on the liberties of regular citizens. Man, if you're going to do that, you better be really sure about what you're talking about. And they weren't. And in fact to actually pull that switch on the American public again they were basing it on conjecture and, and theory and BS and ignoring real world empirical evidence. It's an extraordinary thing that happened. And talking about, just touching on what you mentioned at the very beginning and it's like almost memory hold, people don't want to talk about it much. This is very dangerous to me, the lack of attention being paid to this.
- [24:49]
Matt Kibbe
It's extraordinary as a libertarian that very much focuses on the civil and economic liberties aspects of the, of the tyranny of lockdowns and all of the mandates. I can't think of a precedent. You know, maybe, maybe I go back to 911 and the patriot act and you know, this sweeping disregard for fundamental American values like this is why I'm still, this is why I'm talking to you. I'm still wrestling with this because I don't, I don't have a completely satisfactory answer for this. But one of the things going back to schools and why they stayed locked down and you talk about this some, but there is an institutional capture where the teachers unions very explicitly, well, not explicitly, but obviously put the well being of teachers head of the well being of the students. And I Don't think that was good science. But it was pretty obvious that as I continued to advocate for school closures after, it was so obvious that not only were kids not extraordinarily at risk for going to school, but they were being harmed by not going to school. At that point, it looked as a grouchy libertarian. It just looked like the teachers unions didn't give a damn about the kids anymore. Is that too strong?
- [26:16]
David Zweig
Certainly some teachers didn't and others, I think did. So I try not to talk about them as a monolith. What is clear is that the unions themselves or their leadership took advantage of a situation where the public health establishment had put forth a whole series of claims and guidance that was not grounded in any sort of scientific reasoning or appropriate values. And they then use that as leverage to demand a, you know, sort of fantastical list of things that they wanted to happen, many of which, most of which had nothing to do with COVID or mitigating the virus. There's this, this like, manifesto basically, that.
- [27:05]
Matt Kibbe
I detail in the Money and Power.
- [27:07]
David Zweig
Yeah, there's this thing from. There are a number of unions that did this. The LA Teachers Union. And I have it detailed in the book. This is an extraordinary document. I mean, in order to reopen schools, they were saying they needed a special tax on millionaires, a different tax on billionaires, defund the police. I don't know environmental justice stuff. I mean, it was the fever dream of, you know, the far left and was like, none of this has anything to do with the schools. And Covid, like, what. What is even happening here? Like that. That's a fairly brazen, you know, astonishing even, like. Like list of demands that again, like, were we all. Did everyone forget what was happening here? The claim was the schools were closed because there was some ostensible risk either to children or teachers. And now the things had shifted where all sorts of demands were being made completely unrelated to mitigating a virus, even in an ostensible sense. Because most of the, even the claims about mitigating the virus, those were also fake. But I give teachers unions a pass on that to a large degree. And the blame should go toward the public health establishment and the media because, look, that's what unions do their job. And you know, in the. Randy Weingarten. Her job is to. To advocate for teachers. Her job is not to advocate for children. It's not so. It's without.
- [28:29]
Matt Kibbe
It's not what she would say.
- [28:32]
David Zweig
Well, but that's the reality. Maybe she would claim otherwise, but her job And I don't blame her for that. That's what she's hired and paid to do to advocate for teachers, period. It's not the, you know, the children. So I think it's really important because a lot of people on the right, you know, and perhaps correctly so, have a lot of ire toward teachers unions, not just from the pandemic, but in general. But to me, the focus should be on what, and this is what I try to do with the book is kind of show how the gears turn in our society. The focus should be on what happened with our public health experts, the establishment and the legacy media. What happened where they were putting forth such deeply, deeply unscientific guidance that then enabled the teachers unions to use that as their big leverage in demanding things in keeping schools closed for such a long time. So that's where I think that our spotlight should be focused. And that's what I tried to explicate in the book is really, let's look at how this took place. Something so crazy.
- [29:44]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair way to frame it because the hysteria was real and it was very much manufactured is probably too strong of a word for you, but I could go there. Yeah, very much manufactured by the so called public health. I love to call everything an industrial complex because I'm a crazy libertarian.
- [30:11]
Unknown Host
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- [30:47]
Matt Kibbe
And this, this seems like a good place to bring up the Twitter files. And. And you were one of the reporters that were given access to all of this very explosive conversations that were happening between Twitter employees, Twitter executives, and various government agencies that were browbeating them into supporting certain narratives and stifling other narratives. And to me, that was such an important moment. I think even before that. Jay Bhattacharya had mentioned to me in the first episode of this series I'm doing called the COVID up, that there was a nexus between Fauci's power and the war on terror and national defense agencies and intelligence agencies. And I never even thought about that before he mentioned it. To me. But then when I saw the Twitter files and I looked at the types of agencies that were actually doing the censoring, it wasn't public health. It was more like the things that you would think would be about protecting our national defense. But tell me a little bit about your role. And when did Elon call and say, hey, David, we need you?
- [32:08]
David Zweig
Well, I didn't get the call from Elon, but Barry Weiss, I think shortly after Matt had gotten access, Barry was also given access. And I knew Barry, so I just reached out to her basically as like a friend slash, you know, professional colleague, whatever, saying like, hey, I saw you. You have access. This is crazy. Look, I know more about what's going on with COVID than anyone. For the most part. Here. Here's my advice. And I was, I think in my recollection, at least in my head, or. Or even like in the emailed her, I was like, apologetic. Like, I don't mean to, like, you know, sound like I know what's going on, but, like, here's what I would look for. Like, you might find this helpful. Here's some of the things you should do if you're gonna. Because there's some interesting stuff going on with. With censorship and suppression, related content related to the pandemic. And like, almost immediately after I sent the email, I got a reply. She's like, can you get on a plane to San Francisco? So I was like, yes. So that was unexpected. It was. It was. It was really interesting. It was. It was a great experience, you know, something super important to be involved in.
- [33:18]
Matt Kibbe
And what was your tranche? Like you were the 10th release or something.
- [33:22]
David Zweig
I don't know.
- [33:24]
Matt Kibbe
Whatever it was, it doesn't matter.
- [33:25]
David Zweig
I went there knowing already a whole number of people whose accounts had been deboosted and so some manner people who had been suspended. All stuff related to the pandemic, which is why I think Barry sent me that. A regular person. People don't realize perhaps the Twitter files was not like, oh, you could go into this place and just dig around and search for weeks on end. Like, I was given three days and we had to know what to look for. It wasn't like, here's everything, just go look. So you had to. I arrived already prepared of like, I want to look into these, you know, five people and like, can we look at their accounts and figure out what happened? So for me, it was kind of like trying to deconstruct, similar to my book. I was. I've tried it. Deconstruct and like, Create a schematic, you know, showing what actually happens behind the scenes. To some extent, that's similar to with the Twitter files. Okay, this thing. Thing happened. I know a bunch of people have observed this on their accounts. Let me find out. One, is that actually true, what they thought they were observing? Maybe. Maybe everyone just has a big ego and they thought something happened, but it didn't really happen. And then two, if it did happen, you know, how did that happen? What did that mean? At whose direction? So. And what we found were that indeed, there were all sorts of policies in place, as you noted, to basically advance the accepted narratives within the pandemic and to suppress in any number of different ways, beliefs or views or even data, even studies, not just someone's opinion, but even citing a study that was published that had some contrarian sort of findings to what we were supposed to leave, even that was suppressed on Twitter. So needless to say, deeply, deeply problematic.
- [35:21]
Matt Kibbe
Things that were true but undermining the official narrative.
- [35:26]
David Zweig
That's. That's correct.
- [35:27]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [35:27]
David Zweig
And by the way, things that they.
- [35:29]
Matt Kibbe
Knew were true, so not like, who.
- [35:31]
David Zweig
Knows what they know, but these are things published in, you know, legitimate academic journals. Now, people can argue whether a study is good or not, but, like, give me a break. This is certainly meets the bar for like, you know, information that. That's legitimate something in. In a, you know, know, academic journal. But it's just the findings just happened to, you know, run against what we were told we were supposed to believe about something or another related to the pandemic. And we point blank there was evidence that this was suppressed in any number of ways. And to me, one of the sort of, like, meta angles on the Twitter files, and maybe my perception someone might disagree with it is that this was like, basically, like, not covered at all in. In the major media. You know, whether it's. There's. Some people say there's jealousy, they wish they had access, you know, who knows? Or whether they just didn't like what. What was found. You know, the people, oh, this is a nothing burger. You know, lots of, you know, some mainstream journalists were saying, I'm like, look, that's subjective. People, different people can think what they want to. To me, that's not a nothing burger. When the United States government is sort of, you know, twisting the arm in one way or another, they don't have to explain. You don't need a smoking gun of, like, you must censor these people. It's the US Government. You know, it's. It's like, nice social media company you got there. Shame if something happened to it. You know, it's like you don't, you don't need to explicitly say things. It was very clear that they did pressure them. Social media companies. And quite honestly, obviously a larger issue isn't just the US government, but the social media companies themselves. Let's just leave the US government out of it for a moment. Forget about that. We don't even have to make that claim. It still is deeply worrisome when these incredibly powerful companies that basically control the digital town square, that they were doing this on their own, whether it's at the direction of the government or not. So there are like so many facets of this that to me, as a citizen, are extraordinarily important. And it is quite remarkable, I think, in the literal sense of the word, like to remark on that. The legacy media, for the most part just ignored this and there was a little bit of coverage, but when they did cover it, it was largely dismissive.
- [37:43]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah. And I would postulate potentially that the reason that I don't know what you call it, the mainstream media, the legacy media, the print media, although they're not print anymore.
- [37:55]
David Zweig
Euphemisms. But yeah, all the same, whatever that.
- [37:57]
Matt Kibbe
Is compared to social media companies in a lot of ways, either it's self censorship or some other kind of censorship. I think the reason they didn't cover the Twitter files is that people might start asking, well, why are you guys controlling the narrative in a certain way? There is an ancient history of the government manipulation. Print media as well. We know, like these are facts too. So I don't know. But like Matt Taibbi was telling me that to your point, about knowing enough to ask the right questions and look for the right things, the discovery that Jay Bhattacharya was suppressed in all sorts of shocking ways was Matt and Barry sitting there and talking to a Twitter employee and say, what about Jay Bhattacharya in the. They pull them up. And that sort of opened the can of worms. And I'm trying to bring this back to public health because I don't know what the timing is, but over at the nih, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and other officials were talking about these fringe epidemiologists in the Great Barrington Declaration and having a devastating takedown. And lo and behold, these other agencies start censoring the same people. I'm not saying it's cause and effect, but it could be just a confluence of interests.
- [39:29]
David Zweig
Yeah, I tend to think that it's more of that. The Latter, rather than an explicit conspiracy.
- [39:36]
Matt Kibbe
They didn't pick up the phone.
- [39:37]
David Zweig
They may have, but. But what I show in the book is that to your point, when people have a shared interest, there doesn't need to be a conspiracy then. It's just they are working toward the same goal regardless. So the sort of public health establishment had a. Pardon the expression, but like a lockdown on. On the narrative. Like, what I'm interested in is the term I use in my head and in the book a lot is just sort of is narrative formation. How are narratives formed? How are they enforced? And that's sort of, you know, Twitter files thing that you're talking about is like the enforcement in much of my book. I'm interested in the formation. How did these narratives actually get created to begin with? And then why were so many of these people going along with them? And I talk a lot about the various incentive structures. I think one of the things that makes it challenging for people, perhaps libertarians or those on the right or independent thinkers, who perhaps are skeptical of any number of things that they're observing in the government or at large institutions where it looks like they're working together, is I think it tends to discredit them sometimes a little bit, when it's like, this is a conspiracy. And again, there are times where there are actual conspiracies where people are explicitly working together. But to me, I think that. That it's less. It's less sexy, it's less exciting and less easy. The reality, which I think generally is that there are groups of people who share a sort of tribal kind of affiliation with each other and share a similar incentive structure. And that's more often the case, certainly, within the pandemic about why you have these large groups all working together without necessarily needing to have a backroom handshake in order to do so.
- [41:42]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I mean, I don't really like the word conspiracy because it has baggage that perhaps the technical definition doesn't actually have. But the incentive structure and the institutional structures that you talk about, it's basically the same thing because the money is flowing, and particularly, you don't really get into this so much. But Fauci is now controlling the entire pile of NIH funding, and that's flowing to universities, and there's a whole ecosystem that is invested in the narrative that is coming from public health. Now, is that a conspiracy? I don't really think it is. I think it perhaps is worse because it is a fundamental corruption of the institutions that we depend on to make sure our kids are educated to make sure that we actually have a rational response. Response to. To pandemics.
- [42:43]
David Zweig
I think that's well put that there's things that are worse than a conspiracy which is just sort of like a structural problem with, with how these institutions are created and you know, and, and run and, and incentivized that that's worse than a conspiracy. It's just kind of baked in the cake. So that's one of the things. You know, to me there are a multitude of reasons of what happened. But obviously, and this is perhaps a banal point now, but that the sort of in group dynamics are so powerful for a lot of people. It's not exclusive to the left, it's on the right as well. And maybe we shouldn't even discuss it in binary terms. But what we observed in the pandemic was this in group dynamic both socially and professionally within these institutions created this groupthink where there was a lot of self censorship that I observed and I knew about from physicians, many of them at really prestigious institutions who were reaching out to me when I was writing articles. And I recount this in the book how they. I was in a whole bunch of different private text groups with different doctors and former CDC officials and other people. Everything was off the record. No one would talk about this publicly. But they all were like rip shit over what was going on. They thought it was horrible what was happening to kids. They didn't think it was effective on the one side with the school closures and on the flip side they knew this was harmful. And then you can add in the mask mandates on kids and the barriers on the desks and the closing of businesses. You know, you can just keep fanning out from there. There were a lot of doctors, still a minority, but there was still a lot this. And you talked about the word manufactured. That was a manufactured consensus that the public was told existed and others they were explicitly told. I have stories of doctors whose administrators at a university or wherever or whatever institution they're at said you are not allowed to publicly go against the cdc. You're just not. We're not going to do that as an institution have people working here challenging or questioning what the CDC or Anthony Fauci or whomever is saying. So we had both self censorship to a large scale.
- [45:05]
Matt Kibbe
Well, you could lose your job.
- [45:07]
David Zweig
Oh yeah.
- [45:07]
Matt Kibbe
You could lose your funding. You could be not just lose your job, but made to the point where you lost your career forever.
- [45:16]
David Zweig
You're a non entity. You become like an untouchable.
- [45:18]
Matt Kibbe
There's some Pretty strong incentives to fall in line.
- [45:20]
David Zweig
I am sympathetic toward a lot of these people that, like, look, I mean, you went to school for a zillion years. You have your license. Like, this is how you're paying your mortgage. This is like, I get it. Like, I understand. Fortunately, there were some who had the courage to do it anyway and speak out. But I understand why that happened.
- [45:41]
Matt Kibbe
We should note that one of them is now the head of nih.
- [45:45]
David Zweig
Exactly.
- [45:45]
Matt Kibbe
Another one is now head of the fda. Marty Macari.
- [45:49]
David Zweig
Yeah.
- [45:50]
Matt Kibbe
And others as well. So it.
- [45:52]
David Zweig
And I. Tracy Hogue is now at fda. Like, there's. How, you know, maybe this is. And it was incredibly courageous, what they were doing. Slightly different, though, from a clinician, you know, at a university hospital, you know, who doesn't have tenure or something like that. Again, very courageous of what they did. I just want to draw a distinction that, like, you have tenure. Yes, you.
- [46:13]
Matt Kibbe
They could. These. I don't want to call them nobodies, but these regular guys in the system had no way to defend themselves.
- [46:20]
David Zweig
Right. If they didn't have tenure, you're just some clinician. You're seeing patients. Like, even if you saw what was going on was wrong, like, you had, you know, zero protections if you came out against this stuff. And indeed, as I just mentioned, others were explicitly told not to come out. So when we think about these sort of, like, narrative creation and narrative enforcement, there were all these different, like, mechanisms in place. Some that you could see, some you couldn't see. Meanwhile, I'm, like, in these text groups with these people. And at the same time, I have the, like, superintendent in my town and, like, parents on the local private Facebook group, like, yelling at me and saying, like, you want to kill children? You don't understand what's going on. I'm like, if only I could tell them. There's actually a lot of people who don't agree with this. Credentialed people. And by the way. But here's the thing, Matt. We don't even need to look at that. All we had to do was look at Europe. That was actually real. None of that was hidden. It was happening, but it was ignored or dismissed. And then later, private schools in America, schools in red states and red districts, they were open. Nothing consequential was happening there. The media loved highlighting. There's a school in Georgia. There was an outbreak. And the big thing I talk about in the book is the missing denominator. Well, okay, maybe there was an outbreak. Maybe there wasn't caused by the school. What about the other hundred schools in the area where there was no outbreak and what happened a month later? Well, cases actually went, went down in that area despite this outbreak. Like all this context was missing. Everything was about like there is a narrative, here's a storyline. We're gonna fucking follow that storyline no matter what. And that's basically what happened from like suppression of voices of doctors and others to the way the media would ignore things and then if they were forced to cover it, to dismiss it and, and then the way they would put shine a spotlight on like a Georgia school but without shining the light on the like hundred other schools nearby where nothing happened. Like all of these like different pieces, I kind of put them together to show like this is how a narrative, it's quite complex, like the web about how the narrative gets like calcified in the public's imagination.
- [48:40]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah.
- [48:41]
Unknown Host
At Kibbe on Liberty, Freedom is a lifestyle24.7, something you live and breathe and wear every day. If that describes you, you need the very best liberty swag in the market today. Just like this shirt I happen to be wearing. Go to freethepeople.org kol and check out our exciting merch. You too can love liberty and look cool.
- [49:04]
Matt Kibbe
Your general conclusion is this is a colossal failure of the elite class, a colossal failure of the media, colossal failure of public health and their bubble mentality. I've taken to calling it kind of a class struggle thing, which is kind of ironic because you have very left leaning elites that created haves and have nots because they still wanted the guy to deliver their Uber Eats order while they were sheltering in place. And maybe what you're doing and what the Free Press is doing and what all these dissident outlets that are now I think sort of taking over, maybe that's the reform because I feel like they mortally wounded themselves by such an obvious failure and even indifference to their failure.
- [50:03]
David Zweig
Yeah, certainly this like media ecosystem didn't exist, you know, five slash ten years ago where you have like the Free Press and you know, someone like Matt Taibbi, Schellenberger, these guys have, you know, very, very large audiences. It's funny when, when we were getting ready to launch my book, when you have a book with a publisher, they have a publicist on staff and they have a list of people they want to send, you know, early copies of your book to. And the list was the usual suspects, you know, eight different people at the New York Times and all these other places. But it also includes like 100 other news outlets. I'm making this up, but like the Toledo Gazette, the Arizona, you know, Daily Herald, whatever it may be. And I'm like, we're missing all the substacks. These guys have like a. An audience that's 10x some random newspaper somewhere in middle America. Not that we should ignore middle America, but they really don't understand the influence of the new media outlets, some of which is just one person, essentially, or at least largely.
- [51:15]
Matt Kibbe
Yeah, I don't even think it's willful. I just think the world is changing so quickly.
- [51:20]
David Zweig
They're in kind of the past and still thinking the same way. And I'm like, look, I want to be sending books to, like, I'm friends with these people. I know, like, we gotta get them to, like, these substacks. Even a substack with 30,000 followers, if they're sending out, like, unlike a newspaper or a magazine where there's, you know, I don't know, 10, 20 articles a day or something that are coming out. This is their one thing. They have one post. They're putting out a day or one post or week. So even if they only have 30,000 people and some newspaper has 100,000, that 30,000, it's probably far more of an impact because it's like landing in their inbox and it's like, here's the story.
- [51:58]
Matt Kibbe
And they've curated an audience that cares about this.
- [52:02]
David Zweig
Exactly. So it's quite interesting. I feel like I should start. Not that I want to be a publicist. I feel like I could successfully start a book publicity business because they seem to just not understand the sort of media landscape.
- [52:17]
Matt Kibbe
Well, at least your publisher is helping you with, with promotion.
- [52:20]
David Zweig
That's.
- [52:20]
Matt Kibbe
That's.
- [52:21]
David Zweig
Yeah, I don't want to drag. I'm not dragging my publisher.
- [52:22]
Matt Kibbe
That's not that usual thing anymore.
- [52:23]
David Zweig
Yeah, I'm not, I'm not. And of course, they've worked very hard, and my assist has been terrific and worked very hard. I'm just saying. I was just trying to illustrate your point about the influence of the new media and why it's important and that I think a lot of people, particularly in, you know, perhaps different institutions, don't have a real awareness of. Of the influence. And so I think that is a good. A good chance, you know, if we're. If this is sort of a dark conversation we're having here. The book is dark in many ways. This is one sort of light within that is seeing how, all right, there are other voices now coming through that are having a lot of influence. And when you have, like, Such an abject manifest failure of public health of the legacy media. It's going to drive people toward this stuff anyway.
- [53:11]
Matt Kibbe
I even saw like, I tried to see the upside of this shockingly granular censorship industrial complex that you guys helped expose. And in hindsight it seems really ham fisted that you have federal bureaucrats, you know, these gray suited Soviets and cubicles somewhere sorting through Bob's X posts like that joke's not appropriate. You can't say that. And I'm like this, this seems desperate at this point that they're, they've, they've lost control of the narrative and, and you know, the idea that you're going to try to censor every individual on social media ultimately is, has to fail.
- [53:54]
David Zweig
Yeah. And I should say I believe most of these people, it's hard to speak about the government, but certainly within public health and I think a lot of the government people as well, they believe they're doing the right thing. They don't. They're not the villain in this story. In their, in their minds, they, they are. We have, you know, at least specific to the pandemic, we have this virus coming. There's this, you know, the people are at risk. They had this almost like monomaniacal. And Francis Collins later admitted this in an interview which is, I recount in the book, not an interview with me, but where years later he said, look, I'm paraphrasing, but something to the effect of one of the biggest errors we made was focusing exclusively on the virus and not thinking through any of these second order effects. It's this whole cascade of things that anyone could see were going to happen. And indeed read in the academic literature, this was warned about and I talk about this in the book. There are a number of papers within epidemiology where they explicitly say if you close schools, here's the list of really bad things that are going to happen. And in this literature they weren't talking about a year or longer than a year, they were talking about a month or two. So this was known and this was ignored. But I think there's some element of they just became almost like in a fugue state or something where it was just like, this is all we care about. And I describe why I think that is. And in part it's because of again, incentive structures. If you're Anthony Fauci, you don't, I shouldn't say you don't care, but I should say you're not going to be judged on whether some kid who was a star lacrosse player, player and this was his chance to get into college, was to get, you know, to be seen by scouts and get a scholarship. He was, this was his one shot and they terminated the season. Anthony Fauci is not being judged on how that kid's life is now permanently altered forever because he couldn't go to college. And that's just any number of a zillion examples of how he's not judged.
- [56:02]
Matt Kibbe
On that he was going to be judged quantifiable.
- [56:04]
David Zweig
Exactly, like ineffable. It's like you can't, you don't even. It's hard to know he's not judged on any of that stuff. He's judged on the cases. And they had these dashboards, you know, it was almost like a scoreboard, like you're in like a casino where they're looking at, you know, the betting pools for different games. They had this, like flashing numbers with the graphs and stuff. This is in the front page of the New York Times every day for, you know, years. That's what he's judged on. So the inside incentive was built for him and public health people in general, that's, you know, for their own. And I talk a lot about this. It's quite fascinating that the psychology behind it. One of the chapters in my book is titled it feels good to feel like you're doing something or the title, something like that. Because there was a study done where public health professionals admitted in the study, they said even after they see that something doesn't work, they still want to continue it because it feels, it just feels good to feel like you have some agency.
- [57:04]
Matt Kibbe
We're doing something, we're doing something.
- [57:07]
David Zweig
And so of course it would not have been acceptable for Fauci and all these other people to just be like, look, this is a highly contagious respiratory virus. It's like virtually impossible to stop. Let's try to focus our protection, you know, Great Barrington style. Let's try to do what we can to help protect the people who are most vulnerable. But like, we ain't stopping this thing. Human beings. There is a degree of like, almost. And this is what I think about with people who are more religious, who I disagree with plenty of what they think about in the world. But one thing that showed, I think, some wisdom was that plenty of religious people were kind of like, look, you know, it's God's will. And with something like this, that largely is the case that these non pharmaceutical interventions are simply not effective over the long term. And you have to just accept that I can't do something about it. There's grave harm done in the hubris in thinking that you can do more than you actually can, that you can achieve more than you can achieve. I list a number of studies where over time, public health people over and over overestimate what they think the effect will be of some intervention that they do. And I think this comes from a good place. Why do you go into public health? You want to help people? How do I have interventions that are going to help poor people and help, you know, underprivileged moms or whatever it may be. But over and over again I keep showing that they then put some intervention in place in some of these, you know, millions of dollars on a study, and then it doesn't work. This happens all the time because they have a belief system that what they do is going to be more effective than it actually is. I think it comes from a good place. But it's quite dangerous when you then have those people running the show because then they're forcing these interventions on everyone. It's different if you just want to participate in a, you know, in a study. But when you're kind of pulling the lever on all of society and more than 50 million kids, you need more than just your belief system. You need evidence.
- [59:06]
Matt Kibbe
This is why I still, I'm still not satisfied with the answer. And I do think Fauci and David Morens wrote this article in 2020 that I cite all the time and I forget the name of the article, but it's one of these academic journals called Cell and the now infamous David Morins. But they talk about, you know, your stuff, man. They talk about reimagining society and re engineering society. And the phrase that I always quote is bending modernity. So there is a arrogance and fatal conceit in this idea that you could have a scientific flawless, top down response to a pandemic. Put aside gain of function, put aside all that other stuff that I think is absolutely worth talking about. But, but this idea that you could sort of re engineer things and lockdowns and preventing people from going to work and all of these interventions and closing down schools, these were quite novel. There is a whole literature not just on schools, but on the obvious economic consequences of lockdowns and what it would do to people at the margins who, who depend on an open society just to eat that day. Like there's a whole literature on this. So why this radical departure? And so quickly like that, you know, it's as if Dr. Evil called down and there is no Dr. Evil. But like, how did they all fall in line and pursue this radical agenda? And I think, like you say, like, Fauci doesn't have an incentive to think about those things, but perhaps an accident of history is that he will be held accountable specifically because of angry moms and because of the collateral damage and because people are now, you know, even, you know, they're maybe not all willing to admit it publicly yet, but they're, they're like, I really got hurt during that. My family got hurt. I couldn't see my mom when she was dying. All that stuff. That might be why Fauci is held accountable. We'll see.
- [61:20]
David Zweig
Yeah, there's. Well put. He should be held accountable. I don't even know what that means. Accountable. I'm not much interested in like, trying to get put people in prison and stuff. Like, to me, you know, I just.
- [61:34]
Matt Kibbe
Don'T want it to happen again.
- [61:35]
David Zweig
Right. So to me, I don't think what happened was illegal in large. You know, people can argue about it, you know, and they're obviously the law is quite, you know, elastic and people can argue it in different ways. Yeah.
- [61:46]
Matt Kibbe
During emergencies.
- [61:47]
David Zweig
Yeah. There's all sorts of special powers, blah, blah, blah. What, what is important to me though is, you know, why I spent years writing this book is creating a record of what happened. And part of my book, it's certainly woven in there and I have some sections on, like, these are the harms that were incurred. So make no mistake, that's there. But that's not what the book is focused on, but rather it's how did this happen? So hopefully people will look at this and have an understanding of. And it doesn't need to be a pandemic. It's like any next thing, the next crisis, the next crisis to understand and quite. There's always some mini crisis unfolding at all times because the things, these sort of dynamics at play, you can see happening all the time. But of course the knobs are going to get turned to 11 during whatever next crisis there may be. And that to me, to your point, is far more important. It's just how do we prevent this? And it's by an educated public. It's by people who will, and I assume most of your audience already has a cynical view on this, but I'm hoping that it's the people that will.
- [62:58]
Matt Kibbe
Buy your book, I think is the answer.
- [63:00]
David Zweig
Right? I mean, well, it's just that I think there's more than just having a cynical sense about things in order to help, like crystallize that it helps to have like, like a mental model and like a command of actually the pieces and how they fit together. So, yeah, that's what I attempted to do with the book is to provide people a history and also, in effect, a guidebook to observing sort of what's going on behind the scenes in the next crisis.
- [63:31]
Matt Kibbe
Okay. Shameless promotion. Your new book is called An Abundance of Caution, American Schools, the Virus, and A Story of Bad Decisions. I assume this is available everywhere?
- [63:41]
David Zweig
Well, it's actually been they blew out of supplies in a bunch of places.
- [63:45]
Matt Kibbe
But yes, that's a good problem.
- [63:48]
David Zweig
Yes and no. But yes, it is available everywhere for order.
- [63:51]
Matt Kibbe
And the next places you're going to are those publicly available on your website, Substack, whatever.
- [63:59]
David Zweig
Yeah, I've been a bit remiss in updating that because I've just been flying all over the place, literally. But yes, I'm very easy to find David Zweig.com and silentlunch.net and on X and Avid Zweig. So I'm easy to track. And I like talking with people too, when I can. So if people want to reach out, I'm also easy to find that way.
- [64:24]
Matt Kibbe
Cool. This was great. Thank you.
- [64:26]
David Zweig
Thanks, Matt. Yeah, fantastic.
- [64:28]
Unknown Host
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 Free the people dot org.