American Thought Leaders - How Big Pharma Captured Public Health: Toby Rogers

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

“250 years of economic and political liberalism, and then it disappears in the blink of an eye in early 2020,” says Toby Rogers, a medical freedom advocate and a fellow at the Brownstone Institute.Over the last two years, he assessed every FDA and CDC expert advisory committee meeting for COVID-19 vaccine approvals—and what he discovered was shocking, he says.“It's preposterous, the level of junk science that's being passed off as actual science by FDA and CDC right now,” Mr. Rogers says.How did pharmaceutical companies capture our public health apparatus? And what will it take to turn things around?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

250 years of economic and political liberalism, and then it disappears in the blink of an eye. Dr. Toby Rogers is a medical freedom advocate and fellow at the Brownstone Institute, where he writes about public health, regulatory capture, big pharma corruption, and the epidemic of chronic illness facing children today. It's preposterous, the level of junk science that's being passed off as actual science by FDA and CDC.

Over the last two years, he assessed every FDA and CDC expert advisory committee meeting for COVID-19 vaccine approvals. And what he discovered was shocking. The statistics in these meetings are absurd. They would not pass a high school biology class. They would not pass an introduction to statistics class in a college. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Toby Rogers, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Well, thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of your work.

You're doing amazing interviews. I'm just so honored to be on your program. Wow. Well, you got me speechless for once. Thank you. And I just witnessed a most fascinating presentation that you gave about what has happened to our society, the profound changes that we've seen. Something that's very interesting to me is you come from, as you've described to me, from the left of the left. And so why don't you give us just a sense of who you are, where you come from, and then that will inform what we're going to discuss.

Well, I grew up in Southern California to a family that loved education and went and got a bachelor's in political science at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia. And then I worked for every good lefty nonprofit I could find. So I've worked for farm workers and small business assistants and worked on anti-poverty programs, environmental programs, anti-toxic waste programs, electric buses and LGBT issues as well. And I found that I love school, so in school comes easy to me. So I went and got a master's degree at Berkeley, good left institution. Found that I liked teaching while I was at Berkeley and then I went down to the University

of Sydney in Sydney, Australia and got a PhD in political economy. And the University of Sydney has this legendary political economy program that combines moral philosophy, political science, and economics all as one subject. And that's how I think one should approach topics of politics and economics. You need to talk about morality, politics, and economics all as one subject. And I was actually working on Adam Smith's views on slavery. Spent about a year on that. And then things took a turn and I went in a different direction that's led me on the course to where I am now, now that I'm a Brownstone fellow and really associated with small L libertarians in this fight against

the pharmaceutical industry and their takeover of American society. So it's been quite the political journey. But what I find is small L libertarians understand what's happening right now with the morality, the politics, and the economics of this crisis that we're in in the United States. The Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, are just doing absolutely amazing work and I'm delighted to be associated with them now. Why don't you describe to me the crisis as you understand it. Yeah, so we have lived with economic and political liberalism for the last 250 years. And everybody loves political liberalism, right?

So elections and freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, courts, rule of law, constitutions. There's widespread agreement that political liberalism is fantastic. And then Adam Smith introduces us to economic liberalism which is free markets, free trade, and the right to make money, the right to entrepreneurship, that sort of thing. And so that's the system that we've lived under for 250 years. What's weird about the present moment is that in March of 2020, all that disappeared, right? So political

liberalism goes out the window. Freedom of speech is banned. There's censorship across the internet. Freedom of religion is banned. You're not allowed to meet in churches. You're not allowed to sing in a choir, freedom of assembly is banned, all that disappears in early 2020 and that's weird right? 250 years of economic and political liberalism and then it disappears in the blink of an eye in early 2020 and so a lot of what I'm trying to unpack on my sub stack on the work that I do for the Brownstone Institute is trying to understand what on earth happened how is it that we went from one system to this entirely new system now if I may

describe it which is the pharmaceutical industry dictates what's on the evening news not on your show but on the mainstream networks of CNN, MSNBC, and the rest. And the pharmaceutical industry dictates what the regulatory agencies do in Washington, D.C. The pharmaceutical industry dictates the papers that get published in scientific journals. It's this radical remaking of society whereby the pharmaceutical industry, big tech, and government collude to rewrite the economic and political rules for our whole society.

And that happened just in an instant in March of 2020. It's profoundly strange. Many people were caught off guard. In fact, I don't know too many people that were thinking, of course, this is what, it was obvious that this is what must happen. Or there's people who haven't noticed. I agree with you that we are in a, there's been a profound shift in how we function as a society. But a heck of a lot of people haven't noticed, really.

Isn't that interesting, too? It is strange. For you and I, there's been this rupture. It's pre-2020 and post-2020. It's this rupture in the fabric of society and in the rules of the game, right? This rupture in how our economy works, lockdown, shutting down the entire economy, hoping that it will start up again, trillions of dollars of stimulus money, cash being sent to families,

small businesses being shut down. Everything's different post-2020 for us. And we're now three and a half years into it. And it continues. Everything that we did in response to COVID failed. There's been no course correction. We don't have government by the consent of the governed anymore. I think that is a tall statement, because it has shifted, but we don't have government with consent by the governed. So break that down for me.

In an earlier era, when I was growing up, when you were growing up, politicians at least went through the ritual process of trying to make it look like there was popular support for what they were doing. There was at least some attempt to triangulate, to pick off some independents, to assemble a majority coalition. And now so much of what happens is dictated by the administrative state. So you have CDC, FDA putting forward recommendations, what have you, about masks, about treatments, about vaccines. Those aren't elected officials. And you have the Biden administration, who knows that Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky are very unpopular. They somehow get shown the door in the run-up to the midterm

elections, but then they get replaced by clones who are exactly like them. There is no sense in which the current administration is responding to the data in any way. And it seems that the Biden administration knows that COVID policies are a political loser, and yet they're unable to come to grips with the failure of COVID shots, with the failure of remdesivir, with the failure of the hospital protocols. There's been no course correction. There's been no mea culpa. There's been no reassessment of the path that we're on. And so it just feels like elected officials and bureaucrats and the administrative state in DC tell people what to do, but there's very little effort on building a majoritarian coalition of popular support around any of these policies.

It feels top-down. It feels forced. It feels arbitrary, and it is not based on science whatsoever. But we're told it is in many cases. We're told it is. I watched every single meeting of the FDA's and the CDC's expert advisory committee meetings for all vaccine approvals in connection with COVID shots over the last two years. And these meetings are shocking. They're very long, eight hour meetings, but it's all political theater.

It's all sort of sciencey adjacent sounding things. The statistics in these meetings are absurd. They would not pass a high school biology class. They would not pass an introduction to statistics class in a college. It's this sort of pandemic theater, but the actual science is abysmal. And over time, the standards have gotten weaker and weaker and weaker. So the initial Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials in adults had about 22,000 people in the treatment

group, 22,000 people in the placebo group. By the time the clinical trials reached children, they only had a few hundred children in the clinical trials, not enough to be able to know if there are harms coming from these shots. And then for the boosters, they have decided to skip clinical trials in humans altogether. So the initial booster was only tested in eight mice. The new booster that is on the way is going to be tested in even fewer mice. These people are not doing science. They're doing this sort of profitable corporate government collusion, but they're not doing proper science.

It's not even close. It's preposterous, the level of junk science that's being passed off as actual science by FDA and CDC right now. I want to mention something. You're not new to, let's say, the realm of pharmaceutical-oriented science. This is something that you ended up focusing on. Maybe give me a little bit of that background. Yeah, so I was one year into my Ph.D PhD program at the University of Sydney and I had a topic that I liked and I liked my life in Sydney.

It was fantastic. And my then girlfriend's son was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. And I knew a little bit about autism. My mom was a special education teacher when I was growing up so I had a passing familiarity with autism but I'd never really studied it in depth. So I decided to spend one day, a Saturday, I set aside eight hours to read everything I could about autism. Just wanted to wrap my head around what was happening with autism and then I was going to go back to working on my doctoral thesis on Adam Smith.

Well, when you're in a PhD program, you're required to read original sources. You can't read secondary sources. You have to go back and read the original sources. So the CDC has this narrative about what's happening with autism. But then I went and started looking up their sources. So the CDC has this narrative about what's happening with autism, but then I went and started looking up their sources. And like I see now with the COVID shots, the underlying sources they were using to make their argument were weak, the data did not support their narrative, and it fell apart fairly quickly. One day of research turned into two days of research, turned into three days of research.

I'm a political economist, so I was curious about the costs of autism. The costs of autism are through the roof. This was back in 2015, already we were seeing annual costs of autism in the United States of $268 billion a year, projected to reach $1 trillion per year in the United States by 2025. So you and I know the U.S. defense budget is about 800 billion dollars a year. Autism costs are projected to exceed US Defense Department costs by 2025. This is a massive political economy story. No government in the world is asking why this is happening, how this happened. There's no plan to raise additional

revenue to meet the additional cost challenges. So anyway, I ended up spending six weeks doing nothing but read about autism, 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And so I went and had a very difficult conversation with my supervisor and explained what had happened. And so we had several very hard conversations. And eventually I changed my doctoral thesis topic to the political economy of autism. I spent the next four years reading everything that's been written about autism and trying to understand this dynamic,

both the politics and economics of autism. And what I discovered is that the pharmaceutical industry has captured regulatory agencies, CDC, FDA, NIH, but they've captured so much more than that. They've captured the media, mainstream media, they've captured knowledge production itself throughout science and medicine. So textbooks in medical schools are produced by the pharmaceutical industry, professors are bought off through grants and speaking engagements and that sort of thing. Continuing medical education is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry. So any conversation we might be able to have

about the root causes of autism, the ways that various toxic chemicals from mercury and coal-fired power plants to the ingredients in vaccines, Tylenol, SSRIs, various pharmaceutical products are problematic. We have very good data on this now. All that conversation is forbidden. And so what I discovered was

the pharmaceutical industry's playbook, the ways in which they manipulate the conversation, control the conversation, control what's allowed to be said, by government, by academic journals, by regulators. And even, I just might add, within their own companies. For sure. Right? Yeah. So they have this level of power and control that is unprecedented and this level of intrusion into our lives, which is unprecedented. The pharmaceutical industry literally transgresses our bodies with their products. And so what we have is this capture of our whole society.

And so what I discovered is that autism is less of a scientific mystery. We actually have pretty good understanding of the root causes, the ways that various toxicants increase autism risk. And so I finished my PhD in 2019 and I came out into the world. And my theory at the time was that the costs of autism are so enormous that politicians will surely want to have a conversation with me about what's happening, why this is happening. And indeed, I had a few conversations with a few politicians who would meet with me during that time.

But in 2019, the pharmaceutical industry was running vaccine mandate bills across all 50 states. This is pre-COVID. Focusing on the childhood schedule to kick any kids out of school who are not vaccinated. And what that does is it eliminates the unvaccinated control group that would show that unvaccinated children are actually healthier than vaccinated children. I immediately jumped into the fight and started working with state-based groups to push back against the pharmaceutical industry and try and knock down some of these bills. And we won some of these fights and we lost some of them. And then six months later, COVID happens. But when COVID happens, I already know the pharmaceutical industry's playbook.

I understand how they buy off politicians, how they control regulators, the ways that they control the knowledge production system. Sure enough, they did it all over again with COVID. And so what I had seen them do to society in connection with childhood vaccines and the autism debate, now they are doing to all of society and to adults and to seniors with COVID and COVID shots. But it's this entire process of capture. And so it becomes takeover of the state by the pharmaceutical industry. Everything you're describing increasingly comports with what many people on this show have told me, which we verified.

But it strains all credulity that one industry could have that much power in society when at the same time there's enormous other players, right? You mentioned big tech, of course, and you mentioned the administrative state. You mentioned 10 power centers or something like that, if I've got that right. Yeah, so I wrote an article on Substack

about the 10 cartels that control the United States. And so Big Pharma is at the top of the pyramid, if you will. But it's also defense contractors, high-tech industries. Big philanthropy is incredibly influential. So we have this concentration of power in a few industries, and these industries are not traditional capitalism. It's not competition. It's not the small business world that Adam Smith was writing about as far as the baker

and the brewer and the butcher. It's oligopolies and monopolies. And it's concentrated power. They use their concentrated power to buy off the political system. And look, it is cheaper for the pharmaceutical industry to buy a politician or buy regulators than it is to do research and development on a new product. Right, so research and development can take 10 years on a new product, cost billions of dollars. You can buy off the political system

and you can buy off regulators for a whole lot less than that. And then if you buy off the political system and the can buy off regulators for a whole lot less than that. And then if you buy off the political system and the regulatory system, what's happened with COVID shots is you can force the public to take your shots, to consume your product, and it's cheaper than actually doing proper regulation. But to your point, yes, it is bewildering what we're going through. So when I started working on the political economy of autism, I felt like I was losing my mind. Every single day for six weeks, I broke down crying because the data was so bad and it did

not match what the CDC was saying. I felt like I was losing my mind. And I kept going back to original sources, original sources, original sources, original sources. Don't read what the CDC is saying about the data. Read the actual data for yourself. So the model of the Royal Society in England, the oldest scientific society in the world, is nullius in verba, which means take nobody's word for it.

Examine the evidence for yourself. Do the study for yourself. Actually read the study. Not the New York Times take on the study, not the way that Rachel Maddow talks about the study in the evening. Read the study itself. And when you read the study itself, you find that the CDC is lying, the FDA is lying,

the NIH is lying about COVID shots, about the childhood schedule, about autism, about all sorts of things, about Lyme disease, about a number of other things. And so the way that I stay sane is to actually read the studies. But people who have been through the autism wars, when COVID happened, we weren't surprised. We'd seen the playbook before. And when it started to

play out in similar ways again, we manned the barricades, right? We immediately started to push back, fight back, and try to stop this further takeover of society by the pharmaceutical industry. A lot of the policies came from the public health establishment. Is your contention that Big Pharma was deeply involved in this decision-making at the beginning? Do you have evidence around that? Yeah, so when you watch these FDA and CDC meetings where these expert advisors are weighing in on the data, what one would want is a rigorous back and forth, right? You'd want skepticism.

What do they call it in the military? A red team to challenge the plan by the blue team, right? You would want pushback from the experts to question all aspects of the data, to be skeptical, to be curious, to make sure that the data is robust. That was my expectation going into watching these meetings. That's not what happens at all.

These insiders, these so-called experts, see themselves as allies with industry. There's no hard questions. In fact, at a recent meeting, these so-called expert advisors apologized to Moderna for asking a single hard question about the data. They often use the word we to refer to FDA and the pharmaceutical company that's applying for licensing of these vaccines. They see themselves as in the same business together. And it's really just about getting the approval process across the line, getting these things authorized, and getting these shots into arms as quickly

as possible into as many people as possible. And then hopefully maybe sort of kind of gathering data about possible harms later. And then that sort of falls apart. The FDA had this system called V-safe during the initial rollout of COVID shots. Well, they've dismantled V-safe now. It was the only active surveillance system they had of vaccine harms. They've given up on that. There's this longstanding system called VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System.

It's passive. It's not ideal. They always pour cold water on that and say that it's not reliable. We don't have a vaccine safety system in this country. We just don't. And so we would want these doctors and scientists to be acting in the public interest. They're not. They're actually acting in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. And then they tend to be rewarded for that, either with NIH grants or with a revolving door where they actually get jobs as vice presidents or what have you of these various vaccine manufacturers. It's a completely corrupt

system. I have to believe that most doctors, for example, people go into their fields to do good. Maybe they want to do well for themselves, but they're not looking to be in the sort of structure that you're describing to me. How could it be possible that so many distinguished, ostensibly decent people are completely oblivious to this, in fact, would say, well, this is preposterous. This is conspiracy theory, right? You hear that a lot. Anyway, but that's the difficulty. You're always facing it in any area which seems to sort of defy, let's call it the correct view, the orthodox view, right, today. Yeah, that's very well said.

And many people in the movement for medical freedom tell a story of monsters, right? Of evildoers, of nefarious actors behind the curtain who want to do harm, who enjoy harm. We've seen that. I just want to jump in and say we know those exist too. Fair enough. So there are some, but that's not going to be everybody or some large portion of people. I think this is more a story of structural incentives that are misaligned. So if you're a pediatrician, look, I'm sure most pediatricians went into that line of

work with the best of intentions to help children thrive and live the healthiest life. But you come out of medical school with a quarter million dollars or more in debt, you go through the hazing process of residency staying up all night and being yelled at by the chief resident and what have you, right? And you finally make it into your private practice, or maybe you're working at a hospital, and you're told that you get a bonus if 60% of your patients are fully vaccinated. So you're like, okay, I'll get the bonus this year. It'll help me pay off my debts.

And the next year, it's 70% of your patients have to be fully vaccinated. And then 80% of your patients have to be fully vaccinated. And by that point, well, you've gone along with the system for a while, and it seems to be OK. And it's a series of baby steps over a long period of time. And so this thing that I do where I actually watch the FDA and CDC meetings to see what they're up to, well, they don't have time to do that, right? So they just take somebody else's word for it.

And they say, well, if it's OK with the CDC and the FDA, it's probably OK. It's a series of structural incentives that are not aligned with the public interest and the slippery slope and trying to fit in. And look, these people are selected for their ability to fit in, for the ability to obey orders. Medicine is very hierarchical. It's organized along military lines. You see these FDA and CDC officials who some of them have military rank. This is not a normal workplace that we're talking about. Over time I think you just slide down the slippery slope of not asking questions and then it becomes too late. You've been doing this for 10 years, you've

kind of looked the other way when things have gone sideways with a couple of your patients and now you're culpable. And so I think there's a mental process that we don't understand very well by which people eventually buy in, but they become true believers. They're not, I don't even think they realize that they're causing harm or that they're recommending shots that are not tested against proper placebos that have not been shown to produce the benefits that are claimed. So I think it's a process over the course of years.

I think it's subtle. I think it's a story of very good people who end up doing bad things in some case. And look, Hannah Arendt dealt with this in trying to understand what happened with Nazi Germany. And that was a story of monsters, right? And lots of Nazi monsters. The SS was horrible. Lots of society was horrible, but she told a story of bureaucrats, right? The banality of evil and the ways that bureaucracies create various incentives that lead to outcomes that nobody would have wanted in the beginning. So I mean it's a sociological story of how societies go off track,

and I think the United States society has gone off track. You described a situation where that accountability, which we want to believe is there, is not really there. So what do you think is there? Instead of accountability? Yes. Profit motive, fitting in, not rocking the faith in God, religious practice has declined. But in its place, we sort of worship this pharma junk science.

It's become an idol. It's become a belief system. It's become divorced from science itself, the rigorous rough and tumble of science itself. That's not the proper way to do medicine. We must have skepticism. We must be curious. We must demand the most rigorous standards. And that's not happening right now, given the power of the pharmaceutical industry to shape the conversation and the ways that the

media reports on it, the ways that politicians and regulators think about these issues. That seems terribly daunting to conceive of and imagine, but certainly at least the vestiges of this incredible system that the founding fathers of America conceived exists. And there's a legal system which seems to be functioning, at least in some ways, very well, pushing back on some very significant actions. We're in this moment. Society has changed.

There's a growing kind of pushback to some of that change. People are becoming more cognizant that something bizarre has happened and they need to wake up. What do you think people should be doing here? We had this economic and political system that over time has become corrupted. We have corporations getting larger and larger and larger and then eventually colluding and taking over the state and weaponizing the state to increase their profits in ways that make us poorer and also hurt people when it comes to the

pharmaceutical industry pushing products that are not safe on the general population. So let's take this in two different pieces. So the first piece is what to do about big pharma. That's the 800-pound gorilla, so let's start there. During my doctoral thesis, I did the regulatory history of successful regulation of other toxic products. So asbestos, tobacco, DDT, various pharmaceutical products, thalidomide that caused harm. Even going back a long ways to the beginning of the regulatory state that emerges with the Progressive Era, the government doesn't

really want to fund the studies that are gonna smash an industry and lead to a product being withdrawn from the market. The way that you get good science in connection with dangerous products is through the courts. It's through the toxic tort system. And so basically plaintiffs lawyers will take a look at whatever data they can find about a toxic product. They will calculate the odds of winning a court case, a toxic court case, and then they will actually go out and fund the scientific research to figure out how dangerous this product actually is. That's how the system has worked over the last hundred years. So that's how this research that actually that you end up spending those weeks reading gets

done. That's what you're telling me because industry isn't doing it, right? That's fascinating. Correct. Yeah. So you actually need the court system and you need deep pocket plaintiffs attorneys to spend $10 million, $20 million, what have you, on a study so that you actually have the data to figure out how harmful a toxic product is. That's the way our system works. The pharmaceutical industry knew that. They were losing in court in the 70s and early 1980s when it came to lawsuits over harms from vaccines. So in 1986 they got Congress to pass the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and that gave them liability protection.

You cannot take the pharmaceutical industry to court if your child is harmed by a vaccine because of the 1986 Act. There's this separate court system. It doesn't work very well. The government stands in on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry rather than the pharmaceutical industry representing itself. So the way to solve the problem of toxic vaccines being forced upon the population is to remove liability protection for the pharmaceutical industry. Put it back into the courts. Let's fight it out in the courts. Let's have a conversation about the data in the courts in an adversarial system,

not in the CDC and the FDA that are captured. But you'd have to repeal the 1986 Act. You'd also have to repeal the the PrEP Act that happens in the early 2000s after the events of 9-11 and what-have-you. If we do that the pharmaceutical industry would have an incentive to create safer vaccines. Right now the only incentive is to add as many vaccines as possible to the schedule because it's just all profit and there's no risk because they can't be taken to court right now. So that's how we deal with the pharmaceutical industry. But the pharmaceutical industry is one big cartel,

but there's nine or ten other cartels that are problematic. So I think we need to do a couple things. We need to bring back antitrust. We need to break up some of these oligopolies and actually force these companies to compete with each other so that the market decides. I also think the administrative state has grown too big. So we no longer have elected officials, legislators making decisions. The administrative state, the bureaucratic state, is making over half of the new policies

that govern our day-to-day lives. It's completely out of control. The administrative state needs to be completely reined in. The size of the state needs to be shrunk significantly, and power needs to be decentralized. We need to take matters of health out of DC and not just move them to the states, but move them to families, right, and empower families and local jurisdictions to make decisions. This notion that we're just going to turn to 15 bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. to make all our decisions for our lives, it's failed. This was an experiment over the last three and a half years

about how we might respond to a pandemic, to a crisis, what have you. Centralizing power in Washington, D.C., centralizing public health decisions in Washington, D.C., has been a catastrophic failure. We must empower families, parents, individuals to make their own decisions. We have to shrink the size of the federal government so they can't be captured, so they can't try to take over all aspects of our lives. Okay, that makes a lot of sense, except you're describing a situation where to some extent the institutions that would do that are going to have a hard time doing that because of the capture that would do that are going to have a hard time doing that because of the

capture that you described. I'm saying we need a political revolution in this country to seize power back from corrupted industries from a corrupted government. Half measures aren't going to do it. Gradualism is not going to do it. So in my PhD work, I found that the costs of autism are so enormous. You could do the same thing with diabetes. You could do the same thing with cancer, what have you. The cost of the mismanagement of the COVID crisis has generated trillions of dollars for the pharmaceutical industry

and left us sick, poor, rampant inflation, massive budget deficits. The federal government is completely out of control. Our political system is completely out of control. There are various politicians who are running for president who are promising small tweaks around the edges. That's not going to do it. We need a wholesale re-conceptualization of our government. We need to return to a smaller government. We need to take matters of public health out of the hands of corrupted bureaucrats.

But that's only going to happen if there's a political revolution from below. So I think people of good faith of both parties need to demand that their candidates address these issues. So, I mean, it's a political organizing problem. It's a massive problem, but we're getting sicker by the day. We are not well cared for by government officials. We are in a moment of crisis. We've been in a moment of crisis for at least three and a half years, but probably for at least 35 years since the 1986 act passed.

We need a revolution from below to restore sanity to our broken system. Well, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation for me. A final thought as we finish? Yeah, I have a couple of thoughts. This seems like a very complicated story, and I think it's actually relatively straightforward. If you follow the money, you can actually figure out what's going on. This is a relatively straightforward story of the way that a society loses its way, the ways that power corrupts, the ways that corruption takes over a corporation, an industry, government. If

you follow the money, there's a money trail here that's pretty obvious. Who's getting rich off of this? Who has no liability for harms? And all of the injuries and suffering are happening with families and individuals. I think at the end of the day, this is a question of who do you want making decisions. I think when we centralize power in Washington, D.C., as we've seen over the last three and a half years, bad things happen, society falls apart, capture leads to dangerous products being forced upon the general public. I think we just need to get back to our roots, to our values, to 330 million people making the best decisions for their lives, not captured bureaucrats telling us how to live.

Well, Toby Rogers, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Well, thank you for having me. I've enjoyed our conversation so much. Thank you all for joining Toby Rogers and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janne Kellek.