Ask Dr. Drew - CA Gov. Newsom Bemoans Bungling of COVID-19 Pandemic, Passes Blame: “It was hardly I; it was we” w/ John Phillips & Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 263

Episode Date: September 17, 2023

In Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new interview with Chuck Todd, the CA Governor bemoans the anger he faced after his much-derided COVID-19 lockdown strategy, now saying “I think we would’ve done everything differently” in hindsight and “I think there’s a lot of humility” – before backtracking and passing the blame to others: “we didn’t know what we didn’t know. And it was hardly I; it was we, collectively.” John Phillips and Dr. Kelly Victory discuss the new wave of history-rewriting and blame-passing from officials who previously championed lockdowns and mandates but are suddenly changing their tune as election season approaches. John Phillips is the host of The John Phillips Show, airing weekdays from noon to 3pm PT on AM 790 KABC. Phillips began his radio career as the youngest major-market radio talk show host in the country. He is also a columnist for The Orange County Register and makes regular appearances on cable news. Follow him at https://x.com/JohnnyDontLike and listen to the John Phillips Show podcast on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • PRIMAL LIFE - Dr. Drew recommends Primal Life's 100% natural dental products to improve your mouth. Get a sparkling smile by using natural teeth whitener without harsh chemicals. For a limited time, get 60% off at https://drdrew.com/primal • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew • BIRCH GOLD - Don’t let your savings lose value. You can own physical gold and silver in a tax-sheltered retirement account, and Birch Gold will help you do it. Claim your free, no obligation info kit from Birch Gold at https://birchgold.com/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 WITH DR. KELLY VICTORY 」 Dr. Kelly Victory MD is a board-certified trauma and emergency specialist with over 30 years of clinical experience. She served as CMO for Whole Health Management, delivering on-site healthcare services for Fortune 500 companies. She holds a BS from Duke University and her MD from the University of North Carolina. Follow her at https://earlycovidcare.org and https://twitter.com/DrKellyVictory. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), Dr. Drew After Dark (YMH), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

and welcome everyone today our guest is going to be john phillips he has been a friend of kelly's for a long time and myself for a long time as well uh john phillips show airs weekday weekdays noon to three pacific time on 790k abc a show where i used to have a i think i used to have that exact same same time slot didn't i susan um and then john yeah you're alive mid his oh his his is noon to three six i thought his is noon to three to six. I thought his is noon to three. I don't know. We'll find out.

Uh, John began his radio career, uh, as the youngest major market radio talk show host in the country is also my columnist with the Orange County register. Regular appearances on cable news. You can follow him at, uh, the x.com slash Johnny don't like J O H N N Y donn-n-y don't like and i'm gonna bring kelly in very soon because those two have a long-standing rapport and uh so let's get right to it our laws as it pertained to substances are draconian and bizarre the psychopaths start this right he was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography btsd love addiction fentanyl heroin ridiculous five months i'm a doctor for say where the hell you think i learned that Alcohol, because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction. Fentanyl and heroin, ridiculous.

I'm a doctor for f***'s sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat.

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B-I-R-C-H-D-O-L-D dot com slash D-R-E-W. So here we are. As I said, I'm going to bring Kelly in here. Dr. Victory, of course, in mirror. Oh, my mic wasn't on. As I said, I'm going to bring Dr. Victory in here in mere moments. John Phillips show. You should check it out on 790k ABC. Noon to three. That's right, Susan. My notes tell me. In fact, Susan, hang on. Get behind the mic there. Why don't you tell them your story with, first of all, how much you love John Phillips' show? I do.

I've always listened. And he used to follow you. So I'd hear him when I was in the car. And also after, whenever I was listening to your show. But I also found Dr. Kelly on his show. I want to thank him for setting her up so that I could be introduced to her during the pandemic, but I'm going to try to center your camera if you don't mind. Okay.

Go ahead and do that. And let's bring in John Phillips. There he is. It's like the old days, John, John used to help out on my hln show when we used to sit in boxes like this and talk about with other people there'd be like you'd be one of three boxes or something with the producers would put together but thanks for being here today and thanks for having me and i've got to say i'm impressed that you say x and not twitter because i still say twitter but then again I still put 2016 on my checks.

So I've got a lot to learn. I have a tendency to write 19 before and then wonder where I am. So don't, don't, don't feel bad. Uh, and, uh, the, uh, I, I really actually try to, as a discipline, eventually I will do it more automatically, but I have to pay attention to say X. I try to do that consciously. But it's noon to three, right? Pacific, is that your show?

Yeah. Noon to three. Yeah, that's what I thought. Isn't that what I used to have was midday live and then you followed? Yeah, you were noon to three and thenillian and i were on three to six that's what i thought that's what i remember and so i you think i don't know if you heard the story that uh mrs penske susan just told but she was a huge fan remains a huge fan of your show and

she quotes you all the time and uh she came home one day and goes you know john phillips has this this lady on his show and she seems to understand exactly what's going on and we need to talk with her i thought she was going to be the doctor that was taking over for you at first i was like oh they're getting her ready for her own show to take drew spot and i was like but she's good and we should have her on the show because she's she's no nonsense you have to pay careful attention when my wife speaks she goes i thought they were getting you her ready groomed to replace you but she was good no i just i really liked her i liked her point of view because she wasn't afraid to say things and And we were getting censored everywhere.

And all the doctors were just running scared. And she could say what she wanted on the radio. So I was really happy to hear that. Until she couldn't. And then we brought her over here. Sorry about that. Thank you for exposing us and the radio world to Kelly. And we love having her over here.

Turned out she's married to a dear friend of mine from medical school and if you know this part of the story we didn't know that until she arrived here oh yeah dr. Ron who you do back in at USC and your love life days yep yep yep yep well good tree tree love line tree pre. We were pals in the classroom part of medical school even. All right. Get Kelly in here. Yeah, I'm going to get Kelly in. Quickly, I'm going to ask you to sort of frame what you think is going on with Gavin Newsom these days.

He seems to have some kind of weird apology to her where he doesn't. He's certainly not making amends. It's sort of a weird kind of like, hey, man, we didn't know. What are you going to do? It feels like preparing for a national stage. He's got to clean this up before he gets on the national stage. But I don't think he's doing a very reasonable job. What do you say? Yeah, Gavin Newsom is never going to run for office in the state of California

again. He's termed out as governor. If he wanted to be U.S. senator, he had his opportunity and he took a pass on it. He could have appointed himself when Kamala Harris's seat opened up. So it's the presidency or bust for him. And California during COVID-19 was like North Korea. Everything was shut down. We were shut down longer than just about any other state in the union. And he told us while he was doing it that he was following the science and the science was dictating all of his policies. And if he didn't do that, then we were going to kill all our grandmothers and he didn't want that on his conscience. But now he's going to have to run in places like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina, places that did not shut down like the state of California. And if he goes into those states and he tells them, I had no other choice, this was the only way to do it, they're going to

know that he's full of it because they didn't do that. And they're still around to talk about it. They're still around to vote in Democratic primaries. So it's just not an argument that'll go for him. And to the extent that he's acknowledging that he made mistakes, he's not explaining what those mistakes were. The farthest he was willing to go was saying that maybe we shouldn't have shut down the beaches. Maybe we shouldn't have shut down the tennis courts and the golf courses, because we know that being outside is fine. But then when he was pressed by Chuck Todd on whether or not he would do anything different with the schools, he defended himself and said, no, absolutely not. I'm not not going into that so if you can't acknowledge that shutting down the schools was a mistake

you've learned nothing to me you know john uh i want to talk about the prop 13 thing too once we get kelly in here but as it pertains to the schools you know i did this nightly show on fox 11 here locally we were reporting on sort of what the day's news on COVID, right? And the reason they hired me, it was made explicit to me, that it was because I was open to not just the party lined out of Sacramento. I was sort of trying to evaluate things and come up with a proper answer. And when they closed the schools, they brought a school board member into the into the studio to announce what he was doing and there's that i have i have found the footage and i've aired it on

the podcast i do with adam carolla where i'm going who told you to do this where did you get this idea that this is the right thing to do is did you consult with somebody for infectious disease is the cdc telling you no is dr fauci telling you no where did you come up with this i i really pushed him i was upset about it and he goes because it's the right thing to do we just think it's the right thing to do what yeah think how much harm they did with that bullshit thinking think about the amount of harm that was done it's incredible yeah it was the unions that were calling the shots why did defunding the school police have anything to do

with keeping kids safe during covid how do how do those two things even uh relate to one another and the answer is is they use covid as an opportunity to ask for their wish list. And oh, surprise, the wish list that they had before COVID was the answer to all of COVID, the problems of COVID posed to the population. It was just a naked play for power. And the teachers unions were very successful, unfortunately. And the kids are going to be the ones that suffer because of it. Yeah. And then later in the, you know, six months, nine months later, I had one of the, it wasn't a school board member. It was somebody from LA Unified. It was like the secretary.

And she goes, well, we got to have plexiglass and we got to have, you know, this and that. And I said, okay, great. Let's get all that. You want that? Fine. Let's do it. How long is it going to take? You know what she said? You're a racist and a sexist. That was her response. Cause I was, I was saying, Hey, if that, if that's what you want, let's do whatever we got to do to get these schools open. Fine. Do that.

What's it going to take? What's going to cost? What's your answer? I'm a racist. I'm a sexist. And okay. Okay. Well, there you go. That's a great answer to the abominable. This went on for another year after that. You can't even measure how much harm they did to kids. All right.

Here's what I want to do. I want to stop. I want to bring in Kelly Victory. We're going to do a little business, and I'm going to let you guys go at it a little bit, and I'll kind of dance around with you. Do keep it top of mind. I do want to- in Kelly Victory. We're going to do a little business, and I'm going to let you guys go at it a little bit, and I'll kind of dance around with you. Do keep it top of mind. I do want to- Done ranting? I'm done ranting.

Well, I'm not done about this Prop 13 thing. We want to see your rants on Rumble. Because Prop 13, they're trying to redo the California Constitution quietly without anybody knowing it. That is another level of insanity. But okay, talk about undermining the will of the voters. My God. All right, we'll be right back with John Phillips after this.

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risk-benefit calculation. It is the mandate of public health to consider the impact of any particular mitigation scheme on the entire population. This is uncharted territory, Drew. And we still wander in uncharted territory, Dr. Victory. Here's your friend, John Phillips. Absolutely. Hey, John, so happy. Really been looking forward to this. You know, John and I can diss for an hour easily about the bullshit that Gavin Newsom

put us through. And John, one of the great things about this platform is I can say bullshit, which I could not say on the radio. So this is really way more my style. But the thing that I found... Go ahead. I was going to say, you put the two of us at a steakhouse and you could say a lot more than that.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. The thing that I found most offensive about that interview with Chuck Todd, by the way, and Gavin Newsom, was that the first words out of his mouth, he changed, he caught himself. He said, I, and then he said, no, it wasn't I, it was we. He immediately abdicated responsibility for the decisions that were made. The sine qua non of a leader is that you accept responsibility for all failures and you deflect responsibility for all successes. And he has failed at that. He immediately said it wasn't me. It wasn't me. It was we. And honestly, John, you know, after the 18 months I was on air with you as the voice of the doctor hour during the heat of the pandemic,

and I was saying the things I was saying about the fallacy of masking, the made-up construct of social distancing, the fact that the vaccines were, I was saying these things not because I'm a good guesser. You know, I didn't just sort of say, know here i got i got a wild you know idea i'll guess these things i said it because we've known for decades these things are true and the idea that gavin newsom acts now and says you know well we just didn't know what we didn't know i'm like yeah that's because you and kelly used to listen i want to pile on i I want to pile on a little bit before John responds, which is, in a sense, it was not we. It was whatever Mark Galley said, he parroted line and verse. And Galley is a pediatrician.

He doesn't make adult medicine decisions. And every decision he made was out of panic. And I saw him speak multiple times during the pandemic. And I thought, my God, this is the guy making decisions. He has no sense of risk reward in adult medicine. So now, John. Yeah, there is no we, with the exception of, I guess you could throw Galleon. Because let's not forget, when this pandemic started, the first thing he did was declare a state

of emergency, which effectively rendered the state legislature to be totally useless. And instead of standing up and saying, listen, there's a separation of powers, we are a co-equal branch of government, you cannot do these things to this population without getting our stamp of approval on it, So stop what you're doing. Just because there's a virus that's going around doesn't mean our constitution goes in the trash can. The state legislature was afraid for being blamed if something were to go sideways. So they were perfectly happy to step aside and give Gavin Newsom the power of king all through the pandemic. And because he did this,

it's not just Gavin Newsom that went after us and abused us. Because there was this state of emergency that circumvented the separation of powers, you then kicked it back down to the counties where the county public health directors had the power of God to impose different edicts on their populations without ever having the county public health directors had the power of God to impose different edicts on their populations without ever having the county boards of supervisors vote on it. So that's how you ended up with someone like the fake doctor, Barbara Ferrer, who ruled us like a queen in Los Angeles

County with these ridiculous mask mandates long after they'd been taken off the books literally everywhere else in the state of california and beyond and the reason that no one could step in and say you don't have the power to do that was because newsom had the state of emergency on the books because he wanted the power so until don't the courts's that? Don't the courts need to solve that wrinkle? Don't the courts need to close that gap where this can't happen again? I was talking to my son as a lawyer. He said, you know, we have a problem with the Constitution, which is during an emergency, public health is given fiat authority. I didn't know that.

None of us knew that. We need to change that. The courts need to judge on that so there are guidelines so it doesn't happen like this again well the courts were just as pathetic as the legislature of course they could have stepped up and asserted their authority asserted their control but they didn't want to be blamed either and since they didn't want to be blamed there was this massive power vacuum and Gavin Newsom just took it. And that's why he was the government from the time COVID started until the emergency order went off the books. A couple of things in response, Drew, to this comment about public health being given fiat authority during times of crisis constitutionally. That is correct. The problem

is they were not, public health isn't given the authority to upend the constitution itself. And that's what they have tried to do. They've tried to call a public health emergency as if there was some carve out in the constitution that then allows them to set aside or put on hold some portion of the bill of Rights or some portion. There is no carve out for a pandemic. That's what needs to be solved. Unfortunately. It cannot happen again. Well, I think, yeah, we just allowed it to happen. But John, you went down the road, my favorite road, fake Dr. Barbara Farrar. So I want to talk about that. You and I used to call

her out all the time. To be clear, you can give the background. She actually has a PhD in some social science. I think she's fundamentally a sociologist. Sociology. Yeah. And as I said, Drew, the reality is I do not deny that someone with a PhD like Barbara Farrar or Dr. Jill Biden, has the right to be called doctor. But when we are in a time of a health care crisis. Medical crisis. Everybody knows. Correct. When you are in an airplane and the pilot comes on and says, is there a doctor on board?

You know they're not looking for someone with a PhD in French literature. You are clear that what they are looking for is someone who can actually wield a scalpel and knows how to work a blood pressure cuff. Okay. That's what they're looking for. They're not looking for somebody who studied women's literature or something. So the fact that Barbara Farrar called herself doctor in the time of a public health crisis is what John and I had a heyday with. But John, you need to talk for a little bit about, you got yourself embroiled in fundamentally, I think, a lawsuit or, you know, tell us where you are with the fake doctor. Okay. So this is something that I got dragged into that I had nothing to do with, but in discovery, I guess sometimes strange things can happen. So the fake doctor and the LA

County Department of Public Health are being sued by a group of parents who were upset that they shut down the ability to comment on their social media posts. Ferrer would issue some sort of edict and people would have questions or they would disagree with it and want to put up the counter argument. And they did not want those disagreements. They did not want those questions. They did not want the alternate evidence to disprove what Ferrer was doing. Yeah. So they just shut down your ability to comment.

So a school board member in Palos Verdes, Julie Hamill, and a group of parents took the L.A LA County Department of Public Health and the fake doctor to court. And during discovery, what they found out was that the LA County Department of Public Health, which has a number of political types of people who work there with no background in public health, it really became the Tammany Hall office, the dumping ground for political people who had some problem or another, and they needed to stick them somewhere. So they figured that Barbara Ferrer was weak enough politically that she had to say yes to anything that the supervisors wanted. So she just accepted all of these misfits,

these misfit toys in her office, and they never expected a pandemic to hit. So one of the people who worked in the office is a guy by the name of Brett Morrow, who used to work for a number of members of Congress, including Adam Schiff. So when they tried to bring back the mask mandates, again, long after everyone else had let them go, I was one of the vocal critics saying this is a bad idea. And so Ferrer's office, through Brett Morrow, reached out to Congressman Adam Schiff, who at the time was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And they asked him for help at Twitter to get me deplatformed because they said that by referring to her as the fake doctor, I was undermining her credibility and I was promoting misinformation. So Schiff's office, again, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, then directed the

fake doctor and her office to the top person at Twitter who deals with government relations. They dealt directly with that individual and they asked her to punish me, to de-platform me for calling her a fake doctor. Now, to Twitter's credit, they did not remove me because I am within my constitutional rights for calling her a fake doctor. And again, I have no disrespect to people who have a phd that's a miracle on television that's a miracle advice yeah you need to clarify you should have said fake medical doctor fake medical doctor so so you know so it's a clearer that way so you can't use yourself in trouble because she presents herself as a medical professional, a public medical professional. And there are at least three different biographies of her that are out there,

not LA County department of public health, but she sits on various boards and commissions and institutes and those sorts of things where they claim that she has a medical degree, at least three different biographies. Jennifer Van Laar over at red state has the receipts on this and did a story on it. So maybe she wasn't the one making the claim, but at least the organizations and the people around her are of the belief that she's a medical doctor.

It's one thing if one person puts out a biography for you that's incorrect. It's another thing if three different organizations put out incorrect biographies where they make the same mistake. And I think the reason is because she does give out medical advice in the white lab coat and carries herself like she's some sort of authority on issues pertaining to medicine. Imagine for one second if during the healthcare debate in Congress, Newt Gingrich, who has a PhD in history, demanded to be referred to

as Dr. Gingrich as he gave his point of view on the healthcare bill. That would be unbelievably misleading. I used to work as a writer at CBS News, at KNX in Los Angeles, and our style guide was only to refer to medical doctors as doctor on the air. You could say someone had a PhD and that's fine, but you couldn't refer to them as a doctor. That would violate our style guide. Other shops in town, other shops in this country have the same policies. Just ask Whoopi Goldberg. She thinks that Dr. Jill Biden would make a great surgeon general. She said it on air. I thought, for the love of God, she said, Whoopi Goldberg said, I think she would be the best surgeon general. I thought,

oh my God, you do not know that Jill Biden has a PhD in childhood education. It's just deceiving. It's purposefully deceiving in the case of fake Dr. Barbara Ferrer. We are really there. Yeah, yeah. But I was thrilled that you actually didn't get deplatformed, John, unlike me. That's a miracle. That's amazing that they didn't deplatform you. Isn't that amazing?

No, no. Yeah. So then one of the things that you and I talked about a lot on air, John, was the over-intrusion, the insane amount of power that the teachers' union wielded during the pandemic. How did that happen? As you said, they made it their pet project and everything about COVID was fundamentally to achieve their pre-COVID goals of equity in the tree canopy or whatever it was, remember, and having all this other stuff. But how did that happen? Because in LA County, more than anywhere else, I think the teachers union wielded unbelievable impact in LA. Well, it was a couple of things. The definition of politics is who gets what, when, where, how, and why. And what the teachers unions did was they just showed raw power. The teachers unions are different than private sector unions, than the Teamsters or the autoworkers or the coal miners, groups like that because the teachers unions are uniquely able to choose the

people that they sit across the table from the school board in Los Angeles is a school board that is dominated by candidates who had the blessing and the endorsement and the financial support of the teachers yogis so the minute that there was a crisis that was that was us, they looked at that and they exploited that as an opportunity to get everything they wanted from people who were already on the same page as them. At the state level, go back to 2018 when Gavin Newsom ran for governor. It wasn't clear at that point that he was going to be the guy that got elected because Antonio Villaraigosa was a two-term mayor of Los Angeles. He was mayor of the largest city in the state. He was a guy who served as the speaker of the assembly, was politically ambitious, and had the support

of billionaires like Eli Broad and Reed Hastings and people who were charter school advocates who wanted to change the way that education was done in California. So as were charter school advocates who wanted to change the way that education was done in California. So as the charter school people got behind Antonio Villaraigosa, it was the teachers unions that rallied around Gavin Newsom. And they provided the financial support, them and the Getty family, that allowed Gavin Newsom to defeat Antonio Villaraigosa and win the governorship. Gavin Newsom literally owes his governorship to the teachers unions. So the minute that he had absolute power, and the minute that the school board was chosen by the teachers union, and there was a crisis that allowed them

to come to the bargaining table at their convenience, they got everything that they wanted. And there wasn't even a question as to whether or not they would get it. They were just order takers saying, what do you want? Because I don't see that that has changed. I mean, they clearly wield way more power than they ever should nationally. But in L.A., I'll tell you, or in California, and I think you're right, it is because they are absolutely in bed with Gavin Newsom. And I don't see that that changing with regard to the masking. Go back. Yeah, go ahead.

Because I think I think here is the scary part. And I don't want to sound like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. But we now have a model as to what you can do to get everything you want. You declare an emergency and you move fast and you circumvent the process. We saw in the state of New Mexico declared state of state for gun violence. And she said the constitution no longer applies because there was a state of emergency in that state. Now, I would hope that at some point she'll lose in the courts, but there was a 30-day window that she placed on this edict. So we may never get to know.

But just imagine what can happen if they declare a state of emergency for global warming or they declare a state of emergency for homelessness or they they declare a state of emergency for monkey pox or well in the blank john you you have not only not only have they found ways to get around our constitution they've found a way to get around world elected duly elected authorities the world Health Organization wants exactly that authority to wield on their own in a public health emergency. So it goes on a global scale as well as on a state and national level. No, this was my point before. I was saying, Drew, that, you know, yes, in times of emergency, you give this authority to the public health, but the authority you gave them wasn't to suspend the constitution, which is happening all over the place. It happened in New Mexico with this

governor attempting to suspend and saying, articulating that the constitution does not apply any longer during this state of emergency. So your second amendment, gone. If they decide that climate crisis is a public health issue, as long as they call it a public health crisis, they can limit your constitutional right to travel. If they decide that COVID is a public health emergency, they can eliminate your constitutional right to assembly. These are things to, to these, these are things they just think they can suspend your constitutional rights. You're, you're, you know, I, because they've called it a public health emergency and you're right, John. I mean, there's nothing that can't be, you know, called a

public health crisis, whether it's homelessness or climate or whatever the hell else they decide that it is. Um, so it's truly terrifying. And I And I don't think it's a tinfoil hat thing. I think it's a, you know, kind of coming down the pike thing. Yeah, and I think it's a good time to remind people, the Bill of Rights does not tell you what rights you have. The Bill of Rights tells the government what they can't do to you. That's the whole point. Yeah.

Because of God-given the whole point. Yeah. Right. Because of God given rights that exist. Yeah. Yeah. And the problem, this is the problem with the fact that most people don't have a clue, you know, civics is gone. We need to start teaching this stuff again, because your average person has absolutely no clue what is a God-given right and what the Constitution says, what the Bill of Rights says. And as you point out, it is to protect us from the government and it illuminates those things that they cannot do to you. Go back for a minute to the whole mask thing, because nowhere is the mask frenzy more popular than in the state of California and certainly in Los Angeles? You know, I travel every week and I'm shocked the number of people in the airports who are wearing masks.

And here in California, they're wearing them walking down the street alone, you know, or out exercising. It's crazy. But you used to say all the time, you know, that if you truly believe you, John Phillips, truly believe that something was dangerous, you know, you wouldn't find photos of you doing it. The hypocrisy. I mean, do you really believe that Gavin Newsom or Barbara Ferrer as ghostly as she looks, she does not look like a well woman, by the way, haven't examined her. But I have to tell you, as a physician, she does not look like the fake doctor does not look well. She's a sickly looking person.

But do you think that these people really believe that masks are the answer? No, because every time you catch her at a concert or a sporting event, she's not wearing the mask. But when she's having a press conference and there's one reporter in the room, which is usually Marla Tejas from Fox 11, she's wearing the mask because it's theater. It is virtue signaling. It is her showing the public that she's a good person. Well, if I believe that those little blue masks prevented you from catching a respiratory virus, if there's any place I would wear it, it would be at a concert or a sporting event or someplace where there were a lot of people around me. I certainly wouldn't be wearing it in a room when I'm in there with one other person unless I knew they were actively ill or attested positive for COVID.

So, no, I don't believe that she buys her own BS. And I don't think that Newsom does either. Because if Newsom believed it, why would he have been at the French Laundry when the numbers surrounding COVID were exploding? Why would he send his kid to basketball camp that didn't require masks when masks were required for childhood camps in other parts of the state? You wouldn't be caught doing those things because you would want to protect your health and want to protect the health of your family. So I don't believe that they are being honest about this at all. I think they're unbelievably disingenuous. Well, one of my favorite optics was the reason one with,

hang on for a second, the reason one with Biden through whereby President Biden goes into the room wearing a mask. This is just within the last week to to put the medal, you know, to to be, you know, give the medal of honor to some elderly, I think, 90 year old, 90 plus year old veteran. And he wears it. Biden wears the mask in. And then as he approaches this elderly guy to put the, he takes the mask off when he's two inches from the face of a guy, you know, who's nearly a centurion. I thought, oh my God, of all times, if you truly believed that a mask stopped the spread of respiratory viruses, wouldn't you want to protect this elderly veteran, who by the way, didn't care't look like he cared a whit. But I just found it very interesting. Clearly, Biden doesn't believe the bullshit either.

Where were you going to go, Drew? I cut you off. I was going to go to Prop 13. It's okay. I wanted to hear John's thoughts. I hate to get off the COVID train, but I just want to for a few minutes hear what his thoughts were on the attempt by the California Assembly to undo, to undermine the California Constitution. Well, I think this is related to COVID because you saw massive population shifts when the state of California was locked down the way it was, where the state lost a congressional seat for the first time in our history since joining the union. If they would

have done the census a year later, we probably would have lost three or four seats and not one. You can see the decline in population all around you, friends and family who used to live here and now live somewhere else or traffic patterns or whatever the case may be. When you combine that and the businesses that they took with them and the capital they took with them, and you combine it with the wide open border that we have where cities and their budgets are being overwhelmed by people who need a lot of help, what you have is you have budgets at the state, at the city, at the county level that are absolutely blown. We saw that happen here in the state of California, where our budget is tens of billions of dollars right now with the hole in it. And it's probably going to get worse because of

the storms. We don't have a tax filing deadline until October the 16th. So we won't know what kind of money we have to play with. But my guess is it's going to go in the wrong direction. And Gavin Newsom would have to make some very tough choices. He would either have to figure out how to raise taxes or cut services. And when you cut services, you're cutting money that would go to California state public employees. And he doesn't want to do that. So they're looking for a way to bring in as many dollars to Sacramento as possible. And the one initiative that they absolutely cannot stand, could not stand it from the time that we voted it in in the 1970s, is Prop 13. And every chance they have to chip away at Prop 13 protections

and bring more money into Sacramento, they take it. And that's exactly what they're doing right now. And it came from the legislature, which is owned by the unions, lock, stock, and barrel. And if they can get away with it, they're going to do it. Do you think that the strategy they're using is something that would be successful, this kind of weird undermining of the constitution without actually changing the constitution? I think the courts would get involved pretty quickly. You would hope so, but you really do

have to look at the political will in the state. And the percentage of homeowners versus renters is not what it was in the 1970s. People cannot afford to buy homes in California. And you have very different attitudes about things like property taxes if you're a renter as opposed to a homeowner. You have a lot of people in the state who vote in our elections who don't have skin in the game in terms of owning property here. And when that's the case, when you have a middle class of renters, they have very different attitudes about these things. There was an initiative that was on the ballot some time ago that chipped away at certain protections that Prop 13 gave, and the people voted for it. So Prop 13 is definitely in danger right now.

And the more out of whack those numbers between renters versus homeowners gets, the more you're going to see the public turn against Prop 13, which is just something that would cause retirees in particular to move out of the state en masse. No one on a fixed income will be able to afford to live here. You said at the beginning, John, I think rightly so, that Gavin Newsom is not going to run for office again in California. What's your theory about where he's going? Is he the heir apparent to the Oval Office? Do you think he's going to end up replacing Biden on the ticket next fall. What's your theory on where we're going to see Gavin Newsom next? He's not going to run against Joe Biden. So I don't see him getting involved

in a Democratic primary. However, I don't think he believes Joe Biden's going to be alive come November of next year. But there really is a window that he has. And I think he's running the shadow campaign for president so that if something unfortunate were to happen to Joe Biden, he could jump in and hit the ground running. Because Kamala Harris, as unpopular as Joe Biden is right now, is more unpopular than Joe Biden. If something were to happen to Joe Biden after he were to secure enough delegates to win the Democratic Party primary, they're stuck with

Kamala Harris, which means they're stuck with someone who's probably in the election. If something were to happen, if Biden were to fall out between, let's say, now and when Democrats start voting, then Gavin Newsom is in a position where he can put his name on the ballot and he could, at least in theory, win the Democratic primary. The Democrats are in a real bad place right now because they racialize every aspect of life. Go back to when Joe Biden was searching for a vice presidential running mate. It originally was supposed to be a woman. And then when South Carolina saved his bacon, it became a black woman and it became a contest between Kamala Harris and Karen Bass.

Well, he made the wrong choice. He chose Kamala Harris. And because of that, he is now stuck with someone who he can't get rid of. And maybe the Democratic Party can't get rid of her. I don't know yet. I don't know where their voters are on the subject of Kamala Harris. But you can bet your bottom dollar that if they try to replace her with someone else, she's going to cry sexism and racism. And right now, there just aren't a lot of other viable alternatives in the Democratic Party for one reason or another. I mean, you look at Andrew Cuomo. He was the guy who thought that he was going to be the plan B. His career blew up on takeoff. So many of the other

potential candidates are working for Joe Biden as cabinet secretaries, like Mayor Pete, or, you know, in some state or another. So right now, Gavin Newsom thinks that if there is a vacancy that is created at a certain point in time on the calendar, he has a lane all to himself. Yeah, I think there's no question he's the guy who's going to fill the vacuum. The question is, when is the vacuum coming? I grossly underestimated the ability or the willingness of the Democrat Party to keep Joe Biden afloat. I lost a bunch of steak dinners on the fact that I said that Biden wouldn't last the first year. I mean, I lost a bunch of steak dinners on that. I said, there's no way.

The guy already doesn't know which end of the fork to use. And there's no way he's going to keep going once he has to cross several time zones on an airplane. The wheels are going to fall off the bus. Now, turns out the wheels have fallen off the bus, but the Democrat Party is willing to carry the bus anyway. It's amazing. They just go out there and jack the bus up.

I'm saying you realize this guy is an absolute unmitigated disaster. He doesn't know. He's not oriented to place or time. He doesn't know truly. It's tragic is what it is. Even though I disagree with all of his policies, I certainly would not want anyone, any human being to be in the position that he's in. Parkinsonian dementia is a dreadful disease, and I feel for him. But I am shocked that the Democrat Party has been willing to allow him, if you saw any clips of his recent performance in Vietnam, it was truly painful to watch. So do you think they're just going to let him go until he literally falls over and dies? Or do you think they'll invoke the 25th Amendment or something else and pull him off the stage? As long as he has a beating heart, they're going to stick with him.

When I worked at CNN, I worked with a guy by the name of Josh Rogin, who was a reporter back in the day for Congressional Quarterly. And he broke his arm in some kind of accident and had a cast. And someone at his office said, you know, what would be really neat is if you got every single member of the United States Senate to sign your cast. So he would go from office to office and have a marker and have different members of the Senate sign your cast. So he would go from office to office and have a marker and have different members of the Senate sign the cast. Well, the last member of the Senate that had yet to sign his cast was a senator by the name of Bob Byrd, who represented West Virginia, and who was extremely elderly at the time. And so the staff member took Josh into Bob Byrd's office, and he said that Bob Byrd was staring out

the window. He had a great view of Washington, DC and it was a, the chair had a high back to it. So all you saw was his arms on the chair and they walked him over to the chair and the staff member took one of the arms of the chair and they pulled it around. And in the chair was Bob Byrd whose eyes were totally glazed over, who had drool coming out of his mouth, who never acknowledged Josh Rogan's existence. They then put a stamp in Bob Byrd's hand and the staff member had his hand on top of Bob Byrd's hand. They lifted it up and they dropped it on the cast and that was how the signature made it on the cast they then turned the

chair around back around so he was looking though again Bob Byrd never said a word to Josh Rogan and they walked him out of the room and that man stayed in the United States Senate for years after that. They're more than willing to let you sit around in that condition. That's the Dianne Feinstein. Dianne Feinstein. Oh, yeah. She's got her own stamp, I'm sure. Had a massive stroke.

Had a massive stroke. She must have. Had a massive stroke. She must have. Had a massive stroke and was bedridden. And his wife was running the presidency from his bedroom. And the various staff members would sit outside the room. She would shuttle messages from him, completely aphasic, unconscious, what he was thinking, her thoughts, and what to take out as the presidential edict yeah but you know joe biden has to though stand up on a public stage i mean he's actually got to you know stand up and shake hands with world leaders and say something uh we we watched it

you know what guys last week it was to say, it is such a sign. I let him hear you guys talk about this. Think about, imagine you're 25 years old, and you're looking at these assholes clinging to their power and their money and their privilege. There's something weird going on where elites and the power hungry, I mean, look at Nancy Pelosi running again at age 85 for her office. They have not allowed the natural process of allowing the next generation in.

And when elites become too ossified and top-heavy like this, it doesn't go well from a historical standpoint. There's lots of evidence that these are cycles that end in some sort of kaboom. So I'd love to hear you guys talk about that. Well, I can tell you from my perspective, this is yeah,

go ahead, John, go ahead. As I say that from my perspective, this is not an issue of age. People keep, I think, conflate two equally critical issues, one being term limits and the other being the issue of our right as Americans to trust that our elected leaders have the mental and physical capacity to do the jobs for which they were elected. I think we need term limits because, you know, the fish gets old and it starts to stink. And our forefathers intended

people to come out of the community, you know, stop your job as the dentist or the shoemaker or the, you know, horse ferry or whatever you were, do your four years and then go the hell back home. You weren't intended to become a career politician who they undoubtedly become corrupted and jaded and ultimately owned by special interest groups. But term limits is a different issue from the issue of age. I know lots of 80 and 90 year olds who are spry and sharp as a tack and perfectly capable of making decisions. Joe Biden is not amongst them. Neither is Dianne Feinstein, but neither is John Fetterman at the ripe old age of 50. He is, you know, he's a first term senator

in his 50s who is suffering cognitively and should not be in a position to be making decisions on the part of his, you know, of his constituents. So I think we need to have some version of a cognitive test independent of age. I don't agree with over the age of 60, you need to take the test. I think anybody who is on the tax, if you're on our dime and you're making decisions on our behalf,

you ought to be able to prove that you're cognitively capable. Agreed. John? Elections are popularity contracts. You have to get more votes than the other person to win. And because of the way that technology has changed the nature of our day-to-day lives, it's very difficult to become well-known. It's very difficult to cut through the noise. It's very difficult to become a household name, which is how people choose

the products they buy at the store and how people choose their candidates. It's part of the reason that when you're trying to recruit a candidate to run for an office, if someone is independently wealthy or someone is a celebrity, you go with them because they already have something that your standard mortal doesn't. And that's name identification. And if you don't have celebrity status or you don't have a billion dollars and can buy name ID overnight without it costing you too much, what you need to do is you need to have a name that people know because you've been around

a long time. It takes a long time to be well known if you're a politician, of having your name appear in the paper, of showing up to the Fourth of July parades, of being on the local media. And by the time so many of these people get to that point in their career, they're beyond their best by date. But because they didn't achieve that degree of notoriety until they were old, that was their one opportunity to get the brass ring. Think about this. The oldest member of the House of Representatives is a woman from California by the name of Grace Napolitano. She's in her mid to late 80s. She recently announced that she is going to retire at the end of this term. The guy who is the most likely candidate to take over that seat, who she has endorsed,

is a guy by the name of Bob Archuleta, who is the former mayor of Pico Rivera. He is 78 years old and will be an 80-something-year-old freshman if he were to be elected. Dianne Feinstein, who's 90 years old, announced that she's not running for re-election. Fine, we have an open race to replace her. One of the candidates is Barbara Lee, who is in her late 70s. If she were to be elected,

she would be a freshman, a freshman U.S. senator in her mid-1980s. We are run by a gerontocracy. Oh my, it is terrifying. in her mid-1980s. You're run by a gerontocracy. Oh, my. It is terrifying. No, this is really, really problematic. And let's not forget Mitch McConnell. I mean, Mitch is up there, you know, he's having a stroke on national television on

a weekly basis. This is really, really scary. No, this is scary. And it also, not that I think you need young people because you have the ability to have young blood and different ideas, as much as it takes a lot of energy to serve. It takes a lot of energy to do all the things that are really required of you, including reading hundreds of pages sometimes on a weekend, being able to get on a plane and travel to see your constituents, being able to move across time zones, being able to keep up. It's a physically and mentally taxing job. And we've

got a bunch of folks in there who, I mean, who knows who's actually running it? I suspect it's probably the aides or, as you said, Drew, you know, the wives or spouses who are younger than these people who are somehow capable of putting two sentences together. I think it is terrifying. And so from my viewpoint, yes, we need term limits, but we also need cognitive tests to be able to prove. And I think it should happen, my God, you got to take a test to get your driver's license renewed. You sure as heck ought to have a test to have the nuclear code. Well, we are kind of running, coasting to the end of the hour here, guys. John, I wonder if you have any last thoughts.

And then Kelly, I want to chat with you a little bit once we let John go about sort of where we are right now, you know, in terms of COVID and masks and lockdowns. And there's just sort of the things are kind of drifting around. So John, before I give you a chance for last thoughts here. Well, I'll tell you, the press has a responsibility, I believe. Whenever a politician says that they made a number of mistakes during COVID, the press

has a responsibility to ask them, what was the mistake? Because you leave it open and maybe the Barbara Ferrer's of the world say, yes, they made mistakes. They didn't give me enough power and they didn't allow me to shut things down enough. And they didn't allow me to shut off the comments on my social media soon enough. And only if they did that, we would have gotten through this pandemic in much better shape. They need to explain exactly how they screwed up and they need to do this in a public way so we don't repeat the same mistakes. Agreed.

John, I'm going to see you tomorrow. We have a midday show, noon to three. I will see you at, I think, two o'clock. I'll hear you. I think I'm going to join you on your show around then. All right. Good to see you. Good to see you too, Kelly.

All right, guys. Yeah, thanks for being here. Talk soon. Johnny, Johnny don't like, J-O-H-N-N- Johnny don't like J O H N N Y don't like. So, um, you know, just to kind of recap where you and I have been the last couple of months, I've learned so much talking to all the people we've spoken to. I don't know if you know, but Dr. Freeman was on John Campbell's, uh, YouTube video yesterday, which was astonishing to, to see that and, uh, watching him, you know, sort of have his,

oh my God moments one after the other, as Dr. Freeman presented his data and his experience with the FDA. I, what, what is sort of the, am I sort of thinking is what, what do we do now? I mean, here we are, they're rolling out a new vaccine uh it's i'll tell you one thing that i've noticed i had a very busy day in the office this morning and three quarters of the patients that i saw had met with subspecialists who had been massive vaccine enthusiasts and the subspecialties rank went from cardiology to pulmonary to hematology hematology kind of surprised me and they all said don't get this new vaccine. We have no idea what we're doing.

And, and I, and, and in fact, um, the patients are starting to say, gosh, I'm having this symptom and that symptom. And I saw my friends decline since he took his fifth, you know, fifth shot. I don't really want to do this. And I'm supporting that. And then maybe you shouldn't. It's a, it's a odd time. We're on the threshold.

It seems like of something. And yet the CDC and the powers that be at the FDA go on with this extraordinary enthusiasm for something that is under tested to say, to be kind. Yeah. Well, correct. And I think what's happened fundamentally,

Drew is that the CDC has finally jumped the shark. They gave emergency use authorization to this next booster, which is a monovalent booster. The last booster was a bivalent one that included parts of the Wuhan strain as well as Omicron. And this one is now pure monovalent. It's just based on XBB. A couple of things. First of all, XBB now constitutes less than 4% of all the cases of COVID. So if you get that booster, there's a 96% chance that if you had COVID today, you've got something other than XBB. XBB is almost extinct. So we're talking

about rolling out again, another booster for a virus that no longer exists. So the chance that it's going to work is fundamentally zero. Secondly, and more importantly, people are aware. Go ahead. I just want to ask about the XBB. I just want to say that I am definitely seeing, I've seen a lot of COVID lately. There's definitely a trend of COVID. Even in my own household, we've had some here. And it's a very specific and new syndrome. I don't know if this is something of a local variant here

or if this is what's following the XBB or if this is the XBB. But 100% of the cases for the last four months have followed the, have had the following features, sudden onset of prostration, toxicity, and high fever that get worse over about six to 12 hours. The toxicity can be quite intense. Like they really get sick. And then that passes the first 24 hours is nasty. And then it either completely resolves or has some mild features for three to five days. No cough. No cough and no downstream symptoms at all.

And crazy response of Dipaxlavit. Like crazy response. And no rebound. There was rebound with the last summer now i've seen i've and i've done this 35 times 40 times with this particular syndrome no rebound but anyway something different is happening and i have no way of knowing if this vaccine has anything to do with covering the the local variants caleb you're trying to come in yeah wait yeah just to clarify are you saying a crazy good response or crazy bad response to Paxlovid?

Crazy good response, where they're better by morning, like gone. Like my office staff got this, and she had it on Friday night, and we thought, oh, crap, what are we going to do for the rest of the week? And Saturday morning, she was normal after picking Paxlovid. So there you go. Anyway, Kelly, you're trying to jump in here. I'm sorry. We kept rolling. Well, I was just saying, I could tell you that the current variants have, in general, very mild symptoms.

It resolves very quickly. People are not being hospitalized with it. All of these reports of COVID hospitalizations are up. No, people in the hospital who incidentally test positive for COVID are up because it is very contagious. But those people are not in the hospital because they have COVID. They're in the hospital to get a hysterectomy or a knee replacement or because they got shot in the chest and somebody is shoving a swab up their nose when they go to get admitted and the test comes back positive. These are not admissions for COVID. OK, they simply aren't.

On top of it, back to this new booster and the fact that I am absolutely flummoxed that it got approved, these boosters were tested on 10 mice, 10 mice, not a single human, 10 mice were given the new booster and they were compared not against a placebo again, because they fail every time not against a placebo again, because they fail every time to use a placebo. They were tested against 10 mice that got the previous booster. So we've got a total of 20 mice who got injected twice. They got injected 21-day interval, and they were followed for a couple of weeks following the second shot. So we've got 20 mice total in the study, not a single human being.

They were followed for a matter of a couple of weeks. And you're trying to tell me that you can now say that's safe and effective? That is absolutely unconscionable. So the FDA is running roughshod over what should be the really rigorous regulatory testing policies and procedures that we have used forever in terms of drug testing. This is absolute insanity. And given the mild nature, I always say, look, I'm not trying simply to convince people not to get vaccinated for COVID. You should make the decision that you think is best for you. What I am trying to do, Drew, is educate people

how to evaluate any therapeutic, any intervention. I don't care if it's a surgical intervention, an antibiotic, or a vaccine. And I look at all of them like the proverbial three-legged stool, where the legs are safety, efficacy, and necessity. So the safety leg of this COVID vaccine is very, very shaky. It's woefully under-tested. We do not have long-term data and the number of adverse events is quite alarming. So the safety leg is shaky.

Efficacy, simply not there. These vaccines failed to stop you from contracting COVID. They failed keeping you from spreading COVID to others. And the data are not clear on whether or not they eliminated the risk of hospitalization or death. And then the third leg, necessity, we are talking about, as you and I were just saying, a virus whose symptoms are very, very mild right now. Most people are not at significant risk. So I would submit to you that if you apply Dr. Victory's three-legged stool approach to these, you would say the safety leg, the efficacy leg, and the necessity leg are not stable.

And let me bring up something that has been raised to me, which is that we actually, because we don't have the right data, we don't know if Omicron and the subvariants are actually the virus. The agent is significantly less problematic. All we know is that in the current environment where nobody is immunologically naive, right? Everybody's either had COVID or had the vaccine. The syndrome of Omicron is less severe than the previous syndromes. That is indisputable. And whether or not the agent or the host is the cause does not really matter from a clinical standpoint.

Certainly it matters from a standpoint of making decisions, but the syndrome is the syndrome. And that's what we're seeing today. Yeah. And on top of it, then we have now, if you didn't believe me when I said it three and a half years ago, if you didn't believe the decades of data that we already had, you now have three and a half years of proof that things like masks and social distancing and lockdowns are not recommended. The masks didn't. If you look at places that didn't mask, you know, they did better in general than the

places that did. We know that social distancing had absolutely no impact. We know that the lockdowns did far more harm than good. School closures absolutely devastated children. So if nothing else, if you didn't believe me when I said it in the spring of 2020 that these things were going to fail, you now have three and a half years of hard data to prove that they fail. For the love of God, let's not go down that road again.

Yeah, I see Jay Bhattacharya is out making some noise about trying to get Stanford to also apologize for their excesses and their infringements on his constitutional privileges. I'm tempted to bring him back in to talk about that because he's now going on the offensive a bit. It is about time. Yeah. And as I've always said, he's sort of the poster child. He's the litmus test for where we are. He's the most sensible player in this entire debacle.

Oh, there we go. Oh, no, that's Newsom debacle oh there we go oh no that's newsome that's totally different oh that's yeah so kelly we would have done everything differently well yeah is that something new caleb no this is what he said this is what he said he said this is what he said yeah in the in the uh in the todd interview yeah the chuck todd interview as he blamed everyone else i don't i don't yes exactly he said it wasn't i'm glad to see look i'm glad to see i'm just glad to see the conversation start it is certainly not a settled topic it is gonna go for a while because a lot of people were hurt by their behavior. There is no forgiveness without contrition in my world. So he needs to be, and contrition is a word that he would need to look up in the dictionary since he certainly doesn't have it. So, yeah, but he needs to fess up.

The one thing that, if you remember back to the Clinton era, there was a lot of complaints about his lack of contrition. And I will just say, humbly, narcissists have real trouble with that. It's not easy for them. So we will leave it at that. And Kelly, thank you. I will see you. Is it next Wednesday? Caleb, throw up our menu here.

I think we're next Wednesday. Next Wednesday. I can't keep track of them. I think we're next Wednesday. Next Wednesday. I can't keep track of them. Coming up. There we go. Oh, Dr. Corey. Pierre Corey. Yes.

That will be interesting. It's been a while since we've talked. See if he's had any new thoughts. So everybody, I will be here tomorrow. Tomorrow's Thursday, right? At three o'clock. Caleb, is that correct? I don't want to misspeak.

Yes. I believe so, but I'm not actually clear on who the guest is tomorrow yet. So they'll see that online soon. All right. Fair enough, Brady. We'll see you then. Thanks, Kelly. Thanks.

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