From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Jeffrey Tucker: Liberty or Lockdown?

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

This week, Sean and Rachel invite the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, Jeffrey Tucker, to discuss his new book "Liberty or Lockdown." Jeffrey elaborates on why he believes vaccine mandates are a political tool to punish dissent. Plus, he states his reasoning behind why lockdowns are an ineffective policy measure, but gives a glimmer of hope as to some good he believes came as a result. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I am your host, Sean Duffy, along with my co-host and my partner in life, Rachel Campos

Duffy. Thank you, Sean. Well, today we're back with more conversations from the kitchen table. And today, Sean, we have another great guest. It is Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey Tucker is the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. He's written many, many articles. He speaks and writes on economics, technology, social philosophy, culture, your favorite subject, Sean, cryptocurrency. social philosophy culture your favorite subject sean cryptocurrency he's just written a book called liberty or lockdown and that's why we mainly had him here though i have to tell you

when i look at his bio i mean he's a convert to traditional catholicism we could have him here for three hours i think but we're only going to have him here for about 30. we like everything about about you jeffrey and we're really honored that you would join us on the show and help us understand what's happening today. I mean, all of us feel, at least in my circle of friends and family, like something weird is going on. And when I read one of your articles, I've read many of them, but this one on how fanatics took over the world. I was just moved by that. So why don't we just start? Tell us how the fanatics took over the world.

What's happening right now? These are big questions. I feel like I should be asking the review. I don't have the answer. People stop me all the time. I said, why, why, why? And I'm always a little bit stumped. You know, I wish I i had a clean clear answer to it uh but so much is going wrong i'll just let me just start with a statement by jen saki i guess her name is the white house press spokesman yesterday

and she's telling american business to go ahead with the mandate for vaccinating all employees for all companies with more than 100 employees, which affects something like 80 million people in the country, most of whom probably have natural immunities. But here's what's actually remarkable about this. The Fifth Circuit Federal Appeals Court has ruled that this mandate is completely unconstitutional on grounds that, on many grounds, that it's not in OSHA's wheelhouse to do something like this, that they're invoking emergency, but they've got two months built in for everybody to comply, that natural immunity is completely ignored here. So there was a brutal court opinion.

And so they issued a stay against the OSHA mandate and then came out with another opinion that was just sweeping. It was like, you could have written it or I could have too. And then OSHA on its website, I guess two days ago, said, look, okay, in light of this court decision, we are not implementing this mandate or enforcing it. Done. Period. Over. It's illegal. No business in America should pay any attention to this thing. We think we live under the rule of law. I mean, you know, that's what the courts are for. At least OSHA complied with the court. You know, OSHA, you know, God bless them, they

implemented this idiotic order, you know, at the order of the White House, and they clearly didn't like it. I mean, I read the thing, it was very uncompelling. So they posted on the website, not that the press reported it, but OSHA said no more implementation or enforcement. And then you have the White House

going on national television and a press conference telling everybody to comply anyway. So the courts have ruled against it. The regulatory agencies have said that they want nothing to do with it. And the White House, forget Congress, right? Forget the will of people. Forget everything. The White House alone wants it.

So therefore, they're telling all businesses to do it. They're going to probably get their way. I don't know what it says about our country in which we're doing business this way. We're doing law this way. It's egregious and it's dividing people and people are absolutely freaked out about it. And rightly so. So, yeah, we live in very difficult times. And this has been going on for 21 months of this despotic style of government, all in the name of controlling this respiratory virus that has completely ignored all the politicians and will continue to do so. So, yeah, we live in very odd times. And I like I said in my article, i think fanatics have taken over the world

and uh they're defining all of our motives though jeffrey this is the part i want to get to is it is it profit uh um is it is it yeah is it control is it one world government what's going on probably all of the above and probably we're headed toward a China style social credit system of that's really in the end about political compliance. They're really there's there's a gang in this country that's really interested in consolidating their power in a kind of a Machiavelli way. So they want to eliminate their enemies and they want to find out who their enemies are so they can eliminate and they want to eliminate their enemies and they want to find out who their enemies are so they can eliminate. And they want to track them electronically to consolidate their power and make sure that they can rule the country forever and implement their far reaching agenda for what amounts to a kind of social democratic despotic state. I mean, and I say that I make I sound like a conspiracy theorist in saying that.

I don't think that's conspiracy. I think that's what they're going for. It really is about, and ultimately, this is what the vaccine mandates are about. And it all began in the summer because the New York Times started going on about how state by state, if you look at the states with the lowest rates of vaccination, they tend to be the states that voted for Trump. So I'm reading this article and going, you know, I bet this article gets the attention of the White House. Sure enough, a few weeks later, you know, Biden started railing against Florida and railing against Texas. And back then they were saying, look how high the cases are. These people aren't vaccinating themselves. So they decided, I think, as a kind of a political tactic, they would push the vaccine mandates as a way of punishing political dissent in this country. So it doesn't really have to do with health.

And we know these vaccines are extremely leaky, non-sterilizing. They don't stop the spread. They don't stop infection, which is to say they don't contribute to the goal, which is an endemic equilibrium and herd immunity. They don't make a contribution to that. They have private benefit, but not public benefit. So they're pushing this stuff anyway, I think, as a political tactic and extension of this egregious error that was made from the very beginning, where we politicized a virus instead of letting people deal with their doctors, with therapeutics and just getting through this thing. Instead, we made it a political football.

And now we're facing the consequences of it in the most egregious way. Jeffrey, I spent nine years in Congress as a member of Congress from Wisconsin. And there's people that I disagree with, but I still think they're good people. And in one of your articles, you were talking about how the media will use cause and effect in a perverted way. And this goes to my question, when you look at public health officials in the government, in the White House, and they're not looking at natural immunity. They're not talking about the vaccine, if we want to call it a vaccine versus a therapeutic. So are these individuals who've imposed the mandates and the lockdowns, are they just plain stupid? Are they just misinformed? Are they do-gooders but just going down the wrong path?

Or again, is there something more sinister at play? Or is it a combination of all of those? Because common sense would dictate. Listen, if you've had, I mean, again, you mentioned this in one of your articles. In eighth grade biology, we learned that if you get a virus, you usually will have some immunity to future infection. you usually will have some immunity to future infection. But miraculously with COVID-19, there's no benefit to being infected and you all have to get the jab.

Yeah. Which is untrue, right? I mean, one of the things that Brownstone does is we have a link up there with 128 studies on natural, which is way too many. You don't need 128 studies. You don't need any um you know demonstrating the uh that natural immunity is is broad and effective and guess what that's how our immune systems work that's where they've always worked you know they scale up in light of the pathogen you develop immunities and hopefully you get the milder forms that protects you against the severe form the worst thing you could do yourself is um develop a naive immune system. It's the only thing in history that's ever been more dangerous to the human population, even than governments in war, which is immune naivety, or sometimes called immune ignorance. So we know about natural immunities.

We've known about them since the Peloponnesian War, for God's sake. We just happened to forget about them in 2020. since the Peloponnesian war, for God's sake, we just happened to forget about them in 2020. You know, you mentioned all these possibilities, you know, to choose, is it ignorance, is it profit, is it desire for control, you know, what's going on? I think it's all these things, right?

So, and I obsess about this going back all the way to, as far as I can tell, the early origins of this crazy view that you should be able to manage society the way you manage a computer model. And that really does trace to 2006, the origin of social distancing and the idea of universal human separation to control a pathogen, which has never worked and cannot work. In fact, you pursue that, you're going to destroy society. But there was Deborah Birx on March 16th, standing up, telling everybody in the country, we want everybody to stay separate from everybody else. And the press just said, oh, that's interesting. Okay.

Everybody's going to stay separate from everybody else. What is she talking about? I mean, that is a complete reconstruction of society. But the problem is there are all these intellectuals extant since 2006 who believe this blather. And then it was perpetuated by the money of Bill Gates, who. Right. Let's talk about Bill Gates. Yeah. He's desperately confused. Right. So I'd like desperately, deeply, catastrophically confused about viruses. And you can know that immediately if you watch a TED talk by him.

He doesn't even have ninth grade understanding of cell biology. He thinks like he doesn't know the difference between a biological virus and a computer virus. And in his career, he developed the Windows operating system. And, you know, I came out in like, you know, the early 90s or something. And then the web with no security protocols at all. And then the web came to be, you know, invented in 95 with first web browser. And then everything started going online. And sure enough, we had these things showing up called malware and it really fundamentally threatened Windows.

And he was in a 20 year battle malware, and they got dubbed viruses. But that's a really bad name for them because with a pathogen that affects a computer hard drive, the only real path and the only way you want to fix the problem is to avoid it completely. You want to block and ideally, therefore, stamp out the virus completely. OK, you cannot stamp out biological viruses. You can, you know, I think two have been eradicated in the whole history of humanity. But for the most part, you know, we evolved with immune systems that deal with them. And the worst thing you can do is pursue a kind of a zero exposure policy because then then uh yeah then you you die i mean this

is what happened to so many native americans who when smallpox was brought over by the colonial powers um the a third of four of them were wiped out because they hadn't been exposed to that pathogen before so we have a long history of knowing the dangers of lack of exposure. In fact, I have a really great article today by Steve Templeton. He's an epidemiologist, really brilliant. But he talks about the dangers of, as you put it, of cleaning up the world too much. That you really don't want to create a perfectly sanitized environment forever with it let's just say there's a cost to that you know every but can i tell you every mom knows that by the way yeah i know i'm not saying anything unusual right i know it's so basic so

so bill gates gets involved in all of this we We know the role of Dr. Fauci. We see a lack of curiosity among our leaders and our president about the origins of COVID and the role of China in all of this. And again, I think after 21 months and one of the things I liked about your articles, you seem to be you have a lot of hope that people are catching on. I think after a lot of submission and a lot of going along, you seem to be pretty hopeful that people are catching on to what's going on and are finding ways around the censorship to get the right information. Once they do that, what will they do with that information? Are we going to see civil disobedience? Are we going to see people rising up and taking back control? Or has this been so normalized, especially for young people? I mean, some of the young people are some of the worst enforcers of COVID vaccines

and mandates in their own families. Where is all this going? What will happen as people become more enlightened and realize what's happening? Well, there's going to be always a subset of the population that's going to live in fear of the virus and thinking that the way to solve everything is by dismantling social structures and civilization. I mean, that's always going to be out there. But the ranks of the noncompliant are growing by the day. I'm sorry it's taken so long. It's actually quite pathetic, actually.

I agree. So it's very infuriating, you know, to see 20-somethings out there, even now, you know, in the Northeast, dressed like Taliban wives. Completely. Totally. And so many beta males. Aren't you just so disgusted by how many young beta males there are? I actually know young women who are single, some middle-aged women who are single, and they literally are saying, it's actually helping us in our dating because we can figure out who we don't want to date by how masked they are despite being of having virtually no risk of covid yeah i you know i mean this this it's been a cultural trauma for everybody but there are a whole swaths of the country that are now in massive defiance and i'm encouraged really very much so by uh the approval uh radiance of the

biden administration now they're down to like 36 and you know what's interesting is as we approach that 30 that magical 33 marker you know i have this rule of thumb that you can at any one point in time find a third of the public that believes in anything, you know, that the moon is made of Roquefort cheese or whatever. I mean, like a third of the public is crazy on something all the time. And so, yeah, so we get to that point. And what to me that signals is a complete loss of confidence in the powers that be.

And I draw very much on the old classical liberal tradition of government from David Hume and John Locke and so on. There's a way in which a government that is ruling completely against the wishes of a culture and the people is ultimately unsustainable. And I don't think, especially Americans, we don't want to live in cages. We just don't, because we're not wired to be that way. We're volitional people. We have creativity, we have hopes and dreams and ambitions. And we wake up every day and try to figure out little things we can do to change our world. And if you were surrounded by this sort of tyrants that are constantly telling us what to do and what shots to take and what, you know, put a stick of QR code on our foreheads, you know, that just to

kind of get into a public building and say, I just don't believe it. I think ultimately the American people are good people and will not put up with the kind of neo-feudalism and segregation especially these mandates the lockdowns were devastating for human rights

setting churches for Easter, come on and throwing women out of the workplace. You know, I just can't believe it. You know, for 40 years, homeschooling was always under a cloud until it became mandatory. And, you know, and so if you look and I love to follow the data really carefully on labor participation, that the top victims of the lockdowns were women and minorities by far. We've lost something like four point five million workers just out of the lockdowns were women and minorities by far we've lost something like 4.5 million workers just out of the workforce because of this the destruction of hundreds of thousands of

businesses missed cancer screenings and you talk about the media you know we got the news the other day from the cdc that said you know an unbelievable you know staggering,000 people died of drug overdoses in a 12-month period during lockdowns. I don't need to tell you this. You read the stories. You know what the media blamed for that, right? The pandemic. The pandemic. I'm sorry.

SARS-CoV-2 is kind of a wicked bug, but it doesn't cause you to overdose on drugs. I mean, that's ridiculous. What caused it were these horrifying policies. It's almost like there's a kind of a taboo to talk about it. Lockdowns are unprecedented. We've never tried anything like that in the history of the world. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before. It was a wild experiment.

It did not work. There's no empirical data that suggests there's any relationship between these so-called mitigation measures and virus trajectories. And we know this from countless studies, probably as many as 100 by now all over the world, that they're unrelated. And yet they're unrelated no matter what you do. And yet we've got a media apparatus just sort of carrying water for the ruling class idiots who did this to us and continue to cover up for them. So just yesterday, the Washington Post read a headline that said something like South Korea open relaxes covid restrictions and now cases are up. OK, so you get you catch that. So there's nothing factually incorrect in that headline, but it was a causal inference that's completely unjustified by any existent science. So they're continuing to lie to us every single day.

So I first came to Edward Jones with a great deal of trepidation when I first met with my advisor. And I really was feeling vulnerable about what I would have to share. I was, of course, pleasantly surprised to find that there was absolutely no judgment and a lot of support. And when it was time to get serious, he really took my hand and helped me to do that. Edward Jones, we do money differently. Visit edwardjones.ca slash different. What shocked me was so many smart people, smart doctors, I don't know if they were duped or were shamed, but they remained silent. It seems like so many of the medical, the scientific class has fallen in line with what the media wanted them to say and think and what the government wanted them to say and think.

That, for me, was one of the most shocking things. I thought these were truth-tellers. I thought these people spoke truth to power and there was no substitute for science and data. And here I saw them all crumble. Yeah, we saw so many coward doctors, didn't we? Coward doctors, yes. And so if you would talk about that component, but also, I don't want this to be all doom and gloom.

You also talk about these bright spots that have happened because of strong people, smart people standing up and pushing back. And the censorship that's happened from social media and big media and the attacks that have come at them from government or even their employers. These new outlets have sprung up that are based in freedom and free speech, the kind of these founding principles that we still believe in. So this dark day of the pandemic has, to your analysis, has led to some bright points that could lead us back to founding principles of freedom. Well, okay. Back to your point about doctors, I was just probably a little bit cautious about condemning them because I think early on that, you know, if you're a doctor and you hear this, it's a virus on the loose, your first thought is what happens if my patients get it, how can I help them?

That was not the thought of Fauci and Birx and the public health officials who did this to us. They wanted everybody locked down. The doctors were seeking answers. They were seeking therapeutics. But every time somebody came out with a suggested therapeutics on light, fresh air, vitamin D, ivermectin, whatever the thing was, it was condemned as being a quack theory. And they were shut down. And the medical boards, so for about the last 100 years,

the medical boards have sort of worked hand in glove with government. But that's really gotten very intense in the 21st century. So they started just taking a lot of physicians' licenses away. Yeah, they were threatening them. They were threatening people. Yeah, so they don't want to practice medicine anymore because if they practice medicine, they can get thrown out of their, they have their licenses taken away. I went for a routine checkup the other day.

My doctor stood, he's not really my doctor. It's just one of these urgent care places. He was standing eight feet away from me. I was like, wow, you're going to social distance with your patients? That's pretty. How are we going to do this but that's my but that's my point but that's my point like doctors doctors you know there were many doctors who knew better that i personally knew sure who just went along because they knew they

had to because they had a good position and they were afraid and again if all doctors got together and if more doctors were brave the government couldn't have done that to a mass of them. What happened is only a few stood up. And when only a few stood up and they got slapped down, the others got afraid instead of surrounding them and joining them. And then we could have had, I think, an end to this much sooner because the doctors were the only people that had the

credibility to go up against these government forces, in my view. Yeah, but so here's the problem. I mean, it's, you know, I don't think most people believed that they were supposed to be pressed into a kind of revolutionary defiance of government. Like for the most part, we thought we had, we lived stable lives, you know, with the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and life was good in 2019, you know? And so when all that was taken away from, I think people just went into a kind of a shock. But after 21 months, people are definitely waking up. I think big tech censorship is catastrophic.

We've got all these other platforms that are going on. I mean, Rumble gets almost as much traffic as YouTube now. And Telegram is doing extremely well. Signal is taking over from many of the other communication platforms. There are new social networks popping up. People are really on the move. Big tech is really harming itself to a great extent. I hope you're right, Jeffrey.

I really hope you're right. Yeah. Yeah. And look what happened. I mean, because ultimately this will flesh itself out in politics, too. I hope it's going to be a little deeper than politics. I hope we have a cultural renaissance coming out of this. I'm pretty sure we will, but doctors are going to have to realize that their medical boards are not all

knowing that they have to obey the Hippocratic oath. Here's the thing. In most of our lifetimes, we've never been sort of fundamentally challenged in this way that's required moral courage of us. And that sort of muscle of moral courage has not been exercised during most of our lifetimes. And so suddenly, when it's called upon, people are, it takes a while for people to come around and go, you know, this is an emergency.

I ran an article the other day by a Dutch American who teaches law and philosophy at a very high prestige Austrian university. And he's got, you know, I don't know, 19 degrees and books under his name and well-published, very famous. He wrote an article about Hannah Arendt's origins, totalitarianism. I forget what he called it. The five stages of dehumanization. And I got this article on e-mail. Oh, I'd love to see. I'd love to read that. Yeah, no, it's definitely worth reading. It's received something like 500,000 views since it was posted just two days ago. But I wrote him back and I said, Professor, I just have to ask

you, by the way, this article is 70,000 words, which is just unbelievable. But it's eminently readable. I said, I just have to ask you, you know, what led you to write this? I mean, this is obviously dangerous for you. You live in Austria. The whole country is being shattered by lockdowns and mandates and everybody's tearing each other's eyes out and government's cracking down on everybody. It's very dangerous times in Austria, you, tenured prestige professor with everything to lose, has written this mighty treatise that you know is going to go viral and get translated into five different languages, and you're about to become famous if I publish this. Why did you do it?

And his answer was that in consultation with his wife, he knew history. He knows about the history of outrages and atrocities and evil in various places and various ways around the history of the world. And he told me, he said, you know, he realized that he had a real moral obligation to speak out, that he would be doing the wrong thing to stay silent. And he said, if my degrees and my law and my prestige and my life are worth anything at all, it should be deployed for this purpose. My voice is needed right now. This is what I do. So I'm going to speak out for what is true,

what is right, what is moral. And I hope to make some contribution to avoiding a complete calamity for civilization. If I can do that, then I will do it. If I don't do it, I'm part of the problem. That's what you told me. That's right. I mean, this is the greatest don't do it. I'm part of the problem. That's what you told me. That's right. I mean, this is the greatest threat, I think, to freedom for our generation. There's no question in my mind. And it just feels stronger because it feels like it's global, right? There's something happening as you bring up in all your articles., it's been fascinating. I recommend people to go to the Brownstone Institute to, to read Jeffrey Tucker's articles, to, um, really put some thought into this because I'm, I'm, I'm, when I go there and I read your stuff, I'm reading stuff I'm reading

nowhere else, or, you know, maybe just on Substack, you know, but you know, that that's, that's the problem is that there's a lot of, a lot of stuff lot of stuff out there that has been impacted by a lot of corporate interests. For sure. Pharmaceutical companies. And I've only been around three months and and I have, you know, we've clocked three million pages. So, you know, there is a huge demand out there for truth about this topic. The British Medical Journal has really done a deep dive into their clinical trials of this vaccine, found a lot of misuse of data and dangerous stuff. Look, there's going to be hell to pay. I think so, too. When information comes out, when we get all the data, I think you're right. There's going to be a lot of blowback. Jeffrey, let me ask you, so we're talking about freedom. In essence,

this comes back to basic liberty, basic freedom. And I'm setting up my transition here, okay? I love crypto. And I'm going to ask you a specific question. I know you've done a lot of work in this space, and it's an idea that gives people more freedom and decentralized finance. It's not run by a federal reserve. One of my concerns, so let me take a step back. So nuclear power is amazing. It's revolutionized the way a lot of people can live, but obviously it can be used for evil as well. I think decentralized finance has allowed for great opportunity, great innovation, great freedom for individuals. I want to ask you about the idea that we could have a central bank digital currency, which for our listeners, we could digitize the dollar.

So no longer do you use paper currency, you have a digital currency now. And the opportunity to use that is really remarkable. But if you look at what China has done, China has rooted out all of the digital assets, but for their central bank digital currency. And the reason they're doing it, and you talked about the social credit score earlier, they're doing it because it gives immense power and control to the state. If the state controls how you use your currency, which they can if it's digitized, that's immense power over you. Because a $100 bill, if you think about it,

it can be used for groceries. It can be used for paying your plumber. It can be used for pornography or drug sales. I mean, it can be used for anything. But if you digitize it, all of a sudden you can see the control freaks coming into play and potentially using this amazing technology for evil. Just want to get your thoughts on where we should go and should we be concerned if the US government digitizes the dollar? Yeah. The other thing they can do is cause the money to expire, right? So this is from a monetary point of view, this is what they really want, because one of the things that drives them crazy is that central bankers cannot control whether and to what extent you spend your money right so you get

you've got your money you can leave it in the market where you can spend it then whether to what extent you do that is expressed in this um piece of data called velocity the velocity of money it really is a reflection of human volition it's not really anything uh central bank can control but if they can make the money expire uh they can control the velocity too and that they believe gives them a better ability to manage macro economy because it's nonsense but um so i there's no question to the federal reserve wants their own uh central central bank digital currency mostly they want to use blockchain for for remittances and settlements services which is the only thing the federal government provides but now you're

starting to see we're probably getting too deep into the woods here but these uh these crypto companies with the advent of stable coins they've they've massively improved on ach you know made it um the readers counterparty risk and made it faster and cheaper. And that industry is booming. The Fed is furious about it because it cuts directly into the monopoly of the one service they actually do provide banks. So what they want to do is they want to abolish the stable coins and take over the market for themselves. That's their actual ambition, whether they can get away with it. I don believe it um i i actually have grave doubts i think that i think what i think they've waited too long uh to do this um maybe i may i may be wrong about that but i i what i see in the

crypto industry is so well developed and and what i'm seeing from the from the federal reserve is that they just don't really have enough. They don't have the competence to pull this off. I mean, the federal government. We're really grateful for government being so slow and incompetent that they couldn't catch up with crypto. Yeah, I think that's I think that's right. And so, I mean, there's a reason we've seen the crypto industry boom like it has over the last two years. It's a new safe haven asset, and it was never taken down, and they were never able to shut it down.

It's never been hacked. So it's completely impervious to government control at this point. They can control the exchange, the on-ramps, the off-ramps, but they can't control the ecosystem of the crypto world. And that's why it was designed to be independent of the state. And it's turned out to be exactly that. But, you know, I just, it breaks my heart when people say, don't worry, Bitcoin will fix it.

Well, look, I love Bitcoin. I love cryptocurrency. But there's life outside of the blockchain too. You know what I mean? There's all kinds of things that need to be fixed. Families and faith and communities and businesses chain too. You know, I mean, there's all kinds of things that need to be fixed, families and, and faith and communities and businesses and our confidence in the future, the law, the courts, you know, our medical systems, supply chains, everything seems to be broken.

Those also have to be fixed to live a good life. You know, it's a good life is not just bathing in your digital wealth. You know, it's a good life is not just bathing in your digital wealth. You know, there's more going on. Well, that's interesting that you say that, Jeffrey, because I believe that as bad as the pandemic lockdowns have been, and they have been horrible and for no one more than children who I think we're going to start to see some, you know, psychological effects. And if we're already seeing them, but I think we're going to see an explosion of them with the fear and the submission and all this weird stuff that we've done to kids by masking them for a year completely for political reasons with no science base. But that said, and all the

bad things that have happened and the businesses that were lost and the wealth that has been, you know, accumulated by the few to the, at the expense of small businesses and all this kind of stuff that's happened. I do think that the shutdown did something that maybe the elites who planned this or did this didn't expect, which is when we all did go home, a lot of families said, whoa, this is what life was really about my family. I think the silver lining is that when people did come home, many of them started to rethink the way their lives had been ordered prior to the pandemic. And I think people made some really fundamental shifts in their work-life balance. Many people came back to faith. I mean, Sean's right. There were some people that did get

divorced. They didn't like being together in the house with their spouse. But for the most part, I think most families made some, I think, really positive adjustments in work-life balance and faith life. The housing crisis in the GTA has reached a critical point with more than two and three residents being affected. Almost nine million Canadians are living in food insecure households. Over one million people in the GTA now live below the poverty line. We're just out today. Mental health support is the number one reason

people are calling 211 for a... At United Way, we wake up to a different alarm every day. Help us end poverty and build a better GTA any way we can. Donate today at unitedwaygt.org. I think the most important silver lining here is the possibility that we've rediscovered the value and meaning of freedom. F.A. Hayek, a 1947 donor article in which he said, I hope that we don't have to... He said that nobody loves freedom as

much as people who have lost it and then regained it. And he said, he says, I hope that we in the West don't have to come to that point before we realize the importance of loving freedom and making our understanding of what freedom means and its importance a kind of intellectual adventure that's the most important we can do for the sake of civilization. I hope we don't have to lose it. But we did lose it. Yeah. We did. Maybe not all of it, but a tremendous amount of it.

And I hope that it's going to inspire an awakening. I think it has, actually. It has. In education, but also in families. I think there has been some massive shifts. You see how many parents are homeschooling now. You see parents at school boards going, hey, I saw what you were teaching my kid on Zoom and I'm mad about it. And so, yeah, I think there's been some fundamental shifts.

Yeah. And we really have to rethink our, you know, lots of things, the relationship with the individual to the state, the individual to the community, whether and to what extent compliance is always something to be celebrated. If there's time to time from time to time, you really have to ask yourself, where does meaning come from and what is my life about? And, you know, who who's my final authority in life? Is it just who happens to hold power because he was elected by a thin majority? Or are there more important moral principles at stake? And civilization was built by people who gradually discovered from the late Middle Ages on that there were certain things that are more important than compliance with temporary government managers.

And that's how we found the idea of freedom. That's how we cobbled together the idea of human rights and wrote constitutions. And those constitutions, those rights, those freedoms built modernity. They gave us technology. They gave us the ability to travel and move and live our dreams and start our businesses and seek a good life, you know. And so we're going to have to rediscover all those things if we intend to take the next step in the progress of civilization. If we don't rediscover those values, we could be headed to very dark times. And I don't know which is going to prevail, but here's what I do know.

It really is up to us. I mean, we really, every single person listening to this podcast needs to do some internal soul searching and ask these fundamental questions. You know, what kind of life do I want to live? What kind of society do I want to live in? What is equality and rights and freedom? What are these terms about? And what am I willing to do to fight for them? These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves.

So right. It's like what Ronald Reagan said. You know, it's freedom to not pass down in the bloodstream every generation has to fight for it and this is definitely the battle of our time yeah so listen jeffrey i gotta tell you what when uh when we were able to get you on the podcast rachel and i were both so excited because i think this the issues that you've thought about with regard to to the pandemic and the lockdowns and freedom and the correlation and we could actually do another four podcasts with you because of all the things you've thought to the pandemic and the lockdowns and freedom and the correlation.

And we could actually do another four podcasts with you because of all the things you've thought about. But we want to thank you for joining us at the kitchen table today and for your insights and your work and your continual writing in regard to big ideas that so many in social media and in government want to shut down. We're so happy you're out there actually expressing them and being a voice for so many who don't have the voice like you have. Yeah. Don't have the articulation you have. You really say what a lot of us wish we could articulate. You're saying what we think and what we're feeling, what we're all feeling in this moment. And so your book, again, is Liberty or Lockdown. I

recommend it to anybody. Jeffrey Tucker. I also recommend people go to the Brownstone Institute website. And are you on Substack too, Jeffrey? I'm not. I just started the Institute mainly because I wanted to create a bit of a sanctuary for science and free expression during these times. And so Brownstone isn't really about me. I just wanted to kind of create a venue. And I knew it would be slow to build,

but things are going well. Yeah, they're going good. Financial support has been coming in, which, you know, God, pleases me so much to see this kind of support I'm getting. I'm just really happy. And we hired Martin Kulldorff, you know, a Harvard professor to direct our scientific activities in the future. And things are building.

And, you know, I knew when the lockdowns happened that we really were faced with a kind of hinge of history. And the things will be very different in the future than they were in the past. And I wanted Brownstone to be there to provide a source of light and truth and guidance that was not constrained by all the things that are evidently constrained in the New York Times and the Washington Post, or for that matter, the Harvard or for that matter, the Harvard Medical School, you know. So we've got a lot of rebuilding to do. And these are kind of scary times. It's going to consume the rest of our lives. So many people have been so badly hurt, so many lives ruined.

But there's always hope. The greatest sin is despair. We just have to find the source of hope and chase it and pursue it, create it, build it, reinforce it. And I think we can get through this. None of us wanted this, but we got it. And now it's up to us to change. insidious what the left was doing, trying to shut down debate, which is what we do as Americans. We debate things. We talk about things and have the freedom to do that. And what you've done at Brownstone is allowed that opportunity, again, to make sure the dialogue is happening in a different way, but still a very powerful way. So thank you for that. And to those listening to the podcast, if you want different perspectives, truthful perspectives, check out the writings there. They're fantastic.

So, yeah. Thank you for joining us. We're so honored to be part of the freedom movement with somebody like you. We're so honored you would join us at the kitchen table. We hope one day to have you back. Maybe, maybe for not a virtual cup of coffee, maybe a real cup of coffee. I love that idea. I'd love to talk about your conversion to Catholicism.

One of these times. It sounds fascinating. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. All right. Well, thank you so much, Jeffrey, for joining us at The Kitchen Table. We've enjoyed the conversation. And if you did too, let us know. Subscribe, rate, review the podcast

at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. We hope to see you around the kitchen table next week. Bye, everybody. Have a good one. I'm Guy Benson. Join me weekdays at 3 p.m. Eastern as we break down the biggest stories of the day

with some of the biggest newsmakers and guests. Listen live on the Fox News app or get the free podcast at GuyBensonShow.com.