Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/12/23 Scott and Tom Woods on the Crime of the Century

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Scott talks to Tom Woods about Tom's new book Diary of a Psychosis, and revisits some of the idiotic remarks and failed predictions by the so-called experts. Discussed on the show: Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania, by Tom Woods Tom Woods is the host of the Tom Woods Show and the author of numerous books including Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania. Follow him on Twitter @ThomasEWoods. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon,PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, you guys, Scott Horton here to remind you that it's fun drive time at the Institute right now. We only do this twice a year, but it's got to be done. And I'm proud to do it, too. We've got an incredible crew of the best writers, authors, and podcasters in the Libertarian Movement. From Jim Bovard, Lori Calhoun, Tom Woods, and Ted Carpenter to Keith Knight, Kyle Anzalone, Hunter Durenc, Connor Freeman, and all the rest of the guys. It's the best team around. We've published three books this year. Keith Knight's Voluntaryist Handbook, Lori Calhoun's questioning the COVID company line,

and Joseph Solis Mullins, the fake China threat. And here any day now, we will be publishing Thomas E. Woods' Diary of a Psychosis, Jim Bovard's Last Rights, and Keith Knight's latest, domestic imperialism. That makes 13 books so far, with more coming in the new year, including my new one, provoked how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine, which I know is already overlong and overdue, but I'm working on it, I promise. And which brings me to the point, we don't have a big glass office building in downtown Washington. The money we raise goes straight to payroll and book production costs, and that's about it.

The Libertarian Institute is the best bang for your buck in the movement. If you believe in what we're doing, please go to Libertarian Institute.org slash donate for detail. on how you can help keep us going into the new year, and the great kickbacks we offer as well. And we thank you for your support. All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com,

author of the book, Pools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003. Almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show.

Hey, everybody, Tom Woods here. It's episode 2429 of the Tom Wood Show. All right, y'all, welcome the Scott Horton Show. It's episode 5,9773. The Scott Horton Show. And I'm telling you guys, especially if you're looking on a video, you're looking at two lazy SOBs here because we are doing double duty. We're doing an episode of the Tom Wood Show that will also be an episode of the Scott Horton Show.

And I'm secretly hoping that our overlap of listeners will just be willing to listen to it twice because we're going to just pack that much information into it. They're going to love it. It's dual-use technology. got the DIA all suspicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're darn right. And by the way, by the time people see this, you will have returned from Orlando

because you're coming down to my Christmas party and you're going to be my guest speaker at my house where we're having a great time with supporters. We have a fantastic meal plan. I do the most awesome things for people who follow me, including bringing them Scott Horton at Christmas time. You're a pretty good host there. Thank you.

I'm going to say things. so it should be fun. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. So what are we talking about today, Scott Horton, who is both guest and host at the same time? Well, one of my greatest accomplishments of my entire life right up there is I'm the director of the institute

what just published your brand new book, Diary of a Psychosis, how public health disgraced itself during COVID-Mania. Don't you love that handsome, nice new hardback book? You can get the hardback or the paperback on amazon.com in whatever country you're in and the kindle also is available as well and he's in stark violation of the tom woods rule i regret to inform you this thing blows past 300 pages

it's just about four though and man it's so good tom listen i mean i like you and everything and i would sit here and probably say that i like your book a lot probably you know even if i didn't but the thing is and look all of your great readers and email list receivers and podcast listeners, they know about you how you just absolutely led this fight, just the vanguard of the Libertarian Movement's fight against the COVID regime during this whole time. We already know that. But man, to go back and read it all in a pile like this in a row this way, to see, I don't want to give too much away about the thing. So I'll stop talking soon, I promise. But to see how much the best of they and therefore you knew

about what was true about this thing by what date compared to the rest of how it played out is just one most mind-boggling things I've ever be held in my life, man. It is just something else. Thank you. You know, H-bombs going off in brains everywhere across this country for the rest of this year and in another next. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate that very much.

I appreciate the support of the Libertarian Institute getting the book out. I'm really super happy with it. audiobook will be out in a matter of days. I did the reading of the audio book so you can hear my sarcastic tone all throughout if that gives you additional pleasure. Take on my old man glasses. I was just going to say, Scott, you're aging before my eyes. What's going on here? I have perfect vision, but now I know what the rest of you mortals have been dealing with this whole time. I can still see far away really good, but I wanted to say this guy's name right. Jay Batacharia. Yeah. Jay Batacharia. Other than the author of the foreword of your great book.

here. Jay Bottacharya is a professor of medicine, also health policy. He has a background in economics, too. So he's interdisciplinary at Stanford. And he is a very mild-mannered guy. He's not a hothead like old Woods or old Horton here. You know, he's, when he does a debate at the Soho Forum, Scott, he keeps his cool. I don't know how he does it. I can't do that. He keeps his cool. But he's just a truth teller. And he really doesn't want to be in the spotlight he just wants he says i just want to do science and that's what he was quietly doing but from the beginning of this he found himself on the outs but he's just reporting what he's seeing and he is actually now part of a lawsuit involving the freedom of speech because he was named by name by bad guys in the white house as somebody whose message needed to be suppressed

this guy this mild-mannered guy so this is one of these cases is Scott where just like during the Ron Paul days, you and I got to know a lot of really great people who have become lifelong friends and we would never have known them otherwise. And it's small comfort, but one silver lining of COVID was that likewise I met a lot of really impressive people I would never have known otherwise. And Jay is one of them. Like I've become friends with Jay. And I asked him, would you, I would be thrilled if you wrote the forward to this book. I mean, he's got the credentials coming out that you know what. And I said, but look, I understand. understand there are a million reasons you might not want to do this you know this like puts more

of a target on your back than you already have and i was listing for him all the reasons he wouldn't want to do it and he came right back i mean within minutes he came back with me and and i was offering and i said i'll pay you x dollars because i don't believe in making people work for nothing i was going to pay him you know to write the forward he came back and said it would be an honor to write the forward to your book and i will not accept a single cent for doing it that's a good man good man it's a good forward to it is a good forward it's cool i mean you know it's nice to have a little bit of extra credibility here because he really has been a hero through all this yeah yeah absolutely and as they all those suppressed opinions of his they all were proven correct yeah oh totally

totally because from the beginning for example when everybody was saying that it had like a 3.4% fatality rate everybody was panicked over that and when trump tried to say i don't think it's quite that high. They all said misinformation. Of course, it wasn't that high. And Jay was trying to say that based on what he was seeing. And for some reason, it was like, you remember everybody was, it was like everybody was allergic to good news in those days. Like everybody wanted to hear just the catastrophic version. I could never quite understand that. So anyway, one thing I'd done with this book, though, is I actually put up a website that I dedicated to the book. And I'm so happy with it. Because what I also did was I, you know, I wanted to make the book manage.

and not make it like the one 800-page book that you would read on this subject. Because no one's going to read that. That's just the fact. No one's going to read that. But I didn't just want to show these people were wrong and show what the truth was. I also wanted to tell people's like human interest stories about what life was like during this time. And what happened to people whose careers were destroyed or whose loved ones died with no comfort from their relatives or all these kinds of things. people who lost members of their family to suicide because of the despair we all felt during that

time. I want to tell those stories too. So I ended up making a whole separate volume of that. And so I also have a book just come out. This one's just an e-book form, but it's called collateral damage. Victims of the lockdown regime tell their stories. And that was because I was writing an email newsletter and day after day, subscribers of that newsletter were writing to me with their stories about families pitted against each other and people not able to get life-saving surgery or people whose careers had been destroyed or whatever, people who became alienated from loved ones because they disagreed on this matter. It was just one awful thing after another. And we were not allowed to tell those stories at that time, as you recall,

because if you complained about any of the restrictions, then you obviously didn't care whether your grandmother died and you just wanted to get a haircut or eaten in a restaurant or whatever. But I feel like it was inhuman that these people never got to talk about what happen to them and if we get we want to get the full story of this it can't just be charts and graphs it's got to be what really happen to people so i have a website where if you get my book diary of a psychosis you can get it there you can get it at any retailer you're like then you go to this site and you can get that bonus you get volume two which is collateral damage the real stories these stories have not been told and there is no book collecting their stories this is it yeah so the website if there

is no link you have followed of mine all year. This is the one I am asking you one human being to another to visit. And that is diary of COVID.com. Diary of COVID.com. Not only does it have the most awesome video you've ever seen where I remember, Scott, exactly those moments when Andy Slavitt and Anthony Fauci for once were asked a challenging question on TV. For once, how do you account for the? fact that when you adjust for age, California and Florida look exactly the same, and California

ruined everybody's life in Florida. I mean, how do you explain that? You think, well, maybe they have an answer, and I just haven't heard it. Well, they were asked about that, and the answers are so bad and embarrassing, you can't believe. So diary of COVID.com, all this beautiful stuff, it's a work of art. And as I say, you can also get volume two. So that would be my first thing. But then there's just so much to talk about, Scott, inside. Like, I could talk about this. stuff for hours. Now I don't have to anymore because I wrote a book about it, doggone. Yeah. There you. All right. Well, so I have a couple of follow-ups there, but first, I wanted to chime in one story there that this one was very personal to me was a good friend

of mine, a writer for us at anti-war.com, Reese Ehrlich, who is a leftist, but a long-time activist, and a great journalist. I mean, he would go to war zones like Patrick Coburn and those guys and wrote a great book about the war in Syria, and he was a great regular guest on my show and a great, you know, I don't know, friend, but a close and nice acquaintance of mine. And they killed him with this stuff. I mean, his story, if it wasn't previously unpublished, it would belong right in collateral damage there. And it was his last article for anti-war.com was how I think he'd been forced for whatever

bureaucratic reason to switch from Blue Cross to Kaiser, Permanente, out there in California. And then they just refused to see him, even though he knew he had colon cancer. And they just told him, that's a slow-grown cancer, you'll be fine. And they put him off and put him off and put him off. And he finally was able to go to the doctor, I think, in January of 21 or maybe December of 20. And they said, oh, yeah, no, sorry, you're stage four, pal. You're done. It's in your liver and your brain and your everything, whatever it was.

And so he wrote his last article for anti-war.com is like, well, sign our, pal. I guess I'm a dead man. And he died? Yeah, he died right after that, Tom, like in February or something. He lasts another couple of weeks after that. And he just said, like, well, I know I'm dead. So if anybody wants to write me a nice email about a nice time we ever had somewhere or whatever, geez, I always thought I grow old and write my memoirs and have a nice life and look at my grandchildren and grow up.

And anyway, bye. And then that was it. He was dead. And imagine, I mean, in California, in the land was supposed to be the most wealthy and advanced state in the most wealthy and advanced country in the world, they refused to treat this guy who he wasn't. destitute, living in a gutter, and somehow the social safety net missed him or whatever. He had a job, Tom. He had health insurance, and he couldn't get treatment. They refused to see him.

They knew he was dying of cancer, but they refused to treat him because they, the health care workers, supposedly, or their bosses, were afraid that they would get a respiratory virus. And what in the world is that who's making those calculations to decide that at my for in Reese's expense. When, after all, colon cancer is one of the most treatable ones. He can get it with drugs, with surgery, with radiation.

I know people who survive colon cancer who are alive 20 years later right now, Tom Woods. You know? And this guy's dead. Yeah, and he's dead because of hysteria. I mean, really, he's dead because of irrationality. And by the way, that's the most charitable spin I can put on that.

Oh, this is, I didn't know about this, Scott. I should have, I should have been following. I didn't know about this. That is awful. No, there's a million of them. And, you know, it's great that you're doing this book, collateral damage to go along with this because you're right. These are totally the unheard stories.

You know, we have peer-to-peer kind of social network stuff where you can hear little bits of this. But these people never be highlighted and spotlighted in the media or by government employees or like giving that kind of a platform. It's up to you to give them that platform to say, look at what they did to these people, man. Yeah. And, you know, I know that it's hard to hear stories.

like this. It's hard for us. But the thing is, it's therapeutic for them, and that's why they submitted their stories to me. Yeah. And it's inhuman that they couldn't tell them. And so we can It's the true history of our society. It's an oral history. That's right. And so we can rectify this injustice to some degree by just putting ourselves in that moment with them by reading what they have to say and just redoubling our efforts to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. So Diaryofcovid.com, that book is for free. That one, collateral damage, that one is for free. Yeah.

And by the way, do we edit that? No, I did all that. You did all that one by yourself, okay. And that's great that you're giving that away as a great bonus there, Tom. Hang on just one second for me. You guys know that I consider the Defend the Guard movement, led by the combat vets at bring our troops home.us and defendtheguard.us to be the most important thing happening in American politics today.

Simply put, this law would nullify the empire by preventing the state governors from handing their National Guard troops over to the president for foreign combat without an official declaration of war from the Congress. We've made great progress getting it out of committee and even past the state senate in Arizona. Help support Bring Our Troops Home and Defend the Guard at bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us. And their director of field operations, Diego Rivera, teaches a political leadership class that is the most effective. training like it anywhere. He's still a soldier, only now his mission is peace. So heads up all you anti-war vets, we've got a mission for you. Find out all about their upcoming training sessions and help support at bring our troops home.us and defend the guard.us. Hey guys, I had some wasps in my house. So I shot them to death with my trusty bug assault

3.0 model with the improved assault reservoir and bar safety. I don't have a deal with them, but the show does earn a kickback every time you get a bug of salt or anything else you buy from Amazon.com by way of the link in the right-hand margin on the front page at Scott Horton.org. So keep that in mind. And don't worry about the mess. Your wife will clean it up. So look, you wrote all these essays. It's three years worth of emails that you sent out about all of this stuff, railing against this stuff.

But at some point, you decided to do what I know, that you had already decided you did not want to do anymore. which is make a book out of it and publish it. So what was it the, you tell us, was there a story there? Or was it just, you decided for a specific reason that you wanted to do it this way? Well, initially, I had thought of doing a book a year before. But I would have done like the super thorough book where there'd be, where I would have read all the papers and on every single aspect of the question. And I thought, that'll take me forever.

By the time it comes out, nobody will even remember this thing. So then I thought, I don't want to do that. But then I thought, well, wait a minute, why don't I just tell the story the way I want to tell the story, which is I don't answer every single question, but I answer all the key ones. The thing is, I remember, because I chronicled them, I remember all the bizarre details, the little bits of the story that everybody else has forgotten. Like, for example, in Alachua County, which is where Jacksonville is, the county commissioners decided that there would be one, person allowed per thousand square feet in a retail establishment. Now, was that because they read that in some medical journal? No, it was because according to a commissioner, quote, it was easy math for everybody to do. Now, that's a detail. No one's going to remember that little detail, but that

detail tells you a lot about what happened here, that in the name of science, just a lot of arbitrary stuff was done. Example after example like that. Or I remember Eric Topal, who's a very, very accomplished scientist. I had him on the Tom Wood show to debate Martin Koldorf, and he was saying the reason Japan did so well is that the government issued masks to everybody. But since most Americans, why would they know any details about that? They just let that go. But the real story of that is, yeah, they sent 50 million masks out to the Japanese public, but they were all too small to fit. And so everybody in Japan was joking about these masks. They didn't say, oh, these masks saved us, But Eric Topol read a headline somewhere about the Japanese government sending out masks.

And so he goes ahead and trumpets that as the reason for their success. But again, who's going to remember that detail? The masks that were too small to fit in Japan. Like, that's got to be in there. All these details put together. That's the story. And so I realized I've got all this. So I don't want to write a book that's just like a chapter on masks and a chapter on lockdowns.

I want to walk people through, if not day by day, at least in chronological order, as the madness unfolded and what we were all thinking and what was happening and what the numbers were showing what the graphs all said. And you know you're right Scott about this format

makes it possible to look back and say oh well somebody actually knew by X month of X year what was really happening so I just in flipping through the book just now I just discovered there's a guy named David Leonhardt who writes for the New York Times

and maybe about a year year and a half ago I guess two years ago he started writing a column consistently in his own newsletter that you could get through the New York Times about COVID, and it was his job to gradually and slowly break it to the readers of the New York Times that none of this crazy nonsense they'd been doing had really accomplished anything. But he didn't start saying that until October 2021, October 2021. The damage is all done. The developing world is decimated by this. at Myanmar, they're reporting that people were eating rats and snakes, because when they have no incomes, this is how they have to eat to feed their families, takes him until October 2021 to bother to look at the charts and say, you know what? Doesn't seem like it made any difference. Well, you know, I kind of figured that out early on, and not because I have great insight, just because I like listening to dissident voices. And they're not always right, but sometimes they are. And obviously, there was a tremendous group think and heard mentality. going on in early 2020. So I actively sought out people

who weren't part of that. And I want to know why do you have a different point of view? What are you basing it on? And then I would just look at the charts and the charts told all the stories. They sure did. I mean, I was, I think the first or second time

I was on Kennedy's show on Fox News. I said, go look at Tom's charts. None of this made the difference, you know, the COVID charts.com or whatever the site there. Oh, yeah, COVIDchartsquiz. Yeah, that was, I'm happy about that old thing, too. Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that's definitely something to brag about. I mean, the whole thing when I'm reading it, it reminded me of the weapons of mass destruction, right?

It's like reading Romando about the WMDs. Like, I'll never forget, because there's like a scene in my living room that coincided with it when anti-war.com ran the headline from the Washington Post in September 2002, that those aluminum tubes, those are for rockets. You could never use those for a centrifuge, man. Don't give me a break. So says every actual expert on Earth, and including the horrible David Albright, who was probably an Israeli spy anyway. And even he debunked it.

And then, Tom, they kept talking about the aluminum tubes like they hadn't already been debunked in the post. For months and months and months, they kept saying aluminum tubes, why are we got to invade Iraq? Tom, get this. Aluminum tubes. That's why I got to invade Iraq.

And that's what it's like reading your book. I was like, wait a minute, man. You can't be sitting here. December, and then in March, and then in August, again, telling me what Tom already debunked last July, it ain't right. You can't keep using the aluminum tubes after they'd been debunked, man. And they just keep doing it. And then it's frustrating in a way to go back and see just how thoroughly you knew better and when, not you guessed better and not your libertarian principle would never give in to their policy anyway, but knew better.

demonstratably knew better by X day. I don't want to root for it. I'm already saying too much, but you knew so soon. And then the whole rest of the book takes place after that. Yeah. And I'm just in here hitting myself in the head the whole time going, I can't believe this. Well, yeah, it's just like, for example, I've got in there a chart from the end of 2020, around December. And I'm looking back a couple of two, three months and comparing the numbers like deaths and whatever in Japan and South Korea.

Japan and South Korea had very, very different government responses, and yet the trajectory is identical in both places. The ups and downs occur in exactly the same spots. So remember the morality play we got. If you see a spike, quote unquote, in some place, that's because people aren't complying because they're stupid robs who listen to Trump or whatever, even though Trump was unsound on this for quite a while. But okay, if that's the way you're going to play it, then if I'm looking at Japan and South Korea and the ups and downs are in the same spot, Does that mean you're expecting me to believe that everybody complied and then didn't comply and then complied again and then stopped complying again at exactly the same moment in both countries? That is not plausible.

So don't give me this. Or how about this? Now, again, this is a detail that no one's going to remember. But I remember because I was, if I may borrow a word from my title, I was psychotically interested in this subject. I was very attached to it. So just maybe people who live in Nashville, Tennessee might even remember this. But there was a scandal in summer of 2020 under Mayor John Cooper because some internal emails were leaked in which it is clear from internal communications that they knew bars and restaurants were not a major source of spread of COVID at that time, that they had found 22 cases. And we all know cases didn't even mean anything that they could trace to bars and restaurants.

And you see in this internal email that they're all saying to each other, well, we're going to keep this for internal consumption, right? not to spread to the public because it might confuse them. It might confuse them if we spread this out to the public. Well, then the mayor's office denied all this. You're misinterpreting the email. But you know what? They found a clip of Mayor John Cooper saying that bars were behind a sharp series of recent case increases and clustering of cases and that there's been a record number of clusters originating from bars. So he's spreading this nonsense when they knew the numbers weren't backing that up. And by the way, if the number had been 10, thousand cases? You better believe they would have shared that with the public because that was

with their panicking narrative. So one of the things I do after telling that story in the book is I've got four charts of different counties in Tennessee. And I say, all right, one of these counties has Nashville in it. And bars and restaurants were closed or they were reduced to 25 percent capacity, but not in the other counties. Because for the most part, Tennessee actually was pretty good. We think about Florida and South Dakota. Tennessee was actually pretty good. So I want you to pick out of these four graphs showing COVID, you know, health outcomes, I want you to try to pick out which one do you think is in the county that limited bars and restaurants to 25% capacity, which basically means they can't stay open. You can't make a profit. Like, you can barely

make a profit in a hundred percent capacity in that industry. So go ahead, pick it out. It should be obvious, right? Should be the one with all the deaths. But of course, you know the answer, Scott. The charts are identical that made no difference at all. You cannot tell which one it is. And we can repeat this over and over and over again. Now, by the way, When I started, it's not just the states. You go, here, these two counties were next to each other. Counties. These two cities are adjacent to each other inside the same state or just on the inside of the river.

Right. And the reason that's important is that if you try to compare, let's say, Oklahoma with North Carolina, people will say, oh, well, they're demographically too different. And there are a million reasons that this, that. Or they're too far away. All right. So, yeah, yeah. And it's all kinds of excuses because in March 2020, if you had said, if Oklahoma and North Carolina do two, completely different things. Do you think the results would be easily detectable on a chart and we

won't have to nitpick the demographic differences? Oh, they all would have said, yes, one chart will be dramatically different. Then they're exactly the same and they say, oh, well, demographic differences. You can't possibly compare. All right. So how about we compare not only counties next to each other, how about we compare a state with itself, like a state over time or a state where we look at the masked areas and the unmasked areas and the results are the same. Or in California, we know California was the worst. They had ridiculous restrictions. It made no sense at all. I remember being out there with one of my daughters in 2021. And I thought, well, one thing I can do with her, it's a long story why we were out there, but one thing we could do is go to a drive-in movie. Because a drive-in movie,

how can you give somebody COVID in a drive-in movie? And they had a restriction, no double features allowed per the health department. Because if you see two movies, Scott, that doubles your chance of zero. I mean, so just totally crazy. But if you look at California- Nevada and Arizona. So Arizona probably of the three of them had the fewest restrictions. Nevada was probably in between and then California the most extreme.

You look at their charts in various periods of time and it's just the same. It's just the same. And nobody bothered to ask. Why would you value your life so little that you would see that kind of result in the charts or that you know,

well, it's really that you wouldn't even look for the charts. Whereas I wanted to live my life. I wanted to live my life in March 2020 and beyond. So I was looking for the charts. I wanted to know what's the real story about what's happening. I understand why the media doesn't want to tell me. What I don't understand is why more ordinary people didn't want to, or if they did find the charts, they would ignore them or make some excuse or you can't make an excuse.

When this thing was all said and done, California and Florida, you compare them, the two extremes, really, you compare them on the ultimate question of all-cause mortality. So this includes deaths from COVID, deaths from other causes, deaths from lockdowns, this includes it all. And it solves the problem of how do you classify what death as a COVID death or who even knows that was not uniform across the U.S. or across the world. This solves that problem because it's just looking at death per se. And California did worse. And that's all you need to know. That's all you need to know. I don't care what excuse Eric Fagelding or whatever his name is or Peter, whatever, that guy who wouldn't debate RFK Jr.

Whatever they had to say, that's the Trump card. That wins. That wins. That means we were right. And it should have been obvious early on we were right, as I show in the book. Absolutely. So let me ask you this, Tom, and I'm not sure if this gets much attention in the book, but there's kind of a psychosis that we're living through now, right?

Which is, forget COVID. Now it's Ukraine. Forget Ukraine. Now it's Palestine. Or whatever the thing. And so people really don't want to look back on this anymore. They want to look back on who demanded we support al-Qaeda in Syria during the Obama years away. We're just not going to do that.

That's going to be the forgotten war like Korea or something like that. And I see, I know that you get grief from people now. Like, geez, are you still talking about this? But boy, this is a big deal. This is emergency powers beyond anything, any politicians in America ever tried to claim before. And when you mention this and that personality, the bureaucrats, especially on the national government level and at the state level, and for that matter, the local level who dreamed up and enforced these edicts,

is there any kind of accountability at all, any kind of recrimination? Is anyone even running for office on, that's the guy what locked you in your house? Yeah. And I'm getting out of that, and we're going to overthrow him. Is this part of our culture now that something's got to be done about this? Isn't this crazy that you can see all kinds of Hollywood movies about corrupt private sector entities? And no doubt, many of them are corrupt. But there's no movie about they lied about the war in Iraq.

Or there's no movie about the, I mean, no serious movie movie about the- They finally made one like 20 years later and nobody watched it, right? Or we think about the downturn of 2008, where the government was just an innocent bystander as all that collapsed and whatever. You don't see any of that, whereas there's so many villains you could be casting people for, and we just, we don't get these things at all. And so it's incredible that we've just come to accept that, oh, yeah, our government ginned up a fake case to go to war against people, many, many, many of whom, to the point where we don't even know the number, perished unnecessarily. But, you know, hey, nobody's perfect. That's not normal. That's not normal.

And it's partly because we've just been taught to treat government as different from every other part of society. We would never accept this if, let's say, Exxon, ExxonMobil decided that they were just going to go kill a couple million people and displace another million or something like that. We would say, well, hold on a minute. That we have to put you in jail for that. But if it's our public servants, well, then it's just public policy. And, you know, everybody can have a give and take about it. Who knows what the truth is. It is mind-boggling and it makes you crazy.

But for me, it just makes me fight all the more. I don't know what else to do. And another thing, I knew the media was full of terrible people before. I mean, that was obvious. That's obvious the way they handled foreign policy. It's obvious the way they handle everything. But I feel like it's accelerated. It's gotten way worse over the past three or four years.

Way worse. And wow, was it bad during COVID. So, for example, there's a period of time in late 2020 going into early, 2021, where if you look at the curves in Iowa and New Mexico, they're roughly the same just separated by a period of time. So each one is like a mountain, but just one of them is a little later than the other. And when the numbers are going way up for Iowa, the headline was, this is what happens when government does nothing. Iowa is what happens when government does nothing. When the numbers shot right back down, no headline at all, nothing. With New Mexico, no headline

at all when the numbers are going up. But when they come down just as they did in Iowa, we get an article in Scientific American about this is how New Mexico crushed the coronavirus. There is almost no possible innocent explanation for that, Scott. Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Well, look, so for everybody listening to this, who are your people, you know, your podcast audience and mine, I mean, pretty much everybody's going to already be good on this. And so there's a very valuable use for this book, for those people, which is get your act all the way together and know exactly what's right about this for all your future conversations with your friends and your loved ones and whoever. And this could come up again. I saw a tweet the other day. I forgot who it was. I'd like to give

credit, but they announced some new respiratory virus. And it might have been Clint Russell or somebody said, quick, lock down the entire global economy. You'd screech all civilization to all. Like, Think of how insane that sounds to say it now. But somehow it sounded sane in 2020 and 21 and 22 and 23. And then here's the other thing that I think could be very useful about this book. Because honestly, you know, you swing pretty hard, Tom, but at the same time, like, it's just true and you're a nice guy. And so the book doesn't come across like too brow beatingly. In other words, I think if someone had a family member or a friend who really needed convincing, I think this book,

assuming that they were fair-minded and willing to say, all right, fine, I'll read your book there, Mr. Naysayer. I think that this would be a really good book for them. Because, you know, it really is just very factual-based. You're very frustrated the whole time, but every time with only the best of reason, you know, it's never like, oh, this guy, you know, it's always the reader is in agreement with the author

that I cannot believe that this is what's going on here and that kind of thing. So it's not just a book to read. know and like and learn from. But it's a book for those who are good on this to master the subject and be bulletproof from now on. And I think it really could be good for convincing others and really being a tool to expose. Because look, as you said, nobody else has really done this. I'm sure there are some books that are against the COVID regime out there. But I doubt they're as persuasive as this one is. Well, they're different. And I've had some of their authors on my show and

I like them very much. But I'm super satisfied with this one because I think, first of all, aren't quite indignant enough sometimes. And I've just got the receipts again and again. Yeah, man. And the thing is, you don't even have to say to your friend read this whole thing. You'd say, read these 20 pages. And then one of the things I've sometimes recommended to people is let your friend recommend something for you to read.

And then you can have a discussion about it. And I feel like, I'm, Scott, I'm sorry to sound like this, but I feel like my thing's going to be better than whatever they make you read. So when you have that conversation, you know, it's going to come out. I don't know what uterates already been retracted, you know. Yeah, exactly. That's where, yeah, it's all been wiped from the internet, probably. Some of that stuff.

You have to go into the way back machine. But, you know, another merit of it is that, of course, I live in Florida, so my kids did not endure the worst of it by a long shot. And we really were able to live somewhat normally, with the exception of we couldn't do the ordinary travel we like to do, because I don't want to go to some dystopia somewhere where we can't do anything. And especially when the Vax passports were in place. I'm not going there. I'm not giving them one red cent of my money. So that was a different,

but they didn't really know how bad it was. Now, the older ones, I talked to them a bit. But, you know, in 2020, my youngest was six years old. And I want her to be a kid.

I'm not going to tell her about the global psychosis that has gripped everybody. I don't want to tell her that. So it was kind of like that movie, Life is Beautiful. Like, I was trying my best

to preserve the illusion that things were normal for her. But someday I do want her to know what happened and what we all endured and what the texture of life was like day to day. So part of it was I captured it in this book so that I could do that for her. Yeah. Well, folks, sad to say, they lied us into war. All of them.

World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq War I, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq War II, Libya, Syria, Yemen, all of them. But now you can get the e-book, All the War Lies, by me, for free. Just sign up for the email list at the bottom of the page at Scott Horton.org or go to Scott Horton.org slash subscribe. Get all the war lies by me for free. And then you'll never have to believe them again. Hey, y'all, you should sign up for my substack. It's Scotthortonshow.substack.com.

And if you do that, you'll get the interviews a day before everybody else. But not only that, they'll be free of commercials. How do you like that? Pretty good, huh? Scott Horton's show.substack.com. Oh, that's important. And yeah, like I say, this is an extremely important historical document for showing how this thing progressed and the collection of all the receipts, as they say, showing how you knew, what you knew all the way through. And because it is, it's based on those emails.

So it's day by day by day, the diary of this complete insanity, what they did to us. So it's a huge contribution, Tom. I think it's so important, and I'm so proud that RIS2 had anything to do with the thing. Thank you, Scott. I'm very, very proud to be associated with the libertarian institute. I'm very, very appreciative of, you still have to send me the addresses of those of the team so I can send them gifts because everybody worked so hard on this project. You know, there are other little things here and there, though, like we remember the

relatively short-lived, but nevertheless, profoundly wicked, so-called vaccine. passport systems that were established in various cities. It was interesting to find, now, I didn't see this in the U.S., but maybe I wasn't looking hard enough. But in Canada, I saw a couple of officials basically let the mask, figuratively speaking, come down and admit that the vaccine passport was not intended to, quote, keep people safe. That, well, we have to keep the vaccinated people away from the terrible unvaccinated, so we'll keep you from going into restaurants. That wasn't the main reason.

They came right out and said, the main reason is to change people's behavior, is to, in effect, make them so miserable that they'll just give up and get vaccinated. They just came right out and said it. And again, I don't see that. I think that needs to be in a book somewhere. Like, that's going to be in some permanent place.

I wrote about that, and I didn't want that to be lost in the ether forever. You know, earlier this year, we published Lori Calhoun's book, which is a collection out of her, emails but her collected essays for the institute and it's called questioning the COVID company line and the top of the back summary says what you just referred to there we must protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated how could talk about diary of a psychosis i mean you have it right there what the world

are we even talking about at this point you better get this jab in order to protect the people who already got it from you. Yeah, I mean, and that's a whole other thing. You imploded up the logic and disappeared to another dimension after that. I mean, how do you get away with that? And the thing, really irritated me the whole morality thing that, well, because you're not following the rules, that's why you're not doing so well. But if a place like, let's say, in summer 2021, there was a big spike in hospitalizations in Washington State. But Washington State is a blue state. So absolutely no, said, oh, well, this just goes to show that the approach taken by Washington State doesn't work. It was just, oh, you know, that's one of those things that has no explanation.

But if there would be a similar outcome in some red state, it would be, oh, well, you stupid rubs, won't listen to the people in the white lab coats with their clipboards, and that's why you had this result. There are still people in the world who believe this. And this is why I have to register an objection with those people who would say to me, woods everybody knows this was never about a virus it was about control so forget about talking about your charts or whatever we have to talk about the sinister forces who are running the world well you know what maybe there are sinister forces running the world it would sure explain a lot but my point is

there are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who do think these restrictions were all about keeping them safe and they do think that because of all this we ended up doing better than we would have otherwise. And they do think that people who resisted this are villains. There is a I mean, we could populate much of the globe with people who think that way. So I need to talk to those people. And I cannot initially talk to those people by saying, you know, the Rockefellers have a lot to answer. That is not, that's not going to go anywhere. The first thing has to be nothing they did to you mattered. That is step one. And then whatever you want to say to them after that, go ahead and say it. But step one has to be nothing these people did to you mattered.

just like with the Iraq war. Look, this wasn't about weapons of mass destruction at all. This is about Israel and all these other things. But obviously, I have to talk about the aluminum tubes and the nuclear weapons program and all these lies. I have to debunk them for you. I can't just skip that, even though that's not even the motive. That's only the smoke screen.

I still got to debunk piece by piece, the motive there. So they're wrong to tell you to focus on this instead of that, as you say. This is obviously the core of the whole thing. thing was, were they saving your life or even trying their best? Or was it simply a power grab long after they knew as well as you knew that it wasn't any good? You know, I didn't watch, and I think I was away or something, but I didn't watch that debate that they had between Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom. But I thought I heard somebody say, so I don't know, this is secondhand, but that Newsom was saying, well, you know, based on the

information we had. We did what we thought was, you know, all the whole, how could we have known? But I don't know. I mean, I don't see how you just do this. How could we have known? You know, because as I say, you had Florida sitting right there. Well, let me ask about DeSantis there, because, you know, I'm really down on this guy for a lot of reasons. I don't think he's a very good presidential candidate. But he was the second best governor in the country on this, right? And with a large, wealthy, retired population that he had to deal with and everything else. Oh, yeah. He stood up against a lot of grief and intention more than the governor of South Dakota ever had to put up with. Oh, absolutely.

Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how he handled it compared to the other governors of what difference it made there? Yes, so it is true. And in fact, you see in the book there's a portion of the diary in which I'm complaining that DeSantis is not moving fast enough, that I don't understand what the delay is, that he should be moving faster to reopen. So we got that. But at the same time, the thing that I credit him with the most, first of all, he was extremely well informed. So when he would have a roundtable with some of the scientists that you and I know, he was able to hold his own with them no problem. He would say, oh, yeah, sure, the Icelandic contact tracing study in schools from April 2020.

Yeah, well, that showed us. I mean, he just knew this stuff off hand. He really, really stayed informed. Secondly, he appointed an absolutely outstanding surgeon general, Joseph Latipo, who's been a great surgeon general of Florida, and I'm so glad he endorsed my book. There's a blurb from him on the back of diary of a psychosis. He was a great, great surgeon general, still is, and you can know that he was great because they're all hysterical about him, because he was the only one that I know of who during all this

said, you know, if you're worried about getting sick, you might think about the food you're reading, the exercise you're doing, the sunlight you're getting. I mean, he was saying things that should have been obvious to everybody. So we got that. But the fact that DeSantis brought into the public consciousness, the names J. Badacharya, or Martin Koldorf, or Michael Levitt, or Sinaitra Gupta, Scott Atlas, which Scott Atlas was a little bit better known because Trump had appointed him. But all these people, they were just mild-mannered academic. and then DeSantis put them on a national stage and was thereby able to do something that Trump was not really doing. I mean, Trump soured on Fauci and he soured on lockdowns, but in terms of

highlighting really great scientists who had great answers for the misinformation coming from the media, that was DeSantis's doing. And so when DeSantis finally did fully open, I felt like the difference wasn't all that big because we had been mostly open. before that i did it's true i did in april late april 2020 i had to go to georgia to eat in a restaurant get a haircut so that i remember you tweeting about that yes that's right so i definitely i count that against him but once it really turned around it was border i mean everything that was being done that was annoying was on like the county level mask mandates and whatever and you know you could say he should have overridden those i mean you can debate what's prudent for him to do as governor

but as governor there were no state level restrictions you could do what you wanted that was tremendous fact he did that he made that announcement that i forget it was phase three reopening there were different phases in different states but whatever the last phase was he announced it the day after he had had a public roundtable with batacharya and the others and asking them what is your opinion on this and they all said of course you should open and i thought to myself he's covering himself by having this thing he's about to reopen little that i know was the next blankety blank day that he did it so yeah it's true i don't exactly know he says things in the presidential campaign that i don't like his foreign policy i'm not sure how reliably is

and the way he's run his campaign he should have come on my show malice's show you know dave smith he should have done that like like vivac has been doing he's deliberately been trying to come on our show they ran desantis like a boomer so there are all kinds of things you can criticize him for but on this Scott. The fact is he let my five girls have normal lives, you know, and I think it would be wrong of me not to say, I'm glad you did that. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. Credit words do there. And look, I mean, he was a hero for a lot of people. People fled California by the hundreds of thousands to come to Texas and to come to Florida because they were less worse. And Florida was way ahead of Texas. Greg Rather, it was terrible. And by the way, let me try for a second.

I mean, it's one thing for me to write every day about what's going on. It's another thing to be a governor of a large state and it seems to me that certainly if i'd been in his shoes i would have had some sleepless nights after these decisions i would have wondered how do i know i'm right maybe i'm wrong maybe this is a disaster i am yeah and there it's true there was a sunbelt spike and maybe he doubted himself but if he doubted himself he never gave that away to any of us and he just stayed the course i mean that i mean i'm sorry that takes stones i don't care what you say about to Santas. To stick with that when the stakes are so high is something very, very few people would have had the courage to do. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Tom. Well, look, man, I don't want to

give any more of the book away because I think it's full of shock and I want people to be shocked. So any more things you want to talk about on this subject to kind of tease the book and get people interested besides the actual text inside and what they're going to find in there. But, you know, obviously pitch the website again and any other things you think people need to know. The strategy of just moving on has not worked in any case where the state has been responsible for terrible outrages and enormities such as COVID. Like for instance, the Great Depression. You know, our argument is the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression. But most people don't think that. And that's partly because we don't have enough of us. And it's partly that, you know,

well, that's ancient history and now we've moved on. Well, that's, you know, can you imagine Thomas Jefferson saying the correct response to evil is just to move on? You know, it's just impossible. Not backwards. Right, exactly. Like mom and torture, right? Yeah, no, I mean, impossible to think that way. So likewise with this, there has to be a testament, a record of this, and a detailed one.

And it's, and by the way, it's juicy. And every page you're going to be cheering the smashing of these people. And it's just, you might think, well, maybe Woods has found a few flukes. but the problem is it goes on and on and on and on if these are all flukes you know that just doesn't stops making sense so i haven't written a book in nine years i have told people i was retired from writing books i was very happy i had 12 books i mean that's a great career i just didn't want to do it anymore but this was one i just felt like i can't not do it in this case you know we're a small outfit here i'm probably not going to be interviewed on fox news or on major television like i was

for my other books. And, you know, I don't have the, I haven't focused as much on building my platform as a lot of other podcasters have. So I don't have the kind of reach that a lot of the people you see on Twitter have. What I have is the people listening to this recording right now. That's what I have. I have you guys. And I think what I've done here is important. It was important for me to keep my sanity to write this thing out. But I do think it's important for you. I think it's important for your kids. It's important for our society. And I've also tried to be a good fair sport here and say that if you buy the book, I actually have two others that I'm giving you for free at diary of COVID.com. Two of them. One of them is that collateral damage book. So I've

really, really worked hard on this, but I don't want to sell it to you using the labor theory of value. Because I worked hard, that makes it valuable. No, I just want you to know that I worked start but I think the value you'll see as you start flipping through it that somebody needed to do this and there it is and you know there will still there'll be other works on this perhaps down the road but I feel like this is the one that corresponds best with the way you and I think the way people listening to this and I think it reflects our values it reflects a commitment to reason to genuine science to empirical evidence that has to count for something so I hope you'll check it out The website, again, is diary of COVID.com.

You're going to love that website. You really are. It's an absolute work of art. I'm so grateful to the people who did that for me. And I'm grateful to you, Scott, for publishing it through the Libertarian Institute. Well, thank you, Tom. I appreciate that. And I'm so proud of you.

I think it's such a great work. And it speaks so well of you and your intelligence and your dedication to freedom this whole time. And speaks well of our movement, that this is who we are and what we're about. What that guy Wood said, you're the guy for all of the, rest of us to stand behind and know that you stand behind us. So it's really great. And again, diary of COVID.com. And I have to add at the end here, it is our fun drive at the Institute. And it takes a hell of a lot to publish these books. And we got, you know, Jim Bovard's book also came out and Keith Knights is coming out. And we got more in the new year. And we've done

previous ones this year, two or three others this year. And it takes quite a bit to do. And this is what really makes us an institute. We don't have a big glass castle in Washington, D.C. We have a great website, a great group of writers and podcasters, and we've now published 12 books. 13 within the next week or two. We'll have Keith Knight's book out. But this is something that the Institute thinks is very important to do. And it's a huge thrill. And I take it as a huge vote of confidence in our efforts that you would be willing to take a risk on us, Tom, and let us publish your book like this and the same for Bovard

throwing in with us here. So I'm really proud of what the Institute is doing but I know that we can't keep doing it without the support of all the people in our audience who appreciate it as well. So that's my pitch for the Institute.

You want us to publish Tom's next book too. We're going to have to somehow float till then. So that's Libertarian Institute. Dotware slash donate and you can get great kickbacks like other books we published before and things like that there too. But only go there after you're done, clicking all the proper links from diary of COVID.com

to get Tom Woods great new book. And here it is again in Harback. Ain't that a handsome publication right there by the Libertarian Institute? Diary of a psychosis. How Public Health disgraced itself during COVID-Mania. Thank you so much, Tom. I love the way you read the title, Scott.

Thank you very much. And thanks to all of you, ladies and gentlemen. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on K-P-F-K-90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scotthorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.