The Eric Metaxas Show - #178 - James Howard Kunstler

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

Today On The Eric Metaxas Show, James Howard Kunstler joins Eric to discuss Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony, the unanswered questions surrounding Covid, and whether accountability may finally be coming. They also examine the roles of government agencies, media organizations, pharmaceutical companies, January 6, the Biden-era DOJ and FBI, and the broader collapse of trust in American institutions. Kunstler argues that despite widespread frustration and “black-pilling,” the truth is durable and the wheels of justice may still be turning.⭐ ORDER NOW:Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World📕: https://a.co/d/0ir3NlapTODAY'S SPONSORS:🛏️ MyPillow — Save BIG with code ERIC: https://www.mypillow.com/☀️ Honest, fast, and free Medicare plan guidance: https://askchapter.com/metaxas/0:00 James Howard Kunstler Joins1:00 Why Kunstler Rejects Black-Pilling1:49 Fauci Takes The Fifth 111 Times6:41 Fauci’s Record Before Covid9:09 Does Age Matter When It Comes To Justice?11:16 Covid Treatments And The Broader Bureaucracy17:31 Media Complicity And The Covid Reckoning23:03 Pharma, Vaccines, And Profit27:02 What Really Happened On January 6?30:16 Mike Pence And J632:01 Why Kunstler Still Believes Accountability Is Coming- - -LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/@ericmetaxas#EricMetaxas #TheEricMetaxasShow #News #PoliticsChapter and its affiliates are not connected with or endorsed by any government entity or the federal Medicare program. Chapter Advisory, LLC represents Medicare Advantage HMO, PPO, and PFFS organizations and stand alone prescription drug plans that have a Medicare contract. Enrollment depends on the plan’s contract renewal. While we have a database of every Medicare plan nationwide and can help you to search among all plans, we have contracts with many but not all plans. As a result, we do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 50 organizations which offer 18,160 products nationwide. We search and recommend all plans, even those we don’t directly offer. You can contact a licensed Chapter agent to find out the number of products available in your specific area. Please contact Medicare.gov, 1-800-Medicare, or your local State Health Insurance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options.

Hey there, folks. I don't know what today is, but I know that my guest is the great Jim Cunceler, also known as James Howard Cuncelor or Jimbo. Jim Cuncelor, welcome back. Nice to see, Eric. Well, good to see you. I want to talk to you about what you've been writing and I put your stuff on X because I just hope that people discover you and follow you because there are very few people worth listening to at this point who are hopeful. about the future. I think there are a lot of people that are very negative. They talk about everything that's wrong and that's fine. But then the question is, what about it? You are rather sanguine. You think that things are happening. Good things are happening. So let's start there. Yeah. I have noticed that there's a great deal of black pillory going on in our country.

And this is certainly a fraught moment in our history. You know, there's no, question about it. It's hard. It's difficult. But, you know, it is conceivable and possibly even likely and probable that we're going to get through this and get to the other side of it. And, you know, what is it exactly? It is the deep and destructive polarization of political opinion and feeling in this country that is making us enemies of each other. And, you know, a lot of it is focused on the COVID-19 operation and the blowback that came out of that. And we saw a major manifestation of that in the last 10 days with first the the appearance of Anthony Fauci in front of Rand Paul's committee,

taking the Fifth Amendment 111 times, refusing to answer any question, refusing to do any splainin over his role in the COVID-19 episode, to the great consternation of many people who believe that since he has been given, an unconditional peremptory pardon going all the way back to 2014, that maybe he is actually legally obliged to testify and not really permitted to take the fifth to evade it. There's another interesting question, though, about that is that there's plenty of evidence that Dr. Fauci's activities in developing the COVID-19 organism,

and, you know, the prototypes that preceded it really goes back to the late 1990s when he was working with Dr. Ralph Barrett of the University of North Carolina, who, you know, arguably was the actual creator of COVID-19 and the long chain of developments that went into it, which were finally more or less exported to the Wuhan lab for final assembly, or at least that was, ended up up being its apparent distribution point. So Dr. Fauci's pardon does not cover the period of time before 2014. And there are plenty of documented evidence to show that he was very busy doing this thing that would end up causing millions of deaths around the world and greatly harming the global economy and the American economy especially.

So now there's been a week of blowback after the testimony. And, you know, we're kind of once again waiting to see what's going to happen. I don't think we're waiting to see Dr. Fauci get indicted, exactly. And he'll probably, you know, probably the strategy behind him taking the fifth was simple, it was as simple as this, that it will take so much time to simply adjudicate the question of whether he was permitted to take the fifth legally, will occupy so much time with procedural BS that will never get beyond that by the time that he is, you know, exiting the stage because he's 85 years old. I don't think a whole lot of people, well, I'm going to correct myself.

There are probably a lot of people who would like to see him go to jail even at the age of 85. I think it would be sufficient just to have his reputation definitively ruined. So that, you know, he, the worst punishment for Tony Fauci would be to deprive him of the one thing that he was seeking that seemed to motivate him through all of this, which was simply the megalomaniacal glory of his final, goal to develop a vaccine that would take care of any virus of any kind. This was his holy grail. I'm not a virologist and I'm not even a research scientist of any kind. But there's one simple fact about viruses that makes you kind of doubt that that was even a reasonable goal.

We know from the annual flu virus that we can't even keep up with the mutations of the annual flu. So, you know, viruses are so adept at evading our attempts to get them that I don't, you know, it seems to me that it was probably an unrealistic goal under any circumstances. Now, Fauci's depredations go back way beyond the COVID-19. thing, even as it was developed in the 1990s at Ralph Barrack's lab with the grants that were issued by Fauci. And that goes, you know, he went back to the AIDS problem in the 1980s. And what he was probably best known for through that whole episode was developing the treatment

protocol called AZT, which probably killed as many or more people than the AIDS virus did. See, I didn't know this, and it's amazing to me that this is finally coming out. So he has been involved in all kinds of stuff going way, way, way back. Somebody suggested that Lyme disease was created in a lab. I mean, I've suffered. That's an old story. It's been around for quite a while.

The story is that there's a little island in Long Island Sound, you know, off of Connecticut and Long Island, called Plum Island, where there was a biological weapons development lab sometime in the 1950s. And that sometime in the 50s or 60s, this thing escaped. And then it first turned up in the Connecticut County or district around Lyme, Connecticut, and therefore got dubbed the Lyme disease. And, you know, it was a spiroquite carried in, carried by mice and, and, and, and, and deer ticks. And, you know, there you have it. Now it's all over the whole country.

And I experienced it directly in this sense. I'm lucky that I never did get Lyme disease. But when I first came up to the Hudson Valley in the 1970s, and I was a trout fishing fanatic. And I was bashing through the woods all the time without ever thinking about getting ticks. And I never did. And now, you know, I can't even go into the garden without picking up ticks and worrying about Lyme disease.

And, you know, around here, we know, you know, dozens of people who have gotten at, some of them very severely. And it's pretty terrible. So, you know, this whole bioweapons business is arguably worse than the nuclear problem. In fact, Annie Jacobson, the author of a book about the horror of nuclear. war was a guest on Joe Rogan last week, and the whole show was about her talking about biological weapons and how bad they are. Well, just to get back to Fauci, because it's so extraordinary, the whole thing is so extraordinary, the fact that he would take the fifth 111 times, mind-blowing, I don't know how to respond to that.

I don't know what we're supposed to do, but I think a couple of things. I mean, first of all, you know, when we think, oh, you know, he's 85, we don't want to put an 85-year-old in jail. I don't know if you remember John Demianyuk, who was supposed to be a guard at Sobibor, one of the Nazi death camps or concentration camps. He was put on trial in his 90s. I mean, the fact is there's something to be said for justice because a society responds to justice, that you see that when you do something, you have to pay a price for it. And to kind of wave it away, I think, I also think of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Um, Ikeman, you know, thought he had escaped. Obviously, the Israelis got him.

And years later, you know, you're, that's where Hannah Arendt coins the term the banality of evil. But that's when I think of Fauci, that's what I think of the banality of evil. Well, I think you're generally correct. I wouldn't argue with that. I think that, you know, my, my, uh, idea about, you know, getting him just go is possibly a little lame. But, you know, just as a practical matter,

I'd rather see him suffer permanent reputational damage than to have to, I don't know, exercise all of the machinery of our culture just to pin him to the wall like a coonskin. Well, the only thing is that I think it's important for us as a society to know what it is that he did, right? In other words, because it is pretty gruesome when we really think of how many people died, how people suffered, how it tore the culture apart, and the power that he was given.

I mean, he makes Robert Moses look like a nothing. Yeah, and when you read his diaries and see how he was gloating over all of his publicity and his celebrity, it's really quite disgusting. We also have to remember that, you know, it was Fauci and his colleagues who basically enforced or oppressed on the medical establishment, the treatment protocol of remdesivir and intubation. And, you know, it was a known thing that remdesivir killed something like 40, 50 percent of the people who were treated with it by destroying their kidneys. And this was well understood when they created this protocol. And at the same time, of course, they banished the real treatment options, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which had demonstrated efficacy,

but they banished them because if there was an effective treatment for COVID, it would have obviated the emergency use authorization that shielded the drug makers from liability. So the whole thing was a ghastly operation and a criminal operation. And we just can't come to terms with it. You know, I think that the people, there are people out there who would say, are saying, if only President Trump would basically come clean and say, you know, I was persuaded by this White House task force in 2020 that I had to do these things. And the weight of their opinion was sufficient to cause me to make the decisions that I made to go along with their recommendations to shut down America and allow their treatment protocols to go forward the way they did.

and if you would only, you know, admit that and say, now we have to put that aside and go forward and realize we made a big mistake and that I made a big mistake, me, President Trump, in taking their advice, and now let's get forward, go forward. And I think that that's probably the linchpin to getting through this. What do you mean getting through it? How do you mean behind us? Why do we want to put it behind us? Yeah.

What do you mean? Let me tell you. Yeah. We seem to make, many people seem to make the strange assumption that it is only Anthony Fauci that is responsible, or maybe Deborah Birx and two other people, responsible for the COVID operation. It was the whole public health bureaucracy with help from the Intel community and plenty of other American agencies and persons with names in them.

You know, in the health agencies alone, the NIAID, which Fauci ran, which was issuing the grants that went to Wuhan and went to the precursor labs and then probably to other labs around the country and internationally. There were people working there. There were people with the CDC who banished the Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. These were people with names who made decisions. So far, only one of them has been indicted. I think his name is William Morel, and he was Fauci's, quote, advisor, you know, at a high level in Fauci's executive office. But surely there are dozens, maybe scores of deputies in the agencies, CDC, NIH, NIAID,

who were also equally responsible for pushing this program one way or another. And, you know, there could be quite a few of them in courtrooms in the years ahead, and I don't see why they wouldn't be. And that would be one way of putting this behind us. You know, if you think that a demonstration of the workings of justice is important and necessary, that would be one way to go and one place to look. I have no idea why we aren't generally looking at these other figures in there. They were high-up figures.

They were involved in decision-making and in executing decisions, which were terrible decisions, lethal. They killed millions and injured millions of people in addition. So we haven't reckoned this thing at all yet. You've often heard me talk about the Golden Triangle of Freedom, that intersection of faith, virtue, and liberty. And for that triangle to hold, we need access to the truth. Unfortunately, the Medicare system often feels designed to obscure the truth. leaving millions on plans that don't actually fit their needs. That's why I want you to know about chapter. Chapter is a rare breed in the healthcare world, a completely independent advisor

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It's time to find the clarity you deserve. Also, the complicity of the media, I'm sure you saw RFK Jr. You bet. Talking to CNN's Dana Bash. And it's just horrifying. how they linked arms, the, you know, so-called mainstream media, and the folks who run, you know, Facebook and Google and on and on and on.

We've never seen anything like it in our lifetime. Let's face it. There's just nothing to compare to what we lived through. And I think we need a full accounting of it. It reminds me, I think it's so horrifying, really, but we have to see it. And I mean, it kind of reminds me of, you know, in the summer of 45,

when we opened up the death camps, and we saw that nobody really wants to believe that that's possible. Nobody wants to believe that a civilized society in the middle of Europe could do something like this. But I think we have an obligation to look at it and to have a reckoning and to find out how it happened. Yeah, Eric, you know, I think that we make another

mistake in thinking that, you know, it's merely the talking heads who front for the news networks that are responsible. I'd like to know why the executives in the newsroom and the executives in the parent company and the producers of the news in the newsroom who are off camera, why aren't they testifying and answering in Congress? I think that it's easy to create a story, a plausible reason why that worked the way it did. And my story is as follows. It seems to me that the motivation of all of these people, one way or another, was basically a coup to get rid of Donald Trump by any means necessary, and that they deemed the COVID operation as the way to do it. And especially as a way to re-engineer the election so that they could introduce as much mail in voting as possible to, you know, to queer the election.

And they succeeded in that and the news media is guilty in going along with it and aiding and abetting it. And I think that we're going to find out a lot. One of the possible events that might come on to our screens in the months ahead is that, you know, there are awful lot of people who are being deposed that is interrogated on the record by lawyers, by DOJ lawyers. And, you know, in everything from Russia Gate to Mara Lago Gate to the Fauci and COVID operations, operations, the J6, you know, all of this stuff. And you can just bet that there are going to be quite a few of these people who will be induced to flip on their, on their compadres who participated in this, you know, especially the lower ones flipping on the ones higher up, whose orders they merely executed. And we haven't even begun to see the beginning of this yet.

there is no evidence out there in the first year and a half of the of Trump II, the Trump two administration, that we haven't seen anybody flipping and you've got to believe that there's going to be an awful lot of it. Well, it makes sense. And I guess, you know, it's even uglier to think that this, the whole COVID thing would have been motivated by wanting to get rid of Donald Trump. I mean, when you think of the level of wickedness, that was this one thing.

Isn't that something? Well, I mean, this is what I'm saying, it's like, that's so dark. That is so horrible, so wicked that we need an accounting of that. I mean, who made the decision? Who said, you know what? Yeah, let's use this so that we can have mail-in ballots and this and this and this, and this, and we can tank the economy. Who was behind that?

Was anybody behind that? How did that work? I mean, I think, you know, we want answers. I think the answer to that probably is that there were some sort of leaders of what was really a consensus. You know, it was a consensus born in madness. And these things happen periodically in human history. It's just that it's never happened before. in an age where communication was so deep and so constant and so easy.

You know, when you had the, you know, the witches of Lodon or the Salem witches or, you know, many of these episodes in history, they didn't have the internet. And the hysteria only spread from person to person. But now, you know, the hysteria spreads like lightning through this electronic, you know, it's spread by protons or electrons, excuse me, electrons, zinging through the, you know, the World Wide Web, and it's very, very destructive. So, you know, it's, it amplifies the darkness. So not only does it amplify the spread, but it amplifies the evil and the wickedness that people are willing to take part in.

And nor have we mentioned the, the prophet. motive. I mean, the greed, the idea that Moderna and Pfizer, that they would just be drooling at the billions that they were going to make and how they were incentivized to suppress

the negative information about remdesivir, to suppress the positive information about ivermectin and hydroxychloricine. I mean, that is so wicked. And the effectiveness of their vaccine. Well, the fact that their vaccine was not effective and that it actually killed

lot of people and harmed them and didn't do anything to stop the disease. But I mean, I have at least two friends who died of turbo cancers, I strongly suspect, brought on by the vaccine. Now, that's just me. I'm one person. I'm one person. Everybody has stories. This is absolutely unprecedented in our lives.

There's nothing that can really compare to this. I think, you know, you have to go back to the death camps and the Holocaust. cause. What do you compare it to? I agree with you. There's really nothing comparable and the death camps seem kind of like Mickey Mouse genocide compared to this one. The whole thing is just deeply

dark, evil and we have not been able to adjudicate any of it. It's a tremendous failure, institutional failure. in our society. Now, I happen to think that there's a, you know, a fairly good chance that we could overcome the institutional failure and that there are people who are trying very hard to do that right now, but they are, I believe that the, you know, that Trump's DOJ is doing this,

but they have to do it as the cliche goes by the book. They have to be very careful about doing everything legally and properly, unlike the Joe Biden administration. which did not do things legally and properly. And, you know, in order for this thing to work out, okay, one of the abiding questions is, how are we going to deal with the forces of lawfare? And these forces are lodged in actual living, real human personalities. You know, people we can name, like Norman Eisen and Mark Elias and Andrew Weissman and Mary McCord and Lisa Monaco and Christopher Ray and Merrick Garland and many, many others who

have misbehaved so badly during the Joe Biden years and many who were connected with the whole operation to get Trump by any means necessary, including really evil means. And there were a lot of, you know, I said before that I don't think that there was, you know, one particular leader like John Brennan guiding the whole thing, although he's probably an important figure in this story. It was a consensus. It was a consensus driven thing. But there were institutional mechanisms that drove the consensus. Like, you know, there was a particular committee. I forget exactly what it was called the election. transparency committee or something like that, which gamed out the queering of the 2020 election in all the ways that they were going to go about doing it before it even happened. And they published papers about it. And they, you know, they had websites and they had colloquies and symposiums about it. And, you know, all this evidence is out there.

So we don't know what's going on backstage. where the wheels of justice are grinding away right now. But we do have reason to believe that the wheels are moving. Nor have we touched on J6. I mean, somebody was behind that. I read something. I don't know if it was yesterday or the day before. The information keeps coming out.

And that's the one positive thing, is that this information is coming out. People like Dana Bash are having to deal with this. More and more information is coming out. But the J6 thing, who actually was behind that? Some FBI guy was talking about this the other day. It seems so obvious that this was not organic. But will we get to the bottom of any of that?

Look at, you know, the history books record would happen. Christopher Ray has never really answered for any of that. You know, he was allowed to testify in Congress many times and cop a plea. that he couldn't talk about any ongoing investigation. That was his version of a blanket excuse or pardon from having to say anything. It was his version of the Fifth Amendment. You got to get that guy into a deposition, into a public deposition, and require him now that he's retired from the FBI to talk about this stuff.

I don't doubt that he either has been or will be deposed by the deal. and that, you know, he's going to be implicated and involved, as will be Merrick Garland and Lisa Monaco and many other players in the Joe Biden, DOJ, and FBI who, you know, there were two parts of that. There was the instigation of the operation itself, which we have plenty of reason to believe was pulled off simply to allow. the Democratic Party to avoid the procedure of, you know, confirming the electoral votes on January 6th. There is a particular procedure. And that was halted by Nancy Pelosi and never resumed. So the procedure

never went on. And it was clear that they had gained that out, that they had figured out that if they could start some kind of a violent diversion outside of the chamber, that she could simply, you know, declare that there was an emergency, that they were going to recess, and that when they came back, they were never going to return to the actual procedure of confirming the electoral slates that were actually casting those electoral votes. So that was the mechanism for doing it, and that was one thing. You know, the operation was one thing. The persecution of the people who showed up on January 6th to protest is a whole other thing. And that was, you know, that was strictly Merrick Garland, Lisa Monaco, and a bunch of White House lawyers who were determined to punish

Joe Biden's and the Democratic Party's adversaries. Do you have any opinions on Mike Pence? Yeah, I think he was definitely in play for that operation, and that he was on board with it, that he was essentially crooked throughout the whole first trunk term, and that he was basically seditious treasonous player. I mean, I was, you know, in my innocent way, really taken in by him. I never thought that he was working behind the scenes to undermine the president. I did feel on January 6th that it was a magnificent failure on his part, a horrible thing. But as bad as that was, I wasn't really confirmed in my feelings about him until after that, when he went on to say horrifying things, like the president

forced him to choose between the Constitution and Donald Trump and that I could not do. You know, just absolute lies. Yeah, and let's remember he was, I believe it's correct, that he was presiding over that joint session that day. And, you know, he could have had something to say about whether they were going to carry forward the real, you know, a required procedure which they laid aside. And he didn't do that.

No, he didn't. No, he didn't. I mean, I even remember a fist bump with Nancy Pelosi at some point. I'm not kidding, you know, that just implied solidarity. But I think, I mean, from what I can see, Jim, the American people, history needs an accounting, actually, of who was in on this. Millions of us want an accounting, and millions and millions are impatient, and millions of people are swallowing black pills because they're in a state of kind of despair over this.

And it's a very tough time. We just, we have to remember that the wheels of justice grind slowly and finally, but they do grind. And one of the things about, one of the things we have to remind ourselves about is that the truth is sturdy and untruth or lies are fragile. And sooner or later, truth does overcome lying and untruth. So, you know, I feel fairly confident about the way things are. the moment. Yeah. As far as that goes.

No, and you, you said that many times, and I take great comfort in your assurances along those lines, because it is important that we have some accounting here. And there's just so much. It's just, I mean, even in the last 30 minutes, when you think of what we've covered, my gosh, it's just, it's staggering. It's hideous, really. It's absolutely hideous. It's like a world war.

We didn't even touch on some, some. episodes that were, you know, they seem like they're trivial, like the E. Gene Carroll lawsuit in New York and the Alvin Bragg prosecution for this, you know, real estate nonsense, you know. But the insult to the citizenry that that represents is really very, very deep. The whole thing has been a just deep insult to the United States and to the people in it. And, well, I mean, that's, to me, that's the issue, right? That you can't let it go because every single American has been insulted, has been treated like dirt by our own government. And you can't let that go.

I mean, the idea that people, I mean, you mentioned this in your last substack that the credibility of our whole system, everything has been thrown under the bus. So you have all kinds of people now who, you know, these are the black pillars, but who just believe nothing or don't know what to believe or don't have any sense of, is everything a scam? Can we trust our government? Are we the people still in charge of the United States of America? Are we governing ourselves? Has that disappeared? All of that, we've got to deal with all of that. And it's going to take a long time. It's very dangerous because the loss of credibility. beats a path directly to the loss of legitimacy. That's right. And when you lose legitimacy, you're losing everything.

Well, no, that's exactly right. In my book, about 10 years, I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It, and I talk about that, how it's, that is central. Once we the people don't have the confidence that we're in fact governing ourselves, that my vote counts, that we're electing, represent. Once that's in doubt, it's game. over and we're you know we're in that territory so we're going to have to end uh end things here but it's always great to talk to you james howard kunzler thanks for writing what you write

uh and we'll have you back again as soon as possible thank you very much a pleasure to see you eric metaxus