The Ricochet Podcast - Tossing The Elf Out With The Chump Change

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

It’s hard to put words to the audaciousness of President Biden’s latest charade. Good thing we have an Englishman! Our friend Charlie Cooke is filling in for Peter and James to talk about Joe’s promise to liquidate the American social contract. He and Rob also get into midterms and search in vain for a Republican national agenda. And since we can’t help but cling to a bit of good news, Dr. Source

All right, all right, all right, all right, all right. I have a dream this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. This means people can start, finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt. And by the way, when this happens, the whole economy is better off. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. I'm Rob Long, joined by Charlie Cook, sitting in for Peter and James. Today our guest is Jay Bhattacharya. We're going to do an exit interview for Dr. Fauci. Stay tuned. I can hear you! Welcome to the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 607, which always seems surprising to me.

I am Rob Long, and I am one of the co-founders of Ricochet, and I am not joined today by Peter Robinson, who's off... I don't know. Where is this Peter? I have no idea. Nor am I joined by James Lilacs. To James Lilacs' great delight, he is running some kind of booth. I hope it's the butter

frying booth at the Minnesota State Fair. So it's just me, but luckily, we have the A-team. We are joined by Charles Cook, Charlie Cook from Florida. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you?

Let's get this out of the way. I've known you a long time. Is Charlie... What are you? What would you prefer? Both. I've always been called both. Yeah, it just doesn't bother me. Who calls you Charlie, though? Who in your life? My parents. Okay.

But I grew up as Charles and decided I wanted to be Charlie when I was a teenager, because I thought Charles sounded too stuffy. It does. And then, in fact, when I started at National Review writing, I was Charlie Cook. But there's already a Charlie Cook, the pollster. And he emailed me and said, i get a lot of your hate mail people keep writing to me and saying why are you a conservative now why do you keep writing strange things about taxes and guns and so i said you know would you like me as the young intern

compared to you the well-seasoned political pro to change my name to change my name like it's sag like you're an actor exactly so i i didn't just put charles which is my name but i put in the two middle initials but people think i'm being pretentious actually i was just trying to save charlie cook without knees now i do like the two middle initials i am also a member of the two middle initial club and so i always enjoy it when somebody else has it so i i know there's obviously there's news to talk about but these are the things that are on my mind right now uh your two middle names are they is that a nested name inside your name or is it these are just two different names no i just have two middle names okay because in my mind my middle names are

the name of this name my great grandfather so i have to basically are the name of my great-grandfather. So basically, his first name is my first middle name, and his last name is my second middle name. You know what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Well, yes. Yes. I mean, one of my middle names is the name of my grandfather. I don't know where the other one came from, I should ask. Well, you probably should use all of those names now to just distinguish yourself from everybody else, because you have recently been outed in the wake of Biden's President Biden's order to, I guess, eliminate. I don't know how you actually eliminate debt. What happens?

This is just the actual process of it. But to eliminate ten thousand dollars of for people who qualify, meaning to household incomes over two and under two hundred fifty thousand dollars of um uh for people who qualify meaning to household incomes over 250 under 250 000 is kind of rich um you just eliminate 10 grand like it's gone and you uh recently are invaded against it and then were uh caught up as are you as the guy who took this ppp loan um for mad dogs and englishman so you want to clear that up, Charles C.W. Cook? Well, I don't know if you ever get this or how much time you spend on Twitter. I'm not a big Twitter fan, but I sort of have to use it for work. And whatever you do, someone will respond at some point, this you, with a screenshot of something they believe to be hypocritical.

And I started getting this yesterday en masse and i was completely confused as to what my hypocrisy could possibly be here because i didn't even go to college in america so it turns out uh that these people believed after a cursory search of the pro publica ppp loan forgiveness database that I had received, along with Kevin Williamson of National Review, nearly quarter of a million dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven. I would hate to think what Kevin would do with that money. For my podcast with Kevin, Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Right. I mean, had they scrolled down on the page that came up that said mad dogs and englishman inc they would have seen that it said 29 employees restaurant

and it turns out that the only variables here that have anything in common with me on my life are the word florida because it's restaurants in tampa florida where i don't live and mad dogs and englishman a lot of things called Mad Dogs and Englishmen, obviously. But they were absolutely convinced. And I can put that to rest. I do not own a restaurant in Tampa. I can only imagine how terrible that restaurant would be, by the way. No offense.

But, all right, so we've got to get to this, because I think this is a big story. But had they been right, I think this is what bothers me about it. Just just say you did have that. Just say you did do that. The idea that these two kinds of things are being conflated, the government passing a law saying you must close your business. You have to close your business. You have to close your business. And your willingness or your enthusiasm for getting a degree in French socialist literature, those are two vastly different things.

One is to compensate you for a choice you did not make. I don't think there's anybody who took PPP money who would not have preferred to simply keep their business open. Right. Whereas I think there are a lot of people who should be dissuaded from taking on enormous loans to study nonsense. Or am I making too much of a distinction here? No, I think the distinction is fair. I had some misgivings about the Ppp program i think an awful lot of the money

was stolen right well it's always going to be stolen and i think our a went too far and went on too long and all of that but as you say this is grotesque uh in in tone and structure the ppp program was more akin to a takings clause program exactly and to a bailout i mean essentially the government said we are making claims on you in this case we're taking away your ability to open and run your business here is some compensation and you know that compensation first off went to workers not to the the owners it wasn't a slush fund and second it was clear up front that the money would be forgiven if it went to the workers in other words if it didn't go to the workers you had to pay it back right right if it did go to salaries and health care and so on, then you didn't have to pay it back. Now, this is the opposite of student loans.

When people take out student loans, the deal is extremely clear. It's you will use this money to buy a product that you want, benefit from that product, and then pay us back um that there is no if or or about that or at least there wasn't until joe biden decided congress didn't matter and you know i i think that that has to matter a great deal and one thing i would just add as well is you know you mentioned french literature and i it is obviously yeah i was going to say because it is annoying that there are all these ridiculous degrees. And one of the reasons people can't pay back many of their loans is because they took them out and then they used them to study subjects that haven't really helped them. I mean, we don't talk enough about this, but that's why they can't pay them back.

But, you know, forget French literature for a moment. Let's take something we all presumably agree is useful medicine the case is just as strong if not stronger there and the ads are going to say and they should say because it kills two birds with one stone why should a mechanic have to pay for your theater course agreed but why should a mechanic have to pay for your medical degree it's ludicrous that's right, right. Whereas PPP was given to the mechanic. Exactly.

But also, I mean, look, Marjorie Taylor Greene is no, I mean, I'm certainly in support of her. I think she's a nut, and I don't think she should be in the public sphere. But she had a construction company in Georgia, apparently, and they took a PPP loan. And I see nothing wrong with that. I mean, there was the government saying you can't have your business. And that was, as you weirdly assumed to be a popular measure for Democrats. Right. So they're kind of they kind of got their foot on the gas heading to the midterms. The midterms don't look right now like they're going to be a giant disaster for the Democrats. It looks like they could keep the Senate, probably won't keep the House, but but it'll be tight. The wave, it won't be a wave election. It looks like that.

That may that may change. But right right now that's what it looks like and so they believe that this is going to add to their momentum do you think it's going to no i think they're wrong i think it's going to infuriate people i think this is a disaster and i think you can tell that it's not just conservatives who think that by some of the notable dissents in the last week. First off, we had Jason Furman, who was Obama's favorite economist. That's always how he's touted, which, you know, had a thread on Twitter that eviscerated it. And it does need eviscerating. Every single thing is wrong with this. It's wrong constitutionally. There's no authority single thing is wrong with this it's wrong constitutionally there's no authority it's wrong morally it's wrong economically

it's coming at a time of mass inflation uh then we had swing state democrats in competitive races in colorado in ohio in ohio especially yeah new hampshire saying no then we had uh senator masto cortez in in nevada saying no and then we started to see pieces about democratic consultants saying well maybe it won't be too bad if no one hears about it well the republicans are in charge of that not the democrats you never ever in politics do something that is bad for you on the assumption that people won't hear about it especially in a midterm election yeah right exactly but so i'm i guess i'm wondering whether there's any i mean whatever a loan of any kind or a financial obligation of any kind is erased there's always the what they call the moral hazard here

so i just saw this report this morning you know look if if we if we erase everybody's debt the way we're going to erase it um in four years we'll be back exactly where it was um or worse right i mean what when when you actually do something like this when you when you intervene in a market rather than let people see themselves and say, well, look, I don't want to be stuck with $200,000 in debt, so I'm going to learn something useful. How bad could this be? And I will tell people that, you know, in addition to having what you would call, you know, thought through or ideological or intellectual or practical arguments for fiscal conservatism, I have a moral argument that I've just always believed. I'm very, I'm sure I'm old fashioned and simplistic in this way. And that is, I think people should work, right? Unless they absolutely can't.

And I think people should pay their debts unless they absolutely can't. And I think that those things are goods in and of themselves, irrespective of what they do to other people. So we could talk a lot about what this will do to other people. And that's a huge part of this. But I also just think this is bad. I was not raised to promise to pay back loans and then not to do it and you know much in the same way as it is good for people not to say steal things even if there's no chance of there

being caught even if it is good for people you know not to lie to themselves even if there's no externalities i i think it is good to to fulfill your obligations but the consequences for other people are enormous i mean you can't forgive a loan that's been taken out and spent this this is not student loan forgiveness it's not student loan cancellation it's student loan transference and the product of that is going to be the people who didn't take out the loan and use the loan and benefit from the loan right uh paying for the people who did who have the lowest unemployment rate in the country the best prospects um you know better health outcomes you can run the the gamut here and i just think it's a very specific slice of america that's going to benefit from this and it's certainly not yeah the people living paycheck to paycheck and and and

struggling it's not right anyone on the other on the on the underside of the american economy and i think it's socially catastrophic again it's catastrophic in my view for the people who aren't paying the loans i think it's immoral but it's socially catastrophic i mean it is in a sense a declaration of class warfare and you know i feel now you know i will look at people who benefited in this way at my expense and i will resent them and i went to university god knows how a mechanic or a waitress must feel looking at these people and saying are you kidding me are you kidding me well it's intervening also i mean it was the final intervention in a series of interventions into um the price of a of a product as you say an education that has been insanely distorted over the past 30 years but the cost of a college education, I think,

has gone up over the cost of the Consumer Price Index by some gigantic factor. I mean, I think it's like five times, it's insane. And the product itself hasn't gotten any better. But like anything else, when you subsidize the cost of something, the costs always go up. So I guess the only time I've heard arguments like that recently

has been in 2008, 2009, after the financial collapse, when there's this huge movement, which in fact worked, for mortgage abatement and debt restructuring or debt elimination in some cases. And I had a friend of mine who's like, well, listen, when I grew up, we lost our house twice because my dad was kind of you know kind of a risk taker right and i was always i was always terrified of owing anything

any money and he's a very successful writer very successful guy in hollywood and he said he just saved money so he would never have any debt and he waited because he saw in los angeles home prices go crazy and he knew that they would have to collapse because the bubble always bursts and he waited and when it burst the first thing the feds did was they came in to bail out the prices and he said well that's not how it works you're supposed to let guys like me bargain hunt and i think the intervention in college education, college education costs, has been longer. It's a social, we consider it a social good, had for years. I mean, it seems to me like there's no end to this now, right?

I mean, that this is simply, you know, what do they say? We're only going to do this one time. This is the only time this is ever going to happen. It'll never happen again. But we all know it's going to happen in five years or ten years. It'll continue happening. And the price of college education will continue to go up, because why shouldn't it?

The cost is being subsidized by, you know, 100 million Americans who aren't going to go to college. I mean, I think that's confirmation of its indefensibility that this is not tied to anything else the the u.s congress did not get together and say all right costs are spiraling what can we do and then as part of a broad package change say dischargeability rules so that you can add your student loans in and bankruptcy change the efficiency standards for colleges change the loan program and its expectations perhaps get the institutions of higher learning that are receiving the money

to co-sign the note and as part of that and i would still oppose this to be clear as part of that transfer some of the loans to the public person did none of it and so this exists in isolation and and that has two effects the first is it's actually going to make college probably more expensive because of course they're going to look at this and say okay great um we we achieved some of what we wanted with no skin off our nose um but also it highlighted the complete arbitrariness of the decision in that this doesn't apply to people who just finished paying off their loans it doesn't apply to the people who didn't take out the loans it doesn't apply to the people who went to cheaper colleges it doesn't apply to the people who will take out a loan in a year so you've

got this this lightning strike at this particular moment in time for no particular reason other than the midterms are coming up but that in and of itself is going to inform behavior because as you say there are going to be people out there who say, well, I was a little bit worried looking at the mountain of debt that my friends have about going to this college. But now maybe I'll just do it. You're going to have parents out there who say, I'm not putting money into a 529. I'm going to have debtors out there who choose not to prioritize the repayment of their loans, but wait, because they think this could happen again. So it's not just that it's not tied to anything else, which is a problem.

It's that it's made it worse. Right, of course. It's going to make everything. So, I mean, my reflexive political position has always been government stay out of everything against all this stuff, against industrial policy, against all that stuff. So I've been trying to read up. We're going to be doing a podcast soon with a really brilliant guy. He's a good, great thinker, essentially about China and his, you know, his priors are that we probably do need an industrial policy to compete with China. So what would be the harm? And I'm not saying there isn't a harm. I just wonder what would be the harm of, since we're talking about what the government, what the people, what the taxpayers

should pay for, what educational training the taxpayers pay for. So right now they pay for this enormous amount of training in the military already military already right that's a form of training form of technical training that actually employers seem to prize what what would what would taxpayers not resent covering and it is that is that even relevant i mean one of the things that does rise my gorge here in is just the the sheer i mean that's not for me to say but i the sheer frivolousness and closed and and cul-de-sac quality of some of these degrees that we're paying for right what what should what should if anything should american society be willing to put the bill for well in my, or in the view of the average voter, I find it difficult to imagine the latter, especially in a country this big, which incidentally

is an argument not for doing big things. I mean, from my perspective, I don't, as you know, think that the federal government should do very much. So I don't object in principle to providing some educational incentives or training programs for the soldiery because the federal government's role, the reason it exists, is to have a military. And if you need to induce people to join or reward them for having... It's an ancillary benefit. ...been injured, yeah. But, I mean, as a rule, I'd say very little. Now, the reason that I find this so appalling, I think, is that it is a choice. If you think about poverty, we argue a great deal about how to deal with poverty but there are very few people who

say that nobody in any capacity should deal with it right i mean so you might get people like me who say there should be no federal welfare i'm more open to it albeit on a limited basis at the state level and i'm very much into it at the personal and charity level and so you know however mean i might sound when talking about the federal budget i have no issue with in fact i endorse wholeheartedly and help out myself in say food banks or you know charity giving so we we all sort of get together and although we're disagreeing often profoundly about how we do it we agree that that people who are down and out who can't help themselves who genuinely are in need of the basics should should be helped and as human beings we're

going to do that in some way or another that's not the case with student loans right i mean we're not all sitting around going well of course we all agree that we have to pay off this doctor student loans the question is how we do it i mean absolutely not um it's the the very idea is ridiculous and um i think therefore when i have heard people try to justify this by saying well look at all the other things the government does uh it's it's just a weak argument um I mean, until a few years ago, this had never even been proposed. This was not on the horizon. Perhaps there is a role for states in subsidizing education, running state universities and so on. But federally, come on. And you do have to, state schools actually already subsidized the in-state, there's always in-state tuition.

Tuition's different for people who live in the state than people who live outside the state. So there isn't any answer. There's a great, I mean, I saw it a couple weeks ago, exchange between Elizabeth Warren and some dude. And the dude says, was I an idiot? Am I a fool? Like, am I a chump for saving for my kids? And she kind of like smiles

weakly and then walks away. Thank you for your thoughts. I think she says, thank you for your thoughts. But that does seem like a very dangerous virus to inject into the national culture. the idea that if you play by the rules and plan that you're a chunk right i mean it is it is actually rewarding lack of planning. I mean,

it is. And again, that's why I bring up poverty because the, the, the good logical response to what you've just said is okay. But what about someone who is really poor? They're on food stamps. They're down on their luck. They can't save. Right. but what about someone who is really poor? They're on food stamps.

They're down on their luck. They can't save. Right. Whatever they do, they can't save for college. And I have some time for that. The reason it just doesn't sway me in this case, among others, is, well, there's many of them. First, this is just not what Biden did. I mean, if he'd said up to $40,000 in income, okay, not $250,000. Two, I don't want to hear any more about this from professors at

universities that have $45 billion endowments. Yes, that would be, there's something incredibly grating about that. And the idea that they now are absolutely one more layer of insulation against any kind of market competition and then finally uh because we or should uh have agency and we already have a system that allows people to go to college who don't have the cash to pay for it and it's called the student loan system um so we're not actually talking here about whether people can go if they want to um we're talking about whether people can go if they want to and then have to pay it back and right right such, I just have very little time for it, I'm afraid.

Yeah, no, I think it's a, I agree. I think it's going to be a slow motion disaster. And so I do believe it's a virus we've just injected into culture, that it's going to be a big, big problem. And we'll be paying the price for it for the next 10-25 years of that kind of decision making that people are going to be making that has completely unconnected to the realities they may face. And the one thing we haven't talked about is that it's illegal, which really matters.

That's right, I was going to get to that afterwards. I don't even know how it's going to work. Does it just disappear on your on the website if you go to your student loan dashboard it just suddenly becomes zero no i read this morning that anyone who wishes to benefit from it has to apply and attach an affidavit that accurately represents their income well it's just your tax form. It is, but there's a couple of reasons that's good. The first one is that if you lie, there will be obvious tax liabilities that that incurs

because the federal government won't be able to check it against your tax return. The second is that that provides a little bit of room for legal maneuvers and challenges. I mean, if you just logged in one day and suddenly your bank account yeah well that's more difficult but this this is an affirmative process it's a process that will take some time and you know from what i understand the problem here is not that this is in any way defensible and the memo the olc put out in justification was absolutely

preposterous i mean just a joke uh the problem is that it's hard to see under our current constructions of standing within the courts who can sue i don't know i'm hoping someone will come up with a a good way of demonstrating harm because there are real harms but sometimes when the harms are so distributed then courts regard that as really an objection to public policy rather than a legal question and um they reject the case so we'll have to see that's probably what this would be i think because they're the i don't know what the harm would be if it's not a harm to everyone else it's like that is a major class action lawsuit. I think that's true.

Yeah, I wish there was an optimistic way to segue. I mean, James, of course, is not here. He's at the state fair, and I'm hoping he'll join us for the close if he can with some appropriate sound effects in the background. So I'm not even going to bother to do a, to do a segue. I'm just going to go right into the spot. Liquid IV. Look,

everybody's got part of their daily routine that is important to them. Some people do workouts, some people do yoga, meditation. I find myself scrolling through Instagram, something like that. Anything you do, any ritual you do to jumpstart the day and clear your head and give you energy and everything, this fits right into that. The hot summer months are here,

and we need to be proactive about keeping our bodies fueled and hydrated. Making hydration a priority can help us feel healthier in our everyday lives. One stick of liquid IV in 16 ounces of water hydrates you two times faster and more efficiently than water alone. Liquid IV products taste great. 10 refreshing flavors like Concord Grape, Lemon Lime, Vina Colada, Tropical Punch. Makes you sound like a summer drink. I don't use liquid IV because I haven't gotten any yet, but I do know that James were here. He'd be telling us how much that his wife loves it. So sometimes when we get these new products and we try them out,

someone in the family tries them out first, and she apparently is a liquid IV believer. 16 ounces of water, hydrates you two times faster and more efficiently than water alone, contains five essential vitamins, B3, B5, B6, B12, and vitamin C, three times the electrolytes of traditional sports drinks, made with premium ingredients,

non-GMO, free from gluten, dairy, and soy. Get your liquid IV in bulk nationwide at Costco or better, you can get 15% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use code RICOCHET at checkout. So that's liquidiv.com, all one word, code RICOCHET. You get 15% off anything you order when you shop, and you get better hydration today. Use promo code Ricochet at liquidiv.com, and we thank Liquid IV for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. We are joined now by Ricochet's own, I'm going to call you Ricochet's own, even though I think you probably don't, we're not paying you, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who, you have a lot of titles, Professor of Health Policy at Stanford, Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.

You are a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which is we all know is junk science until a few weeks ago when suddenly it wasn't junk science anymore. We realized it was right. Fringe science, Rob. Fringe. Fringe science, right. But what you are is you are my personal COVID advisor. You were my advisor when I had COVID, and you're my advisor now. But just before we get started, you're in Rome. I am. How's Rome?

It's beautiful. Oh, man. See, they got frescoes on walls here, Rob. Yeah, they paint on the walls there and uh and so did you just meet you met a big roman celebrity here uh yeah i got to meet the pope it was really interesting well i just have a question were you wearing a mask i wasn't okay all right um okay so um i know we got you you're in rome i don't want to keep you from what I imagine is a Parativo hour in about 10 minutes, but I just want to ask. Okay.

Anthony Fauci, he's going at the end of the year. Give him a grade. On lifetime achievement? Yeah, why not? B, okay. Lifetime achievement, B. On COVID, F. F. yeah why not b okay lifetime achievement b for on covid f f um you are uh one of the people giving him an f um but why why why is that not a universally agreed upon grade i mean i certainly

think he deserves an f but it feels like we put a whole lot of emotional investment into this man and into not recognizing the truth well the covid uh the covid pandemic has been incredibly divisive rob as you as your reader as listeners well know um it's been very difficult for uh people to oppose tony fauci's views because he's made it he's made it difficult he smeared the reputations of anyone who spoke up against him including you should say including me and dan and tried to create this illusion that there was a consensus in favor of his position when there wasn't one among scientists and it's made it really difficult to assess him honestly by lay people because, you know, they've been subject to this idea that he was the science. He even said that.

And it's hard to shake that idea. I think time will tell as he leaves, the power that he holds over the minds of scientists and over the minds of the public will wane. And a more clear-headed assessment can happen i don't see how you can in a clear-headed way look at what happened during the pandemic and the advice he gave to lockdown schools uh businesses uh this idea that somehow you could eradicate the virus when we had no technology to do so the advice he gave that somehow the vaccine would get rid of the virus when it wasn't going to um i don't see how you can look at that advice, which has been so damaging, and give them anything other than an F. Okay. He said on Rachel Maddow, which has got its own problems on Tuesday, a quote. And I have a

theory about this quote, and then I'm going to read the quote and give you the theory, and you tell me if I'm wrong. He said, there are so many things we learned on the run with COVID, the things that we thought we knew in the beginning turned out as the months went by to not be the case, which really forced us to adapt and change some of our policies and recommendations. That's what he said, which sounds very reasonable. I posit that it's exactly backwards, that there were many, many things we knew about respiratory viruses before COVID that we just chose to forget. And it wasn't that we had to adapt. It's that we, unfortunately, we adapted. We shouldn't have adapted.

We should have remembered what we knew and followed through on the science that was available to us on November 1, 2019, you know, the pre-COVID period. Am I wrong? Is Fauci wrong? Or is he sort of half right? Am I half right?

There's only really one right answer to this, which is that I'm correct. I mean, you're much closer to right than he is. I think the problem is, you know, when he says the science changed, what he really means is that he changed his mind finally after overwhelming evidence forced him to do so. If he had permitted a discussion, a free discussion among scientists to happen without smearing the reputation of scientists who disagreed with him, that realization that his initial ideas were wrong would have come much earlier. The realization, for instance, of what you just said, which is that this was an absolutely extraordinary way to deal with a pandemic, these lockdown strategies, rather than a traditional strategy of focus protection, that realization would have happened much earlier had Tony Fauci had the humility and the openness to permit that conversation to happen in the first place.

Well, why didn't he, do you think? I mean, did he never have it? Is it, is it a, let me ask you to do some armchair psychologizing. Is it just that when you're. The guy in the room who knows what he's talking about, you know, you come into the room and you're filled. So it's a matter of who the president is. Nobody around the president knows anything about this stuff. That's like and you walk in, you're the boss, you're the guy with all the information. You just naturally just turn into a kind of an arrogant jerk.

What's the how do we avoid the Fauci syndrome when the next? I mean, from all the reports I've had of him, I've never met him personally. He's a very sweet man, very persuasive, seems very empathetic. But at the same time, he's been at the head of the NIAID for 40 years almost. And very few people tell him no no because he is in charge of giving out grants why would you why would you dare to to oppose him when in fact your livelihood may depend on him agreeing with you and so i think in that situation it's very easy to have this hubris build up where you really i mean you see it when he says something like uh if you criticize me

you're not simply criticizing a man you're criticizing science itself only somebody who who really has truly a level of hubris that is almost you know greek tragedy like uh would you have this have that happen to but i guess what i'm trying to there's there was a difference so there's a in my head and with this, the distinction between science and research. Science, I think of a guy in a coat in a lab and a thing in a Petri dish and puts a little dropper in there and comes back the next day and it's blue or purple or green. Research is just collecting data, the number of people getting sick and how they're getting sick and the number of people in the hospital and how they're getting cured and healed and how they're not. And the most troubling thing to me was that that seemed to be where the most conflict was, is in the interpretation of, say, for instance, the Santa Clara stuff.

He just didn't interpret any of that information that data the way other people interpreted and it's not at that point it's not science it's just really like looking at numbers right yeah well i mean science always has some level of judgment right i mean it's it's never as black and white as people think otherwise it wouldn't be fun frankly rob if it was just yeah you're having fun well you're in rome now it's like yeah yeah um but but but i think um i think the issue is that he he was very um i don't know what the word is i mean i think i think he was he assumed he knew better than than everybody else and any data that that contradicted his view of the right policy

he was just going to dismiss out of hand and he that's essentially what he did for a long period like just take another example is is immunity after covid recovery he didn't recognize that although the data piled up on it rapidly through the through the whole pandemic very for very early on in the pandemic it was clear that people weren't getting reinfected at very high rates and when reinfections happened they were relatively mild compared to the first infection he ignored those those data for months and months and months for almost a full year he and for instance on vaccine mandates he didn't make exceptions for people who were covered recovered why i mean it's only somebody who's so certain of himself right that that no it just has to take tremendous data like make make you

change your mind do you think it's certain of himself or do you just think it just has to take tremendous data to, like, make you change your mind. So do you think it's certain of himself, or do you just think it's the idea that, well, I'm going to get blamed if someone gets sick because I took my foot off the most draconian vision. It always seemed to me to be, at CDC, in fact and frankly even in the oval office at the time this desperate need not to get blamed for this sort of occurring virus naturally or otherwise um that really we have no defenses against is is going to make its way through the population 200 million people have been affected infected in america with the covid um i think that's the. It's very close to that. I mean, at that point, it's like, it doesn't matter who the president is or who the, who the head of the CDC is or who,

who's sitting in Fauci's office. It's just what's, what's going to happen. It's going to happen, right? Yeah. I think you're right about that. I think that everyone wanted to point to, you know, like to, to, to try to deflect blame that at the very least they could say, well, we did everything we could. As a result, they put all of the public focus on a single threat to it, this virus, and ignored all of the other threats to public health and well-being more generally, like for our children, for instance, where schools were closed for so long,

on the basis of advice that Tony Fauci gave. I mean, I think that's unfortunate. I think, I mean, that's not just even his fault. That's more broadly, maybe it's a human fault or it's just a fault of our political system of wanting to avoid, deflect blame. I think if a good leader would have done, would have said, sat down, you know,

sort of FDR-like and said, look, or, you know, Winston Churchill, like, look, this is going to be bad. This is going to be very bad. We're going to do our best. Um, we're going to, we're going to try to protect the vulnerable as best we can. We're going to move resources around as best we can, but I can't promise you, um, that we're going to, we're going to end up with, with everyone, everyone's still here. We just can't do that. This is not the kind of thing where we have a human and no human being can guarantee that anyone human being guaranteeing you that is lying to you if they'd done that if they sat down like a fireside chat like thing um i think they would have been uh been open to allowing the debates to happen alone they

went open to like changing as the as the evidence came in much more effectively than they end up being it was this brittle position of like okay yeah we can get rid of the virus we have the technology just listen to us. That was the problem. Did anybody ever come to you, even in subsequently, because I know that you had a lot of pushback for the Great Barrington Declaration, for your statements during the pandemic.

Has anyone ever come to you and said, well, obviously I agreed with you, just it was inappropriate to say, or we couldn't, American people, we couldn't handle the uncertainty or the ambiguity or the, I guess what would you just, what would you just said? The acceptance that you were, you were advocating. Has that been, anybody ever said that to you?

There's been a few like that. I mean, no one at the, no high official as yet. Don't wait for that by the way well i mean there were some like you know like i like a hero of mine during the pandemic is ron desantis who reached out early um i mean it's this is tough i i think there's the post-mortem um sorry about that i'm gonna i just did a talk and uh anyway so so the post-mortem around this is going to be very difficult for people because a lot of mistakes were made. I think to me, the key thing is we have to do

this in a spirit of forgiveness. It was difficult. The whole thing was difficult. But we have to be clear-eyed about what went wrong so it doesn't happen again and make reforms so it doesn't happen again. That's where I'm going to be working in the next few years. I know you've got to run. I want to ask you two questions one about desantis because you and i i say every week on this podcast i am trying my best

to not devolve or evolve into a desantis fanboy but you, you know, there are a lot of political leaders who contended with COVID. Every state governor and a president. And also leaders around the world. All in. All of them. Sweden, UK, Italy,

I mean, or, you know, Singapore, California, the Oval Office. Would you pick DeSantis as probably the one political leader in the world on the globe? Yeah, so, I mean, I think there was several leaders I'd say were really good, but DeSantis stood out to me because he actually read the the data he read the evidence and he and he adjusted as a consequence of the evidence that not very many political leaders did that rob um you know i think in the united states there are people like uh i mean i've met with uh pete ricketts as a governor of nebraska was quite good um and there have been some political

leaders outside the u.S. that changed their minds over time relatively quickly that I'd characterize as having, like, for instance, the Swedish political leaders, I think, deserve an absolute medal. And the public health in Sweden, they stood the test of tremendous pressure when they knew what the science was. So they're definitely heroes around the world in the United States. I think DeSantis really, to me, stands out.

Yeah. I mean, he, he was the one guy who, but, but I think it came, I mean, I guess my theory here is that it came from the reading.

Like he read it. He's a smart guy. He digested it. He got you on the phone. He argued with you. He heard your arguments and, and then he made a judgment, which is sort of what

politicians are supposed to do it's hard though right i mean i think most politicians don't have the capacity to go read epidemiological papers rob it's just that's ridiculous i do it all the time but i think the key thing is like you get uh you make sure that if you have a fauci in the room you also have you know a martin kdorff also in the room with him. So you hear both sides. You don't accept Fauci's word that he is the science. That's the difference. They used to do that for Reagan, apparently.

They would organize these train wrecks, they called them, where two people would sit. Or Lincoln with a team of rivals sitting there arguing how best to prosecute the civil war i mean you have to have a lot of views around you as a political leader because it's a you're in a difficult spot you're not trained as an epidemiologist or whatever um you're not trained as a military leader you have to have good advice around you and the only way that comes out of his debate i think all right so um is covet over in places, most places, this is what COVID is going to look like. There's going to be cases forever. The cases will have decoupled from the deaths to a large degree. So it's the same number of cases is not producing the same number of deaths or hospitalizations.

That's COVID forever. There are places that are seeing like massive rises in cases and deaths, like Japanapan places they had not seen waves before they're seeing waves now so it's not entirely over but the the uh the we're nearing the endemic phase of the disease endemic means it's here for forever to stay here forever to stay and so what what should people be aware of what what you know like get your booster get your what would you recommend people do just in in just to enter the endemic phase? Well, I think, first of all, stop worrying so much about COVID. That's the most important thing I could tell to most people, because you've already had COVID and recovered. You've had the vaccine. You're as protected as you can be. I'd say live your life. If you're

older and more vulnerable, there may still be things to do. For instance, I think we absolutely need to continue to do a lot more research on better treatments. We have to continue to do research. The treatments we have are okay. I was really excited when I saw the randomized trial, but now in real life, it seems okay. It's not perfect as well as the randomized trial said. So we need more research on treatments there are some patients who have actually have had legitimate long covid um symptoms that i think we have to research better i don't think the vast majority of people who have long covid are just it's um there are other reasons for it having not necessarily to do with covid itself more with the anxiety created by the by the by the lockdown policies that followed but there are

legitimate post-viral syndromes, and there's still a lot of people who get COVID to this day, like older people who are still vulnerable to it. So it's not like we should do nothing. I think the thing is that we can now transition to a period where COVID is treated like one of the other 200 or so infectious diseases that are in common circulation, in common human circulation, it like that, as opposed

to the unique disease we have to restructure society around. Okay, so you said a spirit of forgiveness. You have to approach it with a spirit of forgiveness and openness and all that, you know, all that Christian stuff. Works both ways, though, right? I mean, you came under a lot of pressure.

And, you know, there was some actual career danger for you. It was actually quite dicey, right? So are you ready to forgive that? Yes. Come on. I don't have a choice. I i mean some of my friends betrayed me i i don't i don't have any capacity to if i let that if i let that um the desire for vengeance to sit in my my heart out or my head right i'll just be destroyed i mean i have to i have to forgive

i mean it's almost a self-defense mechanism at this point i just have to forgive it and then i don't mean that I haven't learned lessons. I've learned a lot of lessons. And also, honestly, Rob, I wouldn't have gotten to know you if it wasn't for the pandemic. That's true. There are so many benefits. No, no. In all seriousness, that's true.

Like, so there are some offsetting benefits, many offsetting, really amazing benefits. So I just, so I don't, I don't want to overplay like the people should be sad for me. But I guess what I'm using you as a personal and also as a larger example, in that I think it's fair to say I'm no epidemiologist, but I think it's fair to say that this is another one of these coming. This is just the world we live in. How do we keep the next guy in the Fauci chair from getting an F? Well, for one thing, I think we have to make, in my view, he's like J. Edgar Hoover.

I call him J. Edgar Fauci in some sense. You cannot have someone in that role for 38 years. That's just not right. The other thing is, you know, there should be seen as a huge conflict of interest. If you are in charge of scientific funding, you don't get involved with health policy, because then your opinions about health policy then become the de facto opinions of the scientists who you fund or that use careers you can make or break. And it's just, it's too big of a conflict of interest. I think we have to create

a bright line between science and science policy within the context of federal government and state governments um science policy should be so distinct such that anyone like donnie fauci should never have anywhere close she shouldn't be advising presidents right just ipso facto because you subfund science therefore you don't invite it's like you don't have uh pharmaceutical companies evaluate whether drugs work for and then tell the fda what to do exactly right that's a conflict of interest right right and that you think that was a one of the problems that that thought she had or or yeah so we went along with longevity and this idea that like i'm the person who yeah i mean like if if he if he was just the funder of niaid

i give him an a like he did a pretty good job over 38 years i mean not maybe maybe i give him an a minus i don't know you could convince me b plus um he's pretty good at this um but but science policy he doesn't have the breadth for it and he doesn't know depth of knowledge for it and yet he thought he did um and he should so he he brags about advising seven presidents every single president he advised it was a mistake that he advised the president because he was in charge of scientific funding when he's doing that those are conflicts of interest a deep one that silenced scientists because they're afraid for their careers because tony fauci controlled controlled their reputations, Tony Fauci controlled their funding, Tony Fauci controlled their success. That is a huge problem. So even with hubris, he would have been fine as long as he wasn't in charge of both scientific funding and also

science policy. So let me ask you this, sort of the more policy questions as we're talking about policy. The National Defense, National Intelligence intelligence and even the diplomatic arms of the executive branch. They're refreshed at least every four years or at least every eight years, but they're refreshed constantly. Right. Yeah. And they're reassessed constantly. And the one thing about the Department of Defense is that they have this ongoing internal reassessment of its process and its priorities and its strategy right um and we didn't you know we never did that with health policy certainly with infectious disease policy should should that come under the heading now should that should there be sort of a national security way of looking at this stuff so that the decision makers and the researchers and the data collection and the data analysis becomes as rigorous, I mean, it's not as that rigorous, but as rigorous at

least, or as self-examining as defense? I mean, I think there's a huge advantage with infectious disease and epidemiology. They're not national secrets. There should be vastly more transparency with the data and data sharing and the science done by government scientists so that it can be criticized by outside scientists. That should be part of the regular culture of the scientific policy agencies like the CDC and like, you know, the NIH is not supposed to be policy, but has been. I think that kind of culture, it belongs even more in science than it does in national defense. National defense, there's actual secrets that you necessarily can't open to the outside world.

Here, there's no reason not to. Of course you should do that. Okay, so I guess the extra question here is sort of a bigger, I mean, this is an an unfair question but i'm going to ask it anyway um you were uh you were in fousey's office uh during covet instead of fousey thought experiment about a million americans have died is that fair to stuff covet since the beginning something would it have been around the same number? Yes, probably. That number was like written in. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think we, we, it might've been a little bit less on COVID.

Mainly because I, what the, one of the things I would have done differently is I would have recognized sooner the importance of not sending COVID infected patients back to nursing homes. I mean, that I knew in February of 2020. So I, so I think there would have been some fewer COVID deaths. But this is a really bad respiratory infection disease. It would have been very difficult to stop it from spreading very widely. What would have been really different, though, is we would not have closed schools. Many businesses wouldn't close.

The level of panic would have been less because i would have worked very hard to give people tools to protect themselves as best they can without doing unnecessary things that harm themselves and others without actually protecting themselves from covid um so i think a lot of the political anxiety i'm sorry the anxiety would have been less um the political divisiveness would have less because i would work very hard to make sure that no one knew what my politics were. Okay, last question. And I know Seth said it was the last question. This is a very detailed question.

It's a terrible question to end the conversation on. But testing. COVID testing is now a gigantic business. I mean, there's little tents all over Manhattan and they're selling them at CVSS, and I have four of them at home, and I had to take one. It's a constant, these tests. Was there ever a cheaper, easier, simpler test to use? You know that at-home test that you have, the antigen test? That should have been the main test we used all the way through.

The problem was that PCR test. You had to stick the thing up your nose, or you go to a lab, and they send to the lab it takes two or three days right to get it or get the result back the reason why that was used primarily was because public health wanted to know every single person that had covid and try to trace them right right the lab finds it whereas if you do it at home and test and you know and then you just don't go visit grandma um public health doesn't know the the paradigm of identification of patients quarantining right uh contact tracing that paradigm i think actually did a tremendous amount of harm because it instead of empowering people with the information locally so that they could know if they were sick and uh or if they were infected and not expose vulnerable people to it or go to the doctor or whatever.

I mean, that kind of individual empowerment as the paradigm for testing, that would have produced a lot of good. What we did instead was this sort of top-down way of testing that I think ended up causing a lot of damage. I mean, a lot of people stopped trusting public health. People stopped responding to contact tracers. People didn't want to get tested. And so they went and visited grandma without a test because they's in charge to maintain sort of procedures and processes and codes that were going to be nationwide. The most important thing for the COVID administration was to

maintain its control over not only the conversation, but over the cure. Is that fair? Or is that too mean? Yeah, I think that's completely fair. There's this idea that central control would somehow produce better results than some mix of wise deployment of resources by the center to empower people who were in vulnerable states, vulnerable conditions. So I think if the government had trusted the people more, it would have done a much better job. That's almost always the case.

Last question for you, really, seriously. So you're in Rome, COVID's basically over, what now? You got to sit around and wait for the next thing to hit? I don't know. I think I'm going to write some, I have to, just to come to terms with what's happened the last two years to me, I'm going to write some sort I have to, just to come to terms with what's happened the last two years to me, I'm going to write some sort of memoir.

Maybe three people, maybe you'll buy one copy of it, maybe one of three, my mom and some, you know. I'll definitely buy one. I'll definitely, unless there's a free one, but I'll definitely buy one. No, I can't wait to read it. Can't wait to read it. So get to work. Yeah. Get a long plane ride home.

Yes. And then the other thing I want to do is I want to prepare the country for what happens when there's a next pandemic. You have to do a post-mortem, an honest post-mortem so that we prepare better for the next time. I hope to be, I will be an avid reader of that post-mortem.

Jay, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Ciao. Ciao. Enjoy Roma. Arrivederci. We should just, before we keep going, we ought to say there's a bunch of things happening with Ricochet right now. The Texas Tribune Festival

program is now live. You can go there. Texas' Breakout Politics and Policy Ideas event happening September 22 through 24 in Austin. It's a lineup of big names you know and others you should, including some of our own from the Ricochet Network. David Drucker will be there.

He'll interview Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Arkansas Governor Asa Hodgson live on the TribFest stage on September 23rd. And you get to go and explore the full program and grab tickets at tribfest.org. And if you want to attend the event, use our special discount code for a one-time 15 off

discount uh one general admission ticket go to trib fest trib fest dot org enter code ricochet 15 in the promo code box this will all be on the webs uh on our show notes but ricochet 15 and promo code and um click apply and you you will get your discount because you're a member of Ricochet, and we hope to see you there. Also, we talked to Dr. J, of course, and that should remind us the most patriotic thing you can do these days is get out of the house and meet with as many people as possible

and shake their hands, even. The perk of being a Ricochet member is that you have access to the best of those people. Brian Stevens, Atlanta meet up last weekend was a huge success we weren't able to make it be sure to keep with the schedule on the ricochet events page which you can find on the sidebar of the site i think they're i think they're pictures posted which is kind of great upcoming meetups uh are on the official schedule but also be happening so be prepared williamsburg virginia huntsville alabama in october um thank god

huntsville alabama in october because huntsville, Alabama in October because Huntsville, Alabama in August, I've been there and it's hot. October is gorgeous. And we've got one set for New Orleans next year during French Quarter Fest. I will certainly be there. If you're not in the Southeast and these states don't work for you,

join Ricochet, give us a place and time and the Ricochet members will come to you. Again, details on the Texas Tribune Festival and the Ricochet meetups go to ricochet.com slash events. It's also on the sidebar on the site, and we hope to see you soon. All right, so I know you're not procrastinator Charlie Cook, Charlie Cook, but you're another kind of...

So this is sort of a parlor game, right? It's so early. It's not even Labor Day yet. But still, there does seem to be it does seem to be fair to say that the Republican momentum going into the midterms has slowed. Everyone has a reason for this, right? I mean, mitch mcconnell it's candidate quality that's probably a little bit true if you're um uh i don't know if you're if you're a democrat it's sort of like well the dobbs decision that's probably true in some places um and it comes down to age-old question which people ask in midterms do you nationalize it or do you not nationalize it? The most famous successful nationalization of a midterm was 1994. Newt Gingrich orchestrated the takeover of the House of Representatives for the first time in 50 years by Republicans because he turned it into a national referendum. And others say, you know, it never happens, never works.

Don't do that what if you were um if you were getting um if you were working for the democrats right now what would you say for them to do well well i would reiterate what you said at the beginning i i would recommend that they push hard on abortion in some jurisdictions and point out some of the Republican candidates are terrible. The problem the Democrats have, and I think this is also a problem the Republicans have by extension, is that people are, to some extent, annoyed with the Democrats, but mostly annoyed with the climate yeah you mean the and you don't mean the climate climate change change i mean the political and economic climate i know and um i mean if i go back to the beginning i have written and I believe this strongly, that the Republican Party is going to look back at some point and be pleased that it lost in 2020. Which it did lose in 2020.

Yes. Why should they be pleased? the democrats have taken actions that have made things worse and made people cross with them for example on energy joe biden has been a disaster for example in afghanistan joe biden made decisions that are unpopular and the american rescue plan that was passed on a party line vote last year made inflation worse a lot of the conditions that we're now seeing including some of the inflation some of the labor market unrest much of the supply chain mess and high gas prices would have happened anyway perhaps not quite to the same extent but they would have happened anyway and the party that presided over them most notably

the president who presided over them was going to get blamed especially if that president was in his second term this is what we've learned could you imagine what a midterm election would look like for the republican party with donald trump not just any president but donald trump in his second term coming up on his sixth year in office i think all of those latent issues in the economy would have been blamed on him yeah and uh voters would have would have made him better yeah well and also we've now seen no not everything is trump's fault right we can point to certain things and say of course he was over blamed for covid because more people have died under biden now i never blamed either of them but we can see no it's not just because trump was

president that people were dying of covid it's not just because trump was president we had supply chain issues and so on and so forth but you can't see that if Trump's president, because all of those deaths would have happened under his presidency, whether they were his fault or not. So I think that the Democrats, although they have made it much harder for themselves and made mistakes, I think that they have been dealt a tough hand. And I thinkans will come to feel pleased that they weren't in office when it happened the problem republicans have is this how do you nationalize an agenda that you don't have when you talk about gingrich but gingrich was clever in that he got together with the gop in 94 he took advantage of a more conservative electorate, an electorate that had grown used by that point to having a conservative Republican presence, if not domination in Washington with Reagan and H.W.

And he said, what are the 70-30 issues? That's what he called them, that we can seize upon. And they came up with ones that were palatable to pretty much everyone within the party, and they ran on them. What is the republican platform at the moment there isn't one there's one the the republican platform at the moment much as the democratic platform was in 2018 and it does work to an extent is we're not the other side so what do you nationalize you nationalize biden perhaps you nationalize um the excesses of of progressive domination of universities and the media and corporations and the culture but there are things that the democrats can nationalize too

and right i mean the argument i think the argument in the republican circles is this is do you um do you run on pocketbook discontent, gas prices and inflation? When gas prices are coming down and inflation is 6.3%, not good, but it's not 10. Do you run on a faltering economy when it's unclear quite where the economy is, honestly, when you look at the unemployment numbers, do you run on woke craziness, which seems to actually fire up the base? I don't I don't know. I don't I don't I don't know what it does to the to the general electorate. Do you do you run on corruption? Do you want to run on Joe Biden, Hunter Biden? Do you run on? It's hard to know i agree it's hard no i mean the the irony of the of the gingrich uh win was i think that i think there's 10 things they're going to do the promises

the contract with america eight of them i think or seven of them at least were reform issues reforming congress reforming how congress did business and it just seemed like and after 55 years of the sclerotic autocratic one-party rule in the House of Representatives that that felt right attractive to voters I'm not quite sure I know but there is I mean there is that if you're if you're Tim Ryan and running in Ohio you have to you have to run against the student loan bailout which is doing because you know your ohio voters don't like it but that makes it very difficult i think for the democrats in general to nationalize so you're right i mean but i'm just trying to think about yeah but if you pay me a lot of money to give you advice i don't know what what advice I would give you, except maybe that Mitch McConnell's right all along,

that it really doesn't matter who the candidates are, because that's what it's going to carry the day. Well, that matters, but it also matters that perhaps not in Ohio, but in some other areas, you can run against other national issues. Abortion is one. Now, I mean, funny enough, the Supreme Court essentially said, no, it's not one. And it was correct to say that.

I think the decision is correct. But it is going like every other issue in our politics to be nationalized and elevated. And, you know, I i mean this is in a sense where the two problems republicans have here intersect because for a lot of politicians you can quite deftly handle that but if you're a bad candidate and you don't speak particularly well and you're not particularly well informed then you may end up suffering from the national questions that are liabilities for republicans and i don't think abortion is particularly um at least not on net i also think that the effect of dobbs on the election

when it comes down to it's going to be relatively limited just because people don't care about it as much as other things. And because it's quite a while to go. And because a lot of that gets absorbed at the local level, but it's clearly having an effect. And in that circumstance, you want adept candidates who are well-versed in the politics. And I mean, Republicans, once again, don't have them.

And in 2010, they had a lot of bad candidates too, but they just had so much momentum behind them by November that it didn't matter. It didn't matter, right? Well, it did matter. I mean, I just went to Las Vegas last week and I flew into Harry Reid Airport, which might not be called that if he'd lost in 2010 to Sharon Angle, which he would have done if it hadn't been Sharon Angle.

That's right. It's a Harry Reid Airport, right? Was McCarran and now it's Harry Reid. Right. Now the fix was in there. Charlie, this was a lot of fun. I kind of enjoyed this. We didn't have to split this conversation up

between our tiresome partners, Peter and James. We just nanner on. Thank you for joining us. The podcast was brought to you by Liquid IV. So support them for supporting us. It's a great product, great company. And please join Ricochet today. Take five minutes, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts.

I know we always say it just sounds like static, but if you do that, somehow magically the algorithm allows new listeners to discover us, and that helps keep this show going. So please do us a favor, join Ricochet, and give us a five-star review. And we will

see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Ricochet! Join the conversation.