14 Months to Slow the Spread ft. Steve Deace

Ted Cruz, Senator. Usually we talk about very heavy things from the Senate, from the upper Chamber on this show. Now we've got to talk about the lower chamber. I hate to bring the tone down here, but this race, in an ordinary year, this would be sort of a nothing story has come to dominate the news cycle, and it's the left is making a lot of hay out of it because there's infighting in the GOP, so they

like that. But Republicans are paying a lot of attention too, I think, because there's a big split here for the future of the party. You had Liz Cheney was in the position, and she spent a lot of her time bashing conservatives in the Washington Post and other left wing outlets. Then you had at least Stephanic who has a more liberal voting record actually than Cheney, but she, I guess, was more loyal to Donald Trump, and she was nicer

to the conservative base. You then had Chip Roy, who I seem to recall you note quite well, indeed very a very conservative member of the House. He was challenging Stephanic for the position. It's a little insider baseball, but I think that this probably could have some big effects on the party. You know, yes, and no, I actually don't think it's that big a deal going forward. I think the press wants to turn it into World War three because their favorite topic is Republicans in fight wars.

And it's also the only way Democrats can keep the House in twenty twenty two is if we have a civil war on the Republican side. If we don't have a civil war, I think we are very likely to take the House in twenty two, and I think we've got a decent shot at taking the Senate. Look what the House Republican Conference did. It had to do. Uh, Liz Cheney could no longer be in a leadership role because she had she'd lost it. Yeah. I actually liked Liz. I get along perfectly fine with Liz. I don't agree

with her on everything. You know, when it comes to foreign policy, Um, she's much more of a neocon. She's she's willing to send the Marines at the drop of a hat. I disagree with her on that one. You look, she believes that sincerely. I just I think she's wrong. Um, but what caused this? So she hates Trump and she had criticized Trump, she voted doing peach Trump. And then there was another effort to like vote her out a couple of months ago, and it failed. It failed resoundingly.

It failed. I think two to one that I remember that had she just shut up, she would have been fine. It actually would have been very simple for her to say, I've said everything I'm going to say on that, I got nothing more to say, and she would still be Republican conference chare. They had a vote on it two to one. What was weird as she decided that it was somehow made sense to spend every day attacking all

of the other Republicans. Do you think was this an accident that her emotions ran away with her or do you think this was strategic? No? I think I think she was on tilt. Look if someone who is supposed to be your leader, is attacking every other member of the party every day. At some point, it's like, all right, enough, already, you can't be our leader. Like you can have your views, but you ain't leading us if you're if you say we suck every day long like and so she forced

Republicans to vote route. I don't think it's indicative of a broader civil war because I actually think Lizz's views are really a tiny fraction of the party because you hear this in the media, and I'm you know, us media all hates Trump, and so if Liz hates Trump too, she's in the majority position. Look, a couple of weeks ago, Liz had a comment blasting me and saying that that that, you know, I should be ineligible for support, and it

was funny. I actually my press team said, okay, what kind of what kind of comment should you make on this? And we sort of talked back and forth what sort of comment I should give, And like I said, I like Liz, I don't have personal animosity, and so the comment that I came up with, as I said, you know, I think I'll just say, well, you know, I think she has a very promising future as an MSNBC contributor. Beyond this intra political house race, you know, or the

meta political I guess, the politics of politics. I'm interested in some of these other races around the country because a lot of us are looking at twenty twenty two and then ultimately at twenty twenty four. You've been involved, I mean, you've made big endorsements. There have been races that have taken place. Where does the party stand when we're actually facing the voters. Look, I think we're in

a very good position. I told you, I believe twenty twenty two is going to be a very good election. There's actually an earlier moment than that, which is you've got a couple of states that have off cycle elections, and so Virginia, for example, Virginia's electing a new governor in twenty twenty one. And if you look historically, the last time you had a Democratic White House, a Democratic House of Representatives, and a Democratic Senate was two thousand

and eight. Barack Obama was elected with Democrat majorities of both houses. They passed a radical left wing agenda two thousand and nine. The next year, Virginia elected a Republican as governor. Bob McDonnell, and Virginia is often a Canarian a coal mine because it's the first chance voters get to express their views on where things are going in Washington. I think Biden, Schubern Pelosi are going radically left, and I think Virginia we've got a very good shot at

electing a governor. So the Republican nominee is a guy named Glenn Yonkin. Glenn is a friend of mine. So I endorsed Glen in the primary, and I campaigned with him. So last week I was on the road with Glenn. Did I don't know, seven or eight rallies all over the state. Interesting the way Virginia picks it's governor. They

did for a modified convention where they had delegates. They had about fifty thousand people who were delegates to a convention, and it was a distributed virtual convention sort of a COVID thing was weird. So it wasn't a primary, but it wasn't like an in person convention. So it was a strange election to campaign because you basically got fifty thousand people who were eligible to vote. Who are the people who have registered to be delegates? Okay, And in

the rallies. I mean, we had the two days of rallies. We had several thousand people come out, and I think we ended up seeing in person in those two days probably about ten percent of the delegates who ended up voting. Some people are saying, I sound like president from there. A lot of people are saying everybody's talking. Some people are saying that your endorsement was decisive certainly for the people that came to the rallies. I think to many

of them that was persuasive. And I do think my going and barnstorming with him also helped him bring out a lot more people to the rallies. So there's sort of a double you can drive, a narrative, you can communicate, there's a you know, a vouching process of Okay, look, I as a voter may not know so and so, but but if I trust you and you know so and so, that means something. And then I do think the particularly in this sort of weird distributed convention getting

the people to come out to the rallies. I think there were some people that came to the rallies that were coming because they were supporters of mine, but they saw Glenn and he's impressive, like when you see him in person, He's an impressive guy. He's a likable guy. And I suspect there's some people who came to the rally not knowing if they were going to back him

or not. Who I think when they left decided they were going to back Now, Senator, I want to talk for a second about two weeks to slow the spread turned into about fourteen months. But now it seems round the other side there's been insanity the entire journey, and the entire journey has also been marred by a consistent refusal to listen to science, masked in a facade of science.

And our guests today, Steve Days, who is a dear friend, who is a brilliant thinker, a brilliant writer, a fearless conservative, has written a book. And so Steve, tell us about your book. There are two things that are really hallmarks, pillars of our healthcare system that the average American, if they were faced with a serious healthcare decision in their own lives, would be granted automatically, and they have been denied via public policy collectively for the last year. The

first one is informed consent. You have a right to consent to a treatment to know whether the treatment is worse than the disease. That's been denied us. In fact, in the last few days, ironically, a lot of the data that people like me were called crackpots for disseminating for the past year about masks and lockdowns and shutdowns and social distancing numbers and where the six feet originated from a student's term paper and all these other things.

It's funny just in the last couple of weeks, now suddenly they want to confirm all these things because apparently somebody's internal polling is really really bad. The only science that evolves that fast, guys, is political science, if you know what I'm saying. Okay, so that's the first thing is informed consent. We were denied that. The second is

the right to a second opinion. I mean, somebody comes to you and says, well, you've got a really terrible mass on an appendage, and I've got to remove that appendage so it doesn't spread to the rest of the body. That might be true. Before you give up an appendage, you're probably going to go get a second opinion because

you kind of like your appendages. And there have been experts from the very beginning at some of the most renowned centers of academia in the world, Oxford, number one rated university in the Earth, Stanford, Harvard Jail, some of the top rated universities in America that have had varying opinions and contrarian opinions from a public policy standpoint on how to deal with this pandemic, and they have been

almost exclusively ignored. In fact, recently, Governor DeSantis in Florida hosted a panel with them, and that panel got banned on YouTube because apparently some skinny gene wearing avocado toast obsessed engineer at Facebook knows more about COVID nineteen than doctor Martin Coldorf at Harvard, who designed the Bear's Incident

website for the CDC. That is the world in which we live, and it's why we've kind of had this hammer meets nail, ham fisted one size fits all authoritarian and solution over the last year and set of solutions that might have actually solved some things. So let's talk about lockdowns, which was a Dracronian step that was imposed across the country. What was the scientific basis for lockdown?

Does it make any sense that we saw the entire country voluntarily shut down and destroy trillions of dollars of value, destroyed people's lives. What was the basis for this? There was not really the notion of quarantining the healthy. I mean, this has never been done in human history, quarantining the healthy during a pandemic, during an outbreak. We did this

for two reasons. One, this was experimented. This was an experiment that came from a student term paper that somehow made its way into some halls of science late in the Bush administration George W. Bush. They looked at it and thought, wow, that's stupid. It's never going to work, And somehow we ended up doing it last year. And then a lot of this also came from the Imperial College model that was really on March sixteenth of last year, which says, by the way, that it doesn't know for

certain how coronavirus is spread. Now, I don't know, man, I didn't stay on a holiday and at Express last night. But I kind of think that when your model on transmission of a virus admits it doesn't know how a virus is transmitted, maybe that's a problem. Your model is a problem. Okay, But it said if we didn't do these social distancing matter issues. If we did not do these things where we put people away for a period of a few months and then let them come back out,

and then if they did, the virus return. So we'd have to do waves and waves of these lockdowns and reopenings over the course of several years. That that's because millions and millions of people would die if we didn't do it. Here's the problem with why this all didn't work, because it all began from a flawed assumption. Well, really a couple of flawed assumptions. Number one, that the Chinese

were telling the truth. That was a flawed assumption. These were I'm really shocked that the nation that was faced with its first open trade war from the United States in decades and was on the heels of unprecedented civil unrest in its chief financial district of Hong Kong when a virus broke out, thought the best thing for the rest of the world to do was to economically shut down. What a weird coincidence. So we didn't have Wuhan for luck, we'd have no luck at all, all right, So we

couldn't trust the Chinese. That's number one. These were all their solutions, but then number two because we didn't understand that the virus was primarily as airborne spread contagion. That's why that's why there's no real outdoor spread. That's why you're loose fitting cloth masks don't work. We heard about droplets and fomites for months and months and months, when in reality it is an airborne contagion. Steve, I want to talk for a second about the subtitle of the book.

The title is The Faucian Bargain, but the subtitle refers to the most powerful and dangerous bureaucrat in American history. We're sitting here with the United States Senator, with a legislator. I thought that the way laws were made in this country, correct me if i'm was that the legislators legislate and the executive, who is also elected and forces the law. But somehow we've gotten into this position where these technocrats, these eggheads, are governing the country and have much more

power than our elected officials. You apparently watched the same Schoolhouse Rock Michael that I did growing up. I'm just a Capitol hill, right, But you know it's funny. As Congressman Thomas Massey was tweeting yesterday that he was on a domestic flight and the flight attendant came out and said, under federal law, you must wear your mask at all times. And Massey's like, wait a minute, I'm the guy. I'm

the only guy on this plane that makes laws. I don't ever remember voting on any social law, all right, But that's one of the main points we raise at the very beginning of the book. Michael is in the introduction that even though there's a singular figure here in Anthony Fauci, he has been the point person on this

all along. The reality is he's eighty. If he had retired at seventy five seventy like a lot of other Americans do, particularly ones looking at the pension that he's got staring him in the face, it would have just and somebody else that another creature would have emerged in the black lagoon. He is pardon the theological punt here, legion that this is what the technocratic administrative state produces.

It might have been Debbie Bedazzle your facield Burks instead, or Francis Collins, who went from mapping the human genome to being fully vaccinated and wearing masks outside, who who knows who else. It would have been some other nameless, faceless bureaucrat and no one else had ever heard of until now. But this is the way that the system works. We passed the buck of accountability. Well, these are what our experts told us, These are what our technocrats told us,

This is what the bureaucrats told us. And then you have no way of going at them. They're never elected. Your elected officials washed their hands of it. Well, we just did what the experts in the bureaucratic class told us to do. And the and the and the notion of government by the consent of the government. Michael is just thrown, is just tossed aside. So if you write a sequel to the book, and it's it's dacy and

bargain um. What should our leaders have done? If we can go back in time and Steve Dass in charge, the Wuhan virus begins, what should we have done? There's there's two things I would have done if if I were the oracle at Delphi and consulted in the matter. The first is to me, I don't believe the fifteen days to flatten the curve. I think it was I wouldn't have made that decision, but I think it's an

understandable decision. I think it's like in a basketball game when the other team's on a scoring run and your coach calls the time out to thwart their momentum. And so I think, Hey, we're getting all this unprecedented heat pressure. Don't know if we can trust what China is telling us. Let's just get it too, baby, and let's just set this one out for a couple of weeks and see

what we're dealing with. The thirty days to slow the spread, I believe was the absolute worst decision in the history of the US presidency because the entire narrative was lost from there during the fifteen days. That's when President Trump and his advisors should have brought in John Ian Edis

from Stanford. Scott Atlas from Stanford, Jay I can never pronounce his last name correctly from Stanford, sat Thank you, Michael, appreciate it for the solid bring in Sinatra Gupta from Oxford, members of the Center for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford, Scientists from Carnegie Mellon, doctor Katz from Heart from Yale, doctor Risch from Yale, doctor Colder from Harvard. Put him in a room with Debbie Burke's put him in a

room with Francis Collins at nih and Anthony Fauci. Put all those people in a room, put him on camera. It's a steel cage match of expertise. There's wisdom in a multitude of council Let them put their heads together, let them bounce ideas off of one another. We never did that. We never consulted a second opinion, and essentially allowed Anthony Fauci to use the Trump White House as

his ascendency to potentate status, unassailable status. Well, and Steve, you'll recall how a number of weeks ago, I had reporters in Washington freaking out because I wasn't wearing a mask while doing a press conference and talking to a TV camera, And this one reporter in particular, through a fit, I observed, Look, everyone here has been vaccinated. What why you know? I watched the CDC's announcement last week, and in particular their explanation on Sunday that the science has evolved.

Is it new science that vaccines work? Or was this always Look, I haven't been wearing a mask for a lot of weeks. On the Senate floor ever since I got vaccinated. I'm like, Okay, look, I believe in science, I have a vaccine. What the hell am I wearing a mask for? And yet there were only as of last week, there were only four senators not wearing mask. There was Rand Paul who hasn't worn one throughout it.

I was the second, and I haven't worned a asked for well over a month now after I got vaccinated. Roger Marshall, another medical doctor, was the third who didn't wear a mask, and actually, just starting last week, jim risch roma Iawa became the fourth, and he finally said, all right, to hell with it, I'm taking my mask off. I gotta say yesterday, after the CDC announcement, I walked onto the Senate floor and two thirds of the people are maskless. Chuck Schumer is maskless. And I just stood

there and basked in the freedom. You know, we had Joe Biden's you know, pseudo State of the Union address where everyone wore a mask in a chamber where everyone there had been vaccinated. Is this a new evolution of science that vaccines work? Or was the CDC full of crap when they said people who are vaccinated should wear nineteen masks and be in an isolation Champe. Well, you see,

it's quite clear. I think it gets to Steve's subtitle here, no science changed, but what changed were the statements from these bureaucrats, these very power bureaucrats, and then everybody, including Chuck Schumer, fall in line. I suppose we can be happy in the short run that we get to take the mask off, we get to breathe the sweet air of freedom, at least to some degree. But to your point, Senator, and Steve to your book, we may well see a sequel of this soon, So can we hold on to

our freedom? And I will note there at least some of my Democratic colleagues who I think should keep wearing the mask, and if only they could tighten it a little bit, because some of their words are still getting out. And if we get just tightened those masks, that really

would be a public service, you know. On that very important medical advice, I believe we need to leave it there, gentlemen, but I strongly recommend that everybody go out and get the Faucian bargain, not only because you will learn a lot, not only because it's very important as a political matter, but also because it's a very funny title. Steve, thank you so much for being here, Senator. We've only got a minator two left, but I cannot let you go

without bringing up this mail bag question. I think it's very important. And you know, we're talking about all sorts of politics and the politics of politics and this insider baseball stuff. So if you think that the number three position in the House doesn't matter, let's talk about the Prince of England. This is a question from a Carl Carl wants to know. Senator Cruz, would you please explain to the limey overseas how the First Amendment is most

certainly not bonkers. Thank you love the show, Carl. Yeah, that piss me off. For those who don't know, Prince Harry is even still a Prince the erstwhile the sometime Prince the artist formerly known as Prince Harry called the First Amendment bonkers in an interview. Yeah, he kind of reminded me of King George and Hamilton as as sort of this foppish knitwit singing to the colonies. You'll be back, you'll be back. Please contain a little bit of I

got phone in front of you. That's only for the subscribers that we need to have subscribers that that that's worth talking about. Well, if the pitch is that they get to see me do a soft shoe, I don't know that that's going to be the strongest sales pitch, but yes, it would be great too. So would you do it in full costume of King George? Well, that's the only way I would. Good, it's good, good, I'm glad. Look, I mean, Prince Harry, I don't care if you're here.

I actually like the whole Megan Markle thing. I find it difficult to find something I care less about, so listen, I don't I don't necessarily fault the guy for saying I want out. Fine, I you know, okay, you want out, but don't be a pretentious leftist knitwit. And if you do come to our country, fine, you want to come to our country, great, Like, don't don't have such an arrogant, elitist condescension to this country that you don't bother to

understand anything we're about. Um, he's ridiculing the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and I get that that just don't believe in free speech, that that they want government control, because you know what, it would be really nice, I'm sure from his perspective, if he could silence anyone from criticizing, of course, but that's not the way it works. But

freedom is a powerful thing. And by the way, the last British monarch who said you can't have freedom, we threw their tea in a harbor and kick their ass in a war, right right, And there is something to it.

I guess there actually is a bit of a through line when we're talking about the house race or other races around the country, or even Prince Harry, which is there's something very unseemly about this ingratitude, you know, to your family, to your adoptive country, to this great political system that's given you a lot of rights, to your constituents, that to your your words, that condescension, that arrogance, that elitism is really whatever the future is for the Conservative movement,

for the Republican Party, for our politics, that ain't it. If that is the future, then count me out. I want to be out of that. But of course we're going to see how that future is going to break, not just in the Republican leadership, but in these races. Twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two, and then ultimately twenty twenty four, but we'll have to I suppose hold it there for now. I'm Michael Knowles. This is Verdict with

Ted Cruz. This episode of Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country. In twenty twenty two, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.