TODD: Tomorrow, Joe Biden will read something he’s a probably been rehearsing for months, and it’s gonna smell like a celebration of the lockdown, and it’s gonna be that. It’s gonna be for them. I think it’s a celebration of the pandemic. This has been the most politicized thing I’ve ever seen.
It’s changed my personal view of our national public health authorities and state public health authorities, and we’ll talk about that. I want to kick this straight off, though, with just going back to something that Rush taught us very clearly, that Democrats, for them, everything is political. And he spoke very clearly, though. This is one year since this was named a pandemic.
In this hindsight, listen afresh and think about one man in D.C. who seemed obsessed with doing everything he could to protect people while others around him — many, far too many — seemed obsessed with politicizing. So Rush Limbaugh reminded us how President Trump’s swift action to attempt to keep the virus out of the country was assailed by the Democrats and their mockingbird media members.
RUSH: In the very early days of this, you could see every government official not wanting people to panic and trying to keep ’em from panicking by saying, “Come on. Everything’s fine. This thing is no different than the flu.” Everybody was trying to downplay the potential badness of this thing, and then as time went on one guy — one guy — didn’t have the freedom to act like, “Hey, everything’s fine.”
Trump banned all incoming travel from China, and guys like Biden and the rest started calling him a racist and a xenophobe. The one guy that was trying to do something about it. And Trump saying, “I didn’t want people to panic.” You’re exactly right. We do panic! There’s no reason for there to be a toilet paper shortage. There’s no reason for a run on toilet paper in any kind of a viral pandemic.
I think it’s all an exercise here in finger-pointing that is not going to carry any weight with anybody because everybody was in one degree of panic or another back in the beginning and didn’t know anything about it. Everybody was alternately scared or not. You can find people contradicting themselves from the highest level of expertise our country has to offer.
TODD: Absolutely. Early on in this pandemic as we were trying to figure it out, there was reason to be very concerned. And what we observed, again, is a Trump-and-Limbaugh dynamic. Here’s what I mean. I don’t believe President Trump would be president, would have been… Wishful thinking. (laughing) Would have been. I was wishing he still was.
I don’t think he would have been president without Rush Limbaugh, and there’s this dynamic here that I think sometimes God chooses very interesting characters to do things for us. President Trump took this very seriously from the beginning, and somewhere along the line a switch got flipped, and the same media that had said, “This is just the flu…”
And there’s hundreds of headlines, hundreds of headlines that said that. Tony Fauci said (impression), “You know, if I was a young person, this would probably be a good time to go to Italy.” He was talking about that when Italy was shutting down. Take a cruise to Italy. Something changed, a switch got flipped, and all the sudden the effort was then — in my judgment — to scare people, and there’s a cost to this. There’s a massive cost.
It was around this time frame that the CDC made a subtle change in how deaths are reflected, where prior to this, to say that someone had died from the flu, there was a process to that. It was more of a hard science, and the CDC made the decision to soften that science, and you ended up with the most insane things being called covid deaths. One that’s just horrific and stands out to me was a woman who was working on her home and she fell.
She had a terrible couple of skull fractures, and she ultimately succumbed to that. But she had tested positive for the covid the one time know at one point, and it was reflected as a covid death. These are abundant across the United States. That one was in Florida, and then Ron DeSantis did a great job of cleaning up the public health data down there.
Jay Inslee’s Washington state was counting people who were killed by gunshots. They were caught twice — twice! — changing the numbers and counting things like this suicides and motorcycle crashes as covid deaths. Now, part of this was there was a financial dynamic to this. An incentive. Rush has talked for many, many years about perverse incentives that are built into government programs.
The perverse incentive to have black fathers leave the home, the perverse incentives originally built into Joe Biden’s alleged covid bailout. It’s $1.9 trillion, and that maybe $600 million, maybe, went to covid. They originally wanted to pay people more money to stay home than to work! So it’s a classic Big Government thing that perverse incentives led to…
I don’t want to say, “false reporting,” because that’s how they decided to report the deaths, but it had the result of four to six times as many deaths being counted as from covid. There’s a big difference of dying with covid and from it. The body count from this — and I don’t mean to be blunt. But the body count from the games people played are extraordinary.
People went from, “Let’s not panic, people,” to “Let’s panic, people!” And the result was there are people who did not seek medical treatment for things like stroke signs, symptoms of stroke, there were people who would not go to the hospital though they had symptoms of heart attacks. And then there’s denied medical care, where bureaucrats made the decision that certain services were optional, nonessential.
Things like perhaps you have a symptom of a kidney stone and it turns out to be something else. Those deaths, they will attempt — and they do this with data to try to launder those deaths. But they’re finally being counted. Even some of the mainstream media’s beginning to catch up on this. The most bizarre point on this was President Trump simply spoke about a noncontroversial drug.
Do you remember Rush talking about this? (laughing) The mockingbirds became obsessed with a noncontroversial drug called hydroxychloroquine that has a long, long history, and there were some terribly designed studies about hydroxychloroquine after Trump said this had promise. They were terribly designed, that had no chance of succeeding because they were using hydroxychloroquine in ways that are contraindicated.
Now we have the Journal of the American Medical Association, as I recall, and other journals saying, “Yeah, hydroxychloroquine and these protocols can save lives.” There was one analysis that the chances or odds of it not working are like one in a billion — not working for people — maybe taller odds than that. But CNN… CNN assaulted that drug.
Tony Fauci had, I think, in 2005 called it part therapeutic, part vaccine for upper-respiratory viruses. This dynamic of Trump and Limbaugh — of Rush. Trump wouldn’t have been president, in my judgment, without the Maha. Without President Trump as president, I don’t think CNN would ever have shown their hand in that regard.
I mean, to that level, that they were willing to attack a drug, and then therefore you had blue state governors banning that drug. There’s a body count for that. There are people who died, in all likelihood, because they couldn’t get that drug. And then there’s this. The increase in teen suicides and adolescent suicides is an incredibly dark moment in our country, and it continues, and lockdown deaths will continue for a long time.
People who are denied medical care is one thing. People who are watching their businesses crumble is another. Donald Trump made the decision to try to bring this country back online sooner than the mockingbirds would allow. They put him in a box: “Is it the economy or is it grandma’s life?” and now we know that we can have both. Look at Texas. Look at Florida.
Look at the degree to which we can’t control viruses. Just as Rush taught us all these years, we can’t control the earth’s weather, right, and the weather systems! To think so is fanciful — or at least, you know, future tech may get there, but it’s not there now. As we look back on this year, I look back at Tony Fauci, who is a political animal, in my judgment — and brutally so.
Deborah Birx was pro-lockdown, “Don’t see your family,” and then she travels to see her family during Thanksgiving, and Tony mask-off/mask-on Fauci, et cetera. One man I think stood at the center of that, and I thought, “One man really tried to bring this country back.”
And for that I hope that history will reflect this accurately, that President Trump, to me, seemed obsessed with bringing us back. The Biden team seemed obsessed with riding this to a political end, and Rush had told us all these years: To Democrats, all is political, all of life is political. And that extends into one-sixth of our economy.