The Coronavirus and the Constitution | Constitution Day Celebration Panel

good to see everybody here we had a great start last night with the attorney general and looking forward to a couple of uh good panels this morning this panel is on the coronavirus and the constitution my name is r.j pastrito i'm dean of the van andel school of statesmanship on campus and also a professor of politics and i'm going to try to moderate this group of speakers for you we've got about an hour and 15 minutes and each of our speakers will speak for 15 to 20 minutes we'll have some perhaps discussion among them and then turn things over to you out in the audience for your questions i'm going to introduce each speaker before uh they make the presentation and our first speaker this morning is robert barnes robert barnes with high profile wins for clients in constitutional criminal and civil law in cases across the country lives in las vegas and has offices in tennessee wisconsin and california amongst his more prominent clients include the covington boys ralph nader wesley snipes jill stein alex jones and political parties from the greens to the libertarians please join me in welcoming robert barnes when most people think of the constitution around the world the first words that come to their mind are the words that come from our first amendment to that constitution and core to that right is the right of peaceable assembly indeed that right to peaceably assembly is essential to the other rights in the first amendment the right of the freedoms of press of freedom of speech freedom of religious expression and the right to petition our government for redress of grievances our constitution which was formed in a crisis survived centuries of crisis indeed there were seven different smallpox epidemics over the first 15 years of our young republic never once did we suspend any of our constitutional rights or liberties not the right to assemble not the right to speak not the right of religious expression not the right to go to church not the right to petition your government for redress of grievances or the right to protest indeed we our government would survive our constitution would survive without those rights being suspended through a a civil war through world war one through world war ii and would survive all kinds of epidemics including the spanish flu of 1918 including the hong kong flu of 1968 the asian flu of 1958 through the swine flu of 1976 another virus epidemic in 2009 and throughout all of these we never suspended our constitutional rights or liberties including the core rights to peaceable assembly whether that was for purposes of church or politics or any other form of expression the right to peaceably assemble is essential to those other rights but it stands alone until 2020 when across the country mayors governors and politicians of all stripes suspended for the first time in our history the right to peaceable assembly indeed it often declared assembly itself unlawful whether it was for the purposes of attending church the purposes of going to school or for the purposes of political organization or rallying or petitioning for redress of grievances or the freedom of speech how did we get to that point well it's important to go back to understand the founders and in talking about the founders to know those founders in a broader context than just the founding fathers that have the statutes and the memorials and the paintings to them the true founding generation the true founding fathers of the american constitutional experiment were as made up of boston fishermen and back country frontiersmen and baptist farmers as they were merchants and bankers indeed it was the grandsons of those baptist farmers who helped found a small school in southern michigan to uphold those constitutional liberties to extend them to abolition in support of the abolition of slavery to expand it to be one of the first universities to allow african americans and people of any race or any gender admission to college and that college was hillsdale college that still stands more than a century and a half later in celebration of that constitution it is in respect and recognition of that legacy of liberty that we inherited that was that was bequeathed to us by our true founding fathers that has now suffered its most monumental crisis in its history some of the seeds of the problems of our current jurisprudence in this area of constitutional liberty and its suspension date to the trilogy of infamy of cases between 1905 and 1945 where the supreme court of the united states put germinated the possibilities of this day coming where we would and in fact legal scholars and judges alike would openly talk about suspending the constitution during a quote-unquote emergency notably the constitution of the weimar republic of germany was celebrated as one of the great democratic constitutions of european history how did it fail and end up birthing nazi germany because it had an emergency exception to the constitutional liberties and rights enclosed therein and thus suspended them effectively allowing the rise of nazi germany and world war ii to soon follow in that same context the trilogy of infamy of decisions by the u.s supreme court that we were supposed to have turned our back to have resurfaced and been resuscitated by lawyers and litigants alike the first one of course is jacobson issued in 1905 where an individual is asserting that a forced vaccination should be tested by scientific evidence at trial before he should be required as a condition of his citizenship to take it during a smallpox epidemic outside of boston the supreme court in the jacobson decision effectively said that it would defer to the executive branch and not allow such a trial to occur that jacobson decision was then cited as the basis for the debuck decision some two decades later that is where the u.s supreme court infamously authorized and approved forced sterilizations of poor women all across the south white and black alike in the name of of eugenics so when you hear some various people on the left talk about the need to respect medical science and our legal determination i remember that when we deferred to those in the white lab coats at the very beginning of about a century ago it was in the name of racist eugenics so maybe we shouldn't be so quick to defer our political and common sense to those in the white lab coats as if we should live through a live milgram experiment of what their own druthers should be we have a democracy for a reason we do not defer to those in white lab coats for that democracy but that would not be the last decision in the trilogy of infamy by the u.s supreme court where it forgot its foundational bearings where it absconded and abandoned its safeguarding of the constitutional liberties that our founders bequeath to it that would be the korematsu decision of 1945 which would not surprisingly also cite the buck decision and the jacobson decision as its legal predicate that would suspend the constitutional liberties for a group of americans simply because of the nature of their ancestry people would be removed from their homes have their businesses taken from them their jobs stripped away from them their right of peaceable assembly suspended for them what we have done now in the past year over the past six months effectively is taking korematsu and applied it to the entire country in any place where the local politicians are so willing to do so in places like pennsylvania in michigan new york new jersey california large parts of the entire country the right of assembly has been completely suspended the right of speech completely suspended the right of religious expression completely suspended in my home state of nevada if you want to form a church you need to go to a casino to do so if you want to be able to have meaningful congregation and participation as my mom used to say when i was a kid when i didn't want to go to church on a particular sunday morning and wanted to sleep in instead you should not forsake the fellowship of your fellow believers yet we are being forced to do so all across the country and in places like las vegas if you want to go to church you should just operate it inside of either caesars or the wind and there you can rent a convention center room and actually form church that's the peculiar logic our u.s supreme court adopted this past summer though over four notable dissents but that ignoble history of our recent history against the noble history of our constitutional liberty in the centuries before has finally met a resistance in the form of a young 41 year old federal district court judge in the western district of pennsylvania appointed by president trump this week he issued a decision striking down the lockdown orders of the pennsylvania governor as unconstitutional in violation of that right of peaceable assembly in violation of that right of free speech of free press and pre-religious expression not only that he recognized it as a violation of both substantive and procedural due process under the 14th amendment to the u.s constitution for businesses and those who would have it as he noted what led to a position where the judiciary was consciously and publicly stating it was going to susp to completely suspend its role as an independent check on either the legislative or executive branch in the name of a crisis there is no emergency exception in the u.s constitution though president uh first our first president george washington was intimately aware of the problems of smallpox indeed as uh mr berenson can comment upon what the one of the very first inclinations of then general george washington was herd immunity should be the solution for dealing with viruses he inoculated his soldiers with very small doses hopefully not enough to cause them to incur the full wrath of smallpox which had a 30 fatality rate which is far far higher than the one that covet 19 presents to us he understood that and yet he didn't have an emergency exception to the u.s constitution he didn't suspend our constitution when smallpox epidemics raged across america in his first two terms as president of the united states and yet somehow many of our governors suddenly thought that the word governor must have meant something from the colonial days and they could start issuing royal edicts as if they were the colonial governors that we overthrew in our constitutional republic notably this judge the judge stickman from western district of pennsylvania a man from steel town from pittsburgh someone as attorney general barr was talking about last night having more judges having more prosecutors rooted in the local community and understanding and responsive to the democracy that is supposed to govern us is critical and essential to the functioning of justice in our modern age and he fits that precise description what he required was a full trial and a complete record and where finally the evidence would be tested what is the evidence in support of these lockdown provisions what is the counter evidence what does this evidence look like under cross-examination and what we found was there was almost no evidence at all what the judge found was that the this was more like in his own words a theoretical white paper where you basically have the white lab coat crowd doing a live milgram experiment on its population for those who don't know the milgram experiments is where someone would be brought in just someone with a white lab coat they knew nothing else about them would tell them would you please shock this person in the other room and and they would tell them to keep turning up the shocks if their answers were quote unquote wrong they had no reason to believe that the shocks were morally or legally justified some would express concern about their own legal liability but as long as the person in the white lab code kept telling him to do it they kept doing it and doing it and doing it and over half of the populace would do so we're seeing that now in whether to wear masks or not wear masks whether to social distance when to social distance how to social distance whether to have a lockdown or not a lockdown how we can have as this judge noted a sort of a corporate woke virus that somehow knew the difference between church and walmart or church in a casino that it knew that if it saw you know caesars or bellagio it it couldn't go in there that was dangerous but if it saw a small baptist church it would raid immediately in the same way if it was going through any kind of community if it's all walmart or a costco it knew that's an inappropriate not a proper place to go but if it's a small and pop shop they had to invade there right away yet these were the rules that were being laid down by our governors and mayors all across the country walmart's safe mom and pop not casino safe church not these rules were rules that simply confounded not only common sense but constitutional sense but unfortunately until this week our federal courts had turned a blind eye to it many of our state courts had turned a blind eye to it not all but most it took the bravery of a young trump 41 trump appointee 41 year old federal jurist to point out the obvious that when he looked at the evidence he said there was no evidence for the lockdowns he pointed out that in our entire american history we had never ever locked down we had never suspended all constitutional rights and liberties for any period of time anywhere for all the local population for any reason he pointed out that in fact the evidence that could be produced by the state was weak to non-existent while the counter evidence was often overwhelming that there was serious doubts about whether any of these quote unquote mitigation measures mitigated anything at all it was on that basis that he rejected their decision he noted their logic was internally contradictory externally contradictory to existing evidence it didn't even make sense within its own rules and it was often nothing more than a theoretical white paper being imposed on the population of pennsylvania to their great expense and detriment he noted that in fact there was no evidence that public gatherings of the kind that they were trying to be suspended or prohibited or assembly that was being restricted and listed as unlawful had caused any form of super spreading event that led to any mass deaths of any kind indeed the only kind that that had been was the nursing home policies the governors of pennsylvania and michigan and new york and new jersey had done where they forced people who are sick and elderly back into the nursing home to infect the rest but it wasn't lawful assembly that posed any degree of health threat by any of the documented or detailed evidence yet it had been suspended throughout pennsylvania not for days not for weeks as originally promised but for months and months and months with no end as he pointed out a quarantine is supposed to be sick specific the person who has you have clear and convincing evidence that a particular person presents an imminent risk to other people within the community fits the same constitutional due process standards we've had for involuntary institutionalization of the mentally ill the same standards apply to the medically ill these lockdown orders were not consistent with any form of public quarantine and the state would admit during the proceedings that in fact it could not meet the definition statutorily or as constitutionally permitted of a quarantine instead they came to a different defense what was their defense there's no fundamental right to make a living period that was their argument and they expected a court to accept it adopt it and impose it on the rest of us that no american no pennsylvanian in that case had any fundamental right to make a living to support their family to support themselves apparently the words pursuit of happiness no longer appeared in the new declaration of independence as written by the pennsylvania governor indeed despite the fact that the right to make a living was fundamental and established as such from the very inception of our constitution and repeated as such going back to decisions from the 1800s somehow that was completely ignored and wished to be obliterated by the new democratic regime in the state of pennsylvania they admitted that their definition of quote unquote life-sustaining businesses which were given an exception and an exemption from the gathering provisions and the assembly provisions had no definition at all there was no standard for it there was no policy behind it it changed day to day week to week it was like something the stasi or the polar borough would have come up with indeed as the court noted it failed to meet even the most basic constitutional standards of governmental action and it was for that reason that the court determined and rejected what the governor of pennsylvania said said there is indeed a right to make a living there is indeed a right to assemble and that these rights cannot be suspended in the name of an emergency they cannot be declared invalid unilaterally by the actions of the executive branch of any government and he concluded in this way and it's a conclusion we should all remember as we move forward in the cases that i and other lawyers will be bringing across the country in the name of this case and this is here is his final quote the liberties protected by the constitution are not fair-weather freedoms the constitution cannot accept a quote new normal where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures the constitution sets lines and these actions cross those lines let it be so across the country thank [Music] you with apologies to our other two speakers i'm not sure how you follow that but i'm sure they'll they will do very well and our next speaker is alex berenson he graduated from yale university in 1994 with degrees in history and economics he was a reporter at the denver post and then at thestreet.com in 1999 he joined the new york times and at the times he covered everything from the drug industry to hurricane katrina and then he served two stints as a correspondent in iraq an experience led him to write the faithful spy which was his debut novel he has now written 12 john wells novels and two non-fiction books the number and tell your children please welcome alex berenson so um as you might guess from that pedigree i uh didn't really expect that i would be spending all my time speaking to conservative groups and audiences for the last couple of years but here i am um and uh and i've been forced into your hands um and the reason i've been forced into your hands is that the left does not want to talk about data and science as much as they say they do and certainly certainly when it comes to coronavirus they don't you know science science is not dr anthony fauci saying this is what science is and it you know it's not it's not somebody saying we all follow the science you must follow the sciences my mother who's an inveterate and msnbc watcher says to me i just follow the science and i say you have no idea what the data says and what science is at its heart is examining data sets clinical trials coming up with theories that fit those that fit the data you have trying to test those theories trying to reproduce them people being able to reproduce the data independently whether it comes out of a lab or whether it's real world data it's not magic and it is something we can debate and discuss and that's what we should be doing but but the but the left and the media have uh have sort of grabbed the reins of this in a way that that i never would have expected and they refuse to debate anything they don't like um you know i have a i have a couple hundred thousand followers on twitter which is sort of my main outlet to to to get some of these points across and i have been blocked by i don't know how many people um who who i've never even heard of media types um what i call blue checks who have lots of followers who just don't who who are so opposed to hearing anything they don't want to hear that they've preemptively blocked me this is this is not how discourse moves forward um so so so just to talk a little bit about the failure which is actually both a failure and a crushing success of expertise because the public health establishment has really crushed any debate the first signal failure came with the failure of the models in uh in march and april so so there were predictions made that the hospitals in new york and elsewhere would be overrun and those predictions weren't made out of nowhere okay they weren't made out of thin air the theory was and this is true it takes it takes a week to two weeks after you're infected with the coronavirus to uh to become sick enough to be hospitalized depending on you know your age and your comorbidities and uh the viral load that you got you know and obviously most people who are infected with the coronavirus never even know it that now appears to be clear based on um based on the serology test showing that many many more people are infected um then we have active uh then we know we're actively infected that suggests that many people were infected and recovered without even knowing it but some group of people who are infected will become sick and it takes a little while for them to become sick it takes a little while longer for them to be hospitalized and then you know for that tiny fraction of people who are unfortunate enough to wind up in the icu or ultimately to die that takes a little while longer too so so in in mid to late march as the numbers were increasing in new york city especially the the fear of epidemiologists was those numbers show what happened on for example the the uh the number of hospitalizations on march 22nd shows the number of infections on march 10th but there was no lockdown on march 10th so if the virus is spreading quickly through uh through the new york city population by the time we actually lock down which was march 22nd those 12 days there would have been a huge huge rise in infections and that rise would have led to a an overwhelming rise in hospitalizations in the next 12 days that was the fear okay this is that's really where all of this comes from that fear that didn't happen the models failed in late march and they failed in april they failed basically in real time you could see it happening this is how i first got attention because i just pointed out here's what the models say should be happening they say that 50 to 70 000 people in new york state should be hospitalized and the real number's about 15 000 and it's not going up very fast that meant basically that the lockdowns had failed because follow me here if if the lockdowns worked there would have been this huge spike in cases and then that spike would have dropped off very very rapidly as the lockdowns kicked in and new infections stopped instead there was a there was a much shorter spike of a lower spike that didn't reach the levels that were predicted and it went on and on and on suggesting that the lockdowns hadn't really been effective and that the virus wasn't as dangerous as we thought far fewer people were being hospitalized that all by itself should have led to a huge reconsideration of what we were doing it did nothing of the sort and six months later the same people who wanted those lockdowns in march are calling for a second wave of lockdowns despite six months of real-world evidence that a they don't work b the hospital system can manage even in places like houston and phoenix and miami that were hit this summer there was no hospital crisis there were crowded hospitals yes there was no hospital crisis that should call into question everything that we thought we were doing in march and and to and to go back further this panic was not just predictable it was predicted the sum of the same experts who now are desperate for masks and lockdowns and other public health interventions before march warned about this they said there is a real chance we're going to panic at the wrong time that we're going to impose all these incredibly expensive and complicated and society destroying and school destroying and economy destroying public health measures that don't really work we need to be careful about that and then when march came and and you can see some of these people saying this in january and february okay as the chinese were were locking down in wuhan and hubei they said we don't think this is a great idea and in march that all flipped the public health establishment went crazy and it has not been able to pull itself out of the ditch and we are stuck fighting them with facts and data that they don't want to hear but because so much of the media outside the conservative media won't even talk about this stuff it's very hard to have an honest debate or discussion and and so so here we are now six months later fighting about masks and about test and trace and isolate and about a vaccine and whether that should be mandatory when it comes meanwhile in the real world the virus has killed almost nobody under 60 and certainly almost nobody under 60 who wasn't quite ill i'm not saying they're not cases okay but if you look at at who actually gets sick and dies from the coronavirus it is it is overwhelmingly people who are who are either extremely elderly or extremely sick or both that's why forty to fifty percent of all the deaths from the coronavirus occur in people in nursing homes and long-term care facilities and by the way that does not mean it's not real it does not mean we shouldn't try to help people who are at risk it does not mean those deaths don't matter all the things people like to say about me i don't think any of those things what it means is that we have to balance society's our response our our responsibility to all of society and especially to children to our responsibility to the people who are in many cases at death's door okay there's something you know when you're when you're doing bookkeeping you have to look at assets and liabilities you have to look at both sides of the ledger this can't just be about trying to protect a few hundred thousand people who are very sick anyway it has to be about all of society especially since we have next to no evidence that any of those measures that we undertook did any good i mean that's the icing on the cake on this is that we don't even know that anything we did worked but we have this overwhelming desire to do something to do anything i mean i've sort of the older i get the more i understand that what's so intelligence is important but so much less important than intelligence or so much more important than intelligence is the ability to stay cool and calm under pressure and in dangerous times okay give me give me the guy or the woman who can stay cool under fire okay we panicked we had an overwhelming desire to do something even though there was no evidence for what we were doing the simplest public health measures are the ones that work stay home if you're sick wash your hands don't spit on the ground we used to spit on the ground all the time in this country there were spittoons everywhere we don't do that anymore i mean really like you know sneeze into your elbow that's about it okay that's about all that we know works everything else is questionable to a greater or lesser extent and masks are i would say the evidence is near zero that anything but a properly fitted n95 mask does much of anything okay and there's evidence that masks actually may not may be counterproductive because they discourage people from doing these other things and to the extent masks make a difference they probably make a difference as a signaling mechanism in other words if we tell sick people to wear masks it signals to other people that they're sick and they and then people give them space doesn't mean you're you're uh you know you're you're being negative about them it just means you're giving them some space that they're sick but guess what when you have universal masks that signaling mechanism disappears it destroys the only benefit of the mask so so we are stuck and and the reality of the situation and what the media and public health establishments are saying are diverging more and more and people are you know people are getting fed up and they're you know and they're sort of throwing you know we're all not all of us but a lot of us i think are living in what to some extent must have felt like in the soviet union about 1982 when it was clear that you know that everything had failed and that you know you couldn't get any fresh fruit in your your car if you were lucky to have one you know the engine fell out half the time but you had to you know but everybody said that glorious socialist state was going on you know we are being told over and over again that this is the worst you know epidemic since the spanish flu when most people don't know anyone who's died from this and certainly most people don't know anyone who's died from this and i mean when i say most i mean almost all i've i've conducted a survey about this and you know and there's been you know there's been other surveys conducted about it uh you know somewhere between eighty percent america of and ninety percent of americans don't know anyone who's died from covid and most of the you know the people who who and you you define no as broadly okay so bro you know not not a family member but just somebody you might have heard of who's a friend or something like that so so most people don't know anyone who's died from covid and the people who know someone who's died from covet those those deaths overwhelmingly again are you know people who are older and quite ill so the reality of the fact that this isn't that dangerous to most people to almost all people and what we're being told is the gap is getting too far for anybody to accept anymore and so people are returning to their lives but they're doing it in the face of government dictats that are supposed to you know that that i guess we're all sort of saying are not going to be enforced so you know kamala harris said uh you know there'll be a mask mandate but we won't enforce it so what does that mean i mean really like is it just a strongly worded suggestion like i i don't know so so so you know that doesn't breed respect for government or the law or or you know or or science or anything else it's a bad way to live when what you see happening and what you're being forced to pretend in public is happening are not the same thing and i hope we can stop that so so i you know i i i could i could talk for an hour i mean this is to some extent this is like the old aaa stuff five minutes is too much and an hour would not be enough um but uh um but i but i wanna sort of i wanna sort of leave you with one thing it's very it's very easy to say this is all about trump okay that you know the media hates trump or unfortunately there's a lot of people in academia including in the physical sciences who hate trump if you know if trump is not if trump is not reelected this will go away the evidence on the ground is that is not true okay new zealand and australia are both led by progressives they have extremely hard lockdowns okay and and joe biden has indicated that he you know he will he will follow the science the same signs my mother follows on msnbc um and uh and and you know basically continue masks and you know impose another lockdown at the drop of a hat so it's easy to blame this on sort of the hatred for trump but there are but but that misunderstands what's happening here okay to some extent we are doing this because we can what do i mean i mean we now have the bandwidth that most white-collar workers can stay home okay and we can run schools in this horrible way but theoretically schools can function at a distance even five years ago that would not have been possible okay much less 10 or 15 or 20 years ago so we have the bandwidth to enable us to exist remotely or you know for the for the people who have the most money and the most political power in society to exist remotely and we have a bunch of companies that are benefiting massively from this tech companies i i don't you know if any of you are fortunate enough to own amazon or apple those stocks have done really well this year the market is not stupid okay so so we have the ability to do this and we have an interest group and ultra interest group by the way which is now actively censoring people like me and bob um that that is encouraging this that's a and that's not going away okay that that that force is only becoming more powerful b we in in 1960 i couldn't believe this when i when i looked it up i knew that the number would be low but i didn't know how low it would be in 1960 the united states spent 27 billion dollars on medical care okay even adjusted for inflation was 230 billion that was about five percent of gdp healthcare is now 20 of gdp it is almost 4 trillion it is a massive and massively powerful sector in the economy and and we are spending we're spending almost a billion dollars a week on tests for covet alone okay patients are a throughput when you run the health a healthcare company you need patients i'm not saying that this was created for that but what i am saying is that the power the power to to supercharge this rather modest epidemic into something that has shut down society has been driven by two incredibly powerful sectors of the economy both of which benefit and those trends are only going to get worse tech is only getting more powerful and and healthcare is only becoming larger as a part of the economy so we're kind of lucky this time this one wasn't bad enough to actually be what they wanted it i'm not going to say wanted that's the wrong word it wasn't bad enough to actually force us to shut down society in the way that some people i don't want to say hope but in some in the way some people encourage us to do but there will be another flu there will be an h1n1 there will be something else and if the and if the infection fatality rate on that is half a percent let's say instead of you know one two tenths of a percent or three tenths of a percent or whatever this one is whatever fraction this is the pressure will be even more overwhelming to force us back into lockdown back remotely the experts are not going away these trends are not going away and that is why it is so important to fight this battle and to talk about what the data and the science actually say and so [Applause] and so so we just have to keep doing it um because because otherwise we're never going to get out of this thank you and our uh third panelist is john hinderaker john spent 41 years as a litigator in minnesota upon his retirement from the legal profession at the end of 2015 he became president of the center for the american experiment which is minnesota's conservative policy organization in addition to his legal and think tank work john as many of you know is a long time commentator and activist he founded the website powerline in 2002 and he has been a prominent voice on the internet and elsewhere since that time he has appeared as a commentator on almost all major networks he's a frequent guest and guest host on national and local radio programs and he's lectured at many colleges and universities although i don't know if he's been invited recently i should i had to ask about that when i saw that in his bio so please join me in welcoming john hinderegger thank you very much copa 19 is a medical event to be sure but arguably it is just as much a political event and i'm afraid that what it says about the current state of our politics is not positive when news of the wuhan flu first arose the immediate reaction from almost everyone was what is the government in particular the federal government going to do about it we've seen endless references to government president trump and the governors handling the coronavirus and heard about things government is doing to fight the virus now this is a very different reaction from past epidemics in 1968 the hong kong flu killed a million people worldwide and more than a hundred thousand in the us when our population was much smaller i was a college student in 1968 and i have no memory of a virus going around at that time schools and businesses were not shut down and no one imagined that it was the government's job to handle or to fight that virus it wasn't even much of a news story it has been pointed out that the woodstock music festival was held while the hong kong flu epidemic was still going on in 1969 and that is true to say that there was no social distancing at woodstock would be an understatement but at the time no one thought anything about it but that was a different era today most americans seem to have lost the idea that our government is supposed to be limited especially the federal government and that government is not omnicompetent in 1976 a democratic politician criticized hubert humphrey he said quote i think the thing that's most wrong with hubert humphrey is that he is not cognizant of the limited finite ability government has to deal with people's problems who said that joe biden we've come a long way since then in our expectations of government and not in a good direction now the second striking fact about the politics of coronavirus has been the willingness of americans to put up with and for the most part to endorse fundamental restrictions on their freedoms in state after state we have seen governors issue stay home orders that literally directed americans to stay in their houses except to the limited extent they were permitted to go out by the government would prior generations of americans have submitted meekly to orders to stay in their homes close their businesses and so forth i don't think so and the shutdowns in nearly every state have dragged on for months long after the original flatten the curve rationale has been forgotten the shutdowns are starting to feel permanent and by the way do you even remember that when there was an explicit rationale for the shutdowns this is just brief it's just temporary we're just trying to flatten the curve same number of infections just spread over a longer period of time that whole rationale has now completely gone by the boards most recently mask mandates have been added and almost all americans have dutifully donned masks even though we have no idea whether they're actually doing any good so why has there been relatively little political pushback against the shutdown orders i think there are several reasons first the emergency posed by covid19 has been grossly exaggerated to an extent that i think can only be seen as deliberate remember that early on government at all levels purported to be acting in reliance on models that predicted millions of deaths in the united states my own state minnesota created its own model that predicted more than 70 000 deaths in our state without a shutdown and 50 000 deaths with a shutdown we learned later that the model had been created by a few graduate students over a weekend but by then it was too late all of these models turned out to be ridiculously off target but instead instead of saying oops never mind governors simply kept in place the lockdown orders that originally had been predicated on them now i think the centers for disease control has also contributed to the public's exaggerated sense of the virus's danger in a number of ways one of the most important was the guidance it gave to the states to count deaths as coveted fatalities even if covid was not the immediate cause of death the clearest statement i've seen of this practice came from the head of the illinois department of health who was giving a press conference and she said when we classify a death as covet related we are not saying that it was the cause of death a person could be dying of cancer and be in hospice care but if he happens also to have coveted we will count that death in the coveted column when we do that we are not saying it was the cause of death that's a very very important point i think and the federal government has compounded the problem by offering cash incentives to hospitals to classify patients as quoted related and deaths is covered related under the cares act medicare reimbursements are increased by 20 percent if there is a covet diagnosis so we are literally paying to maximize the number of reported covet patients and covet deaths what all this means is that every headline that you have seen trumpeting the claim that the wuhan virus has killed 180 000 people in the u.s or whatever that number or wherever that number stands at the moment every headline you've seen trumpeting that claim is wrong what the actual number of deaths caused by covet is no one knows but the scare campaign mounted by the media has given the public an impression of covid's lethality far beyond anything promoted by cdc you may have heard about the international survey that was done by kext cnc that firm asked the question how many people in your country have died from coronavirus as a percentage of the population in the u.s the average response was nine percent now nine percent think of that that would be around 30 million people which is worse by two orders of magnitude than the most pessimistic current estimates now how did the american people come to be so grotesquely misinformed i i can't read the minds of the people at the cdc the the modelers various public health officials reporters and editors and so forth but i think it is a plausible guess that the sustained overhyping of covid was a deliberate attempt on the part of some of these people to create an issue that might cost president trump a second term i think we can infer that from the fact that hysterical exaggerations of kovid's lethality have been coupled with constant attacks on the president's actions in response to the virus many of which attacks have been completely groundless and even even nonsensical so so the creation of an overhyped emergency certainly helps to explain why americans have been so accepting of limitations on their freedom but i think there's more to the story than that i think another reason why the shutdowns have not been more politically costly to governors is because many people don't mind them much to a great extent what we have seen has been shut down theater small businesses are closed but as alex pointed out target and walmart are open meat packing plants have frequently been hotbeds of coveted infection but they haven't been closed down other than briefly in an individual case in response to a particular outbreak why is that well it's because we need meat in the grocery stores without meat in the grocery stores voters would get restless and i think the ultimate proof of the shutdown's basic lack of seriousness is that while it is deemed too dangerous in many states to go to church total wine stores are open everywhere now if you can catch a virus in a small business a restaurant or a church pew you obviously can also catch it in a target store or a total wine store but governors knew that if they closed the liquor stores there would be pitchforks in the street and so in every state the liquor stores have stayed open so we've had a situation where governors have gained politically by proclaiming a grave emergency and supposedly taking strong action to combat it while at the same time the shutdowns have been so full of exceptions that they didn't seriously inconvenience most people unless of course their jobs or their small businesses were impacted as a matter of fact you can't find any apparent correlation between the severity of a shutdown order in a given state and the number of covered cases or hospitalizations or deaths in that state there doesn't seem to be any correlation at all and i think if we drill a little deeper we find another political element the covet shutdowns devastated small businesses putting many thousands into bankruptcy but big business and alex mentioned this too big business has largely prospered thus for example target walmart costco home depot amazon and apple have all achieved record share prices during the covet epidemic this is one reason why the stock market has been so weirdly buoyant after the initial shock in the spring so big business is largely happy with the shutdowns well who else hasn't been bothered much by the by the lockdowns public employees i assume there are exceptions here and there but generally public employees have simply continued to draw their paychecks in some cases to get raises whether they were actually performing any any work or not that doesn't give them much to complain about who else hasn't minded the pandemic urban knowledge workers these folks for the most part are able to do their work at home and on zoom and many of them prefer it that way for many urban knowledge workers the shutdowns have mostly been a plus now ask yourselves what are the key constituencies of the democratic party they are big business not all of it but most of it public sector employees and urban knowledge workers and as it happens those are the constituencies that have generally been least injured by the shutdowns now on the other hand what are the key constituencies of the republican party small business in rural america the very elements of our society that have been devastated by the covet shutdowns is that a coincidence i don't know but i'm sure that the democratic governors who generally have imposed the most drastic shutdowns were well aware that their own supporters were less likely to be damaged and to protest than the other parties it has been widely reported that republicans tend to oppose lockdown orders more than democrats and are more likely to resist mass mandates and social distancing orders as well why is that well i think it is partly for the reason i just said on the average republicans are probably being hurt by the shutdowns more than democrats but there are other reasons too in general democrats trust government more than republicans and republicans are more concerned with personal freedom we see these tendencies across the whole spectrum of political issues today the general lack of serious resistance to the covet shutdown suggests that in the perennial tension between security and freedom freedom is losing out many have also said that republicans worry less about kova the democrats because they are not as risk-averse and there's probably some truth to that too obviously risk aversion is related to how one values freedom and whether one looks to government for safety at all costs but i would point out that the democrats aversion to covert risk is highly selective i've seen little aversion to the risk of other health conditions resulting from foregone checkups and medical care or the risk to the mental health of many vulnerable people who are deprived of normal social interaction or the risk to the to the livelihoods and in the lifetime of investment of many thousands of small business owners whose dreams have gone up in smoke i've seen no risk aversion or little risk aversion to those risks on the part of democrats and that makes me wonder whether those who seem to be cheering on quote 19 at times are more interested in bringing down president trump than anything else finally these days you can't talk about politics without turning to the polls so i want to review briefly what the polls have been telling us over the last five months and the numbers i'm going to give you come from polling done by a consortium that includes harvard northwestern a couple of other institutions and they have polled all 50 states starting in april and continuing to the present time so it's a nice consistent data set well looking at those numbers from the beginning the respondents have not rated president trump highly on his response to covin he started at 42 in april declined steadily to a low of 32 percent in july and rebounded slightly to 34 percent in august i think it is fair to say that the covet epidemic epidemic has served the purpose that was intended in some quarters and that is the presidential election has gone from being in my opinion a near sure thing for president trump at the beginning of 2020 to being today a toss-up now the governors have consistently been rated more highly on their covert performances than president trump in fact as of april every single governor had a higher covert rating than the president every single governor now that has shifted in august president trump had a higher covet approval rating than 10 governors interestingly all 10 of those low-rated governors are republicans why would that be well i suspect that at least one part of the reason is because republicans at all levels of government get worse press coverage than democrats and i suspect that that's mostly what we're seeing there now all of that said the governor's approval in general has been slipping in late april the governor's collectively had a 63 percent approval rating on covid that has been declining and it stands at 48 down 15 points in august now one hopes that that reflects growing impatience with the shutdowns the mask mandates and so on there are a few bright spots in the polling for example governor newsom of california has gone from 70 percent coveted approval in april to 47 percent in august but in general the polling suggests that people tend to approve the most the governors that have gone the farthest in limiting their freedom so i will wrap up by noting that the political gain games surrounding covet 19 are far from over the trump administration is rushing to get a vaccine tested approved and distributed by the end of the year so now we see the spectacle of joe biden and kamala harris turning anti-vaxxer and saying that they won't take or they may not take any vaccine that is produced by the trump administration so the politicizing of the wuhan virus is going to continue until november and well beyond thank you very much okay thank you to each of our presenters uh we're going to uh present them with some questions and we're going to go to the audience in a moment but i wanted to start with one of of my own and this really could be taken i think by any of our panelists and my question is what what can be done if anything about the censorship on the of of the relevant scientific data maybe mr berenson's most relevant to your presentation in other words if we ever want to be in a position to have any kind of public airing or serious public debate uh the centers the censorship and the major the private tech platforms facebook twitter and others it seems if we can't if we can't lick that problem we'll never have any serious public debate and so i wonder if uh if you or any of the other panelists have any thoughts on that i mean that that strikes me as almost a more legal question what do you know whether whether i mean these are private companies so i mean i mean the problem is the monopolization of the public square by private monopolies which there was a time when you know company towns back in the 1920s 1930s decided that their solution to things like mining organizers and labor unions was well if we just own the whole town then they can't organize anymore and they can't assemble anymore and the answer of the courts in a separate case later on was the u.s supreme court at the time was if you choose to privately monopolize part of the public square then you are as bound by the first amendment as any public entity because it's a combination of a monopoly plus part of the public square that decision was followed up in a case called pruneyard by the state of california which applied it to private malls which said that the public space within a private mall was really a public square the mall had chosen to monopolize ownership and control of that space so as a condition of its continued existence it would be required to have first amendment application logically given that almost all of the big tech companies are based in california you might think that they would apply the same print yard principles to the private monopolization of the public square particularly by companies that came to monopolize the public square by lying to the american people twitter promised to be the free speech wing of the free speech party you can ask alex how that's working out uh you can go to youtube it's even worse google's even worse facebook even worse the degree of censorship to where now doctors including doctors advising president trump are having their medical reports taken down from youtube because it disagrees with the world health organization which by that standard everything the world health organization publishes should be brought down because they've disagreed with themselves particularly about the wuhan virus it was after all the world health organization that told everybody back in january don't worry there's no human to human transmission with covet so the the only unfortunately what the courts have done it's even more egregious in many contexts than what they've done in the covid responses is they have chosen to say these are private companies and interpreted section 230 of the communications decency act to give them broad scale immunity they interpret it as like a political license for these companies to do whatever they want and they say it preempts all state law and they refuse to apply any constraint to these companies the idea that some of us had we recommended to senator hawley several years ago and senator hawley's now proposed legislation and i think the only remedy is going to come from congress it has because the courts are functionally closed until congress sends a different message is a is to give a carrot and a stick if they want immunity as a publisher for things other people publish on their platforms then they have to abide by first amendment restrictions and if they will abide by that there's a big body of first amendment law that precludes pornography precludes child pornography precludes harassment precludes stalking precludes obscenity it's not within its uh contours of its protections that if they want the special immunity that section 230 provides they have that's the carrot then the stick is they have to abide by the first amendment restrictions once they reach a certain economic dominance place those once they have the equivalent of a monopoly over any part of the public square more than 75 percent control is how the anti-trust laws tend to define it which is what twitter facebook and google currently have uh and google has it in the youtube space through visual and then has it in the search base through the internet then they have to abide by first amendment restrictions and they almost every of one of those big tech companies will take that trade off so that's the legislative solution that i think is the only solution because until then they will do whatever they want and they've exposed that very badly in this context i think john wants to i think there's one one other possibility these big tech platforms i think are monopolies currently monopoly law doesn't really really address any evil of monopoly other than high prices but that's not inherent i i think that the law of monopoly could be developed in such a way that there are other uh wrongful conduct that monopolists can engage in that could be redressed in the courts and impinging on freedom of speech of speech could be one of those those forms of of monopoly misuse so i think that is a legal development that could potentially come out of the supreme court if we ever had a conservative supreme court um can i just add uh i i think this is a very very dangerous trend um on a couple of levels i think i think when honest debate and discussion are squelched uh it drives people to believe in conspiracy theory real conspiracy theory it will drive you know people to 4chan and 8chan you know it will it will i mean i don't know very much about q anon okay but obviously that has been becoming more popular that sort of set of conspiracy doctrines and and and when you when you don't allow people to have honest discussion either in conventional or social media they will tend to believe the worst um and you can combine that with something that has actually that i know has happened so so you know for several months people were trying to get me to talk about pcr testing and decay stomach and and i didn't really chase it because i had a few other things to chase and because i sort of thought there's no way that you know that the testing companies have their thumb on the scale uh to you know to make the numbers look much worse than they are the numbers of reported covet infections um and and it actually fell to the new york times to report a story that ran on page a6 although it should have been on a1 and it should have been followed up by every newspaper and good investigative reporter in the country which is we we are running our pcr tests which is how most cases of the virus are diagnosed in the united states and around the world in a way that hugely overstates the number of people who are actively infected at any time okay that's that's just a scientific fact and you can find scientists you know for places like the european cdc discussing this there's a complicated technical explanation for what's going on here but the short answer is we are overstating the number of tests or the number of active infected infections hugely which is probably also causing us to overstate the number of deaths substantially um so so i didn't really think that that was possible and i didn't chase it okay just as until the last couple of weeks i haven't really been paying that much attention to this idea that you know where did the virus come from did it actually escape a chinese lab and what experiments might have been being run those stories are real and worth chasing even if we don't know exactly where they're going to go and major media outlets like the new york times don't seem to be pursuing them you know they're not pursuing them i i can only think because when president trump calls it the china virus people you know people in the media don't like it so they don't want to pursue where sars cove too i don't call it the china virus because that's not its name i call it stars cove 2 where it might actually have come from it doesn't matter what we call it it matters whether it escaped from a chinese lab and whether the chinese were experimenting with it before it escaped and that's what we should be looking at but when major media outlets won't they drive people to conspiracy theory and that's dangerous for all of us all right very good so i believe we have uh roving microphone holders for those of you in the audience who would like to ask a question okay i'm sorry the lights are right in my eyes so i'm having trouble seeing folks please okay yeah well if alex following up on your comment uh let's say that pfizer had developed a virus and it got out of their lab and now um million people are dying have died they'd be sued for a trillion dollars now it's pretty clear at least for most of the evidence that i've seen that this virus has come from a lab in muhat i don't think it's it's a lot of evidence against the fact there's none against it there's a lot in favor of it the wun lab is owned by the chinese government they're therefore responsible for several trillion dollars of damages uh what how do you actually go about to go to the chinese government and say why don't you pay for your damages you know that that's that's above my pay rate um no i i look uh first of all i don't think the case is proven and in part because the science is so politicized around this as around everything else there are there are a number of a lot of prominent virologists who say that they believe this is of natural origin they jump from bats to you know some seconds mammal species and then to the to humans that's why we need to investigate this as to whether or not we're going to get the chinese assuming assuming we can ever investigate it which is not clear if you know do you think the chinese are going to pay a dime for this i mean good luck but but but we need to investigate it even if there will never be a political consequence or an economic consequence of the chinese we need to investigate it if for no other reason then that the chinese are increasingly aggressive around the world they're increasingly powerful and they're increasingly aggressive and if the world is afraid to stand up to them on this what is the lesson they're going to take from it it's that even if you know this did escape and believe me they know where the virus came from at this point that that's for sure okay if if they if they are able to not even face a serious independent international inquiry on this what's the lesson they're going to take it's that they're so powerful they can do whatever they want and there will be no consequences and that's a dangerous lesson again for all of us okay over here uh hi following up on the question about censorship uh and connecting it to constitution day the constitution presupposes not just a virtuous people but a rational people and it seems to me what's happened with the covet virus is brought into very stark relief the question of whether we're still all irrational people scott adams the dilbert cartoon creator says left and right are watching different movies we have now different conceptions of reality i live in northwest dc in a liberal neighborhood i can't even talk to my neighbors anymore it's like their brains have been taken over by aliens um so my question is is this observation true it seems like some some substantial part of the population is no longer capable of rational thought um do you agree with that is is it permanent is it reversible is it hopeless okay who wants to take that well i'll comment on that and and there's a lot you could say about that right but let me just say this you know i mentioned that there's a survey where the average answer that americans gave what percentage of our population has died from covet average answer nine percent now just think about that if nine percent of the people in this country have died of covid your relatives your friends your neighbors your co-workers people who go to your church they would all be dropping like flies right and and how how you can how a person can simultaneously say well i don't know anybody who's died from covid none of my co-workers none of my neighbors etc but then when asked that question i think nine percent of the population has died i don't know how anybody could possibly um believe that and and i think you know there used to be such a thing as common sense you know and common sense is based on a person's own experience so if somebody came along and tried to sell a line of bs the average person would would test that pro that proposition against his experience and his observation and he might say i don't think so that's not the way i've seen it that hasn't been my experience it seems as if that's just gone you know so that now it's the guys in the white coats you know now it's headlines now it's something we heard on cable news and there are many people who seem to have obtained this ability to internalize those things without checking it against their own common sense which i think is very dangerous so i i would just i would add one thing which is people aren't very good at math i mean no they're not and and we should teach like statistics okay that's what should be taught in high school forget a past algebra forget anything you know trigonometry statistics are what people need to function in society and so you know that nine percent number i actually highlighted that a couple of months ago but the truth is people have no idea they don't know how many people are in the country and they don't know what nine percent of the people whose population they don't know is so they just come up with a number they know 30 million people didn't die from covet they just don't know they want they don't want to sound stupid they don't want to pick a number that's too low so they say nine percent uh really but here there is some hope okay which is there's a survey done by something called the kaiser family foundation um you know certainly not a conservative group uh they've been studying they've been asking people for a few months whether or not people think the worst of covet is behind or ahead so in july as you were having the sort of sun belt spike um and the media was saying there's going to be new yorks all over the country uh 60 of the country said uh the worst was still ahead 20 said the worst was behind okay people have actually paid attention the fact that that didn't happen um and so now the most recent uh survey which was done last week 38 of the country thinks that kovid is ahead uh the worst is ahead and 38 percent thinks it's behind so some people are paying attention and people who you know the i i think the school's reopening uh first of all you know people are going to be frustrated even some of those urban knowledge workers are frustrated with the fact that schools are not properly open but colleges you know college students are zero risk essentially zero risk from this and they're under these incredible idiotic and draconian restrictions and tons of them are getting positive tests and tons of them are fine and so that is seeping into parents and it's seeping in to you know the friends of those parents and that's i mean that's many millions of people so i'm sort of hopeful that lived experience is going to help people a little bit but it's been a slower process than i would have liked yeah i mean i mean your core concern is the correct one the whole point of the public square is to make sure everybody has a little platform in that public square in order for debate to lead to truth and debate doesn't lead to truth if you keep half of the people out and that's effectively what the gatekeepers are doing so the the problem is you no longer can find truth if you search by google you look at the great work of professor epstein who comes from the left he's a hillary clinton backer and he identified that even in 2016 google was able to at least move millions of votes in the democratic direction just by manipulating the algorithm of what search terms show up and what as links show up when you do a search and covet has been the ultimate test case for how governors will respond it used to be a conspiracy theory the idea that like an x-files show that they're going to have a they're going to declare an emergency and through an emergency they're just going to suspend the constitution and at some point you'll even have camps for people and now we have actually people wanting to set up covet camps in some parts of the country so this is the kind of insanity that could only occur in a place where the public square has been shut down and censored and that's why it's a critical concern that legislative action take place to remedy it thank you this has been uh an excellent panel uh we could go on all morning but actually we can't go on all morning uh we'll have to uh we'll have to call it there please join me in thanking our panelists thank you you

Channel: Hillsdale College

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Keywords: hillsdale, politics, constitution, equality, liberty, freedom, free speech, lecture, learn, america, Constitution Day

Id: xCn5LuZOFZI

Length: 73min 52sec (4432 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020