“For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify.”
10/18/21
Just a heads up that Substack's software can be a little finicky (I personally hate how the apostrophes are randomly different in some words), and posts in email format might have glitches/redundancies. It helps to click the post headline in the email so that it opens in a browser.
Earlier this year, the mainstream media claimed that Joe Rogan, the host of the world’s most popular podcast, had injected himself with horse dewormer after he contracted the coronavirus.
It was a lie. Not a misstatement or an exaggeration, but an outright lie. Rogan did no such thing. Rather, he took the human version of ivermectin, as prescribed by his doctor. Ivermectin is a very broad-spectrum parasiticide that is sometimes used to treat internal parasites in animals, but it’s a perfectly normal and safe drug taken by literally billions of people. In fact, the inventors of the drug received the Noble Prize for ivermectin’s contribution to human progress, saving billions of people from blindness and parasitic infestation. Many doctors believe the well documented anti-inflammatory properties of ivermectin can help prevent or combat the so-called cytokine storm whereby COVID triggers a release of inflammatory proteins called cytokines into the bloodstream.
Yet night after night, CNN told its viewers Rogan had swallowed livestock paste. Rogan isn’t exaggerating when he accuses CNN of egregious misconduct. Nearly every talking head on the network, along with those at every other mainstream media platform, has taken a crack at promoting the lie that he injected “horse dewormer,” as you can see in the first clip.
But recently, Joe Rogan had CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta on his podcast (the second clip), and the two got to talking about all this. The conversation has gone viral, in large part because Gupta refused to admit that the network he works for outright lied about Rogan taking horse dewormer until Rogan essentially cornered him. You can watch in real-time as Gupta squirms in discomfort.
Note: I’ve only ever listened to a handful of Joe Rogan Podcast episodes, as I rarely listen to podcasts at all; it’s not like I'm some diehard Rogan fan. But I think it’s important to understand something. Most people know Rogan from his comedy standup shows, or from when he was host of Fear Factor, or as an announcer at big UFC fights, or some other thing, and not from his podcast. And so when they think of the “Joe Rogan Podcast,” they don’t really have an accurate idea of what it is and what it’s like.
In a nutshell: Rogan invites very interesting people on to his podcast, and he has long conversations with them (usually around 3 hours or so). Recent podcast guests include Josh Dubin, an Ambassador to The Innocence Project and Criminal justice reform advocate; Amanda Knox, who spent four years in an Italian prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder; Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and addiction treatment specialist; and Quentin Tarantino, the film producer and director. He’s also had everyone from Elon Musk to Demi Lovato to Marcus Luttrell on.
That’s it. That’s the show. There’s no script, no assigned topic, no agenda, no “gotcha” moments, nothing; they simply talk about all manner of things. And believe it or not, Rogan is not only a very humble guy who loves learning and hates politics, but he’s thoughtful and intelligent. Even more importantly, he’s not afraid to admit when he’s been wrong about something.
His podcast pulls in an average of 11 million people per episode. For comparison, CNN averages 833,000 viewers during all of primetime.
Basically everyone in the mainstream media lied about Rogan taking horse paste/dewormer:
Joe Rogan confronts CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Sanjay Gupta:
Unrelated, but still very much worth watching:
“Parents do not want their kids to be taught *as fact* that liberal democracy is a form of white supremacy, that America was founded in 1619, and that biological sex doesn’t exist. Who can blame them?”
— Andrew Sullivan, British-American writer and former editor of The New Republic.
“We have a strong belief that content on screen doesn’t directly translate to real-world harm.”
— Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, who doubled down on his defense of Dave Chappelle following the mounting controversy around his latest comedy special. It’s so refreshing to see someone with a spine standing up to the idiocy of woke ideologues and their fetishistic attachment to pseudo-outrage and censoring and de-platforming. The culture of fear and repression in which a small number of zealots exert their power and cultural capital to silence anyone who dares to disagree with them is ridiculous and un-American.
“It’s not effective to pressure me on anything. Because I am a thoughtful person who takes a lot of time, deliberatively, to make decisions, once I’ve made a decision, I feel very comfortable with it. And it doesn’t matter what other people think.”
— Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who, along with fellow Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, has drawn the ire of the Democratic Party establishment for being a hold-out on the massive domestic spending plan that’s at the heart of President Biden’s economic agenda.
“The most recent national controversy surrounding a letter to President Biden suggesting that some parents should be considered domestic terrorists was the final straw.”
— An open letter from the Pennsylvania School Board Association, which voted unanimously to withdraw from the National School Boards Association (NSBA) after the latter sent a cretinous and extremely controversial missive to President Biden. The NSBA’s six-page rant included a list of allegations against parents, along with this incredulous statement: “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” This, in turn, prompted the Department of Justice to announce that the FBI and U.S. attorneys would discuss ways to address threats against school employees and board members, a task traditionally left to local law enforcement.
Number 1: comparing concerned, ticked off parents, some of whom may have been belligerent, to domestic terrorists, let alone criminals, is pretty outrageous; and number 2: the federal government inserting itself into a situation that is under the purview of local authorities is yet another gross abuse of power by the Biden administration. When parents or community members cross the line into threats, local law enforcement is more than capable of handling the situation. But there’s no quantitative data in the NSBA letter; instead, there are a bunch of disparate stories strung together to make it look like there’s a pattern.
Buried in the letter’s footnotes, the school board association attributed the slanderous charge of “domestic terrorism” to these incidents:
Winery entrepreneur Jon Tiggs getting arrested after he yelled at his school board in Loudoun County, Va., for prematurely ending public comments.
An “unruly crowd” at a Spotsylvania, Pa., board meeting.
Protesters who “disrupted” a school board in Poway Unified School District, CA.
As the aforementioned quote from Andrew Sullivan points out, it’s hardly surprising that parents across the country are getting increasingly pissed off about serious, ideologically motivated changes to school curricula—changes which they’re not being allowed to weigh in on. Many of these school board meetings have obviously featured some parents raising their voices or resorting to profanities, which, though regrettable, is normal when people are discussing things that matter to them more than anything else in the world.
And let’s not even mention the mask mandates being imposed on students. Suffice it to say that kids shouldn’t have to wear masks at school for the foreseeable future (as if COVID will ever go away; it’s endemic, folks, which is another reason why continuing to dispense with the rational cost-benefit analysis framework we use for literally everything else in society is so unbelievably stupid) or get a vaccine they derive virtually no benefit from in order to comfort fearful adults, especially when even the vaccinated can still spread the virus.
“There are numerous [other] community and neighborhood events where students and families who wish to can celebrate Halloween.”
— A statement from the “Race and Equity Team” at B.F. Day Elementary School in Seattle, which decided to cancel a Halloween parade because “it has historically marginalized students of color.”
“So I would have looked like a genius back then.”
— Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, referring to his initial February proposal to pay employees and accept city payments in bitcoin, and the cryptocurrency’s increase in value since then. The city will request a proposal this month to move the resolution forward.
“We’re proving that you can work collaboratively with your people, trusting your people to make the right decisions, respecting their decisions and not forcing them over the loss of their jobs.”
— Ed Bastian, Delta Air Lines CEO, announcing that the company will no longer be enforcing President Biden’s vaccine mandate.
“They literally were driven up and just walked up and turned themselves over to us.”
— Chris T. Clem, the U.S. Border Patrol’s chief patrol agent in Yuma, describing how, on a near-daily basis, his agents intercept illegal migrants who say they recently flew to a Mexican border city. One group, which appeared to include a mix of adults and teenagers, said they took three flights and a bus to arrive in Algodones, a Mexican city across the border from Yuma. They then walked into the U.S. through a wide gap in a border fence. In total, the trip took about two days. As with other people traveling in families who enter the U.S. illegally and request asylum, most are released to shelters and then travel elsewhere to wait for their claims to be adjudicated, a process that can take years due to immigration-court backlogs. (I mentioned in a previous post that a disconcertingly large number of people do not in fact bother showing up to their court dates.)
Needless to say, this is kind of a big problem. These people are not true refugees; they’re economic migrants. A refugee does not buy a plane ticket and then hop on a Greyhound so they can waltz across the border. Our immigration system is so overwhelmed that court dates are being scheduled years in advance, and we have to simply release individuals into the U.S. and hope they just come on back of their own accord rather than disappear into a population of 330,000,000+ other people.Let me present a certain theory: Democrats just barely won the 2020 election after four years of what was supposedly the most divisive and unpopular president in history. (Abe Lincoln smiles any time someone suggests that.) They now have a majority government, albeit a slim one, but still can’t ram through their agenda. Would it not behoove them to alter the electorate so they can better position themselves for future political power? And would they not therefore prefer we go ahead and erect turnstiles at the border?
Ironically, this strategy (and for all intents and purposes it really is tacitly understood to be an actual strategy) might end up backfiring. Bigly. Changes in the electorate are indeed afoot, but they’re the opposite of what you’d expect: more and more nonwhite voters are voting Republican. Trump actually improved upon his 2016 performance with nonwhite voters. He even doubled his support among the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, the only category that Trump didn’t improve in was white men. And the nonwhite voters who now seem to be leaning right are of a particular persuasion: middle class and below.
It makes sense, really, when you think about it. The Democratic Party is the party of the “elites,” the cultural and institutional gatekeepers, the Twitterati, Big Tech, Silicon Valley . . . urban, rich, hyper-moralizing white folks obsessed with ideologically charged identity politics that have deeply alienated a lot of people.
“For children without a serious medical condition, the danger of severe Covid is so low as to be difficult to quantify.”
— David Leonhardt, The New York Times. This really shouldn’t be a partisan issue, and yet it increasingly is, which is why I was surprised NYT would even allow something like this to be published under its banner—something that so many other liberal outlets continue to falsely refute because fear sells and they’re eager to keep the perpetual hysteria machine going.
According to the newest data from the CDC: For people under the age of 50, the COVID survival rate is 99.987%. And that’s being generous, because the CDC also just revealed that 94% of COVID deaths have been individuals with serious comorbidities—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc.
54%: Estimated maximum jump in heating bills for some American households this winter, as prices worldwide continue to surge for heating oil, natural gas, and other fuels. Nearly half the homes in the U.S. use natural gas for heat, and they could pay an average $746 this winter, 30% more than a year ago. Those in the Midwest could get particularly pinched, with bills up an estimated 49%, and this could be the most expensive winter for natural-gas heated homes since 2008-2009.
$2,250: Price that people in Windsor, Ontario have been paying to be flown in a helicopter 15 minutes to Detroit because they’re banned from driving over the border. (This, of course, makes total sense and has saved thousands of lives.)
187: Years that a statue of Thomas Jefferson has stood that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has just three months left in office, is getting rid of. It’s just the latest example of the Progressive war on American history, as they continue to apply a post-modern lens in evaluating people and events from hundreds of years ago. Although it’s completely illogical and ahistorical to judge the people of the past by today’s warped moral standards, which fixate entirely on the negative and have no regard for context or complexity, this is what happens when an ideology intent on upending American society is given license to erase our national legacy.
20%: Percentage of U.S. households that have had their savings wiped out during the pandemic.
$1.75 Million: Donation amount from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (the CA prison guard union) that was made to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s September recall election campaign. Newsome, who has issued the first vaccine mandate in the U.S. for all children in public and private schools (but not for teachers and school staff, because that obviously makes sense), is now appealing the ruling issued by U.S. District Court Judge Jon S. Tigar that stated prison guards must be vaccinated in order to protect incarcerated prisoners.
Newsom had told CBS News less than 24 hours after the attempt to recall him had failed in September, “We need to stiffen our spines and lean into keeping people safe and healthy. We shouldn’t be timid in trying to protect people’s lives and mitigate the spread and transmission of the disease.”
50: Pounds of fentanyl seized by United States Border Patrol agents at a checkpoint near Amado, Arizona. For context, one kilogram of Fentanyl (approximately 2lbs) is enough to kill 500,000 people. The drug, which is roughly 100 times more potent than morphine, is primarily manufactured in foreign clandestine labs and smuggled into the United States through Mexico. (The biggest reason I think the border should actually be walled off, though Mexicans are crafty little bastards with their tunneling.) Fentanyl is being mixed in with other illicit drugs to increase potency, sold as powders and nasal sprays, and increasingly pressed into pills made to look like legitimate prescription opioids.
$89.4 Million: Sum spent by all states on COVID-19 vaccine lotteries organized to incentivize vaccination. New research by economists suggests that the lotteries did not raise vaccination rates.
16%: The decrease in President Biden’s net approval rating among Black voters since Sept. 8, the day before he issued vaccine mandates.
1.3 Million: Number of Amazon employees worldwide. In the U.S., the company employs 1 in every 169 workers.
Create your profile
Only paid subscribers can comment on this post
Check your email
For your security, we need to re-authenticate you.
Click the link we sent to , or click here to sign in.