Scott Atlas “The Fight to Stop COVID-19 From Destroying America” – Socrates in the Studio Transcript
Scott Atlas: The Fight to Stop COVID-19 From Destroying America
INTRODUCTION
[Metaxas]
Welcome to Socrates in the Studio. Today, my guest is Dr. Scott Atlas, the larger subject of conversation is “What is liberty?” but we’re approaching it mostly from a public health policy angle. He was a medical doctor for many years and edited many medical textbooks, but most recently has been a public health policy expert, has advised many presidents on that subject. Today, we’re talking to him about his most recent book: A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America. Fascinating conversation with a fascinating guest, here it is.
INTERVIEW
[Metaxas]
Welcome to Socrates in the Studio. It’s my privilege right now to be talking to the incarcerated rapper Suge Knight. Gosh, you know, I always get that wrong. I apologize. You’re not Suge Knight. You’re Scott Atlas, aren’t you?
[Atlas]
That’s right.
[Metaxas]
Thank goodness. Because the question that we are talking about today is really, what is liberty?
I have wanted to talk to you about it because, you seem, although you started life principally as a medical doctor, well, you professionally were a medical doctor teaching at the medical school at Stanford and so on and so forth, but you’ve taken a great interest in liberty to the extent that you founded the Global Liberty Institute. So, why don’t we start, Scott Atlas, with first of all: welcome. And let’s start with who you are and how you found yourself being so concerned with liberty in our time because there’s a lot, there’s a lot to cover.
[Atlas]
Sure. Well, thanks for having me first.
[Metaxas]
Thanks for not being Suge Knight.
[Atlas]
Well, that’s a different conversation.
I would say my background is about 25 years of being a professor in academic medicine, doing clinical work, teaching and doing research for half of my career at University of Pennsylvania after graduating from University of Chicago Medical School, and then the last half or about 14 years of being at Stanford University School of Medicine. About a decade ago, I full time shifted into health care policy, quit the medical school because I thought it made sense for people who understand how health care is delivered, the value of tertiary care medicine, medical technology to be at the table, not just dealing with spreadsheets of the economics of health care, but integrating all the information.
So I’ve been working at Hoover Institution, which is a public policy institute at Stanford. Then early 2020 came. And news of this infection from China, this pandemic emerged, say February 2020, while I was originally working on a book on health care system reform.
I began to notice that the narrative about the infection was what I called many, many times off the rails because there was a total miscalculation of the risk, the infection fatality rate that was touted by the World Health Organization. To put it simply, it’s a fraction. The bottom of the fraction is the number of people who have the infection. The top is the number of people who died. And they came up with this extraordinarily high, frighteningly high number: 3.4% infection fatality rate, which makes everybody afraid. But then if you think about it for 10 minutes, if you know anything about medical science, you would realize they were only considering the people who were infected and sick enough to go see a doctor. Whereas there’s usually tens or orders of magnitude more people infected that should have been making that fraction much smaller. So in March, I noticed that we were locking down everywhere, meaning shutting schools, closing businesses, taking people off of beaches and parks, forcing them indoors where, of course, these infections spread, so it made no sense. But we were also failing to notice that this infection, the pandemic of 2020, COVID was really only lethal to a very small group of people.
The high-risk people were very old and basically frail with multiple co-morbidities or underlying illnesses. Whereas young people, children, had a minuscule, if any risk, of serious illness, children who were healthy. Yet this was not in the news and the people everywhere, but particularly in the United States, were very afraid.
[Metaxas]
Now, I want to get to all of this. But was this what pulled you into thinking about liberty and freedom? I say that because you were for a long time a medical doctor teaching medicine.
You said about 10 years ago you were brought into the Hoover Institution. At what point in your life did these concepts begin to come into the foreground for you? Because most doctors are too busy doing medicine to be thinking about this kind of thing.
Was this something that you grew up with?
[Atlas]
The breaking point for me was the fact that the lockdowns for the pandemic were the most imposing, severe restriction that I had seen in my lifetime. This was a shock that everything would close down and people would accept it. But you’re pointing out something very interesting to me, which is that most doctors are basically, if I can generalize, sort of a very traditional profession. A conformist sort of thing.
[Metaxas]
You would expect them to be agnostic on these issues. You don’t expect them to have a considered opinion on liberty or the founder’s view of liberty. You just expect them to be professionals in that sphere.
[Atlas]
Yeah, well.
[Metaxas]
It sounds like before the pandemic you were already thinking more broadly if you’re involved with the Hoover Institution from a decade ago.
[Atlas]
That’s right, because in public policy you don’t consider just the medical science or the data, you consider the whole sphere of influence of policy. In this kind of case means the consequences of the policies that weren’t being considered. The economic disruption. The harm from severe economic downturns that literally kill people. The mandates, the edicts. There are impositions of freedom, particularly shocking given the country’s founding on limited government and individual liberty.
[Metaxas]
Were you thinking about this before 2020? In other words, 10 years ago when you were at Hoover, you were already thinking about this stuff because you had been, you drifted into the world of public policy. You were no longer just doing medicine.
[Atlas]
Right. Well, there’s two parts to the answer. Number one, my entire career on public policy pre-pandemic was talking about the way that we get good health care to most people, which is not the government-imposed single-payer system, and that’s a whole separate topic.
So, I was sort of oriented to that, but I would say that I was, I think it goes back to the individual, the way you were raised. Okay, I was raised explicitly to question authority. I’m not from the elite background of my peers at Stanford. I’m the first generation in my family to go to college. My grandparents weren’t born in this country. They were immigrants. They had to learn how to speak English after they came.
[Metaxas]
Where did they come from?
[Atlas]
Well, I had grandparents from Russia, London, France, and Poland. So I had four different grandparents, of course. They came at the turn of the century because it was the land of the free opportunity and escaping whatever they had, but these are people that had nothing but valued education. It was instilled in me to not just question authority, but think for yourself. I mean, as a child, my opinion at our dinner table mattered. Not everyone’s raised that way.
I was not raised to sit still in the corner until you’re spoken to. I think that’s part of my own personality that allowed me, and actually, it was natural for me to question what was done, to be what I call a critical thinker. We can’t just accept things that are told to us without thinking through them.
In fact, I think that’s a very important thing that was exposed by the pandemic management and the era that we’re in, which is that you’re supposed to speak up. It’s not just an opportunity to speak up when you live in a free society. It’s an obligation because freedom disappears.
[Metaxas]
You’re not familiar with me, but there’s a lot that you’ve just said that are some parallels because I was raised by European immigrants. I think without realizing it, I had an outsider’s perspective on America and American freedom, and a very negative view of authoritarian government, since my parents had had experience with them. When you have that perspective, you’re automatically different, whether you choose to be or not, from most Americans who have been blessed with so much freedom, so much liberty over the decades, that you forget that it is a thing.
You think it is normal, and because you think it’s normal, you are inured to possible threats. You don’t really take them seriously, and that will get to that. With the pandemic, I think that’s what happened.
That’s part of the story. You see this in other cultures and societies, but when some people are, in a sense, prepared to question, and other times, things have gone so well for so long that you forget that maybe at some point you have to say, “Excuse me, I think this is a mistake,” or whatever. So that’s just interesting to me.
So your background, when you were doing public policy at Hoover, a decade or so ago, were you thinking about these things, were you speculating about these things before the pandemic?
[Atlas]
Well, I was involved in the sense that being in healthcare policy, the big issue for many years was the imposition of mandates and government control over healthcare, as if single payer centralized healthcare is better for people when the data, because I’m very data driven also, which was missing in the pandemic, the data showed that individual people not only should make choices for themselves but are better at making choices because that sort of competition-based system makes quality go up and price come down in the narrow sense of healthcare reform.
So the power of the individual was always, to me, one of the fundamental parts of how to derive better policies.
[Metaxas]
So you were already thinking about the free market and you were thinking about the problem of the government getting involved in healthcare as a threat to liberty fundamentally, not just ideologically as a threat, but as a harm.
[Atlas]
As a harm to prevent the emergence of quality and actually choose itself for people because there’s nothing more personal in many ways than healthcare. This is not something simple, to me, it’s antithetical to common sense that some external authority would tell you how to take care of your body. I think that’s sort of the individualistic view of it, philosophically.
[Metaxas]
Well, first of all, I agree with that. But what I’m interested in is that, you know, there are levels of externality, right? It’s one thing for the state to mandate something. It’s another thing for the country to mandate something. But what we’re talking about, which I guess we’ll get to, is where the U.S. government, to some extent, allowed non American organizations, WHO, and so on, a hand in determining policy for Americans. That, to me, is another kind of chilling level of how liberty is threatened.
It’s one thing to be threatened by a powerful state taking over large swathes of what used to be in the private sector, you know, the medical establishment. It’s another thing when you cede control, not just to the American federal government, but when the medical federal government cedes control to, quote unquote, international organizations.
That was, to my mind, one of the stunning developments in the last few years.
[Atlas]
I think, and maybe we’ll get to this, but we’re on a pathway. The Biden administration has already said they support this New World Health Organization, quote, “Pandemic Accord,” 100%, even though it’s not even been finally drafted. And in that accord, there are complete incursions into national sovereignty, such as the WHO, defining when a public health emergency is occurring in your country.
[Metaxas]
This is so staggering. I mean, we need to get to this, because the idea of our elected leaders in America ceding basically our sovereignty on this issue, on other issues, it’s frankly mind blowing to me, because it is antithetical to the United States. In other words, it’s not an interesting idea.
It is fundamentally antithetical to our sovereignty, which should stagger people. People should be shocked, but somehow they’re not. And so I want to talk about that.
But I want to go back to your, you know, you’re at Hoover, the pandemic happens, and you’re invited in as an expert, a public health expert, to talk about this. So let’s go there for a moment. In other words, you already had concerns before you were asked by the White House or whoever to opine on where we were.
[Atlas]
I was writing and doing research, because I saw frankly that even my own children, who I think are smarter than I am, doesn’t mean I’m more knowledgeable.
[Metaxas]
Or wiser, but maybe smarter, okay.
[Atlas]
But they didn’t understand the basic thrust of what I was saying, that lockdowns were harmful, that locking down children was extraordinarily harmful and simply a misguided policy. So I wrote and did research and became somewhat visible doing a lot of interviews over the spring, summer 2020. And then mid to late July, I was called up by the White House and asked, would you come and at least speak to the president?
Which sounds to me like sort of a ridiculous question. I’m an American, it’s my country, it’s the biggest healthcare crisis in a century. And anyone who would say no to coming in and speaking to the President of the United States, I just, I can’t even fathom that, although in our highly politicized device of sort of situation in this country, with a president who many people despise, that was considered a question.
I’m talking about President Trump. So I said, of course I would come in and I spent the day at the White House interviewing with all the people that you’ve heard of, President Trump, Vice President Pence, Jared Kushner, Mark Meadows, et cetera. And at the end of the day, Jared Kushner said, we would like you to help advise the president on the pandemic.
[Metaxas]
In what month of 2020?
[Atlas]
This is in July, late July, 2020.
[Metaxas]
So fairly well along into this already. In other words, we had already experienced dramatic lockdowns for months because we were all told obviously two weeks to flatten the curve. So this is well, well past that.
I remember Trump rather hopefully saying, I think Easter would be a good time for us to end this, that that would be, and I think a lot of Americans were tracking and thinking, yeah, we’ve had enough of this, but we were only at the beginning of it at that point.
[Atlas]
We were only at the beginning. And so yes, the task force, the White House Coronavirus Task Force, which was the official sort of policy body of the federal government, was already in place for six months, verbal five months by the time I got there. And I remember, you know, at first my reaction was, well, of course I’ll help, but I just want to make sure you know what you’re going to get.
I’m not going to sign on to something that I don’t agree with. I’m not going to change my mind just because the president or anyone tells me to. And they said, well, that’s exactly why we want you.
So I said, okay, that’s great. But then the next sentence that Jared Kushner said was, but they’re going to destroy you once it becomes public. And so I said, okay, well, okay, I’m a neophyte.
I’m not a political person at all. And I said, well, that doesn’t sound so good to me. And so I said, I’ll go back to California and we’ll see how it works from there.
And so I went back to California and for a few days tried to advise, but things were sort of chaotic and a lot of total misinformation was being fed to the president. And so I came back and, you know, and he was right that the media went ballistic.
[Metaxas]
Now, most people are familiar with this dynamic, but it’s still horrifying. It’s horrifying afresh every time I think of it. Those things could be so politicized that it would affect fundamental questions of health.
So we have two issues here. First of all, you had perspective, wisdom, experience as a medical doctor that how we were dealing with things, the lockdowns, the masks, was bad from a health perspective first. So that’s one piece.
The second piece was that to talk about that somehow early on became politicized
because we always wonder how these things happened. That’s a horrifying development in American history that when you’re talking about nuts and bolts, black and white, one plus one is two, that that would be politicized, that your position on lockdowns, a medical perspective, a medical opinion would be politicized, that you would be demonized for having a genuinely considered opinion on medical things.
[Atlas]
Right. And the question, of course, is how did that all happen? I mean, one, as you’re pointing out, I think in the beginning it was political.
Of course, it ended up being all over the world and not everything is about Trump and hatred for Trump. So it can’t be just that. But there were two things that happened, I think.
Number one, you were demonized by people saying, if you’re ending the lockdowns, you’re choosing the economy over lives. And that would be, of course, a heinous decision to make. But that’s actually contrary to decades of economics literature.
[Metaxas]
I was going to say, ironically, yeah. So that’s kind of extraordinary. But, well, I mean, even that is a politicization of…
I mean, we’re talking about many different things. But it is interesting, at least to me, how political this got so quickly.
[Atlas]
Immediately. And I think part of this, like I say, when President Trump said, he was early on saying, now, wait a second, this doesn’t make sense to close down the economy and schools. That’s not a good thing.
And he was saying things without data, but with common sense, I think. And that was viewed in an election season with the beginning of a presidential campaign season as, okay, that must be… This is my opinion.
That must be, no, that’s wrong by the political opponents. It’s similar to when he said very prematurely, hydroxychloroquine works, you should take hydroxychloroquine. And so the immediate reaction was, no, that’s a very dangerous drug, even though hydroxychloroquine is not a dangerous drug.
Whether it works on COVID wasn’t known at that time, but the trials should have been done. But they weren’t done. People were frightened of hydroxychloroquine because, in my view, President Trump said, use hydroxychloroquine.
So this was, in fact, one of the things I said when I first met him going into the White House in that interview, or not interview, but just discussion. One of the early things I said was, you should have said hydroxychloroquine does not work.
[Metaxas]
I was just going to say, if you want to play 5D chess, that’s the thing to say.
[Atlas]
And he, of course, got that joke right away. And so it was very political, but it was more than that. There were some things going on that were in addition to that.
I don’t think it’s fair to say it was all political. First of all, people were afraid. And fear, as we know, makes people think and irrational.
[Metaxas]
But actually, that is itself political. In other words, when you’re living in a country, I mean, we’ve seen this historically in the past, but one way, one of the ways the enemies of freedom work against freedom is often by instilling fear, whether we’re talking about the Reichstag fire in the early years of the Nazis. But to use something to silence opponents, to instill fear, there’s this threat.
Therefore, we must all shut up and do X, Y, and Z. To some extent, that happened with the approval of the Patriot Act under Bush, the idea that we’ve got to do this. We’ve got to throw out the rules because this is unique, this is an unprecedented threat to everyone.
That played into how 2020 went.
[Atlas]
I think you’re hitting on a couple things that are very important. One is, that’s why I say it was propaganda, because propaganda has a purpose. It wasn’t just that people were ignorant, incompetent, afraid.
Speaking against, by the way, 15 years of known pandemic management saying the lockdowns don’t work and are harmful. This was known. It wasn’t true that we learned that.
It was known before spring of 2020. But the propaganda used was also to instill extra fear, like you’re saying. And how do I mean that?
They demonized people like me who were saying end the lockdowns by claiming they’re dangerous. They’re calling to let it rip. Let the infection spread with zero mitigation, survival of fittest, let whoever dies dies.
That was never said. That’s not what I called in March of 2020 targeted protection, which was increasing the protection of people who had a significant risk to die. And meantime, as we saw, people were dying in the nursing homes.
So there was a very poor sheltering of the people who were at high risk, known to be high risk, and instead locking down schools and locking up playgrounds outside here in New York, getting in San Diego Coast Guard to go and get people out of their sailboats that were offshore because they were the dangerous people.
[Metaxas]
Look, this is clearly a kind of madness. There’s just no question about it when you’re doing things like that, when you’re arresting people in a park. That seems patently to be madness.
So the question is, who was pushing this larger narrative? In other words, if you’re saying that as a public health expert, you know that lockdowns are bad, who would be pushing for lockdowns? Why would they be pushing for lockdowns?
In other words, it’s painful to speculate that there were people at a very high level who were pushing another narrative or who were with just unfathomable cynicism saying we can use this to defeat Trump in the presidential election this fall, that this will redound to our benefit. It seems to me inevitable to see that ultimately, but it’s painful to see that.
[Atlas]
Well, it’s a sad state of affairs when you have people use power for secondary gain. I think there was a confluence of interest here, though. I don’t want to portray it that it was all political or anti-Trump.
I don’t believe that. I think that being in the White House and sitting in on the coronavirus task force and talking to these people like Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, who was in charge of the medical side of the task force, these are bureaucrats. They have a certain mentality.
They were in their positions for 30, 35, 38 years. They’re not scientists. They’re not really thinking like that.
They have a different mentality, one that was very foreign to me. I mean, I wasn’t like that, not a political person. So these people have a lot of different sets of gains, in my opinion.
Number one, there are people who like to have power. Power is a goal in and of itself. Not necessarily to take down somebody, but to keep the power, to have the power.
The way you are in a position like Dr. Fauci for 38 years is not necessarily because you’re good. It’s because you’re skillful at navigating a highly politicized environment, making friends in other health agencies, making friends in the media. These people would call people in the media by their first names.
I mean, this was shocking to me. I was really like Mr. Smith going to Washington here. I didn’t know what was going on.
I was busy bringing in scientific papers. They were just talking to their friends in the media after the meeting. This is a totally different atmosphere.
[Metaxas]
Well, you’re talking about bureaucrats, right? It seems to me Lord Acton’s aphorism that power corrupts, because the larger conversation here is about what is liberty. The order of liberty given to us by the founders had as a principle idea that career politicians, career bureaucrats, people who were not answerable at the ballot box, that they were a threat to liberty, because they would over time amass power, and keeping that power would make them hostile in many ways to the desires of we the people.
It seems to me like you’re describing that, when you have people like Anthony Fauci in particular having worked for decades to amass power, to keep power, we have people in Congress and the Senate like that. It’s like they evolve away from accountability and toward self-preservation. It gets very, very ugly, and it sounds like that’s what we’re dealing with when we talk about Fauci.
[Atlas]
I think that’s a big part of what we’re dealing with in all the people who are in these agencies. These government agencies, my take on it after being there for four months, was that actually these career bureaucrats really run things much more than people understand. It’s not necessarily going to be solved by term limits of elected officials.
These people have been there for decades. They outlast the president. They really run things to a great extent, and that’s why one of the solutions is term limits on the bureaucrats themselves.
It’s true. There’s a total lack of accountability because these people not only are unaccountable, but they’re doing things that the American public is not aware of at all. For instance, the FDA, NIH, and CDC employees share royalties for the drugs they approve.
This is shocking. This is a massive conflict of interest. The people in the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH share royalties for the drugs and devices they approve.
This was just recently exposed. $325 million over 10 years has been allocated to employees in agencies, including Dr. Collins, the head of the NIH, and Dr. Fauci, the head of the infectious disease branch.
[Metaxas]
Dr. Collins was a guest at Socrates in the City some years ago. I have been astonished and deeply dismayed at his complicity in this. What you’re talking about, to be clear, is corruption.
Yeah, it is corruption. Corruption. I don’t think there’s anybody out there who thinks corruption is a good thing or a neutral thing.
It is an evil thing. It is what the founders tried to give us because we’re talking about liberty. Liberty is at war with corruption.
So this is mission drift. In other words, over the decades, the United States government has grown and grown and grown and grown to a point where we have what you’ve just described. It is a horror.
It is antithetical to liberty. And even term limits on bureaucrats. It seems to me, and you can help me figure this out, but it seems that you need politicians with the will to defund the bureaucracy.
We’ve gotten to a point where if we do not defund the bureaucracy and shrink government very dramatically, we will never get out of this problem.
[Atlas]
Well, I mean, this is very true, is that we have a lack of, we have serious problems with the leadership that we are electing in the United States on many levels. We have a lack of courage in our leaders. We have leaders, two presidents, dozens of governors.
They hid behind the CDC bureaucrats. Instead of leading, which is what they’re elected to do, they pretended like they weren’t responsible. And they said, okay, whatever the CDC says.
I mean, I don’t know how many times we heard this. And this is at the federal and state and local level.
[Metaxas]
Now you’re talking about Trump.
[Atlas]
I’m talking about Trump and Biden. This happened under both administrations. During 2020, the White House Coronavirus Task Force was the official policy, and that policy was lockdowns and school closures led by Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.
And the president had a different message that he was talking about. In fact, for the four months I was there, giving part of the help for his remarks at the press conferences and answering the questions myself about COVID. But the fact is that everything that happens under one administration ultimately is the responsibility of the person in charge.
So you can say all you want about, okay, Fauci said this or Birx said this. But the reality, in my opinion, is that there’s an abrogation of leadership when you’re in charge and you just say, well, okay, whatever the CDC says. And I think that we saw that at the state levels, one of the things I thought should have been done was to disrupt, disband the people who were incompetent, giving the absolutely wrong, harmful information to the president when I got there.
And that was rebuffed, okay, when I came into the White House.
[Metaxas]
By whom?
[Atlas]
All the political advisors of the president. Mark Meadows?
[Metaxas]
And ultimately, therefore, the president. But I’m saying by whom, Mark Meadows? Well, okay, so…
I mean, I’m curious because look, we have to be clear. This was unprecedented. I personally would give more grace than usual to a president when you’re dealing with something dramatically unprecedented.
It’s not like we have some experience with these kinds of things. This was the sort of thing no one in any of our lifetimes had ever seen before. And so I think it is normal to defer to medical experts.
It’s normal to defer to experts in general, and it’s always bad to do that because yes, you’re supposed to leave. But when it’s a life and death issue, suddenly you realize when we’re talking about how do we get here, you realize, well, because when it’s a life or death issue, when it’s a public health issue, most people, including the president of the United States, feels out of his depth.
[Atlas]
No, that’s true except with one very important qualifier. And the important qualifier is that yes, in the beginning, and I think as a society, we are all raised to appropriately defer to experts and people who have the credentials, et cetera. That’s natural.
But the problem is that by spring of 2020, we knew. And I mentioned that earlier in this discussion. It was not learned in late 2020, 2021, 2022.
What did we… We were told all kinds of things that were false, such as that the infection is dangerous for everybody, that asymptomatic people drive the spread, that the only way you get protection is from a vaccine, that the infection fatality rate is multiple orders of magnitude higher than influenza that mass prevent the infection. All of this was known to be false in the spring of 2020.
And by the way, it was known 15 years earlier that lockdowns don’t work for viral respiratory infections. This is the classic 2006 review by Henderson and colleagues, who has been credited with eradicating smallpox.
[Metaxas]
Okay, so how is it possible, knowing that then, that people were still pushing for lockdowns? And why would they do that if what you’re saying is maybe not common knowledge, but knowledge?
[Atlas]
Yes, well, the question is difficult to answer. Again, we go back to this, what I call a confluence of motivations. Okay, we have people who want power.
This is an opportunity to say, do this. If you give a bureaucrat a pen, they write a regulation kind of thing.
[Metaxas]
So at the principle, I mean, the principle figure here would be Fauci.
[Atlas]
Well, I mean, again, like, I like to assign, it’s true that Fauci was delegated authority that was completely inappropriate. He’s an advisor. And you’ll hear Dr. Fauci, by the way, sort of trying to rewrite history a little bit, but he has a point when he says, he didn’t actually lock down anybody. Okay, he didn’t. He didn’t have the power to lock down. He was given the power.
He was given the most visible voice.
[Metaxas]
Mike Pence was the head of the task force.
[Atlas]
Pence, Vice President Pence was the, formally, the head of the task force. Birx, Deborah Birx was in charge of the medical side of the task force. Fauci, by the way, was not in charge of anything.
He’s the head of the infectious disease branch of the NIH. He was at the table. When we all sat at the table, he was the most visible face of the task force to the public.
Birx wrote all of the guidance from the White House to every single governor on locking down, on shutting schools, on testing, testing, testing, quarantine, quarantine, quarantine, isolated. She visited every state, with or without Pence, to talk to the local officials. She was on their radar of who was in charge.
[Metaxas]
Okay, so why would Birx be in favor of lockdowns?
[Atlas]
Well, it was a combination of two things. Number one, gross incompetence. I know people don’t want to believe that, but I saw it.
Secondly, these were people from a different era, and here I’m giving the benefit of the doubt. They were from the HIV AIDS era. Birx was the so-called ambassador under the Obama administration for Africa AIDS.
Fauci worked in Fauci’s lab, Redfield, the head of the CDC. They were all working on a vaccine for AIDS. Okay, now why is that relevant?
Number one, it’s reminiscent of what happened here where it wasn’t the drugs that were being pushed. It was a vaccine, and I didn’t do anything until the vaccine. Okay, they never have a vaccine for AIDS, as we know.
But the second part is the science of it, and this sounds obvious, but HIV is a disease that’s prevented by a physical barrier. This is not. This is a disease that’s spread by breathing, okay?
HIV is a disease that you can do contact tracing at because you know who the sexual partners are, and it’s not spread by breathing indiscriminately. They had to have physical contact. So their policies are very reminiscent of what they try to do under HIV AIDS, but there’s a massive amount of people who are out of their league.
I would go into the task force meetings when I began, which is in August of 2020 in the task force, and Pence would turn to me and say, Scott, what’s the risk to children? Let’s talk about that. And I had two dozen scientific papers in my folder, and I went through a five- to 10-minute discourse on all the data.
And what did Fauci and Birx do? They said nothing, except they had no papers. They never had a single scientific paper that they brought with them. These people were bureaucrats. They were not critically thinking scientists. That’s one of the things I’m trying to get across here.
But the second part is that Birx said her only answer was, you’re an outlier. To you. To me. You’re an outlier.
[Metaxas]
And where’s her data that you’re an outlier?
[Atlas]
No data. And, OK, I was used to a totally different environment where I was in a medical setting or academic setting at Hoover. You have to walk in the room.
Other people are smart. You have to know what you’re talking about, and you have to have facts to back up your opinion. This was not the mode there.
These were people. You mentioned this. I think, generally, society, regular people, I’ll say, are sort of intimidated by people who are MDs or PhDs, scientists.
And that’s natural. And so you had a situation where you have Birx and Fauci sitting at the table in a room full of people who were what I call laymen. OK, they were experts in their field of whatever it was, but they were not medical science types.
And so whatever they said went unchallenged. And in fact, I’m not like that, number one. Number two, people were dying.
OK, I went there. I didn’t care about making friends on the task force. People were dying in that we’re doing the wrong things to kill them.
And so I had to speak up. But secondly, I would walk out of the task force meetings after going through the data, and then I would have all these non-medical people who were in the task force for months before I got there come up to me and say, that’s exactly what I thought, but I never wanted to speak up because I’m not, I don’t have the credential to speak up. So this was, they were used to being deferred to.
Now, it’s true, as you mentioned, the President of the United States is a layman. OK, and that’s probably good, by the way. But yes, he deferred to the people in the beginning.
But after a while, it was not just on hidden knowledge, although to most people it was hidden, that the lockdowns were wrong. And why was it hidden? Because the media was poisonous in censoring and delegitimizing everyone, including anyone who would stand next to Trump on the podium, by the way, answering questions.
Which, so I think that the political, again, there were many explanations. There isn’t just one. There’s pharmacological sort of financial corruption.
There’s a moral corruption going on here. And you hit on this, or you touch on this, where people are willing to do the wrong thing and parentheses, therefore people die just to get political advantage. This is a moral corruption, a heinous black mark on America.
[Metaxas]
That is, I think, and again, it’s why I would give some grace to the President and to a lot of people, because I remember myself being unable to comprehend that in the United States of America there would be people so power-hungry that they would look the other way knowing that human beings would die. I didn’t think that that level of evil existed. Even among those in the political class, in the party that I wouldn’t agree with, I still would give them enough credit as Americans that we would share some common values.
So I think that there was a level of naivete, whether with President Trump or with other people, that any of our leaders, when we’re dealing with life and death issues, would be that cynical. That’s such a horror, and it’s so unprecedented, that I think it took time, and there are many people who still don’t see it, but it took time for people to process that this could be happening.
[Atlas]
Well, I think that’s true. I just want to clarify a couple things, though. One was, you asked me who was saying, well, you know, it’s political.
They weren’t saying it’s political in the White House. What I was told explicitly was, Scott, shut up, don’t rock the boat. Okay, these are people who brought me in, by the way, to help advise, but they said, don’t rock the boat, don’t talk to the media anymore.
And they said, don’t rock the boat. An election is coming up. This was said to me many times, don’t rock the boat, an election is coming up.
Okay, and I said, the boat is capsized, except I put it in an expletive in there. The boat is effing capsized, people are dying. I don’t care about an election, but this is the state of things in our political system, and that’s not unique to the people in this White House, in my view, so that’s very evil.
The second part of the evil that is shocking to me that you’re pointing out was our media, and we all know the media has its issues and is biased or whatever, but I never understood the depth of it, and there’s actual data that shows that the American media, during 2020, on the same pandemic as the European media, okay, the American media, 92% of the stories about COVID were quantifiably negative. The European and English speaking outside the U.S., 54% of the stories were negative. It’s the same pandemic, so there was a uniquely poisonous media that vilified anyone who was saying, don’t lock down, that intentionally inculcated fear in our society, and I don’t know why.
I think partly they’re fearful people. I’m gonna, and that’s sort of an excuse, but they are fearful people in the media themselves. I believe that, but the other reason, again, the political reason, what is the benefit of making people afraid?
In fact, when I got to the White House, I said, the first thing you have to do, Mr. President, is get back on the stage, do the press conferences, because the country’s afraid, because you’re not even doing press conferences. They think you don’t even know what’s going on or don’t care. I said, tell them the data.
Even if you don’t know what to do, be aware, have a handle on what’s going on, because fear is very dangerous in society, and I think the media ignited that fear over and over again, and you have to wonder why. I think it’s an evil part of American society. We don’t have an objective, truth-seeking media.
We have a media that’s trying to influence people.
[Metaxas]
Well, I feel like we’re doing forensics on the Titanic. In other words, you’re trying to figure out, the more you know, the more you realize, this could never happen unless this and this and this and this and this and this and this came together, impossibly almost, but did, so that this could happen, because there’s so many things that had to happen in order for this to be possible.
[Atlas]
Right, it’s a confluence of events, but I’m always asked, but that doesn’t make sense. There must be a big grand sort of unifying conspiracy or whatever, and I sort of, first of all, I’m not a believer in that sort of thing, so I have a tendency to say no to that, but generally, I think you’re giving people, not you, but those who say there’s a grand conspiracy, they’re giving people too much credit. I think they don’t know, that’s not true, although yes, there were exercises in pandemic management just preceding this.
People like Bill Gates bought up Pfizer stock like crazy or other stock for vaccine makers right before that. There were financial motivations, but I just think it remains, and it will remain very difficult to explain how this happened, but the other shock besides that it happened, and I do want to mention this explicitly, was that Americans acquiesced. I was shocked to see that a society founded on freedom, on individual liberty, on limited government, on independent thinking, the world’s hope for freedom, acquiesced without much more than a whimper, and why do I say that without much more than a whimper, because the protests about the lockdowns were mainly in other countries.
Yes, there were small protests in the United States, but I didn’t see a million New Yorkers in Central Park saying, no, we’re not going to lock down.
[Metaxas]
Now, what can I count for this? We have to go back to, you know, you said that you’re the first member of your family to go to college. You come from, your background is people who came from other places to this place.
So you have this perspective. I have that perspective as well. My theory really is that most Americans, again, in the last 60 or so years, have forgotten about the basics of civics because it’s all been fine.
[Atlas]
It’s been too good.
[Metaxas]
It’s been too good. We forgot that we need to be vigilant to protect liberty, you know, when Franklin said, a republic madam, if you can keep it. We forgot that we had a role in keeping it, and this has been a decades-long process, so that by the time you get to 2020, you have most people that don’t really believe that they need to be vigilant on any of these things, because they have no memory of ever having to be vigilant.
They didn’t live through threats to liberty. They didn’t have to fight for liberty, so that’s part of it.
[Atlas]
I think that is part of it, and to sort of back that up, it’s very clear to me, traveling and speaking all over the country and even outside the U.S., the people that are shocked are more so people from other countries or immigrants to the U.S., people who came directly as immigrants from other countries, escaping the power of an over-imposing government. And the people in the U.S., particularly, I have to say, the younger generation in the U.S., who has lived through their whole lives in prosperity with no historical context, really, to speak of, are the people who are for not just not protesting against the lock-ons, but they’re actually advocating censorship and things like this. They think there’s a value to this sort of thing.
[Metaxas]
I agree that the young people are particularly pointedly ignorant and foolish, and it’s dismaying, but I do think that we’ve had so many decades of this that you have, you know, anybody younger than 80 has no memory of having to deal with existential threats to liberty, because, again, we’re talking about liberty here. We began to think that liberty’s normal. Liberty’s the normal state in which we find ourselves.
And, of course, that’s not true. It’s not true around the world. So it’s interesting to me that we as a people have been so blessed with so much liberty that we got to the point where we couldn’t really conceive of having to do anything about it.
And I mean, I’ve written about Germany in the 30s. It’s actually strangely similar in a way that there had been such a good relation, for example, between church and state for so long, that when the head of the state is Adolf Hitler, you forget that, oh, maybe we’re going to have a problem, because things have gone so well for so long, so that they took their eye off the ball just long enough so that he was able to, you know, crush the church, crush dissent. They weren’t used to having to speak up.
[Atlas]
Right, and I think, you know, we were raised as the younger generation are the ones that are speaking up against authority. I mean, I was a little kid, but during the Vietnam War there were all these protests. And now we see something that’s sort of flipped.
We see a younger generation that seems to want to justify restrictions on other people’s speech, restrictions on blocking what I thought was the most essential part of a university, the free exchange of ideas. I mean, to me, it’s obvious you cannot even be a critical thinker if you don’t hear differing views, including views you disagree with, of course.
[Metaxas]
Well, again, we’re talking about liberty. So these are the fundamentals, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. These are the Givens, and so you think about the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and it is astonishing that we have come to this place so that young people and the chattering classes and the broken journalistic establishment have all really not only stepped away from caring about those things, but are actually actively hostile to them.
That’s an extraordinary moment for America.
[Atlas]
Yes, it is. It’s extraordinary. And again, we saw this during the pandemic.
It wasn’t enough, I guess, to delegitimize and vilify the views that said open up society. They also censored the information. So you say, why wasn’t it known?
All the things that I say were known in the scientific literature. It’s because it wasn’t allowed to be known. You know, I was the advisor to the president, for instance, and YouTube took down my interview about COVID that I’d given months earlier on the low risk of children.
Twitter took down my tweets where I actually cited the CDC studies on masks. You would think that the country should hear what the advisor to the president is saying during a crisis, yet they, whoever they are, the people in power, whether it’s the media, or now we saw the Biden administration was explicitly involved in censorship, these people somehow think that it’s dangerous to hear the information in a free society.
[Metaxas]
Yeah, well, Stalin also thought it was dangerous, and that was not a free society. So it’s not a free society if the gatekeepers of that freedom are in bed with the devil. And that sounds like where we are right now.
In other words, when we don’t, because I want to deal with this, I want to ask you about the question of our confidence in various authorities. In other words, if we the people, this is a fundamental idea of liberty in America, we the people must know that we the people are the government and that the people we elect will represent us, and those are fundamentals. We have to have a free press that we basically trust.
Let’s say the press is left leaning. Well, we know that a little bit, but basically we can trust them. The medical establishment, basically we can trust them.
Once those trusts are eroded, as they have been so dramatically among these various previous sources of authority, you can no longer have a free society. You can no longer have liberty. In other words, trust in institutions is at the heart of all this.
I mean, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. We could be talking about election fraud, right? Everyone needs to believe that basically when I vote, it’s counted.
Once you have a skepticism about that, it’s over. People cease to vote. People cease to care.
People begin to think of the government as them. It’s us versus them rather than we the people are the government. So that to me is maybe the greatest casualty of what has happened in the last three years.
[Atlas]
That’s right. The legacy of the people who ran the pandemic is not just the mass of death and destruction. It’s not just the damage that will be long-lasting decades to our children.
There is a total loss of trust in these vital institutions, not just public health guidance itself, although that is one of the biggest. In fact, we see from the polling, I think it’s Pew Foundation polling, that the drop in assessment of the quality of institutions in the government is the biggest decline since 2019 for FDA and CDC. These are things that people don’t even want to be involved in detailed investigation of FDA or CDC studies.
You’d like to take the recommendation for what it is. And when that decline has dropped so precipitously that only 40% of Americans rate those agencies as good. Okay, 60% is poor.
[Metaxas]
Well, isn’t there maybe a sunny side to this? In other words, I think when the colonists in the 18th century began to realize that we cannot trust the king and the king’s government, the king’s government is at odds with us and with our concerns, that at some point that becomes healthy because it’s true and it causes them to take action.
[Atlas]
Right, this is the wake-up call. This is sort of the pendulum analogy that it has to swing so bad before it gets better. I think people became complacent.
We do have to have some trust though because we’re such a large, diverse society and people are working, people have lives and there’s differing opinions. We do have to have some objective sort of authorities to go by. But you’re right, the era of trusting people on the basis of credentials alone is over.
That has to end. We have a burden now, at least at this point in time, of individual responsibility, of thinking critically for ourselves, for our families, for our children. And we must learn that from this, that’s a good lesson to learn, but it’s a painful lesson.
[Metaxas]
It’s a good thing. It’s a painful lesson, but it’s a good lesson. And without that, you cannot have a free society.
You have no liberty. In other words, to be self-governing, to be self-governing, to be free, means we must govern ourselves. In other words, it means I must take responsibility.
I cannot defer to a bureaucrat or to an expert. At some point, I myself am responsible for my family and my community. That’s what was lost.
I think that we have drifted and drifted and drifted. I mean, it always reminds me of when George W. Bush was saying, like, “You know, we’ve had these terrorist attacks, but Americans, don’t you worry about it. You just go shopping.”
You know, in other words, there was a time in America, you saw it in World War II, where everyone was involved in the war effort. If you were not on the front lines in Europe, you had a victory garden. You were collecting metal in your neighborhood. Everyone was involved in the war effort because this is our country. That went away over the decades, and we have, for example, a professional military class.
You’re not going to get drafted. Don’t worry. We’ve got other people to take care of that. That undermines liberty for me.
[Atlas]
Yes. I think it’s not just, though, complacency. The other factor that we saw the past few years, and we see now, is that there’s a very powerful cancel culture going on.
And so even people that want to be involved to speak out is to be involved, by the way. The most important part of speaking out is you empower others to realize, hey, wait a second. There are people who think logically and agree with what I say.
But if you have this powerful, and we do have a very powerful pressure, a cancel culture that is actually successful at its intent, it does cause self-cancellation. They tried to do it to people like me and others. For me, that doesn’t work, but what I found was that I had hundreds of e-mails from medical scientists, including some on my own Stanford campus where they tried to censure me, saying, you’re right, but we’re afraid to step forward.
Okay, this cancel culture is very dangerous. It stops good people from stepping forward.
[Metaxas]
Well, how are they good people if they are confessing that they are cowards to you? Cowards are not good people.
[Atlas]
Right. I agree with that. It stops right-thinking people from stepping forward.
But there is a tremendous deficit in courage in the United States. I mean, let’s face it. What do you think?
[Metaxas]
This is something new? I mean, I guess my question is, this is exactly what happened, because I’ve written about it in Germany. In other words, if I say this or say this, somebody’s going to look at me funny, I could lose my job, I may end up going to a concentration camp, so I’ll keep my mouth shut.
[Atlas]
I think you’re right.
[Metaxas]
I think it’s… That is cowardice, and that is exactly what leads us to the success of cancel culture. If any number of people would speak up, cancel culture could not exist.
[Atlas]
Right, and this was a very frightening, I think, phenomenon going on in the United States, when I think… I didn’t know much about history when I was young, but I did wonder, how did Nazi Germany happen? And this is a very crude analogy, and it’s sort of rough to make the analogy, but I see how that kind of thing could happen, like you’re saying and like you know far more about than I do.
But we see that just sitting there saying nothing when you know something’s wrong, this cowardice is poisonous to society. Liberty and freedom disappears, and it did disappear during the management of the pandemic. It disappeared.
The most basic freedoms of speech, of religion, of freedom of assembly were gone by edict, and people were told, your business is closed, your school is closed, you stay inside, you can’t see your elderly parent in the nursing home. These were shocking things, and people, again, they acquiesced. It’s pure cowardice.
While you may say, while we may like to say it’s understandable because people were afraid, at some point, no. You must speak up, or it’s gone.
[Metaxas]
I think, first of all, when you talk about that, I speak across the country on this issue. People say, how did Nazi Germany happen? I’m sorry to say it happened precisely as it is now happening.
The differences are immaterial. It’s the same thing. Human nature is the same.
Whether you’re a coward or a hero, these moral questions don’t go away. And my only question now is whether we will learn from what’s happened in these last years, which is why I wanted to speak to you about this, because the ship, to use this metaphor for the third time, really, it’s not that the entire ship has capsized. We are here.
We still have enough freedom to speak. We’re speaking now. Enough people spoke, you among them, that we have been able to see some of these things and talk about some of these things.
The only question is, I feel, on some level, what has happened is kind of a test. Do we learn from this? Do we wake up and then move forward understanding some things, or do we just keep drifting along?
[Atlas]
Right. I agree. It’s a test.
I feel like we failed the test, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fixed. And we didn’t just fail the test by losing freedoms. We also did things that were really breaking a moral compass of a society, like injecting young, healthy children with an experimental drug with known side effects, trying to have them shield us as adults.
Okay, that’s breaking a social contract. My children are not to be using shields for me. I’m a shield for my children.
[Metaxas]
That’s what Hamas does.
[Atlas]
That’s a moral black mark, a failure in society. We have a new status quo here of this lack of courage and this sort of piling on mob rule. But I think there’s something else that was created by all the censorship and all the vilification.
And that is, there’s a basic loss of civility in our country. It’s not just that people are cowards. There is a loss of civility that shocked me.
You know, on a personal level, we lost many friends on Stanford campus, although on the other side of it we gained real friends because we saw who has sort of a basic human decency. But we can’t have a country, especially one this big and diverse, where there’s not basic civility. I mean, and I think, I’m wondering what it will take to restore that.
I’m speaking out, I’m having, I have some new initiatives. I try to nurture young people in their 20s and 30s who have a lot to lose by speaking out because, A, they’re more dependent on their social network, B, they’re young in their careers. We need to nurture these people, mentor them.
We need to restore that because we can’t even have the free exchange of ideas if we’re not being civil to each other. We can’t have a successful country. We can’t unite for the basic freedoms that I think most people probably want if we’re not allowed to interact with people on a civil level who disagree with us about some of the points.
[Metaxas]
Well, I think enough of these horrors have been exposed that you have people all over the map politically and otherwise seeing it. And that, to me, is good news. In other words, that things have gotten so bad that many people who weren’t awake to where we are have awakened to it.
And I also think that, you know, whether you want to call it creative destruction or the free market, but I think there’s something very healthy in seeing the profound corruption at places like the New York Times, which I can never read again, just because they took a dive. You know, there was money on the table, and I said, okay, we’ll take a dive. We’re going to go all in for whatever it is.
We’re going to cease to do journalism. That happened mainly among the mainstream journalistic class, the legacy media, and I think, ultimately, it’s a healthy thing that people have realized, oh, okay, I can no longer take them seriously. I don’t want to have nostalgia for, you know, what they once were.
I think a lot of the academy, the Ivy League, you know, anybody with a brain understands that they have become, you know, sort of Marxist think tanks. You don’t really want to send your kid there because they’ve lost brand value. They’re no longer, so a lot of people are still persuaded, well, there’s that name, but I think a lot of those
names that we once accorded some measure of value, you know, whether it’s the Pulitzer Prize organization, whatever, that they have really, as a result of the last years, they’ve spent almost all of it, and I think there’s something healthy about that because I think new organizations will rise up, are rising up, to replace them.
[Atlas]
Yes, I think there’s been a great unmasking, if you want to use that phrase. People were exposed. It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes kind of syndrome here.
We trusted places, institutions. We assessed things on something that we were sort of assuming was authority, and now, you’re right, it’s a healthy thing to have that exposed, and so we need new thinking. We need to be critical thinkers.
We need to be skeptical about things. We need to have competitive institutions, and we need to have our eyes open, and I think eyes are being opened.
[Metaxas]
Well, again, it seems to me healthy that Americans, many Americans, are rediscovering that they have a principal role to play in keeping the republic. We just thought, we’ll farm that out to professionals, and I think that’s part of this larger conversation. Trusting the experts was never an American value.
There’s something fundamental about that, which is wrong, which doesn’t work. Buckley famously said, I’d rather be governed by the first 3,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard College. That is an American value, the idea that we, the people, know enough to govern ourselves, and we have to always be wary of being governed from without or from above, and I feel like we have been rediscovering that.
[Atlas]
Right, and I think one of the examples was local school boards, parents getting involved, because they really were just assuming things were going a certain way in school, curricula, or whatever, and I think this is one of the solutions, is that people have to realize how powerful the individual can be and get involved, whether it’s at a young age or an older age, get involved in your community, run for office, be a thinker when you’re voting for somebody, make your voices heard. This is what I said during my time in the White House once on a tweet was, rise up, that meant speak up like you’re expected to do in a free society.
[Metaxas]
I want to ask you a little bit about the Global Liberty Institute. At what point in this story that you’ve been telling us did you decide this is a big issue, this is something I want to get involved in very directly? When did you move over from where you were to where you are now as the head of the Global Liberty Institute?
[Atlas]
Yeah, so I still work at Hoover Institution of Stanford University, but I’m also addressing something else which is on a sort of more of a global scale which is restoring liberty and the free exchange of ideas with the Global Liberty Institute. We’ve seen, as you said, over decades really a gradual erosion of individual sort of freedom at the expense of both centralized power but also international organizations like, for instance, the World Economic Forum that brags about, quote, infiltrating cabinets of governments with their disciples, like, for instance, Justin Trudeau as a graduate of their Young Leaders Program. So I feel like conservatives and sort of conservative libertarian type people have sort of dropped the ball on things that the other side has been very aggressive about.
And here I’m talking about the universities, for instance, where there’s been an ideological capture of what goes on in universities. There’s been this false narrative put forward about the harms of capitalism in free markets. There’s been a centralization of power over individual rights.
So I thought, okay, Global Liberty Institute, we need to address free exchange of ideas on campus. We need to address rational, objective, database policies, not just on pandemics, but on things like energy and climate change. We need to restore the idea that opportunity for all is important, not necessarily a guaranteed outcome.
And so we formed an organization that is headquartered both in the United States and in Switzerland, which is, to me, Europe’s sort of single nation that stands for individual freedom, independent thought, free market, diminished role of the federal government in Switzerland, and the value of the private sector. So we’re bringing together business leaders, academic leaders, policy makers, and going forward with not just policies, but also trying to inform people that are in power in government, because whether we like it or not, the people in government have power. There are some good people in government, but they need to be educated on how to articulate things and need good ideas.
And we’re also addressing what we’re calling our Rising Leaders Program, which is directly oriented toward people in careers but in their 20s and 30s, whether it’s in the media, in policymaking, in the private sector. We need to empower them, not just with ideas, but with the knowledge that they’re not alone. We need to mentor them, network them among each other, because there has been this invasion of what we thought was beyond touching, which was corporate America.
We thought, okay, that’s a bottom line area.
[Metaxas]
They either makeup or after they go out of business. It’s like there’s a whole category we haven’t discussed. I’m with you.
I was astonished that corporate America, because you think it’s about numbers, it’s about the bottom line, it’s about reality, that they could be infiltrated by any, or infected by some of the groupthink that we haven’t touched on too much. But that’s shocking. The same thing with the military.
Those were two places you thought, the madness can’t spread there, but of course it has.
[Atlas]
It has, and the social pressures are great, but this idea of the cancel culture, it’s only effective if people don’t realize that there’s a lot of other people that are like them. I think it’s not easy to go first. There’s a saying in Silicon Valley applying to venture capital.
No one wants to go first, everyone wants to go second. And that’s sort of true, but in this case, as I found out, when you go first, okay, you’re the nail sticking out of the 2×4, you’re going to be hammered down, but the biggest value of people speaking out, like I’ve said before, is that you’re letting other people know, wait a second, I can agree with that. I can support that.
And this is very important to young people who, as I say, need their social network more than somebody like me. I’m sort of, okay, whatever. So we want to help them.
We also want them to not lose their jobs. I mean, the other side, what I call the extreme left, has set up a system where they have dominated now in all the industries across the board, not just education or government, but in the private sector. And so those people can say what they want at Facebook or YouTube or all these things, and they’re not canceled, they’re not fired.
I’m not calling for them to be fired, but we need to have people that are on the conservative side also realize, hey, you know, there are people that are going to support me in the private sector. I’m not going to lose my job in the media company. I’m going to be able to have my job as a newscaster or run for office and be able to speak out.
So I think it’s very important to nurture and mentor and network these younger people.
[Metaxas]
Well, I do think that we are seeing, you know, that the radical left who, you know, we’re talking about cultural Marxists at this point. It’s obvious. Their values are fundamentally anti-American, anti-American founding.
I think many of them have, in most recent years, gotten so far out over their skis that we see there is pushback, you know, whether you want to talk about Anheuser-Busch or Target, that they thought that there never would be pushback, that you could go farther and farther and farther in a certain direction. But to some extent, you know, the free market is still healthy enough that there is pushback. And I think that that’s part of what we’re talking about before we end.
I just want to touch on the idea of globalism versus nationalism. I’ve been so fascinated with how nationalism and healthy patriotism has been demonized. That’s part of this conversation, that we all know what, you know, national socialist nationalism looks like.
But the idea that we’ve forgotten what George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s sense of pride in the nation looks like and that those who have a love of country, whether Americans or others, would be demonized for that and this new paradigm would be set out as an ideal, this globalist ideal, as though somehow this transcends, you know, the pettiness of national boundaries or whatever, that is something that’s at the heart of a lot of what we’re discussing as well because the values we’re talking about are rather distinctly American values that come out of our founding and we need to reassert that. And if we don’t, it’s really not possible to have this conversation.
[Atlas]
Absolutely. I think you’re exactly right. And, you know, patriotism has become a dirty word as if that’s something oppressive to other countries.
I have sort of an anecdote. A few years back, I was in France taking a taxi and this person asked me what I did and I explained that I work on public policy and I’m from the U.S. He pulled over his car and he got out and he opened my door and he said, I want to shake your hand. I wish we had a president in France that said “France first.”
And I think patriotism has been demonized. I don’t understand why. I mean, most immigrants, when my grandparents came to this country, they came because they were thrilled to be Americans.
My grandmother, I distinctly remember, wanted to have no foreign accent. She wanted to speak like an American. That is distressing that somehow that pride has become a subject of derision.
I wonder if we have enough patriotism to win a war. I know that sounds sort of frightening.
[Metaxas]
Well, it depends on the war.
[Atlas]
I’m very concerned about the lack of patriotism in this country. It has many ramifications beyond just immigration control or anything like that.
[Metaxas]
Well, we don’t have time to go into it, but this gets at what we’ve been speaking about throughout this conversation. You know, when you say patriotism, the question is love of which America? Love of the America of the founders? I think that there is plenty of that kind of patriotism. But if you ask me to follow this president to war or to fund a war, that people rightly have a skepticism, not of the nation, but of the government, which I think, ironically, is at the heart of what America is, is that we ourselves are the government. If the government begins not to represent us, we’re skeptical of the government.
So to me, that’s a sign of health. I am generally slightly, but generally, optimistic on this score.
Well, Scott, Atlas, it’s just been a real pleasure having this conversation with you.
We want to thank you for coming all the way from the “Left Coast” to New York City to the Union League Club to be my guest at Socrates in the studio. Thank you so much.
[Atlas]
Thank you for having me.
