So, I got to know Jeffrey through Brownstone Retreats.
If you don't know what Brownstone is, it is this incredible project that Jeffrey started
and founded and has been really dynamically changing the landscape through the written
word.
through practicing fearless, brave reporting
across all sorts of things.
Now, I got to know Jeffrey through a variety of means being
at Brownstone Retreats, but also we met each other
at this little quirky libertarian gathering called Porkfest,
where, yay, where we got on stage together and found
out we were some sort of comedy duo.
There's a Netflix special coming.
Jeffrey has an incredible ability to herd cats
intellectual cats, and even better ability as a writer,
but as you're about to find out,
an even more remarkable ability as a public speaker.
I don't know how he does it all.
Big hand for Jeffrey Tucker, please.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Well, I'm so honored to speak
to the Independent Medical Alliance.
How wonderful it is that we have this new name, isn't it?
It's so perfect.
I asked about the ambition.
They said, well, we are coming up with a parallel health system.
Oh, that's a pretty big ambition, you know, all told.
But these are exciting times, which strikes me
that that's what the world is waiting for.
And it's entirely possible, because everything is possible.
The reason I'm up here in part is
because I am probably most famously known as the shepherd
of a thing called the Great Barrington Declaration.
Do you know it?
Strange times, strange times.
Five years ago, this month, a third of the world was locked indoors
because of the invisible enemy, the virus, a pathogen
about which nobody knew anything or so they said, but we did know
for sure that it was outdoors.
So we had to stay indoors.
But at some uncertain moment, that changed.
The virus came indoors.
So we had to move outdoors.
I was at a train station one time and I went into a restaurant
and got a glass of wine and she said,
you have to drink it out there.
And I said, well, that's regrettable
because there's a beautiful room right here.
And she said, well, you can't drink it in there
because of COVID.
And I said, do you think that COVID is in there?
And she said, yes.
Yeah. Yeah, those were dark times.
And nobody could figure out what was happening.
It was the strangest period of our lives.
The Great Barantian Declaration came along well.
It's Martin Kulldorf.
I noticed that there was a scientist at Harvard
who was raging gets locked.
As you remember these days, we couldn't find anybody who was willing
to oppose what was happening.
You know, it was very strange times.
We didn't know each other yet.
Most of us in this room didn't know each other, and we felt alone.
But I found this guy from Harvard who was upset
about what was happening.
I just texted him.
I said, why don't you come for dinner?
So he did.
And then we talked all about COVID.
So he said, what we really need is an educational conference
to explain to these reporters about epidemiology
and public health.
They just don't seem to know anything.
It's the strangest thing.
It's an excellent point.
So he says, let me bring some friends and we'll hang out
and then we'll educate the journalists.
And now it's your job to get all the journalists there.
I said, well, okay, I'm going to do my best.
So I wrote the New York Times, Wall Street Journal of Medicine,
NPR, you know, whatever, thinking that they would all come
and study under the world's greatest epidemiologists
and learn about viruses and transmission, you know,
public health and what to do and so on.
Well, not a single person answered my email, not one.
So, when the event took place, I had to, you know,
get the gardener to come in and the, you know,
the homeless guy on the street or something
who was defying lockdowns.
I go, come on in.
Isn't there a virus in there?
No, just come on in.
It was mostly a maskless event except for the one real stringer
who showed up from the British Medical Journal, you know,
dressed like a medieval flagellant, you know.
Terrified, maxed up, you know.
Social distancing, you know.
Oh, thanks.
Stay safe.
Remember when people used to say, well, stay safe?
Oh, they still say that.
Okay. Yeah.
Well, anyway, they came out with a statement and Martin said,
well, why don't we call it an open letter?
I said, that's the most boring thing I've ever heard.
Why don't you call it a declaration?
He said, that's a good idea.
Let's call it the Great Barrington Declaration.
And I said, well, can you think of any other names you like?
I mean, why do you like that name?
And he said, because it has the word great in it.
It's Swedish.
Now, it's true that there is a Great Barrington bakery,
than a Great Barrington Clothiers and a Great Barrington Bank.
But there had not yet been a Great Barrington Declaration
and I thought this is going to get me in a lot of trouble.
And I was right.
There is a funny moment when I got a certified letter,
certified delivery letter for Jeffrey Tucker.
Okay, sign here.
Opened up a letter from the town.
You are an immoral son of a bitch, just, you know.
And, you know, I don't know why I didn't keep these things.
I just laughed and threw it in the trash, you know.
Just crazy.
I didn't keep it.
But, and I called Martin up about it, and I said, you know,
we've got a problem here.
The town of Great Barrington really is upset about this.
He said, yeah, they say that before their property
of ours go through the roof once they realize we're right.
He always knew that the world would know they were right.
He never had any doubt about it.
The statement itself was a plain statement about public health.
It just said everybody should just go back to doing their thing.
If you're particularly vulnerable, you might want to, you know,
not gather at big events or something like that.
But apart from that, this will pass through a combination
of natural immunity exposure and vaccines, all right?
So not particularly controversial.
Well, you know what happened next.
It turned out to be very controversial,
and we got the fatwa from Fauci.
Oh, did you notice that Mrs. Dr. Anthony Fauci just?
Yeah.
Why are you waving?
You're not she.
Okay, I thought you were, okay.
No, she got, she got us into the Indian Health Services
in Alaska, yeah.
The Indian Health Services in Alaska.
We're not firing you, not at all.
No, you're very talented.
In Anchorage, we've got an igloo picked out for you.
Oh, God. What wild times we live in.
Okay, well, yes, I was fired, of course.
I started Brownstone, you know, in the tradition
of what the Gray-Brenton Declaration represented,
which is to say plainly true things in crazy times.
That's all we've really done ever since, right, Robert?
That's what we do.
We say plainly true things in crazy times.
In many ways, these are better times, but I do want to caution you.
We have a long way to go.
Yes, we have RFK, very important appointment at HHS.
We have our good friend, Jay Bhattacharya.
Pray for him.
He needs it.
NIH, Marty Makary, with whom we've worked on a number
of projects is there, many, many friends, and a big network,
and a ferocious dedicated network, and a lot
of public support for what we're doing.
It's very exciting.
There's much better times, but, you know, it's a very tenuous
and fragile situation we're in.
There have been no real laws changed, no admissions of guilt.
The mRNA shots are still in the market.
you know, the childhood schedule is apparently untouchable
and so on, you know, all the situations.
So we can't give up the fight.
We have to fight ferociously, actually,
and ever more so than ever.
And the people on the inside now need people on the outside
to kind of be their, you know,
not just the peanut gallery denouncing them all the time
for not having completed the full revolution, you know, yesterday.
They really do need people thinking about them, praying for them,
cheering them on when possible, rooting for them,
telling your friends, working through this.
Because this is basically the most ghastly period in our lives.
And maybe, I don't know, it's hard to find a historical analogy
to a time when all the governments simultaneously did
evil things to their citizens, denying them their rights.
And for what purpose?
And I'm going to use the rest of my time to talk about that.
Because we're still unwilling to talk about it yet.
The Wall Street Journal interviewed me the other day
to see if I was appropriate for their new movie they're making,
this 30-minute documentary on the Great Branson Declaration.
They want some background.
But, you know, when you deal with mainstream media,
there's always parameters, right?
So when you're the talent, you have to fit within.
Yes, you can say this, but you can't say that.
And you can't say this, but you can't say that.
And so when you're being interviewed, it's just a matter
of trying to figure out what you can and cannot say.
So, we were talking about the censorship
that immediately hit the Gray Branson Declaration
when Francis Collins, the singing geneticist or whatever he is.
What a clown show, huh?
Told Fetch, we need a quick and dirty take down of this, you know.
They censored science and they shut down disputes and debates
and punished the intelligent people in favor of the people
who were saying crazy things.
And we were talking about this Wall Street Journal
and they said, do we do it?
Isn't that wrong to just shut down science like that?
Isn't it wrong to not have debate?
Yes, yes, it's very wrong.
Yeah, we should have just had free speech and that's
with the yes, yes, that's exactly right.
So there's a pause and I said, you know, have you ever considered,
for example, why they did that?
Is it possible they're trying to privilege one view over another?
And they said, well, you know, we hadn't really thought
about that, what's your sense?
And I said, well, you know, now that you asked me,
I have a sense that they might have been trying to sell a product.
And they were worried that talking
about natural immunity might not,
might diminish consumer demand.
And they wanted everyone to buy it.
And so the nice people making the movie said,
well, that's a very interesting theory.
Now, let's go on to the next topic, you know.
So we're not there yet, right?
We're not anywhere near coming close
to discussing the reality of the situation.
I do want to tell you one interesting story.
In April, it was April of 2020, my phone rang.
And I got a phone call from a guy named Rajeev Venkaiah.
The name was failure to me because he had worked
as the head of bioweapons research under George W. Bush back in 2005
and 2006, and took credit for inventing pandemic planning.
You know, he said, when the bioweapon comes,
we'll all just lock down and wait for the countermeasure.
That was his theory, and he was the architect of lockdowns, really.
And he called me up, as if a regime, this is such an honor,
it's such a pleasure to speak with you.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, listen, you need to stop saying what you're saying.
As I said, all this raging
against lockdowns you're doing is becoming annoying to me and others.
And I said, well, not entirely compelling request,
but since I have you on the phone, answer me one question.
Everybody locks down.
We hide under the sofas.
We get our refrigerator boxes and live in them.
Get the hoi polloid to deliver us food, you know, the working class
that don't read the New York Times, you know, give them a job.
And we do this, and we do this, and we do this.
What happens to the virus?
And he said, what do you mean?
I said, well, I don't know.
Does the virus get scared of Fauci?
It's, you know, oh, I didn't know the World Health Organization is
going to be involved in my business here.
And moves to Mars, jumps in a hole, you know, disappears, you know.
I don't think that's how a fascinating respiratory virus
with a zoonotic reservoir works.
He said, oh, oh, that, oh, yeah.
What we're going to do is drive down the R0.
And I said, don't give me that.
I know better than that.
The R-naught is a measure of what has happened.
It's not a driving causal effect of what's going to happen.
You can't just drive the R-naught down to stop a virus any more
than you can just take down an umbrella to stop the rain.
He said, well, that's a good point, great metaphor.
But I'll tell you, just between us,
here's what's actually going to happen.
We're going to have a vaccine.
Now, this is the first I had heard about this.
Or maybe I heard about it but I dismissed it. And I dismissed it on the phone with him that day. I said that is the most
absurd thing I've ever heard. First there's never been a vaccine against a respiratory virus of this sort. Always mutating all
the time. You can't have any kind of sterilizing product to kill them. Even if you did come up with something like that it
would be 10 15 years in the testing before and be safe to give to the general population. So this isn't going to happen. And he
He said, you will be surprised.
And I said, well, at that point, I dismissed him as a crank
and a has-been.
Nobody can be that crazy.
And we got off the phone.
Of course, what actually he did that day in April
of 2020 was spilled the beans to me.
I didn't believe him because I thought it was so absurd,
thought it was so dumb that I just forgot about it, really,
and went on.
Gray Branson Declaration came and went.
It took me a fully two years and a little slow
to realize why it was so controversial.
Precisely because it said we could use natural immunity
to get out of it.
That's it, that's the whole reason.
Yeah, it recommended less population panic
and it said natural immunity was gonna be
the way to get out of it.
That's why they had to shut it down.
Because they're all about selling their products, that's it.
I didn't know, I've been studying economics
and politics my entire life, I did not know
that pharmaceutical companies had bought every government
in the world.
I didn't know that.
If you'd told me this six years ago,
I'd say this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard
that can't be true.
But that is in fact what happened because it's an industry
so powerful they were able to shut
down all the world economies at once for the better part of two
and three years waiting for their product.
And then they banked everything on a product
that turns out not only not to work,
but to cause a grave, grave population damage.
That's what happened.
And we wonder why people have lost trust in the system.
This is why.
And this is why the upheaval is going on in Washington.
Nobody says it, but this is why.
How can you just fire 20,000 people from HHS?
Oh, cost cutting.
It's not cost cutting.
It's justice.
It's justice.
We're just at the beginning.
We're just at the beginning.
The distribution coalitions that have gathered
up around public health in this country
with the pharmaceutical companies buying the agencies
and the patents and the shared revenue
And the way they buy politicians like that Cassidy guy,
you know, on the committee hearing the other day said,
I'm not going to let your nice friend at CDC
because I've got a good retirement package coming
from Pfizer, Moderna, whoever it is, right?
And all the endless outposts, the NGOs and the USAID,
they're all compromised and corrupt.
And who knew, right?
A large part of the medical profession is willing to go along
with it and the retail pharmaceutical companies.
It turned out to just be what I call the, you know,
we talk about the deep state, CVS is the shallow state, right?
If you want to think of it that way.
They deny people the treatment, she knows the whole story.
The point is this.
What we need is massive upheaval.
It's just barely begun.
We need something much more dramatic,
something much more permanent.
This is not going away, my friends.
People are angrier now than they've ever been before about the lies,
the forced treatments, the lost jobs, the lost two years of education,
the population trauma that led to, you know, vast illiteracy,
substance abuse, cultural collapse.
Never forget that they canceled what, two Easter's in a row.
They did this and the churches went along, right?
So, yeah, there's a lot of anger.
A lot of people are very, very upset.
We're just to the beginning.
I'm out of time, but let me just say this.
I just want to end with this.
Look, we've got to stick with this.
We've got a long way to go.
We've got a lot to build.
IMA and Brownstone and only a handful of other organizations are
on the front lines here to rebuild.
My mother named brownstone, by the way, because she said it was the stone
that built America in the 19th century before the age of steel.
She said to me, she said, after all that we've been through,
this country needs to rebuild.
So you will found brownstone for that.
Yeah? She was right.
She was right.
We will rebuild.
A lot of people making enormous sacrifices in this room.
I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Pray for Jay.
Pray for RFK.
Let's not let up.
We've got a world to rebuild.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
