EPISODE 92: “The Covid Coup” with Angelo Codevilla

Angelo Codevilla and Bill Walton talk about COVID-19

Automated (00:04):

Welcome to The Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and thinkers, fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics, and human flourishing, interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:24):

I imagine we are all growing frustrated and, in my case, angry, about the continued lockdown of America by politicians who claim they are protecting us from the COVID-19 virus, but the more I research and study what’s happening to our country, certain words come to mind, like deception, self-interested, agendas, power grabs, fraud, political crimes. But the one word I think best describes what is happening is this one: coup.

Bill Walton (00:57):

I’ve asked Dr. Angelo Codevilla to join me on the show today. He’s written a powerful 21-page essay for The American Mind, entitled The COVID Coup and How to Unlock Ourselves. It’s an exceptional explanation of the direct, persistent assault on freedom that’s going on in America. He writes, “Panicked by fears manufactured by the ruling class, the American people assented to being put essentially under house arrest until further notice, effectively suspending the habits, preferences, and liberties that have defined our way of life.”

Bill Walton (01:34):

Dr. Codevilla is Professor Emeritus of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, and a member of the Working Group on Military History at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Among his 13 books are War: Ends and Means, Informing Statecraft, A Linguistic Analysis of Machiavelli’s Prince, The Character of Nations, and the monograph, The Ruling Class Versus the Country Class. A google search for Angelo Codevilla yields some two million items.

Bill Walton (02:08):

Angelo? Angelo, thanks for joining me today.

Angelo Codevilla (02:12):

You’re welcome.

Bill Walton (02:14):

There’s so many things I want to dig into with you, but let’s start with The Ruling Class, because the premise, here, is that this is not about the virus, this about something else, and that something else is power, and it’s power being exerted by what you’ve defined as the ruling class. Would you give me a quick summary of what you mean by that? I think I know, but …

Angelo Codevilla (02:37):

Well, this is the United States of America, there’s not supposed to be a ruling class. The founding document of this country, the Declaration of Independence, says all men are created equal, and that, of course, is an explicit denial of any person, or any group’s right to rule anybody else, without their consent.

Angelo Codevilla (03:00):

But, in fact, what has happened to us is something very familiar in history, very familiar to great thinkers. Aristotle described in Book V of The Politics, the sort of standard process by which constitutional republics like ours come into the hands of a ruling class. What happens is that parts of the polity, the oligarchs, the officials, gradually gain more and more strength, become more and more self-interested, govern more and more in their own interest rather than in the interests of the whole. And at a certain point they drop the mask and simply explicitly seize the rest of the power, and say, “You simply obey, and we command. And that’s all there is to it.” There are a million pretexts on which they can do it.

Angelo Codevilla (04:10):

Over the centuries this has happened in a number of ways. One of the usual ones is to claim that an emergency has arisen, something unusual, and that requires the seizure of power. History, again, is full of these things. Perhaps people are mindful enough of history to know what happened in Germany in 1933. There was a fire in the Reichstag, and because of that a mustachioed little bastard ended up taking over and reeking havoc. Now, here, we have a …

Bill Walton (04:56):

A fire that was started by the little guy with the mustache. Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (05:02):

By the little guy with the mustache.

Bill Walton (05:02):

Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (05:04):

So what we’ve got now is a pandemic which was not started by anybody here, but as Mr. Axelrod reminded us, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” And they’ve made, from their standpoint, very very good use of it. They have taken power in ways that none of us would have imagined possible just a short while ago.

Bill Walton (05:34):

Well, there’s really no emergency now, except, maybe, for them, the 2020 election?

Angelo Codevilla (05:39):

That is a gamble that they’re taking, and we have yet to see how that gamble will turn out. But it is a gamble on their side; this will either consolidate their power, or it will wreck it. It might very well do just that, because there’s nothing quite awakening a sleeping giant and filling him with terrible results, as Mr. Yamamoto said.

Bill Walton (06:06):

Well, I think that’s beginning to happen. I think more and more people are growing suspicious.

Angelo Codevilla (06:11):

Again, you don’t know; this remains to be seen.

Bill Walton (06:15):

Is there any evidence that the COVID-19 provides extra risk to people’s lives?

Angelo Codevilla (06:22):

Oh no. No. Look, the very name COVID-19 tells us that this is something that has happened before. You’ve had various … 18 kinds of coronaviruses coming out of China in the past, and we have this one.

Angelo Codevilla (06:46):

Now, it is a virus, and it’s not a friendly, cuddly thing, it does some harm, but the question is how much? And the ruling class has taken very good care to make sure that the American people, indeed, the people in the West, are not aware of exactly what that virus does and does not do.

Bill Walton (07:18):

We’ve locked everyone down. And the premise, essentially, maybe not everyone’s equally vulnerable, but certainly, everybody needs to be equally responsible. So we’ve inflicted this on everyone when, in fact, the virus is lethal, but it’s lethal to people who are 75 and older who have comorbidity. And you very friendly, corrected me on how to pronounce your last name before we got started. As an Italian, you’re probably aware that Italy, 99.1% of the people who died averaged 80-years-old, and they had all had Type 2 Diabetes?

Angelo Codevilla (07:57):

There’s some peculiarity in this virus with regard to diabetes; again, we don’t know why, but we do know that it is that. Now, the Germans did a study and came up with conclusions that are very similar, but they phrased it differently, and they said, “Look, the people who have died are people who would almost certainly have died anyway during that period.” Because every year, every day, people do die for a variety of reasons, and at the end of life the human body is very weak and absorbs all kinds of viruses, all kinds of germs. I mean, at the end of life, everything kills you, together; this is what happens.

Angelo Codevilla (08:55):

And, again, the view of the German health authorities was that this really, in and of itself, was not a terrible problem. But, now, this is the view of the health authorities, but the government chose to present it, not as in as virulent a way as the U.S. government, but still in … somewhat in the same way. Let me explain why the similarity between the reactions of most governments. Let me … I’ve got a phone. Sorry.

Bill Walton (09:54):

Is that your daughter-in-law?

Angelo Codevilla (09:57):

I’ve no idea who that was.

Bill Walton (09:58):

We have these identified rings. I was trying to …

Angelo Codevilla (10:05):

All over the Western world, for the past dozen years at least, the ordinary people have been revolting against their rulers. What has happened, here, in the United States, with the election of Donald Trump, is by no means-

Automated (10:27):

Unknown caller!

Angelo Codevilla (10:31):

… is by no means unique. In Italy, the ruling parties have been clobbered in a referenda, and electorally the same thing has happened in Germany, Angela Merkel who was the reigning major statesman of Europe, has been roundly rejected by her-

Automated (11:03):

Unknown caller!

Angelo Codevilla (11:06):

This is incredible.

Bill Walton (11:07):

I’m on the board of the American Conservative Union, and-

Angelo Codevilla (11:10):

Let me finish. I’m sorry for being heavy, but-

Bill Walton (11:12):

I was going to amplify your point, though. Which is … Runs CPAK. And we hold CPAK in United States once a year. But we’ve taken to hosting it around the world, and you find the same kind of people showing up in Japan as you do in the United States, who are revolting against what you’d called the ruling class, to the extent that some people show up at the rallies in Tokyo wearing MAGA hats.

Angelo Codevilla (11:41):

Oh yes. Well, of course, of course. There is a fellow feeling, both on the part of the ruling classes, and on the part of those who revolt against them. It’s essentially the same phenomenon because, again, the governments of modern countries are very much alike, and so are the people’s very much alike. And so the phenomenon that we have here, in the United States, is akin to that which exists in other countries.

Angelo Codevilla (12:16):

So the ruling classes have had the very same interest in using that … using this virus as an occasion, not to say excuse, to first of all change the subject. The subject of public discourse had been dissatisfaction with the ruling class. At least, now the subject has to changed to, “Oh, the virus.” And it has given the ruling classes the presumption of authority, it’s given them the change to exercise the presumption of authority.

Bill Walton (12:55):

Are you familiar with what’s happened in Melbourne? In Melbourne, Australia, Geoffrey Tucker of the EIR has written about Melbourne, and their lockdown is infinitely more draconian that what we’ve seen here in the United States. And they have police now entering homes without warrants, you can’t visit family or friends, there’s a $200 fine for no mask, only one person, per day, per household, can leave the house, and that’s even for… Weddings are illegal, and there are no gatherings of any size. And the army is on the street arresting people.

Bill Walton (13:33):

And what happened was they thought that as an island they were secure and they could keep the virus out. And you know a lot about this strategy. I guess the Venetians used it, you keep people out of your country. But once the virus comes in-

Angelo Codevilla (13:47):

Well, that’s the point-

Bill Walton (13:48):

… there’s nothing you can do, it’s going to have to spread.

Angelo Codevilla (13:51):

Exactly. Exactly. No, quarantine is something which is rightly, properly exercised on infected people. The idea of quarantining healthy people is reality upside down. Look, again, this is not a complex thought, this is not something you have to be an epidemiologist to understand. The purpose of quarantining is to keep infected people apart from others until the disease has or has not manifested itself, so that the disease does not enter a population. Once it has entered the population it’s [inaudible 00:14:39] by the door; it will go through the population.

Angelo Codevilla (14:44):

Angela Merkel, who has politically failed, is herself a scientist, and at least with regards to scientific matters, honest, and when the virus hit, her reaction was that 70% of Germans would eventually get it, and that would be that. And that is the case, here, as well; that’s the bad news. The good news is that this particular virus is unusually mild. For most people, this is a lot less than the flu. It’s not just the flu, it’s a lot less than the flu.

Bill Walton (15:25):

You’ve got some data to back that up, I think it’s in…

Angelo Codevilla (15:31):

Look, the Spanish government most recently published that 60% of all of the people whom they have tested, and have tested positive, are asymptomatic, i.e., that they didn’t know they had it. I mean, that is how mild the COVID-19 virus is for most people; four out of five who are infected, four out of five cases are asymptomatic cases.

Angelo Codevilla (16:09):

I began my essay by making the distinction between the COVID virus and the plague, and that is a distinction which the ruling class has tried to elide, but that is the basic distinction. The beginning of wisdom about all of this, the truth about all of this is that, no, this is not the plague.

Bill Walton (16:38):

And we knew that very early on, because of the way that it behaved in Wuhan, we knew what had happened with the Chinese that it was actually not …

Angelo Codevilla (16:47):

Repeat after me, “This is not the plague. This is not the plague.”

Bill Walton (16:52):

I will do. You’re watching the Bill Walton show, and I’m here with Dr. Angelo Codevilla, and we’re talking about COVID-19. And it is not a plague, and we know that, and now we need to figure out how we can unlock our country.

Bill Walton (17:07):

So we’ve made a lot of mistakes. We’ve locked everything down. If you could wave a wand to say, okay, well let’s get rational, what should we do? I mean, we need to protect the vulnerable, we need to protect older people, but this idea of not sending children to schools is just crazy.

Angelo Codevilla (17:24):

Now simply, we should not protect simply older people, but older, sick people. Because, again, the data that we have from countries that have actually gathered such data … And this country of ours has not. The data for Spain is that the mortality rate for infected people, for healthy infected people over 90 is 10%. Now, we’re talking about people over 90-years-old, we’re talking about the very oldest people, but who have no underlying conditions; ordinary, healthy people over 90-years-old, and who get the virus, only 10% die.

Bill Walton (18:19):

Isn’t the fatality rate for people under 70, 0.04%?

Angelo Codevilla (18:24):

I’m not certain-

Bill Walton (18:27):

It’s an infinitesimally low number.

Angelo Codevilla (18:28):

It’s very, very low.

Bill Walton (18:30):

Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (18:33):

Again, all illnesses strike those who are already ill, hardest. This is a basic truth, if you are weakened by something, anything that hits you will make you even weaker. I mean, this is common sense.

Angelo Codevilla (18:50):

In this case, in the case of this virus, it takes particular kinds of weakness to be really struck. So what Governor Cuomo did, of course, was the absolute opposite of commonsense; he put COVID positive people in nursing homes, which are not simply full of old people, they’re full of old, frail people who have to be subject to nursing care. These are simply the weakest of the weak. He put his virus among the weakest of the weak, and of course they died like flies, what else would you expect?

Bill Walton (19:38):

Isn’t that the reason why New York fatalities are the highest per capita in the country?

Angelo Codevilla (19:44):

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Walton (19:47):

If you wanted to put your finger on why it’s so different in New York, that’s a big reason-

Angelo Codevilla (19:50):

Sure-

Bill Walton (19:50):

… why they had excess deaths of 20- 30,000, because of that?

Angelo Codevilla (19:54):

Again, nobody knows exactly what it is, because again they’ve been very careful not to allow those figures to be gathered. But if you think about this, nursing homes are the places where the weakest of the weak are, where the most vulnerable of the vulnerable are. Now, question, where are the least vulnerable people in the world? Schools.

Bill Walton (20:23):

Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (20:26):

That is the place where the least vulnerable people on the planet gather.

Bill Walton (20:31):

Well, the teachers’ unions, though, have been using this to say, “Well, okay, the children may not get it, but they could spread it to us.” And there’s very little evidence that this spreads to older people.

Angelo Codevilla (20:43):

Very little evidence. But, again, is to give them their due, everyone has his own level of fear. I have a neighbor who is totally healthy and who is paranoid about the virus. And I say to her, “Well, it’s a free country. If you want to indulge that fear, if it makes you feel fuzzy and warm, to indulge that fear, go ahead.”

Bill Walton (21:09):

But I think your point is this fear’s been engineered, and it’s been engineered by people who benefit from it.

Angelo Codevilla (21:21):

Well, yeah. That’s right.

Bill Walton (21:22):

And you’ve got a list of MDs and organizations that have benefited from the fact that we’re locked down?

Angelo Codevilla (21:28):

That’s right. That’s right.

Bill Walton (21:29):

I mean, government’s benefited. Nobody’s been laid off, there hasn’t been a single [crosstalk 00:21:33].

Angelo Codevilla (21:34):

The teacher’s unions, of course, have made this… You want a testimonial to brass faces and other parts of the body, here you have the teachers’ unions saying, “Hey, look, pay us what we’ve always wanted, or we won’t… ” To which the rational answer is, “Okay. This is a free country. You don’t want to work? You don’t have to work. You’re fired!”

Bill Walton (22:09):

But one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this with you, though, is that you said at the outset, this may be a political blunder by people who think this is going to be helpful in May and November, and that this could backfire. And what we’re identifying here is we’ve government that’s benefiting, teachers’ unions that are benefiting, Amazon … I mean, Jeff Bezos is a big one.

Angelo Codevilla (22:33):

Amazon’s the richest of all.

Bill Walton (22:36):

The news’ media, social media companies: Twitter, Facebook, Google.

Angelo Codevilla (22:41):

That’s right. That’s right. Guess who put all these people together, and what collective name would you apply to them? Oh, the ruling class.

Bill Walton (22:53):

Could you coin that term, and maybe write it down.

Angelo Codevilla (23:02):

Well, no [crosstalk 00:23:02].

Bill Walton (23:02):

I’m appreciating your, uh…

Angelo Codevilla (23:02):

What I did is, I applied it to the United States of America, and it had not been applied to the United States of America before, because we really didn’t have one. Always, you had rich people, you had more influential people and less influential people, but the influential people in America… And this is a very important point with regard to the ruling class, were diverse; you had different ways of being prominent, different ways of being powerful. Now, it’s different. Now, there really is only one way of being prominent and of being powerful and of being rich, and that is being connected to the government, and specifically, the Democratic Party.

Angelo Codevilla (23:43):

Now, it’s possible to be well-off and powerful and not a Democrat, and not be connected with government, but take for example the epitome of this, a man by the name of Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas sits on top of the judicial… of the legal hierarchy; a member of the Supreme Court. [inaudible 00:24:09], et cetera, et cetera. Is he part of the ruling class? Absolutely not. He has none of the privileges of the ruling class, you see. People like the ruling class… I’m sure that Bill Walton is not a poor fellow, but Bill Walton is not a member of the ruling class. Why? Because members of the ruling class do not consider Bill Walton a member of the ruling class, just as they don’t consider Clarence Thomas a member of the ruling class

Bill Walton (24:37):

Well they consider the basketball player, a member of the ruling class but… So that’s not the point, you got sports figures and the whole NBA and NFL is now falling on its knee to…

Angelo Codevilla (24:51):

[crosstalk 00:24:51] sports figures, but even bad ones like Colin Kaepernick, who’s allowed as a quarterback.

Bill Walton (24:58):

We’re digging into something here that you’ve labeled as intersectionality right, people have labeled, which, there’s a [crosstalk 00:25:09].

Angelo Codevilla (25:08):

That’s not my label. Intersectionality is a house term of the radical left.

Bill Walton (25:19):

So what that means is, you make common cause with people, you’ve got the global warming people, abortion open borders, media censorship on speech that kind of thing and there seems to be an incredible alignment between people who thinks this virus is lethal. And the people who hold those views right and you’re not going to punch through because they’re aligned to say this is the most lethal thing ever.

Angelo Codevilla (25:53):

The fact that we pointed out here, the question to ask is, why are they all aligned? On what are they aligned? And the whole point of intersectionality is this, you may hate the United States government and Western civilization, because it is a barrier to abortion. You may hate the United States, because it is racist. You may hate the United States of America and Western civilization because it is patriarchal et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Angelo Codevilla (26:28):

We are all different, we all have… we good people have different concerns. But the reasons for our concerns are identical namely, we all hate the United States of America. We all hate Western civilization. It is this hatred for this one thing that unites us. That is the meaning of intersectionality you see, sharing only common hatred. Because we share the common hatred and now this is the final point, because we share this common hatred, we all share each other’s hatred. We who are against who hate America for reason A now also hate it for reason B, C, D, E and F.

Bill Walton (27:19):

Well speaking of intersectionality, we had the virus erupt and then very quickly thereafter we had the Black Lives Matter and rioting and looting and tearing down places like Portland. Those two are interconnected.

Angelo Codevilla (27:35):

Well yes, by intersectionality. They are connected by a common hatred of the United States of America and civilization. What is the commonality between COVID virus and the racial resentment and tearing down a statue of Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar! Yeah.

Bill Walton (28:04):

I missed that one. They tore down Julius Caesar as well?

Angelo Codevilla (28:07):

Julius Caesar! What is the commonality there? Well the commonality is Western civilization. Not that Julius Caesar was a great champion of it, but he was one of the major figures there of. Whether you like Julius Caesar or not, he was big stuff [inaudible 00:28:32] civilization one way or another, either…

Bill Walton (28:35):

So where have the republicans been in this, I think they’ve been absent without leave [crosstalk 00:28:44]. Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (28:45):

And that points is to a political fact, which is key to the existence of the ruling class, namely that, in the United States of America, there is no bona fide opposition through the ruling class. And the reason for that lack of opposition is the nature of the Republican Party. The Republican Party is the junior member of the ruling class, which lives electorally by pretending to be an opposition party. And, at best is has its foot in both camps. But it is that equivocation which makes all of this possible.

Bill Walton (29:39):

You make…

Angelo Codevilla (29:40):

You and I have just been saying that the revolutionaries are taking a big gamble in all of this. Yes, they are. But what would failure… what would loss consist of. Well, it would consist of the Republican Party getting lots of votes that it wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. The Republican Party, the Republican Party that does what? The republican party that generally backs up the ruling class, you see. So in a way their…

Bill Walton (30:15):

Downside is not that great.

Angelo Codevilla (30:17):

… downside in not that great. Which is why, excuse me for staying on [inaudible 00:30:27] politics a little longer, which is why the great struggle that took place in 2016 took place in the Republican primaries, not so much in the general election. The question was, would there be anyone coming out of Republican primaries, who was against the ruling class. And what we got was an ambiguous result because Donald Trump is only verbally, primarily verbally, an opponent of the ruling class.

Bill Walton (31:03):

You’re watching the Bill Walton show and I’m here with Dr. Angelo Codevilla, and we’re talking about how the COVID-19 is really about politics and partisanship and intersectionality and people making common cause against the ordinary Americans.

Bill Walton (31:21):

You pointed out in the book something I quite agree with in your piece. I think Donald Trump made a strategic blunder early on, to not say to people, look, this is bunk, this disease is not lethal, it’s not a plague, it’s not going to kill a lot of people, there’s no evidence coming out of the numbers in China that would suggest that. Relax everybody we’re going to get through this. And we’re not going to lock down and yet on March 19 when he announced that we’re locking the country down that pretty much gave the playing field to the people that… Well, they still have it.

Angelo Codevilla (32:02):

He gave credit where credit is not due. And the people to whom he gave credit, grabbed it and began beating him over the head with it. This was a… if Donald Trump is thrown out of office, I must say that he deserves it fully. Because he made a mistake that no individual, never mind a political man, should ever make.

Bill Walton (32:30):

Well, he made a claim early on, why save three million lives by locking everything down, which was just absolutely wrong.

Angelo Codevilla (32:37):

Which again he tried…

Bill Walton (32:38):

And now he’s still living with that.

Angelo Codevilla (32:39):

He tried to build himself up but was foolish and doing it. But as we downgrade Donald Trump, let us not forget…

Bill Walton (32:54):

I am downgrading him. I think he made a blunder though…

Angelo Codevilla (32:56):

No, it’s cool.

Bill Walton (32:56):

We all do. But I think he has a hard time walking that one back [crosstalk 00:33:01].

Angelo Codevilla (33:01):

Nothing but the truth. Look, I voted for Donald Trump in 2016, I’ll vote for him again. But the mistakes he made are mistakes that he made. Not only is he suffering from them, the rest of the country suffering from them. The things that have been dumped in this country by the lockdowns are monstrous.

Bill Walton (33:24):

But it’s falling so much disproportionately on the ordinary Americans it’s stunning. Because if you look at the beneficiaries, why is the stock market up 50%? Well the stock market’s made up of names like Adidas, Amazon, American Express, all the big companies, and all the tech companies. And so if you’re if you’re living on a portfolio, you’re among the wealthy, you’re not hurt by this.

Angelo Codevilla (33:49):

Oh, not at all. Not at all. Not all the wealth… the more money you’ve got, the proportionally better off you are. But, think of the economic effects, there really are very remarkable. One would not have thought it possible, for example, and it’s… Major economists are going to have a hard time explaining how it is that, by reducing the supply of things, because the supply of things has been reduced by people no longer being employed producing supplies of food and everything else have been reduced, by reducing the supply of things, prices have been driven up. But in a way that has required the things that are produced, some of the things that are produced, to be thrown away, especially in agricultural goods.

Angelo Codevilla (34:55):

I run a farm and I see all over farm country vegetables being plowed under, things being thrown away, animals being slaughtered and buried, and yet prices rising. What monstrosity is this? Also, I have more contact with the public hospitals that I would like because I am a heart transplant patient. So I noticed that my own appointments, my own monitoring of my condition has been drastically reduced and millions of others have had their tests and procedures delayed. And a lot of people are suffering and dying because of manufactured shortages in healthcare.

Bill Walton (36:01):

They did a show with Jim Agresti who runs Just Facts and he’s done… he’s a hardcore statistical analyst. And he estimates, of the deaths caused by the lockdown could be some 80 times that of the actual lives saved.

Angelo Codevilla (36:16):

Right, right. By the way, there was no evidence whatsoever that the lockdown saved any lives.

Bill Walton (36:23):

Yeah. Well, and so people aren’t going to the dentist, they’re not taking tests, they’re not being diagnosed, they’re not taking treatments.

Angelo Codevilla (36:32):

[inaudible 00:36:32] the meaning of the word quarantine, okay.

Bill Walton (36:34):

Yeah.

Angelo Codevilla (36:35):

Quarantine is a period of isolation imposed on the sick, and potentially sick, not on the healthy. This is simply a fact, this is fundamental. And yet you have the likes of Anthony Fauci say, “No, no quarantine the healthy.” This is not science and Donald Trump does not have the courage to say, “This man is a fraud.” Now he knows, Donald Trump is not dumb, he knows that this man is a fraud, he realizes… he has realized for a long time that he made a mistake. But he has been frozen by fear from saying…

Bill Walton (37:19):

Who is Dr. Anthony Fauci? I mean I know from TV, and how did he come to such prominence and why do we care what he [crosstalk 00:37:27] says so much?

Angelo Codevilla (37:32):

Well, let me suggest this, you use two different tenses when you ask that question. Who was Anthony Fauci? Anthony Fauci was a renowned epidemiologist. He did some work 30 years ago, which made him justly famous in his field. Who is Anthony Fauci? That’s something different. He is a bureaucrat, and the leftist bureaucrat to boot, a partisan leftist bureaucrat, an activist partisan leftist bureaucrat. Who is Anthony Fauci also? He is also a profiteer of the drug industry. So when you say who is Anthony Fauci, well, you must use tenses. And ask in regards to what.

Bill Walton (38:34):

Was he behind the attack on hydroxychloroquine, I mean is that because he had another [crosstalk 00:38:46] cure? I mean we have a cure at hand, it seems to work quite well and I think you point out that Michigan’s Henry Ford Health System’s done a lot of work that shows that it’s effective.

Angelo Codevilla (38:57):

Not only that but you have a doctor, actually, one thing that Dr. Fauci is not. He is not practicing doctor. I don’t believe that this man has seen a patient in 30 years. But you do have many many many practicing doctors who have treated patients successfully with hydroxychloroquine. Now the left, when the left speaks of abortion, speaks to the sanctity of the relationship between patient and doctor. Well, what about the sanctity now. The [inaudible 00:39:42] does not allow the use of hydroxychloroquine, which has been used safely for 60 years.

Bill Walton (39:50):

Yeah. Jenny Beth Martin had a group of doctors in front of the Capitol [crosstalk 00:39:56].

Angelo Codevilla (39:56):

This whole business with hydroxychloroquine shows zero sincerity. Fauci, by the way, showed his lack of sincerity when one day he was asked early on, this is back in April, “Dr. Fauci, some people say that hydroxychloroquine is an effective drug. If you became infected with the COVID virus, would you take hydroxychloroquine?” And since he’s actually becoming infected was a real possibility, he hesitated, hesitated, hesitated, and started to say don’t ask that question. But the interviewer insisted. In fact, he said, “Well, yes I would take it, but only in a hospital setting and as part of a clinical trial.”

Bill Walton (40:57):

One of the words I used to open the show was a word, crime. It seems to me that if you know something’s effective, and you discredit it. In fact, you collude with, I don’t know if collusion is the right word, but you get the social media companies to pull videos off of YouTube or Facebook or wherever they are that, where you get practicing doctors, claiming that this works. And there have been hundreds if not thousands of them that will come out and said that and yet that’s been blacklisted, that’s radio silenced, you’re not allowed to say that.

Angelo Codevilla (41:35):

We do have, in this country for good or ill, probably for ill, a very active civil tort bar. I would imagine that it might be very interesting if someone who had suffered because hydroxychloroquine was denied him or her, sued a whole bunch of people for in fact, making it difficult to get that drug or someone’s husband or wife had died. Said, look, this drug was denied my husband, my wife and he died, and I’m now suing these bastards for x millions of dollars.

Bill Walton (42:28):

My guess is that’s going to happen, now you have… we’re winding things up, we’ve got just a few minutes left. You have a way to get at the truth from this that involves holding hearings, and you pointed out the kief our held hearings about the labor unions in the mafia and Sam Ervin did Watergate and there’s a whole lot of good when a senator pulls somebody in front and puts their hands on the Bible and says you got to tell the truth.

Angelo Codevilla (42:54):

Listen, I worked for eight years on the Senate Intelligence Committee. And I had to deal with some of the worst liars in the world, namely the CIA. But boy, oh boy, you get these people in a hearing whether, especially if it’s public, and you get them to put that hand on the Bible. And all they see when they do that is the number 5, 5, 5. That’s the number of years you for perjury. You ask him a hard question and you ask it again and again.

Bill Walton (43:34):

Who would hold these hearings and who would they call to testify?

Angelo Codevilla (43:39):

Well, I…

Bill Walton (43:39):

I think you mentioned Rand Paul, Ted Cruz [crosstalk 00:43:42].

Angelo Codevilla (43:42):

You would bring in Fauci, and the… those who have made decisions. In this regard, claiming the authority of science, claiming that they knew something, and you would ask them, “How do you know that, do you really know, did you act on a reasonable basis, or did you not or was there no reason? And if the interviewers are sharp, they can punch through claims of reasonableness really rather quickly, “So you didn’t know, or you didn’t. Did you take into account this fact,?” “Well, I didn’t know the fact,” “Yes, you did know that fact.”

Angelo Codevilla (44:38):

In other words, hearings can hold people responsible, that’s one advantage. The other advantage is that these hearings can show case the truth. Number one, the COVID was not a play. It never was a play, there never was any reason to believe it was a play. Number two, what did you know, did you know that, well yes you did know it. Number three, even though A, it wasn’t a plague and B, you knew it. Why did you do A, B and C, and so on so forth. That is what hearings will do.

Bill Walton (45:18):

Well we’ll get to the senators and talk to them about that because that’s a great line of action. People are looking for leadership to help us out of this and instead of freeing people up, the things seem to be more draconian especially if you live in the Maryland area, DC area with what’s happening in August to 2020. Well, Dr. Codevilla, thank you for joining me. This has been fascinating and we covered just a bit of what we can get into so I hope you’ll come back. I recommend everybody to go to the American Mind Website and pull up his essay on the COVID Coup. There’s a lot of wisdom in it and Dr. Codevilla is a very wise man and I hope you learn a lot from it and I hope we can continue our conversation sometime soon.

Angelo Codevilla (46:11):

You’re most welcome.

Bill Walton (46:12):

Oh and hold on a second. My wife is in the other side of the set. Oh yeah, and we’d also have you read the ruling class versus the country class which really gets at the roots of how this division came about and why it matters today.

Angelo Codevilla (46:30):

What about the rest of my books?

Bill Walton (46:31):

How about the rest of his books? Well I think, I want to read your one on [inaudible 00:46:37] prince. That sounded interesting. So we’ll read all your books. So anyway, thank you and I’ll see you again. All right, take care. Great. Bye. Thanks. Thanks for joining.

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