Fake Wars, Fake Claims: The GOP’s November Panic Is Showing

[0:00] The Trump administration claims we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979 and we are now finishing it. Like most everything coming from that administration, it isn’t true. And could someone get Lindsey Graham a towel to clean up his war orgasm? The real reason Trump wants the SAVE Act to pass is because he knows the GOP is going to lose big time in November. And here in Ohio, the GOP claims the presumptive Democratic governor candidate, Dr. Amy Acton, was a tyrant and quit during the pandemic as Ohio Health Director. And neither one of those is true.

[0:45] This is Secular Left with Doug Berger. An independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day. So Trump wanted to distract from the Epstein files and his other problems, like the not reducing the grocery prices and the job, poor job numbers, terrible job numbers. And the fact that the Republicans are probably going to lose the midterms. They’re going to lose control of Congress in the midterms. And so what’s he do? He decides to bomb Iran along with Israel. And so it’s been a couple of weeks or a week or two that they’ve done this. They claim it’s for regime change. They wanted to get rid of the Ayatollah. So they killed the Ayatollah. They also killed a bunch of other members of the leadership. And then the Ayatollah’s son took over. So they didn’t get rid of the Ayatollah. And the fact that they’re doing it with Israel. Israel has been wanting to bomb Iran for decades. And the reason why they want to bomb Iran, they claim it’s because of Iran’s nuclear program, which may or may not have been sustainable.

[2:13] I think it was in June of last year when the B-52s bombed the nuclear sites in Iran. And President Trump at the time claimed that they had obliterated their facilities, nuclear facilities. But that was an argument that the Israelis always used. The other argument that the Israelis always used to attack Iran is that Iran supports the Hezbollah and all the other militia groups that are trying to get rid of Israel, financing state-sponsored terrorism, which they are. Let me be clear. Iran is not a good country, okay? There’s a lot of issues with Iran. They’re a theocracy. The people there do not have any civil rights. They do sponsor terrorism around the world. They sponsor Hamas and Hezbollah that have attacked Israel. that’s all of that is true alright.

[3:21] But the thing is, Israel’s been wanting to attack Iran for decades. And each time that it came to Israel wanting to attack Iran, the president of the United States at the time would talk them down, give them more money or more equipment or something so that they wouldn’t do it. Because the rational people that were in charge at the time knew that if they let Israel attack Iran, that it would destabilize the area. It would affect the oil prices and all of that stuff. You know, it’s just, it’s not precision bombing. Put it that way. You just can’t bomb the country and think that, go, oh, that’s no more of that. And then go home. because there’s repercussions. There will always be repercussions. If you attack a country unprovoked or provoked, there’s always going to be a repercussion anyway.

[4:23] So they bombed the nuclear facilities last year, and Trump decided, well, that was enough. And so he brokered a ceasefire and told Israel to stand down. And then for some reason, this month in March, Benjamin Netanyahu talked him into it. Now, somebody in the Trump administration, I think it might have been Marco Rubio, said in an interview that Israel was going to attack Iran anyway.

[4:58] And so they figured that if Israel attacked Iran, Iran would attack United States targets. And so we decided to attack them first. That seems plausible. But the thing is, Israel has been wanting to attack Iran for decades.

[5:18] Lindsey Graham, Senator Lindsey Graham, has been wanting to attack Iran for decades. And man, he was so happy on the talk shows when he was making the rounds after the bombing started that I thought he was having orgasms as he’s talking about it. That’s how happy he was. And then there’s a lot of people, a lot of Christian nationalists, extreme Christian nationalists that love it because they think it’s the prelude to Armageddon.

[5:48] And that is what happened recently when somebody reported, a military person reported to the, military religious freedom organization that one of the commanders said that this attack was bestowed by God and to bring on the second coming, et cetera, Armageddon. You know, that’s bad news. You don’t want to hear that when you’re talking about somebody that’s got heavy ordinance and guns. You don’t want to hear that, that this is for God. We’re going to do this.

[6:28] Because the Iranians, they’re Muslim, isn’t God on their side too? See, that’s what happens when you start doing this bullshit with religious violence. Okay. So that’s going on. And basically, one of the things that I think it might have been Pete Hegseth started it and it kind of got spread throughout the Trump administration when they were responding to it. They were talking about how we had been at war with Iran for 47 years. 47 years ago, 1979, after the Iranian revolution, they stormed the U.S. Embassy and took hostages and held them for 400 and some odd days, 444 days, something like that. And so we’re just and so they Trump people are saying well we’re just finishing it well we haven’t been at war with Iran for 47 years Iran has hated us probably for longer than 47 years, and that is because we committed a coup or staged a coup in 1953 they got rid of a democratically elected prime minister or not prime minister president and brought back the Shah Haw.

[7:50] And and installed him as ruler of Iran. So I probably could go into detail and explain everything. But I saw this video clip from Mehdi Hassan of Zito talking about it, and he’s going to explain it better than I can. Can you refresh our memory of the last time the U.S. attempted regime change in Iran? So the major regime change, you have to go back even further than 1980. The year that we don’t talk about enough in Western media, but which every Iranian knows, is 1953. In 1953, Mohamed Mossadegh was the democratically elected left-wing prime minister of Iran. This was the height of the Cold War. This was the Eisenhower administration. Anyone who was vaguely left was seen as a secret communist ally.

[8:35] And the CIA, the Dulles brothers and co went in and with the British did a coup.

[8:40] Took him out, engineered fake protests, and toppled Mossadegh and brought back the Shah, the royal ruler, the king of Iran. By doing that, they not just set Iran’s democratic development, secular development behind. They then precipitated something like 16 years of autocracy under the Shah. The Shah was a secular ruler. He was a pro-Western ruler, but he was a brutal ruler. His secret police was feared throughout the Middle East. And by 1979, the Iranians were ready for a revolution. Now, that revolution wasn’t supposed to just be religious. Let’s be clear. There were many, many factions. There was the left. There were, you know, there were the trade unions. There were also the Islamic parties and Ayatollah Khomeini who led the revolution from France and returned as the conquering hero and then stamped out the other parts of that coalition. But that Islamic revolution in 1979 was precipitated by our coup in 1953. The word blowback that you often hear was a CIA term invented precisely to describe what happened after 1953, the unintended consequences of our dumb and illegal interventions in the Middle East. It led to the very regime we’re now fighting with, which has been in power for over 40 years. And then, of course, the Khomeini comes to power in 79, and immediately we back Saddam Hussein against him in an illegal Iraqi invasion of Iran. And, of course, he takes American hostages because of the Iranian-American hostilities and the perception that America is behind the Shah. And then Jimmy Carter’s presidency partly fails as a result of that, the failed hostage attempt to release the hostages.

[10:07] There’s reports, many reports over the years that Ronald Reagan was secretly telling the Iranians not to release the hostages. You then have Iran-Contra in the 1980s, where we’re actually facilitating weapons going to Iran in order to fund another illegal war of ours in Nicaragua. So we have a very long and sordid history with Iran. I haven’t even got to the airliner that we shot down in 1988, killing hundreds of Iranian civilians that we never really apologized for. And of course, the Iranians have targeted Americans across the Middle East in attacks, kidnappings. As we talked about in Iraq, it has been a horrible relationship. But you have to go back to 1953. I know we don’t like doing history in the United States. I know we have short memories. We have the memories of goldfish in this country. But in the Middle East, they have quite long memories. So that is the history of the United States and Iran. This is not going to help relations at all. Bombing them and killing all those school children in that school that we bombed, that’s not going to help things at all. And so Israel is using the opportunity to bomb the crap out of southern Lebanon to go after Hezbollah.

[11:14] And so that led, that bombing in southern Lebanon triggered a Lebanese gentleman who was a naturalized citizen. And he drove a truck into a synagogue near Detroit on Wednesday the 12th, March 12th. Which uh was very scary luckily none of the none of the uh teachers or children that had us there was a school there too they weren’t injured or anything like that there was a security guard that got injured the uh perpetrator was killed and and so that’s bad but that was probably the bombing in southern lebanon triggered this guy and so that’s what you get you get the retaliation the retribution, and it just, violence begets more violence. The other thing too that’s going on now is Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz. That is that little bit of narrow passage between the, was it the Red Sea and the ocean, and it comes very close to Iran, and they are shooting and blowing up tankers. They’re mining it. They’re closing it down.

[12:33] And 20% of the world’s oil comes through that straight-of-hormuz. So that has jacked the oil price way up. Trump is flailing. He doesn’t understand how his Venezuelan playbook did not work with Iran. They thought they were going to take out the leader, that people were going to give him a parade, give Trump a parade, and we were going to get all their oil. That’s, I’m sure that’s what he was thinking. And it’s not going to happen. And Israel’s giddy because they get to do what they’ve been wanting to do for decades and get revenge on the nation that’s been funding all the terrorists that have been killing Israelis over the decades. So he’s really dug a hole for himself. Trump has really dug a hole for himself because we’re not going to be able to extract ourselves out of this anytime soon. And there’s some MAGA people that are upset because he ran on the fact that he was going to not start any wars.

[13:39] And here he goes starting a war. And it’s obvious why he did it. He’s having problems at home and he’s trying to distract it. But the fact that he ran on that and then he totally changed his mind is something to behold. And then the other thing that really caught my eye that kind of gave me a chuckle is that Russia is giving Iran targeting data for U.S. troops for the Iranians to hit.

[14:13] Our buddy, our Trump’s buddy Putin is helping the Iranians attack America. Oh, it’s just choice. It’s just so much choice. My guess is that that’s Putin’s revenge for the United States assisting Ukraine. That’s my guess. So we don’t know how that’s going to happen, but I wanted to kind of clarify the history of the conflict between Iran and the United States and how it really is the United States’ fault that we’ve come to this point. And now it’s just making things even worse.

[15:00] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[15:20] So President Trump knows that he’s in trouble for the midterms because you have an unpopular war. He started an unpopular war. Gas prices spiked. Stuff that people care about, like grocery prices, hasn’t changed any.

[15:40] And people are discontented. And we’ve seen that Democrats, when we’ve seen these recent special elections, Democrats have flipped Republican seats, and there is expectation that the Democrats will win big in November of 2026, possibly retaking the House, possibly retaking the Senate, maybe both. The Republicans already have a thin majority in the House, and it’s getting slimmer by the moment. And they also do not have the votes to pass things in the Senate. Even though they have a majority in the Senate, the Senate works on that rule that you have to have 60 votes to pass anything. Because you have to be able to get over, get away from a filibuster. and you need to have 60 votes to end in filibuster. So basically they won’t pass anything unless it gets 60 votes. Unless you’ve agreed beforehand to waive that. And usually they don’t because both parties want to have that tool in the shed, even though it’s not part of the Constitution. But that’s another episode. We’ll talk about that for another episode.

[17:02] So one of the bills that Trump is pushing to try to, you know, he tried, he tried gerrymandering, forcing red states to gerrymander. And that is kind of hit and miss. He didn’t kind of win a lot of that. And then California came back and gerrymandered against him. And so that kind of was a wash. The other thing that he’s trying to do is he’s trying to re-litigate his loss in 2020. He had his personal FBI people seize ballots in Georgia, which he claims that he won in Georgia and it was stolen from him. And he just recently had the Department of Justice ask for the election data from 2020 from Arizona. And it just so happens that Arizona was a hotbed of conspiracy theories about the election, so much so that the Republican majority in the state legislature in Arizona had brought in a third party called the Vote Ninjas. I forget what the name is, Ninja something, to come in and audit the election.

[18:20] And they came away with the same answer that Trump lost Arizona. Well, Trump doesn’t believe that. So he wants that data. He wants to take that data too. So basically what he’s doing is he’s setting up a way of taking over elections. He’s going to claim that there’s mass fraud and that the federal government needs to take over state elections as a matter of national security. That’s what he’s trying to set up.

[18:50] Or at least he’s going to try and it’s going to go to court and, you know, you know, the, you know, the playbook, this is his playbook. Okay. His basic playbook is he just does stuff that nobody ever wants to do or never thought you could do. And then one of his court, people that he appointed to a court will let him do it. And then there’ll be a lot of gnashing of teeth and then people will rise up and then he’ll back down. But this is the election we’re talking about. So, you know, he’s going to try to muck everything up and do his shenanigans. So the other thing that he’s doing is he’s pushing the SAVE Act. And the SAVE Act on the federal level, what it does is it requires a photo ID to vote. It also requires that you prove your citizenship before you can register to vote.

[19:47] And it limits the documentation that you can use to prove your citizenship. 2020, something like that, we were supposed to move to real IDs. And I remember going through the process of getting a real ID. And I had to have a birth certificate, my social security card, and some other piece of identification. And it cost like 50 bucks to get this enhanced ID so that I could travel on an airplane. You had to have it to travel on an airplane.

[20:21] Well, the real ID is not allowed to be used to register to vote, which is insane. That’s just an insane limitation. I’m sorry. Basically, you either have to have your birth certificate or a passport in order to register to vote. And if you use a birth certificate, your name, your current name has to match the name on the birth certificate. So what that will do is that will impact married women. That will impact transgender people who have different names on their birth certificates than the names that they currently use. And it will also affect people like J.D. Vance, who has changed his name three or four times. But we know he won’t have a problem because he’s J.D. Vance. He’s the vice president. So people will look the other way for that.

[21:16] You know, so, oh, and just a side note to people in Cincinnati, if he comes and votes, I would challenge his ballot because I bet you he is not, he doesn’t have proper identification on his voter roll. But anyway, that’s if the SAVE Act passes. Anyway, the other thing too is that they’ve been trying to do, he’s been pushing the SAVE Act. And the other thing that I forgot, the other thing that he’s trying to do is get the voter data from all the states, not just not just aggregate. They want to know your name, your date of birth, your address.

[21:56] Whether or not you voted Democrat or Republican and the last four digits of your Social Security number. Now, they claim that that’s just public information, but it’s not public, public information. The state has it. The state that you vote in has that information, but it’s usually not public information. When a party like a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian party requests voter rolls so that they can send out mailers, they get your name and your address and your zip code, but they don’t get your date of birth. They don’t get the last four digits of your social security number. So that’s the other thing he’s doing. And he’s pushing the SAVE Act. In fact, he’s pushing the SAVE Act so hard that he’s told the Senate Majority Leader Thune that he’s not going to sign any other bill until they pass the SAVE Act.

[22:53] So you’re like thinking, why is he pushing so hard on the SAVE Act? Well, because what they’re going to do is they’re going to use it to purge people off voter rolls without their knowledge.

[23:05] You’re not going to get a notice. You’re going to show up at a polling station to vote, and they’re going to say you’re not registered. Or if you find out ahead of time that you got purged, that you’re off the voter roll, when you go to re-register, then you’re going to need all this identification. In fact, I think that’s what they’re gunning for, is they’re going to force everybody to re-register.

[23:29] And so why is he going so hard on this and he wants to do away with mail-in ballots completely except for the military and disabled people so you’re like why is he going so hard on this it’s because that is how he can manipulate elections if you can’t if you make it near and possible for thousands of people to vote, it’s easier to manipulate the results. If you have voter data, it’s easier to manipulate the vote. He actually said in a speech in early March in Georgia exactly why he wants the Save Act passed. We’ll never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t loser race. We want voter ID. We want proof of citizenship. And we don’t want mail-in ballots except for the military far away, except for people that are ill, disabled, or people that are away. Even for a vacation, we’ll be generous, okay? Other than that, we don’t want mail-in ballots because mail-in ballots say cheat. Yep, you heard him right. He says if you pass the SAVE Act, and he’s talking about the SAVE Act, that Republicans will not lose an election for 50 years. Talk about brazen, talking about arrogant.

[24:55] And everybody knows it. And that’s the thing. He’s not subtle about it because everybody knows that that’s his playbook. That’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to game the system to give himself an advantage so that Republicans will not lose the midterms. On the backside, what they’re going to do is the Department of Justice is probably going to sue a bunch of states about the results after the election. So basically, I don’t know if people remember, listening to this podcast, I don’t know how many people remember the Gore v. Bush Supreme Court case about the Florida recount in the 2000 election. You need to go check it out. And the reason why is because it dragged through courts for so long that we didn’t have a, we technically did not have a clear winner all the way through almost January of 2000, of 2001, I mean. You know, the election was in November. The result was in doubt because of the Florida count and the chads and all that stuff. And so the court case played out during November and December, and we didn’t have a winner, an official winner until January or whenever the Supreme Court ruled. I forget when the Supreme Court ruled.

[26:23] And so that’s what I see happening. If the SAVE Act doesn’t pass, I feel that that’s going to be his next step. Well, I think it’s going to happen to you anyway. He’s going to have the Department of Justice go into specific states, probably the blue states, and challenge the results and go to court for it and try to get the results thrown out to try to save the Republican majority in the House and the Senate. The other reason, the main reason, and I hear this from here in Ohio all the time from the Frank LaRose and the people running for secretary of state here in Ohio, is it’s meant to end voter fraud.

[27:12] And so, unfortunately, that is not a good reason to disenfranchise people is what you’re doing. When you’re creating a poll tax where you have to spend $160 to get a passport to prove that you’re an American citizen to vote, and if you don’t have that passport, you can’t vote, so that’s a poll tax, you have to have a really good reason. And I found this video clip on Facebook the other day from this guy that does the sub stack. He’s called the justice guy. And he basically tells you why the whole argument about voter fraud is total bullshit.

[27:55] The SAVE Act is unconstitutional, and I can prove it to you with numbers in the next 90 seconds. And I have a deep dive on this one in my sub stack, but to start, you have to understand that the Supreme Court uses a test called strict scrutiny in cases like this one, which answers the question, is the government’s interest in solving a problem big enough that it justifies using a law that limits a constitutional right? In the case of the SAVE Act, the question would be, does the government have a big enough need to prevent non-citizens from fraudulently voting that it justifies the potential disenfranchisement of people who have an actual right to vote? And to figure that out, you can compare the size of the problem the government is solving, which is non-citizens voting, and the size of the problem the solution proposed by the government actually creates. So the first part of our question is how many non-citizens vote? And to find out, we can look at probably the most extreme study conducted by the Heritage Foundation, which incidentally is the same group that created Project 2025 and supports the SAVE Act, collecting and documented instances of voter fraud since 1982. So over that time span, the Heritage Foundation was able to document a whopping 1,513 cases of voter fraud. But that’s over a time span of 43 years. And during that time, Americans cast about 5 billion votes. Oh, And also those 1513 fraudulent votes were mostly cast by citizens because the total number of voters cast by non-citizens is 68. Most of them cast in error and not through fraud.

[29:24] 68 over 43 years. That’s 1.6 cases per year. That is an incidence of non-citizen votes of 0.00000136% according to the Heritage Foundation. So now that we have the size of the problem the government is solving, let’s compare it to the size of the people whose constitutional rights will be compressed. There are about 22 million people who would have a hard time complying with the SAVE Act in order to vote. Let’s even drill that down to the single most vulnerable class, and that is economically disadvantaged citizens who do not currently possess proof of citizenship. And that group is made of 3.8 million people. Yes, almost 4 million voters could be disenfranchised and prohibited from voting to ensure that we prevent 1.6 ineligible votes from happening. Dear American voter, this is not about preventing fraud. This is about preventing the other side from Legitimately Winning.

[30:31] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[30:51] The primary for Ohio for the 2026 election is May the 5th, and we have a pretty competitive race for governor. We currently have on the Republican side, we have Vivek Ramswami, who is running as a Republican, and he has chosen Ohio Senate President Rob McCauley as his running mate. And Rob McCulley is from Northwest Ohio, and he lives in Napoleon. And then we have Casey Pooch. He is running as a Republican, and he has chosen Kimberly Georgetown as his running mate. Casey is from the Perrysburg area. And then there’s Appalachian businesswoman Heather Hill is running as a Republican with Stuart Motes as her running mate. And entrepreneur Rena Turner is running as a Republican with Jalen Turner as her running mate. Oh, that’s interesting. She made headlines in 2020 after being accused of attempting a citizen’s arrest of Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. So that means she’s probably an anti-vaxxer. And then running under the Libertarian banner is former Honda worker David Kissick, and he’s running with James Mills as his running mate.

[32:20] And so for the two major parties, like how the Republican situation is going to work out is many people think it’s going to be Vivek Ramaswamy because he’s going to get the endorsement for Trump if he hasn’t already. I think he did. And Rob McCauley is running with him as for the lieutenant governorship. Casey Puch, who I mentioned earlier from the Perrysburg area, he decided to jump into the ring, I believe, for the white supremacists in Ohio who don’t want to vote for somebody from India, even though Ramoswamy is not from India. He was born in Cincinnati, but his parents were immigrants. And so Casey Putsch, I don’t know how to pronounce it, but there’s a lot of people talking about him being the preferred candidate because he’s a white man.

[33:18] And in Heather Hill, Republicans won’t nominate a woman, I’m going to tell you right now. They just won’t. And, of course, then the Libertarian, he’s going to take in the November election, if he makes it to the ballot in November, he will take votes away definitely from the Republican side. So, and on the Democratic side, the only Democrat, main Democrat that’s running, there’s no other Democrats running, is Dr. Amy Acton. And she is running with David Pepper. And he’s the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party. I believe he’s been in state elective office previously, but I can’t remember what office he held, but he’s a known quantity.

[34:05] So that’s how it’s shaping up. It’s shaping up. It’s very competitive. I saw a recent poll that came out this week.

[34:13] Showed that, uh, Amy Acton was ahead of Ramaswamy in, uh, in the, in a poll. Um, so, you know, it’s still early and it was within, it was kind of within the, the, uh, limits of the error, error rate. So it could be essentially tied, but it showed that she had a couple of points on him. And, of course, Ramaswamy has his problems anyway because he’s connected to Trump.

[34:44] He also believes that they should get rid of, basically get rid of income taxes. And then, of course, we’ve got these Republicans that are trying to get a ballot measure on the ballot to do away with property taxes. So, of course, Ramaswamy doesn’t have an answer as to, well, then how are we going to pay for things like the fire department and the police department? If we don’t have taxes, if they do away with taxes. But, you know, they don’t think about stuff like that. You know, especially Rav Swamy, he’s a tech bro. He flies around the state in his private jet. So that’s it. Anyway, so Dr. Amy Acton, she was the director of the Ohio Department of Health when the pandemic broke out in 2020 or when it showed up in Ohio. And she was the one that signed orders that kept people at home, that did the lockdown.

[35:44] Kind of, and she appeared with the governor in their daily press briefings as they talked about the numbers of people that were catching it, that were hospitalized, and how best to mitigate it.

[35:57] Um, there was a stay at home order. So everybody had to stay at home. They shut, uh, businesses down. You couldn’t go out. You couldn’t, you weren’t allowed to drive anywhere. If you did go, if you did have to go out because your work was essential, then you had to wear a mask. You had to, um, socially distance. And it was all in order to flatten what they called flatten the curve. That means that people were going to get sick.

[36:28] But if everybody, if enough people did these mitigation behaviors, like staying at home and wearing a mask, that it would lessen the number of people that eventually got sick and had to be hospitalized.

[36:44] And at the beginning of the pandemic, there wasn’t any vaccines. Nobody knew anything about this virus. They didn’t know. And now, with hindsight, we know that it mutated and there was variants and things like that. But we didn’t have a vaccine. So that’s the things that you did. I remember staying at home with my family and not leaving the house. And if people would come to the door being very cautious, making sure we had masks on, Um, we did drive to go to the store cause the stores were open and, and doing the, the, uh, six feet, uh, social distancing and all that stuff. I remember doing that. Well, there was a segment of the population at the time that hated the lockdown, especially when it went on for two or three months. They thought that was too long. There was people who thought that they knew better for medicine. They thought that the state was overreacting and that since they didn’t know anybody that got sick and they weren’t sick, then why should they stay at home?

[38:07] You know, because they didn’t understand a pandemic. They didn’t understand the virus. You know, the main thing about the COVID-19 virus was that you could have be a carrier of that virus and you could get other people sick and you wouldn’t be sick until much later. And so we had a lot of anti-vaxxers. I know I have a picture somewhere in my files of protesters at the statehouse pounding on the door, demanding that the stay-at-home order be lifted. There were armed people that stayed outside Amy Acton’s home in Columbus to protest.

[38:50] And the other people that protested were Republican state legislators, including Rob McCauley. In fact, Rob McCauley was so against the lockdown that he worked with another senator to introduce a law. It was Senate Bill 311 that would have removed the power of the health director to issue those kind of orders. They would have to be go through the state legislature. They would have to approve it before it would become official. Luckily, Mike DeWine stuck to his guns and stuck to the science and vetoed that bill. And that was in June, June of 2020. And that was the month that Amy Acton resigned as the state health director.

[39:44] So Rob McCauley is running for lieutenant governor. So he’s supporting Vivek Grumswamy. And he comes out with this…

[39:54] This, uh, image on Facebook the other day that caught my eye and he posted on March the 4th and it had, it was a picture of a Columbus dispatch posting and it was a letter to the editor. Somebody had written and it had a picture of Dr. Acton with governor DeWine during the pandemic. And the title of it was, I won’t trust Amy Acton. She has stolen fair shots from Ohioans. Now, it’s a letter to the editor. I don’t know who wrote that letter to the editor because I didn’t look at it. But it was interesting that Senator Rob McCauley posted that. And then he wrote on his blurb, she failed. Many lost everything they worked for. Then she quit.

[40:51] So that’s the main attack line that these Republicans are using against Dr. Acton. All right. First, they say that she is a tyrant, a dictator akin to Attila the Hun.

[41:06] There’s also some people during the pandemic in 2020 that compared her to Nazi, a Nazi, even though she’s Jewish. Talk about and they also talked about her being part of a world uh domination or something like that it was an old jewish trope so they’re slinging anti-semitic insults at her these were these are and these are people i don’t think there’s i think one of these people that said that stuff is not in the state house anymore but most of them were still in the state house So that’s the attack line. They’re saying she failed and she quit. And she did resign, but she didn’t quit. She resigned for an ethical reason. Because at the time, in June of 2020, she was getting very intense pressure from the state legislature to rescind her stay-at-home order. They wanted to open things back up because, again, they denied the science. They just said, you know, we’ve been on a lockdown long enough. I am not sick. My friends aren’t sick. So it’s over. Let’s get back to work. Let’s go back to normal. Since she was the one that had the sole power to sign these orders, they wanted her to rescind the order. And she refused to do it.

[42:29] And so I have an interview here that she did with Channel 4 in Columbus when at the time that she announced her run for governor, where she talks about what it was that made her resign. Well, I have to ask you, there was a lot of speculation when you left the administration and stepped away from COVID leadership about why you did that. Why did you step down? You know, often the press has talked about protesters, and we all know that I’d actually, you know, the governor and I had had issues with that since March. When I stepped down in June, it was because I refused to sign orders. As you know, the health director is the only person who can sign health orders, orders that were coming from the legislature, from lobbyists and particularly Larry Householder, that frankly would have killed people, that would have hurt people. What orders did they want you to sign? There was a real pressure on the governor and on me to sign orders. And this one order in particular was the final straw for me. It was to open the fairs. We were just, if you remember, beginning to open businesses and finally stabilizing our hospitals. And it was pressure for fairs to be opened in a way that there was no science for.

[43:49] And that is when I said to the governor and his team, you know, I will continue to advise you and which I did. I have continued to advise the governor on issues, but, you know, it wasn’t anything to do with the protesters. So that’s what it was. It wasn’t the protesters. It wasn’t the people that were slinging anti-Semitic remarks at her and complaining about her. And it was the people that were ignoring the science thinking, hey, I’m not sick. My friends aren’t sick. Let’s just open things back up. And so she did modify the order so that people could leave their house.

[44:33] But they still had some things that were closed, like some schools and amusement parks and things like that. And so that’s what she says Larry Householder wanted her to do, was to sign an order to open up the fairs, the county fairs. And she was like, that’s just too much. And so she resigned. So she was basically forced to resign because they wanted her to do something that she didn’t feel ethically able to do, which is good on her, good on her. She remained as an advisor to the governor for much of the rest of the pandemic, but she worked on other projects. And it’s interesting to note that after she resigned and they got another health director that was more pliable and Governor DeWine lost his nerve, basically, and gave in more and more so that a lot of the orders got rescinded or changed and lessened.

[45:44] And it’s interesting to note that the amount of deaths associated with COVID shot up dramatically after Dr. Acton had left, after she was no longer the director of health. And that can only mean that because Ohio, which was leading the way at the very beginning, because some legislators ignored the science and got tired of the lockdown, they caused the deaths, needless deaths of many Ohioans because they got somebody to rescind the health orders, most of the health orders. And one of those persons was Senator Rob McCauley. So he may not trust Amy Acton. He may think that she quit, but it was because of his leadership in the Senate that caused the death of thousands of Ohioans needlessly, because he supposedly didn’t get sick and he didn’t know anybody that got sick, so he thought that the medical science was full of crap.

[46:58] And so that’s what I wanted to do is bring that up. And it just gets me, you know, that these Republicans are saying how much of a tyrant Dr. Acton was while she was health director of health during the pandemic. But then they say she quit. You know, they still haven’t taken responsibility for the over 20,000 Ohioans who needlessly died during the epidemic. And it was lucky that Macaulay’s bill that would have put the legislature in charge instead of the health director, luckily DeWine at least had a backbone enough to veto that, and then it didn’t get overridden because it could have got overridden, but it didn’t. And it’s just ridiculous that these Republicans still think this way five years later. You know, they were on the wrong side of history. They’re always on the wrong side of history. They’re on the wrong side of the pandemic.

[48:07] The belief about the pandemic. Dr. Acton was correct for everything, pretty much. And so one of the articles I was reading said that people were complaining because she was wrong at the very beginning. I was like, yeah, there was a lot of people that had a lot of wrong information because we didn’t know anything definite. That’s why we had the lockdown. That’s why we had the stay-at-home orders. Because we didn’t know what this infection would do, this pandemic. And then once the information became clearer in the path to move forward, and then we finally got the vaccine, then things started turning around. And now when people get COVID, unless you have complications, like if you have COPD or kidney problems or something like that, you’re less likely to be hospitalized and you’re less likely to die now.

[49:07] Because the science solved the problem for the most part. But you still have people like Senator Rob McCauley who think that they know better than a doctor, a medical doctor, who had all this training and all this education. They think that they know better. And those are the people that I do not want leading the state. I do not want ignoramuses. We see that in Washington, D.C. with Trump. He is a moron. And that’s what you get. The stuff that’s going on now is what you get when you have a moron in charge. And Senator Rob McCauley is a moron.

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