Rand Paul And The GOP Still Blaming Fauci

[0:05] Six years later, anti-science Christian nationalists like Senator Rand Paul are still trying to make Dr. Anthony Fauci’s life a living hell by falsely blaming

[0:16] him for the COVID pandemic. Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission was sued for lack of diversity, and of course, a Trump judge redefined diversity to dismiss the suit. And establishment Democrats hate progressives. And the pearl clutching has boiled down to repeating GOP talking points. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[1:00] If you follow the news at all, you are probably aware that in the last week of July, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee was having a hearing and they had subpoenaed Dr. Anthony Fauci. And Dr. Anthony Fauci was the head of the National Institutes of Health, and he was the COVID czar during the pandemic. He led the response to the pandemic and advised President Trump at the time. He appeared often on TV talking about it. Well, the conservatives in this country, the extreme conservatives, like the people like Rand Paul, who is the chair of this committee that was interrogating Dr. Fauci the other day, they don’t believe that the pandemic was a thing. They think it was a hoax, that it was a setup, that Fauci was involved, and that he needed to be prosecuted.

[2:16] And they have been making these threats since the pandemic, and since Fauci left, retired from government service. They’ve been accusing him of nefarious things and that they were going to prosecute him and send him to prison for ruining this country. And they also accused him of killing people with the pandemic. The major claim that they make is that his agency, the National Institutes of Health, funded a gain of use for the COVID-19 virus. Which means that they accused him of paying to have it developed, to weaponize it, to use it for nefarious reasons. And they believe that it escaped the lab in China. And so they want to blame him for the pandemic and all the resulting chaos and upheaval, saying that he intentionally set it off.

[3:19] Or he was an accessory to setting it off. Okay. Now, I’m not going to get into the politics because that’s beyond the scope, of this podcast insofar as it is a political issue. Um, science has been politicized in the last, uh, decade, decade, two decades, you know, ever since the conservatives started getting more assertive in, in the legislative branches around the country, they’ve been pretty much anti-science. They don’t believe the science, they believe in their own research, or they only believe in science that agrees with their political agenda. And we see that here in Ohio where the state legislature banned gender-affirming care, because in spite of the scientific consensus and the, advice of the major medical associations and hospitals and the hospitals in Ohio that said otherwise, they claimed that gender-affirming care was harming children and they needed to ban it. That’s just one example.

[4:40] Another example is they’re wanting to ban abortion for women, claiming that it harms women. Not only does it claim that it harms women, but that they’re murdering babies. We see that.

[4:57] With the head of the Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., and his anti-vaccine crusade. We also see the anti-science in the conservative movement with the people that are called the.

[5:15] Maha Movement, make America healthy again. And a lot of the influencers, our social media influencers, aren’t doctors. They’re not scientists. They make wild accusations, wild claims about the food system and about chemicals. And usually it’s because they want to sell their, uh, snake oil. You know, that’s usually how these, these things work. They say you’re poisoning your body with this X thing. Uh, and how you can get rid of it is take my elixir. And so people spend millions of dollars and, and it’s on, there’s TV commercials with stuff like this, say snake oil stuff. I had a friend of mine that used to work for the Center for Inquiry, Nick Little, he’s a lawyer, and they sued Walmart and.

[6:11] CVS for marketing these Wu medications in their pharmacy departments.

[6:22] Putting it on the same shelf with actual medication that works. And this was stuff that was highly diluted. The benefits were suspect at best if it didn’t make you sick.

[6:36] And there’s a lot of stuff that’s on TV today, TV commercials for this medicine, this snake oil that they’re trying to sell. And if you watch these commercials closely at the end, they always have it at the end down at the bottom of the screen in small text. So you can barely read it. It says the medical claims made in this ad have not been reviewed or approved by the Federal Drug Administration. And so that is a red, that is a red flag right there. And so that should tell you that if it has not been, if the claims have not been proven, then they’re BS. They’re just total BS and they should not be believable. And I, I’ll throw, I’ll throw a link or two in the show notes about some of the snake oil stuff, like the, the lawsuit with Walmart and CBS.

[7:29] I’ll try to find some previous articles about that. So this is what Dr. Fauci came into when he showed up for this hearing so that they could try to rake him over the coals. And basically, at the end of President Biden’s administration in 2024.

[7:55] President Biden issued a preemptive pardon to Dr. Fauci because there was, not rumors, but there was actual public statements by people like Rand Paul and other extreme Republicans that they were going to prosecute Dr. Fauci when they got control of the war. White House and the Congress and everything, and that they were going to put him in prison. And so President Biden.

[8:25] Did a preemptive pardon for Dr. Fauci, but that doesn’t cover anything after he left public service. So that’s why they brought him in to the hearing to answer questions. And so what they were going to do is they were going to try to catch him in a lie and charge him with perjury. Well, Dr. Fauci had a lawyer He had several lawyers with him, which is a good thing And he knew their intent And so when the hearing started, he made a statement, Complaining about the witch hunt And it is a political witch hunt against him, Rand Paul has had an unhinged obsession with him for years, And so that under advice of counsel He was not going to answer any questions and he was going to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights not to. And I was like, good for him. You know, if somebody’s bringing you in to interrogate you and you don’t believe that they’re doing it in good faith or want to find the truth, just invoke your Fifth Amendment rights. And so that’s how the whole hearing played out. I forget. I didn’t watch the whole thing. I think it might have been an hour or two. So you had these extreme Republicans that want to get Dr. Fauci reading these extreme.

[9:52] Factless claims and innuendos and insults and everything to Dr. Fauci. And then he would say his response to every question was, under advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment right not to answer the question. So I thought it was pretty funny because these guys, they had probably practiced, how they were going to get Dr. Fauci. And Dr. Fauci just kind of threw it back in their face. So now they’re going to, Dr. Rand Paul is going to submit him to the Department of Justice for obstruction of Congress. He showed up. He was subpoenaed. He showed up. He elected not to answer the questions. They knew, basically, they knew the answers they were looking for. And if he wasn’t going to say it, then they would get him for perjury. Okay. So, again, it wasn’t a good faith effort to find the truth, to figure out how something happened.

[10:56] Okay. Now, the science aspect of it.

[11:00] You know, they are blaming Dr. Fauci for weaponizing this virus and causing all the lockdowns and school kids losing their almost a year of education because they couldn’t go to school, and the businesses that suffered and the post-pandemic inflation. And they are putting that all on Dr. Fauci. That had nothing to do with him. The response had nothing to do with him. He was going by the best information that he had. And the thing about it is, it was a worldwide consensus. Dr. Fauci isn’t in a bubble. He’s not just one guy deciding all this stuff. This was a worldwide consensus that this pandemic was happening, and this was the response that needed to be taken. And one of the senators, I forget who it was, actually admitted 15, it might have been Senator Paul, 15 million people died worldwide due to the COVID-19 virus. 15 million people died. If it was a hoax, if it didn’t mean anything, how did 15 million people die? Almost a million people died in the United States alone.

[12:17] And, and most of those deaths were needless deaths. Most of those deaths were the, uh, besides the, the vulnerable people, like the immune compromised people, elderly people, um, drug users, you know, things like that. Those people were susceptible to, if they got it, they would possibly die. You know, if somebody had COPD or something like that. They, it’s a good chance that they would die. I mean, that’s what scared me about it. That’s why I never left my house for a couple of months is because, I didn’t know how I would, my body would react if I got the COVID, if I got COVID.

[13:03] And so then you had a lot of people that died because they had no defense for it. They were compromised. Their health was already compromised. And then you had the people that knew better and thought they knew better than a scientist. And these were the people that didn’t wear a mask, didn’t have the six feet separation. They went out to parties, to bars, to fairs. They went to church. Remember, there was a Supreme Court case that allowed people to go to church because the churches were complaining that they were being discriminated against and that people need to get together to praise God, which, doesn’t make any sense because you can praise God at home. You don’t need to be in a church obviously and so.

[14:01] You know and and so you had all these people that thought they knew better they got sick they ended up dying or you had the people that thought they knew better and they found the snake oil uh, solutions to covid like the ivermectin which doesn’t take care of viruses in humans. You had President Trump claiming people could drink bleach and protect themselves from COVID.

[14:34] And these guys wanted to prosecute Dr. Fauci because he knew what he was doing. He got us through the pandemic. His leadership in the response got us through the pandemic. With only a million people dying, it could have been much, much worse.

[14:53] And the government supported the research at the time into the vaccines, which once the conservative, extreme conservatives got control of the government, they got rid of all that stuff. The Doge cuts cut a lot of the RNA research money because it was political. They didn’t agree with their political agenda, even though RNA vaccines are relatively safe. And then you have somebody that’s in charge of health and human services who doesn’t think vaccines are safe and wants to get rid of them, who has a major measle outbreak. Then you have these scientific behemoths in charge of the Department of Agriculture, and you have diarrhea lettuce. You have E. coli outbreaks going on now in the food supply. Again. Salmonella and eggs. Again.

[16:04] And then you have Dr. Fauci. And the thing is, Dr. Fauci has a long history of knowing his job and working his butt off to protect people like he did during the pandemic. He was at the forefront of the AIDS crisis in the 80s. And the thing is, like most people at that time, he thought it was a gay plague. And he didn’t take it seriously until he talked to people who had it. And looked at the evidence and saw this is something that’s major, we need to deal with it. And he started dealing with it. He was one of the lead scientists on trying to find a way to stop the AIDS crisis. Even though he had little to no support from the government, President Ronald Reagan at the time thought it was a gay plague and ignored it for many, many years.

[17:02] But we had Dr. Fauci. So when I heard that they were having this hearing, knowing who was involved, it made me mad. It made me angry. You know, anti-science people make me angry, personally make me angry. You know, it’s the kind of people I want to smack around. And I’m not, I don’t do that. I know that’s not good. But sometimes I get that mad. Now, what I’m not talking about is I’m not talking about scientism. You know, the undue acceptance of science. I’m not saying that at all. Science has been wrong in the past, and we know that. We have proof of that. The eugenics movement was wrong. The scientists that did gonorrhea tests on black people back in the 30s and 40s, I think it was, that was wrong.

[18:06] There’s been quite a bit of stuff going on. Dr. Mengele, the Nazi doctor that was doing experiments on prisoners, that was wrong. So I’m not saying that we can never criticize science or take a critical look at it. We should. And as somebody online recently said, that scientists have at least two major things about them. One is they want you to know everything. They want to give you all the information about something. Whatever it is, they aren’t trying to hide anything. You know, you get a lot of these Maha influencers saying that scientists don’t want you to know this thing works or whatever. Scientists, credible scientists, ethical scientists are not like that. They want you to know everything. The second major point with scientists is they love telling other scientists that they’re wrong.

[19:10] And that’s the scientific method. What you do is somebody makes a claim. Other scientists try to replicate that claim and the conclusion. If they can’t, then they tell that scientist you’re wrong. They love doing that. So that’s why for finding out the truth in our world, our natural world, I believe the Dr. Fauci’s of the world far more often than I believe the Maha influencers or people like Robert Kennedy Jr. who saw a video about something. Or ChatGTP, that’s the big thing nowadays is people put in ChatGTP and got the information. And all that does, that ChatGPT for most part, is it just scrapes stuff that’s already out there. You know, it’s stuff that you can find if you look for it. If you’re not lazy, you can get the information.

[20:14] So that’s what I wanted to talk about today, about Dr. Fauci and the anti-science crusade in our current government. And it’s a problem. It’s going to be a problem for quite some time, no matter how the November elections turn out. And so I can’t tell you specifically who to vote for, but I can tell you that I would not vote for somebody who did not trust science, who was anti-science. I would not vote for somebody who believes that Dr. Fauci should be in prison. Because that person does not have my well-being in mind. They have a political agenda that doesn’t match my health and well-being. And that’s a problem. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[21:35] If we remember right, back in 2025, President Trump formed this blue ribbon panel to examine religious liberty in the United States. And basically what it was is it was the Religious Liberty Commission. It was put under the Department of Justice.

[21:59] The chairperson was Dan Patrick, who is the lieutenant governor of Texas. And the vice chairperson was Ben Carson, and it included a wide range of Catholics and Christians, evangelicals, and a token Jewish person. And they were going to examine the religious persecution done in the name of the government in this country. And they ended up putting out a report. They finished their work. They put out a report that said that religious people have gotten the short end of the stick in the United States over the last few years, and that separation of church and state was the problem, and that needs to go away, et cetera, et cetera. We all knew that. What was interesting about this commission was that it didn’t include any other religions. It didn’t include Buddhists. It didn’t include Rastafarians. It didn’t even include atheists. And basically, it turned into a bitch session where Christians would come in and complain that they weren’t allowed to force their religion on somebody. And they were very, very upset about that.

[23:29] And so when it was getting ready to publish its report, an interfaith group that also included Americans United for the Separation of Church and State sued the Trump administration and federal court to basically stop the commission. Saying that it was formed illegally, that it didn’t represent all views, and that there was a federal law that when these commissions are formed, that it has to include the views of all people, and it has to have a balanced view. The claim that they made was that the overwhelmingly conservative Christian makeup lacked a legally required balance of viewpoints. On Monday, July the 27th, a federal judge tossed out the lawsuit.

[24:22] It was filed by the Progressive Interfaith Alliance, as well as Hindu-Muslim Sikh groups, and as I said, Americans United for Separation Church and State. The judge said the lawsuit, which saw a more ideologically and religious diverse commission, failed to meet legal criteria to proceed. He wrote that the commission is diverse in other ways, such as including both clergy and lay people. And he said the commission has adherence of at least five different religions, by citing the one Jewish member and then members of various Christian denominations and identities. So basically, the judge was saying because these Christians and evangelicals, all don’t go to the same church, then the interfaith group didn’t meet the legal standard that they needed to say that it was discriminatory.

[25:17] Oh, that cracked me up. When I heard that, when I initially read that, I thought I was reading it wrong. Honest to goodness, that’s what a federal judge said, that it did have, a diverse viewpoint because the adherents didn’t all go to the same church. Oh my gosh. Oh, I hope, I hope the interfaith group, I hope they appeal that, but probably not. They probably won’t because the lawsuit actually got dismissed. So maybe they’ll try it, try it again. I don’t know. Said Cronin, the judge, wrote that because Trump’s executive order creating the commission rejected the idea of religious liberty as inconsistent with civil rights, he wasn’t obligated to appoint someone who disagreed with that founding premise. And that’s not what they were talking about. It said the Interfaith Alliance argued that the commission lacked balance because members believed the law should protect the exercise of religious belief over the civil rights of minority groups. And that’s exactly what they talked about. That was just.

[26:30] That still is cracking me up. Court case. Yeah, yeah. You know, we’ve got all these Christians and evangelicals, but because they don’t go to the same church, it’s a diverse viewpoint.

[26:43] The other interesting tidbit about this Religious Liberty Commission is they had a member. Yeah, her name was Carrie Prejean Bowler. She was a former beauty pageant participant who got in trouble at that time for being a religious conservative. She’s a Catholic. And so, of course, you know, Donald Trump, loving beauty pageant women, appointed her to this commission and she got kicked off. She got kicked off back in March. She got removed from the commission because she was anti-Semitic. Turned out she was anti-Semitic. Like, and so they had, a committee hearing where they were hearing from students and other people in colleges who claimed that the colleges weren’t protecting students from anti-Semitism. And Carrie Prejean Bowler said, disputed the fact that there was any anti-Semitism going on.

[27:59] And she is actually one of those Christians who believe that the Jews are responsible for killing Jesus. And other anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. She supports Candace Owens, who’s a podcaster who’s also made comments like that. And when she got kicked off, she actually claimed that the commissioner, the head of it, Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, was a Zionist. So, yeah, so she was a real piece of work. So yeah so we kind of knew that when they released their report that it was going to say what it was going to say that that the poor old, religious people mostly christians mostly evangelicals are so persecuted in the united states and we need to do more to make sure that they are taken care of and allowed to, practice their faith without any government intervention at all.

[29:04] You know, it’s like, why waste the time? Why waste the time on this commission? We knew exactly what they were going to say. And unfortunately, that lawsuit was dismissed. So we’ll see what happens after that. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either complement a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets at secularleft.substack.com and it is totally free.

[29:46] As we speed towards the November election, there have been a lot of primaries that have been run. I believe Michigan is the first week of August, and then there’s some other ones before we start. Usually Labor Day is the date that most campaigns really hit out for the November elections. And one of the campaign, one of the election stories that’s been brewing, for the past, over the summer, the spring and the summer, is that according to establishment Democrats and Trump, communists are taking over the Democratic Party. Basically, what they are complaining about is that some of these candidates that have been winning in certain districts are either members of or endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. And there are a lot of the political class, establishment class, that is not happy about that. And we know why they’re not happy about it. The Democratic Party, as a party, has gotten low marks. They’re not as low as the GOP. They’re not as low as Trump. But people don’t hold them in high esteem.

[31:13] One of the reasons is people don’t believe that the Democrats are fighting for them against Trump. And some of them aren’t. Chuck Schumer isn’t. You know, there’s more things that they could be doing to try to block what Trump does, but all they do is they send strongly worded letters or they do press conferences. And that’s about it. So they’ve been endorsing, they’ve been endorsing the Democrats, the establishment Democrats have been endorsing middle-of-the-road centrist Democrats for office. Meanwhile, some of those districts are getting challenges in the primaries by progressive, either progressives or those that are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists. Zoran Mandami, the mayor of New York City, endorsed three candidates for, congressional districts in New York, and they all three beat establishment Dems for their primaries. So they get to move on to November. And when that happened, you thought that the world had fallen apart. And so there’s been a concerted effort for the last few weeks now, going into the summer, of chastising and trying to diminish the work of the DSA in winning those elections.

[32:42] Now, this is something you need to understand. These are people who campaigned for these spots. They filed the paperwork. They knocked on the doors. They visited voters. They told them who they were. People knew what policies they supported. And these voters still voted for them and selected them to be the nominee. The voters selected them to be the nominee. It wasn’t some backroom, cigar-smoke-filled room, which most establishment Democrats would love for that to happen. Because they like to have a thumb on the scale and decide who gets to run and who doesn’t. But the voters chose those people. And so what I want to do is the freak out. The freak out, like I said, is across the board in the political class.

[33:44] And so I’m going to play some clips here, some audio clips. I have Joe Scarborough, who does the Morning Joe show on MS Now. He kind of tries to pretend that he’s an independent, but we all know that he served in Congress as a Republican. And until he made nice with Trump, Trump didn’t like him too much, but now they’re friends again. And so, get a load of what he talks about in this clip. And then I’m going to play another clip by James Carville, who is a Democratic consultant, who’s been out of touch, who hasn’t won an election since Bill Clinton in the 90s, who is still raking in the money. See, that’s the thing. These Democratic consultants, you know, if the progressives are running, they don’t need consultants. So you know i think that’s what’s wrong with james carvel is he’s uh, upset that he’s losing money we were gonna lose money so i have a clip of him from a podcast in which he said that he’s not in the democratic party if it’s being taken over by the dsa.

[35:02] And then he complained about one of the candidates in new york he got the name wrong but he complained about one of the candidates who was against, he said, interracial marriage. He got that wrong. He was even reading it from the New York Times and he still got it wrong. And so I wanted to play that, listen to that, and then we’ll come back and talk about it more.

[35:22] Okay, so we’re gonna put up on the screen a few of the things that are part of your platform. And I wanna ask you, just give me sort of a true or false on these, abolish the Senate. True. Okay, replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them. Abolish ICE. Absolutely. Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the U.S. illegally.

[35:48] As a long term plan. Yep. Remember how the Democrats pushed back against the lawlessness of January 6th, and the attempt to overthrow the election, how they rose up and fought back against Americans and immigrants being gunned down in American streets. And they did it to defend the basic American values and the Constitution. And as far as defense goes, JFK promised America would pay any price, bear any burden to assure the survival and the success of liberty. LBJ passed the most sweeping civil rights legislation in history. That’s a party worth fighting for. Bill Clinton balanced the budget four years in a row. Nobody’s done that in over a hundred years. And Barack Obama, he created the Affordable Care Act and expanded health care coverage to record levels. You know, he added 20 million Americans to the insured rolls.

[36:49] And Joe Biden fought back against the corrupt anti-democracy forces that still infect Donald Trump’s Republican Party. But being that party defends democracy, also demands condemning a party that calls to abolish the U.S. Senate, the House, the presidency and the Supreme Court, wants to release murderers and rapists from jail. I mean, one candidate was asked by The New York Times three times.

[37:20] Do you support letting murderers out of jail? She wouldn’t even answer.

[37:25] A party that zeroes outspending on defending America’s borders, defending America overseas, defending America at home, takes police officers out of our children’s schools and off our streets, and erases America’s borders? Come on. Democrats have always believed you can love your country while pushing it toward being that more perfect union. And you can do that without wanting to burn it to the ground. If Democrats want to make America more affordable, more fair, and more free, and I think they do, they better speak truth to its most extreme base, or they’re going to let a small faction of radicals drive more people toward Donald Trump. Mr. Valle, in the New York Times, reported and I have the quote right here I’ll get to it she is against.

[38:25] Passed off all their views, she has attacked interracial relationships in the American flag. Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you. I’m sorry.

[38:36] I’m just not. And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word, schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, no, no, we’re a coalition, we’re a big tent. And there’s just some shit that I can’t be in the same camp with. And we talk about what Madonna was three for three last night in Manhattan. They call it the Comic Corridor. Fine. Jason Crowe’s service pack, Vote Bets, 10 for 11. You wouldn’t know Jason Crowe exists. No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know Abel Schenberg exists. You wouldn’t know. I want to be very specific. I understand the free press for being here because, if they nominated David Duke or something like that, we’d be the same way. I understand all that. To the extent I understand the Times because they are the New York Times, so they have to cover the hometown newspaper. But the idea, the idea that we must neglect everything else that’s going on, all of these other primaries, all the recruits Jason has, all huge phenomenal successes we’ve had, and declared that the party is now under the control of a democratic socialist of New York City is insane.

[39:58] But understand, these people do not like Democrats. Not only are they not Democrats, they wish Democrats poorly. So I just cannot—maybe.

[40:11] There’s a way that you can say to—I guess Mondami is the leader of it is, you know, you insist that—you try to insist that the people that run into your banner run as a Democratic socialist and don’t use the Democratic, Party as your guideline. And let’s negotiate the terms of a schism here. Maybe we can part under some kind of advantageous terms for both of us. But I’m done. I’m not in that fucking political party. I am totally comfortable in a political party that spends time questioning the policies of the government of Israel. In fact, I’m enthusiastic about that. I don’t want to be in a political party that denies the right of the state of Israel to exist. That’s just not – I just can’t do that. I’m sorry. It’s just not doable.

[40:57] They are a great gift to Donald Trump. So basically, the Morning Joe and the Carvel clip ends with that this is perfect, a perfect gift for Donald Trump to win the midterms. You know, they just totally forget that Donald Trump is so far underwater. His policies are so far underwater. He’s like 30 points underwater. Right.

[41:27] Recent poll that I showed, and this was several weeks after the New York City elections, Democrats on a generic ballot are up 11 points. Some of the races that people thought was a shoo-in for Republicans have been switched from likely Republican to toss-up. The Ohio Senate race is a virtual tie. The governor’s race is a virtual tie. And the Texas governor’s race is a virtual tie because the candidates that are being run are just so tainted with the stink from Donald Trump. And there is nothing going around. I saw a recent poll. I’ll have to see if I can find a link to it. They did a poll about democratic socialism and half the people didn’t even understand what democratic socialism was. And half the respondents did. And you haven’t seen an effect in it in any of the other polling that’s been done recently. And speaking of polling, somebody that I follow on Twitter, I’ve been very disappointed because they’ve swallowed the red pill concerning Democratic Socialists. And that was Rachel Bytecoffer. I’m not sure how to pronounce her last name. But she was.

[42:56] A PhD that has done polling work and political strategy. She is totally jumping into the Democratic Socialists are bad for Democrats pool. Even though she’s the one that was complaining about centrist Democrats in 2024 when Harris was running and the corporate Democrats that were caught. She kept saying that it’s bad for the party, they’re not going to win, and it ended up that they didn’t. And now she’s on the other side.

[43:33] She had a post up on Twitter, complaining or criticizing Zoran Mandami for his effort to have affordable groceries. He’s having a pilot project where he’s establishing some city-run grocery stores. That are going to sell basic necessities at 30% discounts. And I guess it’s starting with two stores in Manhattan, and I think the Bronx is the other one. And so Dr. Beikhofer was saying, well, that’s not going to end well. And.

[44:18] I think some of the reaction to it is the fact that the Democratic Socialists, like any reasonable progressive out there, opposes the genocide in Palestine. That’s one of the reasons why Harris lost in 2024 is because she turned off enough voters that didn’t come out for her. And being that it was going to be a close race, you know, Trump won because people were pissed off that Harris wasn’t trying to get on that bandwagon about stopping the genocide. And so, like I said, the Carvel was talking in his clip about.

[45:03] Democratic socialists saying that Israel didn’t have a right to exist. Nobody said that. There’s no, there might be some really far, far left democratic socialists, that may have said that, but nobody, no rational person on that side of the aisle believes that. Just like the, When he was complaining about that candidate talking about being against interracial dating, she was opposed to interracial dating because she didn’t like how black men were dating white women. And that is a common concern in the black community. I’ve heard that before, where some black women complain that the black men don’t, come to their community to look for mates, that they date these white women. Trying to, I guess, raise their stature? I don’t know. And so that is a valid complaint in that community. That doesn’t mean that this woman, this candidate is against interracial dating.

[46:12] Or opposes it or wants to make a law about it. And the other thing, too, is, you know, these were big elections in big areas that get a lot of media coverage. But you can be a progressive, even be a member of the DSA in a rural area, and nobody’s going to really care. I mean, they have progressives running all the time in Minnesota and Wisconsin for various offices. And so just because these people have these things like that clip with the Morning Joe clip where a member of the DSA was talking on, I think that was Fox News, saying they were going to do away with the Senate and they were going to do away with, the military and things like that, there are real concerns that we are spending too much money on the military. There, you know, it’s that whole thing when they were talking about.

[47:14] Defunding the police and how the conservatives took it to the extreme that somebody said that they wanted to defund the police means that you want to get rid of the cops. And that was not the case. It always meant that you wanted to take some of that money, all that money you’re spending on police, and redirect some of that into social service programs to try to interrupt any potential violence or any potential, criminal activity before it becomes activity that the police have to react to. Because, again, the police are reactionary. They don’t prevent crimes by looking for it ahead of time. They react to crimes. They investigate. They arrest people. They chase people.

[48:06] So all this horse crap from these establishment Dems, it’s just really pissing me off. It’s just really pissing me off. I’m not a Democratic Socialist. I just, I’m not into parties. I don’t, I haven’t, I vote, I tend to vote for Democrats, but I’m not an official Democrat. I don’t, I’m not registered with the party. I don’t like, because I just don’t like the party. I just don’t like the structure of that party. You know, it’s always the, you know, it’s my turn, so I should get elected. Or you have people that are bought and paid for by corporate money. You know, like James Carville. So James Carville doesn’t want to be in the Democratic Party. I’m fine with that. Because like I said, he is batting a thousand in no races. He has not been relevant since the 1990s. But yet there they are. They traipse him on to these things when he’s saying BS stuff about Democrats and about the DSA. So I can rest assured to my audience that the Democratic Socialists are not taking over the Democratic Party just yet.

[49:35] And the other thing, too, that also bothers me is why aren’t we seeing this outrage against actual fascism from the Trump administration? I mean, actual outrage. Chuck Schumer and James Carville, they are more angry, at progressives than they are at some of the crap that Trump has pulled. And that is why the establishment Dems, the centrist Dems, lost those particular elections. Is that going to happen across the board? Probably not.

[50:13] You know, I saw a video clip, it might have been from 2020, when John Ossoff down in Georgia was saying that he doesn’t support Medicare for all. Which a lot of DSA people support Medicare for all. He supports Ossoff, at least at that time, supported the Affordable Care Act, and the public option, which, by the way, is a compromise for the big pharma and for corporate health insurance. Medicare for All would pretty much decimate private insurance companies, which they should be. In fact, Ossoff has tried to get legislation passed that would prohibit insurance companies from denying or delaying treatment or coverage for treatment. And he’s lost every single time. Now, if he supported Medicare for all and got some of his buddies involved in that to get it passed, then that would be part of it is they would not be able to deny or delay coverage or treatment in a Medicare for all scheme.

[51:24] So anyway, that’s all I want to talk about that. It’s really grinding my gears recently is this whole freak out about Democratic Socialists. Again, I’m going to have a link to the Democratic Socialists website. If you’re interested in it, find a local chapter. Personally, I’m not going to do that, but I do support a lot of the things that they talk about. And there’s a lot of voters out there that are struggling, that are having problems, and they’re looking to that. So if you’re a progressive, maybe if you’re weary of the label DSA, at least, you know, trumpet some of their policy statements if you’re running for office.

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