No. This is the FCB Podcast Network, a brand Mansoda day that we won't said and we won't say all we got it? Does no one get Takedatowa? Is gonna be okay? Day that we won't said and we won't say all we gotta Does no one get TAKEO? Don't don't say it is don't be okay? Hey, guys, welcome back to another episode of Just Listen to Yourself with Kia Davis. I am your host, Kia Davis, and this is a podcast where we take hot topics, hot bun issues, and we discuss the talking points on those issues, and we draw those talking points all the way out to their logical conclusion. Today feels less about exploring topics and asking questions and having a discussion all be it imagineering with you, your listener, and more about ranting. Because today I saw a study that was released. I don't know if it was a study, it was statistics, it wasn't a study, but the Department of Education has released statistics on math scores. And I'm sure you're not going to be shocked to learn that math scores have plummeted since the pandemic, absolutely plummeted Furthermore, what these numbers reveal is that minority students, particularly black and Native American, suffered the most. They absolutely cratered math scores for middle school students. Among Native American students or American Indian, as the LA Times calls it where I'm getting this article, American Indian students dropped twenty points. Their math scores dropped twenty points between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three, Black students dropped thirteen points, White students dropped six points, and Asians held even That is absolutely incredible. This whole time, they've been saying, yeah, you know, the pandemic, the pandemic, the pandemic has had all of this effect, and the pandemic has affected students, and the pandemic has affected their scores, and the pandemic pandemic has affected their mental health. No, the virus had nothing to do with any of that. All every all of these issues are our fault. We did everything wrong, and I'm using the corporate our the corporate we because I wouldn't have done it this way right. And I'll tell you what my plan would have been for COVID. I guess at the end of the show. But Everybody keeps talking about how the pandemic caused all of this, and it's absolutely not true. It wasn't the virus. It's not like the Black plague, like if you read your history, and I know a lot of us were reading the history of the Black plague and smallpox during the pandemic or Spanish fluke, but the black plagues are great example. It's not like that the Black plague came along and yet it did halt society. It completely altered society, global society. Half the world's population was lost. And of course we didn't have the same kind of record keeping, so we don't know what like, or we didn't care much about mental health either, so we don't know what like. The other consequences were mental health or you know, small business or but clearly, when you lose half the population, the world changes. The way you interact with society changes. I mean, we've all seen Avengers endgame, right, So you could say in that case, like let's move the Black plague to twenty twenty. In this case, it was in modern times. We could absolutely say with certainty, yes, the pandemic really affected the testing scores of kids and really affected whatever the job market, small business, the economy because we lost half of our people, so we lost half of our teachers, We couldn't put the kids in school because it was highly contagious, or whatever we decided to do with the black Let's pretend we treated the Black plague the same way we treated COVID. We surely could blame the Black plague for a lot of society's ailments, because that was a disease that was brutal, A virus I guess that was brutal and took half the world's population. COVID was a virus that posed a great risk to a small minority of a vulnerable population, but otherwise had one hundred percent survival rate for everyone else. And yet we completely punished every healthy person in society. We did everything wrong. So I want to break down what we did wrong. I know that means this episode is going to get flagged. I'm sorry, Darvo. I don't have control over the COVID cultists who run social media these days. I wish I did, but I'm just gonna have to take this risk because I'm furious I'm reading I wrote about it on my substact today. By the way, you can go over there, just Kia Davis, just sub excuse me, just Kia Davis dot substact dot com, or just search my name on substack. But I wrote about it over there, and what I was saying is like, this is a confirmation of everything we were saying from the beginning right as parents, especially everything we were saying that we got ostracized for, insulted for. We were called granny killers, we were called murderers, we will call we were called racists for some reason because that's like the endgame argument always racism, and I guess keeping in theme with our Avengers theme. You know, it's like fanos the snap, you snap racism and it makes half the argument go away. So we were called even me. You know, I'm standing up talking to my schoolboard at my school board meetings and I'm going, hey, I'm a black mother, I'm raising a black family. I need my kids in school, and They're going, you're racist. You know, we're protecting minority students. Why don't you care about minority students? We are the minority here, we are, but we were treated so terribly. But that's just sort of the emotional tool. Then there were people who lost their jobs over suggesting that kids really need to be in school. And I want everyone to remember that we knew we had. None of this data is new. Turns out cdcnew right from the start that the vaccine did not prevent transmission. We held the world hostage over this damn vaccine. I'm not even going to get into the issues of big pharma and all money to change hands and how rich we made them and what politicians they supported. I'm not because that'll just that's too depressing and it's too big. It really is. There's a there there, obviously, but I can't. It's too much for me. It's infuriating. So plus, that is a small minority of people making those decisions, right the people at the very very tippy top, the people that have lunch and places that we can only dream of. Most people thought that they were on the side of righteousness. Most of the people who did what they did during the pandemic, who made the decisions they made, were either getting some kind of kickback and they were living life just fine so they didn't care, and or they really were ideologues. They really did feel like, no, you know, these stupid, toothless hicks. It's our job to make them do the right thing. Regardless, we are seeing not only did we do everything wrong, but we were lied to, and then those of us who were telling the truth and standing up for truth, we're ostracized. Lost work. Jennifer Say she's been on this show. She was the Levi's executive who she's liberal San Francisco liberal, and she started tweeting, and why aren't the kids in school? Like we have all of the we have all of the evidence, we have all of the data, we have all of the medical evidence. These kids are not getting ill. There's no reason why they can't be in school. And for that she was fired. So she was next in line to become the first female CEO of Levi's Strouse, which is you know, that would be huge. It's one of the most coveted positions in corporate America. And she was summarily dismissed from her job and her position as a fancy San Francisco liberal for for what? For what? She didn't murder anybody, she didn't like, kidnap any kids. She went on Twitter and said, I think the kids should be in school. So I find it absolutely infuriating that now, of course, now all of this evidence is coming out, and I would love to feel Schaudenfreud. I would there's a really satisfying feeling. I guess that's what the words Chaudenfreud described, but I can't because the consequences of what we have done are so dire and so dim. We did everything wrong. It's the same FBI under JEdgar Hoover that tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. To commit suicide that is now targeting its other political opponents. And so this isn't a partisan point. I just think it's important to see that. But I think that part of my view is bureaucracy itself is part of the problem. So at the local level, you've got local police and you've got local prosecutors. You don't have a giant investigative bureaucracy sitting in between. At the federal level, you have US Marshals, which as best I can tell, has not been at all politicized agency. They just carry out their responsibilities. And then you've got a Department of Justice, which I think has some problems of its own, but that's the prosecutor. You don't need this giant bureaucracy sitting in between and you know what the irony is. It's still the j. Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI. It's literally the name of the building that people reporting to every day. Check out our interview with Republican presidential candidate Vec Ramaswami, episode three fifty eight of The Outlaws Radio show Find Us wherever you get your podcast. That's out Laws, The Outlaws Radio Show, NFCB podcast. We have nothing good to show for what we did, and all this time you can have that. I know some of you out there going, well, we save lives. How do you know? How do you know? Because I need evidence, I need facts, I need data and science two words that were used very liberally by the liberals during the pandemic, and yet did not refer to either because those of us were worth quoting science. We were the ones pushed to the margins, ostracized, We were the ones getting COVID warnings on our podcast platforms. This episode is going to get a COVID warning. That whole idea of like, oh, we can't even talk about where the virus came from because somehow that's racist and now, and people were losing their jobs, their livelihoods, they were getting deep platform, they were getting fired, they were being ostracized from their families, like we were doing horrible things to each other over the truth. Here's my fear. I made a list here of things, so I'm gonna go down this list. Here's my fear. Pandemics are sort of part of the cyclical nigature of humanity. We have lots to lots of examples to point too, as I've already said, you know, black play, smallpox, Spanish flu, and so our epidemics as well. You have localized epidemics, the flu. You know, we had swine flu for a while, bird flu saw our Because viruses are cyclical, they come around, we have an issue, and they can be very serious, obviously, and so society does have to have some kind of response when we are faced with mass sickness like that. Particularly viruses, which are you know, tiny invaders and they're really hard to guard against. Its diseases is a very difficult battlefront. And we're due for a big pandemic. We were due in twenty twenty. But to say that COVID was was the pandemic, here's the thing. I don't think it was, because, first of all, we're going to get off lucky if that's the cyclical pandemic that we got, because COVID has a near one hundred percent survival rate, like statistically speaking, yeah, that point one percent at the top of vulnerable people, the elderly and the very ill, but statistically speaking, I mean ninety nine point seven or eight percent is statistically speaking, So we would be lucky to get off with that being the pandemic in this cyclical nature. But if it's not and the next one we get is something like the plague, where we really do need to keep people home and we really do need to start shutting things down or at least put precautions in place, travel precautions, where we really do need to start rushing vaccines and figuring that out. We're not going to have the heart for it. We're going to be the world that cried wolf. We're not going to have the resolve to do what we did to each other over COVID, and people like me are are probably not going to be keen to listen to what the government has to say about some disease raging through the population. Everything's going to be a hundred times more difficult to deal with because we didn't do it right with this. We used COVID as a weapon, We used it as a as a bully pulpit. We used it to hurt people. You know, we hurt each other more than COVID hurt us. We did everything wrong. We did everything wrong. There's nothing you can point to that we did right during COVID. If there is, please write me j Lty at ProtonMail dot com. J lt Y at ProtonMail dot com. Now, there are some individual people like de Santis in Florida or Christy Noom in South Dakota. There are some places I get that liked it, did some right things during COVID. But even still, I'm talking about like our national response sort of this, you know, which is I get it. That is a fractured subject because of the nature of US government. We're a republic, so we have a we have a federal assistem, which means we have a federal government that works in tandem with state governments. But state governments are superior to the federal government. They're supposed to be. We're self ruling, right, We're a combination of tiny little countries that fall under one flag, and so that makes it difficult to do what countries like Canada did or the UK did, which is sort of enacted these mass rules, which was probably one of the only saving graces for US during COVID, lest we had gone the way of Australia. But I understand. I just mean, like the conversation is obviously generalized because state to state things may have varied, or even town to town. But I think we can all agree on some of the responses, and a lot of it was formulated in DC and disseminated throughout their minions across the United States. So that's what I mean when I talk about our quote pandemic response, and I worry that we blew that wad on a virus that was not be virus, You know what I mean. And now the next time we might really be in danger, we might really need people to listen to what their local and federal and state governments are saying and take precautions and they won't be in the mood we did everything wrong. Well, let's start with education. We did everything wrong. I just read the education numbers to you. Are you surprised, Well, no, of course not. Of course you should not be surprised. I don't know why anyone is surprised. I don't know what kind of an idiot you would have to be to think that Zoom School was going to even hold kids even And I understand some people out there might have been like, yeah, it's not going to be great, but we just need to hold it together for a little while. And we did, and we could have like that's air right, Like the first few months is like, well, what the heck's going on? We don't know what's going on. Everyone's staying home, we're shutting everything down. We don't know. Are we all going to die? Like we didn't know much. And so maybe if we had just finished out that school year with Zoom School and then gone back to regular we might have had minimal damage. But that's not what we did, and that's what we did wrong. It wasn't necessarily wrong to send the kids home, send the teachers home, and everybody sits still for fifteen days to slow the spread. That's not necessarily wrong. What was wrong is when we realized there was no spread among the kids, they were fine, they were healthy, that this was a high survival rate, and that most teachers, unless they were elderly, were not at risk. Once we realized that we still kept the kids out of school. There's lots of reasons for that. Obviously, there was money attached to keeping the kids out of school. School districts were getting money from the Feds to hold the line on that. It's just that was another thing we did. I didn't even write this one down, this point down. That's another thing we did wrong. We added money to the COVID battle. There never should have been any money involved. I know, money gets involved when you need to set up government programs and pay costs and labor and all of that. But then the government saying, Okay, we're gonna shut down your business, and then we're gonna do this weird convoluted loan program that you have to jump through hoops for. But that is completely it's like a sieve, like there's no one monitoring it. I think here in California we lost eleven billion of that PPE money to like inmates who are running scams from prison. Scott Peterson, you know that guy murdered his wife Lacy. He's on death row. He scamped something like one point one million dollars from the Feds. Yeah, in PPE loans. So we added money. We paid people to stay home Oh my gosh. We paid people to not work. We paid people to not produce, to not be productive. We paid hospitals for the beds they left open for COVID patients. So we paid hospitals for each COVID case. Right. Last year, the New York Times release as an article, oh look at this. After they canceled everybody for saying the same thing, they released an article saying, we may have miscounted COVID deaths. Right, because in the beginning, it's like, there's a million people have died. Why are you You are horrible? Why don't you care that a million people died? Now we know, we'll sure a million people did die, but they didn't die of COVID. A lot of those people died of something else and then had a COVID test and if it comes back positive, you send that on to the government and you say, hey, this is a person who died with COVID. Give us some money. So we added money, which which gave people incentive to inflate the numbers and make the danger seem worse than it is. And doing that skewed everything right. We changed everything. This is another thing we did wrong. The labor force. We completely perverted and twisted the labor force, so we were paying people to stay home. I have a relative who just worked sort of a menial job like hostessing somewhere, and then COVID came along. And she's a single, young woman and she's living in a big city, and she was getting nine hundred dollars a week basically with rental assistance, which basically rent was paid for, and then a few hundred dollars a week from the state and Feds nine hundred dollars a week to do nothing. So yeah, a lot of these young kids who are just coming out of school and no workforce to go into took that money, and then they got this idea that they sort of deserved that money. There's this whole mentality that has cropped up among younger millennials and gen's ears, which is like, oh, I'm worth something. They made so much, So many of them made so much money just sitting at home, So why would I go get a job at McDonald's when I can just sit here and rant on TikTok all day for nine hundred dollars a week. So even when businesses were allowed to reopen, and here we are in this economy that's tanking, and my gosh, people are desperate for money and income. You can't pay people enough to fill the jobs. It's completely counterintuitive. It's really not when you understand human nature. And that is one of the reasons why I left liberalism, why I left the left. I realized, I don't think progressives have a very mature understanding of human nature. I think they understand. I think they like see human nature right, and they have this idea like we can change human nature, and you can't change human nature. No one can change human nature. We can change our habits, we can change our patterns, but human nature is fixed. It really is. I'll give you an example. My daughter and I were as shopping center recently. We're in the parking lot. A bunch of boys, teenage boys whipped by on their skateboards and bikes, and they were just being so obnoxious and they were like banging on cars as they went by, and like shouting and laughing at each other and just being generally obnoxious. And my daughter and I looked at each other and we rolled our eyes and I go boys, I could have said that phrase in any decade in human history, and every single person around me would have understood what I meant. Why human nature is something about bulls ways that make them do stupid things, Like a teenage boy is a teenage boy no matter where you go. And they're reckless, and sometimes they're rude and they're loud, and they get in groups and they the testosterone starts running and it gets nuts. Human nature voice human nature. So some things in human nature can't change. And progressivism is an ideology that demands that human nature changes. And that's why nothing works. That's why it can't ever work and never works. And progressivism was how we attack the pandemic, and it didn't work. None of it worked. So now we even when it hadn't changed the behavior of people. When it comes to working, people would go to work because why do you go to work. Go to work so you can eat right, so you can whatever, so you can eat, so you can pay the bills, so you can take that trip. You go to work to earn because you need to earn your way in this world. When people stopped needing to earn their way in this world, it created a sense of entitlement. And I don't understand why so many people out there, like here's what's happening today as I'm recording. There's a missing submarine. Right. It's a tourist sub and I use that term lately because I was looking at the specs for this. It's basically just a metal too. It's horrifying. I can't believe that anybody would get in this thing, but people with money do crazy things, spirit of adventure, whatever. So it's a it's basically a bunch of rich folks and the billionaire founder of the sub team and they're they're they've gone missing. They're on the ocean floor somewhere. Probably it doesn't look good. I pray that, you know, for a miracle for their families. But I mean, it seems terrifying. I can't imagine anything more terrifying. But to go on Twitter today, there are so how many people are like, yeah, well there's a bunch of rich people trapped in a tube in the bottom of the ocean. What do I care? Or that's what they get. That's what you get being a billionaire and doing something stupid. There are so many people out there, particularly on Twitter, who have no problem calling peep nepo babies entitled. You're if you're a Nepo, Baby, you're entitled. If you're rich, you're entitled. They hate entitled rich kids, entitled rich white kids, right, we hear that all the time. I hate those entitled rich white kids. You're so privileged, you're so entitled. We believe that, get that people who just have money are entitled, and we don't like them. And yet somehow we feel that people who just have money that's from the government are not entitled and we should like them. Like, what's the difference. If you have free money, it's free money. It creates entitlement no matter who you are. So what's the difference between being a poor person who gets free money and a rich person who gets free money? When free money just entitled you to more makes you feel entitled to more things, it creates entitlement. That's why you hate the billionaire's kids. So we created an entitled class of people, and in the fallout, we created a labor shortage. It's starting to even out, I see, but we've created this warped entitlement mentality. Hey y'all, this is Ali Michelle. I'm a conservative social media influencer that has been censored by big tech. So I broke away from the restrictions and started a podcast called pillow Talk with Alie Michelle. My show is a space to have real conversations about the issues that impact our everyday lives without the fear of being canceled by the big tech tyrants. Subscribe to pillow Talk with Alie Michelle and FCB podcast on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you getch podcasts. That's Ali Ali. Come check out my show. I'll see you there. We created a loneliness epidemic. I've been I've been thinking about the oddity of isolation during the pandemic because we weren't completely isolated, right if you like the Chinese, Those people were isolated, like literally sealed into their apartments, compartmentalized, not allowed out of their homes except for a few minutes at a time. They literally starved people in apartment buildings. There would be one person to shop for the entire apartment building, one person. So as a result, people just starved. Can you imagine just starving to death in your apartment in a major metropolitan area. Just it boggles the mind. So we didn't have that kind of isolation, you know, like I still had friends, we you know, stores were open. Not every store, but major stores were open. You could go, you could see people right, maybe even interact with people here and there. And so it was a deceptive type of isolation because what was what we ended up doing is we ended up sort of closing all the avenues where we would socialize. So we saw each other, but we weren't socializing. We weren't touching each other, we weren't hugging each other, we weren't meeting for drinks and going to doing all those little things you take for granted, you don't think those are very valuable aspects of your day. Yet just standing in the car line together at school, right, or standing next to somebody at the post office, we couldn't even do that, And the effect was to create isolation. And then what happened after that is when it was time to go back, what happened we formed new habits. People started feeling anxiety about going back out in public, like the idea of getting dressed, brushing your teeth, going out there and being judged. When you could just sit around at home all day and that no one would look at you and no one would care how you looked or smelled. It created an epidemic of loneliness, not to mention the people who just never really had much companionship in the first place. What we did to the elderly during the pandemic is a sin. I can't imagine so many people died alone, and I can't imagine the fear and confusion and the pain I would I would be crushed. I would be absolutely crushed if I had to say goodbye to my husband or my kids over FaceTime. There's so many people that deserve to pay such a high price. And again, there might be a time that comes where we have to be that strict and that rule, and we're not to be able to do it. Between twenty twenty three and between twenty twenty and twenty twenty three, here's an article from Fortune magazine. The homicide rate for older US teenagers rose to its highest point in twenty five years, and the suicide rate for adults in their early twenties was at its worst in fifty years. And you might wonder, and that's a lot. So a lot of young people were affected by the pandemic, Loneliness said in Desperation Depression. Here's why the suicide rate rose. I think a lot of people feel like, okay, well, depression rose, so that is the that accounts for the rise in suicide, And technically that's true, but I think really what it is, Well, I'll let me read this quote to you, because I think this really points out what was happening, especially among young people who haven't had the opportunity to get connected yet in society outside of school, so they don't have you know, if they weren't in school and they didn't really have friends outside of school. You and I have our work friends, and our friends base is very diverse because we're adults, so we have friends from all different areas of our lives, you know, church and work and social events and sports or whatever. But a kid has basically their one group until they get old enough to spread their ring wings. So here's what this scientist says. This researcher picture a teenager sitting in their bedroom, feeling desperate and making a decision impulsively to take their own life. If they have access to a gun, say it's game over. And that's what is Most suicides are a spur of the moment decisions and if you don't have the means to do so available to you, in that moment. Most of the time, the moment passes. I know I've told the story on here before and you've probably heard it before, because this guy has an incredible story. I heard him on the Tim Conway Junior Show here in LA and he is an older gentleman now, but he committed tried to commit suicide. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, which as we know, is like a popular suicide spot. They have a lot of precautions now, if you go, they have a lot of suicide prevention. They have netting, and they make it really difficult for you to get out there to jump off the bridge. But he managed. There's workarounds and he managed to find one. And I can't remember how high up the bridge. It's very high, obviously most of you have seen pictures of it. And he's miraculously he survived this jumpany He said, I stepped off the bridge into the fog because it was fogging like it is mostly in San Francisco are often and he said, the moment, the second, the split second, I began to fall, I changed my mind. That's how most people are, right. I think most people it's a spur of the moment decision and you change your mind, and sadly for too many people it's too late then. And for him, he said, on the way down, he said, all I kept thinking of was that my parents were never going to know that I wanted to live. H It gets me. And then he says some other things about free falling through the fog because that's water, and he's like, when you're falling that fast, the crystals are like razor blades. So he was all cut up from the fog and then of course hitting the water. It was a miracle. I think, like a I think a seal like actually pushed his body near a boat and then a boat picked him up. It was because it was literally a miracle. To this day, won't tell people how he like what position he was in when he jumped, because he doesn't want to encourage, which is sad because it would be interesting to know. But it's sad that also they're idiots out there who would take that as encouragement. Oh anyway, that's a big side bar. But all that to say that suicide is for the moment, and when you're isolated, you have more opportunity for that spur of the moment decision. No one to stop you. There's no one around, no one to talk you down, and no one's coming in, no one's calling you. No you're not like, there's no you're not going to school tomorrow. So I see we did everything wrong. We just we abandoned kids. And then when parents were saying, hey, our kids are suffering, they really should be in school, we were just treated so horribly. Small business was affected so far there are an estimated two hundred thou and small businesses that have closed due to the pandemic. It was just so bizarre, how easily so many people accepted that, well we have to get our groceries from somewhere here. Well sure we do, sure absolutely, But if one place can't can be open and do just fine, why can't we all? And why is that one place, one big corporate, big box store we close? Sound small business? And I know when we say the word small business, it sounds so quaint, it sounds cute. You think about you know, your friendly neighborhood grandma, that's sells stationary. No small business is America. Small businesses still make up sixty four percent of American business. I think if that number's higher, I don't know why I have sixty four in my head. I'll have to ask Carol. Carol Roth as a new book out. She's a financial genius. She's coming back on this show, so I'll ask her. It's huge. It's it's something around the seventy percent range. So it literally is the engine of this country. That's where employment comes from, that's where the taxes come from. And we just crushed it. We hobbled them, we broke our ankles and then expected them to walk with Just devastating to watch people lose their businesses, just oh my gosh. We moved my son to college year two of the pandemic in Chicago, and I mean Chicago was barely open when we got him to school at first, and just walking down the street, it was like it was so sad. It was just business after business, close, close, close, closed. We did everything wrong. Families split over this vaccine. If you shunned a family member over the vaccine, shame on you. I can understand you saying, hey, I don't want to be around you, even I think that's ridiculous knowing the data and knowing the science, but hey, I get that. But I'm talking about people who have who just for like you, know what if you if you are afraid to take the vaccine, there's something wrong with you. And I don't even want to be with you anymore. I don't want to see you. You're worse than a Nazi. Families broke up over this, all right, I've got to take a break. When I come back, I'm going to tell you my plan for the pandemic. It's the same FBI under j Edgar Hoover that tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Junior to commit suicide that is now targeting its other political opponents. And so this isn't a partisan point. I just think it's important to see that. But I think that part of my view is bureaucracy itself is part of the problem. So at the local level, you've got local police and you've got local prosecutors. You don't have a giant investigative bureaucracy sitting in between. At the federal level, you have US Marshals, which as best I can tell, has not been at all politicized agency. They just carry out their responsibilities. And then you've got a Department of Justice, which I think has some problems of its own, but that's the prosecutor you don't need this giant bureaucracy sitting in between. And you know what the irony is. It's still the j Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI. It's literally the name of the building the people reporting you every day. Check out our interview with Republican presidential candidate vvek Ramaswamy, episode three fifty eight of The Outlaws Radio show. Find us wherever you get your podcast. That's out Laws, The Outlaws Radio Show, NFCB podcast. Welcome back. All right, we're going to wrap it up, and I wanted to first give you the opportunity to weigh in. What are some of the other things we did terribly wrong during the pandemic jilty at ProtonMail dot com? And what would you have done to make it right? Okay, so here is what I would have done if I were the Queen of America during the pandemic. I empathize with Trump during those early days. I don't know what all information He was prippy too, and I do understand that it was all muddied up by an election and him having to make decisions that could affect his re election and maybe not being sure about what the right thing to do is. So I get that, and again I don't know what information you had, but I do feel for him because there was so much at stake and this people were so panic, and when he tried to put people at ease, then the you know, the medium machine ginned up and they were like, oh, he's going to kill us all. And so then he decided to air on the side of caution, or at least that's how I see it. Maybe his ideas were more nefarious, but I figured he was airing on the side of caution because what do you do. You're looking around and world governments are closing. They're closing their borders, they're closing their stores, they're closing their schools. You're seeing people are panic. There is an election on the horizon. You don't want people to say, hey, look he killed all these people. So they came up with says, hey, we'll do this short fifteen thing fifteen days to slow the spread. Understand the impetus behind that, especially when you realize that in the beginning, we thought respirators were going to be in high demand and they were going to be the saving grace, and it turns out respirators were the problem. Most of the people who were dying in the early days were dying because they got put on the respirators and that turned out to be the total wrong treatment for COVID. So I get that. But because government cannot give up control once it has control, it just it was too dangerous. Again, if this was the Black Plague, maybe maybe I would have changed my mind about that. But even from the beginning it was clear we weren't in Black Plague territory. So if I were a Queen of America, here is what I would have done with COVID nothing I now, can you believe it? What the government not doing anything? As queen, I would leave it to the states to do what they want to do for their citizens. Now, some of y'all, like me, are stuck in states that are run by communists. So you know, say, lovey, you live in Michigan, you live in California, You're kind of screwed. But that is the good and the bad of a constitutional republic rights. That's the tension. Sometimes you're likely leaders make good decisions and sometimes they make bad decisions, But it's up to each individual state to decide who those leaders are to make those decisions. And you got to deal with it, or you move, which is another great thing about living in America. You have freedom of movement, which we lost during the pandemic. So I would have done nothing, now, not absolutely nothing. I would have started programs, for instance, maybe done some things with healthcare testing, you know, the government passing out tests and even asks. You know, I think that's fine, I really do. I think it's fine to equip people and give people what they need. And so if you wanted to do that, if you wanted to give people vouchers, or if you wanted to offer alternatives like I would have encouraged the Education Department to develop a zoom program. I would have encouraged that. And I also would have had the Education Department said about what well, first of all, listening I was Queen of America, there would be no Department of Education. So I'm not even gonna I'm not even give you my my thing for education. There would be no Department of Education. Is absolutely useless. There's not a single student at the Department of Education, everybody. I don't even think there's a teacher there anyways. But I would ask people to do what we were forced to do. I would have asked them, particularly with the understanding that we had in the beginning of the pandemic versus the end now where now we know all the science and we know that everything we did was wrong. Then we were guessing a lot. I would have asked you, well, would you please wear a mask? Would you please get this vaccine? Would you please close your business if you can, or limit people? And look, people were doing that already voluntarily, weren't they. We all know there were so many people who got off on it. They were so excited about it. They're excited to stand at the door and yell at you for not coming for coming into their business without a mask. You know, so plenty of people did it. There would be plenty of people who would be willing to participate in a way which it did become. It would become a type of virtue signal, I guess, and that's what it became. But I would I would encourage that, Okay, great, go ahead, go ahead, if you want to do this for your business, you have absolutely every right too. Here are the statistics, here is and that's what I would have done. Mostly, I would have taken like three percent of what they ended up spending on all their ridiculous COVID stuff, and I just would have sunk it into an advertisement campaign and sunk it in to a publicity campaign, and I just wouldn't. I would have spent all my money, well my money, your money. It would be mine. If I'm Queen of America, I guess it is my money. Everything that's yours is mine. Would have spent all my money on just combating media messaging, you know, taken over the air and doing what the media did, taken over the airways, paying YouTube to put put this messaging out. I would have done what Sweden did, which is about nothing, and that country probably came out the most unscathed, even in the case of a black plague, a terrible virus. I'll tell you this. I'll end with this. I am loathed to ever removed freedom from people. And I know that that feels wrong, especially when there's a danger like a virus. Right, It's like, well, this is for the greater good, Kira, It's for the greater good to keep people isolated or to force them to do the things they don't necessarily want to do, because it's going to help everybody, and it's just for a little while, And everyone needs to suck it up. And I understand that reason, and I do. I get it, and I get that you that you can imagine that is the right thing to do. But I think freedom is for the greater good. And when you sacrifice freedom for one thing, you'll sacrifice it for anything, and then you don't have freedom. And there is a slippery slope when it comes to giving up freedom and when you give it up, and look, we did it in COVID. We gave it up in one place and suddenly it was gone in so many other places. It's so dangerous. It's so dangerous to say, well, yeah, if we can suspend freedom for this little bit for the greater good, then suddenly the greater goods starts getting all lucy goosey and wonky, and then the greater good just becomes whatever anybody thinks the greater good is. Like, now you hear a lot of activists saying we should shut down, we should go into lockdowns for the environment. Well, they got a great idea, and now you know, no bad idea ever goes away all with these people. So I know it sounds so flip and naive to say I would do nothing, and I wouldn't do exactly nothing. I do think the government had a part to play and educating people, advertising what's going on, and even helping maybe with medical costs and mitigating some of the hospital particularly in nursing homes. The government really should have That's where all the resources should have gone to the nursing homes, not to Scott Peterson on death row. We should have done a massive program to just funnel all that cash into caring for the elderly. But to say we would do nothing, I know it sounds strange, but I just think freedom must be protected at all costs. It has to because when we're gonna need it, we're gonna need it. So as terrible as it sounds, yeah, I think you have to do things for the greater good. I do believe in the greater good, and I think freedom is for the greater good. So if there was a terrible pandemic, we would have to support each other in other ways, not ways to take away each other's freedom, but ways to protect each other. You know, we would have to depend on the goodness of others and figure out how to protect ourselves from the not goodness of others. And that's all I was asking people to do in the first place, Like teachers, I get it, you don't know what's going on with COVID. Maybe you had cancer, maybe you were older, you didn't want to be as school. I get that. Stay home, you stay home, You suspend your career for a year, and let a younger teacher, college student or an intern get in the classroom, someone who's healthier, less vulnerable. Let them have your position. But then, of course teachers were like, oh, I'm entitled to this job. You're entitled to your job, but my kid's not entitled to his education. Every day, Well tell me what you think. I go and tell me what you think. Glty at ProtonMail dot com. J L. T Y at ProtonMail dot com. Don't forget to sign up for my substack Jessica Davis dot subsat dot com, by my book Drawing Lines, available on Amazon right now, and of course, like and subscribe to this podcast. I will talk to you next week and until then, don't forget. Every once in a while, just stop listen to yourself that we won't and we won't say all we gotta does no want to get tao Okay, that we won't say. And then we want to bade all we got it does No one can take that away, don't okay. 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