Senator Rand Paul 7-28-26
Showing mention at 3:40 — highlighted below
Transcript
35 segmentsIt's unbelievable, man. When you have a U.S. Senator, I don't know if it's true for all of them, but when you have Dr. Rand Paul scheduled to call, and it's 7.45, man, you can just take that to the bank. Dr. Paul, good morning, sir. Good morning, Jack. Thanks for having me. I love it, man. I'm just sitting here watching. A little secondhand go up to seven. You got people, don't you? You got people for that. Well, we calculate our interview times according to the Vandenberg atomic clock. And when the atomic clock strikes the hour, make the phone call. Place the phone call. A couple of world leaders in town today. Benjamin Netanyahu. and Volodymyr Zelensky for obviously the U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham's funeral, but they're also going to talk to the president this morning. What if anything do you expect to come out of that? I would assume they will ask for more money, more missiles, more armaments. I think that's not really the answer. You know, I think it'd be great to try to figure out a solution to the Ukraine-Russian war, but I think that's going to ultimately involve negotiation. I don't think either side's going to win an outright victory. They're sort of at a standstill. They both are able to kill each other, primarily with drones. It's a deadly war. But I don't think there's going to be a military solution. So I think we should let them know that the money spicket is going to be turned off. We're going to borrow $2 trillion this year. So we really don't have the money to be funding both the Ukraine War and the Iran War. I'm more concerned about the American homebuyer. I'm more concerned about the American trying to go on a trip this summer and paying for the gas. So I think those are the things we need to be looking at and not how to continue war. In a letter sent to Senator Mitch McConnell's office on Monday, Governor Andy Beshear's urging the longtime senator, and this is a quote, to provide proof of his capacity to serve. Your thoughts about that, sir. You know, I think Andy Beshear is looking. From Taco Night and Toulon to Loon to sushi in Tokyo, make every bite rewarding with gold from MX. Wherever you've done, four times membership rewards points at restaurants worldwide are piling up. Learn more at Americanexpress.com slash explore dash gold. Terms and points cap apply. For publicity, he's looking for a way to appear pertinent to anything, you know. So I think this is more about Andy Beshear's self-promotion than anything else. Look, I haven't always agreed with Mitch McConnell on a host of issues, but he's a human being. He deserves a little bit of a break, and he deserves some ability to recover. You know, I mean, we've had many people injured and sick in the Senate and in the Congress in our country before, and I think Andy Beshear is just looking for a little attention. Can we talk about Dr. Anthony Fauci this morning? We absolutely can. We're going to be seeing him tomorrow morning.
Yeah, as in testifying with a part of your committee under a subpoena because he would not appear on his own, right, voluntarily. We negotiated for months to have him come in voluntarily, and he chose in the end to refuse. So he's coming in by force of subpoena. I assume he'll be a hostile witness. But there are still questions the Americans have. Look, a million Americans died, as many as maybe 15 million people died worldwide. And there's a great deal of evidence that this virus started in a lab in Wuhan that was funded by Anthony Fauci. And so I think it'll go down in history as maybe one of the worst. public health decisions probably ever to have funded a lab in a communist country and a country that is very opaque and often not completely forthright with the truth and not to have any controls over it. He said he's never seen the lab in China, never really looked into it, somebody else was doing this. But ultimately the buck stopped with him. But it's not just this mistake. He's an advocate of gaining function. He wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2010 when this debate really got going, he said that even if a scientist should be bitten, even if a pandemic should occur starting in a lab, that the knowledge would be worth risk. I just really think that's a terrible judgment, and we should never have someone who believes that in charge, but many of his acolytes are still in government. And so we have to be very, very careful that we don't have more Anthony Fauci's lurking in the wings if we should have another pandemic. And Anthony Fauci's own diaries have confirmed all that, right? Yeah, one of the most important things that we learn from the diaries is in January of 2020, He tells Deer Diary, well, it looks like the outbreak did not come from the wild animals at the marketplace. We know that the original deaths were unconnected to the marketplace. So he knew that in January of 2020. But then he promoted an article in March of 2020 and says, oh, no, definitely came from nature and looks like it came from the marketplace, from these exotic animals at the marketplace. He said that for years and years, even while knowing privately that that wasn't true. So he promoted falsehoods in order to try to steer people away from the idea that he might have funded this research that caused the pandemic. He wanted to and did everything within his power to misdirect people, to... you know, not tell the truth to basically put forward things that he knew privately were wrong. The other thing that we know very clearly now is that the virologist, the scientist around him, had a great deal of uncertainty and doubt as to whether or not this came from nature. He had them write basically an article called Proxinal Origins, and this article was adamant that a lab leak theory was not plausible. It was, you know, used over-the-top language.
They wrote a letter to Lancet saying people who say this are, you know, it's a conspiracy theory. But privately, when they're talking to each other, like, yeah, I'm about 30% that it came from the lab. Oh, I'm 50-50. Oh, yeah, this looks suspicious. This is, you know, they, you know, back and forth, they use colorful language to describe, oh, my God, do you see this? This looks like it was manipulated in the lab. And then Polka, they say, nothing to see here, nothing to see here. But mostly that was at Anthony Fauci's direction. He also in the diaries proclaims that, you know, shutting down schools was his idea and that the mayor of New York thanks him for advocating for shutting down the schools. He's privately advising people in California to shut down the schools. But then when he got criticism for this later on, he says, who am I? You know, I'm just this little scientist and I didn't have any, you know, a... power ability. These were governors that did this. But privately, he's patting himself on the back, looking in the mirror and saying, look how great I am. Look how I was able to tell the mayor to shut the schools down. And so this is the two-faced nature of this that in private, he's one thing in public, he's another. But one thing he always is, is very, very proud of himself. What can you ask tomorrow of Anthony Fauci that hasn't already been asked? You know, we will emphasize the destruction of records. We have several of his emails back and forth with other people, TNIH, saying, read this and delete it, and then delete it from your deleted files. That doesn't sound like your typical honest government employee. And these are all about, you know, grants. These are about government work. And he's saying, delete this, delete it from your deleted files. We have comments from David Morens, where David Morens was his 20-year assistant saying, I know how to avoid the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA lady has taught me how to put other symbols in. So instead of S's, we put dollar signs in their names. And then when you foyer someone's name, it doesn't show up because when we talk about that person, we'll misspell their name. Just, you know, the same guy, Merenz was saying, I'll take him messages. Don't ping his phone. Don't communicate with him directly. I can take him handwritten messages or verbal messages. I mean, that sounds like the courier for Omerta, you know, for the mafia. So. You know, this was a great deal of, you know, 40 years of this abuse of power, you know, going all the way back to the time of HIV. And so, I don't know, we need to get to the bottom of this. And there is a danger that will get another one of these pandemics, particularly if we keep doing this dangerous research. Your legislation to lower drug prices unanimously advanced out of committee, I see. Yeah, it's not the ultimate answer, but it's part of the answer. A lot of drugs are called biosimilars. They're either monoclonal antibodies or something that's a drug that's not just like a chemical. It's biologically created. And we have a lot of generics to these now. And there's one step that Europe and other countries have stopped in the approval process. It's not a safety step. It's just repeating steps that have already been done, cost about $20 million per drug.
If you skip that step, the drug gets to market quicker and also the expense of bringing it to market will be less. So we do think over time, it'll drive prices down. The other thing I've been advocating is to let people buy drugs as a group. So like if you joined Amazon and Amazon had one person negotiating with the drug companies, Amazon's big enough to drive prices down. So there ought to be an Amazon drug purchasing group, a Costco drug purchasing group. You should be able to get your insurance that way, too. You know, if you work for a business, it's easier the businesses negotiate. They don't get great rates. They still pay a bunch, but they do some ability to negotiate. If you work for yourself, we have a lawn business or accounting business or a small doctor or dental office, you have no negotiating power, and the insurance rates have gone through the roof. But what we really need to legalize are group plans where you can get it through Sam's Club, Costco, something like that. And I think that if we did that, that would be, you know, then we're talking about, you know, Costco's got 44 million members. You know, if Costco were buying insurance as a group for 44 million members, my guess is the CEO of every health care company, health insurance company, would sit down and meet with them individually. They would have that much power. It'd be bigger than any corporation in America, you know. So there are a lot of things we can do that don't really cost money, but that are just trying to get the... get capitalism and competition to work. President, want you all to skip the break. If you can't pass voter ID bill before the midterms, what are your thoughts on that? You know, I'm for voter ID. Obviously, we ought to show an ID. Only citizens should vote. And there are still other ways we can do it. We don't have the vote. So just staying here won't change the outcome. I think people get mad and they want their way. And, you know, they're going to take their crayons and say, oh, you know, I'm going home if you won't do this. But the thing is, is we don't have the votes. But there are some things we could do. If we were to fight this on a state-by-state basis, there were probably 10 Republican states. that still are doing unsolicited mail-in ballots and aren't checking ID and aren't checking for citizenship. So I would go into those individual states, use some of the national Republican money. Trump administration has a bunch of money. I would go in and fight a ballot initiative and try to get rid of the problem with the most disruptive thing and the most dishonest thing and most abused, mailing people ballots who don't ask for them. You know, my sons lived in apartments in recent years, and they'd be in an apartment and get like six ballots with six different people's name on them because, you know, young people move so often. But really, that wouldn't happen if you request the ballot. Only you'd have to really be dishonest to request somebody else's ballot. But in all likelihood...
You know, there'd be a lot less fraud if you had to request your ballot. I think that would be a good reform. And we could still do citizenship and ID at a state level. You know, we do it in Kentucky. I think we have pretty good elections in Kentucky. You have to present your ID. You've got to sign in. And most people, I think about 95% of people vote in person. And we have rules if you have to honestly say you cannot come in or will be out of the country or out of the state or something. And it's a felony if you lie on that. So we actually do, I think, a good job in Kentucky. We have paper ballots. We also have random. checks of them will they'll go in and count the entire set of votes in a precinct in different places around the state so i think we're doing better than many states and you know frankly the federal law won't change things in kentucky sir sir sir paul always good to have you thank you sir thanks jack