COVID-19: Globalism, “Trusted” Evangelicals, and Dr. Bob

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast.

My name is John Harris.

Coronavirus, Globalization, and the Weirdness of the Moment

Today, we're gonna be talking a little bit about the coronavirus. I know you probably didn't know that, couldn't guess that, but it's obviously being talked about everywhere, and so I wasn't gonna do a podcast this week because I'm very busy with some personal things, but I thought, you know what?

The world is really weird right now, and especially for those who really like the podcast, I don't wanna make it weirder by skipping a week. I mean, I usually put out a podcast every week, so we're gonna at least have one thing that's normal this week, and that will be this podcast.

So I'm gonna be talking kind of fast, so if you usually listen at double speed, you may wanna slow it down for the monologue. After the monologue, we're gonna talk to Dr. Bob, as we affectionately call him, at Duke University Hospital, and we don't reveal his name because, well, he's a fan of this podcast, and that's enough of a reason, you know?

People in those kind of communities where they have influence and they have, let's just say, politically correct constraints that they have to live under, they probably don't want people to know that they listen to this, but Dr. Bob is, I'll let him talk more about what his expertise is, but he's definitely qualified to talk about this pandemic, and so we're gonna ask him some medical questions, mostly, and we're gonna end with some silver linings here, but I wanna talk a little bit about this whole thing, just start off kind of bird's eye view here.

I probably feel like a lot of you, like, and I just kind of mentioned it, the world just doesn't feel right this week. It just feels different in a bad way. We're used to going to church. We're not going to church.

Church looked different if we did. We go to the store. We can't find milk or eggs or toilet paper. It's crowded. We go out in public, and no one's dying on the street. There's no emergency that we can see around us, generally speaking, but at the same time, things feel empty, and so it's, having a change happen that quickly from the normal habits of our life, it can, I mean, we're sitting at home now, a lot of us, and we have time now.

I don't. I have no time. This is probably the busiest week of my life. It's hard for me to even get this out there, but many of us do, and I probably will soon, and so we sit at home, and what do we do?

Are we watching TV? Are we on the internet? Are we reading? We have time now to look at things we probably didn't before, and I encourage you, number one, to look for the blessing in that, especially if you get to spend time with your family, if you get to projects that you just haven't gotten to, if there's a theological question you had, now you can study it.

I mean, there's some blessings to this, but at the same time, we can't shake, probably, the feeling of, this is just weird. So, I wanted to bring to your attention a few things, and I'm gonna share with you some links, some things that I've uncovered on the World Economic Forum, and kind of just the general flow of where I think this whole thing is going, as far as more globalization, more consolidation.

I think that there are forces that, whether they're behind some of the regulations that are taking place, or whether they wanna benefit from the panic and some of the regulations that are being put in place by governments, there certainly are people with an agenda right now.

And I'm not a conspiracy theory guy. I need to let you know that. Here's my modus operandi. When someone comes to me with a conspiracy theory, especially one that's like the Bilderbergs, or the Masons are controlling everything, or something, I usually say, what do you want me to do about it?

Even if that's true, which I don't think it is, but what can I do? Well, you just need to be aware. I'm like, I understand being informed, but here's the thing, and this is what I usually say. I believe there's a greater conspiracy that is way beyond what you're talking about, a spiritual conspiracy.

We get a glimpse of it in the book of Daniel, that demons, Satan himself, is influencing world governments. He's against the forces of good, of God. He controls some of the evil forces that you're probably thinking are man-made, or in some weird cases, people say reptilian, or alien, or whatever.

No, no, no, look, you're talking small stuff. It's way beyond that. All that to say, though, if you have Jesus Christ, if you are in him, if you are a Christian, you have access to the king of the universe who controls, who is over those entities, and you can have comfort in that.

If you don't have him, then, well, I guess I'd be afraid, too, but there's nothing you can do about it. So I can at least pray with knowledge. But other than that, what's the practical reason for knowing things that are so big, and global, and outside of your control?

Well, not much. So there's a few things I wanna share with you, but I wanna make it clear what my intention is. I want to share some of this trend, if you wanna call it that, towards globalization and consolidation.

I wanna share it with you because I just want you to be thinking, number one, about questions that are gonna be arising about your own investments, how you raise your kids for this world that we are embarking on in, that we're living in, and the world that's also just around the corner.

And I want to get behind, I think, what's enabling this because there's a fear that, I think, is driving people to be more, I mean, it's what I saw when I went to the store and there's no toilet paper, right?

There's a fear, there's a willingness to trade in liberty for security, and I think that there's a sense of personal responsibility itself that is lost. I noticed that local municipalities in many places were cracking down on social gatherings much more than the national or state governments were initially, and then state governments were more restrictive than the national government, and now, of course, they're all being restrictive, but there was a sense I got that there was a fear, maybe there was a moral posturing, and I mean, some of these guys genuinely probably care about their citizens, but there's also, I just sense, a fear that they don't want to be blamed for not taking the proper precautions and someone dying on their watch, and so they're going to take extreme actions.

If it means completely crashing their economy, their local economy, completely destroying their tax base, which really, I mean, you need that in order to fight this. You need resources, right? Resources don't come out of thin air.

Governments don't produce money. We all need to remember that. It comes from people. It comes from productivity, and so if people are not going to be productive, if you're limiting that, you need to be very careful.

Some cures are worse than their diseases, and this is one of the things I'm watching is not saying that we should take precautions, but I can't escape the feeling that we're going overkill here on some things, and I think there's an assumption that these leaders, civic leaders, are responsible somehow, and they do bear responsibility before God for implementing justice, but we have personal responsibility.

That's really one of the defining things about Americans, or it was, was that we believe in self-government. We believe that government should leave us alone and we should make responsible decisions.

Now, people are less and less so making those decisions responsibly, but that is our heritage, and normally, I would think, and you'll hear me say this kind of later to Dr. Bob, but in a situation like this, there's a risk.

There's always a risk to going outside, right? You can get in a car accident. There's a lot of things that could happen that could go wrong, but in this specific situation, I'm more of a believer in local municipalities, local organizations, local businesses, local families organically making decisions about what's best for them, and hopefully a good media providing information about how to make that best decision.

I don't like the top-down stuff. I'm just giving you, this is just my gut feeling right now. I'm giving you, I don't like it, and in some cases, I think it's overstepping boundaries, and I'm gonna talk about that a little bit in regards to the church, but all that to say, I think we need to get out of the mindset that government or civic leaders of any kind are somehow responsible.

If your pastor holds church, and you go to church, and you get the coronavirus, ultimately, the decision to go to the church was your decision, right? The decision to go out to the grocery store is your decision, and we hear this about the coronavirus every five seconds, so there's an awareness there already, and so I just think personal responsibility needs to be regained somehow because I think we've lost it.

We cry out to our gods, and our god right now is the government, it seems like. That's the god we pray to. It really is our father who art in Washington at this point. Every time a hurricane blows through, every time a pandemic happens, it's what's the government gonna do, and I'm on a tangent at this point, but I was glad Donald Trump did a National Day of Prayer, and we probably need to have another one, but in addition to prayer, humiliation and repentance would be nice.

I mean, look, the possibility that this is the judgment of God, I mean, why not? Why can't it be that? We certainly deserve it, don't we? So I want to go through some things here, just if I can. Let's see here.

Oh, there we go.

Ah, here we, I want to talk a little bit about some things I've noticed. Some of them you might find interesting, but there's a general narrative I'm gonna be weaving. I think there was some anticipation for this.

If you go to the CDC website back in November, on November 15th, public health advisors for the quarantine program were being hired all over. Alaska, California, Chicago, Illinois, Detroit, Michigan, Minnesota.

I mean, all over, you just read this, all sorts of places. And it's just, it's very interesting to me that this was taking place back then, and I haven't compared all the dates, but if I'm not mistaken, that's right when, that's like immediately when things were happening in Wuhan in China.

It almost feels like that was before, but either way, there was some kind of a, either someone was way ahead of the game and they knew that this was coming, or they assumed this could happen, or someone, it had already started to take place and someone was just seeing the potential for what could happen.

But either way, there was some anticipation. But despite the anticipation, despite hiring people for this quarantine program back in November, there was some unpreparedness because the Center for Disease Control, look, here they're hiring in November, and this is an interesting article, by the way.

And you know what? I don't think I put the website I found this on. Most of them, I have the website, and I can't remember what website this was. This is, the headline is the CDC was fighting racism and obesity instead of stopping epidemics.

And I'm not gonna read all this for you, but essentially, the CDC for years now has experienced a complete mission drift. Instead of studying outbreaks and where they formed and how to fight them and so forth, they were focusing on disparities and trying to make sure, researching these grandiose proposals for the federal government where they could eliminate inequity on certain things, or eliminate obesity, studying what causes obesity and how to implement programs to fight it.

I'll tell you what causes obesity, all right? It's taking in too many calories and not burning enough. One of those two things are both, a combination. I mean, a lot of this stuff isn't rocket science, but the CDC was focused on these things, and so they were unprepared for what's taking place.

There's also, and I'm sure there's a lot of examples of this, but there's also government incompetence. This is something I saw the other day from Canada. Passengers were allowed to return home from Europe without being tested.

And they were given a pamphlet, but they were not tested. And so just some basic common sense things weren't followed. And of course, restrictions have been imposed now. And this is, a few days ago, I put, maybe this was yesterday, I don't even remember.

Time is just weird right now with how fast things are happening. But when Cuomo had, I think it was yesterday or the day before, said that we're gonna shut down restaurants, gyms, and bars by 8 p .m., I thought, this is crazy.

How can someone do that? And now, of course, we're seeing this everywhere and more severe restrictions than that.

We're trying to make sure that we get the most clear, best guidance to give people safe, judge. Okay, with respect to bars and restaurants, there's a couple of different issues there. I do not believe I have the legal authority to do that.

Section 418 of the government code gives me powers under disaster, which I do have. If I read those the way that I read them, I can apply uniform hours to businesses. I can't pick and choose. But let's get past section 418 of the government code right now and talk about the U .S. Constitution, which forbids me from depriving you of liberty or property without due process.

So I think if we got past section 418, I'd still have a constitutional problem. As the doctor mentioned, cities might have some different tools to work with. I don't have them. I don't believe I have any authority to close bars and restaurants.

And so, I'm, my head's spinning. It's almost like too fast to digest what's actually taking place. But that is taking place all over. And of course, the economic ramifications, I can't even imagine. This was an interesting thing.

This is actually from back in February, but this is what was happening in China. And I don't know if it'll happen here or not, but the government was literally taking physical currency to be quarantined, because it may have the virus on it.

And who knows what else they were doing in regards to the money supply. I don't know, but that was, I mean, this is the extent to which this kind of thing can go. Then we have, we had a run on a bank in Midtown.

They were cleaned out of $100 bills. Of course, the stock market has been steadily going down. And so, I think people are starting, people are panicking in different sectors. And now, it's not so much the coronavirus that's making people panic.

It's now the response to the coronavirus. Because of these responses, people are panicking further. And so, you have things like in Denmark, the parliament ruled on Thursday, last Thursday, unanimously, they passed an emergency coronavirus law, which gives health authorities powers to force testing, treatment, and quarantine with the backing of the police.

So, imagine that happening here. You know, that would be incredible. And then, here's another one, barge restaurants closing in Illinois, et cetera. And so, here, I'm gonna start showing you some things I found on the World Economic Forum website.

So, these, just so you know, this is more, these are the kind of global elites, globalist-friendly organizations, publications. And so, if you wanna know kind of like where globalist thinkers want to take things, this would be where you go.

And so, Trump's trade policy, not good, hampering the U .S. fight against coronavirus from the Peterson Institute of International Economics. And, you know, they're arguing that medical supplies from China, we could have easily been more prepared and had more of those supplies if Donald Trump hadn't started his trade war.

And of course, those restrictions have been lifted at this point. But, you're gonna see a trend. As I show you the rest of these articles, there's a theme here. In The New Yorker, and I found this, again, through the World Economic Forum, they were linking to it, the coronavirus calls for wartime economic thinking.

Here's a paragraph. The world is de facto at war against the virus rather than against each other. This is the good news. Oliver Blanchard, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund tweeted on Monday.

He went on to point out that during the Second World War, the federal deficit as a percentage of the GDP rose to 26%. As the Roosevelt administration spent heavily on armaments and other programs. Let's not be squeamish, Blanchard added.

So, what they're essentially saying is, treat this like you're in war, like a physical war, and don't be afraid to go into debt. And so, yes, run up the spending bill right now, because we're at war. There's proposals now for universal basic income.

I mean, that's been there before, but more than that, actually, in this article, and I didn't pull up the quote, but even Mitt Romney was saying we should, because of this emergency, this coronavirus emergency, we should, I think it was like 1 ,000 bucks or something, we should give to every American.

It was something like that, or every family. But he wanted to give this across the board kind of monetary, from the government, monetary, I guess, gift, for lack of a better term. In fact, it's not a gift, though, when it's your money, but it's redistribution if it's not your money.

And he wanted to do this because of, I guess, the, to help people out, the missed work, business problems, so forth and so on. Donald Trump is, of course, bailing out airlines, and it looks like possibly cruise ships.

$50 billion handout from the government to help through the current downturn in travel. I mean, this is amazing. Do you think any of this could have happened without the precedent that George Bush put in place, really, and then Barack Obama continued and made worse during the 2008 economic downturn?

I mean, this is incredible that it's just, it's not even a thought. It's just, of course, the government's going to help these industries, which, again, that's your money. That's not, the government doesn't have money.

It's your money. You're paying American Airlines. Of course, more global control here. Here's some articles. Center for Global Development. Coronavirus response. Time to take the G20 seriously again. World Economic Forum.

How the coronavirus market turmoil compares to 2008. Third, and here's one of the points they make. The global business community needs to come together to help lead the recovery. The World Economic Forum's COVID Action Platform aims to galvanize both governments and business leaders to do just that.

And what's the COVID Action Platform? Galvanize the global business community for collective action. Protect people's livelihoods and facilitate business continuity. Mobilize cooperation and business support for the COVID -19 response.

It's all about coming together. That's gonna be the theme you're gonna be hearing. It's gonna be private businesses and corporations and governments and everyone just consolidating to form something. A global stimulus has been proposed by the IMF blog.

This is, again, I found this through International Monetary Fund. I found this through World Economic Forum. They linked to it. And so they think there should be a global stimulus. That is a frightening prospect in my mind.

Because, I mean, a national stimulus is frightening enough. A global stimulus? Where's all this gonna come from? Well, again, there's a consolidation happening. And so if there's consolidation of all these various corporations and governments and so forth, they can create, they can have a fund or something that can bail out countries that are having problems.

And we can eliminate disparities. The only problem is, if you create something that big, the amount of control it would have, there might be some potential for good, maybe. I'm willing to give a very big benefit of the doubt, sort of.

But the potential for evil is even worse if you start creating things of that proportion. I mean, what other problems can we tackle? Well, I'm glad you asked. We can tackle immigration. The crisis, the International Crisis Group put this out.

Sharing the Burden, Revisiting the EU, Turkey Migration Deal. And the point of this is, I'm gonna just read, as the European Union and Turkish officials revisit the 2016 deal in the coming weeks, the two sides should explore options for modernizing the customs union and fostering the integration of refugees in Turkey.

They should also assess the prospect of offering substantially more humanitarian aid and other assistance to civilians in Idlib. Worries over the spread of the coronavirus among these vulnerable populations who may soon be on the move is all the more reason to take measures to address their desperate conditions.

Progress in these areas is more realistic than efforts to unstick complex talks on visa liberalization or acts of ascension that are conditioned on Turkey meeting a long list of criteria, et cetera. So this is trying to, in some ways, it's pulling the heartstrings, but we need to up our humanitarian aid.

We need to help these people, which of course, I mean, it's always good intentions can lead to sometimes some boneheaded moves. And so far that's happened in Europe. I mean, it's one of the reasons Brexit happened because immigration, the unrestricted, more just immigration pouring in from these countries has not been good culturally for them.

And it's changed many European countries. And so now that there's a crisis, it's kind of like, well, let's up more compassion, more resources, more money being poured into helping these people and bringing them in.

And I don't have a long time, I don't have any time really to get into a big discussion of this, but we wanna help people, especially as Christians, we wanna help people, but what's the mechanism we ought to be using to do that?

And how do we help people out of a hole when they're in a predicament, when they're in a predicament that is generational, that every generation lives in the same kind of grinding poverty or the same kind of tyranny, maybe leading by example, maybe sending missionaries, and maybe there's other ways to address these things and actually help people more long-term, kind of the principle of teaching a man to fish instead of giving them one might be better than importing some of those problems.

And I'm not saying that people are problems, I'm saying importing the problems, the ideas that some of these people will bring into your country. So more immigration. How about climate change? I mean, you thought that coronavirus was just about a virus.

No, coronavirus and climate change, there is much uncertainty and much to play for. The Grantham Institute, and again, through the World Economic Forum, I found this. Here's one of the paragraphs. First and most strikingly, experts are back on the agenda and their place in informing public policy has been restored to some degree.

And in contrast, a low point of Michael Gove, I'm not sure, it was earlier in the article, Michael Gove's comments during the Brexit campaign. Okay, so this is,.

So here, let me explain this.

What this article is saying is that during Brexit, this was a populist uprising and they weren't trusting the experts. Now, it was a horrible thing, but they didn't trust the experts. And Michael Gove being one of these people.

And listening to experts is now widely recommended. There are few, if any, coronavirus deniers. And we are, for the most part, turning to, I can't pronounce this, epidemiologists, I think I got it, to inform public policy.

Those who would deal in epidemics, those guys. This is welcome and hopefully a lesson that will be retained for climate change. So what's the moral of coronavirus? Hey, they're finally trusting the experts again.

The people are looking towards the elites. Oh, they're listening to us. Maybe they'll listen to us now when we talk about climate change. That's the takeaway from this. And here's another article. This is from Green Biz again, World Economic Forum linked.

COVID -19 and the climate change, a healthy dose of reality. We'd better get started figuring this out. We have a window, a painfully clear window on what's coming next, a window of opportunity to align our organization's value.

Listen to that, align our organization's. Everyone get in a lockstep. Value chains and systems of commerce with this strange new normal. As I said, COVID -19 could be a taste of our collective future.

So this is, that paragraph scares me. It just, not in a way that I'm shaking to my boots. I'm a Christian, I don't do that. But as far as like just knowing, this person is a utopian, a utopianist dreamer.

They, and what they want is for everyone just to come together and learn and do it now. Do it now under the present circumstances, but keep this coalition so that we can fight the next thing, which is climate change, which is, I mean, this video isn't about this, but this myth that there's this man-made global warming that's just gonna flood everything and ruin everything.

We're gonna use what's happening with coronavirus to now deal with an even bigger threat. I mean, it's about control, guys. It's about control. Think of yourself now as a global citizen from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

These occurrences, coronavirus, show how profoundly the virus has cut into the relationship between citizen and as a guarantee of the state's responsibility for the well-being of its citizens on the one hand, and human rights and practices of solidarity on the other.

So which one are you gonna choose, guys?

Which are you gonna choose?

Are you gonna choose being a citizen? Are you gonna choose something, I mean, so much more nice, human rights and solidarity? Well, I mean, I don't know, human rights and solidarity, that sounds a lot nicer than being a citizen.

Well, that's kind of what that article is about. Here's one from the World Economic Forum on Education. Three ways the coronavirus pandemic could reshape education. So here's a few things. Public-private educational partnerships could grow in importance.

Similar to Hong Kong-based readtogether .hk forum, China, and they have a video of it. There's a consortium of over 60 educational organizers, publishers, media, and entertainment industry professionals.

So read elites when you hear that. Providing more than 900 educational assets, including videos, book chapters, assessment tools, and counseling services for free, for free. Of course, nothing's for free.

So there's gotta be strings attached, guys. Gotta be strings attached. The consortium's intention is to continue using and maintaining the platform even after the coronavirus has been contained. Unless access costs decrease and quality of access increase in all countries, the gap in education quality and the socioeconomic quality will be further exacerbating.

So you don't want a disparity. You don't want some people, you know, haves and have-nots. We need to come together. We need to make sure everyone has the same access, the same technology, the same tools.

We need to offer it for free. Here's another one on education. From Pew Research Center. As schools close due to the coronavirus, some US students face a digital homework gap. Oh, the homework gap. And it's worse, of course, for black teens than it is for whites because 11 of them don't have computers.

It's comparing income levels. So we're gonna have to, we need equity. We need equity in order to do this. And how are we gonna do that? Well, it's the tools I just described for you. Everyone's gonna come together and we're gonna offer services for free and we're gonna close this gap.

So let me tell you what's going on. You remember in World War II, if you will, if you're old enough, maybe you remember, or you studied about it, the whole world came together. The Allied powers came together.

And I mean, first there was economic cooperation like Lend-Lease, but then, you know, it was consolidation, it was Allied forces. I mean, we, you know, from World War I, we had the League of Nations.

From World War II, you know, more of an involvement in global efforts from the United Nations. And you had NATO during the Cold War. And so you have these, you know, in reaction to actual war, there's, or the potential threat of war, there's a coming together.

And of course, on an individual level, that happened. I mean, women were in the workforce. People were tightening their belts, having victory gardens and recycling tires and so forth during World War II because everyone was motivated for the war effort.

And liberals, you know, they want that kind of cooperation, that kind of consolidation. You can control something like that. You can think of all the good you can do if everyone's on the same page, pursuing the same kind of goal.

The problem is war stinks. And something like this, something like this pandemic, which also stinks, but isn't quite as bad as war, this brings people together because people are afraid. If they can sacrifice, they'll sacrifice, especially when you know that it's someone that you love that could die from it, or you yourself, you're willing to come together to find a solution.

And so that's kind of what they're tapping into, that, you know, willingness to work together on this commonly valued project. And again, the issue, well, from a biblical standpoint, there's a bunch of issues with this.

This is the Tower of Babel tendency. This is, when you do this on a global level and you're talking about every level of government, you're talking about businesses and corporations, and then just all consolidating, that can be used for tremendous evil.

And there's a reason God didn't want that. However, you know, that being said, just a common sense kind of way of approaching this, even if you can do tremendous good, if you start creating the kind of entity or entities that have the backing of armies or private armies, or there's force that can implement some of the things they have, or they're gonna control your education for free, but there's strings attached with it.

They can indoctrinate your kids. There's potential for a lot of harm. And we need to be aware of that. This is the direction things seem to be going. Now, not all this stuff has happened, but they're dreaming right now.

This is the, I mean, these are utopianists. When they see this, they think, oh, goodness, how can we use this crisis to show people the truth of what we've been saying? Just follow us. We're the elites.

We can centrally plan everything. We can control everything from education to medicine to now, I guess, with the global warming stuff, regulating the economies in such a way that it'll impact the environments.

This is, what happens to national allegiances? What happens, I mean, there's a lot of concerns that we could talk about in regards to this. But I should say, before I, there's silver linings. I said I would bring those up.

Don't be too worried. Not all of this has happened. I'm just pointing out that there are people who want this to happen, and the solution, again, is to go back to personal responsibility and to say, look, in the United States of America, we've been through a lot.

We've been through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and all sorts of pandemics before Spanish flu, and we can hang tough together in our country, in our local community. That's really what love your neighbor, I mean, it really does start.

It's your neighbor. It's the Good Samaritan was someone right there on the side of the road that they saw. That's who that was. The love one another passages, generally, like, first John, love your brother.

It's your brother. It's your Christian brother. Those who don't provide for their family, worse than an infidel. There's a proximity.

There's a principle in scripture.

There's those who are the closest to you have the most responsibility for, and that's where, really, I think our effort should be going, primarily. It's to those who are closest to us, and this consolidation kind of tendency that we're seeing in places like the World Economic Forum is it's not your neighbor across the street.

I mean, they want you to care for them, right, but just as much as you would for someone who's in India, or in Russia, or wherever. You're going to come together and create this organization, which, frankly, organizations, when they get that big, it's impersonal at that point.

It really is, and they don't get their money out of a vacuum, so there's always strings attached, so I just wanted to point that out, and no, I'm not saying it's just, it's a big globalist conspiracy and spooky music.

I'm saying this is what actual links from elite institutions the World Economic is linking to. These are what those people are saying. This is what they want, so be aware of it, that we're moving in that direction, and don't fear, don't fear.

Don't go buy toilet paper. Show that you don't need those guys as much. As Americans, as in my case, as Virginians, or wherever state you're from in your local community, we'll hang tough together. We'll get through things together.

Love your neighbor, and devote your time to those things, and show that we can, I'm hoping one of the silver linings here in regards to education, I'll just say this, is homeschooling. I hope people realize when their kids come home from school and maybe they have some online work they have to do that parents start thinking, wait a minute, we could do this.

We don't need the government schools anymore.

That would be nice.

I mean, there's actually potential here for even more nationalism. I mean, I'm not saying that's gonna happen. I don't think most elites want that to happen, but look, the potential is that people could start thinking, you know what, this virus came from another country.

We should have shut down travel sooner maybe. We should, maybe we should make more medical things in our country and not be dependent on China for those things. Maybe there will be more of a nationalism.

I don't know, I don't know. So here's some other things I just wanted to point out. Individual liberties are being, people are getting nervous, people who care about that kind of thing. We have a coronavirus patient refused quarantine so deputies are surrounding his house to force him to,.

Which to be honest with you,.

In some ways I can kind of understand. I don't know the details to what extent he was refusing to be quarantined. Maybe he wanted to be in his own house quarantined. You'd think that would be okay, but the concern I have is that this becomes more widespread and we enter a phase where there's, again, you can hear even the struggle in my own voice because there are people out there who just don't take precautions.

Every time you see one of those discovery channel things on like a volcano explosion or a tornado or hurricane, there's always those people who are like, I've lived here my whole life, I'm not leaving.

And those are the guys that you think, well, someone should probably, should keep them from harming others. And that is a role that government has. And so if it's the local government, I don't have as much of a problem with that.

But again, this is authority that can be abused. Harris County Judge Linda Hildalgo, this was on Twitter, I guess, earlier today. Today are new regulations on bars and restaurants. So basically they must not operate except in delivery, takeout, drive-thru.

And then to report violations, call our hotline. And so people were upset that, what, you're just trying to get people to call on businesses who are remaining open. And it's like, yeah, this isn't, I don't recognize this either.

This isn't the country I thought I lived in where you just lead with that. Let's all kind of police each other. That means there's sort of a civic mistrust in that area. And you wanna build trust in an environment like this.

But at the same time, you wanna be concerned for safety. So again, if we can self-regulate, if we can have self-government, and we don't need those things. And that would be my hope is we can return to that, a basic trust in each other.