Thoughts. I've Got Some.

What a boring title. The benefit of doing a subscription newsletter is I don’t feel compelled to do a fancy title when I just want to write to you guys and give you updates.

Let me start with this one.

A Confession

My best friend in law school was in a plane crash when he had been in college. He has a settlement that had been invested well. He took some of the money and bought a house in Hilton Head, SC. I had never been there before.

Hilton Head became a second home for me. We’d go down there on the weekends.

A sub-confession within this confession is that my brain never turns off. I go to bed and wake up seven hours later still thinking about what I thought about when I went to bed. It never stops spinning. Except, when I cross that bridge into Hilton Head my brain stops spinning. It is the most remarkable thing. I’m like Pavlov’s dog in that regard. I cross that bridge and suddenly physically and mentally relax.

I have been working on radio five hours a day five days a week since August 12th of last year and that started up one week after finishing off my 2019 Resurgent Conference where I sat on stage for two days and over eight hours each day interviewed a variety of congressman, senators, and others in addition to hosting the Vice President of the United States.

Christmas was no real break because all I could do was be jealous of Chris Burns, my friend and guest host, who filled in for me. I wanted to be on the air while I was on vacation. It’s a sick addiction to work. I literally could do and have done before eight hours of radio in a day and loved every minute of it. For that matter, I once did 15 straight hours of radio in a snowstorm because one could get to the office.

But when I cross that bridge it all goes away. It should go away in two weeks. I should be able to cross that bridge and suddenly mentally unplug for seven days.

I cannot tell you how high my anxiety is getting that I will not be able to go. I am now in mortal dread that the President or the Governor will ban all travel. It is perhaps irrational. But I have literally bought all the food and toilet paper I’ll need to go and never leave the beach house we have rented. I just need to go.

Yep. It sounds totally silly. It is totally selfish. One day I want the income to justify buying a house there. Right now, I have saved up and split it with a friend so I can go sit by the pool and get up in the middle of the night to take pictures of the Milky Way. Here’s a shot I took two years ago. That’s Jupiter at the top right and a Delta jet flying to the right of the Milky Way. The bright red one just above the jet is Mars.

Yes, I took that picture at 3:30 a.m.

Admittedly, it is totally selfish. Admittedly, I am whining. Admittedly, you do not care. But I care a great deal and really need this vacation. So I really hope we can make it. I need it. Ironically, I hate the beach. I hate the sand getting everywhere. I burn easily. I hate the beach. But I love Hilton Head.

Relatedly

I do not think it is at all helpful for supposed experts with blue checkmarks to be on social media telling everyone how much worse it is going to get.

Already, there are rumors of martial law and state lockdowns. On a daily basis, I get reports that Governor Kemp here in Georgia or President Trump is going to call out the National Guard and arrest anyone on the streets. I read supposed experts telling people online that food shortages are going to happen along with gas shortages.

The data is not there to support the fearmongering on shortages. It simply does not exist. The American food and gas supply lines are in really good condition. The experts seemingly want to spark a panic.

I know they have rationalized that they are being helpful, but it is no more helpful to tell Americans they’re going to be locked in their homes and starved than it is to explain rationally how an asteroid is going to wipe us out next week because it will, in reality, fly between the moon and us.

We have already experienced irrational panic in buying toilet paper. There is just no need to spark more of it.

China

Good for Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton calling for an investigation into this virus. It is clear at this point that China lied about both its infection rate and mortality rate. You need to read this great Jim Geraghty piece at National Review on the matter.

We are in this mess in large part because of the decisions of the Chinese government. And once it’s safe to come out, we’re going to face some extremely consequential decisions about how we choose to treat the Chinese government after their catastrophic secrecy, coverups, blundering, and disregard for human life around the globe.

China made the situation worse, lied about it, and is now running communist propaganda to deflect blame.

More appalling are the American media institutions that have long taken Chicom advertising dollars now helping China with their lies.

As a badge of honor, China’s information minister blocks me on Twitter.

The Other Drama

Watching the President’s press conference yesterday, I could not help but notice the reporters who wanted to relitigate the past two months or attack the President in various ways. The media is deeply upset people do not trust them and cannot figure out why.

Perhaps they need to look in the mirror.

For the past several weeks, the media has been telling us the President needed to get a better grip on the situation, be serious, and stop dismissing reality. He did exactly that yesterday.

Half the press corps then tried to make him apologize for past statements, own up to misdeeds, or pick fights with his friends who have disagreed. What purposes is there in that?

A great many Americans still believe this is a partisan press operation to take out the President of the United States and the media keeps giving ample evidence for that. The President did exactly what the press corps has been calling on his to do. Now it is on them to move on and let the past stay in the past.

Of course, I suspect there is a sneaking suspicion among some reporters that if they actually do that, the President’s odds of re-election go up. Some in the press would rather double down with the drama than let the President and the country move forward with crisis management.

About that crisis management

Dr. Fauci and the Vice President probably both deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Their cool, calm demeanor and willingness to daily engage the public in a fact-based assessment has been critical to getting the President focused and the public focused. Dr. Fauci has been a breath of fresh air on television. I wish I could get him on my radio show. That guy has an impressive way of making the complex understandable by the average American and that is exactly what we need.

The President said yesterday that we may be in this through August. I hope not. But if we are, it will not be because of incompetence. He has surrounded himself with competent experts to navigate us through this.

Conspiracies

I had an interesting thing happen on my evening radio show yesterday. A man named Michael from Woodstock, GA called in. He was upset that I have been dismissive of the virus news and been telling people it is not a big deal.

To be sure and to be fair, I told people in early January to keep an eye on it, but it had not spread outside China then and if we could keep it there we’d be okay. But going all the way back to January I had cautioned people we need to pay attention to the story and have felt like a lonely voice in conservative radio and TV telling people to pay attention and realize this is serious.

It should not bother me. I know. The guy clearly has me confused with someone else. But it bothers me nonetheless. I need to cross that bridge in Hilton Head to let it go.

This man is not alone, however, in pushing nonsense.

For the last several weeks, a number of well-educated people have been telling me that COVID-19 is not new and was actually patented in 2015. "WTF?!" I thought. So I went down the rabbit hole to figure it out. Reminder, even smart people are stupid.

In 2015, Gilead Science patented a drug called remdesivir. It was designed to fight Ebola, MERS, and other coronaviruses, according to the patent. In January of 2020, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is where a lot of people believe COVID-19 came from through an accidental release, filed a patent under an international patent treaty.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology waited until China had publicly admitted the extent of the epidemic, then claimed it might have found something.

It appears the Wuhan Institute of Virology stole the chemical composition of Gilead Science's drug and repackaged it as a potential cure or drug to use against COVID-19.
So Gilead Science had to update its patent in January to make clear remdesivir could be used in the treatment of COVID-19.

As a result, conspiracists saw Gilead's patent filing and presumed it had patented COVID-19 in 2015. It had done no such thing. But it had to preserve its legal claims when China tried to steal what it had developed.

That required updating its 2015 patent in 2020 and connecting its drug to COVID-19. The conspiracy theorists latched on to that and started circulating Instagram videos, Facebook memes, and other social media postings claiming COVID-19 was patented in 2015.

Another conspiracist informed me that the CDC does not know the number of people who actually die of the flu and so makes up its figures. In fact, I am assured, the number of people who die is far less than is believed.

Yet another conspiracist tells me the numbers of deaths of COVID-19 will be inflated to justify a federal government takeover of state and local government.

Sadly, one of the downsides of the internet is too many people can connect with other fringe believers and they can dangle together half-truths to build a lie that sounds true.

I work daily to tell you guys the truth and try to correct things when I get them wrong. What I am realizing though is that a lot of people would rather believe the lies. They would rather believe the worst. They would rather believe by faith the thing not true than to take at face value the actual truth. Many of these people claim to be Christians and they harm their own witness and the rest of our witness.

I continue to believe, however, I have a real obligation to truth and so do you.

On churches

I continue to see pastors feeling lost about what to do. History shows churches rose to the occasion during crises and plagues. Your church may not be able to meet on Sundays, but your members can prepare meals for those who cannot take care of themselves. Your members can go grocery shopping for those who cannot. Your members can fund the businesses of their fellow congregants who might otherwise shutter because of social distancing.

Churches are not just about sharing the gospel through a sermon, but sharing it through living it. Christ fed the hungry and gave actual water to the physically thirsty. Churches have a divinely given opportunity to pick back up the gospel of sweat.

If your church has not called its members this week to find out what they actually, physically need, you are doing the gospel wrong. Stop wringing your hands on social media and feeling lost. Pick up the phone, grab the church directory, and make a phone call.

Don’t stop at the congregants. If I were a church, I’d adopt a restaurant, a gym, or another small business and step up to cover their rent at a time no one could visit. Go out and buy groceries for those in need. But really, build community through phone calls. Your voice — not a metaphor — your actual voice on the other end of a phone call with a congregant shut in their home with their kids and family just to check on them is something.

We are not meant to be alone and this virus is forcing us to be alone. Build a community outside the church building if even with just your voice or your wallet.

Last thought

It is sad to see so many people demanding direction from the government on what to do. People of good character should not need the government to tell them how to behave responsibly. If people cannot hear the flow of news and decide for themselves to do the right thing, they’re going to get a government that takes their liberty away from them.

Speaking of which, it continues to make me laugh to see a bunch of progressives who think the President is a dictator now complaining that he isn’t behaving like one to, of all things, cut bureaucracy and red tape. It really is funny to see.