New doc: "It Wasn't Fauci: How Trump Really Got Played on COVID"

a behind-the-scenes look at how we got lockdowns

Team —

Our government did not have to response to COVID the way that it did.

Our radical restructuring of society — closing businesses, shutting down schools, mandating sustained “social distancing” — was a choice, a voluntarily response dreamed up by a specific group of people in power. And this response came at an enormous cost, some extra human misery added to the toll of the virus itself.

There’s now ample evidence indicating that misery was pointless. Severe lockdowns did not lead to lower deaths rates. The few states that defied lockdown order didn’t suffer waves of unnecessary deaths (despite breathless headlines claiming they would), and they were able to avoid incinerating livelihoods and hobbling kids with missed school.

But in all the public accounting of our COVID response, one mystery has gone unsolved.

After initially championing lockdowns, then-President Trump did actually turn against them. He famously refused to wear a mask, badgered governors to “open up” on twitter, and assured the public that “there’s nothing to be afraid of” after contracting and recovering from COVID himself.

And yet, the actual policy coming from his administration didn’t change. The official federal COVID guidelines, stamped with the White House seal, continued to pressure governors to shut down…all the way through the election.

How is that possible?

Anthony Fauci, your second cousin’s favorite subject of poorly punctuated Facebook screeds, is typically cast as the “deep state” villain who swindled Trump. Our new documentary does figure out who was the chief engineer of lockdowns in the White House — and it’s not him. It’s someone largely lost to history whose rise and rule reveals something profound about the nature of power in Washington.

We interviewed about a dozen former Trump White House staffers, including Scott Atlas, the Stanford professor tapped by the president to counterbalance the lockdown zealotry dominating White House COVID policy:

He provides a detailed look inside the federal policy machinery, sketching out the specific humans who drew up the blueprint imposed on hundreds of millions of people. And he thinks the focus on Fauci is a distraction.

We also interviewed Tyler Goodspeed, the former chief economic advisor in the White House who, in the summer of 2020, was briefing the President at least once a week.

The insider accounts reveal a single, profound analytical error at the center of the White House guidelines. Amidst the chaos and confusion of the early stages of the pandemic, a key person in charge made a mistake. And that mistake was never corrected even after we had clearer picture of COVID’s risks.

We also talked with Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, who were some of the earliest critics of the zero-case maximalism. Both were called up to advise President Trump — and then systematically marginalized by lockdown enthusiasts.

This documentary is not a simple story of “deep state” trickery.

It also punctures the marketing gimmicks of Trump, the man now boasting a better-than-even chance of reclaiming the White House. Despite his brand of the alpha man of action, the tycoon wielding the decisive “you’re fired!”, when he had power the first time, he let someone slight just snatch it from him:

You can watch the new doc in full on our Youtube channel:

-rob