Newt gives his thoughts on the Dr. Fauci controversy, defending the U.S. against communist China, and his new book, Beyond Biden.
Transcript:
Newt Gingrich
The Faulkner Focus
November 4, 2021
NEWT:
I think in any reasonable society Fauci would be gone. He has violated his own rules, he wrote a paper on this back in 2012 talking about dangerous research and what standards ought to be set and admitting that in the end this was more than a scientific question because dangerous research was a threat to the whole society. I’ve known Fauci since he did brilliant work on HIV/aids in the 1980s but I’m sad to say I think that now he’s destructive, dishonest trying to safe his reputation and doing so at very substantial risk to lives around the planet. And it’s very unfortunate and they go through this same conversation every time. And Fauci hides behind word games. The fact is that there were running experiments. The very notion that he trusted the Chinese when you know that the Chinese dictatorship was literally locking up doctors who didn’t do what it told them to. You look at the origins of this. The effort by the Chinese dictatorship to cover it up for the first two or three months. That fact that Fauci to say I could trust them by itself is an indictment of naivety.
NEWT:
You have to ask yourself the question, given the degree to which China is still clearly a totalitarian society in which the dictator Xi defines reality why would the U.S. taxpayers be funding research in a Chinese laboratory? The answer is well south Asia and south China is a major center of these kind of diseases. Well, I would much rather have the bats brought to the U.S. Or Taiwan or Japan or Singapore but the idea we’re going to send money to Wuhan in order for Chinese scientists under the control of the Chinese secret police, that we’ll then going to trust — not have people there. By the way, when it did break out, they wouldn’t let us come in. So, they wouldn’t even let us look at the research we were paying for.
NEWT:
Fauci behaves as though all of this is not reality. So, it’s as though there is not a Chinese dictatorship and scientists didn’t die and it is unfortunate because he is probably the most prominent spokesperson on these kind of diseases in the world. And the fact that he is now completely defending his reputation at the cost of the people not just in the United States but worldwide is tragic and someday historians will write about it.
NEWT:
Which would lead you to be a little more cautious and a little more humble. I did a podcast with Dr. Fauci in February of 2020 when this was just starting, and it is interesting to go back and listen to it now because in February he was pretty passive. This is probably not going to be a pandemic, it’s probably not going to be a crisis. NEWT: It’s in his own words. It is not me; it is his voice.
NEWT:
I deliberately decided not to write an anti-Biden book on the grounds that Biden would be sufficiently anti- himself, that’s not an issue. What we wanted to do was say this is going to be a mess. We have really big things. By the way, the Youngkin his campaign really fits almost exactly what Beyond Biden talks about because he talked about fixing the schools, he talked about creating jobs, he talked about doing things to bring down crime. So, he was talking about in the real world about real change. That’s what I think we need to recognize if we don’t go through profound modernization, we are not going to be competitive with China and we are going to lose in our lifetime.
NEWT:
I don’t think Biden has a clue. I think Joe Biden is a nice, pleasant guy who is totally out of touch with reality surrounded by left wing staffers who live in a fantasy world. I always tell people to understand their attitude towards threats whether it’s terrorism or China, imagine that they saw the lion king and thought it was a documentary and they actually believe lions and zebras dance together. That’s how they behave. They don’t understand we’re in a life and death struggle with a Chinese dictatorship which would like to dominate our society which has hundreds if not thousands of agents in our society which has a methodical strategy of both stealing intellectual property and bribing our scientists and lying to us all the time.
NEWT:
Right after the election we sat down. You could — the great tragedy is that big government socialism doesn’t work. Didn’t work in Venezuela or Zimbabwe. I was — once you knew who was going to dominate and it was clear that Biden, he gave a very nice inaugural address about coming together and the same day, he signed a series of executive orders dismantling what Trump had done. You look at what he is doing behind the speech. I knew by then what they were going to try to do would be a disaster.
