After three years of almost utter and complete homogeneity in the mainstream media and pop culture, dissenters are starting to have their say. And it s not that the dissenters didn t exist during the COVID-19 pandemic, you just couldn t hear from them because of intense censorship online. Author Gabrielle Bauer from the Brownstone Institute joins me to discuss.
00:00:00.000Did the COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates serve society's best interests?
00:00:04.740Author Gabrielle Bauer from the Brownstone Institute joins me today to discuss.
00:00:10.360I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
00:00:30.000After three years of almost utter and complete homogeneity in the mainstream media and, you know, in pop culture, dissenters are starting to have their say.
00:00:43.340And it's not that the dissenters didn't really exist during the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:00:48.600You just couldn't hear from them because of the intense censorship online.
00:00:53.600And the dissenters, they weren't necessarily wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.
00:01:00.600They were the fancy people, the well-connected people who all of a sudden found themselves cancelled and othered, like, well, current presidential candidate for the Democrat Party, RFK.
00:01:15.400Now, my guest today is Gabrielle Bauer.
00:01:18.000She's an author and a longtime journalist, and she's got a new book published by the Brownstone Institute.
00:01:23.760It's called Blindsight is 2020, Reflections on COVID Policies from Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, and More.
00:01:31.200And the book features 46 thinkers drawn from different parts of society and even different political persuasions.
00:01:41.600But they all agree on one thing, that the policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic crossed the line and the world lost its way.
00:01:50.400I'm very fascinated to talk to Gabrielle.
00:01:53.720I've heard nothing but good things about her from my friend Laura, and she joins me right now.
00:02:01.200So, joining me now is author Gabrielle Bauer.
00:02:09.380She's the author of the new book, Blind Sight is 2020.
00:02:14.000And, Gabrielle, thanks so much for joining me on the show.
00:02:17.160Before we get into the meat and potatoes of the book, I was, as is my job to do as a fellow journalist, poking a little bit around into your background.
00:02:25.980And as I previously said to you, don't take this the wrong way, but you're not a crazy person.
00:02:30.860And I'm told by the mainstream media and the people in the white lab coats that anybody who disagrees with the prevailing government narrative on the COVID pandemic is a crazy person and a conspiracy theorist.
00:02:47.500And if you ask Justin Trudeau, a fringe radical extremist and quite possibly a white supremacist, but I don't find any of that.
00:02:54.600You forgot. You forgot racist and misogynist.
00:04:06.400What I know for a lot of people, there's a moment in time where they figure out, wait, this is not at all making any sense and not at all what we've normally done.
00:04:18.940When we have a wave of infectious disease rolling out of China, as we tend to do every five to 10 years.
00:04:25.280What was it for you that really was the scales falling off your eyes?
00:04:31.020Well, to be honest, the moment was literally from day one, from hour one.
00:04:36.300There was no sort of period, you know, of a month or two months when I was on board.
00:04:40.380I pretended to be on board for the first six weeks because everybody in my circle was and it took me a few weeks to really find my sea legs and, you know, start venturing online at first and then talking to other people and finding my tribe.
00:04:55.600But I remember thinking literally when the lockdowns were announced for the first time, I thought, why are we only listening to scientists here?
00:05:29.700And that really troubled me right from the start.
00:05:33.740And then the whole culture that sprang up around the lockdowns and the pandemic, you know, the shaming and the snitching and the wholesale panic, it just seemed disproportionate and unhealthy and very alien.
00:05:48.840You know, and at first I didn't quite have the vocabulary to understand my feelings.
00:05:55.840And I spent the next three years really trying to understand why I was feeling what I was feeling, reaching out to like-minded people and developing that vocabulary, ultimately writing a whole bunch of essays about COVID.
00:06:09.880And then when this opportunity to write this book came along for the Brownstone Institute, I really couldn't say no.
00:06:16.640I often wondered how quickly it happened that people in East Germany adopted the snitch culture right in front of them.
00:06:27.660And there was, you know, the threat of real force from the government.
00:06:31.800And I don't want to say coercion isn't forced because it definitely is.
00:06:34.820But you had this real threat of people being imprisoned and taken away and gulagged because they didn't snitch on their neighbors in East Germany.
00:06:45.720We didn't have to get that far in our culture with the threat of this virus.
00:06:51.880What do you think made it happen so fast?
00:06:55.420Well, I guess, you know, there's still so much debate about that.
00:07:54.440And this just happened on a wider scale because of social media and instant connectivity and all that.
00:08:01.680And so I kind of believe in the dominoes falling theory that, of course, there were some bad actors that took advantage of the situation.
00:08:10.580And although I work for the pharma industry, I mean, I think it's because I work for them, I understand their vested interests and I understand how they present data, you know, with a certain slant.
00:08:48.340I mean, media, of which I'm a member, abdicated its role as a check and balance on all the craziness.
00:08:56.040You know, as a pushback, media just got swept along as well.
00:09:00.640So it was a confluence of all these factors.
00:09:02.800I think I think when Italy fell, so to speak, then that somehow gave the signal to the rest of the world that they had to do this.
00:09:11.660So I don't know, I think I think people are still investigating this a lot.
00:09:16.740And there's probably things that are going to come to light in different countries that help set all this in motion.
00:09:25.080You know, my my interest, like in writing the book is more.
00:09:31.220You know, why people behave the way they did and also what what ethical breaches all this entailed.
00:09:37.820You know, why this was this response was so misguided from a social, ethical, psychological point of view.
00:09:47.240And so that's why I feature people from various disciplines, including a comedian and a priest who address all these ethical lapses.
00:09:57.620Yeah, I think a lot for me, I've tried I've tried to do a lot of thinking about what caused people to just all of a sudden join the hysteria and start throwing gasoline on the bonfire of civil liberties instead of trying to get a bucket of water.
00:10:14.200And I think I think there's a lot of people and it's unfortunately true with the development of society becomes ease of your life.
00:10:23.220And a lot of people, they want to feel like heroes and you didn't have to work very hard during the times of COVID to be told that you were saving lives.
00:10:35.520All you had to do was stay home or wear a mask or follow the stupid arrows on the floor.
00:10:40.840And you were psychologically, in your own mind, akin to a firefighter running into a burning building and carrying out a grandmother.
00:10:49.540You were saving lives just by following stupid, arbitrary rules that didn't work.
00:10:54.740And so I think that's why there are a lot of people out there who've never really done anything for other people in their lives,
00:11:00.800except follow these mindless rules that are clinging to that sense of moral superiority.
00:11:08.820And that's why they don't want to give it up.
00:11:11.520That's why they want to keep the masks and they want to keep the stupid arrows and they want to keep the social distancing.
00:11:16.940And all the dumb rules is because you take away the rules and all of a sudden you're just a normal person who never held the door for an old lady.
00:11:56.780And, you know, it was, it was all very new for me.
00:12:00.220I had never experienced any of this and it was utterly shocking.
00:12:05.040And it took me a while to thicken my skin a little bit and just to realize, you know, not to take it seriously and realize that, well, people were scared.
00:12:14.660And I think I also detected and still detect this incredible sense of entitlement that people have.
00:12:21.320They think the government can and should keep us safe, keep us from dying ever.
00:12:29.960You know, just this amazing sense of entitlement about life and refusal to acknowledge that life has a season and an arc.
00:12:39.520And, of course, we do try to protect people, but life ends for all of us.
00:12:45.320And, you know, again, I just sensed beneath it all this, this was more than COVID.
00:12:52.660It was more that people were coming face to face with their mortality in general, and they just didn't accept it.
00:12:59.220And there was something else very weird manifesting that I had never really seen before, that it all of a sudden became a moral failing if you became sick.
00:13:15.440You know, I give the example of the flu.
00:13:18.780Like, before COVID, if a very old and very frail person died of the flu, and I know somebody, a relative to whom this happened, people just attributed it to their age and their frailty.
00:13:44.640And yet, when COVID came along, it was, oh, you know, where did this, who transmitted it, and who transmitted it to the person who transmitted it to transmitted it?
00:13:53.200It's just, that's not how life works on a planet that's shared by humans and microbes.
00:13:59.300I mean, inadvertent transmission has happened since the dawn of time.
00:14:03.820You know, of course, we don't go around deliberately infecting people.
00:14:06.700Yeah, but this idea of assigning blame, and especially telling children, you know, don't go and kill grandma.
00:14:14.080That's so destructive to a child, you know, to saddle them with that unnecessary and unwarranted burden of guilt.
00:14:26.840So, before we get into your book, because that's why you're here talking to me, I wanted to ask you, did you have, you know, personal fallout for being a skeptic about how the pandemic was handled?
00:14:41.000I think, for those of us who have, I think most of us, if you are an open-minded person and don't shun your friends, if they think differently about things that you hold different values on, I think a lot of us ran up against people that we disagreed with on COVID.
00:15:00.540But it seems as though, for me, if you came from my side of the argument, if you disagreed with someone, you could just disagree with someone and life went on.
00:15:11.780But from the other side, again, it's that sort of sense that you had a moral failing if you didn't follow the government narrative, and so now they couldn't talk to you.
00:15:21.720Did you have some of that in your life?
00:15:23.900Well, I have to say I was pretty fortunate, as I just told you.
00:15:26.920I mean, people attacked me online like crazy, but as far as losing personal friendships or relations with relatives or even colleagues, that has not happened so far.
00:15:37.380And I've even had some colleagues buy my book, colleagues who didn't agree with my position, and I'm not sure why.
00:15:44.620You know, I guess I tried not to be too combative in my discussions, but I did.
00:15:51.060After the first six weeks, the first six weeks, I was scared to talk to anyone, and I only talked to people online.
00:15:56.520And after that, I made the decision, you know, I'm old enough that I should be able to say what I think, and whatever happens, happens.
00:16:04.240And so I did start to talk to people, and I did have some disagreement, but I haven't lost a single friend or colleague so far.
00:16:10.660So, and I know I've heard lots of stories of people who have.
00:16:14.220I mean, the worst that happened is, I remember one, I was at a family gathering in New York last year, and when I was talking about my views to a cousin, he said, but surely you didn't support the convoy, did you?
00:16:27.640And I said, well, as a matter of fact, I did.
00:16:30.140And he just looked at me, just kind of baffled, as though, you know, this was just something that had never entered his field of vision before.
00:16:39.300He was very, very far left, and I think he had just never, he didn't expect that response and didn't know what to do with it.
00:16:45.640So he just kind of changed the subject.
00:16:47.740I thought it was, it was funny, because, yeah, he could accept that I'm against some of the lockdowns, but you actually supported the convoy?
00:16:56.820I see some of those people who were very pro-lockdown, pro-coercion coming around to my way of thinking, and I'm trying to exercise some grace and stick my I told you so's in a sack, because these are baby critical thinkers, and I don't want to scare them back to the other side.
00:17:15.740But I'm glad that you have a, you're obviously a good judge of character to the people that you keep close to you, because you didn't have a lot of people shunning you or any people shunning you for your worldview.
00:17:48.440I imagine that if I had not gotten vaccinated, then I might have faced more of that opprobrium.
00:17:55.620And you had told me that before we were recording, but I just didn't think that was actually all that relevant to our conversation.
00:18:04.620One of my, my heels to die on during all of the pandemic was, it's, I care about medical privacy.
00:18:11.680I don't want to know, I don't think your bartender should know, or your flight attendant should know what your vaccination status is for the flu or for COVID.
00:18:21.920So I just, I didn't even want to bring that up, but I think that's a really important point to make that you just made, is that we're not necessarily against the vaccine.
00:18:32.760Although I think this one was not as advertised, and a lot of people are figuring that out.
00:18:39.060But you seem to be, as you said to me, against the mandates and against the coercion of it all.
00:18:44.700And, and for me too, it was also the government handing the coercion over to the private sector, and then saying, see, it's not us.
00:18:53.440It's actually the bar that wants to stay open to the guy who owns the place doesn't lose his shirt.
00:19:03.080And I have to say, and again, my views evolved as well.
00:19:05.760Like when, when the vaccine rollout started, I wasn't that opposed to the mandates at that point, because I thought, well, it's not that different from school mandates.
00:19:15.200And I, you know, I, all my, my, my kids got vaccinated, and I never really gave it too much thought.
00:19:22.480I thought it was the right thing to do at the time.
00:19:24.200So I thought this is not that much different.
00:19:25.820But then as time went on, and as I talked to bioethicists for the book, I began to realize that, no, this was not just a, like the childhood vaccine mandates, this was much different.
00:19:38.300The degree of coercion was, you know, off the charts way more.
00:19:44.100If a parent did not want their child to get vaccinated, there was always a way out without sacrificing their career, you know, or their prospect.
00:20:18.320So there's nothing to compare against at the end of the day.
00:20:21.600And I think for, that was one of the reasons why the mandates were so harsh that you couldn't watch your kid play hockey, couldn't get on a plane.
00:20:30.620I mean, this is Canada, one of the biggest, least populated countries on the face of the earth.
00:20:36.720Hopefully someone will edit my alarm going on in the video.
00:21:14.160You know, whether that was the explicit intent, that was certainly the result.
00:21:18.120And I do remember, you know, coming back to the vaccines, after I got vaccinated and there was that period of the vax passports to go in the restaurant, I always felt really uncomfortable.
00:22:24.520And from the start, I started collecting links and quotes and listened to interviews.
00:22:30.040I didn't know where this was all going, but there was such a need to understand and to somehow express and put my little drop of water into the conversation
00:22:39.300that I started doing all this research without knowing where it was going.
00:22:43.140And then in August 2020, I took a trip to Sweden when there was that window of opportunity for travel, just to get away from the madness that was Canada.
00:22:54.800And to experience some semblance of normalcy amid all this.
00:22:59.620And when I came back, I wrote an essay about my experience in Sweden and that got published and that led to a bunch more essays.
00:23:07.900And then I realized that I really enjoyed doing this, writing these social philosophical essays about COVID.
00:23:15.900And I started writing for the Brownstone Institute, among other news outlets, some mainstream, some more niche.
00:23:24.660And then I pitched this idea for a book to them and they went for it.
00:23:29.780They were, you know, happy with my writing.
00:23:31.440They said I was a popular writer on the site and then it became a reality.
00:23:36.160So I'd say the whole thing was sort of organic and not really premeditated.
00:23:40.980So it was the best kind of scenario in a way.
00:23:43.080It's when you have a strong passion for something and, you know, you find a way to get it out.
00:23:47.600Yeah, I love the title of your book because now looking back, we can really see that those early objectors were right.
00:23:55.240The data is continuing to roll out with Sweden.
00:24:50.660It's oil and gas rich and forestry rich.
00:24:53.040And the town council there said, large companies, you don't get to come and work inside of our county if you have a VAX mandate for your employees.
00:25:03.580And they became the control group for the rest of the, I think, for the country.
00:25:10.100Because when now you look at what their vaccination rate was without coercion, because they removed coercion from the equation, it's only about 30%.
00:25:20.980So places like that, places like Sweden, they really show you what the uptake on vaccination for COVID would have been without government coercion.
00:26:08.800And I think also the societal fallout of our institutions, I think that's going to take time to manifest.
00:26:17.060You know, like we've chased all the good, we, I mean, the government, the royal we.
00:26:22.200They've chased all the people who should be in positions of leadership in their institutions, in medicine, in academia, in the judicial system, in policing, in the military.
00:26:34.680All the critical thinkers, the conscientious objectors, the people who are resilient to coercion, they've been chased right out of the organization.
00:26:46.480When they should be, they should be promoted to positions of leadership.
00:26:50.160And now we've just got a bunch of yes men left in these institutions.
00:27:03.860But I found it interesting that you were referring just now to this town in northern Alberta, you know, where there was some religious practice.
00:27:12.040And it reminds me of, I saw a video about the Amish as well.
00:27:15.800They just said, we're not doing any of this.
00:27:18.700And they fared at least as well with COVID as anyone else.
00:27:24.000And I found that whole religious aspect interesting because, I mean, I'm not religious myself.
00:27:28.680But during COVID, I really came to have an appreciation for the religious worldview and perspective and rejection of this biomedical model of life.
00:27:42.780You know, and the Orthodox Jewish community was another.
00:27:46.980I have, you know, a mostly Jewish background.
00:27:49.120And when I read about the Orthodox Jews in New York and in Israel who just refused to comply, I felt an understanding or kinship with them that I'd never felt before.
00:28:02.760Because I really, they were just rejecting that whole model of life that the mainstream was imposing on everyone.
00:28:10.840And this model that says you can completely disregard everything that makes life worth meaning, that gives, you know, community.
00:28:19.000We can just disregard all that in this futile quest to, you know, try to keep people metabolically alive.
00:28:27.080You know, that was the only thing that matters.
00:28:28.740And our reasons for being here don't matter at all.
00:28:34.780Community, connection, doesn't matter at all.
00:28:37.220And I think that's what some of us just recoiled against instinctively.
00:28:41.320It was just this very two-dimensional view of life, you know, and the whole purpose of it all just never entered the discourse.
00:28:49.500Just stay home, save lives, stay home, save lives.
00:28:51.840There was something very alienating and off and off-putting about it.
00:28:55.040Yeah, we saw that with a lot of the Christian pastors featured in our documentary that's being released on July 5th.
00:29:03.460It's called Church Under Fire, Canada's War on Christianity.
00:29:06.580And we spoke to members of the Christian community who objected to the lockdowns or at least the restrictions on places of worship and the consequences that they faced because of that.
00:29:19.860I mean, we had pastors facing, you know, weeks in jail, Pastor James Coates here in Edmonton, Phil Hutchins in New Brunswick.
00:29:29.420I mean, it was just an insane time to see these China-style lockdowns on pastors.
00:29:37.700And many of them weren't even COVID skeptics.
00:29:40.800They just said, we are going to gather.
00:29:42.880That's all they said, and that's what had them end up in jail.
00:29:47.940Getting back to your book, because I could talk to you forever about what you think about the lockdowns and all those things, but I know that your time is precious.
00:29:55.560Tell us about some of the people featured in your book.
00:30:01.580I featured Father Raymond D'Souza, who was also a columnist for the National Post.
00:30:06.820You know, and he was one of the people who just really made me understand, you know, that for some people, religious communion is, you know, is like food and water.
00:30:17.040And you can't just arbitrarily declare that this is non-essential and then declare that, you know, walking through the aisles of Walmart is essential.
00:30:28.500And, again, the people that I featured in my book, I deliberately went beyond scientists and doctors, because scientists, epidemiologists, virologists, public health people, they can tell us about what they know about containing a virus.
00:30:44.240They cannot tell us, and they have no extra authority on what it means to be human, how to balance different priorities, you know, how to do cost-benefit in one way or another.
00:31:03.780The scientists are just one group of experts at a table, and we should have had all these other experts right from the start.
00:31:10.500And so I feature a comedian, Bill Maher, who had a very sane perspective on COVID from the start.
00:31:18.860I feature many writers, novelists, philosophers, deep thinkers, who, like one of them being Giorgio Agamben, Italian philosopher, who, again, you know, I really could connect with his visceral objection to all this.
00:31:35.180He talked about this emphasis on bare life and what I call metabolic life at the expense of living.
00:31:42.220This idea of cancelling living to save lives, not to mention that, you know, it didn't save lives the way people promised.
00:31:52.180But even so, it was just this two-dimensional vision, and he talks about that.
00:31:56.540And he emerged early in the pandemic as a voice against all this.
00:32:02.360And he also talked about the permanent state of exception, how we are living in a society that is just looking for emergencies everywhere.
00:32:11.400And after one emergency has ended, we move on to the next, and we move on to the next.
00:32:15.700And, you know, he talked about how unhealthy it is for a society to be living in this permanent emergency mode where we cannot allow any semblance of normalcy.
00:32:31.320One of them is Lionel Shriver of We Need to Talk About Kevin fame.
00:32:37.700She's a great, you know, very wry, crotchety American writer who's been living in England for many years.
00:32:46.660And I put her in a chapter on freedom because, again, she was just appalled that her compatriots just accepted this assault on freedom.
00:32:56.220And she and another writer that I feature in the freedom chapter, Matthew Crawford, just talk about the value of freedom and how people, you know, just dismissed that.
00:33:11.660You know, freedom really is as important as life itself.
00:33:13.860And it was very disconcerting to me to see freedom reduced to this caricature.
00:33:19.620You know, free dumbs, or you want your free dumbs to go to Arby's and get a sandwich or something.
00:33:28.560It was about the freedom to do whatever I want without the government asking me my medical status.
00:33:36.020I want to ask you, before I let you go, because you've been very generous with your time, I want to ask you about the censorship of the COVID skeptics and how it was constantly morphing.
00:33:51.580You could have your entire existence online cancelled early on in the pandemic if you said something like,
00:33:57.780well, I'm not sure if these vaccines are as effective as they keep telling me they are, because I got it and then I got sick and they told me that I wouldn't.
00:34:05.900You couldn't even talk about your own personal experience.
00:34:10.340Even online or on YouTube without your Twitter account being just locked down, your YouTube channel being taken away.
00:34:18.240It became my full-time job to make sure we didn't lose access to our 1.6 million YouTube subscribers every day just by saying things we knew to be true because of the just intense censorship of people who are now proven right.
00:34:38.120And those same social media companies, they changed their policies quietly.
00:34:42.580And now you can talk about vaccine injuries and you can talk about skepticism about lockdowns, but they never actually go back and retroactively fix the censorship that they did as though you could fix censorship.
00:34:56.060But they never even give you your account back.
00:34:58.260They just say, well, we got it wrong, but that's not our problem.
00:35:05.340And in addition to that, I think what I've experienced also with this book, and it's a disappointment, is just the left wing media's lack of interest.
00:35:16.320I mean, my objective in writing the book was to speak not only to people on our side, but to people on the other side.
00:35:23.800And I really, really tailored the book with that in mind, the kind of book that you could give to your, you know, left leaning friend who's locked in a certain narrative just to sort of make them think, ah, okay, this is why some people objected to this.
00:35:40.400And, but I've found that it is, I mean, my publisher has been great in promoting the book, and I've supplemented my publisher's efforts, but I found that it's been so much easier to attract interest from so called right wing media, than from left wing media.
00:35:57.620And, you know, that's another form of censorship or ignoring, and so then people don't get the full picture.
00:36:03.580I mean, I'm still working on it, you know, and I've had, you know, a few little bites here and there, but it's, I find that that's a very big shame, in that, again, you know, we aren't, we don't get to influence or to really participate in the discourse, to the extent that we should.
00:36:20.380And, and then the debate still gets framed in a certain way.
00:36:26.760On the flip side of that, I somewhat understand the psychology of people who don't want to pick up your book and read it, because your book, if you pick up the book and read it, if you're on the other side of this, and you just spent three years acting like an absolute tyrant, like just discriminating against people because of their medical choices, and you pick up this book.
00:36:48.700And again, I use this, the phrase, the scales fall away from your eyes, you don't want to admit to yourself, like you have to admit to yourself, that you were wrong, really wrong.
00:36:59.500And you were not the person you thought you were, when you are mugged by the reality of something like your book.
00:37:08.260Although I have to say, where I have had success is individuals that I know, that were on board with that, and who know me, and you know, I told them my book was published, they bought it, they read it.
00:37:20.880So I think that, you know, once people get their hands on it, you know, it's really not a combative book.
00:37:26.460And sure, it's more of an exploratory book, you know, here, look at the menu, you know, see why we felt the way we did.
00:37:33.600And I also get deep into some personal experiences, you know, how the lockdowns drove me to try LSD and see a Zoom therapist and all this stuff.
00:37:43.420I have a history as a memoirist too, so I weave all that in.
00:37:45.980And so I think, again, you know, once people get it into their hands, it has not, it has made people think it hasn't offended people.
00:37:54.000It's just, you know, the barrier really is to get the left wing media to, you know, to sort of spread the word.
00:38:03.100And I think that's what all of us face who write so-called counter-narrative books, you know.
00:38:09.800So I know my publisher, Jeffrey Tucker from Brownstone said, this is the sort of book that people on our side should just give their friends on the left wing.