>> Scott Atlas, he's the guy that this Washington
Post article is really shedding a lot of light
on. But he's, to some people, not a new name.
He is to me cuz I don't watch Fox News, but
we're gonna to tell you all that we found
out about him.
So he's a neuroradiologist from Stanford's
conservative Hoover Institute, by the way,
not an expert on infectious disease. He's
a doctor, which is why they're lifting him
up, but not on infectious disease and its
spread, so bear that in mind. Might be an
explanation, by the way, as to why he's been
so consistently wrong about this one.
So he's advocated that the US should adopt
the model that Sweden has used in response
to the virus outbreak. He's argued both internally
and in public that an increased case count
will move the nation more quickly to herd
immunity and won't lead to more deaths if
the vulnerable are protected.
That is dumb when he said it before it was
tested, every day it gets stupider. The Sweden
thing I just love because conservatives in
America have virtually never pointed to another
country to say that's what we should do. They
did it for the first time and it made me long
for the days when they only cared about America
because they could not have gotten it more
wrong than they did.
So let's bring up Sweden, Dr. Tom Frieden
compared the death count. So this is deaths
per million people. I understand if you're
on a small screen, you can't read all those
labels so let me summarize. There's a bunch
of numbers down at the bottom. Those are Sweden's
neighbors geographically.
The two numbers at the top are the US and
Sweden. Sweden's a little bit higher than
us in deaths per million actually, six times
higher than all of its geographic neighbors.
So they decided to point to a country that
has failed on American levels to address this
pandemic with their boneheaded strategy of
herd immunity, which basically just means
not doing anything.
All the countries around them took it more
seriously. And have had far fewer deaths and
have suffered less economically cuz what turns
out that when people keep dying every day
for literally months, that hurts your economy.
Now it was stupid when they said it at the
beginning with the initial weeks of evidence
back in March and April show that Sweden wasn't
doing a great job in this.
They're still doing it despite months of evidence
that it's failed. They don't care that it
failed. Because their audience, the people
that are eating this up on Fox News and Twitter,
hear Sweden model and think, some other country
did it. If I talk about this, I'm gonna sound
cosmopolitan like I understand what's going
on around the world.
I'm not gonna do a damn second of research.
I'm just gonna say it. And so that chart is
more information about this debate than literally
anyone talking about on Twitter will actually
have that we should follow.
>> It makes me feel good that another country
is getting it as wrong as we are.
We're 328 million, Sweden is 10 million people.
10 million people, and they still have the-
>> LA.
>> Same million, right, one LA. They're on
par with deaths per million. Wow, wow, what
a failure. Good God, not just kind of a failure,
not just a Brazil failure, a worse than the
US failure.
You're lifting up here.
>> And, yes, a worse than US failure being
lifted up. That is a great way to summarize
Scott Atlas. So why is Atlas one of the top
advisors to the president on this? I'm gonna
tell you in a second, but you already know
what it is.
What is the one qualification? Okay, maybe
there's two qualifications. See, you're doing
the money symbol. Francesca, that's a good
point in general. Yes, the money thing is
a good thing but-
>> How much did he give?
>> But for Trump specifically, yeah, in general.
For Trump, it's loyalty, but loyalty by itself
doesn't necessarily get you noticed.
What gets you noticed? Appearances on Fox
News. He's appeared 20 times on Fox News since
the end of April. Despite the fact that his
appearances universally show him making terrible
predictions and terrible ideas of what's gonna
happen. In March, he predicted that there
would be 10,000 deaths from COVID, in the
end only 10,000.
In April, he said that the pandemic appears
to be entering the containment phase. In May,
he said the curves have been flattened. More
recently, he's been telling people that we
should totally reopen schools because kids
don't spread coronavirus to their parents,
which is as wrong as all of his other previous
predictions.
But in America, particularly in DC, nothing
moves you up like being wrong. And so, he's
now one of the top medical advisors to the
president despite having no expertise in infectious
diseases, and a track record of being as wrong
on the pandemic as, I don't know, Navarro
and Mnuchin have been on the economy.
He could not be more wrong. He said in April
13th, we now need to reenter normal life and
continuing full, this is on The Hill, by the
way, continuing full population isolation
and waiting for a vaccine would be doubling
down and yielding to panic. And in his defense,
he has never yielded to panic.
He said on April 13th, we should reenter normal
life. That was 120,000 deaths ago, and he
hasn't changed his position. He hasn't panicked
even when any rational person would.
>> This is what awaits us if we have four
more years of Trump. I mean, I'm wondering
how many Hoover Institute rejects are going
to be on Fox and then funneled up.
And once again, I believe that if there are
four more years, we will recycle back through
all of the Trump administration officials
once they're done with Dancing with the Stars,
or they are the stars dancing with themselves.
And it scares me, I mean I feel like I am
just.
If you want to go outside, and this is what
the Democrats need to be saying every single
breath, Trump did this. And if you want to
go outside, if you want to eat in a restaurant
again, if you want your kids to go to school
safely again, if you want to go to work again.
If you don't wanna have your job completely
vanish on you essentially, cuz you know corporations
are going to be taking advantage of people
working at home to further and further squelch
them and make them do more work from home
etc., etc. If you want any of that, Trump
needs to be gone.
It's just basic, it is basic. So yes, Biden's
a neo-liberal, Kamala's a neo-liberal, you
know what neo-liberals do well? They make
things safe for business. They know how to
get things going cuz they do global capitalism.
But MAGA idiots and Trump at the helm, they're
just strong man populism who believe that
they can force a reality on a population,
and force people back to work when everything
around us is telling us the opposite.
So I get that people wanna say they're the
same. They're incredibly not the same.
>> Yeah.
>> I mean, this is just like look, dude, after
the RNC, I'm like North Korea is taking notes.
North Korea is like, didn't think of that,
done and done and done. So if we don't think,
what's this dude's name again, Scott?
>> Which one, Scott Atlas?
>> Scott Atlas, Scott Atlas shrugged. Scott
Atlas shrugged at all of the deaths because
our bodies will feed the market. Hey, I wanna
get back to Democrats who believe that we
should be actually in the workforce, not trampled
underneath it with our death.
>> Capitalism is people, it's people.
>> Markets are people, this is the whole point.
>> Shove us into the machine and just grind
us up. And as they're being shoved in the
machine, Trump fans are shouting, four more
years, four more.
>> And that's what it is.
>> Yes, because if you died, you died for
the cause of the fantasy.
You died for the dream, baby. You died for
the dream that COVID's not real.
>> There's a quiet dignity to that. Well,
it's not quiet and it's not dignity, but there's
something to that, yeah. And who thinks the
next pandemic's gonna go, Trump will take
the next one more seriously.
After he's been taught that he can win reelection
when doing nothing for the first one. My god,
you know how bad I wanted to be wrong after
2016 about what was gonna happen? I never
predicted any of this. It's just so much worse.
