BUCK: Our friend, Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, with us now to talk about everything from covid, to budgets, to January 6th, and more. Senator Johnson, great to have you on.

SEN JOHNSON: Well, guys, hope you’re doing well.

BUCK: We’re good. So, Senator, I want to start with, if I could, your sense of where we’re going here at the federal level based upon New York City — where Clay and I are currently sitting — having this vaccine mandate at the city level. The Biden administration still has the transportation administration folks putting mask mandates in place. The White House has said they don’t want total lockdowns, but everything is on the table. What do you think is gonna happen here, and what are you gonna do to stop the madness?

SEN JOHNSON: Well, first of all, I think they are trying to re-instill the state of fear that has worked so successfully for them to gain so much control and power over our lives. So, I think the best antidote to this is gonna be the truth. We need to keep pressing federal health agencies that I don’t think have been transparent, have not been forthright with the American public. They haven’t provided us the information we need to make informed choices about our lives.

Because they’re right there with the mainstream media, the social media. They want to create a state of fear so everybody has to look to them for salvation, I guess, for a small sense of security. And it’s simply not working. The human toll, the economic devastation of these shutdowns, what we’ve done to our children… If you take a look at Sweden, they didn’t shut down the way we did.

Their kids — 1.9 million Swedish schoolchildren — went to school — no masks — not one died of covid. And the teachers who were the health care workers actually had a lower rate of infections in the classroom teaching those kids. Why would…? Why would we inflict this kind of devastation one more time? It makes sense. And, by the way, there’s so much we don’t know about covid. There’s so much we don’t know about the Delta variant. But we ought to be looking to places like the U.K. and to Israel where they’re a little bit ahead of us and publishing better data than what our federal health agencies are publishing.

CLAY: Amen. And thank you for coming on with us, Senator Johnson. You have been one of the leaders in sanity in the Capitol, which is no small measure given how insane so many things have gone. And you just hit on something. England and Israel both have — and you mentioned Sweden as well, but I want to focus on England in particular.

They were able to do a study to look at how many people had natural immunity as well as the vaccine, and the data that they had most recently suggested that 92% of the people in England either had the vaccine or had natural immunity, meaning they had gotten covid. Why has America been so poor at figuring out how many of our people have had covid and, therefore, how many might have natural immunity?

Buck and I have been open with the fact that we both had covid and that, as a result, we have natural immunity. That helps us to understand where this pandemic might be going. Why do you think our own data has not been as good as the ones from Israel and England and Sweden and other countries like those?

SEN JOHNSON: That’s is the $64,000 question. Why have our health agencies, why have the media, the social media been so intent on making sure that everybody gets a jab in their arm, denying the reality that natural immunity is strong? It’s long lasting. It is with most other viruses. Why would we basically make the assumption that it’s not gonna work?

A report out of Israel said that those that had natural immunity from previous infections, were almost seven times less likely to get reinfected than those that got vaccinated. And, again, vaccinated cases are growing in England and the U.K., and they’re being reported honestly. I just don’t have faith that our media, our social media, our federal health agencies are going to report on this honestly.

But again, they want a vaccine every arm. That seems to be their primary motivation throughout this process. You really gotta scratch your head and say, “Why deny the reality of natural immunity?” You know, particularly when I talked to doctors before the vaccine was even approved, they were a little concerned about vaccinating over a previous infection. We are very careful.

When you go and get a flu shot, the first question they ask you: “Are you feeling sick today?” because it’s not smart vaccinating somebody who’s ill. And yet we haven’t taken any precaution whatsoever in this mass vaccination campaign of avoiding harm by vaccinating over even a current infection. We’re just not paying attention to it. Particularly knowing that 40 to 50% of Americans that were infected with covid were asymptomatic.

That was my case. I was asymptomatic. But I got tested for antibodies. I’ve got a whopping level, as Dr. Noorchashm tells me. So I’m not gonna use vaccine. But as a result, I get attacked as an anti-vaxxer when I’m not. I’ve got every vaccine since the swine flu, current on everything else. I just don’t need this one.

CLAY: Join the club. And, by the way, thank you for saying that Senator Ron Johnson. We’ve got Alex Berenson in studio with us tomorrow. I saw you tweet, and this kind of ties in with how good of work he’s done sharing data and helping people to see what’s out there. There’s also a report — I don’t know if you’ve seen it — that the New York Times and their top editors told their reporters, “Don’t pursue the idea of a lab leak from China,” because they didn’t like the idea of where it might lead them. How crazy is that in this world right now?

SEN JOHNSON: Well, yeah. There’s further evidence of corruption of the media. I was the advocate for early treatment. I held the hearings even though the New York Times labeled me and eminent doctors “Snake Oil Salesmen of the Senate.” But it didn’t deter me. I held a second hearing. It was Pierre D. Kory’s testimony in the second hearing about the effectiveness of Ivermectin, that after about eight million views got pulled off the internet.

We can’t let Americans know that there just might be some effective early treatment there with safe, effective, repurposed, generic, cheap drugs, that we gotta keep Remdesivir in the hospitalized patients costing 3,000 bucks a dose. Now, again, there’s so many things that make no sense. There’s so many unanswered questions. But, no, you’re right. Alex Berenson has been doing yeoman work at (audio drops) second opinion, providing facts and data.

But, of course, now he’s been censored. He’s been thrown off Twitter so that information is not getting to the public. I have to also say, that’s been the tragedy of this pandemic. We have internet! That internet has got a marvelous ability to disseminate information. Doctors who are practicing medicine have the compassion and courage to treat patients trying different things. Their voices were shut down! How many people lost their lives just because the internet wouldn’t allow the dissemination of helpful information?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Basically, sir, the budget looks like it’s gonna be a monstrosity, trillions of dollars. We got infrastructure thrown in here as well. What should folks know about this? Because a lot of it’s happening behind closed doors, and the bill’s so big — or the text that we’ve seen so far of the infrastructure side is so big — that it feels like no one in the public even knows.

SEN JOHNSON: Well, first of all, what we should understand is that we could have actually financed infrastructure without further integrity our children. Every Republican voted against the $1.9 trillion covid relief bill. Over $700 billion of that wasn’t even spent ’til 2022 through 2028. So the Republicans should have been saying, “Yeah, we’ll happy to spend money on real infrastructure, things that will grow our economy.

“But we just repurposed that $700 billion for that without further indebting our kids,” because if we don’t do that it’s gonna be spend and the debt will grow. The other thing we need to understand is why that $3.5 trillion figure for the Bernie budget just isn’t accurate. What the Democrats are doing is they’re leading up all these bills with new entitlements.

What they’ll do is have the CBO only score them for a few years, knowing that — as Ronald Reagan said, the closest thing to eternal life say government program — these things will never end. So if you assume that these programs — and it’s a good assumption — are gonna continue during a 10-year budget window, that puts the bill from $3.5 trillion up to $5 trillion or $5.5 trillion.

But the unfunded liabilities as you go beyond the 10-year window is even larger. So, again, the Democrats are not honest with you, and I personally find it very disappointing that we have Republicans that really cooperating with them in what will turn out to be about a $7 trillion spending package when all is said and done here.

CLAY: What kind of a relationship, Senator Johnson, do you have with Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona and Joe Manchin in West Virginia, two Democrats, and how much do you think they might pull this number back? Kyrsten Sinema came out and said she doesn’t support a $3.5 trillion bill. As you said, the dollar figure of what it actually costs is not being accurate. But how much do you think they might be able to dial this back? How much ammunition do they have in this battle?

SEN JOHNSON: Well, they’re both very smart. I work with Senator Sinema on what we called Operation Safe Return, which somewhat morphed into the Return to Mexico policy. So, again, she was helpful from that standpoint. But right now, just thank God that they’re willing to stand by the filibuster. I pray for their health. I guess they also have to recognize they’re in such a position of power, I don’t know why they’d want to give that position up.

But still, standing by the filibuster, be a little more fiscally conservative is popular in both their states, so hopefully they’ll be helpful here. But in the end, there is gonna be such tremendous pressure and, again, you can place… You can just engage in smoke and mirrors so easily in the budget process. Because if she says, “It’s not gonna be $3.5 trillion,” they’ll say, Okay, so we’ll just… We’ll just cross this one for two years rather than four,” and, you know, magically all the sudden that number drops to $3 trillion so she can get credit for it but in effect it doesn’t do anything. So, again, I have my doubts that they would actually abandon the filibuster ’cause it gives them all their power. But again, the pressure will be tremendous by people on the left.

BUCK: Senator, January 6th, the so-called insurrection — which I think is a stupid and dishonest term for it, but this is what the media calls it. We have the House bringing their select committee together to, it seem, just make this, force-feed this into the news cycle whenever they see fit. I want to know if you think that we’re actually going to get answers about what happened that day, the kind of answers that if this was really a security review would be helpful about things like who shot Ashli Babbitt, why wasn’t there more security that day, what did the FBI know and when did it know it? Do you have any faith that we’ll get those answers in the Congress either in the near or long term?

SEN JOHNSON: Well, not certainly out of this committee. Senator Lindsey Graham and I actually are were the first people to call for a completely independent commission. I’ve written at least a dozen oversight letters asking questions that should be asked. What did Pelosi know? When did she know it? What did she do to actually have a plan for adequate security knowing tens of thousands of people would be protesting on the Capitol?

So, no, I don’t think we’re gonna get this out of this committee. But I understand why everybody likes… Not everybody, but, you know, congressional leadership as well as the media, the Democrats love this narrative — which is completely false, by the way — of thousands of armed insurrectionists. Look, what happened the Capitol is not what an armed insurrection would look like. I condemn the violence. I think we all do.

I want to see those people prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But the reason they like the “thousands of arms insurrectionists” narrative, first of all, it paints a broad picture, paints 75 million Americans who voted for President Trump as essentially domestic terrorists and need to be survived. But it also completely absolves them of responsibility for securing the Capitol.

What could they have done in terms of planning for this if there were thousands of armed insurrectionists over in the Capitol? So again, that’s why congressional leadership is actually quite happy and does not push back on that narrative like I have. Plus I’d say, people know how I’ve been attacked for just telling the truth, and that’s probably another deterrent of not having more people speak out.

CLAY: Senator Johnson, I appreciate the time you’re spending with us. Question. You have been up front — we talked about this earlier with you today with us and certainly you’ve been talking — about it a lot about the likelihood of a lab leak theory. The Biden administration is now looking back at that. Facebook is suddenly allowing people to discuss it.

If it is determined, if the Biden administration agrees as well that the most likely outcome which seems likely is that this leaked from a Chinese lab, what should we do with that information as Americans based on what has entailed from covid so far? What, in your mind, is the appropriate response?

SEN JOHNSON: Well, first of all, we did send a letter to get all of Fauci’s emails in an unredacted form. So the American public needs see what his communication was, to what extent he was covering up his own activity of funding gain-of-function research. That’s the first thing we need to take a look at is, “Should this be allowed?” you know, “What kinds of controls do we need to have over this?”

And really, no matter what, it was just plain stupid to be sharing this kind of research with anybody in China — you know, particularly the Wuhan Institute of Virology — knowing full well that the Chinese Communist Party, the PLA, know everything that’s going on there. Fauci, these guys, Krause, they know the danger of what they’re dealing with here, and yet they allowed it. So we certainly need to understand what happened there.

From the standpoint of China, we just need to recognize the threat that they represent to the world, and we need to be strong ourselves. And unfortunately, under President Biden we’re just exhibiting weakness throughout the world, whether it’s to Russia, in Afghanistan, in Iran. Just across the board we are portraying weakness and of course we’re not even looking at… With all this double-digit increase in the budget, we’re going to starve the Defense and Homeland Security budgets. That’s not the Democrats’ priority: Keeping the people safe.

BUCK: Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, sir, great to have you on. Come back soon.

SEN. JOHNSON: Have a great day. Stay healthy.