Unmasked Ian Miller

The latest podcast episode is a fascinating conversation with John Tierney from City Journal discussing his fantastic work documenting the lack of justification for vaccine mandates for kids, the failures of Dr. Fauci and Deborah Birx, and society's addiction to crisis.
John's work at City Journal can be found here, and his excellent book "The Power of Bad" is available here.
"Unmasked" is available here, now in hardcover format as well.
**Transcript isn’t available for this episode, unfortunately the software was not able to produce a usable one**



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Laura Dodsworth, author of the fantastic book: "A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic" joins the show to discuss masks and how global governments used fear to ensure compliance with mandates. 
You can find Laura’s Substack here and her incredibly important book here. You can also follow her on Twitter here.
The podcast is also available through Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Full transcript is available from the web version of Substack.
Ian Miller (00:00):
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We've got another very special guest today. Her name's Laura Dodsworth she's the author of the book, a state of fear, and she writes the Laura Dodsworth Substack. Everybody should go check that out. But so Laura, welcome. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
Laura Dodsworth (00:17):
Oh, thank you for having me. I can't think of a better podcast really you know, fit wise for me. So it's fantastic. I loved your book.
Ian Miller (00:26):
Yeah. Well, thank you. And I, I really enjoyed speaking with you, so I'm glad we're getting to do this again. My, my first question for you was kind of about your initial reaction to it. And, and you wrote about it in the book that the virus you were initially seemingly were a little concern because it's something new you weren't familiar with and, but you kind of seemed a little bit more, fairly measured in your response, but then when Boris Johnson gave his speech saying everybody needs to stay home, we're locking down. That's you know, we're moving in that direction in terms of policy, it seemed like you kind of reacted a bit more viscerally. So why do you think it was that his speech in particular kind of do that way? Maybe even more so than the virus did?
Laura Dodsworth (01:06):
Mm, yeah, isn't it funny? I think that there was just a lot of fear in the air and really everybody was subjected to some fears. It's just which fears you yourself are susceptible to. Now, I did have some fear about the virus and, you know, I remember up on tined food, I'm a, a single parent. And I thought, well, if I'm, if I'm terribly ill, how will my children cook? Because we were being told we couldn't leave the house at all. Mm-Hmm . And so the sort of normal recourse to help like family and friends wouldn't be available. So I had some nerves and my children still tease me about the fact that I asked them to wash hands when they came indoors for the first couple of weeks. . But my my approach is often to sort of deep dive and research and, and look things up for myself.
Laura Dodsworth (01:56):
And from very early, I was reading up on different epidemiologists and scientists, views of the virus. So rather a lot of unknowns at the beginning, there were also very respected voices urging caution on the IFFR for instance professor Johnny and Artis and contextualizing epidemics and pandemics. And I don't think I had an out of scale fear of it. And you see here in the UK, the initial response was that we would cocoon the elderly and a certain amount of herd immunity would build up. And then there was this sudden U-turn and I think I found the U-turn discombobulating. I just couldn't believe the address to the nation. On the 23rd of March, it was very stern. It was really going for a wartime vibe, you know, war on a war, on a virus. And for some reason I fast forwarded mentally very quickly, not that night, but very quickly into what the consequences could be.
Laura Dodsworth (03:06):
And to be honest, watching those fears become fulfilled, you know, to see them on furl over time has been quite horrific. So the longer lot I went on it was, it was obvious that we would have high inflation because we were quantitative easing our way through this. I was surprised that people were so adamant that children were resilient and children would be okay, and shutting schools and masking children would be fine because clearly it hasn't been. And I fe

David Zweig, author of the book "Invisibles" and frequent contributor to The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Wired and many others, joins the show to discuss his fantastic work on school masking, CDC flaws and how experts and politicians make decisions
A collection of David’s work is available through his website and his upcoming book on schools during the pandemic will be released next year. You can follow him on Twitter and Substack as well.
His fantastic article on the CDC’s flawed justification for masking kids is available here.
**Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.



This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ianmsc.substack.com/subscribe

Drew Holden, who does more than almost anyone on Twitter to hold pundits, media members and news organizations accountable for intellectual hypocrisy and inconsistency, joins the podcast to discuss the coverage of COVID, the failures of government communication and his favorite examples of the media’s rush to judgment.
Follow Drew on Twitter and check out a list of his articles here.
***Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble***
Past episodes of the Podcast are available here on Substack, or also available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
Full transcript is below:
Ian Miller:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We have a very special guest today drew Holden, who is a a maker of threads and, and defender of intellectual consistency in those threads. He's also a freelance commentary writer who is written for a lot of major publications, New York times, Washington post Federalist Fox news, et cetera. So welcome drew. Thanks so much for doing this,
Drew Holden:
Ian. Pleasure's mine, sir. I appreciate you having me on.
Ian Miller:
Yeah. so I wanted to ask, and you might have answered this previously, but I'm curious what, what got you started making these threads? They're so, you know, brilliantly simple, but incredibly important. And to me, especially, what was it that made you start putting these together?
Drew Holden:
Well, I, I appreciate that. So the first time I remember the, that I ever put together a thread was it was, it was back around the time when general Soleimani, the, the Iranian general was killed. And the reason I had put it together was because I, I remember the coverage and I looked at a lot of it and I was like, man, this is, this is weird. And I don't know that we always get these honorifics for for, for these sorts of titles, but who knows, maybe, maybe there's some new trend where we're trying to be nicer to people when, when they die. So wash forward a couple weeks and Don, I miss the bomb throwing radio host, who famously made a, a racist comment about the Rutgers women's basketball team back probably about a decade ago. So he passed away a couple weeks later and just got slammed his obituaries, the, the headlines across all his corporate press were just really trashing this guy hours after he had died.
Drew Holden:
And I saw them and I was like, you know, I, I get it. People had issues with, I miss. Obviously he made some, some really indefensible comments, but there's no way on any sort of moral playing field. Is he worse than a guy who is the leader of a terrorist organization, right. Who has, who has an enormous amount of innocent blood on his hands? And so I went through for a bunch of different outlets and I posted the two side by side and I didn't even, I didn't think I even said anything, right. There was no real analysis. It was just the pictures. And I looked at them and they jumped off the page to me. And I was like, whatever, I'm, I'm gonna string six or seven of these together and see if folks like it. And you know, I got, I had a pretty good response. And then I started thinking about it and I was like, man, there's, there's definitely a lot to say here, and I should figure out how to do that. And then from that, that kind of moment, the, the thread, the at least as a concept was born. And then I've had to tinker and refine a little bit on the format to, to try and get the point across a little bit better. And I'm, I'm sure I'm still learning too.
Ian Miller:
Hmm. Do you have a, a favorite example of an issue? I mean, obviously that one kind of jumped out at you, but what, you know, after you started making them has been going down through this, through the process, was there something that came up where you're like, oh, this is, this is it. This is gonna be perfect. I've already got, I know, I already know the examples are coming for this one.
Drew Holden:
Yeah. So this, I think the one that, that comes t

Phil Kerpen goes into detail on the problems with listening to CDC guidance, the disastrous Fauci and Birx lockdowns, and the possibilities of indefinite masking in certain parts of the country.
Follow Phil on Twitter.
Ian Miller: (00:27)Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the unasked podcast. We've got a special guest today, Phil Kerpen the president of American commitment principal at the committee to unleash prosperity frequent Fox news contributor, and, and also a CDC critic. So we'll we'll get into that. Welcome to the show, Phil. Thanks so much for doing this.Phil Kerpen: (00:47)Hey, Ian, my pleasure. Great to be with you.Ian Miller: (00:49)Yeah. so I wanted to start with kind of where we we've started a lot with these conversations, which is, you know, what were your initial thoughts about COVID where you immediately skeptical about, I mean, how severe it was any of the policies we were doing or were you concerned, you know, what was, what was your response?Phil Kerpen: (01:08)Well, you know, I thought the it's interesting. I thought the most striking feature of the early data out of China was the extreme age skew in all of the data. And, you know, I remember telling my kids in like January and February of 2020, this really doesn't affect kids. It's nothing you have to worry about. It's not gonna ha have any effect on you. And of course I was incorrect only because of the way it was mediated by bad government policies. But you know, it became pretty clear pretty early on that the policy response was going to be, you know, catastrophically off course poorly targeted, poorly designed that it was being politicized in an extremely destructive way. And so, you know, normally I work on kind of economic issues, taxes, spending, regulation, that kind of stuff, but it was kind of obvious that all the usual stuff they care about was about to become largely irrelevant because we didn't have government, you know, forcibly shutting down people's businesses and schools and kind of destroying their lives. And so I've been on kind of this two year detour trying to fight all of this stuff and unfortunately with a lot less success than I would've liked, especially when Trump administration was in. Cause I had a lot of pretty good ties there and for the most part, they, they didn't listen to much of what I have to say. Unfortunately,Ian Miller: (02:33)That is, it's funny. You mentioned that, cause that was my next question for you. So you know, obviously you have a lot of contact with politicians and, and especially in the Trump white house early on. So what do you think, what is your opinion or, or what was your sense of what was going on inside the Trump white house with regards to COVID policy? Did they kind of unquestionably accept the, the Fauci Burke's lockdowns or was there concern that these would have other impacts or, you know, what, what did you think their sense was early on of what the policies were gonna do?Phil Kerpen: (03:03)Well, you know, I think the first of all, they had a team that was very poorly designed for dealing with this virus. And, and this has continued to this, to this very day, but I mean, they had people whose experience and expertise really was from fighting HIV and just a completely different type of virus, you know, for, for a sexually transmitted infection, you can actually do contact tracing and it has some value even, even for that, it it's you know, limited, but it has some value for a highly infectious respiratory virus it's completely absurd. And yet they took kind of this whole mentality, this whole model. And I think that the Burkes hire was kind of the key bad hire of the Trump administration because they took this, this sort of paradigm that really didn't fit at all. And they tried to use that as the foundation of everything that came after.Phil Kerpen: (03:55)And I actually think that Trump had some reasonably good instincts fairly early on. You might own, remember when he said

Adam Creighton, the Washington correspondent for The Australian and contributor to Sky News, discusses Australia's strict lockdowns and the long term policy implications, as well as the political climate in the US and his thoughts on the public opinion of COVID interventions. 
Follow Adam on Twitter here and check out his work at The Australian here.
Listen to the Unmasked podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
The book “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates” is available for purchase through Amazon and many other outlets.
Full transcript of the interview is below:
Ian Miller: Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of The Unmasked Podcast. We've got a special guest today. Adam Creighton, who's the Washington correspondent for the Australian and also contributor to Sky News Australia, which is very exciting, Adam, thank you so much for doing this.
Adam Creighton: Thanks very much for having me.
Ian Miller: Yeah, first of all, I wanted to say thank you for your wonderful review of my book. It's it's been really, really great to see all the positive response to it. It helped dramatically help to get the get it into Australia and kind of awareness of it down there, which I hugely appreciate. Yeah so thank you for that.
Adam Creighton: No, I hope lots of people read it. It was excellent.
Ian Miller: I appreciate it. So my first question for you was when when COVID first started you know this was back March 2020. What were your kind of initial thoughts and reactions to it? Were you skeptical of the policies we were putting in? Were you supportive of them and has there been any kind of adjustments or changes in your thinking overtime?
Adam Creighton: You know, certainly at the start I was actually very scared about the whole thing going back to March 2020 because I knew a bit of history. I knew about the Spanish flu. I knew how bad these things could be, and so I was kind of expecting the worst. I mean, I was so scared. I actually shifted my money out of a one of the smaller financial institutions that I was in and put it in a larger bank, but I was just worried about. You know what was gonna happen to the global economy? Uhm, of course, as it turned out, those those fears were, you know, were kind of ill founded at least as fast. As far as the virus went, and I guess because I was so concerned, I was checking everyday the publicly available statistics on worldometer and the various U.S. government websites, and it became pretty clear to me by the end of March at least, that we were massively overreacting to this thing, that there was a climate of hysteria. And I felt as though it was my responsibility as a journalist to point that out, but that was quite a risky move. But as I say, there was a climate of hysteria and it wasn't until the middle of April the 13th or 14th of April that I wrote in my weekly column in the Australian that we were over reacting to an unremarkable virus. And you can imagine how that went over. So because it really was that was kind of peak hysteria and I pointed out things like the number of deaths every year. You know, know, million odd every year that the numbers that the infection fatality ratios were likely very very low. Drawing on some of the work of John Ioannidis, very eminent professor in this field, and he made a lot of sense to me. So I you know, I quoted him. So yeah, so I, so I guess I changed my view pretty quickly and then I you know, I became a champion of that view really up until now and. In terms of how I changed my view at all, well, I mean I'm shocked how long this whole thing has gone on for I would never have, you know, never have thought that almost two years on would be talking about this. I think that's just extraordinary and I was wrong about the vaccines and how quickly that arrived. I guess I was skeptical based on history and based on. The conventional view that these vaccines would take many years to develop, but but as it as it turned out, they a