Live from Music Row Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. –  host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist, Crom Carmichael to the studio to weigh in on the unhealthiness of mask-wearing and Sweden’s COVID-19 health position compared to the rest of Europe and United States.
Leahy: We are joined now as we almost always are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 am by our good friend, the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael. Crom, good morning.
Carmichael: Michael. Good morning, sir.
Leahy: Well Crom, eight days until the election. We’re going to talk about that but in a second. But I want to say congratulations to the winners of the National Constitution Bee. It was a great event held Saturday in Brentwood, Tennessee at the Spring Hill Suites-Marriott in Brentwood. They were gracious hosts. We had students from all around the country.
Some drove in from, Illinois, Chicago, Georgia, Knoxville, and other parts of Tennessee. And the winner was a very fine young man. Jackson Carter. Jackson Carter is a senior at Spring Hill High School in Maury County. And he won, and we wrote a check to him and delivered it to him for $10,000 from the Star News Education Foundation.
Carmichael: So, is that a scholarship or is that $10,000 in cash? $10,000. It’s for educational purposes, so it’s not taxable income to him.
Leahy: It is not taxable. It’s an educational scholarship.
Carmichael: What congratulations to him.
Leahy: And he’s going to the University of Alabama. He wants to be an attorney. The second-place winner was a freshman named Gianna Ross from Independence High School here in Thompsons Station here in Williamson County won a $5,000 educational scholarship. And third place went to Alea Vandevelde from Golden, Illinois who won a $2,500 educational scholarship. She wants to go to Liberty University in Virginia. And Alan Dershowitz was a man of his word. He showed up. We have a story about it at the Tennessee Star.
He had a 15-minute Zoom call and the kids got to ask some questions. He was very interesting. Grace Estes who is a junior at Stewart asked a great question. And she is now his best friend because she asked, what was it like defending the president when he was impeached. And he said, you know, I’m here in isolation on Martha’s Vineyard. None of my liberal friends will talk to me. They won’t have dinner with me. And so we’ve invited him to Nashville and he will come to Nashville and have dinner with us and all the students after the COVID-19 because he wants some friends.
Carmichael: Well good. So it was a great event.
Carmichael: Good.
Leahy: Now the news of the day. Eight days until the election Crom. What are we to make of it?
Carmichael: Well, you know, this is truly an election of the battleground states. This is not a national election now because that’s the way our rules are set up. And so when you go state by state my sense of it is that last week Trump was gaining and had significant momentum. He’s holding three or four rallies a day, which is absolutely incredible. How many people show up at each rally 15, 20 thousand?
Leahy: 15,000-20,000.
Carmichael: So then they go home and they’re energized and they talk to their friends and family and more people go out. And so and he’s and he’s very strategic and in two ways. One is he’s going to the battleground states the other is he’s using the weather map because wherever he goes is not raining. So he’s paying attention to the weather.
Leahy: It’s a very good point.
Carmichael: Because all of his rallies are outside. But what’s also interesting to me and this doesn’t have to do directly with the campaign and that is the increase in COVID outbreaks in Europe. And let me go back to March if we could Michael. I made a comment back in March and I’m not trying to say that I’m that I was prescient per se. And it’s conceivable that what I’m about to say turns out to be false. But I said back in March I thought that this would require herd immunity in order
Leahy: You did say that. I recall you saying that.
Carmichael: What would solve the problem faster than herd immunity would be a vaccine. But masks and let’s just think about this. I’m going to make a statement here and people on the left can disagree with it, but they can’t disagree with the logic. It’s not possible to disagree with the logic. Masks are inherently unhealthy. That’s my statement. Masks are inherently unhealthy. Now, why do we know that? How do we know that?
We know that because people don’t wear masks normally. And if they did wear masks normally it would be because they aren’t a problem. But just think about it breathing your own breath over and over. Your own exhale, over and over again for long periods of time every day is not healthy. It is just simply not healthy. Now, what we also know in Europe is that they’ve been much more regimented on wearing masks. Haven’t they? Much more.
Leahy: Double in the U.S. But yet the spike in coronavirus cases in Europe is double what it is over here.
Leahy: By the way, there’s a report a study done in Denmark on the efficacy of masks. Okay, and guess what? Not a single academic journal will publish it. Hmm. I wonder why. Could it be it shows that masks don’t have any impact?
Carmichael: It could be negative. What I’m saying is that what I think is true is it it’s not whatever it is not positive. And breathing your own breath every day has to be a bad thing. And I say it has to be a bad thing because if it were a good thing people would wear masks all the time regardless of COVID. It would be a fashion statement and a health statement. I wear a mask because it’s healthy. It’s good for the environment.
I’m not exhaling CO2 or whatever it is that we exhale them supposed to create global warming. But the point I’m trying to make here is it could be that this whole effort to try to and I believe it is an effort to discredit Trump. It could be the whole effort actually is extremely harmful. That’s a possibility. And so when I look at the headlines, I see that Europe is imposing new COVID restrictions and that the second wave accelerates. Well, what will they do now? Sweden never did a lockdown. I don’t believe Sweden is having the same kind of problems.
Leahy: They are not. They’re doing better. They’re doing better than all the rest of Europe.
Carmichael: And so so what Sweden recognized early on I believe is that this virus is contagious A. B it is fatal to a very small percentage of the population. And that if you protect that part of the population the number of people who are not in the elderly or pre-morbidity part of the population where you have significant pre morbidities. If you’re over 80, it’s a risk. If you’re under 70 and in fact, even if you’re under 75 and you’re in good health, the therapeutics now can cure the disease or address the disease pretty quickly. So Sweden made the decision is that their economy is an important part of their lives.
Leahy: Yes.
Carmichael: And except for those people who get paid even in lockdown, it’s an undeniable fact. And the one thing that I wish Trump had done if he had it to do over again is to require that everybody who has worked for an organization that is controlled by the FTC that none of them get and no employee all the way to the president of the entire organization just paid normal no more money than the lowest-paid cameraman until we are out of the problem.
And that would have focused those news organizations on the same kinds of problems that millions of other Americans are facing rather than on the pure politics of the situation. To answer your question on the election, I don’t think that COVID, as much as the media is now trying to make make our entire election now about COVID.
Leahy: They’re trying to make it about COVID.
Carmichael: I don’t think it will work because I don’t think the American people want the economy shut down. In fact, it might even have the opposite effect because if it’s if it is going up Biden has already said if we have a second wave he will shut down the entire economy of all 50 states.
Leahy: Even though he doesn’t have the legal authority to do it or assert it.
Carmichael: He will assert it and try to do it anyway.
Leahy: The contrast between the anemic car rallies held by Obama and Biden.
Carmichael: I understand those are self-driving cars too.
Leahy: (Laughs) That’s very good, Crom.
Carmichael: Thank you.
Listen to the second hour here:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Masks” by U.S. Department of Agriculture.Â
It’s quite likely that imposing the wearing masks most of the time in the workplace violates OSHA health standards with high CO2 concentrations and O2 being too low. . I think that an O2 level less than 19.5 is a violation.