Sen. Rand Paul tells Dan Bongino COVID restrictions are ‘about conditioning the American individual to submit to government’

Paul spoke out against Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who complained on the Senate floor that the GOP senators who voted to overturn President Joe Biden's mask mandate were "anti-science" and "anti-vaccine."

Schumer claimed that "We cannot go back to the days when people were driven by wild theories. Some of the anti-vaxxers here in this chamber remind me of what happened 400 years ago when people were clinging to the fact that the Sun revolved around the Earth. They just didn't believe science. Or 500 years ago when they were sure the earth was flat."

In response to that, Paul said "My colleague, Chuck Schumer left out one thing, when they were denying that the Earth went around the sun. It was the government denying that and it was an independent scientist trying to set them straight."

Paul was referring to Galileo, the Italian scientist who discovered, through use of the telescope, that the Earth rotated around the sun and not, as was previously believed, the other way around. He was the first to see that the moon had mountains. Galileo challenged the accepted wisdom of his time, and for this heresy, was placed under a life sentence of house arrest by the Roman Catholic Church in 1633. He died while serving that sentence.

"So the danger is when you let science be controlled by government, or by one sort of monolithic individual like Fauci. It really doesn't have anything to do with science. Science usually discovers the truth eventually. But when science is dictated by the government, that's when you get, you know, Flat Earthers," Paul said.

"They seem to love the character assassination and insults, Senator," Bongino replied. "But listen, as you well know, being an active proponent of God, given rights and liberty liberties is a zero-sum game.

"You can't have a big sphere of individual liberty and a big government at the same time. And what's really concerning me, Senator, is he's constantly moving goalposts, which don't seem to be grounded in science at all. He keeps shrinking the sphere of individual liberty, and empowering more and more government. And it's not going to stop until we stop it. There doesn't seem to be an endpoint here," Bongino said.

"I don't think it's been about science for a long time," Paul said unequivocally. "It's really the about conditioning the American individual to submit to government. And you're right, it never ends, the goalposts will continue to change. And ultimately, more and more of your healthcare will be controlled.

"You know, under socialized medicine, when we centralize all controls, most of these decisions are made by government bureaucrats like that Fauci.

"So if you love the dictates on vaccines, you'll love it when Fauci is in charge of who can be dialyzed. In England for many years, they wouldn't dialyze you after age 50 because they thought that you don't have much left to live and over a 50 year over the hill and I personally resent that now that I'm well past 50.

"But the thing is, nobody in government should be making those decisions. And once they do, it gets into rationing and arbitrary decisions by little autocrats like Fauci. And it's a huge mistake to let this happen and we do need to fight back," Paul said.

Nearly 61 percent of the US population is fully vaccinated, while 72.5 percent have had one shot, and almost 17 percent of Americans have received a booster shot.