Hello, this is Father David Nix on the Padre Peregrino podcast. This is TCE number 38, theology and current events.

I'm so happy to be joined today by one of my most distinguished guests ever, Dr. Mark McDonald,

M.D. Dr. McDonald, thanks for joining us today. Great to be here, Father David Nix. Lovelyly.

I'm going to give a little CV for the audience out there.

Dr. McDonald was born and raised in Los Angeles, graduated from UC Berkeley before attending

medical school at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

He was trained in both adult and child and adolescent psychiatry at UCLA.

Now he works primarily with children in private practice in West Los Angeles. Dr.

McDonald has lived and worked in Europe, Asia, and Central America. His opinions on topics such as

the need to reopen America schools and the pandemic of fear in the United States today

have been widely published in local and national news, including the Wall Street Journal

and the Federalist. Dr. McDonald has been on published in local and national news, including the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist.

Dr. McDowell has been on Tucker Carlson, and he has also been in the roundtable discussion with Florida Governor DeSantis on mandatory mask wearing.

Again, Dr. McDonald, thanks for coming on today.

And I just finished your book not too long ago here. I'm holding it up for any of the video people called United States of Fear. One of the things you go through in your book is they've kind of been greasing the rails for a while to get us to enter a period of totalitarian takeover. You point out the Cold War fear, the climate change for you, you point out that for a while, they've been kind of ramping us up to live in fear. But why did they finally get a foothold on this virus if they couldn't exactly get a full foothold on the cold warfare, the nuclear warfare, the climate change fear. How did they finally get a

foothold with this virus? Well, a lot of people will believe and will argue that there's a

massive global conspiracy afoot. I'm not denying that, but I'm certainly not. I'm agnostic,

let's put it that way. I don't really know.

What I do know, though, is that regardless of how much conscious effort and thoughtfulness went into the creation of this virus and its release, and I'm sure that there's evidence to support

that it was conscious and probably intentionally released,

but I can't prove that. Regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, I think that the evidence is

overwhelming that if not a conspiracy, certainly a confluence of opportunism occurred in the spring of

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