lack of knowledge about something in particular. So I'm going to fill in a knowledge gap for many of you. So many people would say do not take a medicine unless it has gone through the gold standard type of double-blind placebo test. In fact, I had a conversation with my most Trump-hating Democrat friend last night by text in which he said with no uncertain terms no doctor ever should recommend a medicine that has not gone through the highest standard of tests. Now my friend is really well read, highly educated — more educated than I — and very, very deeply involved in reading the news and following the news. So this is a really smart, really well-informed person who used his smartness and well-informed status to tell me that it is crazy for a Trump, a Peter Navarro, or even a doctor to recommend using — can you believe it, the horror — a drug that has not gone through the clinical testing for the purpose it was prescribed. To which I said, have you heard of off-label prescriptions? He said he hadn't. In a private prior conversation he said he hadn't, had never heard of it. And then last night I said, do you know that 20% of all prescriptions are off-label? Which means that 20% of all the prescriptions, one in five in this country, have not gone through that standard that my friend and a lot of people on Twitter say is the only way you should ever prescribe something. Because their blind spot is that if a drug has been proven safe for anything and the cost is reasonable, that your doctor working with you can make a risk management decision that goes like this: I've got this drug that was only gold-standard tested for another thing, but we did find out the side effects are nothing to worry about. So given that the side effects are trivially dangerous, you know, barely enough that it's not even worth mentioning, and it might work and there's some reports that it works but they're not the gold standard, let's give it a try.

And how often does that happen? Well, it turns out that some of your most popular drugs that are commonly prescribed did not go through any gold standard testing except for other purposes. So hydroxychloroquine has been tested in the past for its own use, you know, lupus, etc. I assume I think that's true. And if anybody claiming that it should not be prescribed because it has not passed the gold standard test — which is true, it has not, but it's also because they haven't tested it in the right application — so if you see anybody saying that it hasn't gone through the rigorous trials, they are ignorant of how medicine works. And you can fill them in with that 20% of prescriptions that did not go through that process. And it is so safe, so routine, so rational that 20% of prescriptions are in that category. If you — I mean, ask yourself, if this were a problem, would 20% of prescriptions be in this category? No. No.

All right. How about this? Do you have this problem where you want to make a joke about bad things that are happening but you don't know where the line is because you don't want to be canceled, because you don't want to be that person? But sometimes it's so funny you can't help it. Well, when I heard about — as you know, the Libertarian Party candidate being bitten by a possibly rabid bat — I looked at the comments and I saw that Matt Schwartz asked, "How's the bat?" Now I didn't feel proud that I laughed at that. "How's the bat?" And I felt even less proud when I responded to it with the answer to how's the bat. I said, "Ahead in the polling." I don't feel good about it, but if you laughed at it, well, maybe that's something.

Big news of course is so we've got some big fake news about Russia, China, and Iran. And the thought is that they're all trying to influence the election. And but the problematic one seems to be Russia, because according to the fake news the Russians are trying to support President Trump. President Trump's response to that is he's been the toughest on Russia. He gives a number of examples. That's not really the answer to whether Russia is trying to help you, because it could be true that the president is their toughest — toughest sanctions, toughest opponent, toughest president on them. That could be true, and there's a really good argument for it. It could be true