Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Call COVID, Climate and Race Biggest Hoaxes

Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew Pinsky spent this week’s podcast declaring COVID-19 protocols, climate change and the “White Supremacy” narrative the three biggest hoaxes of their lifetime. Carolla, the comedian and longtime radio host, said Dr. Anthony Fauci was “compromised” long before that view went mainstream. His co-host backed him up, and the two spent the episode of “The Adam and Dr. Drew Show” walking through why, in their telling, none of the three hold up.

One leg of that argument now has real company. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is run by a man who says he was censored for arguing almost exactly what Carolla argued back in 2020. Another leg leans on membership numbers for a real extremist group that are already several years stale.

Carolla and Pinsky Name Their Three Hoaxes

Dr. Drew Pinsky opened with a specific date. He brought up a decades old United Nations forecast about rising seas swallowing entire nations, then read out when it was published.

“The UN has reported that entire nations are gonna be swept away by rising sea levels,” Pinsky said, naming the year the report came out: 1989.

Carolla turned to the other two items on his list. “What has caused more destruction and damage,” he asked of climate change and what he called the “Race” issue, before answering his own question. “The two biggest f***ing hoaxes of our time along with COVID.”

Both hosts kept returning to one idea: you are not allowed to question any of it. “As soon as you say, ‘you can’t talk about it,’ or you harm people by talking about it,” Pinsky said, “trying to shut you down probably means I do not have a lot of conviction and a lot of faith in my story,” Carolla added.

The Pandemic Claim Gets an Unlikely Assist

On COVID, Carolla’s timeline gets backing from an unexpected place. Jay Bhattacharya, an economist and physician who challenged lockdown policy in 2020, now runs the NIH. He is one of several officials featured in a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Opinion documentary called “The Lockdown Dissidents,” released in June 2026 about experts who say they paid a price for questioning the pandemic response. The film is described on social media as the story of scientists censored for questioning lockdown consensus.

The fact that it happened in this country where I’d never thought I would ever see suppression of free speech, and in such an insidious way behind closed doors where people didn’t even know they were being censored, still shocks me.

Bhattacharya said that in the documentary, describing his own experience during the pandemic. The film also follows two other officials who now hold prominent roles or once did.

• Jay Bhattacharya – the Stanford economist and physician who ran a Santa Clara County antibody study in 2020, now director of the NIH
• Scott Atlas – a former White House pandemic adviser under President Trump who says he received death threats for opposing lockdowns
• Robert Redfield – the former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director who flagged an early theory about the virus’s origin

None of that proves COVID-19 posed no danger to anyone. It does confirm the part of Carolla’s argument about dissent getting shut down rather than debated, since the man who led that dissent now runs the agency that funds American medical research.

Why Does Carolla Keep Bringing Up Germany?

Carolla names Germany because his argument treats Europe as the place where both the climate and immigration debates collided hardest and earliest. He argues the continent absorbed strict climate rules and large scale migration from Muslim majority countries at roughly the same time, and points to the resulting friction as proof his larger point about the two hoaxes causing real harm.

“The climate thing has f*ed up Germany and Europe and the globe,” Carolla said. “The race thing has f*ed them up, too. Now, you have a lot of Muslims there, and you have issues.”

He tied the moment to popular culture too, pointing to “Citizen Vigilante,” a new video on demand release starring actor Armie Hammer, as a sign the same tensions are showing up on screen. Carolla did not offer data on crime rates or migration figures for Germany specifically. He offered the claim as an observation from someone who tours the country regularly, not as a cited statistic.

Three Claims, Three Records

Set side by side, the three arguments do not all rest on the same kind of evidence.

Each claim rests on a different kind of proof: a personal read on censorship, a single old headline, and a direct disagreement with a federal official’s sworn testimony.

The Race Argument Leans on a 2021 Chat Log

Carolla’s strongest specific evidence on race comes from a leak, not a headline. In January 2022, the left-wing outlet Unicorn Riot published a large trove of internal chats from Patriot Front, a white nationalist group founded by Thomas Rousseau after the 2017 Charlottesville rally.

“We are absolutely desperate for new people,” Rousseau wrote to fellow group leaders in a message dated December 14, 2021. “We’ve been in the 220’s to 230’s membership rut for nearly a full year.”

The same trove revealed more than recruiting struggles.

• Members were pressured to attend mandatory rallies and faced discipline for skipping fitness or participation quotas
• Leaders discussed inflating public perception of the group’s size and reach on social platforms
• Directors ordered members to document acts of vandalism on camera as proof for internal quotas, even when it created evidence of crimes

That single struggling snapshot from late 2021 is the version of Patriot Front that anchors Carolla’s argument. It is not the only version that exists.

Does the FBI Actually Call White Supremacy the Top Threat?

Yes, though the exact wording matters. FBI Director Christopher Wray has told Congress multiple times since 2020 that racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism, most often tied to white supremacist ideology, sits at the top of the bureau’s domestic terrorism caseload and shares its highest threat priority with international groups like ISIS.

Wray testified that the bureau elevated the threat to its highest priority back in June 2019, a status a Newsweek fact check later confirmed reflected Wray’s own sworn testimony on the subject. Carolla’s counter is experiential rather than statistical.

• Adam Carolla argues that if the threat were as large as officials claim, he would have encountered visible signs of it while touring comedy clubs across the country for decades
• FBI Director Christopher Wray testified that racially motivated violent extremism produced the most lethal domestic attacks of any category in 2018 and 2019
• The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a group that tracks antisemitism and extremism, says the visibility gap is by design, since propaganda groups favor overnight flyering over public rallies

Both things can be separately true. A threat can generate relatively few visible public rallies and still account for the bulk of a specific federal caseload.

Patriot Front’s Head Count Has Changed Since That Chat Log

The chat log Carolla’s argument leans on is now more than four years old, and Patriot Front looks different today.

• 300 members was ProPublica’s 2019 estimate of the group’s total size
• 220s to 230s was the “membership rut” Rousseau complained about in his December 2021 message
• 540 members is the group’s approximate 2026 size, according to internal documents described by USA Today, an 80 percent jump from the 2019 estimate and more than double the 2021 rut
• 82% of reported hateful propaganda incidents nationwide in 2021 were tied to Patriot Front, per the ADL

That growth showed up in public over the Fourth of July weekend, when hundreds of masked members marched through Washington, D.C. as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary events. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican, wrote on X afterward that the group had gone “never investigated” under the Biden administration and has since pushed the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to look into it.