Video: Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Says “Most of the Press Reports Have Been False, Liberty Did *Not* Reopen”

Earlier this morning, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr. appeared on CNN’s “New Day” and had a great deal to say, including the following. Presented without comment, other than to note that it’s very hard to know if what a long-time, pathological liar like Falwell is saying is true, accurate, factual, etc.

• “First of all, most of the press reports have been false. Liberty did *not* reopen. Liberty has between 1,000 and 2,000 students on a campus built for 15,500  and almost 1,000 of those are international students who have nowhere else to go.”
• “We decided early last week, when the governor said no classrooms over 100 people, to go completely online…”
• “These reports have been overblown. The false reports started with a local newspaper article here that was just irresponsibly written.”
• “The campus has become more like an apartment complex than a university. All the education is being done online. All the restaurants are serving takeout only. We are wiping down every surface that’s touched often every hour…”
• “We’ve become one of the largest online universities in the country…there are going to be pandemics like this in the future, and I think this is the only way to do it safely.”
• “Academic buildings are open, but there are signs on every other chair, do not sit here….The Virginia Dept. of Health did an inspection, and the boss sent a message, said he wanted to talk to someone about ‘the fantastic infection prevention practices our health inspectors observed while on your campus today.’ We got that message yesterday.”
• Liberty “looks like a ghost town.”
• “All faculty are teaching from home, with something called ‘Microsoft Teams’, where they can put every student on a little square box on a TV screen on their computer… and the office hours that were required before spring break are now optional for professors…that decision was just made yesterday.”
• The mayor of Lynchburg’s criticism was just a “misunderstanding between people who are good friends; I have the greatest respect for both the city manager and the mayor.”
• Falwell: “I just don’t think we can take this thing too seriously. It’s something we don’t understand. You know, the H1N1 virus back in 2009 had 300,000 Americans in the hospital, 60 million contracted the virus, 17,000 died, but we didn’t see the response back then that we’ve seen from President Trump and from the media. And so I think we’re taking this a lot more seriously and I’m glad we are…”
• Falwell: “All last week we consulted with medical experts...[Trump] is running this whole pandemic like you would hope a CEO would, it’s his job to be upbeat, to get people thinking about getting back into their normal course of life, because we can’t afford to be shut down more than a month or two…It might do irreperable harm to our country, so he has no choice but to push hard to get this behind us.”