Digital Social Hour
Ian Smith: $15,000 a Day Fines?! How One Gym Destroyed the COVID Narrative | DSH #1617
14 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What challenges did Ian Smith face during the COVID lockdowns?
if you really take a look at like that whole propaganda system that brought you covid that same propaganda machine brought you the blm movement brought you the ukrainian war the conflict in gaza all these levers were pulled you get the mainstream media involved all of sort of like the psychological things that torturing people like the death counters and the
corner and then the major corporations were involved and there was whole media campaigns out of nowhere millions and billions of dollars being spent to convince you to stay at home and they're pulling all these emotional levers and people fall for it and they get people to just believe whatever they're being told no matter what
All right, guys, fellow New Jerseyan, we got Ian Smith here. Let's go, baby. What's up, man? Jersey represent. Jersey represent.
Chapter 2: How did Ian Smith's gym become a symbol of resistance?
How are you? Good, man. You been there your whole life?
Most of it.
Chapter 3: What role did community support play in Ian's journey?
Most of it. I'm in Florida now. I lived in Arizona for a little bit, but most of the 40 years I've been around.
Chapter 4: How did Ian Smith transition into political activism?
Oh, so you moved to Florida? Yeah, moved to Florida about two years ago.
Because of all that COVID stuff that happened with your gym?
Um, well, after after all of it, I kind of just wanted to change.
Chapter 5: What insights does Ian provide about government overreach?
You know, we made it through, thankfully. And I had just had my son and my mom lived in Florida and didn't really have anything holding me down anymore. So I decided to pick up and start over in Florida.
I mean, I don't blame you, man. They did you dirty.
Chapter 6: What are the implications of $15,000 daily fines?
Media attacking you. You put in all your money into that gym and you couldn't even run it.
Chapter 7: How does mainstream media influence public perception?
Yeah, yeah, it was an interesting couple of years, to say the very least. And I'll always love Jersey, but the way that it's run, going through all that, seeing not only myself, but how people were treated during COVID and sort of their lives were disregarded, left a pretty sour taste in my mouth.
Was it the state attacking you? Was it the county? Was it the township?
So we reopened about two months to the day that the original closures came around. You know, we closed down first. We didn't want to, but we didn't really know enough to confidently stay open. You know, the last thing we wanted to do was hurt anybody. But we were highly suspicious. So we reopened in May of 2020. And first it was the... just the township itself. And we were very open about it.
I went on Tucker Carlson a week before we opened, so everybody knew. The governor knew we were going to open. We were willing to negotiate. We said, here's our terms, here's how we're opening, and we're going to keep people safe.
Chapter 8: What advice does Ian give for supporting local businesses?
Let's talk about it. And nobody wanted to, so we said, OK. So it was originally the township, and then it became the county, and then it eventually became pretty much 75% of the state's legal power at one time. Yeah, there's 12 attorney generals in the state of New Jersey, if I'm correct, and during sort of the height of the absurdity, 75% of them were assigned to it. They were working our case.
That's nuts, because I'd imagine there was other gyms doing what you did.
Well, there was just other things in general, too. I mean, there's still crime and, you know, actual things that they should be monitoring and tending to. And they were focusing, you know, almost all of their attention on us.
This is like a negative ROI because they're not going to get any money out of you.
It did. And that's, that's eventually sort of how we won. Um, we were, and there's still stuff ongoing too. So it's still, yeah, there's still, you know, sort of unresolved state issues and stuff like that. It's come pretty much to a halt at this point. Um, which is how these legal battle work. You know, when you, uh, when they come after you, they come at you really hard.
I mean, there'll be times where we get calls from our lawyers and they'd be like, you have court today. It'd be like, when they'd be like in an hour. Um, But then when you go and the dust settles and you're going to take legal action against the state for some sort of remedy, it's three months for this and six months for this. So, yeah, there is still stuff going on.
But when I say one, I mean they back off.
Yeah.
the goal for us was just to stay open and everything that they did they it was just shooting themselves in the foot over and over again to the point where there was a negative roi no matter how hard they punished us there was enough people behind us to support us that they just they looked crazy you know because now we're two years into covet and they're still finding us fifteen thousand dollars a day and doing all these absurd things and everybody at that point was pretty much had moved on and uh and governor murphy still wouldn't
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