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Joe Rogan Experience #1864 - Alex Berenson

Alex Berenson is a journalist and award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction. His most recent book is "Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives" is available now. www.alexberenson.com

Alex BerensonguestJoe Roganhost
Jun 27, 20243h 1mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:02 – 1:33

    Twitter ban for “doesn’t stop transmission” and the decision to sue

    1. AB

      (drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

    2. NA

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. AB

      Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)

    4. JR

      (sniffing) Smell that? That's vindication.

    5. AB

      (laughs)

    6. JR

      You are the sweet smell of vindication.

    7. AB

      Not, not, not yet, my friend.

    8. JR

      (laughs)

    9. AB

      Not yet.

    10. JR

      Not yet, but it's, it's definitely in the air.

    11. AB

      (laughs)

    12. JR

      Has there ever been a person that has, uh, gone to court and got back on Twitter, besides you?

    13. AB

      There has not.

    14. JR

      That's pretty impressive. That's pretty impressive.

    15. AB

      Uh, s- (laughs) there's more common.

    16. JR

      There's more?

    17. AB

      Oh, yeah.

    18. JR

      So explain the process. So you were, uh, what was the exact, uh, definition of what they kicked you off for?

    19. AB

      Oh, are, are we, are we live?

    20. JR

      Yeah, we're live.

    21. AB

      Oh, oh, good, good.

    22. JR

      We're rolling.

    23. AB

      Okay, um, uh, all right. So, uh, it was almost exactly this time last year, Joe. It was August 28th, 2021. Uh, I, uh, wrote a tweet that began, "It doesn't stop infection or transmission." And they banned me. Um, I went on to say, uh, "This is not a vaccine, or don't think of it as a vaccine. Think of it as a therapeutic, meaning a drug, that has side effects, and that you have to dose in advance of illness." And then the last line was, "And we wanna mandate it? Insanity." Okay, I, I would say that that's been pretty well vindicated by events.

    24. JR

      That's...

    25. AB

      (laughs)

    26. JR

      That's vindication.

  2. 1:33 – 4:05

    Section 230 explained: immunity for user speech vs platform moderation power

    1. AB

      So, so they banned me. That was, they said that was my fifth strike and that I was not allowed to tweet anymore, and my account was not available to anybody. All the previous tweets were gone. Uh, the 300,000 people, too bad. Um, so I sued them, uh, in December. And here's it gets, it gets interesting and tricky. Uh, so other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, uh, and Wikipedia, actually, all these companies, um, and said, you know, "You've banned us." Uh, uh, you know, "I just wanna be able to use your platform. I haven't done anything wrong." And the companies say, "We can do whatever we want. We can ban you. We can, you know, attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other." Uh, and there's a law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. It's a federal law from 1998, I wanna say, maybe '96, uh, that basically was intended for two purposes. Purpose one was we don't want these companies to get sued over stuff that people are saying on them. So in other words, I go on and I say, you know, terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan, or I say terrible things about my ex-wife, whatever, okay? Or I say, you know, "Go shoot the president." The, whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal. We can't expect, uh, a bulletin board or Facebook or, uh, or, or Twitter or whoever to police all that stuff. There's too much of it. It's not fair. So we're gonna give them complete protection from that. And that makes total sense, by the way, all right? You can't, you know, you can't have these people, uh, policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded. It's not, it's not within their capability, okay? The second idea was we want these folks to be able to give their users a better experience, and so we're gonna give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted, meaning let's say I'm posting tons of pornography and, you know, I'm posting it to a Christian website that, uh, that, you know, that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place. The idea was the, uh, 230's gonna allow me to take action against, uh, that user in good faith for harassa- harassing or objectionable content. So I'm gonna be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it.

  3. 4:05 – 6:57

    The ‘Sikhs vs Facebook’ precedent and how it supercharged platform discretion

    1. AB

      And, and that was really intended, when you look back at the statute, for porno- pornography especially. Okay. So what happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is, uh, the, the federal, uh, judges in, in California, which is where most of these companies are based, um, California and the West Coast, uh, managed to get bigger protection. And this really, this was happening for a while, and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, uh, uh, you know, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, "We don't like these people. They're protesting against us. You gotta ban them. You gotta ban their, their group website." And Facebook said, "Okay," and pulled them. They sued Facebook. They said, "This is not right." And by the way, like, this was a classic example of a government telling, uh, you know, it's didn't, not wanting dissent, okay? They didn't... Facebook, uh, the, the Indian government didn't wanna deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it, okay? The Ninth Circuit said that 230 protection that allows you complete immunity if, if Alex Berenson says, you know, "Here's naked pictures of my, of my ex-girlfriend," that also allows you to ban whoever you want whenever you want. The, they called it first-party/third-party. They said there's no distinction in the statute between the immunity you get for, uh, you know, for, for this, for this defamation that Alex might be doing versus your own decision to ban these people who don't wanna be banned. And ever since then, 230's been a beast, and every time somebody has sued, the companies have said, "Look at Sikhs versus Facebook. We win."... and that's basically been how it's been. They've been allowed to do whatever they want. And so, uh, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background.

    2. JR

      Okay.

    3. AB

      So sometimes when conservatives say, "Hey, we need to ban 230. We need to repeal 230," I, that's actually not true. You just need to have the courts interpret 230 the right way, which is, you don't get to sue Facebook or Twitter for these defamatory or harassing or illegal posts that other people are putting up. But at the same time, they shouldn't have blanket protection for their own decisions. So they've had the best of both worlds. They call themselves publishers when they want, and as a publisher, I have the protection to publish who I like, not publish who I like. But I'm not a publisher for the point- from the point of view... I'm more like a telephone company if somebody does something bad over my airwaves. Does that make sense?

    4. JR

      Yeah.

    5. AB

      That's how they've gotten.

    6. JR

      Okay.

  4. 6:57 – 11:47

    Berenson v. Twitter: the contract-based strategy and why the judge let it proceed

    1. AB

      Okay. All right. So fast forward, Berenson sues, Berenson v. Twitter. Here's what I had. I had conversa- uh, I had emails from a guy inside Twitter named Brandon Borman, who is a pretty senior executive, he was their Vice President of Communications, telling me explicitly, "Hey, we know what you're saying. We are in favor of encouraging debate about COVID." That was in 2020, and then in early 2021, he even went on to say, "We're encouraging debate about the vaccines, and we don't think you're doing anything wrong." So, so I said, "Not only are they violating my rights as a, you know, as an American, and, you know, the California Constitution actually has additional free speech protections, and I think they're violating those too." They're specifically... They made these promises to me. They made, they, they modified their contract with me, and there's a broader point that's important to everybody. When they say, "We have a COVID misinformation policy," or, "We have a election misinformation policy," or, you know, pretty soon they'll probably have a climate change misinformation policy. Whatever these policies are that, that govern what you can and can't say on their platform, they have to follow those. So even if they say their contract... And, you know, when you, you, you remem- you, you, you sign up for Twitter, you, uh, you know, you click on something at the end, and you've signed a contract with them basically, and that contract is written by their lawyers. It's very favorable to them, very unfavorable to you as the user. They're modifying that, okay? That was our argument. They're modifying that when they put out a COVID-19 misinformation policy. They don't have to have a COVID-19 misinformation policy. They could say, "Hey, we're Twitter, we're gonna ban you whenever we want for whatever reason." But they did have that policy, and our argument was they have to now follow it. And the judge, his name's Judge Wilso- William Alsup, he was in California, and he is not a Trump appointee, he's not a George Bush appointee. He is a Bill Clinton appointee, known for being a smart guy who kinda plays it down the middle. He in, in April of this year, just a couple months ago, said, "I think Berenson's got a case. I'm gonna allow this lawsuit to proceed. I am not gonna dismiss it." And that was a, that was a major event, uh, you know, in sort of the point of view of internet law. Um, because again, even though I did have these communications with Borman that other people, uh, don't have, this broader issue of who is... of, of whether or not these platforms when they tell you, "We're gonna have this strike policy. We're gonna do these things," do they have to follow that? That's the question. Again, if, if, if the, if the argument is, "I'm Twitter or I'm Facebook, I'm all powerful. I operate under 230, and I'm gonna kick you off whenever they want," they gotta tell people that. Instead, it's like, "Well, as long as you play within the rules and you color by our guidelines, it's okay." W- and then they don't even do that, now you can sue them.

    2. JR

      So you sue, and then did they settle?

    3. AB

      So, so I sue in December. In April, we get this ruling, and the judge doesn't allow everything to proceed, which from my point of view is sort of unfortunate. He didn't allow, uh, my big claims on the First Amendment or my California claims to proceed, and frankly, I still think there's a chance, uh, whether it's me or, you know, it's, or, uh, well it's not me, but whe- whether it's somebody el- somebody else going forward might be able to have a good claim on, on California constitutional law 'cause again, Twitter's based in California, and the California Constitution is even more protective of free speech than, um, than the US Constitution. It actually says, for example, the way it's been interpreted in California, the California Constitution, if you own a mall, you have to let people come in and protest. Even if they're, you know, like, from the Vietnam War on, even though that's a private facility, you, because you're running this place that's open to the public, and that a lot of people who, you know, go to, it becomes almost a public facility for the purposes of the California Constitution. And my argument, my lawyer's argument, uh, is Twitter is, Twitter is a huge public space. It's referred to itself as a public square many times. It should be forced to do the same thing under California law, and if the federal law, if 230 blocks that, now we have an issue of, uh, you know, does the federal law go too far and sort of hurt First Amendment protections? But put all that aside. Judge didn't allow any of that stuff,

  5. 11:47 – 13:47

    Discovery as a weapon: depositions, internal documents, and the settlement leverage

    1. AB

      but what he did allow was my breach of contract claim to proceed, and he did something else, Joe. He, he said, "This guy's gonna get discovery." So discovery is a le- in, is a legal term. It means that the two parties have to exchange information in a civil lawsuit. So, so, and it's actually kind of amazing if you think about this, that this is how this works.... the, the lawyers for, you know, for Twitter were gonna go to Twitter and say, "You gotta give us all your documents that in- you know, that- where Alex Berenson is named, whether that's internal or whether that's, you know, Pfizer emailing about him or whatever it is, and we're gonna hand that over to his lawyers so he can help sue us." And I had to do the same thing. I mean, for me, it's not a big deal, you know, it's, like, me and my phone or whatever. But, but disc- and then he said, the judge said I would get to depose two Twitter executives, and that could be anybody. He didn't put any limits on it. So that could've been, like, Jack Dorsey, okay? So, if you're a big company, that's a nightmare for you. You do not want that. You do not wanna have to go through discovery. You do not wanna have to go through depositions. You just want, uh, you, you want a lawsuit to go away, okay? So- and my position was, look, the judge gave me this stuff. I'm not backing off. I want those depositions, I want this discovery, and I want the right to make it public. And so Twitter- I did not think we were gonna be able to settle, but Twitter, uh, and I- in June, we had these- th- this long mediation. And I can't sort of talk about how that went specifically, but I can tell you that at the end of J- well, July 6th, they, they, they reinstated me to the platform. We settled, they- I, I guess you could argue they didn't apologize,

  6. 13:47 – 21:48

    Claim of White House pressure to ban Berenson and plans to sue the government

    1. AB

      but they acknowledged they were wrong to have taken me off, uh, i- last August. And, and this is the really good part, since then, I've been publishing internal documents where Twitter says that they came under pressure from the federal government to ban me. So this, to me- so people said when I settled, and it was funny, it was actually people on the right, they said, "This guy, he took all this money to sue Twitter. He didn't care. He just wanted to get back on the platform. He just wanted to be able to tweet. He wanted some money from Twitter. That's what he got. He promised you he'd get discovery. He didn't get it. Nothing, nothing's ever gonna happen with this." Well, screw those people too, okay? 'Cause I've now been publishing documents that show that the White House wanted me banned, and that is the biggest part of all of this, okay? That's where the story is going now. That people inside the White House, this is- and this is, this is Twitter employees talking to each other about a meeting that they had in April of 2021, before Twitter had ever done anything to me, where they said, they said that the White House said, "Why is this guy still allowed to tweet?" And at that time, they were saying to each other, these Twitter employees, "We think he's fine. We don't think he's doing anything wrong." Well, you fast-forward to July of 2021, just over a year ago, and Joe Biden says the vac- anybody who debates the vaccines, if social media platforms allow that, they are, quote-unquote, "killing people." And then less or barely a month after that, four hours after that, I should say, Twitter puts a strike against me. They begin the process of deplatforming me. Six weeks later, they deplatform me. So my position- and I'm gonna sue. I've said I'm gonna sue the White House and I'm gonna sue a guy named Andy Slavitt, who's named in these documents, who was working at the White House at the time. Uh, my position is that those- that there are people inside the Biden administration who violated my rights as an American citizen, violated my First Amendment rights, tried to get Twitter to suppress me personally. That's where this is going.

    2. JR

      And what was their basis? Like, when they said- did they have a very specific thing that they were accusing you of where they wanted you to re- remove from Twitter?

    3. AB

      It's not clear from the documents that they had anything specific. They- I mean, the term they use is misinformation, so vaccine misinformation, and in fact, they specifically said, um, acc- again, this is according to these Twitter employees who are talking about this meeting, that I was influencing persuadable people. So you gotta remember the- you gotta remember what the landscape was last year, okay? The beginning of the year, January through June, it was, "Hey, we're gonna vaccinate a lot of people. This is gonna go away." And yeah, there's people like Berenson who are out there talking about this VAERS data and they're talking about side effects and they're a pain in our ass, but ultimately, all those mouth-breathing anti-vaxxers, they're gonna see- you know, they're gonna see their buddies die and they're gonna see how well this thing works, and we're gonna get 90 or 95% of the country vaccinated, okay? We're gonna win. That was- that- a- and, and so there was pressure from the White House, but they felt they were in a really good position. Uh, there have been a- a lot of people have been vaccinated, uh, and, and it did look like w- I mean, it looked like the vaccines worked for a period of time in the spring. I don't know if you remember, but cases- especially in Israel, Israel was always the leader on this- cases in Israel went down almost to zero. They'd been in the thousands, uh, and then they went to zero. Deaths had been, you know, close to 100 a day in Israel. They went to zero. Okay. That was the spring. That was April. They were, they were upset about me and people like me, that- you know, disinformation, misinformation. To me, it's journalism, okay? If I'm pointing to you to government statistics and data and I'm saying, "Here's questions," and I'm saying, "Here's some questions about the clinical trial and how long it went and who was included in it and whether or not it actually shows the vaccines work as well as you've been told," that's journalism. One man's reporter is another, you know, is another man's disinformation specialist, okay? Just like one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, okay? So-That was April, May. Then something happened in June and July and August, the worst case scenario from the point of view of these people. What happened was cases started to go back up in Israel, in the UK, and then in the US. And they had known, if they had any sense, that the vaccines weren't gonna be permanently protective. But I guarantee you, they did not think that that was gonna happen in a matter of months, and that set them up to do two things. First of all, they were gonna start to push for boosters, okay? Now, maybe if all you watch is MSNBC, you could get convinced that boosters were, you know, that was always a part of the plan. But almost nobody who, who got a vaccine in, let's say, February or March or April thought that they were gonna need another one by the end of the summer or the fall, okay? So they knew, they knew that they were changing the narrative. Second, mandates. And this was really the worst part, Joe, right? This was, "We are gonna tie this to your job. We're gonna basically force almost every American adult of working age to get one of these who isn't self-employed or who isn't an i- you know, an illegal immigrant." Like, they don't have to get it, but most Americans who work are gonna need this for their jobs, and every healthcare worker and every government employee, and they, I mean, they, they pushed a lot of people last fall. And the anger they stirred was intense, and, you know, still intense. At that point, I was a problem for them. I'd been a problem in the spring, but I was a problem in the summer because it was starting to look like I was right, and it was starting to look like this wasn't gonna be something you could just... I don't know if you remember the shot and a beer, the lotteries. There was all this sort of quasi-coercive crap going on in the spring. By the summer of 2021, it was different. It was, "You wanna fly? Maybe we're gonna make you get vaccinated." They never did that, but they talked about it. And in Canada, they actually did do it. "You wanna work? You're damn well gonna need to be vaccinated. You wanna, you wanna go to a restaurant? You wanna go to a movie in New York City? You're gonna need to be vaccinated. You want your kids to go to school? Guess what? We're gonna make you get them vaccinated." That was talked about too. They don't even wanna pretend they said that, but everybody from Gazem- Gavin Newsom on down said that. So, so I was a problem for them, and, and Twitter cracked. Twitter had defended me, and they clearly internally, at least into April, did not think I was saying anything wrong. And I can tell you, I did not change my reporting standards. I did not ever say anything. I did not talk about, you know, magnetizing or any of that stuff. I always stuck to the data. Twitter cracked. They banned me, and now we know that the White House was leaning on them.

    4. JR

      So, where do you go from here?

    5. AB

      Well, I'm back on. Um-

    6. JR

      Right. You're back on, and now, uh, I should point out that the things that you got in trouble for are now, uh, YouTube has amended their policy.

    7. AB

      (laughs) They sure do.

    8. JR

      So now YouTube is allowing you to say that masks don't stop the spread. They don't protect you. They're also allowing you to say that the vaccines do not stop you from catching COVID or from spreading COVID.

    9. AB

      Yep. So, so it's-

    10. JR

      'Cause that's true.

    11. AB

      Yeah, 'cause that's true.

    12. JR

      And this is something that you said a year ago.

  7. 21:48 – 28:33

    From transmission debates to deeper alarms: excess deaths and declining births

    1. AB

      A, a year ago. But unfortunately, now we're at a whole different set of questions, unfortunately. We're at, uh, so, so where do I go? Where do I go on Twitter and, and, uh, and the, and the Biden administration? Well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna keep pushing. Um, I mean, I'm gonna sue. Uh, I have, I have my lawyer, James Lawrence, who I really like, who, uh, you know, who handled, who handled my lawsuit against Twitter, and we're gonna be putting together a case against, again, the Biden administration. The only question, you know, you gotta do it, you gotta make sure it's right, you gotta make sure it's nailed down. You know, we, we, uh, we, which documents do we include? What are our legal arguments? We have people, uh, very smart lawyers who wanna be involved in this and help. Um, you know, do we sue in New York? Do we sue in DC? Uh, there are a lot of different questions. But, but that's gonna happen. Um, and then, so that's A. But the, but the other question, unfortunately, we're done talking about whether the vaccines help infecti- or st- help stop infection or transmission. We know the answer to that. They don't. There's two big questions now. One is, do the vaccines actually increase your risk of getting Omicron, and do they increase your, or decrease your risk of serious illness if you do? And in some ways, because Omicron's pretty mild, and because we've all gotten it at least once, maybe twice, the, assuming nothing terrible happens to the virus itself going forward, in other words, assuming the virus doesn't somehow mutate again to become more virulent, it's gonna be what, what we thought it was gonna be two years ago, which is ultimately it winds up as a cold for everybody. It just, it's just another, you know, virus that you get from time to time. And eventually they'll stop counting the cases and they'll stop counting deaths, um, in part because they don't wanna admit the vaccines do nothing. So the easiest way to, to move past that is to just stop collecting the data. Um, and, and you can already see the data is being collected less frequently. It's certainly being publicized less. So that's question A, and I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful basically that we will get to a point where, um, whether or not the vaccines do any good, the virus itself is essentially, you know, not a big threat. Not that it doesn't kill some people, but that it's not a big threat societally. Okay, but there's a bigger, even bigger issue that no one will talk about right now, and that is, what is happening to all cause of mortality and to birth rates in countries that use these mRNA and DNA COVID vaccines very heavily? Um, so essentially Western Europe, Japan, South Korea,... Australia, the United States, Canada. There is this, there's this notable increase in death rates, uh, in a lot of countries. And in the last couple of months, although the data is less clear, there's been a notable decrease in birth rates in some of them. Now, I don't wanna overstate this. I'm not talking about, like, deaths are doubling or tripling or births have gone to zero. When I say notable increase, I mean it looks to me, when you ... And I ge- actually just wrote a Substack on this, uh, that I posted, uh, Thursday morning, uh, uh, all-cause deaths might be up 10%. And when I say all-cause, I ... That's literally what it sounds like. It's like how many people died in, in Germany this week? How many people died in the UK this week? And other countries are better at collecting this data than we are. They collect it more rapidly. They publish it more rapidly. And then, you know, some people are still dying of COVID, a few, so how many ... When we, when you X out those deaths, and you just say, "If nobody died of COVID, would all-cause death still be above normal?" And the answer is yes. They'd be about 10% above normal. Now, I don't know whether 10% sounds like a lot or a little. To you, it's, you know, it's a-

    2. JR

      Sounds like a lot.

    3. AB

      It's enough that for COVID ... COVID caused a 10% increase. We shut down the world for that increase. Um, and I ... 10% in the US, really. Less worldwide. Um, with births, it's a le- the data's a little more kinda all over the map, but what's so striking is birth rates in some of these countries started dropping almost exactly nine months to the day after they started mass vaccinating women of childbearing age. Now, we know the vaccines can cause some menstrual irregularities, and it looks like they can cause a drop in sperm count. It's not clear whether that's temporary or not. Um, uh, it's possible that this is just sort of a temporary thing and births will come back to normal. Um, let's hope. So, but that's, that's where I'm going. On the data, that's what I'm pursuing. I'm pursuing w- w- ... Is this happening? It appears to be happening. Next question: why is it happening? And there's ... You can come up with plenty of explanations that don't involve the vaccines, okay? For example, you could say, "Well, I think deaths are increasing because, you know, during the lockdown, people didn't go to the doctor. They didn't get medical care. Um, uh, you know, maybe they didn't get exercise. They put on 20 pounds. That's increased their risk of a heart attack, and so now we're just seeing this downstream effect." You could say, "Well, I think deaths in people who are 30 are increasing because those folks, uh, you know, they were forced to be home. Now, they're making up for it by partying a lot more. They're doi- ... You know, they're doing drugs, or they're, you know, they're drinking and driving, and so those kinds of deaths are increasing." So, so there are stories you can tell that don't involve the vaccines to explain this. But my argument is we need to be talking about this, and the same people who were screaming about, you know, deaths during COVID need to be acknowledging this and looking into the reasons why.

    4. JR

      What do you make of these bizarre stories that you see, that get published, that are starting to blame an increase in heart attacks on climate change?

    5. AB

      (laughs) Yeah. It's a joke.

    6. JR

      It's strange.

    7. AB

      I-

    8. JR

      It's strange because journalists are publishing these things-

    9. AB

      Yes.

    10. JR

      ... in legitimate places.

    11. AB

      Yes.

    12. JR

      Like, ABC had one the other day that was widely mocked because it's so crazy for them to say that.

    13. AB

      Yes. It's bizarre.

    14. JR

      Like, how much climate change-

    15. AB

      (laughs)

    16. JR

      ... are we talking about? Shouldn't the sky be on fire? I mean, what the fuck are you talking about?

    17. AB

      Well, well, I will say this. It is true that when we have these extreme heat waves, especially-

    18. JR

      Sure.

    19. AB

      ... in Europe where they don't have air conditioning-

    20. JR

      Sure.

    21. AB

      ... some old folks-

    22. JR

      Yes.

    23. AB

      ... are just gonna die, basically, of ... Uh, you know, they're gonna be in their apartments, and they're just not gonna be able to get out of bed, and they're gonna die. But that, but that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about-

    24. JR

      No.

    25. AB

      ... these stories where it's like some 30-year-old had a heart attack-

    26. JR

      Right.

    27. AB

      ... and it's ... Yeah. No, that's ... It's, it's absurd. It's absurd.

    28. JR

      It is absurd.

    29. AB

      Yeah.

  8. 28:33 – 39:24

    Media coordination, ‘Trusted News Initiative,’ and the shift to climate narratives

    1. JR

      But where do you ... Are they being influenced? Like, why is someone publishing a story like that? Like, what is going on? Like, w- h- ... What's ... What are the processes in place that would allow someone to p- to publish a story that's that ludicrous?

    2. AB

      S- so I see ... I'm glad you ... Uh, this is a good thing about talking to you, is you pull me back. 'Cause I can get lost in the weeds, in the details of, you know, this is what the deaths in, you know, Germany were last week. You get me ... Or you, you think sort of more wholistically. So, so here's what we're t- ... Here's what we've learned in the last couple years. We've learned that the media, uh, broadly, the, the elite media as I generally call it, but you know, it's The New York Times and it's CNN-

    3. JR

      Corporations.

    4. AB

      The corporations and ... But it, it's more than corporations. It's a group of people who all live in Brooklyn and DC, who are ... tend to be politically liberal, who all went to the same schools. By the way, one reason they hate me is 'cause I went to one of those schools, right? So I'm a traitor.

    5. JR

      And you were from The New York Times.

    6. AB

      Uh, and I worked for The New York Times, so I'm a, I'm a class traitor, okay? Um, they have engaged, in the last several years, in a coordinated effort to, to sort of present stories in a way that I don't think ever really happened before 2016, before Donald Trump was elected. So these people ... When Trump beat Hillary, it was a shock to the system. They couldn't believe that America had betrayed them this way. And there's a fam- (laughs) there's a famous Onion headline from 2015. The Onion is always the best, but ... And the headline was something like, "Hillary Clinton tells America, 'Don't fuck this up for me.'"

    7. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    8. AB

      Right? And there was this sort of, like, idea there was gonna be this baton death march where it was gonna end with our first female president. God help it. Didn't matter that no one on Earth liked her. Like, she was gonna be the president. And it didn't work out that way.And these people decided, "If this country is stupid enough to elect Donald Trump, we can't trust it, and we better work together to make sure nothing like this ever happens again." So you saw, really, coordinated stories about how Russia had elected Trump, which turned out to be complete nonsense, and then, you know, Mueller was gonna take Trump down, and, and they... (sighs) I don't know whether they had actual meetings over that stuff, but when COVID came along in 2020, they did have actual meetings. There was something called the Trusted News Initiative, okay? The Trusted News Initiative was a group of organizations, which I think, at the time, actually didn't initially include Twitter, which is sort of interesting. It included Facebook, and the Washington Post, and the BBC, and a lo- and Reuters, and a lot of other news organizations. And it was, "We're gonna combat misinformation together," okay? This was a mistake. News organizations should not be working with one another to set the agenda, okay? They're better when they're independent, chasing their own stuff, okay? And tha- this is ha- and, and this is now happening with climate change. It's clear. The same people who, uh, you know, who were wrong about Donald Trump and Russian collusion, who were wrong about lockdowns and COVID, and, and the effect of school closures, and wro- ... And I would say wrong completely about ba- vaccines. Now, we can s- talk about where we actually stand right now, but fine. They think that climate change is an existential threat. They have convinced each other that climate change is an existential threat. And, oh, by the way, they also think that, you know, like, letting, uh, hundreds of thousands of people out of jail would have no effect on crime rates, which turns out not to be so true either. Um, but, but, so they are gonna present the same stories over and over again. They're gonna find th-... You know they're dying for a good hurricane. They would love a good hurricane to hit New Orleans or Miami, but they haven't been able to get one in 20 years (laughs) . So they're stuck writing about, you know, flash floods in St. Louis or whatever. They're gonna look for any extreme weather event they can, and they're gonna, they're gonna talk about how it's all climate change related, and the, you know, sort of the, the, uh, the ultimate example of this is trying to blame some random heart attack on climate change. It's nonsense. You know, pretty soon, they're gonna be blaming fentanyl overdoses on climate change. They just... And, and it is. You're right. Like, this didn't happen until the last few years because they didn't do this. They didn't work together this way.

    9. JR

      Can this ship be turned back around-

    10. AB

      I don't-

    11. JR

      ... at this point?

    12. AB

      I don't know. I mean (sighs) , you know, there's people like you. There's people on Substack. But it's, I mean... (sighs)

    13. JR

      Yeah, but I'm (laughs) , this, I'm not a good example of this. I'm not-

    14. AB

      I- y-

    15. JR

      ... chasing stories, and that's not what I do.

    16. AB

      No, and-

    17. JR

      I'm just talking to people. So, uh, the, the, the fact that I can get something that's widely spread, and I can, you know, have this podcast and have conversations with people like you and some other controversial folks that are, have been telling the truth and have been suppressed, it's great. But, you know-

    18. AB

      But-

    19. JR

      ... clearly, I'm not a journalist.

    20. AB

      Right, and you n-... You do need, like, these org-... You know, when you have war reporters in Ukraine, okay, or you have reporters willing to spend a month chasing a story. Really doing high-end news work is expensive, and difficult, and does-... It requires editors and requires trained... You know, i- th- there's a skill to it, a legit skill to it. And there's only, you know, there's only so many organizations that can do it. And, uh, how we break them out of their monoculture, I don't know. I mean, from, from, l- wha- wha- one let-... I mean, so one of the, like, sad things about this is that there are many stories you could write, for example, about the vaccines that wouldn't necessarily be like, "All the vaccines are terrible and they're gonna kill you all." You could have written about, uh, you know, like, "Whether or not enough old people were included in the clinical trials," okay? That would have been a legitimate question that, once upon a time, The New York Times would have seen, "We can write stories questioning the development and pricing, let's say, of the vaccines. We can question whether the United States should be putting tens of billions of dollars in profit into the companies, uh, th-... you know, w- when this is a public health emergency." And those would have been legitimate questions. But because it became so politicized and polarized and ideological, they fell down even on asking those questions.

    21. JR

      You can't even bring up whether or not the vaccine-related injuries-

    22. AB

      (scoffs)

    23. JR

      ... are real.

    24. AB

      That's right.

    25. JR

      They, they, they won't even discuss it.

    26. AB

      That's right.

    27. JR

      It's not... Uh, you don't hear legitimate stories about the numbers of people that have suffered strokes, and blood clots, and all the various ailments, and people that have pacemakers now that are in their 30s.

    28. AB

      That's right. Let, uh-

    29. JR

      It's-

    30. AB

      L- let me give you a... well, to me, what is a really good example of that. So, you know, there's diabetes, type one and type two, right? So type one diabetes used to be called childhood diabetes, and type two was adult. And the reason it was called childhood was it's an autoimmune disease, essentially, right? So type two diabetes, you just eat, and eat, and eat, and you overwhelm your, uh, your pancreas and your insulin. You bec-... You know, you, you, you basically eat so much you destroy your ability to process all that food. But type one is different. Type one is your i-... your pancrea... You know, you, you, you stop making enough insulin as a kid. It's an autoimmune disease. So there are legitimate cases in peer-reviewed journals of people getting type one diabetes as adults following mRNA vaccination, okay? Now to me, that's a, that's a giant red flag, okay? That-

  9. 39:24 – 52:57

    Fauci clips, rewriting history, and accountability: gain-of-function, lockdowns, vaccines

    1. JR

      I mean, there was a, there was a smash cut of Fauci.

    2. AB

      (laughs) Yes.

    3. JR

      Did you see that?

    4. AB

      Yes, I did.

    5. JR

      What he actually had ... See if you can find that, Jimmy. What, what he actually claimed he said versus what he actually said.

    6. AB

      Yes.

    7. JR

      You know, that he said he never said, "Shut anything down," and it's like ... I mean, but he's 81 or whatever he is. Like he's d- ... you know.

    8. AB

      Are we giving him a pass 'cause he's 81?

    9. JR

      No, but I'm saying maybe his memory sucks.

    10. AB

      (laughs) No, his memory is fine.

    11. JR

      I think it's pretty good. I'm, I'm giving him a pass, I guess.

    12. AB

      Somebody, somebody-

    13. JR

      I'm fucking around.

    14. AB

      Somebody, uh, referred to it as the Shaggy clip. It wasn't me.

    15. JR

      Shaggy?

    16. AB

      Yeah. You know that video?

    17. JR

      No.

    18. AB

      The ... Yo, you remember that song. Uh, it's the ... "It wasn't me."

    19. JR

      Oh.

    20. AB

      He gets caught by his girlfriend.

    21. JR

      Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

    22. AB

      "You even caught me in the shower. It wasn't me."

    23. JR

      Right, right.

    24. AB

      Yeah. That's, that's Fauci. "It wasn't me."

    25. JR

      Well, I think these guys operated in a day before the internet.

    26. AB

      (laughs)

    27. JR

      And they became accustomed to these sort of patterns of just, like, b- repeating a narrative over and over again, and then, "This is the official story," and that's what they did during the HIV crisis. That's what they're doing now. It's the same thing. But now people will go back and pull up clips and make these little edits.

    28. AB

      Yes. He- here's why it's not gonna work though. Here's why. So, uh ... And I wa- I wanna ... I'm, I'm gonna give you this right now, and I'm gonna ... Uh, I'm giving it to you, uh, for a reason. This is a-

    29. JR

      Whiskey.

    30. AB

      This is a whiskey, um, and it's from a d- it's a distillery near where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York. Um, but the reason I'm picking it specifically isn't just that it's delicious whiskey. The guy who runs the place, uh, emailed me a few months ago. He said, "I'm on your side. Uh, can I ... I know it's been a long, uh, you know, 18 months. Can I send you some whiskey?" (laughs) And I said, "Please do." I said, "Send me the strongest stuff you got." (laughs) And so he sent me a couple bottles. Um, but that guy, he hasn't forgotten that they tried to make him get vaccinated. I haven't forgotten. You haven't forgotten. There's a lot of pissed off people out there. Let's play this.

  10. 52:57 – 1:22:25

    Vaccine messaging, injuries, and the collapse of nuance: myocarditis and risk by age

    1. JR

      And if you looked at the overall m- positive net benefit of the vaccine, I think it saved lives.

    2. AB

      I, I will give you the best bull case for the vaccines. So last year, Delta... Delta was clearly a worse variant than Omicron. For a period of months in the spring, probably into the summer of 2020, uh, the vaccines probably reduced the infection rate substantially. That's what they do for a period- you know, a few months. They, they really do. And then I think the booster in the fall probably helped some, not as much, 'cause there's definitely, um... Like, y- y- you definitely... Y- y- your first hit is your best hit. Um, there's definitely a limited sort of benefit from boosting. Um, but let's say that last year, in 2021, there was a substantial decrease in the number of Delta infections. Now, all those people wound up getting Omicron this year, but Omicron is not as dangerous as Delta. And we have Paxlovid now. So even just by delaying a few months, you can argue that the lives of some 70 and 80-year-olds were saved, okay? Some of those people who got, who got infected this year and were fine might've gotten Delta last year and died. I-

    3. JR

      And the, uh... particularly older folks.

    4. AB

      Particularly older folks. And, and, and, and I think there's a legit case to be made about that. I've actually been meaning to write a Substack about that, 'cause I think it's important that people understand that. But that doesn't mean that any- that this benefited anybody under 50 or 60, okay? And unfortunately, certainly with the myocarditis, which is, you know, this heart infection you can get that can actually be quite dangerous and in some cases deadly to younger people, especially men, the risk is the other way. The younger you are, the worse the risk seems to be. So here's what we should've done, okay? First of all, we should've tested the vaccines for longer. For- w- and we should've made sure that we tested them on old people who are the most at risk. We didn't do either of those things. But okay, y- they wanted to get this out very quickly in the- you know, in, in, in the winter of 2020, y- d- you know, s- uh, January 2021, fine.... they should have said, "Okay. We think we have, we think we have something good here, but because it's been so... it's been tested for such a short period of time, and because the technology is so novel, we're gonna limit its use to the people who are really at risk from COVID. We know who those people are, you know, over 70, maybe if you're under 70 and you have really severe comorbidities, go get your vaccine, can't hurt you. The rest of us, we're gonna wait and we're gonna see." And probably if they had done that, they could have had whatever benefits they did have last year, um, without any of the problems that seem to be getting worse. And again, this is why we have to talk about all-cause deaths, okay? Because that is the... those numbers shouldn't be where they are right now.

    5. JR

      Now, these people that were convinced early on that the vaccine was the savior, and that, you know, these people would have resisted that narrative, that you were gonna vaccinate the older folks and the other people are gonna wait.

    6. AB

      Yes.

    7. JR

      They, they didn't wanna wait.

    8. AB

      No, they were desperate to get vaccinated.

    9. JR

      And, but there was also this narrative that kept being promoted, "safe and effective".

    10. AB

      Yep.

    11. JR

      Those were the two words that they used, you know. And it was so prevalent. It was everywhere. And if you resisted that, somehow or another you were an enemy of the future. You were, you were-

    12. AB

      You're an anti-vaxxer.

    13. JR

      Yeah. You're an anti-vaxxer, which is a... that, that pejorative that they used over and over again, it's like the... It didn't matter if you had every other vaccine there was.

    14. AB

      That's right.

    15. JR

      If you didn't believe in this one thing that you stated, and I think accurately so, that you should think of more of as a therapeutic. It's a gene therapy, correct? Sort of?

    16. AB

      We can, we can, we can argue about that.

    17. JR

      Whatever you wanna call it.

    18. AB

      But what I, what I meant by therapeutic was it had a limited window of, of working. It worked for three, four months, and then it stopped.

    19. JR

      Well, there were certainly people that were resisting the idea that it was a leaky vaccine...

    20. AB

      Oh, right.

    21. JR

      ... which was crazy.

    22. AB

      It's weird.

    23. JR

      Because there was already indications that people were k-... And remember in the early days, it was "breakthrough infections are very rare".

    24. AB

      (laughs) That's right.

    25. JR

      It was breakthrough infections.

    26. AB

      Yeah.

    27. JR

      These were these, these were these aberrations, these rare outlier cases.

    28. AB

      Yes.

    29. JR

      And they're not to be taken into consideration.

    30. AB

      Yeah.

Episode duration: 3:01:19

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