EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,093 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast,…
- ABAlex Berenson
(drumming) Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
- NANarrator
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- ABAlex Berenson
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music plays)
- JRJoe Rogan
(sniffing) Smell that? That's vindication.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
You are the sweet smell of vindication.
- ABAlex Berenson
Not, not, not yet, my friend.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- ABAlex Berenson
Not yet.
- JRJoe Rogan
Not yet, but it's, it's definitely in the air.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
Has there ever been a person that has, uh, gone to court and got back on Twitter, besides you?
- ABAlex Berenson
There has not.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's pretty impressive. That's pretty impressive.
- ABAlex Berenson
Uh, s- (laughs) there's more common.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's more?
- ABAlex Berenson
Oh, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
So explain the process. So you were, uh, what was the exact, uh, definition of what they kicked you off for?
- ABAlex Berenson
Oh, are, are we, are we live?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, we're live.
- ABAlex Berenson
Oh, oh, good, good.
- JRJoe Rogan
We're rolling.
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's...
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
That's vindication.
- ABAlex Berenson
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. 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- ABAlex Berenson
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 15:00 – 30:00
And what was their…
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, where do you go from here?
- ABAlex Berenson
Well, I'm back on. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs) They sure do.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yep. So, so it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause that's true.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yeah, 'cause that's true.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this is something that you said a year ago.
- ABAlex Berenson
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sounds like a lot.
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs) Yeah. It's a joke.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's strange.
- ABAlex Berenson
I-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's strange because journalists are publishing these things-
- ABAlex Berenson
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... in legitimate places.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, ABC had one the other day that was widely mocked because it's so crazy for them to say that.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yes. It's bizarre.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, how much climate change-
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... are we talking about? Shouldn't the sky be on fire? I mean, what the fuck are you talking about?
- ABAlex Berenson
Well, well, I will say this. It is true that when we have these extreme heat waves, especially-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sure.
- 30:00 – 45:00
Mm-hmm. …
- ABAlex Berenson
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.'"
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can this ship be turned back around-
- ABAlex Berenson
I don't-
- JRJoe Rogan
... at this point?
- ABAlex Berenson
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)
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but I'm (laughs) , this, I'm not a good example of this. I'm not-
- ABAlex Berenson
I- y-
- JRJoe Rogan
... chasing stories, and that's not what I do.
- ABAlex Berenson
No, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- ABAlex Berenson
But-
- JRJoe Rogan
... clearly, I'm not a journalist.
- ABAlex Berenson
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
You can't even bring up whether or not the vaccine-related injuries-
- ABAlex Berenson
(scoffs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... are real.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
They, they, they won't even discuss it.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right. Let, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's-
- ABAlex Berenson
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
What are these numbers?
- ABAlex Berenson
They're not, they're not a lot of cases, okay? You know, it's like f-... you know, four cases in Japan, two cases in Turkey. It- it's a... It's what, it's what you would call an epidemiology or medicine a signal event.... right? It's a, it's a signal that should be followed up on. And by the way, you never see these case reports coming out of the US because US doctors are ... I think they have decided it's not in their career interest to write too much about vaccine side effects.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ABAlex Berenson
Um, so, so to me ... Okay, that doesn't mean that a million people are gonna get type one diabetes following the mRNA vaccinations. What it means is, these are, these are really biologically active compounds that we've given to a lot of people, and we owe it to them to figure out what some of these dangers might be, and we are not doing that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Do you think that maybe with time, as more of these instances arise and more people come forward about their injuries and their e- th- all the ailments that they've acquired since being vaccinated, that this will somehow or another bring people back to where they were before, where they were very skeptical about pharmaceutical companies and what they do with their studies and how they, how they disseminate that information?
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Which is also the…
- ABAlex Berenson
that claims that, oh, because, you know, most of the cases the Chinese reported first were in the v- a vicinity of the market, it must've been the market.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is also the vicinity of the Wuhan lab.
- ABAlex Berenson
Which (laughs) , and by the way, the Chinese knew exactly what they were doing when they were collecting that data. So it's totally compromised data. You can't trust it at all.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, we've never trusted their data-
- ABAlex Berenson
No. (laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... in the past.
- ABAlex Berenson
No. So-
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is so bizarre.
- ABAlex Berenson
So there's gain of function, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ABAlex Berenson
There's the lockdowns, and, uh, you know, his pushing. Now he's probably got actually the best defense on that one, right? Because that's about, "You know, we didn't know exactly what was happening, and I didn't make the decision. I just made my best recommendation. It was these governors who did it, and we all agreed." So okay, but nonetheless, he could, he could get some heat for that. And then the third issue is the vaccines, right? And, and that one's interesting because NIH, National Institutes of Health, they were basically a direct partner with Moderna on the, uh, not on the, you know, not on the Pfizer-BioNTech m- m- vaccine, but there are two mRNA vaccines, and, uh, and you know, the federal government i- you know, was basically a, a, a more than a handshake partner, a partner of Moderna on that vaccine. And so there's gonna, e- assuming we ever start asking real questions about what the data shows about the vaccine, uh, he might be on the hook for that too.
- JRJoe Rogan
How much of an impediment is this agreement that they had where they're not allowed to be held liable?
- ABAlex Berenson
Uh, it's a huge impediment. So it's a huge impediment for a few reasons. Um, now as, uh, you know, as my lawsuit with Twitter shows, if you sue, the civil litigation process is very powerful. It's not as powerful as a subpoena, you know, from a, you know, from a prosecutor. Still very powerful. You get these companies to hand over documents, so you can see what they were thinking. And you know, for the most part, it's, it's actually kinda hard to believe, but the companies do comply with this. They will, whether it's because their lawyers make them or whether it's 'cause they don't really know what they're giving you or whether it's because they actually believe in, you know, the American justice system, uh, who, wh- that, that's probably the least likely. Uh, th- they give you the documents so you can actually see them. Um, no, no litigation or i- immunity means no liability, means there's no, A, there's no way to get the documents, and B, the really good trial lawyers aren't interested 'cause there's no money for them. It also means Wall Street doesn't care 'cause Wall Street, from their point of view, if there's no liability issue, uh, it's not gonna hurt the company's stock. So, so they don't care either. So two very powerful forces that could help kinda keep the companies on a straight path are gone.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was so strange to me to watch people blindly believe the pharmaceutical companies, given their history, given the history that they have of being fined insane amounts, causing tens of thousands of deaths that could've been prevented-
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs) Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
... causing the opioid crisis-
- ABAlex Berenson
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
... all, all the things that we know that they w- lied about, hid data, distorted data, and yet still people were getting Pfizer tattoos.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs) Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
There, it, it was a, a strange thing to watch, this sort of, you know, what does Robert Malone call it? Mass formation psychosis?
- ABAlex Berenson
Mass
- NANarrator
psychosis, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And people are like, "That's not a thing." But what about... Forget what he called it. That thing is clearly real and happening. We saw people that just put all of their, all of their suspicions, all of their m- misgivings aside from the past and now blindly trust the same organizations-
- ABAlex Berenson
y-
- JRJoe Rogan
... that they had widely disparaged just a few months before that.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yes. Um, yeah, uh, look. I mean, you can call it lots of things. Uh, uh, we've all, I mean, uh, look. I, I play poker, okay? And I think of myself as a pretty good poker player. But a few days ago, I was, uh, at the, uh, casino. It's about an hour from our house, and, uh, and I was not having a good night, and, um...... and I was in a hand, and somebody made a bet, and I was like, "I am so beaten here. Like, I, I am just, uh, I'm just beaten." And I called. And then, that was the f- turn card, the fourth card. The river card came, a guy made another big bet, and I called again, okay? And I didn't have a... I, I wasn't... I was destroyed, okay? People make bad decisions. They double down. They fall in love with a hand or with a product, and they can't rethink it. And, you know, Tucker would say it's a lack of faith, right? It's a secul- you know, it's the crisis of we don't believe in God anymore. We're all terribly scared of our own mortality. We're looking for some product that will save us.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ABAlex Berenson
Um, you know, I, I, I think that's part of it. I don't know if that's all of it. It- I think it's part of it. Um, certainly the vaccines became an object of secular veneration on the left. I mean- And this is- I'm gonna give you my other present for you now. This is Pandemia.
- JRJoe Rogan
The book?
- ABAlex Berenson
The book. And, uh, there's an inscription for you in there. But, um, uh, I brought- So the second copy, anybody who wants, uh, in the office can have. But I, I will-
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
S- so I, so…
- JRJoe Rogan
that we, we supposedly operate under.
- ABAlex Berenson
S- so I, so I wrote a Substack a few days ago (laughs) where I said, "We need a name for this phenomenon." This phenomenon of, I don't really... I used to be somebody... I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I, uh, I used to think, "Hey, if, you know, if the government says this is a safe drug, or, you know, a safe medicine, I'm gonna take it if my doctor tells me to." I... You know, I, I, I believe in the system broadly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- ABAlex Berenson
I know it's not perfect, but I believe in it. And a lot of people, including me, now don't believe in the system broadly, right? And w- and we... A- and there needs to be a name for that. It's... The way I described it is, it's the... it's, it's you're on the plane, the plane's taken off, and you suddenly realize that the guy, uh, you know, in the cockpit, you know, the captain, the voice you heard coming out of the cockpit is the voice of somebody who you saw doing some shots the night before in the bar. And it's like, "Oh man, maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was. Not that he's drunk right now, but maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was."
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- ABAlex Berenson
It's that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah. It's that. It's the, the, the knowledge that the system is run by humans, and humans that have a very clear interest in pushing a very specific narrative. And they pushed it early on. And one of the things that you'll find about people in the media that's really bizarre, they have a complete, total unwillingness to admit any incorrect information-They, they won't admit that they've made mistakes. They won't admit that they were incorrect. They won't admit that they were misled or confused or just flat out wrong. Because if they do, it opens them up to liabilities. It opens them up to not being trusted. It opens them up to saying, "Well, if you're the expert and you were wrong, well, who... you're not an expert."
- ABAlex Berenson
Don't we all have that?
- JRJoe Rogan
We should.
- ABAlex Berenson
Isn't that human nature to, uh, to not want to admit you're wrong? (laughs) I mean-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but we-
- ABAlex Berenson
... I'm guilty of it too.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know, man. I'm a big proponent of admitting you're wrong. I think it's very important. I think it doesn't mean that y- you're... It just... If you are wrong and you don't admit you're wrong, now you're wrong again. Now you're wrong more. And I know it. If you are wrong and you admit you're wrong, I just know you're a human. And if you say, "I'm sorry. I thought... This is what I thought. This is why I thought it."
- ABAlex Berenson
This is, this is-
- JRJoe Rogan
"This turns out to not be correct."
- ABAlex Berenson
... one reason, this is one reason cancel culture is such a... Uh, actually, you know, you did admit you were wrong back in January. But you were big enough, I mean, not just big enough in person, but, like, big enough, uh, and important enough culturally, they couldn't cancel you. They were trying to cancel you, and your apology meant nothing to them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's not about whether or not someone's wrong or right. It's about someone being inconvenient and someone being a problem. And the, the, the fact that my platform is not controlled by any corporations, so I can have a guy like Robert Malone on, who is... He owns the patent for nine, uh, nine patents in the, the invention of MRNA technology. I mean, he's a guy who fucking knows what he's talking about.
- ABAlex Berenson
Oh, yeah. He knows what he's talking about.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they tried to make him out to be a kook. I mean, this is a guy with a rock solid reputation outside of that. I mean...
- ABAlex Berenson
But, but, but back to you, right? Like, I don't remember the exact words that you used, but you admitted you'd made a mistake. You'd used a word that, you know, was not a good word. And unfortunately, it didn't satisfy the people criticizing you. That's part of the problem, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, but that... You're always going to have people who hate you. They're always going to be there, and they're not gonna want to forgive you. That's just them. That's on them. Now, if I don't like someone, but someone comes out and says they made a mistake, I admire that because I think that's an admirable human quality. The, the ability to swallow your pride and also the ability to want to be forthcoming with, with truth and just say, "This is where I am. This is who I am. This is what I did. I shouldn't have done that, and I recognize that. And if I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry." Or, "If I misled you, I'm sorry. If I gave you information that made you act in a certain way or go and make a certain choice because you thought that I was informed and I was correct, I feel like you have an obligation if you're someone whose... your job is to distribute the truth." That's what you're doing if you're a journalist, if that's what you're doing, if you're a pundit, if you're someone on television, and you're speaking from a position where you supposedly have some sort of authority or at least some sort of, uh, like, uh, w- w- like, reasonable research basis to s- s- to say these things. You should come out and say it.
- ABAlex Berenson
I mean, look, I basically agree. Look, look, you know, I just said a few minutes ago, I think there's a case to be made the vaccines saved lives last year.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think there's a case to be made too.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
But that... See, I'm not a black and white person. I'm not a one or a zero. I'm not binary on these things. I think it's a very messy situation, and I think part of the problem is that we were so indoctrinated with this propaganda. It was so shoved down everyone's throats that people were very reluctantly to abandon their earliest notions. And a lot of their earliest notions were based in anger on people who weren't doing the right thing, who weren't-
- ABAlex Berenson
Or doing what they're told.
- JRJoe Rogan
... spreading the right thing. Yes.
- ABAlex Berenson
Or doing what they're told.
- JRJoe Rogan
Doing what they're told. But they thought that doing what they were told was doing the right thing. And I think there's a lot of people that did it, you know, in... With noble intentions.
- ABAlex Berenson
So-
- 1:15:00 – 1:18:29
That's... I mean, we,…
- JRJoe Rogan
and didn't come back.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's... I mean, we, yeah, we, I mean, we, we, I remember we talked about this years... It's funny, like, I now feel like we have had a conversation that's gone on for years-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- ABAlex Berenson
... about various topics.
- JRJoe Rogan
We have.
- ABAlex Berenson
But, you know, my, my problem with, with, with cannabis use, and with sort of drug use in general, that is cocaine or methamphetamine, is that these drugs have risks that most people who use, like, underestimate until it's too late. And there's people who can use, like, you know, like, you clearly can use drugs and, you know, use them your whole life and not have a problem. But there's people who are gonna have problems, and we don't really know who those people are, and they can do a lot of damage, not just to themselves, but to their families.
- JRJoe Rogan
They can destroy families.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
The, and this is just, but this is the case with alcohol. We both just had a drink.
- ABAlex Berenson
Y- Y- Yep, that's true, too.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? It's, it's the case with many, many, many things that people regularly consume. But human beings are not identical. We're not bio-identical. The, the, the things that affect you might not affect Jamie. It's just the way it is with being a human being. And to deny that nuance, I think, is ridiculous. And for me, as a person who uses cannabis, there were so many people that were upset at me that were cannabis users.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
They're like, "How? What are you-"
- ABAlex Berenson
Just for having me on, oh?
- JRJoe Rogan
W- Yeah, well, not just for having you on, but agreeing with you.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And they were like, "What are you doing?"
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
And I'm like, "I'm telling the fucking truth."
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
This is a part of it. It, and it didn't stop me from smoking pot.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
Because it doesn't do that to me.
- ABAlex Berenson
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
But it doesn't stop me from eating peanuts either.
- ABAlex Berenson
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm not allergic to them.
- ABAlex Berenson
That's right.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know what I'm saying? It's like, we need reality, and we need data, and we need all of the truth laid out in front of us so that we can make informed decisions. You can't make informed decisions if the truth is hidden. You can't make it if these inconvenient truths bother some people, and they would rather you deny reality and, and, uh, you know, remove facts from the conversation. That's not the way to do things.
- ABAlex Berenson
Yep. I, uh, y-
Episode duration: 3:01:19
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