In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with my good friend Alex Berenson to talk about how he got back on the internet after being banned from it, and how he was able to get it back up and running again. We talk about the process of getting his account back up, how he won his case against the companies that banned him, and what it took to get him back on, and why he thinks we should all be able to do the same. It's a great episode, and I hope you enjoy it and tweet me if you do! to let me know what you thought of it and if you think it was a good episode. Tweet Me! or and tell me what you think of it in the comments section below! Timestamps: 4:00 - How to get back on social media 5:30 - How I got my back on it 6:20 - Why you should go to court 7:15 - What's next for me? 8:40 - What s next for my case? 9:20 10:00 What's the best piece of advice I ve ever gotten back on my social media? 11:15 12:30 Can I get back onto social media again? 13:00 | What s going on with my account? 14:30 | Should I go back to my account 15:40 | Is it possible? 16:20 | How much money I should I should get? 17: Is it worth it? 18:15 | How do I can I have? 19: What s the worst thing I ve got? 21: Should I be allowed to use my own social media account 22:40 23:10 | What do I have to pay for my own legal strategy? 25:10 26:10 - How much do I m gonna pay for this? 27:00 // 26:30 Can I have it back? 29:30 Should I get my own lawyer? 35:30 Do I have a lawyer 32: Is my ex-wife get a tattoo? 31:30 Is there a tattoo 36:00 Can I keep it back 37:00 Is there any chance I m going to get my back out of this case any better than this case ?
00:01:55.000So other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, actually all these companies, and said, you know, you've banned us.
00:02:09.000I just want to be able to use your platform.
00:03:22.000The second idea was we want these folks to be able...
00:03:27.000To give their users a better experience.
00:03:30.000And so we're going to give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted.
00:03:36.000Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography, and I'm posting it to a Christian website that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place.
00:03:49.000The idea was the 230 is going to allow me to take action against that user in good faith for harassing or objectionable content.
00:04:00.000So I'm going to be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it.
00:04:04.000And that was really intended when you look back at the statute for pornography especially.
00:04:13.000What happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is the federal judges in California, which is where most of these companies are based, California and the West Coast, managed to get...
00:04:32.000And this really, this was happening for a while and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, you know, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, we don't like these people.
00:04:57.000And by the way, this was a classic example of a government not wanting dissent.
00:05:05.000The Indian government didn't want to deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it.
00:05:12.000The Ninth Circuit said, that 230 protection that allows you Complete immunity, if Alex Berenson says, you know, here's naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend, that also allows you to ban whoever you want,
00:06:03.000And that's basically been how it's been.
00:06:05.000They've been allowed to do whatever they want.
00:06:08.000And so, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background.
00:06:12.000So sometimes when conservatives say, hey, we need to ban 230, we need to repeal 230, That's actually not true.
00:06:20.000You 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.
00:06:33.000But at the same time, they shouldn't have blanket protection for their own decisions.
00:06:38.000So they've had the best of both worlds.
00:06:40.000They call themselves publishers when they want.
00:06:42.000And as a publisher, I have the protection to publish who I like, not publish who I like.
00:06:46.000But I'm not a publisher from the point of view.
00:06:50.000I'm more like a telephone company if somebody does something bad over my airwaves.
00:07:07.000I had emails from a guy inside Twitter named Brandon Borman, who is a pretty senior executive.
00:07:14.000He was their vice president of communications, telling me explicitly, hey, we know what you're saying.
00:07:21.000We 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.
00:07:31.000And we don't think you're doing anything wrong.
00:07:37.000Not only are they violating my rights as an American and the California constitution actually has additional free speech protections and I think they're violating those too.
00:07:48.000They're specifically, they made these promises to me.
00:07:56.000And there's a broader point that's important to everybody.
00:08:00.000When 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 govern what you can and can't say on their platform.
00:08:18.000So even if they say their contract – and, you know, if you sign up for Twitter, you know, you click on something at the end and you've signed a contract with them basically.
00:08:29.000And that contract is written by their lawyers.
00:08:31.000It's very favorable to them, very unfavorable to you as the user.
00:09:21.000And that was a major event, you know, in sort of the point of view of internet law.
00:09:28.000Because, again, even though I did have these communications with Borman that other people don't have, this broader issue...
00:09:39.000Of whether or not these platforms, when they tell you, we're going to have this strike policy, we're going to do these things, do they have to follow that?
00:09:50.000Again, if the argument is, I'm Twitter or I'm Facebook, I'm all powerful, I operate under 230, and I'm going to kick you off whenever they want, they've got to tell people that.
00:10:01.000Instead, it's like, well, as long as you play within the rules and you color by our guidelines, it's okay.
00:10:20.000And the judge doesn't allow everything to proceed, which from my point of view is sort of unfortunate.
00:10:24.000He didn't allow my big claims on the First Amendment or my California claims to proceed.
00:10:30.000And frankly, I still think there's a chance...
00:10:34.000Whether it's me or, you know, it's not me, but whether it's somebody else going forward might be able to have a good claim on California constitutional law.
00:10:44.000Because, again, Twitter is based in California and the California Constitution is even more protective of free speech than the U.S. Constitution.
00:10:53.000It actually says, for example, the way it's been interpreted in California, the California Constitution, if you own a mall...
00:11:00.000You have to let people come in and protest.
00:11:03.000Even 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.
00:11:20.000And my argument, my lawyer's argument is Twitter is...
00:11:27.000It's referred to itself as a public square many times.
00:11:30.000It should be forced to do the same thing under California law.
00:11:34.000And if the federal law, if 230 blocks that, now we have an issue of, you know, does the federal law go too far and sort of hurt First Amendment protections?
00:12:00.000It means that the two parties have to exchange information in a civil lawsuit.
00:12:06.000And it's actually kind of amazing, if you think about this, that this is how this works.
00:12:10.000The lawyers for Twitter were going to go to Twitter and say, you've got to give us all your documents where Alex Berenson is named, whether that's internal or whether that's Pfizer emailing about him or whatever it is.
00:12:27.000And we're going to hand that over to his lawyers so he can help sue us.
00:13:16.000And I want the right to make it public.
00:13:18.000And so Twitter, I did not think we were going to be able to settle.
00:13:23.000But Twitter and I, in June, we had 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, well, July 6th, they reinstated me to the platform.
00:13:45.000I guess you could argue they didn't apologize, but they acknowledged they were wrong to have taken me off last August.
00:13:53.000And, 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.
00:14:08.000So, this to me, so people said when I settled, and it's funny, it was actually people on the right, they said, this guy, he took all this money to sue Twitter.
00:14:50.000And 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 that the White House said, why is this guy still allowed to tweet?
00:15:04.000And at that time, they were saying to each other, these Twitter employees, we think he's fine.
00:15:40.000So my position—and I'm going to sue.
00:15:42.000I've said I'm going to sue the White House, and I'm going to sue a guy named Andy Slavitt, who's named in these documents, who was working at the White House at the time— My position is that there are people inside the Biden administration who violated my rights as an American citizen, violated my First Amendment rights,
00:15:59.000tried to get Twitter to suppress me personally.
00:16:21.000And in fact, they specifically said, again, this is according to these Twitter employees who are talking about this meeting, that I was influencing persuadable people.
00:16:45.000And 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.
00:16:52.000But ultimately, all those mouth-breathing anti-vaxxers, they're going to see their buddies die and they're going to see how well this thing works.
00:17:01.000And we're going to get 90 or 95% of the country vaccinated.
00:17:40.000They were upset about me and people like me.
00:17:44.000You know, disinformation, misinformation, to me, it's journalism, okay?
00:17:50.000If 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,
00:18:20.000Then something happened in June and July and August.
00:18:24.000The worst case scenario from the point of view of these people.
00:18:28.000What 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 going to be permanently protected.
00:18:39.000But I guarantee you they did not think that that was going to happen in a matter of months.
00:18:45.000And that set them up to do two things.
00:18:48.000First of all, they were going to start to push for boosters, okay?
00:18:51.000Now maybe if all you watch is MSNBC, you could get convinced that boosters were, you know, that was always a part of the plan.
00:19:00.000Almost nobody who got a vaccine in, let's say, February or March or April thought that they were going to need another one by the end of the summer or the fall.
00:19:08.000So they knew that they were changing the narrative.
00:19:15.000And this was really the worst part, Joe.
00:19:18.000This was, we are going to tie this to your job.
00:19:23.000We're going to basically force almost every American adult of working age to get one of these who isn't self-employed or who isn't an illegal immigrant.
00:22:36.000And then, so that's A. But the other question, unfortunately, we're done talking about whether the vaccines help stop infection or transmission.
00:22:51.000One is, do the vaccines actually increase your risk of getting Omicron?
00:22:56.000And do they increase or decrease your risk of serious illness if you do?
00:23:00.000And in some ways, because Omicron's pretty mild, and because we've all gotten it at least once, maybe twice, 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,
00:23:16.000it's going to be what we thought it was going to be two years ago, which is ultimately winds up as a cold for everybody.
00:23:50.000I'm hopeful basically that we will get to a point where whether or not the vaccines do any good, the virus itself is essentially, you know, not a big threat.
00:24:00.000Not that it doesn't kill some people, but that it's not a big threat societally.
00:24:04.000But there's a bigger, even bigger issue that no one will talk about right now.
00:24:09.000And that is what is happening to all-cause mortality and to birth rates in countries that use these mRNA and DNA COVID vaccines very heavily.
00:24:19.000So essentially Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United States, Canada, there is this notable increase in death rates in a lot of countries.
00:24:33.000And in the last couple months, although the data is less clear, there's been a notable decrease in birth rates in some of them.
00:24:42.000I'm not talking about, like, deaths are doubling or tripling or births have gone to zero.
00:24:46.000When I say notable increase, I mean it looks to me, and I actually just wrote a substack on this that I posted Thursday morning, all-cause deaths might be up 10%.
00:24:59.000And when I say all-cause, that's literally what it sounds like.
00:25:03.000It's like, how many people died in Germany this week?
00:25:06.000How many people died in the UK this week?
00:25:10.000And other countries are better at collecting this data than we are.
00:25:47.000With births, the data's a little more kind of 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.
00:26:03.000Now, we know the vaccines can cause some menstrual irregularities and it looks like they can cause a drop in sperm count.
00:26:09.000It's not clear whether that's temporary or not.
00:26:14.000It's possible that this is just sort of a temporary thing and births will come back to normal.
00:27:20.000We need to be talking about this, and the same people who were screaming about deaths during COVID need to be acknowledging this and looking into the reasons why.
00:27:33.000What 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?
00:28:10.000It is true that when you have these extreme heat waves, especially in Europe where they don't have air conditioning, some old folks are just going to die, basically.
00:28:19.000You know, they're going to be in their apartments and they're just not going to be able to get out of bed and they're going to die.
00:28:24.000But that's not what you're talking about.
00:28:26.000You're talking about these stories where it's like some 30-year-old had a heart attack.
00:28:42.000What are the processes in place that would allow someone to publish a story that's that ludicrous?
00:28:50.000This is a good thing about talking news.
00:28:53.000You pull me back, because I can get lost in the weeds in the details of this is what the deaths in Germany were last week.
00:29:02.000You get me, or you think sort of more holistically.
00:29:06.000So here's what we've learned in the last couple of years.
00:29:11.000We've learned that the media, broadly, the elite media as I generally call it, but you know, it's the New York Times and it's CNN. Corporations.
00:29:42.000They have engaged in the last several years in a coordinated effort to sort of present stories in a way that I don't think ever really happened before 2016, before Donald Trump was elected.
00:29:56.000So these people, when Trump beat Hillary, it was a shock to the system.
00:30:02.000They couldn't believe that America had betrayed them this way.
00:30:06.000And there's a famous Onion headline from 2015. The Onion is always the best.
00:30:11.000And the headline was something like, Hillary Clinton tells America, don't fuck this up for me.
00:30:16.000And there was a sort of idea there was going to be this baton death march where it was going to end with our first female president.
00:30:55.000I don't know whether they had actual meetings over that stuff, but when COVID came along in 2020, they did have actual meetings.
00:31:03.000There was something called the Trusted News Initiative, okay?
00:31:06.000The 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.
00:31:14.000It included Facebook and the Washington Post and the BBC and Reuters and a lot of other news organizations.
00:31:21.000And it was, we're going to combat misinformation together.
00:31:45.000Who, you know, who were wrong about Donald Trump and Russian collusion, who were wrong about lockdowns and COVID and the effect of school closures, and I would say wrong completely about vaccines.
00:31:58.000Now we can talk about where we actually stand right now, but fine.
00:32:01.000They think that climate change is an existential threat.
00:32:05.000They have convinced each other that climate change is an existential threat.
00:32:10.000And, oh, by the way, they also think that, you know, like, letting hundreds of thousands of people out of jail would have no effect on crime rates, which turns out not to be so true either.
00:32:20.000But, so they are going to present the same stories over and over again.
00:32:27.000They're going to find, you know, they're dying for a good hurricane.
00:32:30.000They would love a good hurricane to hit New Orleans or Miami, but they haven't been able to get one in 20 years.
00:32:35.000So they're stuck writing about, you know, flash floods in St. Louis or whatever.
00:32:38.000They're going to look for any extreme weather event they can, and they're going to talk about how it's all climate change related and the, you know, sort of the...
00:32:49.000The ultimate example of this is trying to blame some random heart attack on climate change.
00:33:30.000So the fact that I can get something that's widely spread and I can have this podcast and have conversations with people like you and some other controversial folks that have been telling the truth and have been suppressed, it's great.
00:33:46.000But, you know, clearly I'm not a journalist.
00:33:48.000And you do need, like, these, 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 it requires editors and requires trained,
00:34:05.000you know, there's a skill to it, a legit skill to it.
00:34:09.000And there's only so many organizations that can do it.
00:34:12.000And how we break them out of their monoculture, I don't know.
00:34:19.000One of the 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 going to kill you all.
00:34:34.000You could have written about, you know, like...
00:35:28.000You 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, they're in their 30s.
00:36:35.000It's like four cases in Japan, two cases in Turkey.
00:36:39.000It's what you would call in epidemiology or medicine a signal event.
00:36:45.000It's a signal that should be followed up on.
00:36:48.000By the way, you never see these case reports coming out of the U.S. because U.S. doctors are I think they've decided it's not in their career interest to write too much about vaccine side effects.
00:37:00.000So to me, okay, that doesn't mean that a million people are going to get type 1 diabetes following the mRNA vaccinations.
00:37:07.000What it means is 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.
00:37:24.000Do you think that maybe with time, as more of these instances arise and more people come forward about their injuries and all the ailments that they've acquired since being vaccinated, that this will somehow or another bring people back to where they were before,
00:37:44.000where they're very skeptical about pharmaceutical companies and what they do with their studies and how they disseminate that information?
00:38:17.000And they think that in news, it's higher, which is fucking bonkers.
00:38:24.000I mean, you've seen the clip, brought to you by Pfizer.
00:38:26.000Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer.
00:38:29.000You can't say something that's going to destroy the profits of those companies when the profits are literally what's funding your organization.
00:38:38.000So, again, maybe it's because I was on the inside.
00:38:41.000I do see it more as this cultural issue.
00:38:46.000I think the cultural issue with the Donald Trump thing, as you brought it up before, I think that emboldens people and it makes them justified in their actions, that the overall good is more valuable than being completely square with all the data.
00:40:09.000Well, I think these guys operated in a day before the internet, and they became accustomed to these sort of patterns of just, like, 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.
00:40:25.000It's the same thing, but now people will go back and pull up clips and make these little edits.
00:41:42.000And in fact, I think we need to make sure that your listeners understand I didn't shut down anything.
00:41:49.000I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.
00:41:54.000And the only way to do that is by draconian means of essentially shutting down a country.
00:42:00.000We know that we can do that if we shut down.
00:42:04.000Well, I think one of the things you really need to do, to the extent that you can shut down temporarily, the country I think is important.
00:42:15.000Well, if I knew at the time that shutting down would have such a dramatic effect, On controlling the spread, obviously, we would have shut down earlier.
00:42:28.000There were those who say, you shut down destructive things by disrupting the economy.
00:42:33.000And others say, well, if you save so many infections by shutting down, why didn't you shut down two weeks earlier?
00:42:40.000But I don't regret saying that the only way we could have really stopped the explosion of infection was by essentially, I want to say shutting down, I mean essentially having the physical separation and the kinds of recommendations that we've made.
00:42:57.000You've been a big fan of Cuomo and the shutdown in New York.
00:43:00.000You've lauded New York for their policy.
00:43:02.000New York had the highest death rate in the world.
00:43:04.000How could we possibly be jumping up and down and saying, oh, Governor Cuomo did a great job.
00:43:08.000He had the worst death rate in the world.
00:44:15.000I think it makes it, and this is, like, I'm not an expert on what, I don't think they can subpoena him or the process is much more complicated if he's not a federal employee.
00:44:26.000They have to negotiate and get him to testify.
00:44:32.000Remember, there's three separate issues for Fauci, right?
00:45:39.000But nonetheless, he could get some heat for that.
00:45:42.000And then the third issue is the vaccines, right?
00:45:44.000And that one's interesting because NIH, National Institutes of Health, they were basically a direct partner with Moderna.
00:45:52.000Not on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but there are two mRNA vaccines.
00:45:58.000And, you know, the federal government, you know, was basically more than a handshake partner, a partner of Moderna on that vaccine.
00:46:06.000And so there's going to, assuming we ever start asking real questions about what the data shows about the vaccine, he might be on the hook for that too.
00:46:16.000How much of an impediment is this agreement that they had where they're not allowed to be held liable?
00:46:39.000You get these companies to hand over documents so you can see what they were thinking.
00:46:43.000And for the most part, it's actually kind of hard to believe, but the companies do comply with this.
00:46:48.000They will, whether it's because their lawyers make them or whether it's because 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.
00:47:27.000So two very powerful forces that could help kind of keep the companies on a straight path are gone.
00:47:34.000It was so strange to me to watch people blindly believe the pharmaceutical companies given their history.
00:47:41.000Given the history that they have of being fined insane amounts, causing tens of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented, causing the opioid crisis.
00:47:52.000All the things that we know that they lied about, hid data, distorted data.
00:48:00.000And yet still people were getting Pfizer tattoos.
00:48:16.000That thing is clearly real and happening.
00:48:20.000We saw people that just put all of their...
00:48:25.000All of their suspicions, all of their misgivings aside from the past, and now blindly trust the same organizations that they had widely disparaged just a few months before that.
00:51:20.000This is a woman named Molly Jongfast, who was like the voice of the terrified Brooklyn left throughout 2020. This is what these people thought of the vaccine.
00:51:34.000Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I spent my first Thanksgiving without any of my 70-something parents in the hope of keeping them safe.
00:51:41.000Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I look ahead to what will be an even lonelier Christmas.
00:51:47.000Yes, the vaccine is coming, I tell my father who hasn't seen his grandchildren in months.
00:51:51.000Yes, the vaccine is coming, I silently mouth as I look into my children's bedrooms as they stare into the blue lights of their computer screens, deprived of school, friends, family, and what used to be called normal life.
00:52:07.000But for these people who had terrified themselves about COVID, who had told themselves that, you know, COVID really was the Black Plague, they needed to believe in something.
00:52:24.000I mean, I have friends that were against my perspective initially, and they thought that I was being ignorant and foolish, that I was believing conspiracy theories, and now they're like,
00:54:20.000And I think there's a legit case to be made about that.
00:54:23.000I've actually been meaning to write a substack about that because I think it's important that people understand that.
00:54:28.000But that doesn't mean that this benefited anybody under 50 or 60. And unfortunately, certainly with the myocarditis, which is this heart infection you can get that can actually be quite dangerous and in some cases deadly to younger people,
00:54:44.000especially men, the risk is the other way.
00:54:46.000The younger you are, the worse the risk seems to be.
00:55:00.000But okay, they wanted to get this out very quickly in the winter of 2020, January 2021. Fine.
00:55:09.000They should have said, okay, we think we have something good here, but because it's been tested for such a short period of time, And because the technology is so novel, we're going to limit its use to the people who are really at risk from COVID. We know who those people are.
00:55:30.000You know, over 70, maybe if you're under 70 and you're really severe comorbidities, go get your vaccine, can't hurt you.
00:55:38.000The rest of us, we're going to wait and we're going to see.
00:55:41.000And probably if they had done that, they could have had whatever benefits they did have last year without any of the problems that seemed to be getting worse.
00:55:51.000And again, this is why we have to talk about all-cause deaths, okay?
00:55:55.000Because those numbers shouldn't be where they are right now.
00:56:01.000Now, 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 going to vaccinate the older folks and the other people are going to wait.
00:56:39.000Yeah, you're an anti-vaxxer, which is a...
00:56:41.000That pejorative that they used over and over again, it's like...
00:56:46.000It didn't matter if you had every other vaccine there was.
00:56:49.000If 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?
00:57:07.000Well, there were certainly people that were resisting the idea that it was a leaky vaccine, which was crazy, because there was already indications that people were...
00:57:15.000And remember in the early days, it was breakthrough infections are very rare.
00:57:49.000And by the way, I will argue this, you know, and this gets complicated epidemiologically.
00:57:54.000I don't think the vaccines work very well.
00:57:57.000Once they stop working against infection, remember, they have this period when they do work against infection.
00:58:01.000I think that once they stop working against infection, the protection they offer against serious disease and death is actually pretty limited, too.
00:58:08.000And I think that's really true for Omicron.
00:58:32.000It's a very bizarre time to be going through this because there was such a social push and so many people were upset.
00:58:42.000And I've seen so many of those people come around now when they've had friends that have had strokes or they've had their own personal issues with it.
00:58:50.000And then they've also got it and they got COVID. Yep.
00:58:53.000I had a very good friend of mine who was all about the vaccine, and then he got COVID recently, and I'm the first fucking person he called.
00:59:01.000And I sent a nurse to him, and I had him taken care of.
00:59:05.000That was another thing that was very bizarre, was the not just limited distribution, but preventing people from getting monoclonal antibodies.
00:59:14.000Yeah, well, the Biden administration was playing a game with Ron DeSantis.
00:59:18.000They, you know, they were trying to get, you know, DeSantis has been the smartest politician about all of this from the beginning.
00:59:23.000And he knew that the antibodies were a good idea.
00:59:26.000And he tried to get a lot of them for, you know, people in Florida and the Biden administration tried to stand in his way.
00:59:31.000Not a great moment for the Biden administration.
00:59:33.000Well, they were also trying to limit the distribution of them, saying that it was based on the earlier strains.
00:59:39.000Meanwhile, they were trying to increase the distribution of the vaccine, which was also based on the earlier strains.
00:59:48.000It's just how the fuck did we get here?
00:59:51.000It's so disconcerting and it just makes you distrust the very foundation of truth that we supposedly operate under.
01:00:03.000So I wrote a substack a few days ago where I said we need a name for this phenomenon.
01:00:08.000This phenomenon of I don't really – I used to be somebody – I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I used to think, hey, if the government says this is a safe drug or safe medicine, I'm going to take it if my doctor tells me to.
01:00:28.000I know it's not perfect, but I believe in it.
01:00:30.000And a lot of people, including me, now don't believe in the system broadly.
01:00:37.000And there needs to be a name for that.
01:00:39.000The way I described it is, you're on the plane, the plane's taken off, and you suddenly realize that the guy, the cockpit, the captain, the voice you heard coming out of the cockpit, is the voice of somebody who you saw doing some shots.
01:01:05.000It's the knowledge that the system is run by humans.
01:01:10.000Humans that have a very clear interest in pushing a very specific narrative and they pushed it early on and One of the things you'll find about people in the media that's really bizarre They have a complete total unwillingness to admit any incorrect information They won't admit that they've made mistakes.
01:01:30.000They 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.
01:01:40.000It opens them up to not being trusted.
01:01:42.000It opens them up to saying, well, if you're the expert and you were wrong, well, you're not an expert.
01:03:31.000Now, 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.
01:03:40.000The ability to swallow your pride and also the ability to want to be forthcoming with truth.
01:03:58.000If 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...
01:04:07.000I feel like you have an obligation if your job is to distribute the truth.
01:04:14.000If 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 reasonable research basis to say these things.
01:04:53.000And I think part of the problem is that we were so indoctrinated with this propaganda.
01:04:58.000It was so shoved down everyone's throats that people were very reluctantly to abandon their earliest notions.
01:05:05.000And a lot of their earliest notions were based in anger on people who weren't doing the right thing, who weren't spreading the right thing.
01:05:42.000But when Joe Biden says a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and if you're not vaccinated, you're going to be sick or dying, and you're going to fill our hospitals, it was...
01:05:51.000It was demonizing a lot of people for a personal medical decision.
01:06:21.000Of course, because he's a fucking super athlete.
01:06:24.000I mean, it's really crazy that we want everyone held to the same standards, but we're still not telling people to lose weight.
01:06:30.000I mean, if the government cared about you, they would say, hey, you know, one of the things we found out 78% of the people who are admitted to the ICU with COVID are obese.
01:07:30.000But let's be honest with these folks about, you know, they're the ones at risk.
01:07:35.000And, you know, by the way, this is what happened with HIV the first few years, too.
01:07:38.000They wouldn't tell the truth about that.
01:07:39.000And then eventually the gay community said, look, we're the ones who are dying here.
01:07:42.000We have to be honest with each other, and we want the government to be honest, too.
01:07:46.000And hopefully that will happen with monkeypox.
01:07:48.000But the idea that the public health establishment, their first inclination is to lie...
01:07:54.000And to not tell you who's really at risk, I don't understand.
01:07:58.000Well, the conversation that I had with one of my friends who's a doctor, and it was a very quiet conversation, where he was like, I can't tell people what I really think about these things.
01:08:31.000I can't say you, a guy who works out six days a week, you're probably going to be okay.
01:08:36.000You, a guy who regularly takes vitamins, has all sorts of things you do for your health, You are supposed to be treated the same way as that fat old guy, which is bonkers.
01:08:47.000And one of the things that drove me nuts about when they were so mad at me about COVID, forget about the fact that CNN literally used a filter on my face to make me look jaundiced.
01:08:59.000We've showed side-by-side clips of the original video that I posted on Instagram, which is just me standing in front of my sauna with my iPhone going, I feel pretty good.
01:09:11.000And then they took that and put it through a filter that made me look yellow.
01:10:08.000And I wasn't vaccinated, and I was 54. You didn't get it because you're in good shape.
01:10:13.000Yes, but this is the thing that they don't want you to say.
01:10:17.000They wanted it to be, this is something that everyone has to do, and if you don't do it, you're not doing the right thing.
01:10:23.000Listen, there's data, and this is one of the sort of storylines that I need to pursue going forward.
01:10:29.000You're talking about what's going to happen.
01:10:33.000There's this whole behavioral psychology movement that governments and private NGOs funded.
01:10:44.000It started a few years ago, but it really took off with COVID. This idea of how do we nudge and persuade people?
01:10:50.000How do we get healthy people to stay home?
01:10:53.000Because they're not really at risk and some of them are aware of that.
01:10:57.000So is the best way to try to scapegoat.
01:11:05.000How do we get people without actually doing sort of Chinese style?
01:11:12.000We're just going to take your rights away.
01:11:13.000How do we get people to surrender their rights?
01:11:18.000I don't think I've said this to you in the past, but the email that I got was just a couple lines a few months ago that stuck with me more than any of the, you know, obviously a lot of people contact me over the last couple years.
01:11:30.000This guy said to me, he said, I thought love and hate were the two most powerful emotions, but it turns out I was wrong.
01:11:37.000It turns out the most powerful emotion is fear.
01:11:48.000And there's a certain level of anxiety that many people in this country already had.
01:11:54.000And they had a hard time with just regular, everyday life before the pandemic.
01:11:58.000And then the pandemic came along and that shit got ramped up to 11. And we got to see a lot of very frail, psychologically frail people completely fall apart.
01:12:09.000And you saw them on Twitter calling people that were unvaccinated.
01:13:43.000And, you know, all I ask, I guess, of myself is to try to be consistent ideologically.
01:13:50.000And, you know, if I don't believe that I should have vaccinated, you know, that I should have to be vaccinated, Or that you need to be vaccinated because I want you to be, then it's the same thing with abortion.
01:14:03.000It's a personal decision, even if I think it's a horrible one.
01:14:06.000I guess the one thing people would argue with me about is that I'm not consistent about drugs, that I'm anti-drug use.
01:14:14.000And you know, you and I had this conversation with Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and I brought you on here because even though I am a proponent of cannabis, I'm a regular user of cannabis, I think you're correct.
01:14:27.000And that is, in many ways, in opposition to my desire to have it legalized.
01:14:34.000I think it should be legalized, because I think people should have the choice and the decision.
01:15:10.000You know, my problem with cannabis use and with sort of drug use in general, whether it's cocaine or methamphetamine, is that these drugs have risks that most people use We're good to go.
01:16:22.000It's like we need reality and we need data and we need all the truth laid out in front of us so that we can make informed decisions.
01:16:30.000You can't make informed decisions if the truth is hidden.
01:16:34.000You can't make it if these inconvenient truths bother some people and they would rather you deny reality and, you know, remove facts from the conversation.
01:16:48.000Well, that's why I admired the way you handled that and that's why I admired the way you handled COVID because I know the pressure that was on you was substantial.
01:16:58.000The shittiest thing that's happened to me, and I would actually guess this hasn't happened to you, is that I've lost a lot of friends.
01:17:59.000Unless, I mean, if you're dealing with something that's going to kill, you know, 98% of the world or whatever, by the way, then you wouldn't have to have any rules.
01:18:05.000People would stay inside, you know, till the end of time.
01:18:08.000But it was striking and upsetting to me that people who I'd known for years would say to me basically, screw you.
01:20:48.000Now, I didn't know if that was the case, but one of them was a fit guy who was in his 50s, and the other one was in his 40s.
01:20:54.000It was weird, and it got me like, whoa.
01:20:58.000And then it brought me back to all of my thoughts that I'd always had about pharmaceutical companies and studies, and what I understand from talking to people.
01:21:06.000From talking to researchers when they would describe how they were allowed to throw out studies that didn't fit their narrative.
01:21:14.000And that they would do 10 studies and then they'd have two bias studies that showed, you know, oh, 100% effective because, you know, two people got it in the control, but four people got it in the COVID. So that means, you know, it was weird fucking,
01:22:15.000You're trusting the people that make the product to give you the data instead of the scientists having access to all the data and them being able to make their own informed decisions.
01:22:25.000So there's a, and I, you know, I don't like talking about stuff when I have not read it myself, when I haven't sort of reviewed it myself, but there's a, one of the people in the Pfizer trial, there's a case report, I believe she had a heart attack and died.
01:23:02.000I think they said, you know, she had had, maybe she'd had, you know, cardiac disease before.
01:23:10.000We're classifying this as not related to the vaccine, okay?
01:23:15.000So the way that works is when the FDA then publishes the report on their sort of like review of the vaccine, and when the pharmaceutical company, when Pfizer writes about it, when their researchers write about it for the New England Journal of Medicine,
01:23:38.000And only because there was this FOIA request of the FDA, a Freedom of Information Act request of the FDA, that forced the FDA to disclose lots of documents, including these documents that showed the underlying cases of the people who had died,
01:23:53.000do we know that Okay, the reviewer said this wasn't related to the vaccine, but in fact, it was really just a few days after that second dose was given.
01:24:07.000I don't even know if an autopsy was done.
01:24:09.000I don't know more than what they said.
01:24:11.000But the reason I mention this to you is this is an example of how you make problematic data go away.
01:24:20.000Your researcher, for whatever reason, says, I don't think this was related to the vaccine.
01:24:24.000It didn't happen five minutes after, and this woman did have heart disease, and sometimes people have heart disease, have heart attacks, and die.
01:24:34.000By the time it gets to the public through the FDA, All you hear is there were no deaths related to the vaccine.
01:24:43.000And technically, nobody's lying because that's what the reviewer said.
01:24:47.000We just don't know and wouldn't have known if not for this Freedom of Information Act request.
01:24:53.000Maybe it's more complicated than that, and maybe there was somebody who—well, we know there was somebody who had a heart attack and died post-vaccine, and it was pretty close, but the company just decided to say, no, it wasn't related.
01:25:08.000What's the data when it comes to the VAERS report?
01:25:13.000How much of it is published versus—how much of it is reported versus how much of it is actually taking place?
01:27:58.000About three – actually, last year, I think the numbers have been going up slightly, but about 400 or 500 people a year in the United States get it, okay?
01:28:05.000There's 350 million people in the United States, 330 million.
01:28:08.000That's one per million, maybe a bit more.
01:28:26.000And at this point, no one can prove that there's a relationship there.
01:28:30.000And here's the thing about VAERS. You can make that argument about practically any case in VAERS. Even if it's five minutes after, you could say, well, this person, they were going to have a heart attack anyway.
01:28:43.000Now, at some point, if enough doctors who are sort of medical experts in a field write enough case reports and there's enough of an outlier, with the myocarditis, okay?
01:29:00.000And there were so many extra cases following vaccination that even the CDC and the FDA and Rochelle Walensky and all the vaccine fanatics, they couldn't argue about it anymore.
01:29:12.000They had to admit that this was a problem, that this was happening.
01:29:15.000But for something like strokes especially, the more common the illness is, Even if there's a big increase, any one case, it's going to be hard to argue.
01:29:28.000And the increase has to be really big before it stands out.
01:29:32.000So if you had Peter Hotez or some vaccine advocate on, he would be saying to you, well, Joe, I'm really sorry your friend's had strokes.
01:29:42.000But we can't know that that's related to the vaccine.
01:29:45.000And Berenson, that Berenson character pointing at the VAERS data, he was just putting out things to try to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
01:29:59.000It's so weird to hear you say these things because it sounds so logical, but it's more acceptable now for some strange reason.
01:30:09.000It seems like the tide is turning and then the numbers of people that are upset about the fact that they had been misled and the fact that the data was somewhat I mean, absolutely filtered.
01:30:26.000It's such a confusing time because I don't remember a time where there was this much pushback against data, this much pushback against analyzing something that could be a significant factor in the rest of people's lives.
01:30:47.000I mean, again, I do think there's It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the next few months and years because there are people and not a small number of people who are angry now that they were forced to be vaccinated.
01:30:58.000They feel they were forced, right, at risk of losing their jobs.
01:31:26.000Look at how few children under five have gotten this thing since it was approved in June.
01:31:32.000And I don't know if Jimmy can pull up the number, but 95% of kids under five have not gotten a single shot.
01:31:42.000And what's even more stunning to me is that even in that group, that 5% group that got the first shot, 80% of those kids didn't get a second shot yet, even though most of them are eligible at this point.
01:31:55.000So 99% 99% of children under 5 are not vaccinated against COVID. And you're a parent, I'm a parent, if we believed that that was good for our kids, or even not bad for them,
01:33:16.000People have these belief systems that they've adhered to, and they don't want to let it go.
01:33:21.000And that gave them comfort during the early days of COVID, and it's going to be a slow erosion of that faith that they have.
01:33:28.000And I don't know what's going to turn the tide for everybody, but I feel like in the future, when the dust settles and we get a chance to look at this accurately, I think people are going to have a very different view than they had when this all was going down.
01:35:06.000It's not an accident that both in the U.S. and the U.K., and Israel, deaths went up in January 2021 because there is this period of time after you get the first shot, you are definitely more vulnerable.
01:35:20.000That's why you don't vaccinate for the flu in the middle of flu season.
01:36:51.000There was this moment in January of 2021. I don't think they did any good because, again, you have that first month or the first couple weeks of where infections actually appeared to rise.
01:39:22.000So I believe that it's sort of a corruption of the argument, which I think actually is true, that the Chinese never provided the original virions.
01:39:34.000So when they isolated the original virus in Wuhan, in Hunan province, they didn't give us copies of that.
01:39:46.000They just gave us the molecular formula.
01:39:50.000I think that's where that complaint comes from.
01:39:56.000So, where it stands with you now is that you are in the process of preparing to sue the federal government?
01:40:47.000They have the right to do what they want.
01:40:50.000Twitter, the argument is Twitter is just a bigger version of that.
01:40:54.000So if they want to dump me, they have the First Amendment right to do that.
01:41:00.000And again, we can argue about whether California actually stops them from doing that, but put that aside.
01:41:07.000The federal government doesn't have the right to stop me from speaking.
01:41:12.000Unless I'm screaming harassment at somebody for six hours, then I'm committing a crime.
01:41:18.000But it doesn't have the right to stop me from being outside and speaking or speaking in my house.
01:41:24.000I have the right for freedom of speech.
01:41:27.000And when whoever it was in the White House told Twitter, and again, we could pull up the exact language, but Twitter employees said to each other after this meeting, They had a very tough question about why Alex Berenson is still on the platform.
01:42:54.000You know, last week or just a couple days ago, I published something showing that Oliver Darcy of our favorite network, CNN, went to Twitter to complain about me and basically tried to get me banned.
01:44:01.000It was me saying stuff that people didn't like that they call misinformation and then they go to Twitter and say, this guy's using your platform for evil.
01:44:18.000When The Atlantic wrote that article about you, the wrongest man of the pandemic, how many of those things that they said turned out to be absolutely true?
01:44:30.000The single best thing in there, and I'd have to go back and look, is they said, Berenson claims that infections increased after vaccination.
01:46:22.000Here's the problem with that term scientific evidence, is now that we know where the evidence is coming from and how the evidence is actually being relayed to the people that are reviewing the evidence, it's not raw data.
01:47:03.000Well, this is a legitimate—I think it was a terrible idea, but this was the argument.
01:47:08.000The argument was, we know these work, and we have a couple months of data showing that they're not dangerous, and so it's unethical to deny these people who took a risk, you know,
01:47:23.000because we don't—you know, when they went into the trial, we didn't know how well the vaccine would work.
01:47:41.000But what it meant was we don't have any long-term safety data that's really clean.
01:47:47.000And now that all these – the strokes, the myocarditis, and worst of all, this increase in all-cause deaths that no one has been able to explain – Now that this stuff is piling up, if we had this group, if we had continued the trials and said to those 20,000 people who'd gotten the placebo,
01:50:47.000Because the risks are seemingly marginal, although a marginal risk over a huge group of people can still be a lot of injuries and death, because it's not just that the companies don't want to do any research, it's that the governments...
01:51:04.000So they're not going to want to find out the answer.
01:51:07.000I mean, I wrote something like this a few weeks ago where I said, the problem for the public health authorities is that even announcing an inquiry, even saying, you know what, we're concerned about this rise in all-cause deaths, we're going to look, would throw into doubt the last 18 months.
01:52:16.000So the analogy that I use is like, so there are some problems that like you can solve as a person.
01:52:23.000There are some problems you can solve with like civil litigation and regulation.
01:52:26.000There are some problems that you need a subpoena and a gun and a badge to solve, right?
01:52:30.000And then there's problems that are bigger than that.
01:52:33.000No, despite what Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone or Chris Evans can't fly to Ukraine and get the Russians out.
01:52:45.000That's a national level problem, which requires a government or group of governments to figure out.
01:52:53.000The vaccine issue is now a national level issue, right?
01:52:57.000It would require enormous data collection, somebody in charge asking the right questions, and a decision that we're going to find out the answer, even if it's really unpleasant.
01:53:08.000Maybe it won't be unpleasant, maybe it will, but we're going to find out the answer.
01:53:13.000Is there any possible connection to people getting COVID and developing heart issues and that leading to the all-cause mortality increase?
01:53:21.000So that, I think, is going to be the case that's made.
01:54:18.000I can believe they have post-COVID symptoms, but that's not what we're talking about mainly when we're talking about long COVID. It is a group of I get in trouble, but I'm just going to say it because it's true.
01:54:29.000It's a group of middle-aged women, generally, with anxiety disorders or, you know, other moderate psychiatric syndromes who oftentimes had other sort of ill-defined, whether it was fibromyalgia or irritable bowel,
01:54:46.000you know, this is stuff that's been...
01:54:49.000That doesn't really get worse or better.
01:54:56.000These are the people who say they have long COVID. Not always, but mostly.
01:55:01.000And it is very hard to connect those illnesses, whether it's fatigue or uterine fibroids or whatever the...
01:55:09.000Whatever the syndrome of the week is with serious strokes and heart attacks and the stuff that actually kills people.
01:55:19.000Now, when we talk about myocarditis, what is the data in terms of people who got COVID and got myocarditis versus people who got vaccinated and got myocarditis?
01:55:30.000So the argument people will make, sort of the vaccine community will make, is that...
01:55:46.000Is that, you know, there's very high rates of myocarditis in people who got COVID. So the problem is, you know, when you really dive into the data, it's not clear.
01:56:32.000The default should have been, this is a technology that has been used in a few hundred, a couple thousand people in clinical trials In the last five years, we've been unable to advance any of these drugs out of phase one or two testing.
01:56:48.000Why on earth are we telling a healthy 20-year-old or 10-year-old or 30-year-old who's at zero risk of serious complications from COVID to get this shot?
01:56:58.000And it shouldn't be, by the way, it shouldn't be to make grandma feel better.
01:57:03.000You do not make people get medical care to make somebody else's life better.
01:57:08.000That's not how it was supposed to work.
01:57:10.000Particularly after the wide distribution of the vaccines for those people.
01:57:44.000Wild shit, because with what we know about the potential risks of the vaccine, giving that to a child who's already compromised doesn't seem like a wise choice anyway.
01:57:59.000I mean, look, so, for example, in Denmark now, they're not giving the vaccine to any kids under five, except if those kids are really sick.
01:59:17.000The vaccine is designed to encourage your immune system to ramp it up in case you are infected with COVID. So is it possible that that is having off target effects in some people?
01:59:30.000Again, as you said, we're not all the same.
02:00:01.000So they're now admitting that that's not always true.
02:00:03.000And maybe the spike itself, even if it's unconnected to the rest, the coronavirus can have especially heart problems.
02:00:10.000So those are sort of the two primary theories.
02:00:13.000What I will say is this is where like, you know, like an A-team of immunologists and virologists and people who are like specialized in organic chemistry, like this is where we need those people to be operating outside of Pfizer immediately.
02:00:32.000And to be coming in clean and to be really looking for what the answer is.
02:00:36.000And maybe the answer is, you know what, we've looked for a year and we really actually don't think the vaccines cause any of these problems.
02:00:42.000But I would feel way better if it weren't the same people who'd been saying since December of 2020, the vaccines are perfect, saying that.
02:00:51.000Why is it affecting young boys and young men so much?
02:01:00.000You know, one theory is that the analogy that I've heard is that so, like, if you're a young athlete, for example, you know, you're the equivalent of a fast car, right?
02:01:10.000So, you know, if the engine is going to blow, it's going to be more obvious in the case of a car that's, you know, 10,000 RPMs a minute, you know.
02:01:22.000Than, you know, most of us who are semi-sedentary.
02:01:35.000Now, I want to say one positive thing about the myocarditis, which is, you know, the studies that have been done seem to show that after a few months, you don't see long-term heart damage.
02:01:51.000I would say, you know, have they looked really, really hard?
02:01:55.000They haven't looked really, really hard, but they've looked pretty hard, and they seem fairly confident that whatever, you know, adverse impact doesn't necessarily last that long.
02:03:59.000First of all, I don't think it's particularly dangerous, and I think anybody who wants it should be allowed to use it under a doctor's care.
02:04:07.000I don't think there's a great theoretical justification for it, and I think that the data, when they've tried to do prospective trials...
02:04:16.000You can go look at a bunch of people who got it and say, oh, they did really well, and we're going to find an equal group of people who didn't get it and see how they did.
02:04:29.000There's always a little bit of cloudiness around how good that data really is.
02:04:34.000The best way to do it is to take 1,000 people, say, I'm going to give 500 of you ivermectin and 500 of you nothing, and we're going to see how you are a week later.
02:04:43.000And there have been a couple of those trials done, and they haven't shown great results for ivermectin.
02:04:49.000And is it the dosage that's recommended by the FLCC? Because that's what I've heard.
02:05:28.000And, you know, as far as I, and I have done some work on this, The people who conducted those trials discussed the correct dosing with some of the very big ivermectin advocates on the way in.
02:05:42.000So they didn't get the results that the ivermectin people were hoping for, and now the advocates say that the trials weren't properly conducted.
02:05:53.000What do you think about the assertion that it is prophylactic?
02:05:59.000Viral replication in vitro was stopped by ivermectin, right?
02:07:32.000It seems to me bad faith that all of a sudden you say your drug is just like that other drug.
02:07:37.000But is ivermectin a protease inhibitor?
02:07:40.000I mean, people have said to me, look, here's this paper showing that it does have this effect as well.
02:07:49.000Again, this is a level of complexity of sort of...
02:07:53.000I would say virology complexity that I don't claim to be an expert.
02:07:57.000I don't claim to be able to say, having read this paper, I can tell you that ivermectin works as well as a protease inhibitor as Paxlovid did and does.
02:08:08.000What I can say, this is what I am good at, Joe, is saying, you guys are changing your story on this.
02:08:33.000Well, there was a pretty good retrospective trial where they looked at two groups of people with Omicron.
02:08:40.000And once again, they had very positive results for the Paxlovid group.
02:08:46.000Now, if you want to say to me, you just said to me, that's not a good kind of trial to do.
02:08:51.000You discounted all the positive ivermectin trials that had that kind of study where you go back and look instead of going in at the beginning and then measuring the two groups.
02:10:04.000I've seen recent articles that have started to promote this narrative that Trump is to blame because he fast tracked the COVID vaccines.
02:10:16.000Which is really fascinating, because if the COVID vaccines were what you were reporting, not you, but what these people were reporting, that means it's safe and effective.
02:10:28.000So why are you upset that he fast-tracked something that was proven to be safe and effective?
02:10:41.000Knowing that the government did come in contact and even CNN came in contact with Twitter about you, I wonder what kind of influence is causing these new articles to be released.
02:10:55.000Trump White House, this is on Politico.
02:10:57.000Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for COVID-19 emergency use authorization, House report fines.
02:11:05.000Trump officials tried to bully FDA over COVID treatments, House panel says.
02:11:11.000So this is a recent narrative that it's one of those, you know, trusted news source initiative, weird things that you just, like, you realize that, okay, there's a signal.
02:12:00.000The really good research that's been done suggests that it doesn't...
02:12:06.000The T-cells that you gain don't work very well against Omicron, which is another reason that I think that this notion that the vaccines give you any help against severe disease is nonsense.
02:12:18.000And one of the things that you see, if you look at New Zealand and Australia, which are very interesting cases because those countries locked down hard, right?
02:12:28.000New Zealand's a couple little islands.
02:12:31.000Australia's a big, big island, continent-sized island.
02:12:35.000They were able to control COVID for two years, right?
02:14:36.000They haven't given anybody mRNA vaccines.
02:14:39.000They, for whatever reason, are continuing to stick with this, to my mind, bizarre strategy of zero COVID. So, at some point, I mean, presumably, they're going to have to let it out.
02:14:53.000And it will be very interesting to see what their experience is without the mRNAs.
02:14:58.000Whether they have a lot of deaths, a few deaths, we will see.
02:15:03.000As a journalist, what has this been like for you?
02:15:07.000You were never involved in any real significant controversies about the things that you reported or data or you being called a grifter or promoter of misinformation and disinformation.
02:15:26.000The shitty part has been, you know, the personal stuff with my friends, and it hasn't been great for my marriage either, but as a reporter, it's been great in two ways.
02:15:34.000First of all, first of all, I have all these great stories and no one else writes about them.
02:15:40.000So I get to, I mean, it's like, it's like this is the most important story in the world and I'm coming at it and like there should be 15 people out there, good investigative reporters who are competing with me to break news about the vaccines and everything else.
02:16:40.000Now listen, that may be because they're just sick of, you know, being screamed at by passengers or whatever, and they want out.
02:16:48.000But it's certainly an interesting data point.
02:16:52.000So, just to go back to the reporting question.
02:16:55.000So, first off, I feel like I've got a great story and I have a big audience that's interested.
02:17:05.000I mean, you know, it's not a Joe Rogan size audience, but it's a good audience.
02:17:08.000And, you know, some of those people are willing to pay.
02:17:12.000You know, my sub stack, most people who subscribe don't pay, but enough people pay that, you know, I'm doing well.
02:17:20.000Which, by the way, I think is one other reason that a lot of people at the New York Times and elsewhere don't like me because, you know, the idea is if you ever leave the Times, you know, you're never going to be able to support yourself as a journalist.
02:17:31.000And I've managed to do that pretty well.
02:19:04.000He's, you know, why aren't you telling the truth?
02:19:07.000Why aren't you telling gay men who are most at risk?
02:19:10.000Didn't we learn anything from HIV? And he's gotten some pushback.
02:19:15.000And what I was saying is what I think he has seen is what I've seen and maybe what you've seen.
02:19:22.000If you are telling the truth, if you're doing your job, And you believe you're telling the truth and trying to get the word out on whatever the issue is.
02:19:30.000And people start lying about you and attacking you personally and calling you a grifter.
02:20:16.000The number one thing I was wrong about that I can remember is that in 2020, in the summer, I thought that we might be getting close to herd immunity.
02:20:25.000I thought there was this possibility, because the waves seemed to come and go without everybody being infected, that there would be this sort of – people speculated there would be what was called cross-T cell immunity, that people who had been exposed to other coronaviruses couldn't get sick with SARS-CoV-2.
02:20:43.000And that that's why, you know, in New York, there had been this big fall off in cases.
02:20:48.000And that's why in the Sunbelt states, there was a big rise and a big fall.
02:22:05.000When you take away people that are already on death's door, when you take away people that are already morbidly obese, I think amongst the people that died, there was a significant number, like a huge number, that had at least four comorbidities, right?
02:22:32.000So in other words, of the million who died, if you look at the comorbidities, I think at least half of those had four or more comorbidities.
02:22:39.000Which means, comorbidities means things that were killing you already.
02:23:01.000Then there's this bigger group of people who were in this group, who wouldn't have died today if they didn't have COVID, but who weren't very healthy.
02:23:11.000And how many of those people were there?
02:23:13.000There were, I mean, a lot, but those are still people who died from COVID, you would say, I think.
02:23:22.000But here's what's so screwed up about the excess mortality.
02:23:25.000I know I keep coming back to this, and I know it's sort of complicated and mushy.
02:23:31.000In 2020, in early 2021, the people who were looking at the numbers the hardest were all saying the same thing, which was, okay, we got all these people dying.
02:23:42.000COVID's going to go away and we're going to have fewer deaths for a while because COVID pulled forward.
02:24:01.000What they were talking about was pulling death forward.
02:24:03.000So, COVID was killing people who were going to die in 2022 in 2020. You were going to die in 2021. COVID killed you in 2020. So, they were actually sort of warning their investors, we're getting more funerals now.
02:24:19.000We're going to get fewer funerals later.
02:26:13.000So again, this is non-COVID. These countries, just like the U.S., still have COVID deaths.
02:26:19.000Nobody talks about it anymore because it's inconvenient.
02:26:22.000They still have plenty of COVID deaths.
02:26:23.000Even when you factor those out, they have all-cause mortality.
02:26:30.000Above normal on COVID deaths and 5% to 10% additionally above normal on other deaths.
02:26:36.000So they're running about 15% above normal on all-cause mortality, which in a country like the United States, 400,000 or 500,000 deaths a year.
02:28:06.000Right, but I mean in terms of like all-cause mortality, in terms of health complications.
02:28:10.000So the AAVs, actually, by the way, look a little bit better now against COVID. It looks like they, like, interestingly, if you got one dose of J&J, your protection wasn't as great initially, but it looks like it lasts longer.
02:28:26.000They kind of look like better vaccines as vaccines.
02:28:30.000They definitely can cause what's called thromboembolic events.
02:28:35.000They can cause nasty, nasty clots in people that lead to strokes.
02:28:40.000You know, this is another great question that if we had a real investigative reporting community would be asked.
02:28:46.000Somehow, for reasons that are not clear to me, the mRNAs won.
02:30:43.000We're going to turn your body into a little cell or into a little factory to make the spike protein.
02:30:50.000The Novavax vaccine, by the way, is actually just them injecting the spike protein into you.
02:30:56.000And then the other vaccines are more old school, where it's basically just the virus itself that's been changed so it doesn't replicate, and that's injected in.
02:31:06.000And which viruses, or excuse me, which vaccines are those?
02:32:44.000And look, I think it should be clear to everybody at this point, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I would love to know, I would love to be a fly on the wall when Pfizer is talking to the NIH about why that is.
02:33:00.000Do you think that any of this was done in good faith?
02:33:03.000Do you think that they believed the data?
02:33:05.000Do you think that they believed that this was going to be the panacea to everybody?
02:33:14.000I think that they got fooled by the clinical trial data in November and December of 2020, and then they got fooled, as you said, by the Israeli data and the British data in the spring.
02:33:28.000If you look at what Fauci said, what Walensky said, I mean, what they said wasn't that different than what our friend Rachel Maddow said.
02:33:35.000You know, like, Fauci was talking about elimination of the virus.
02:33:41.000And they were all talking about herd immunity.
02:33:44.000And that's just a remarkably stupid thing to have said in the light of what happened.
02:33:49.000There's a few things that he said that were remarkably stupid.
02:33:53.000One of the things that he said is that lockdowns are designed to increase vaccination.
02:34:08.000I mean, a lot of what they did was, right?
02:34:10.000So like with the, you know, when the Canadians wouldn't, I mean, you know, Canada's a bigger country than the United States, they wouldn't let unvaccinated people on planes.
02:34:18.000They were clearly trying to punish those of us who are unvaccinated, force us to do this.
02:35:18.000You're a courageous guy in a lot of ways.
02:35:20.000What you did, you talked about the personal cost of this in terms of relationships that you've had, and I know the attacks aren't fun.
02:35:29.000Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's, you know, if somebody, this got taken out of context, I said it, maybe I said it to you last year, but even if I were wrong about all of it, it would be good that there's somebody on the red team, right?
02:35:43.000It'd be good that there's somebody raising these questions.
02:35:47.000From the point of view of society, it would be better if I were wrong about all of it.
02:35:50.000It would be better if we had no COVID right now and the vaccines actually worked.
02:35:54.000And I were saying to you, you know what, Joe?
02:36:26.000It's bizarre to watch because these are the people that are supposed to be uncovering corruption and undue influence and following the money and they just didn't do it.
02:37:59.000And I think the rise of independent journalism, and that's one of the reasons why I praise Substack so much, and giving people like yourself and other independent voices who are legitimate journalists who do the work and really are chasing down the truth of the story and not this culturally convenient narrative.
02:39:02.000Maybe we should pull it up so people could see it for themselves.
02:39:05.000Two weeks ago, on my stack, I published, in black and white, Twitter employees, what they said about what the White House had told them to do.
02:40:18.000Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.
02:40:31.000At the time, employees said internally they did not believe I had broken the company's rules.
02:40:36.000I've taken a pretty close look at his account and I don't think any of it's violative, said an employee wrote on the Slack conversation a few minutes after the really tough question about why Alex Berenson hadn't been kicked off.
02:41:14.000Journalists are supposed to be inconvenient to the powers that be when the powers that be are not doing what they're saying they're doing and that are withholding information or are being unduly influenced by massive amounts of money.
02:42:37.000And when they realize it's a lie, it makes them more anxious.
02:42:41.000So that's a book Regnery wants me to write.
02:42:43.000But no, you know, Simon& Schuster or Putnam, all these places that publish my earlier books and my novels, I don't think they're going to publish anything for me anymore.
02:44:25.000People, you know, inside journalism, people say to me, oh, you must have a lot of people contacting you quietly from the Times and elsewhere.
02:44:50.000I thought that the ethics of journalism was always supposed to be objective analysis of data, and if it's inconvenient and uncomfortable for people, that's sort of the point.
02:45:02.000Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
02:45:30.000The thing that I said when, you know, I got famously canceled when I had Eric Weinstein on the podcast and he said, I can't vote for Biden.
02:45:46.000But I said that because I realized that Biden was...
02:45:50.000He's deteriorating in front of our eyes, and to deny that was crazy.
02:45:54.000And now that we're seeing it, we're seeing him fall down walking upstairs, we're seeing him ramble on in these run-on conversations, forget where he is, come off stage, try to shake hands with people who aren't there.
02:46:33.000I really wish there was an independent option.
02:46:35.000I think that the problem is human nature tends towards tribalism, and we have these people on one side that think that Trump is the devil and that having him in place, regardless of whether or not his economic policies were more effective, that Trump is bad for our culture and bad for society and divides us.
02:46:54.000I think they're right though, aren't they?
02:46:56.000Yes, yes, and that's what I've said, and that's why I didn't want to have him on.
02:47:32.000And I think people would probably get a chance to see a side of him, a fucking around side, that they would like.
02:47:39.000I don't know if it would be the worst thing in the world if you had him on.
02:47:42.000It probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
02:47:44.000I just don't want to be involved in that.
02:47:47.000I don't want to be involved in helping political figures.
02:47:50.000I think Tulsi Gabbard should be president.
02:47:53.000She's the only one that makes any sense to me.
02:47:54.000I think she's a powerful, independent voice who speaks her mind on a variety of subjects and makes a lot of sense, exhibits real leadership capability.
02:49:41.000See, I don't know, really, as I hear you say, I realize I know almost nothing about That's the problem is that everybody has this thing in their head, oh, Tulsi Gabbard's crazy.
02:50:58.000I don't want to say exactly what he said.
02:50:59.000But my impression was that he certainly didn't challenge him in the way that was proper for a journalist to...
02:51:07.000You know, maybe I have a visceral reaction to Sandy Hook because we live, you know, like 15 minutes away from there on the other side of the Connecticut, you know, on the New York side of the border.
02:51:22.000And it's pretty terrible to have done what Alex Jones did about that.
02:51:27.000I think it's terrible that he said it and I think he thinks it's terrible that he said it and I think he was also going through a mental health breakdown and You know Alex has had problems in the past with substances and he's had problems with he He's a guy who had significant head trauma when he was younger.
02:51:47.000And I attribute that to some of the issues that he has.
02:51:52.000And I think excess drinking also attributed...
02:51:55.000And it's also the fact that he keeps finding things that are true.
02:52:11.000And this is when Bush was running for president.
02:52:14.000And that's when I, at first, was aware of him.
02:52:17.000This is when he was protesting against what they were doing with the World Trade Organization, where they were stopping any kind of dissent where you couldn't even have a WTO badge on your backpack with a line through it and go and cross these lines.
02:52:35.000And he also was the first to expose the agent provocateurs and that they use government agents to smash buildings and light things on fire so they could say this is not a peaceful protest and then they could go in with force and stop the protests.
02:52:48.000He exposed a lot of things that are true.
02:52:58.000You know, when someone like him tells you there's an island that they take influential people and they have sex with underage people, you'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
02:53:06.000And then if you told me years later that the guy, Epstein, would, first of all, go to jail for doing that very thing, for having sex with underage people, Then, still be able to court people like Bill Gates and be able to have them and travel with them and go places with them and then years later he would be suicided in some way where all the cameras stopped working and no one ever got brought to justice for it in any significant way and
02:53:36.000that years after that Ghislaine Maxwell would be arrested, that she would be tried, that she'd be convicted and that the list of the people That engaged in this illegal activity would never be released.
02:53:49.000I would say that is a banana republic bullshit thing.
02:53:52.000That's not going to happen in the United States of America.
02:53:54.000People are going to be brought to justice.
02:54:42.000I mean, where we sort of started this whole line of conversation is, like, you've got to know that stuff and still keep your bearings, right?
02:54:51.000So, like, I'm not out there saying, like, Pfizer and Bill Gates are trying to kill everybody in the world, right?
02:54:56.000And I think that's why I'm kind of valuable, and I think that's why I'm kind of dangerous to some of these people.
02:57:07.000I mean, again, because the media has been so focused on trying to get Donald Trump the last six years, all those stories don't count anymore.
02:57:17.000He's a giant problem in that way, right?
02:57:20.000Because he represents this thing that's so easy to label as evil and must be stopped that it justifies so much.
02:57:28.000And, you know, I mean, as I said, he's, you know, I always keep quoting my own stuff.
02:57:45.000And now I fear, and we'll find out more about this raid last month, but I fear he's ruined, I guess it was earlier this month, but he's ruined law enforcement.
02:57:57.000You know, those guys have even, you know, they have real strict ethical guidelines because the stakes are so high.
02:58:58.000There's this widespread belief amongst people that love cannabis that it's this wonder drug that's nothing but good and a net positive for everybody.
02:59:07.000But I think we have to look at reality.
02:59:09.000And I think that what you did in publishing that, Tell Your Children, is very important.
02:59:15.000And I think people should be aware of it.
02:59:17.000And I think that what you've done with all this information in the pandemic and the way you've distributed it, I think it's very valuable.
02:59:24.000And I think a lot of people appreciate you.
03:00:24.000And the book, if you can find the final remaining copy of Barnes& Noble, it's Pandemia.
03:00:29.000But look, I hope at this time next year, or whatever time, I hope obviously I'll come down and I'll come on with you anytime, we are talking about sort of...
03:00:42.000Twitter and big tech and all that stuff.
03:00:45.000I'd much rather be talking about that than some, you know, wave of deaths, you know, all-cause mortality.