RFK Jr. The Defender - Alex Berenson on Wins Against Pharma and Tech

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, most of you know my guest today, Alex Berenson.

00:00:04.000 For those who aren't familiar with his background, Alex is an American writer and former New York Times journalist.

00:00:13.000 He was a reporter for the Times and has authored several thriller novels and a book on corporate financial filings.

00:00:20.000 He was born in New York, grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, graduated from Yale in 94 with a bachelor's degree in history and economics.

00:00:29.000 In the fall of 2003, in the summer of 2004, Aronson worked covering the occupation of Iraq for the New York Times.

00:00:39.000 He then covered the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries, specializing in issues concerning dangerous drugs.

00:00:46.000 Beginning in 2008, Alex reported on the Bernie Madoff $50 billion Ponzi scheme scandal.

00:00:55.000 He is now a pariah among his former journalistic colleagues because he has integrity and an inclination to tell the truth, even when it doesn't suit his career or professional interests.

00:01:12.000 And we're all very, very grateful to that, Alex.

00:01:16.000 The reason I wanted you on board, there's a couple of reasons.

00:01:19.000 I mean, the stuff that you keep cranking out is amazing.

00:01:23.000 And it's so well researched and so reliable.

00:01:26.000 I love to read your post because, you know, you're very, very disciplined about making sure that you got your facts right.

00:01:35.000 The really interesting thing that's happening now is your Twitter case.

00:01:40.000 And particularly the recent revelations that show that the White House Actually, use your name in telling Twitter, you got to deplatform this.

00:01:51.000 And that just seems like an open and shut, clear cut First Amendment violation.

00:01:57.000 And I don't see how they get out of it.

00:02:00.000 But anyway, tell us what happened.

00:02:02.000 Sure.

00:02:03.000 You know, as you know, and people watching this know, last year there was a lot of pressure on social media companies about the vaccines.

00:02:10.000 And, you know, I had, in 2020, taken a position, really, that the lockdowns were a mistake and that school closures were a mistake.

00:02:19.000 And, you know, I think a lot of people on the right actually supported me pretty strongly.

00:02:24.000 And then the vaccines came out, the COVID vaccines came out in December 2020.

00:02:28.000 And I initially really wasn't strong.

00:02:30.000 I didn't have a strong feeling.

00:02:31.000 I thought, oh, this is, you know, this is probably a good thing, probably going to help end this epidemic.

00:02:36.000 But as I, you know, I'd covered the drug industry for the Times for a long time, so I was pretty familiar with the games that they played.

00:02:43.000 And I pretty rapidly, especially in clinical trial design and testing, and I pretty rapidly came to the conclusion that the vaccines really hadn't been very well tested, despite the size of the clinical trials.

00:02:54.000 And so I, you know, the early rollout, I, you know, I raised questions about in Israel, and I quickly became, you know, there was this disinformation dozen that you were a part of, I think. 0.60

00:03:05.000 And I was not part of that, but I was like the 13th person who became a focus of the White House.

00:03:14.000 And in some ways, I think I was more of a focus because I did have this background of credibility and because I used my Twitter feed in a pretty pointed way.

00:03:25.000 I'm a writer by train, so I would be sarcastic and I would make fun of people like Andy Slavitt for posting 85 tweet threads.

00:03:35.000 This is stuff that, you know, I think somebody like you didn't necessarily engage in that kind of voice.

00:03:40.000 And I think that they didn't like my voice.

00:03:43.000 And so in April of 2021, we now know, or I now know, there is a meeting that happened To discuss what the White House likes to call disinformation or misinformation, which to my mind is just, from my point of view, presenting facts about the vaccines that they didn't like.

00:04:02.000 And look, I think there are other people out there who posted stuff that probably went too far, and in some cases wasn't true or was highly speculative.

00:04:09.000 I try not to do that.

00:04:11.000 But whether it's disinformation or misinformation or malinformation, the most important part of that word is information.

00:04:20.000 And, you know, in the United States, as far as I'm concerned, we have a right to say what we think and debate, even if we're wrong.

00:04:27.000 And in some cases, even if you're lying, as long as you're not harassing people or hurting people, you have the right to speak.

00:04:32.000 Whether that right extends to a platform like Twitter is a different issue, but certainly the government shouldn't be trying to curtail your right to speak.

00:04:40.000 So...

00:04:41.000 In April 2020, they have a meeting at the White House to talk to Twitter, and my name came up specifically as somebody who they were focused on as putting out information about the vaccines they didn't like.

00:04:53.000 And this appears to have put Twitter in a bad position because Twitter had been assuring me Privately, that what I was doing was okay.

00:05:02.000 And they'd done that in May of 2020.

00:05:05.000 They'd done that in December of 2020.

00:05:07.000 And they'd done it again in March of 2021.

00:05:10.000 Let me interrupt you, Alex, because I have a question about that.

00:05:15.000 How did you even engage?

00:05:17.000 I mean, you know, I was doing stuff with Twitter and Instagram.

00:05:20.000 Nobody ever had a conversation with me.

00:05:23.000 They just took me off.

00:05:24.000 Sure.

00:05:25.000 So, great question.

00:05:26.000 You know, if you're the...

00:05:28.000 You know, the head of a big company, or if you're a big public figure, you're going to have some kind of channel to Twitter.

00:05:35.000 They're going to reach out to you, probably, or your PR people are going to find a way to contact them.

00:05:40.000 I didn't have that, actually.

00:05:42.000 Jack Dorsey just suddenly began following me in May 2020, and at the same time, Twitter's vice president of corporate communications...

00:05:50.000 Contacted me and said, hey, let's have a conversation about what you're talking about.

00:05:53.000 We don't want to censor.

00:05:54.000 We don't want to censor you for sure.

00:05:57.000 And we had these sporadic conversations.

00:05:59.000 They weren't long, but it was when the vaccines came out and I realized I was going to be questioning them, I wanted to make sure they would know that.

00:06:06.000 And then again in March of 2021, I had a short conversation with them because they were again tightening their policies.

00:06:13.000 So in April, Twitter's internal people were having communications with each other saying, you know, we don't actually think he's violating our policies.

00:06:25.000 Yeah, he's saying stuff, but he's careful about it, and he's sort of coloring within the lines.

00:06:31.000 And the White House was focused on me.

00:06:34.000 And the language that they use is the White House asked, or I can't remember if it's asked or demanded, it's in what I posted, but the White House wanted to know why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off the platform, which is clearly targeting me.

00:06:50.000 Now, I guess what the White House is going to say when we sue them is, well, we didn't demand it, we just asked.

00:06:57.000 To which I say, when the cop says, sir, can you get out of your car?

00:07:01.000 Do you think you have a lot of leeway in that question?

00:07:05.000 So Twitter was in this position where they were under a lot of pressure, but they didn't seem to believe that I'd done anything wrong and they'd been having these conversations with me.

00:07:15.000 So you fast forward to July of 2021, about a year ago, and the pressure's increasing even more.

00:07:21.000 And I think the reason the pressure was increasing even more is that The smarter people inside, a few smarter people inside the White House and inside the companies, inside Pfizer and Moderna, were realizing that the vaccines weren't working nearly as well as they'd hoped.

00:07:36.000 There was evidence out of Israel that they were already declining.

00:07:40.000 So what did they start to do?

00:07:41.000 They started to say, we're going to need to boost, and we're going to need to mandate.

00:07:45.000 And both of those were going to be very unpopular things to do.

00:07:49.000 But boosters, a mandate is more than boosters, right?

00:07:52.000 But Mandates, a lot of the country viewed that as an infringement on their rights, totally understandably. 0.99

00:07:57.000 And as for boosters, you're asking, you told people these are vaccines.

00:08:01.000 The common perception is that a vaccine is something that's going to last forever or at least a long time.

00:08:06.000 Now you're telling them they needed another shot a few months later.

00:08:09.000 So they know there's going to be pressure.

00:08:12.000 This is not going to be great for them.

00:08:14.000 And their response is, we need to turn up the heat even more.

00:08:18.000 And on July 16, 2021, I think?

00:08:31.000 And a few hours later, Twitter locks me out for the first time.

00:08:35.000 About a month after that, I am banned permanently from Twitter.

00:08:38.000 I then sue them in federal court in December of 2021, saying you shouldn't have banned me.

00:08:44.000 You made me these assurances.

00:08:46.000 I didn't do anything wrong.

00:08:48.000 Look at what I said.

00:08:49.000 Everything I said is accurate.

00:08:50.000 Those claims, as you know, I know your claim did not survive the motion to dismiss and you're now appealing it.

00:08:56.000 But these claims against social media companies have a very, very hard time because social media companies say, well, there's this thing called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and that gives us essentially carte blanche to do whatever we like in terms of banning decisions.

00:09:11.000 And if you don't like it, sue us, but we're going to win anyway.

00:09:14.000 In my case, the case was heard by a federal district judge for the Northern District of California, a Clinton appointee, not a Trump appointee, not a Republican judge.

00:09:25.000 And he said, look, Berenson seems to have shown, at the least, that he has these communications with a Twitter executive, and they seem to have been in the process of sort of modifying their contract with him.

00:09:38.000 And so he's got a breach of contract claim that I'm going to allow to move forward, and I'm going to allow very wide discovery of what they were talking about to third parties.

00:09:48.000 But he said, you know, the big claims, the big First Amendment claims, the claims that Twitter's a state actor, I'm going to throw those claims out.

00:09:54.000 Okay, so this led to an interesting position for me, which was I could have...

00:10:00.000 Let me interrupt so people understand, because the term state actor is a term of art.

00:10:07.000 And what it means, so that people understand this, is that the First Amendment, if you own a printing press, you can print anything you want.

00:10:17.000 It can be lies.

00:10:18.000 It can be the truth.

00:10:19.000 It can be anything.

00:10:21.000 Nobody can stop you.

00:10:22.000 Nobody can tell you which writers to host.

00:10:26.000 Who you can fire, who you can, who you can de-platform.

00:10:29.000 And Twitter, essentially, the law looks at Twitter as just a big printing press.

00:10:35.000 It's privately owned.

00:10:36.000 The state has no right to tell them who and who they cannot fire or de-platform.

00:10:43.000 The problem is, if a state or federal official orders them to censor people, And at that point, they become a surrogate of the state, and the way that we refer to that is a state actor, and the state is not allowed to censor you.

00:11:01.000 You know, just so people understand when you say state actor, the theory is that in your case, they were acting as a surrogate for the federal government in censoring you, and they weren't.

00:11:15.000 And at that point, the First Amendment is implicated.

00:11:19.000 Yes, so I would, yes, that essentially the federal government has deputized them.

00:11:23.000 So I would push back a little bit on the printing press analogy, especially because Twitter's a California company.

00:11:30.000 There is a question under California law, certainly, of at what point does a private company become a public forum and have to allow all speech, even speech it doesn't like.

00:11:42.000 California's constitution has even stronger free speech protections than the U.S. constitution.

00:11:48.000 And for example, shopping malls in California are not allowed to ban political speech.

00:11:53.000 And this is something that has been litigated over and over again, and it's very clear.

00:11:59.000 And so one of the arguments we made was that, look, under California's constitution and California case law, Twitter is clearly bigger by far than the biggest shopping mall.

00:12:10.000 It should be required to allow me that way.

00:12:13.000 And if it's not going to because of federal law, because of Section 230, that creates a different constitutional problem.

00:12:19.000 I still think that that claim can potentially be successful and certainly should be argued again in California courts, but it has not been successful, and it was not successful in my case.

00:12:29.000 So the argument that, again, because these platforms are essentially...

00:12:34.000 I mean, Twitter has referred to itself previously, although they don't anymore, as a public square.

00:12:39.000 They are functioning as this very...

00:12:42.000 Broad platform, and they can't start discriminating on speech.

00:12:46.000 But that said, that claim didn't survive either.

00:12:49.000 So that left me, and the state action claim didn't survive, actually, because at that time, we didn't have this evidence.

00:12:57.000 And in fact, the judge dismissed those claims with prejudice, which is another legal term, meaning you can't refile.

00:13:05.000 Even if you get new facts, you can't refile.

00:13:07.000 Now, I wish he hadn't done that, but he did.

00:13:10.000 Nonetheless, it was a big win for me in April because he allowed my case to move forward on these narrow claims, these breach of contract claims.

00:13:19.000 And most importantly, he allowed discovery.

00:13:22.000 And discovery, again, people may not know sort of the ins and outs of how civil litigation works.

00:13:28.000 Discovery means that under penalty of law, you have to turn over documents that are relevant to your case to the other side.

00:13:36.000 It's actually a pretty amazing thing to make people do.

00:13:39.000 So basically, you have the right to, you know, I had the right to find out whether Twitter had been talking to other third parties, because in that way, I would help make my case the breach of contract case.

00:13:51.000 And, you know, I also had to turn over certain information to Twitter too.

00:13:54.000 Then there's something called depositions, where you actually get to question people under oath.

00:13:58.000 So the judge allowed me to have discovery of Twitter and to take depositions.

00:14:05.000 And frankly, I thought we were going to roll right ahead into that phase of things.

00:14:11.000 As part of federal litigation, once you survive a motion to dismiss, there's a mediation element.

00:14:16.000 And that means you get either a retired judge or a lawyer, somebody who's got legal training, and they try to bring the two sides together.

00:14:25.000 Because from the judge's point of view, the best case is a case that settles.

00:14:30.000 And most cases do settle.

00:14:31.000 So, you know, they view a trial as expensive and time consuming and you want to settle these cases if you can.

00:14:37.000 And I came in with, I would say, pretty aggressive demands.

00:14:40.000 I can't really talk about them specifically, but I came in with pretty aggressive demands.

00:14:43.000 And as I said publicly in June, which is just two months ago, I'm not going to settle this case unless Twitter essentially agrees to turn over all the third-party discovery that it would have to turn over otherwise.

00:14:57.000 And lo and behold, a month later, I did settle the case. 0.81

00:15:00.000 And a lot of people, people on the right actually said, oh, this jerk, he raised all this money to fight Twitter and he promised he'd never settle the case. 0.98

00:15:10.000 There he is. 0.99

00:15:11.000 He settled the case.

00:15:12.000 He just took money from Twitter. 0.95

00:15:13.000 He's just a grifter. 0.55

00:15:15.000 You're never going to hear another word about this.

00:15:17.000 Well, last week, I published documents that come out of the case.

00:15:22.000 And those documents show that Amazingly, what we talked about to go all the way back, that in April 2021, the White House was asking for my head on a platter.

00:15:33.000 Now, what do I do next?

00:15:35.000 Well, I can't sue Twitter again.

00:15:37.000 Twitter, that lawsuit, that ship has sailed.

00:15:40.000 I'm back on the platform.

00:15:41.000 That case has settled.

00:15:42.000 But...

00:15:43.000 I can now bring a claim directly against the White House and against people in the White House or who were in the White House at that time for trying to abridge my free speech rights.

00:15:53.000 And there's something called a Bivens claim.

00:15:55.000 And this is just something I'm starting to learn about.

00:15:57.000 But essentially, a Bivens claim is Look, I have this constitutional right, even if there's nothing specific in the law that gives me a tort, my constitutional right is so powerful, I have to be allowed to sue the government on my own behalf, and I have to get injunctive relief if I win, and maybe monetary damages.

00:16:18.000 We'll see.

00:16:19.000 But that's the next phase of this very clearly.

00:16:23.000 Yeah, just to kind of compare our experiences, We sued.

00:16:30.000 I have a couple of suits in this area.

00:16:33.000 One, I have a direct suit against Elizabeth Warren, who asked Amazon to stop selling a book that I wrote the introduction to by Joe Mercola.

00:16:45.000 Oh, yeah, she did.

00:16:48.000 You know, I'm in that letter, too.

00:16:50.000 That's right.

00:16:51.000 So we're going through the courts on that.

00:16:55.000 Of course, we expect it to get a motion.

00:16:57.000 We expect...

00:16:59.000 The lower courts to dismiss it.

00:17:02.000 We've now gone up to the Court of Appeals.

00:17:03.000 And then we have our Facebook.

00:17:05.000 CHC has a Facebook case, which they got deplatformed from Facebook, my organization.

00:17:13.000 So I'm representing them on that case, along with some other really great lawyers.

00:17:18.000 And we argued, I guess, last month in front of the Ninth Circuit.

00:17:24.000 And that case, and we got three judges who And one of them seemed friendly.

00:17:30.000 One of them was, like, poisonously hostile to us, just angry, angry, hostile.

00:17:37.000 It was a Republican judge, and, you know, I don't know why, but he was hostile.

00:17:43.000 And then...

00:17:44.000 One who was indeterminate.

00:17:47.000 So we're waiting for that decision.

00:17:49.000 Do you have any sense of when that will be handed down?

00:17:52.000 Oh, you don't know.

00:17:53.000 You don't know.

00:17:54.000 It could be six months.

00:17:56.000 It could be, you know, a week from now.

00:18:00.000 But, you know, one of the things, the judge who was hostile to us, you know, we went in there and said, we said, look, the White House was telling them to do this.

00:18:11.000 It told them, it told Facebook, To take down everybody who's on the disinformation dozen, and I'm at the top of the disinformation dozen.

00:18:21.000 Not only that, but Janet Pisaki, the communications director for the White House, specifically mentioned me in a White House press conference as somebody who was promoting the kind of disinformation that they were asking the social media to take down.

00:18:38.000 So We're not suing the public convention, which is what you're doing right now.

00:18:44.000 On that case, we're suing Facebook.

00:18:46.000 We didn't sue the White House.

00:18:49.000 With Facebook, not only the White House told them to take us down, but Adam Schiff told them to take us down, and Elizabeth Warren told them to take us down.

00:19:02.000 And when we said that to the judge, the hostile judge ridiculed us and said, well, Congress tells people to do the same things all the time, that it has no power to make them do, and there was no threat behind that.

00:19:18.000 And what I said to the judge is these are the same two senators who are publicly threatening to break up the company and to revoke their Section 230 immunity.

00:19:32.000 You mentioned Section 230.

00:19:35.000 This is an extraordinary law that says that even if somebody defames you on that site, so somebody says something that is overtly lying, defamatory about you, you may have a lawsuit against the guy who said it, but you cannot sue the site. you may have a lawsuit against the guy who said You cannot sue Facebook or Twitter, so they're not responsible for any kind of, you know, poison they put out.

00:20:01.000 By the way, I agree with that part of 230, because how could Facebook or Twitter monitor a trillion tweets?

00:20:09.000 That part I agree with.

00:20:11.000 Right, okay.

00:20:13.000 But Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren are threatening to take that away from them.

00:20:18.000 It is, as you just pointed out, this is what I said to the judge.

00:20:23.000 I said they're considering this legislation.

00:20:25.000 That is an existential threat to that company.

00:20:29.000 You know, you cannot say that that company is not conscious of what is not feeling the threat of what Congress says to them.

00:20:38.000 If you don't take them down, we're going to take away your Section 230 immunity.

00:20:43.000 That is a genuine threat.

00:20:47.000 They ridiculed us because they said, well, they didn't specifically mention your organization and have an explicit threat.

00:20:59.000 Next to that.

00:20:59.000 Now, that's never been required by law, but that is now because of the panic of the pandemic.

00:21:05.000 They're trying to make sure that, you know, the judges are doing things they never did before to really go out of their way to make sure to protect these organizations, these platforms, when they try to censor people who criticize government policies.

00:21:22.000 Yes, and as the Wall Street Journal pointed out when they wrote an op-ed about the documents that I had disclosed the other day, and this is something that's funny, you may feel totally different.

00:21:36.000 This idea, what if the White House was telling people who had views it didn't like about climate change?

00:21:42.000 Or about Ukraine, right?

00:21:44.000 There really is no...

00:21:45.000 If this is the principle that the White House is going to meddle with people who are putting out information it doesn't like, there's no reason it has to be restricted to COVID or the vaccines.

00:21:54.000 And it could be a position you totally personally agree with.

00:21:58.000 For all I know, you think every car in the country should be...

00:22:01.000 It should run on, you know, vegetable oil or whatever.

00:22:04.000 But it doesn't matter.

00:22:06.000 That's not the point.

00:22:06.000 The point is that the government should censor.

00:22:09.000 I think the Ukraine issue, because they're already doing that.

00:22:14.000 Right.

00:22:14.000 And I think the Ukraine issue is a really important one.

00:22:19.000 There was self-censorship in the media.

00:22:23.000 During the Iraq War, as you know, the New York Times apologized for Judith Miller's reporting and everybody was kind of subsumed in the orthodoxy that Saddam Hussein is bad and we gotta get him. 0.95

00:22:35.000 And anybody who says anything else than that should be shut up and silenced because they're an enemy of the public.

00:22:43.000 They're doing the same thing with the Ukraine crisis right now.

00:22:47.000 And it's really dangerous.

00:22:50.000 It's really, really dangerous when government can get these platforms to censor dissent or to censor anybody who criticizes any government policy.

00:23:01.000 It's a license for governments to commit atrocities.

00:23:05.000 Yes, I totally agree.

00:23:08.000 And so, I mean, there's so much more we could say about this.

00:23:12.000 I mean, one thing that's been stunning to me and really disheartening So, okay, I survived the motion to dismiss.

00:23:20.000 That's April.

00:23:21.000 Kind of a big deal.

00:23:22.000 You know, nobody's really survived any of those.

00:23:25.000 Huge deal.

00:23:26.000 You know, maybe, maybe not.

00:23:28.000 It doesn't mean I've won the lawsuit or anything.

00:23:30.000 Nobody writes about it.

00:23:32.000 Politico writes one piece about it.

00:23:34.000 You know, the right-wing media writes a little something about it, not too much.

00:23:37.000 Okay, okay, I thought it was kind of a big deal.

00:23:40.000 But, whatever.

00:23:41.000 Last month, I get back on Twitter.

00:23:45.000 They released a statement that they shouldn't have banned me.

00:23:49.000 You know, they made a mistake.

00:23:51.000 My tweets were not violative.

00:23:53.000 They put me back on.

00:23:55.000 First person to have gotten back on that way.

00:23:58.000 Really, as far as I know or anybody knows in the history of these platforms.

00:24:03.000 I mean, they've put people back on, but never under the threat of a lawsuit.

00:24:07.000 A lawsuit that survived an MTD. Okay.

00:24:10.000 And they acknowledged that I was wrong.

00:24:12.000 I'm sorry, that they were wrong.

00:24:15.000 Again, nobody...

00:24:16.000 I worked for the New York Times for 10 years.

00:24:19.000 They don't write about this.

00:24:21.000 All the people who wrote stories when I was banned saying, oh, this vaccine conspiracy theorist who is banned, they don't write about it.

00:24:28.000 Nobody writes about it.

00:24:29.000 And my friends, I guess they're not really my friends anymore.

00:24:33.000 My former friends at the New York Times and elsewhere in the media basically don't contact me.

00:24:39.000 Okay.

00:24:40.000 Now, last week...

00:24:42.000 Last week, I put out these documents.

00:24:45.000 And I have more documents.

00:24:47.000 And I'm going to release more documents.

00:24:48.000 But just what I put out already.

00:24:50.000 At a White House meeting, I am named as somebody who needs to be deplatformed.

00:24:57.000 Because of information I'm putting out.

00:24:59.000 You can say I was right.

00:25:00.000 You can say I was wrong.

00:25:00.000 I was right, by the way.

00:25:01.000 Right about basically all of it.

00:25:03.000 But it doesn't matter, right or wrong.

00:25:05.000 I was functioning as a journalist.

00:25:07.000 They targeted me.

00:25:08.000 A few months later, Twitter banned me.

00:25:11.000 The only comparable thing I can think of is Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

00:25:17.000 Now, obviously, that was a bigger deal at this point.

00:25:20.000 But that's the only thing I can think of that's comparable.

00:25:24.000 Still, no one is writing about it, except in the right-wing media.

00:25:29.000 It's incredible to me that that's where we are.

00:25:32.000 Yeah.

00:25:33.000 And by the way, you know, just to clarify again something that you've been saying all along, but people should understand.

00:25:42.000 The First Amendment protects your right to tell a lie.

00:25:47.000 Whether you're right or wrong, it protects your right to be wrong.

00:25:52.000 It is irrelevant whether what you said is right or wrong or good information or bad information.

00:25:59.000 It is protected by the First Amendment.

00:26:02.000 Now, by the way, it doesn't protect everything.

00:26:05.000 You can't harass people.

00:26:07.000 I can't sit outside your house and play my radio speakers all night long.

00:26:14.000 There are things that free speech is not an absolute infinite right.

00:26:18.000 There's a private right.

00:26:20.000 If you defame somebody, people can sue you.

00:26:24.000 And the other prohibition is the Supreme Court dicta that you can't shout fire in a crowded theater.

00:26:32.000 If you're going to do something that is going to provoke or advocate violence, that, you know, there is a consequence of that.

00:26:43.000 The government has a right to step in and stop the incitement of violence.

00:26:50.000 But absolutely nobody is claiming that I did any of those things.

00:26:54.000 This is my talking about the vaccines in a way that people didn't like.

00:26:59.000 Period.

00:27:00.000 Let me ask you this.

00:27:01.000 And the term vaccine misinformation has nothing to do whether that is truth or falsity.

00:27:10.000 It is a euphemism.

00:27:13.000 For any statement that departs from government proclamations and government orthodoxies, and that's all right.

00:27:19.000 Let me ask you this, because you had a kind of unique seat in the stands watching the Elon Musk take over of Twitter.

00:27:29.000 And also, your insight was interesting to me to watch because I don't know Musk and I don't know Jack Dorsey, but Jack Dorsey's been the one guy who has seemed, in his public statements, as parsimonious as they have been, but has seemed really uneasy with the censorship.

00:27:50.000 Yes.

00:27:51.000 So yeah, I mean, look, I don't really have insight into Dorsey personally, but I will.

00:27:56.000 One theory that my lawyers and I had as we were discussing a settlement with Twitter and sort of finding them surprisingly willing to budge on stuff, and again, I can't be more specific, but was that we were talking about deposing Dorsey.

00:28:13.000 You know, that was something that I thought we should do.

00:28:16.000 And that perhaps Dorsey had things he wanted to say that he would be prevented from saying as a result of, you know, his fiduciary duty to the company or an employment contract or whatever.

00:28:31.000 That under a compelled deposition, he would have actually been able to say.

00:28:36.000 I have no idea if that's true or not.

00:28:38.000 It was just a theory that I had.

00:28:41.000 Now, unfortunately, one thing that in any settlement we were always going to have to give up was depositions.

00:28:47.000 You can't compel somebody to testify under oath in a case that's settled.

00:28:51.000 So there will be no deposition.

00:28:53.000 Well, unless the new lawsuit goes forward and we're able to depose Twitter execs as part of that.

00:29:00.000 So we'll see about that.

00:29:02.000 So I do wonder about Dorsen.

00:29:05.000 In terms of Musk, and I've said this publicly, look, I think Elon believes in free speech.

00:29:11.000 I do.

00:29:12.000 I don't think it's a great thing for the world that we would be dependent on this billionaire for our free speech.

00:29:19.000 Especially because Tesla has a huge market in China.

00:29:24.000 You know what the Chinese think of free speech.

00:29:26.000 I would like to believe that If Elon owned Twitter and the Chinese government said to him, hey, you know, we don't like what you're doing with this, you know, make up your mind whether you're going to be allowed to sell cars in China or not, he would say, go get bent.

00:29:42.000 But, you know, he's not...

00:29:44.000 The ideal situation is not that we're dependent on Elon Musk.

00:29:49.000 It's that Twitter gets recognized, to my mind, as a public utility that essentially has to allow all the speech in the world.

00:29:57.000 Whether we get there or not, I don't know.

00:29:59.000 By the way...

00:30:01.000 It was this very, very strange outcry in the liberal media when Elon was going to take over Twitter saying we can't have a billionaire running our communications.

00:30:14.000 What about Dorsey and Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Larry Ellison and Bill Gates?

00:30:21.000 And Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post.

00:30:24.000 Yeah, who owns the Post, which was apoplectic about Elon.

00:30:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:34.000 No, the left has really not distinguished itself, and I know that this has been upsetting to you, and it's upsetting to me too, but you must feel it very personally.

00:30:44.000 It's baffling to me.

00:30:45.000 It's really baffling that You know, it's what my cousin said to me one time, we were talking about, you know, somebody who had gone off the rails and he said one day we were all eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and thinking we're on the same page and the next day you wake up and, you know, who are these people?

00:31:04.000 I grew up believing that free speech was sanctimonious, that we ought to be protecting the poor and vulnerable in our society, and these COVID countermeasures were really just a war on the poor.

00:31:17.000 They just obliterated.

00:31:18.000 They were, as I say in my new book, A Letter to Liberals, it was a pajama party for the wealthy.

00:31:26.000 They got to order DoorDash and Uber and And their kids were watching, you know, were doing remote learning and the whole family.

00:31:35.000 For me, it was wonderful having my kids home for a year.

00:31:38.000 If you were a Black in Compton or Harlem, it was a nightmare where the police come in and they cut the rims off the basketball court so you can't go out where you don't have the computer, you know, the laptops in your house.

00:31:56.000 And, you know, child abuse...

00:31:59.000 It's the only indicia of poverty that actually where the data improved.

00:32:05.000 All the other things, suicide, alcoholism, depression, mental illness, everything else.

00:32:13.000 And the only reason child abuse got better is because child abuse is reported by the schools.

00:32:19.000 That's right.

00:32:19.000 It was an artifact of data collection.

00:32:22.000 And what we really did is we took those kids who were abused and we locked them at home with their abusers and 55% of teenagers in this country, black and white, reported being abused during the pandemic of emotional abuse or physical abuse.

00:32:40.000 So this was just, you know, there was many more children died of color across the globe, 200,000 kids, many more than died from the pandemic.

00:32:52.000 They were being killed by the lockdowns, by the We're catastrophic for the poor.

00:33:00.000 What's funny, funny is the wrong word, but what's funny is, you know, people on the left, you see them just starting to talk about this.

00:33:07.000 I mean, mainly they don't want to talk about 2020 at all, which is very interesting.

00:33:10.000 But you see there's sort of this consensus, the schools must never close again.

00:33:15.000 That was a mistake.

00:33:16.000 And, you know, these few people who are left, you know, on Twitter and elsewhere who are sort of complaining that the country's moved on, even the left is largely mocking them at this point.

00:33:27.000 But that...

00:33:29.000 And I guess that's as close to a reckoning about lockdowns and school closures as we may get.

00:33:34.000 But that reckoning hasn't spread at all to the vaccines, right?

00:33:40.000 So people still...

00:33:42.000 And yet, I think in their heart of hearts, almost everybody knows the vaccines basically failed.

00:33:49.000 That at best, they worked for a few months last year, but they are totally ineffective against Omicron.

00:33:55.000 I mean, look at what the uptake is right now, and look at how few people are getting their young children vaccinated.

00:34:01.000 So there's this weird disconnect over what you're allowed to say about the vaccines and what I think a lot of people feel.

00:34:08.000 And it will be interesting to see over the next couple of years how that plays out.

00:34:13.000 Yeah, that will be really interesting.

00:34:15.000 How do you unravel an orthodoxy?

00:34:18.000 That's a real kind of just is a subject of great interest to me just because it's so much a part of human nature is to embrace orthodoxy, follow a strong leader, and then, you know, make yourself impervious to any information that challenges your worldview.

00:34:37.000 And I think a lot of that predisposition to embrace orthodoxy is hardwired into us.

00:34:45.000 From the 20,000 generations that human beings spent on the, you know, wandering the African savanna and these tiny groups following a strong male leader and with being the only key to survival.

00:35:02.000 Yeah, I mean, look, it's a scary world and everybody dies at the end.

00:35:05.000 And so you need to believe in something along the way, something and someone.

00:35:10.000 Yeah.

00:35:11.000 Let me ask you, I'm going to let you go.

00:35:13.000 This has been really powerful.

00:35:15.000 Thank you, Alex.

00:35:16.000 Let me ask you just about one other thing that I know you've been following, which is the Denmark decisions.

00:35:23.000 Now, I want to mention this about Denmark.

00:35:26.000 For many, many years, CDC's position is that Denmark has the best data reporting system and virtually all of the vaccine decisions are Are based in one way or another, and sometimes almost completely on Danish data.

00:35:47.000 And so now the Danes have said, holy cow, we should not be vaccinating children.

00:35:53.000 And so tell me what your take is on that.

00:35:58.000 Well, my take is they've been pretty...

00:36:04.000 It's very interesting.

00:36:05.000 The left, as you say, the CDC in Denmark, I say, you know, the left in Denmark, you can find stories in the New York Times talking about how the Danes had wonderful vaccine uptake in the first, you know, in the first wave last year and how they all wore masks and they had tremendous social cohesion and they have government trust.

00:36:23.000 And that's why everything works so wonderfully there.

00:36:25.000 Look, in reality...

00:36:27.000 The Danes are pretty healthy people.

00:36:30.000 And so, you know, as we know, sort of the number one, well, the number one, you know, mortality risk with COVID is age, but the number two is obesity and sort of general cardiac and cardiovascular unhealthiness.

00:36:42.000 So, you know, they did reasonably well, and then they did go get vaccinated, and they enjoyed what I call this happy vaccine valley for a few months last year.

00:36:51.000 But lo and behold, In December and January, December 2021 and January 2022, as Omicron came to town, they had a huge wave.

00:37:01.000 And they had a lot of deaths, and they've had another wave since then.

00:37:06.000 And I think that they are well aware that the vaccines don't work very well against Omicron.

00:37:12.000 And they know that any risk for kids, even if it's a small risk of myocarditis or other potential long-term problems, is just completely unacceptable.

00:37:22.000 And so that's basically what they've said.

00:37:24.000 You are not going to be allowed to be vaccinated as a child or anybody under 18 unless you have some sort of severe condition that would put you at high risk from COVID and you have a consultation with a pediatrician.

00:37:38.000 That's where the United States should be, by the way.

00:37:41.000 If we're not going to completely pull these vaccines from the market, basically for any...

00:37:46.000 I would say...

00:37:46.000 I mean, I would extend it far past 18.

00:37:48.000 I'd extend it to 50 or so, probably.

00:37:51.000 Anybody who's not morbidly obese or at really high risk from COVID for some reason, who's under 50, these vaccines should be black boxed for, and basically nobody should be allowed to get them at this point.

00:38:03.000 Look, you could go even further and say they should just be pulled entirely, but I'm trying to reach some kind of reasonable suggestion.

00:38:10.000 And are we going to get there?

00:38:13.000 Or are we at least going to follow...

00:38:15.000 Because I think other European countries will follow the Danes.

00:38:18.000 Are we at least going to follow the Danes and hopefully other European countries on this?

00:38:23.000 I hope so.

00:38:25.000 But you're right.

00:38:26.000 They're pretty data-driven.

00:38:27.000 They're smart.

00:38:29.000 They have a comprehensive national health insurance system, so they know what's happening in the country.

00:38:33.000 The Danes have good data on schizophrenia and cannabis, by the way, which is, as you know, another pet issue of mine.

00:38:39.000 So...

00:38:39.000 And these countries that are sort of 5 to 10 million people that are well run, it's sort of like a handful of people can be in charge of collecting this data.

00:38:47.000 And so it works pretty well.

00:38:49.000 And it's still a big enough data set that you can draw meaningful conclusions from it.

00:38:54.000 Well, we used to have a good data system in our country.

00:38:57.000 Our data's terrible!

00:38:59.000 It's terrible now!

00:39:00.000 Everything else in the U.S. healthcare system.

00:39:02.000 I would argue it was deliberately sabotaged, and that's not theoretical or conspiracy theory I can show you.

00:39:09.000 But, you know, one of the interesting things, the last thing I'll just mention to you, and I don't know whether you have any comment on it or not, but it came out this week that Pfizer...

00:39:21.000 As you know, Pfizer is the only company that has an approved vaccine, an FDA approved vaccine.

00:39:28.000 But the FDA approved vaccine, which is the Cominardi vaccine, is not available in the United States of America.

00:39:37.000 The Comanardi vaccine is identical to BioNTech vaccine, which is available, but that one is still under emergency use authorization.

00:39:46.000 Yes.

00:39:47.000 It should be illegal because you can't get an EUA when there is an available approved one.

00:39:53.000 Yep.

00:39:54.000 They wanted something approved so that they could tell everybody, oh, there's an approved vaccine, you got to get it.

00:39:59.000 Yep.

00:40:00.000 Even though it's not available here.

00:40:01.000 But it was kind of a shell game.

00:40:05.000 Yep.

00:40:05.000 It was pretty clearly related to the mandate push last summer, but yes.

00:40:09.000 It justified the mandate push because everybody said, oh, it's approved now, and now we can mandate it.

00:40:16.000 But what they didn't tell you is the approved one's not available, and they will never be available.

00:40:21.000 And we said, ISIS at the outset, they will never let an approved vaccine be available in this country, because the second they make it available, we can start suing them.

00:40:31.000 Under the VICA, the new vaccine would go through the VICA system.

00:40:36.000 And under VICA, you have to go to the vaccine court first, but you can't sue them for product liability.

00:40:44.000 You can sue them for fraud.

00:40:47.000 And that's what we're doing with CardiCell cases.

00:40:50.000 And they committed fraud.

00:40:52.000 We know the fraud they committed with the Daguerreys, who are all of these people who got badly injured and were hidden. 0.99

00:41:00.000 And that is fraud.

00:41:01.000 And if I get in front of a jury with Matty Daguerreys' story and tell people who got those kind of neurological injuries, tell the jury...

00:41:11.000 About what Pfizer did, Pfizer is going to be bankrupt overnight.

00:41:16.000 So it cannot allow a single EUA vaccine or a single approved vaccine in this country.

00:41:23.000 And it told, we now know that they told FDA that they were never going to get an approved vaccine available in this country.

00:41:32.000 And it's because they don't want to get sued.

00:41:34.000 They can't afford it.

00:41:35.000 I mean, so this is an area that I'm not, you know, I don't claim to be anything close to an expert on.

00:41:41.000 I mean, it's clear to me that they prefer the current situation where they are sort of completely immune from any liability at all.

00:41:48.000 It's also been very clear to me that they don't want to sell the approved vaccine in the U.S. I'm not trying to disagree with you.

00:41:54.000 I'm just trying to tell you I don't really have much to add to the story that you're telling me because this is something I'm not an expert in, but it sounds plausible.

00:42:01.000 Let me just finish with a short plug for my substack, which is Unreported Truths, where I did write about the Denmark stuff just a few days ago, and actually today I wrote about something that you and the Defender wrote about last year, which is the case of a woman who Who developed a CJD, which is a terrible brain disease, literally days after her second Pfizer dose.

00:42:24.000 Now, there's no proof there was a connection.

00:42:27.000 I think her daughter believes there's a connection, but she's now unfortunately died.

00:42:31.000 But what was interesting to me, because I'm not going to write about something that you wrote about nine months ago just for the sake of it.

00:42:38.000 What's interesting to me, or it's actually even further ago than that, Is that the doctor, one of the doctors who treated her, several of the doctors who treated her, wrote up a case report on this and put it in a poster that HCA, which is a giant healthcare, a giant hospital company, the biggest for-profit hospital company in the United States, if not the world, put up on its website.

00:43:00.000 They actually put up a case report of this woman who'd gotten CJD and died after getting an MRA COVID vaccine, which surprised me that they put it up.

00:43:10.000 But lo and behold, People started paying attention to this thing, this case report, and HCA pulled it.

00:43:16.000 So that is actually my newest substack.

00:43:19.000 It is about this case report of this woman being pulled.

00:43:22.000 And to me, so somebody said to me, well, do you believe that the mRNA vaccine caused this?

00:43:28.000 And I'll tell you the truth.

00:43:29.000 I don't know.

00:43:29.000 I suspect it probably didn't, okay?

00:43:32.000 Because CJD is very, very...

00:43:35.000 Rare, thank God.

00:43:37.000 But it does happen.

00:43:38.000 And if you just look at sort of the number of people we vaccinated, there are going to be some number of people who develop this in the weeks or months after being vaccinated just by chance.

00:43:48.000 What I do care about is that this company, after allowing its physicians to write about this, suddenly decided it was too hot to handle.

00:43:57.000 And so when I called HCA or I emailed HCA and said, hey guys, what happened here?

00:44:01.000 Well, they've now claimed they're going to put it back online.

00:44:04.000 So let's hope they do.

00:44:05.000 So that's a small victory for free speech over censorship.

00:44:09.000 Okay, so...

00:44:10.000 I want you to tell our audience how to find you on your Substack.

00:44:14.000 Alex's Substack is one of the ones that I follow religiously.

00:44:19.000 We don't always agree with each other.

00:44:21.000 We don't always agree, but we don't have to, right?

00:44:24.000 So it's alexberenson.substack.com.

00:44:30.000 Also, if you search for unreported truth Substack, it should come up.

00:44:35.000 But sometimes the search engines do funny things, but you can always get to it at alexberenson.substack.com.

00:44:42.000 And as I tell people, you can pay for it or you can subscribe for free.

00:44:47.000 Basically, the product is much the same.

00:44:49.000 Most people do subscribe for free, which is okay by me.

00:44:52.000 I want the largest audience possible.

00:44:54.000 But enough people have decided to sort of support me and support the movement that I know I can support my family, which is very nice considering I don't think I'm going to be working again at the New York Times anytime soon.

00:45:05.000 Yeah, so, and I think it's important for our movement, for people who care about democracy, about public health, and about just integrity and good government to support the people who are taking a stand on that and getting punished for it.

00:45:22.000 You've lost a lot of income, you've lost a lot of career prospects, and I would encourage all of our audience to subscribe to the extent you can also pay for Alex's subset.

00:45:33.000 Thank you, Alex and Aaron.

00:45:34.000 Thank you.

00:45:34.000 Thank you so much.

00:45:36.000 Let's talk again soon.

00:45:37.000 Yes.

RFK Jr. The Defender - October 05, 2022

Alex Berenson on Wins Against Pharma and Tech

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