Someone is trying to frame us. Until our names are cleared, we re fugitives from Interpol, like Bonnie and Clyde, with better snacks. Better is there love language? We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller and romantic comedy. We make up our own rules. Tony and Ziva.
00:17:15.000I mean, the other thing that was insidious when you when you got past the blatant insults,
00:17:19.900you know, towards these journalists was several of the Democrats did say, oh, you know, we love free speech.
00:17:25.860You know, of course we like free speech.
00:17:27.340And the Democrats do love free speech unless there's an emergency.
00:17:31.300And by an emergency, they mean climate change denialism or transphobia or racism or, as we know, anything having to do with COVID or Hunter Biden.
00:17:50.400They weren't asking that many questions.
00:17:51.860What they were really saying is, well, the government's working with Twitter to protect Americans from misinformation and dangerous speech.
00:18:01.840And Taibbi and Schellenberger were both trying to explain to them what all of us knew as fifth graders, which is you can't have a democracy without this.
00:18:10.580And it seems it just seems completely lost on these Democrat members of Congress.
00:18:18.540I mean, it was it was they're the ones doing it, you know, working with Twitter and the other social media companies to snuff out any tweets by the so-called disinformation dozen, including people like RFK Jr., Dr. Mercola, any narrative that that countered their narrative was to be disallowed, which is un-American.
00:18:39.820Here's just a little bit more from Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
00:18:42.460She's come on my show on the midday when I had the afternoon show at Fox America Live.
00:18:47.120I submit to you, Jury, that she was not always this nuts or this nasty, but I could be wrong.
00:18:53.900Maybe I was just in a different place mentally.
00:18:55.960But here she is in her attempted cross-examination of Taibbi.
00:19:01.760The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise integrity or credibility.
00:19:09.600Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud of your object objectivity.
00:19:13.340Journalists should avoid accepting spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it's likely to be slanted.
00:19:24.640You wouldn't agree that a journalist should avoid spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it's likely to be slanted, incomplete, or designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion?
00:19:34.400Mrs. Congresswoman, I've done probably a dozen stories involving whistleblowers.
00:19:40.340Every reported story that I've ever done across three decades involves sources who have motives.
00:19:46.680You stated this on Joe Rogan's podcast about being spoon-fed information, and I quote,
00:19:51.480I think that's true of any kind of journalism, and you'll see it behind me here.
00:19:55.620I think that's true of any kind of journalism.
00:19:57.660Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost.
00:20:00.800They have you at that point, and you've got to get out of that habit.
00:20:46.420You know, we all know that she's up there to make a speech.
00:20:48.520But every piece of news that comes to a journalist, especially in a whistleblower case, comes from people who have agendas.
00:20:57.440It's your job as a journalist to sift through that, to check it, to understand those perspectives and see what parts of it you can corroborate and what parts of it you need to move on from.
00:21:08.000That is how every story in Washington gets planted.
00:21:11.320It doesn't, you know, people like to have this magical picture of, you know, people in parking garages talking to people in dark light.
00:21:22.160A lot of this stuff is just leaked to these people, and that's okay.
00:21:25.840It might start them down a road that is really important.
00:21:28.220Here we have a story that journalists typically would beg for.
00:21:33.960You're getting access to thousands of internal documents that can help understand a major national story.
00:21:41.840And all the government can do here is shun the journalists who took the time to bother to care enough to sift through this and make it understandable for people to go through.
00:21:53.580I mean, in my view, this should be illegal, the stuff that they did here behind the scenes.
00:21:58.440For government officials, for Adam Schiff's office to email Twitter and say, hey, can you pull these tweets down?
00:22:04.220And some of it happened on the right as well.
00:22:06.920It might not be an official request, but how is someone inside of Twitter going to take that request when it comes from a guy who you see on CNN every day blabbing about how people should be fired and censored and impeached?
00:22:19.140It's going to be something that you take seriously.
00:22:20.640They're going to listen to it, even if they don't have Democratic leanings, as many times, of course, at Twitter, they really did.
00:22:52.840Like, so I guess if you I mean, the same could be said of Glenn Greenwald, right, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Snowden.
00:23:02.080Or let's let's take somebody who she probably likes, Ronan Farah, who also I think he won a Pulitzer, too, for the Me Too reporting he did on Harvey Weinstein.
00:23:12.780He got more Twitter followers as a result.
00:23:14.780Does she is he a money whore or like where is she going with this?
00:23:18.840I mean, maybe only independently wealthy people are allowed to be journalists because, you know, if you make any money doing it, then, you know, you're clearly whoring yourself out.
00:23:26.620But setting aside the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly has no idea how journalism works, she's a member of the federal government.
00:23:36.480And as a journalist, when I see a member of the federal government lecturing us about how we're supposed to do our job, I mean, it's like, who the fuck do you think you are?
00:24:46.060He's talking about how the government used these NGOs, these non-governmental organizations to do what it wasn't really allowed to do directly.
00:24:56.320And those NGOs funded in large part in many situations with taxpayer money.
00:25:04.000Pressured Twitter and the other social media companies to suppress.
00:25:10.000Heterodox voices on these issues when it came to covid in particular.
00:25:21.320I didn't put anybody in office who agreed to that.
00:25:24.060And the government's not allowed under the First Amendment to punish speech in that way by silencing it because it doesn't like your viewpoint.
00:25:32.940And it goes well beyond, oh, you're a Russian bot and you're not real and you're trying to interfere with an election.
00:25:39.200This is we don't Matt Taibbi was pointing out, Stu.
00:25:42.820They were suppressing even truthful commentary, like people saying how they how they had negative consequences from the vaccine because they worried that these NGOs who are telling Twitter and others to stifle this conversation.
00:26:00.000They worried that it would diminish the number of people who would get the vaccines.
00:26:09.720And, you know, they've they've created this this term malinformation to be able to cover this stuff, which is stuff that's true, but kind of leads people down the wrong road.
00:26:17.820And therefore, we shouldn't let them say that is a dark, dark road, especially for the government to be involved in.
00:26:23.840But they are now increasingly using these workarounds where they go to these NGOs and they have they it's a great little circle of grift that's going on here.
00:26:33.180These NGOs are seen as the experts on any given topic, and they are the ones that the media goes to and asks what's going on.
00:26:41.860And when some dissident voice comes out, even with the with great qualifications, they say something else is going on here.
00:26:49.180This is important for people to talk about.
00:26:50.880The media hears that claim if they acknowledge it at all and then go back to those same NGOs, those same glorified experts and ask them, wait a minute, is that other person right?
00:27:01.860And then that other person becomes a conspiracy theorist as their life wiped out.
00:27:06.160You know, and it's funny because, you know, they mentioned all of the money supposedly going to people like Matt Taibbi and and Barry Weiss.
00:27:14.540I mean, Barry Weiss left the cushiest job in the world because of her standards.
00:27:20.100She could have been absolutely sitting at The New York Times raking in money till the end of her life if she just stayed with the narrative.
00:27:27.420And instead, she decided to leave on her own and go out completely on her own and create a completely new enterprise just to be able to talk about the truth.
00:27:38.800And, you know, in The New York Times, when they bother to cover important stories, they still run ads next to them.
00:27:45.320They still make me see Ronan Farrow's reporting behind a paywall.
00:27:49.340CNN, when they're running important stories on, you know, on Donald Trump, when they were raising their ratings on the back of Donald Trump, continue to run their Metamucil ads every 10 seconds while that was going on.
00:28:04.540I know these people don't like capitalism all that much, but it is an important part that you're actually able to pay people to help you with this research.
00:28:12.080That is not a grift. That is not that is not benefiting off of of getting information leaked to you.
00:28:20.880That's journalism. And at least these people are uncovering things we didn't know, things that are important to the American people and things we need to get to the bottom of.
00:28:28.680Because this this is just one example. But every story going forward, they're learning more and more on how to do this and get around the Constitution, get around these laws, get around the journalistic ethics.
00:28:39.640We need to stop it before it goes any further.
00:28:42.080No, I used to joke that if you spend one year working in cable news where you have the TV on all the time, right, you see all the ads, you see all the content.
00:28:48.720You are convinced you have mesothelioma and you are definitely ready to buy gold.
00:28:53.840Those two things are a guarantee. They all rely on advertisers to support the product.
00:29:00.240I'm almost old enough to be able to check my zip code for extra Social Security and Medicare benefits.
00:29:05.720We all get there eventually. It's it's not a public service. There is a public service element to journalism, but it is not a pure public service. It is for money.
00:29:16.860No matter what Chris Hayes says over, I've never checked the stock price of Comcast, but you check your ratings every night.
00:29:24.080And why is that? Because you like your paycheck. And you know what happens to your paycheck if the advertisers all pull? It goes away.
00:29:30.240So nobody's completely altruistic in this game. Not Matt, not Michael.
00:29:35.300They wouldn't have purported otherwise. And certainly not Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
00:29:39.380All right. There's more to discuss because they really zeroed in a Matt zeroed in on some of these NGOs and exactly how they're doing this at Twitter and other social media companies.
00:29:48.480And wait until you hear. Speaking of Meghan Markle, there's a little hint.
00:29:53.100Wait until you hear who's actually running some of these organizations that Matt uncovered as having controlled our discussions on Twitter.
00:30:00.900Stand by. More with Stu and Dave after this.
00:30:29.560NCIS Tony and Ziva. Now streaming on Paramount Plus.
00:30:36.920Just another minute on the Taibbi reporting that got Debbie so upset.
00:30:40.700And others and why she's, you know, she's got her face doing what it was doing there.
00:30:46.980Taibbi talks about how it's working, like how the censorship regime.
00:30:50.480He calls it the censorship industrial complex, where he says, look, when Twitter files reporters were first given access to Twitter and the internal files last year,
00:31:00.280we first focused on the company, thinking that at times it was acting like a power above government.
00:31:10.460Along with other tech firms, Twitter had held regular industry meetings with the FBI, with DHS,
00:31:15.880developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government.
00:31:20.040HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police, all trying to control the conversation on Twitter and then goes on to say that.
00:31:27.360And by the way, in some of these cases, they there were they weren't even claiming that misinformation was out there.
00:31:32.800They just didn't like what people were saying or the messaging.
00:31:35.200But the bulk of censorship requests, he writes, did not come from government directly.
00:31:40.540They came from state agencies like DHS, FBI and so on, but also these NGOs, NGOs that are not academic, he said, which are they turned out to be unexpectedly aggressive in trying to censor people.
00:31:59.440Well, he goes through it and he says it's groups like the National Endowment for Democracy,
00:32:05.140the Atlantic Council's DFR lab, Hamilton 68's creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, most of which nobody's ever heard of.
00:32:13.220Then he says the Aspen Institute, OK, receives millions of dollars from both the State Department and other U.S. governments.
00:32:19.940It held a star studded confab in Aspen, August 2021, where they all went.
00:32:25.540They were all there figuring out how they could censor our speech.
00:32:28.280And the report ultimately produced was co-authored by somebody named Chris Krebs, who's the founder of DHS's cybersecurity, whatever group.
00:32:51.740Prince Harry was a commissioner of this group.
00:32:55.620So Prince Harry, who is on record as saying he thinks the First Amendment is, quote, bonkers, had his hand in putting, well, Twitter's hand over our mouths, over all of our mouths.
00:33:09.400There is no end to the nefariousness of this couple and where they use their limited powers to try to silence Americans.
00:33:15.840And then they go on, he goes on to talk about how, hold on a second, I want to get the right quote.
00:33:25.040OK, Twitter sometimes push back on people like Prince Harry and these others telling them who is not a bot, what can be said and what cannot on things like vaccines or elections.
00:33:37.440But they say, in general, they instantly defer, Twitter did, to sites like PolitiFact, PolitiFact, which is funded by the very same names that fund those NGOs who are trying to silence us all in the first place.
00:34:04.220PolitiFact is a great example of this.
00:34:05.940They've always had left-wing funding pouring into this organization, and they've been constantly fact-checking left-wing figures lightly and right-wing figures harshly.
00:34:20.660They can select which quotes they want to fact-check, whatever claim they want to push the narrative, and they do this all the time.
00:34:29.300And once they are elevated to this level, we've come in this country to a place where, instead of thinking as individuals, we want to look to a constant authority figure.
00:34:38.320We want the group think thrust in our faces, or at least a lot of us do.
00:34:42.580This happened, of course, with COVID, where Anthony Fauci was coronated as king of all science, and we all had to look to Anthony Fauci to find out what the right answers were.
00:34:51.860And when people would come up with different answers or important questions, the person who was always there to answer was Anthony Fauci.
00:35:00.540And then these NGOs would be there to collect signatories to a letter that said, well, the lab leak is totally a conspiracy theory.
00:35:07.540And this would just go back and forth and back and forth with journalists going to Fauci and his allies and NGOs that supported the same thing and asking them to fact-check the people they were disagreeing with.
00:35:21.240Well, that's not how you get to an answer.
00:35:25.880And we've gone so far down this road now where I think just the credentialism, the circuitous form of credentialism that we're elevating in America is becoming really hurtful.
00:35:38.860It's ruining people's lives, and we are not getting those moments afterward where we all come together and say, wow, that was a mistake.
00:35:47.280Like, these newspapers, these media companies would really help themselves to just come out and say, hey, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, we got that one wrong.
00:35:56.720Hey, the lab leak theory, that was wrong.
00:35:59.160Hey, masking kids outdoors, that one was wrong.
00:36:03.100Here's how we're going to fix this next time.
00:36:04.900Instead, they double and triple down, become more insular and more incestuous, and the cycle continues.
00:36:11.420And I think it's spinning out of control at this point.
00:36:13.260And still want to cloak themselves in the authority of, like, I will be the arbiter of what is and is not disinformation.
00:36:20.460One of these groups, Dave, an NGO, came out of Stanford, the Stanford Internet Observatory, SIO, whose election integrity partnership is among the most voluminous flaggers in the Twitter files, reports Taibbi.
00:36:35.420Stanford created this thing to try to police talk on the Internet, in particular when it comes to elections, when it comes to COVID and so on.
00:36:43.260I actually had one of the officials from that group.
00:36:46.540Her name is Renee DiRestra on the show and asked her, like, what are you doing?
00:36:54.220And most interestingly, do you have any conservatives whatsoever in your organization as you try to figure out what is disinformation and what is not?
00:37:04.340Here's just a little sample of that exchange I had with her.
00:37:06.840What was happening during COVID, even prior to the rollout of the vaccines, was you had this novel disease.
00:37:15.880The health institutions were not producing good content.
00:37:18.940They didn't want to surface the most popular content because oftentimes that was not medically reliable or it was from anti-vaccine groups.
00:37:26.940What I'm not comfortable with is the idea that large accounts that are that get a lot of attention because they have a lot of followers that they've managed to accrue in a totally unrelated space should be the things that platforms surface just because they have a contrarian perspective about a disease.
00:37:42.140Fauci and Collins actually did try to suppress, like, the Great Barrington Declaration.
00:37:48.020The social media companies, the more they're on a side in making those decisions, the more aggravating they are, the more they infuriate people, the more people choose other forums.
00:37:57.760I don't know what the solution is, but I see the problem very clearly.
00:38:00.020I listened to your interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but what I thought was very interesting about your interview with him was that you had the conversation, right?
00:38:09.300There was the dialogue there, but you also did the fact check right alongside it.
00:38:13.820You have different ideologies on your team?
00:38:16.480I would like us to have more conservatives.
00:38:19.520I think that this is the kind of constant chronic challenge of, you know, of academia.
00:38:26.520That woman right there, she's your daddy, Dave.
00:38:28.500If that's your daddy, she's deciding what you get to talk about on the Internet right now.
00:38:34.520I have firsthand experience with this, and here's how it works, right?
00:38:39.740You have these independent fact-checking organizations that sort of hire themselves out to social media, and they say, you know, they'll flag a story.
00:38:48.700They'll say, oh, well, this outlet's story is wrong.
00:38:51.240Then Twitter or Facebook will basically, you know, reduce the visibility or ban it, which means that advertising revenues are reduced for that given story, right?
00:39:03.760Now, some places I write for, like Daily Mail and Fox News, they've got eight gazillion lawyers, and this doesn't really affect them.
00:39:10.600Other places that I write for that are smaller, I mean, when I was at the Federalist, I think we had a staff of 14, 15.
00:39:15.840This is going to have a huge impact on basic revenue, not to mention that somebody then has to spend all day trying to refute the bogus fact-check.
00:39:27.000And the end result is a chilling of speech.
00:39:30.500I have literally spoken to editors who told me, especially about COVID, masking, things like that.
00:39:37.040But there's true, accurate stories that we didn't run because we knew if we ran it, the news guard or one of these people were going to flag us, it was going to cost us money, and we were going to have to spend the whole day dealing with it.
00:39:50.540So, unfortunately, these people are already winning.
00:39:53.100Now, my answer is I think these people need to be regulated.
00:39:56.920I can't just hang up a shingle and say I'm a stock analyst, right, and then say you should buy my buddy's company.
00:40:17.040She did raise a point that lured me in a little where she was saying one of the reasons it's important to control the algorithm is you can't have somebody type in how to cure breast cancer and just have some crackpot thing come up with like,
00:40:33.140oh, you should, you know, swallow the ink from a big pen.
00:40:36.660You know, and if that turns out to be a very popular hit, it might come up if the algorithm is left to do its own thing,
00:40:43.800as opposed to hits from the Mayo Clinic, you know, the Cleveland Clinic and so on.
00:40:49.360That actually makes sense, some manipulation of search results, but they've taken it to a very dark place, and that's what Taibbi's proving Barry, Schellenberger, and the others.
00:41:01.320All right, let me shift gears because this one's too delicious not to ask you about that.
00:41:04.100If I can just say, though, as a free American citizen, that's my job to determine whether drinking the ink from the pen is going to cure cancer or not.
00:41:26.580They all believed he was the greatest person in the world up until, I don't know, six months ago, and all of a sudden now he's this bad guy.
00:41:33.120I mean, I feel bad for someone like AOC, who did the good liberal thing and went out and bought a Tesla a few years ago, and now her principles have expired before her car payments, and she has to keep driving around this car that Elon Musk built, even though he's the most evil person on the planet.
00:41:48.080It was Alyssa Milano who said, I got rid of my Tesla and I traded in for a Volkswagen.
00:41:53.900Oh, yeah, because they have a great history.
00:41:56.100A simple Google search would have helped you out there, sister.
00:41:59.460Whatever you do, don't Google that one, Alyssa.
00:42:01.540All right, I got to ask you about this story, because this is a fun one.
00:42:04.320The other one wasn't fun, but it was interesting.
00:42:07.440Trump is going to be releasing a book on April 25th titled Letters to Trump.
00:42:14.220It's going to cost $99, which is a lot.
00:42:17.700Or if you pay $399, you could have a signed edition.
00:42:22.020It's going to reveal 150 letters that celebrities have sent him over the years, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton is going to have a letter in there, Michael Jackson, former Senator Ted Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, even Oprah.
00:42:47.500Apparently, and this has taken me back to my law school days and copyright.
00:42:52.780The principle, quoting now Jane C. Ginsburg, professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University School of Law in New York, who gave this quote to Newsweek.
00:43:00.880The principle that the writers of the letters, not the recipients of them, retain the copyright in the text has been well established in copyright law for hundreds of years.
00:43:12.780So I think Mr. Trump is about to get himself sued again by people like Oprah.
00:43:18.380Dave, is this a good idea or not for 99 bucks?
00:43:22.060Look, what what Trump's doing is is is interesting right now.
00:43:27.400I mean, it's very clear from inside conservative media and I think from outside conservative media that pretty much everybody is in the bag for DeSantis right now.
00:43:38.920And I have real concerns that that's going to backfire.
00:43:42.580Right. I was down at CPAC and I'm, you know, I'm talking to people there.
00:43:46.620And there are a significant number of Trump supporters who are more fearful of career politicians, donors and billionaire media moguls taking back control of the Republican Party.
00:44:01.720than they are of four more years of Joe Biden.
00:44:05.260And it makes a level of sense because their attitude is if we go back to the pre-Trump GOP, no one's fighting for us anyway.
00:44:12.940I think everything that you're going to see Donald Trump do over the ensuing months is to set himself apart.
00:44:20.180From anything that looks like the establishment getting sued, you know, by by the estate of Princess Diana or something, I mean, I don't know that I mean, it might work for him.
00:44:32.440Right. He's going to try to paint DeSantis as a return to Paul Ryan, a return to Mitt Romney.
00:44:38.140The DeSantis people are pushing hard back against that.
00:44:41.220But that's the dynamic that's starting to form.
00:44:43.520And I think you're just going to see Trump go farther and farther outside of the mainstream and in whatever ways he can.
00:44:49.480Yeah, well, it makes sense because one of his the nicknames he's kicking around for DeSantis is Ron DeStablishment, which would play right into that that narrative you're saying.
00:44:58.540Stu, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
00:45:00.340And also just to update the audience on it may be that Trump is facing maybe a lawsuit from Oprah, but also a possible indictment for an allegedly illegal campaign contribution to Stormy Daniels.
00:45:12.160Just prior to the 2016 election, it was paid.
00:45:14.680She was paid money from Michael Cohen.
00:45:16.800He says it was on behalf of Trump to keep her quiet.
00:45:21.040Trump denies that he had an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels and has said he would not have an affair.
00:45:28.580He did not have an affair with Stormy Daniels and he would not have an affair.
00:45:31.860Forgive me with I believe it was Stormy Horseface Daniels.
00:45:36.200If that doesn't sum up Trump, what people love and hate about him in one sentence, I don't know what.
00:45:41.280Anytime you can work a horse face into a response to a legal claim, it's always worth doing.
00:45:49.320I honestly think the book itself is I think he'd love to get sued by Oprah Winfrey over this.
00:45:55.320If there's anything there's nothing better that can come out of this book.
00:45:58.340Him making a few extra hundred thousand dollars off of a book about letters is neither here nor there.
00:46:04.880The publicity that would come from all of these giant public figures taking time out of their day to sue Donald Trump is a dream come true to him.
00:46:15.840And I think that's one of the most interesting parts of this campaign, you know, if and when DeSantis jumps in is DeSantis we've seen as a really competent, good governor.
00:46:55.280It's easy to call your political opponent.
00:46:57.300It's easy for, you know, Ron DeSantis to come out.
00:46:59.160He can attack Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden with the best of them.
00:47:02.400He's going to have to try to walk this line of attacking Donald Trump, but realizing that a lot of the people he needs to vote for him like Donald Trump still.
00:47:11.280Trump just doesn't care about that stuff.
00:47:41.440Gets back in the ring and calls him on.
00:47:43.040And I think this is DeSantis is going to have to figure out a way to get to that point and make these attacks on someone that his audience and his voters still kind of remember fondly.
00:47:52.600Or he's just going to get overwhelmed and thrown out of the ring and it's going to be over.
00:48:28.020Government officials conducted an astonishing surveillance program to actually spy on churchgoers who dared to break COVID rules during the pandemic.
00:48:38.060And just as bad as you think that may have been, it's even worse.
00:48:40.940Journalist David Zweig joins us now to discuss his latest investigative report.
00:49:39.200Santa Clara County was the first among with a half dozen other counties, the first ones to issue lockdown orders on March 16th.
00:49:48.280And they really have the distinction of not only being the first, but being probably the most aggressive public health department in the country for enacting and importantly, for punitively enforcing lockdown orders throughout the pandemic.
00:50:06.240It's very, very, very progressive area.
00:50:08.120And so they're like, we're locking shit down like we are locking it up.
00:50:11.180We're locking up everything, everything, including the churches.
00:50:13.620Well, unfortunately for them, San Jose's Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, quoting from your piece, Mike McClure, they had a different vision of how things should go.
00:50:23.200And two months later, May 24th of 2020, the pastor said, I'm reopening this church and I am going to allow as many people in as want to come in and I will never close this church again.
00:50:36.420And they started fining him like there was a great line in your piece.
00:52:13.900Quoting from your piece, by one analysis, as of March of 2021, so a year later, the dispute's ongoing,
00:52:19.800the county had issued an astonishing $4.9 million in fines to nearly 400 businesses and other entities for pandemic rules infractions.
00:52:28.320By comparison, six other Bay Area counties combined had collected just $82,000.
00:52:34.060So they were fine happy in Santa Clara.
00:52:37.460And this was their favorite target of all.
00:52:41.500Then they did what we saw in too many cases throughout the pandemic.
00:52:45.160They decided to try to get citizens to be each other's little policemen and to start reporting on one another if they saw anybody violating the precious COVID rules.
00:52:55.420And some people did indeed report on Calvary Church.
00:53:00.820The county encouraged citizens to basically tattle on each other for if they saw entities or individuals breaking various public health rules.
00:53:11.080And someone filed a complaint against Calvary Chapel.
00:53:14.740So the county had set up a what they call like an enforcement unit with some sort of like, you know, SWAT team type unit within the within the public health department.
00:53:27.860They had something I think I believe it was at least nine or 10, possibly more people whose job was to function as enforcement officers.
00:53:36.620So they sent the enforcement officers over to Calvary Chapel and they observed people gathering, not wearing masks, and they began issuing fines.
00:53:48.940And that sort of started it on on the the course that they went.
00:53:52.360It's amazing because as I understand, like Palo Alto is included in Santa Clara County.
00:53:56.600I mean, like these are like the richest people on Earth.
00:54:25.880So what to me, what just blew my mind about this case and what drew me to it initially was that this is not just about the county finding out about a complaint and seeing some people not wearing masks or too many people gathering indoors.
00:54:40.480The county launched essentially this multi tiered surveillance campaign against churchgoers at this particular church.
00:54:49.320One of the ways that they did this in this sort of like three prong approach was they after they initial this initial violation to the church, the church then barred them from entering.
00:55:01.540So they had to find another way to find out, to keep observing them.
00:55:05.940So they got an agreement from the church next door to them at the property next door.
00:55:11.160And they basically set up camp there and they conducted stakeouts.
00:55:14.320They were peering through a chain link fence, writing the reports.
00:55:17.740You almost imagine them using like a telephoto lens.
00:55:23.160And I quote from them pretty extensively, these sort of minutia.
00:55:27.020And it almost sounds like it's out of like a like a cop comedy where you have these people there and they're writing about we observe eight individuals to the greeters weren't wearing face coverings.
00:55:38.860And we observed a child hugging someone else or something like it's just report after report of this stuff.
00:56:14.340And this is where things for me, as I was covering the story and I'm reading through just these hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, it went from being kind of a sad but still sort of like amusing novelty, reading these crazy reports that they wrote up.
00:56:30.560And you had these enforcement officers going into the church and they are observing a lot of these really intimate private events, baptisms.
00:56:39.040There was a small prayer group that they were going in.
00:56:41.920There was a special thing called Manna for Moms, where you have moms with young children.
00:56:47.140These really intimate gatherings of people.
00:56:50.140And you have officers from the government there monitoring them.
00:56:54.420And, you know, presumably with a clipboard writing down in great detail.
00:57:39.240It's all amusing to think of them looking through their little, you know, binoculars like, oh, if they saw my church, they'd be like, oh, there's a nine year old boy watching it, washing his hands in the holy water.
00:57:49.700But this went next level to where intimate gatherings, where people truly bear their souls.
00:57:56.900I mean, you write it in a very heart wrenching way about let's not forget the stories of suicidality, of depression, of extreme anxiety and loneliness during the pandemic.
00:58:09.240And where did some people choose to seek solace at this church?
00:58:15.700And one of the really important parts of the story, as I mentioned, what drew me to it was, you know, hearing about the surveillance component.
00:58:24.340But while I was researching it, I found something really strange.
00:58:28.600And I started looking up the various public health orders that were issued at different times.
00:58:34.000And over and over, the church or churches in general, houses of worship, had far more restrictions on them than other entities.
00:58:42.060So you have people completely barred from getting together inside of a church.
00:58:47.300But yet malls and retail outlets could operate at 50 percent capacity.
00:58:52.660And then ultimately, seven months, seven months after the initial ban on gathering in a church, they finally released it.
00:59:01.620And they allowed 100 people or 25 percent, whichever was fewer, to go in churches.
00:59:06.900But at that point, then they said, oh, by the way, malls, retail stores, no limits at all.
00:59:12.780So you have just this wildly incongruent policies that if they were truly concerned about viral transmission, that is it appropriate for malls to be open, for people to go to a liquor store, to casinos?
00:59:27.460But yet, and as you mentioned, Megan, and this ties into, ultimately, these were not people who were demanding that the barbershops opened on March 17th, you know, and trying to cause a ruckus.
00:59:38.840These were people, I interviewed a number of people, and I gave some examples in the article.
00:59:43.380These were people who were really suffering, some of them.
00:59:46.060People who rely on the church for their support system.
00:59:50.640And it's funny, coming to this as someone, I'm not a churchgoer, but I instantly and very deeply empathized with what these people were going through.
01:00:00.320And by the way, it's an irony in this, Megan, is that a lot of the problems caused for these people were from the lockdowns.
01:00:09.420There was a gentleman who was working at a motorcycle dealership.
01:00:26.220So there are a number of examples that what the public health department didn't understand is that the church was not, you know, a mere novelty or just something that people were doing.
01:00:37.200These were law-abiding citizens before the pandemic, and they were pushed into essentially becoming criminals because they needed a support system for their health.
01:00:46.380I mean, there's a reason that, you know, your right to do this is protected by the Bill of Rights.
01:00:52.560Our founding fathers understood very well how important it was the right to assemble, the right to practice your religion.
01:00:57.680So they, question for you, what's the denomination of the church?
01:01:14.240But I mean, to me, I hear about these ordinances, and I think these are written by a bunch of non-believers, because no faithful person would misunderstand how important it is to the faithful to meet their Sunday day of obligation, or, you know, Saturday, if you're Jewish and so on, right?
01:01:30.520Like, there is an intimate connection between you and God, and you need to get there.
01:01:35.120Otherwise, you're just, your entire epicenter is upset.
01:01:38.340The people who I talk to, oftentimes, a number of them mention fellowship, and how important it was for them to, you know, sitting in a car, listening to like a radio version of the, you know, the church meeting, that wasn't going to cut it.
01:01:55.620Again, we have to try to remember back, people were really isolated, and particularly in California, the rules were incredibly strict.
01:02:02.960And that also is public health, that there is real harm.
01:02:07.200There were people who had suicidal ideation.
01:02:10.180There was a man I spoke with who had had a really hard breakup with someone.
01:02:15.100And, you know, this isn't, this is not trivial when you think about what some people are going through, and they didn't have any resources to turn to.
01:02:22.420And even as someone who's not religious, I completely understand why these support systems are also a necessary part of people's well-being.
01:02:31.600And instead, this sort of myopic focus on trying to mitigate the spread of a virus without looking in a sort of more holistic view about what keeps people healthy.
01:02:43.680And again, there also is the bit of the hypocrisy that plenty of other things were open in society at the same time.
01:03:12.760Like he, he too was a diehard Catholic.
01:03:15.880The priest would come over to their house on Sundays and give my grandfather communion and he couldn't even get it down.
01:03:22.940And the only way he could get, he could get it down was with pudding.
01:03:26.720And at first the priest objected to it because you're not supposed to put the communion in anything other, you know, but he couldn't get, it was so important.
01:04:25.760And it shows, you know, there's a fair amount of research into this that, you know, and this is obvious, that the people who make the rules, obviously their own lens through it, through within which they view the world and how they live their lives, has a profound influence on their, on what they think is appropriate.
01:04:43.020Their values, and remember, these are not elected people.
01:04:47.200This is someone who's appointed, you know, the head of the health department, Sarah Cody, the head of the health department there.