The Megyn Kelly Show - Democrats Against Journalism, and COVID Truth Revealed, with Stu Burguiere, Dave Marcus, David Zweig, and Isabel Oakeshott ｜ Ep. 509

00:00:00.000 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:00:02.860 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:00:05.140 Until our names are cleared.

00:00:07.700 We're fugitives from interval.

00:00:09.480 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:00:12.880 Espionage?

00:00:13.560 You still as good a shot as you used to be?

00:00:16.600 Better.

00:00:17.400 Is there love language?

00:00:18.860 We like to walk that fine line between techno thriller

00:00:21.340 and romantic comedy.

00:00:24.180 We make up our own rules.

00:00:25.940 NCIS Tony and Ziva.

00:00:27.400 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:00:30.640 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.540 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.360 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:44.060 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday.

00:00:47.180 COVID may no longer be affecting most of our daily lives.

00:00:51.380 I mean, if you're sane, you've moved on.

00:00:54.460 You might be severely immunocompromised and having to deal with it.

00:00:57.860 I understand that there is that small strain of the population.

00:01:00.100 But let's be honest. 1.00

00:01:01.140 These morons riding around with their masks on inside their cars alone. 1.00

00:01:04.520 There's no helping them. 1.00

00:01:06.100 They'll never move on.

00:01:07.880 Nonetheless, revelations keep coming out day after day about how governments around the world

00:01:12.860 lied to us, leaned into authoritarianism.

00:01:17.200 And it's not just our own.

00:01:19.440 It's really disturbing.

00:01:21.120 And the deep dive on how they did it and how so many of us allowed it and how some few heroes,

00:01:28.600 in my view, fought back is educational, instructional and important so that we never

00:01:33.580 repeat these mistakes.

00:01:35.080 Joining us ahead, journalist David Zweig.

00:01:37.880 He's been so great, hasn't he?

00:01:39.400 You guys have seen him on the show and heard him on this show many times,

00:01:42.060 pushing back on the nonsense science they were trying to shove on us over mask mandates.

00:01:47.480 He's one of the few who actually took a hard look at these studies they were saying justified

00:01:52.040 those mandates and saw how flawed they were and pointed them out.

00:01:56.160 This is a guy who writes for places like New York Magazine and yet was willing to tell the

00:02:00.360 truth.

00:02:00.700 He joins us today to discuss his latest investigation into how a California county

00:02:06.120 began to spy on, spy on churchgoers who refused to stay home, who refused to obey what was later

00:02:17.420 ruled to be an unconstitutional edict that they not attend church.

00:02:21.600 You will not believe what these tiny little bureaucrats with the big egos and the small 1.00

00:02:29.480 brains did to the churchgoers. 0.78

00:02:32.000 We're talking the infiltration of prayer groups.

00:02:35.660 Ever been to a prayer group?

00:02:37.520 It can involve very private, personal discussions about your struggles, your relationship with

00:02:44.460 God. 0.55

00:02:44.760 Can you imagine some county loser in there surveilling you, taking notes on what you 0.86

00:02:51.580 said so you could report it back to corporate? 0.82

00:02:54.340 Some guy wearing a three piece suit and is just you can just picture it's like a too big

00:02:59.040 body in a too little suit trying to keep eyes on you in your church.

00:03:03.020 It's worse than you knew.

00:03:05.200 And then we'll speak with another journalist over in the UK who blew the lid off of what

00:03:08.800 the government over there really thought about its citizens during the pandemic.

00:03:13.820 This woman did something extraordinary.

00:03:16.380 She was hired by one of the government officials to ghostwrite his book, and she got

00:03:21.560 a look at all of his WhatsApp messages talking about how, oh, yeah, we'll unleash a new strain

00:03:25.740 on people to force compliance with our mandates.

00:03:29.400 And you know what she did?

00:03:30.520 She betrayed her confidence of this guy, his confidence in her, the private agreement.

00:03:35.460 And she went public with the WhatsApp messages.

00:03:38.900 It's unbelievable.

00:03:40.340 She's here.

00:03:40.700 But we begin today with Democrats on Capitol Hill showing their complete disdain for actual

00:03:48.300 journalism yesterday.

00:03:49.260 Can I just tell you, this is why this is why you don't look at Congress and say, that might

00:03:54.840 be a cool thing to do.

00:03:56.540 Maybe I'll encourage my child to consider running for office.

00:03:59.500 You don't because of people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

00:04:02.740 That woman alone is reason not to join that body. 1.00

00:04:06.000 I know you could say, get in there and fight her. 0.68

00:04:07.640 Who would want to be associated with her? 0.87

00:04:10.300 It's like, well, I could also join the KKK and the white supremacists and fight David

00:04:15.140 Duke, but I don't really want to be associated with that organization. 0.99

00:04:19.440 No, Congress is not the KKK, but they're disgusting. 1.00

00:04:22.360 They have stupid, self-aggrandizing, lazy, hard partisans who don't care about America. 1.00

00:04:29.840 That was on display yesterday in full measure. 1.00

00:04:33.800 Turning me now to discuss it and walk you through what happened.

00:04:36.200 And Stu Bergeer, he's host of Stu Does America over on Blaze TV and a great guy.

00:04:41.560 And Dave Marcus, another great guy who's a journalist and author.

00:04:44.880 He writes for the Daily Wire, for the Daily Mail, for Fox News.

00:04:48.560 Guys, great to have you both here.

00:04:51.060 Thanks, Megan.

00:04:51.440 Appreciate it.

00:04:51.860 Thanks for having me.

00:04:52.760 Right?

00:04:53.180 Remember when you were a kid and it was like, oh, Congress, that's cool.

00:04:56.980 Yeah.

00:04:57.200 Like you get a little pen.

00:04:59.340 You represent the government.

00:05:00.960 Remember when you used to have respect for Congress people?

00:05:03.420 Think back.

00:05:04.820 I know it takes a bit.

00:05:06.140 Dave, you're almost exactly my age, I think.

00:05:07.840 Do you remember those days?

00:05:09.980 Yeah.

00:05:10.280 You know, you'd see him sitting on the, you know, in some convertible or the neighborhood

00:05:13.960 St. Patrick's Day parade.

00:05:15.340 And they seemed relatively inoffensive.

00:05:17.160 Right.

00:05:17.480 It was a different age.

00:05:19.360 Right.

00:05:19.780 Right.

00:05:20.240 They are not relatively inoffensive.

00:05:22.160 I mean, look, what we saw yesterday was an absolute travesty.

00:05:27.220 We're going to get into it.

00:05:28.000 But do you want to set it up?

00:05:29.280 We saw we saw Matt Taibbi take the stand.

00:05:33.040 We saw Michael Schellenberger, who's amazing.

00:05:35.940 Michael Schellenberger, you'd think they'd like these two.

00:05:38.580 They're actually of the left.

00:05:40.380 Originally, they're they're heterodox in their views.

00:05:42.860 They're great journalists.

00:05:44.160 But you'd think, you know, they maybe would have a benefit of the doubt with somebody like

00:05:47.860 a Debbie Wasserman Schultz, too.

00:05:49.200 It wasn't the case.

00:05:50.040 I think you're talking about these so-called journalists, Megan.

00:05:55.560 Tell the audience what they were doing there, just so they understand our story.

00:05:58.440 Yeah.

00:05:58.860 I mean, it's incredible.

00:05:59.640 Here they are just trying to go through what we've learned from the Twitter files.

00:06:03.680 This is something that has not been covered by the mainstream media really at all.

00:06:07.520 And these are a couple of journalists who have just been able to get access to these

00:06:12.120 internal documents.

00:06:13.580 These are the type of things that usually the media drools over to get internal company documents

00:06:19.820 of an important public company.

00:06:21.560 Of course, we need to look at that.

00:06:23.220 They're not looking at it.

00:06:24.780 Only people like Schellenberger and Taibbi and Barry Weiss have actually been able to

00:06:30.620 look at these things and present them to the public in a way that is understandable and

00:06:35.180 shows the scope of the influence from not only media figures, but government figures trying

00:06:41.260 to control people's free speech.

00:06:43.220 And, you know, this is the type of thing that has, I don't think, ever happened before.

00:06:47.460 We've seen whistleblowers inside of companies before release internal emails, of course,

00:06:51.160 but never has the whistleblower been a guy who paid $44 billion for the company, who seems

00:06:57.300 to be much more interested in exposing these negative behaviors and just getting us toward

00:07:03.940 free speech than he is the actual financial future of his company.

00:07:08.100 He doesn't mind if his company takes a hit, if we can get to something real here.

00:07:12.260 And thank God he's done this.

00:07:13.920 Of course, as you point out, the people in Congress don't seem to have the same interests.

00:07:17.440 Oh, my God.

00:07:17.940 You know, what occurred to me was, can't there be anything where people across the aisle

00:07:22.160 say, I'm just going to listen?

00:07:23.800 I'm just going to listen.

00:07:25.060 I'm going to try to learn.

00:07:26.320 And I'm not just going to resort to, well, the Republicans put this guy on, so I must be

00:07:30.380 against him.

00:07:31.300 You know, like what if what this guy is saying is of interest to your constituents, these Democrats

00:07:36.320 who who pounded Taibbi and Schellenberger?

00:07:39.580 What what if they actually have something alarm like deeply alarming to your fundamental

00:07:43.260 principles as an American?

00:07:44.660 Just to set it up, Dave, because you had a great piece on this yesterday.

00:07:48.620 This was the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

00:07:53.560 Two witnesses, Matt Taibbi, longtime journalist for Rolling Stone.

00:07:56.400 Now he's independent.

00:07:57.380 And Michael Schellenberger, who I love his backstory.

00:08:00.120 He used to work for Greenpeace.

00:08:02.080 He was out there on the boats trying to get people to, you know, help save the environment.

00:08:06.380 And then he worked for Solyndra to try to get those panels in all of our houses.

00:08:10.060 And during the Obama administration was trying to get those grants and green energy, hardcore

00:08:14.800 green energy guy.

00:08:17.200 And from the inside realized, oh, wait, this stuff is not actually great at all for the

00:08:23.900 environment.

00:08:24.460 It doesn't work.

00:08:25.520 There are serious downsides.

00:08:27.000 Why did we demonize nuclear?

00:08:28.700 That's something that could protect the land and really help clean up things.

00:08:31.720 Why isn't the left listening to me?

00:08:33.080 Wrote Apocalypse Never, has done on-fire TED Talks, ran for governor in California, but

00:08:38.360 is not a hard partisan guy.

00:08:40.940 And he's been doing great reporting now for Barry Weiss and others.

00:08:44.040 OK, so those are the two guys.

00:08:45.280 So they take the witness stand to talk about what they found at Twitter in terms of the

00:08:50.740 government cooperation or really, you know, it was willing cooperation before Musk with

00:08:56.860 and Twitter to suppress views on vaccines, on anything the government was shoving out

00:09:04.240 there that Twitter and the government thought needed to be accepted wholesale without any

00:09:08.600 questioning.

00:09:09.020 Yeah, I mean, this is one of my beats.

00:09:14.280 So, I mean, I've been covering the Twitter files as they as they come out.

00:09:17.980 So, you know, I tuned into the hearing and I knew that there would be pushback from the

00:09:23.060 Democrats because it doesn't make the Biden administration look good.

00:09:27.140 When Representative Plaskett, in her opening remarks, I mean, these guys hadn't said a

00:09:32.360 word yet.

00:09:33.440 And the opening remarks called them so-called journalists.

00:09:37.700 It was amazing.

00:09:38.880 I mean, I was stunned.

00:09:40.280 Did you see the two of them?

00:09:41.340 I mean, Tavia and Schellenberger looked at each other like, did she really just say that?

00:09:45.240 Like, is this actually happening?

00:09:47.600 And it just got worse from there.

00:09:48.880 Mila, she knows nothing.

00:09:50.040 So this is a delegate, Stacey Plaskett, Democrat, U.S. Virgin Islands.

00:09:54.040 OK, first of all, like, take a seat until you represent an actual state.

00:09:57.660 OK, it was like an actual county or somebody has actual voting rights on the on the floor.

00:10:02.300 She didn't even know who Barry Weiss was. 1.00

00:10:03.960 She's an idiot. 1.00

00:10:05.000 She's obviously not well read. 1.00

00:10:06.520 She hasn't done her homework.

00:10:07.560 So, like, I don't why she's the ranking member, why this person gets to question people like

00:10:11.620 Matt and Michael.

00:10:12.840 I know not, Dave.

00:10:15.040 It was it was absolutely unbelievable.

00:10:17.280 And I mean, so-called journalist is not something you throw around.

00:10:20.880 That's not like if you go to a restaurant and you don't like your meal and you say, I don't

00:10:24.860 think the chef is very good.

00:10:26.460 So-called journalist means you're a liar, right?

00:10:29.440 It means you are intentionally deceiving people. 0.77

00:10:34.260 It's a horrible thing to say.

00:10:35.780 And no evidence was presented whatsoever.

00:10:39.380 She just didn't like their journal.

00:10:40.920 She didn't like what they had concluded in their actual reporting.

00:10:44.420 It's so here's a sample just to set it up.

00:10:46.220 We've made the audience wait long enough, 10 minutes in here is a sample of what these

00:10:50.300 Dems did to Taibbi and Schellenberger when they tried to reveal what they had found inside

00:10:56.520 these Twitter files over the past couple of months.

00:11:00.520 Republicans have brought in two of Elon Musk's public scribes to these so-called journalists

00:11:06.640 to release cherry picked out of context emails.

00:11:10.180 Ranking member Plaskett.

00:11:11.140 I'm not a so-called journalist.

00:11:13.740 I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F.

00:11:16.460 Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York

00:11:21.380 Times bestsellers.

00:11:23.300 Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the emails?

00:11:27.140 Well, the attribution for my story is sources at Twitter, and that's what I'm going to refer

00:11:31.100 to.

00:11:31.420 Are you trying to get journalists?

00:11:32.480 No, I'm not trying to get sources.

00:11:34.080 No, I'm not.

00:11:34.620 So what we're getting is your dissemination, your decision as to what was important and not

00:11:39.640 important in that, correct?

00:11:40.680 Which is true in every news story.

00:11:42.800 Now, the ranking member of the Committee on the Weaponization of Government is asking

00:11:46.540 for your sources.

00:11:48.240 I never asked them for their sources.

00:11:50.440 I did not ask for sources.

00:11:52.740 I asked if they were talking to Elon Musk.

00:11:55.320 I just need a date, sir.

00:11:57.060 But I can't give it to you, unfortunately, because this is a question of sourcing.

00:12:01.380 So you're not going to tell us when Musk first approached you?

00:12:06.300 Again, Congressman, when you're asking your journalist to reveal a source.

00:12:09.900 Well, sir, I just don't understand.

00:12:11.580 You can't have it both ways, but let's move on.

00:12:13.760 No, he can.

00:12:14.760 He's a journalist.

00:12:15.320 No, he can't.

00:12:16.200 Because either Musk is the source and he can't talk about it, or Musk is not the source.

00:12:20.720 And if Musk is not the source, then he can discuss his conversations with the source.

00:12:23.180 No one has yielded.

00:12:24.120 The gentlelady is out of order.

00:12:25.240 You don't get to speak.

00:12:25.800 The gentlelady is not recognized.

00:12:27.600 The gentlelady is not recognized.

00:12:28.740 The gentlelady is not recognized.

00:12:28.880 You're not recognizing my time.

00:12:30.160 He's not said that.

00:12:31.120 I don't.

00:12:31.700 But what he has said is he's not going to reveal his source.

00:12:34.140 I ask you this because before you became Elon Musk's handpicked journalist, and pardon

00:12:39.200 the oxymoron, you crossed that line with the Twitter files.

00:12:42.380 No.

00:12:42.800 Elon Musk, it's my time.

00:12:44.440 Please do not interrupt me.

00:12:45.500 You also said that you were invited by a friend, Barry Weiss?

00:12:49.940 My friend, Barry Weiss.

00:12:51.500 So this friend works for Twitter, or what is her?

00:12:54.860 She's a journalist.

00:12:56.380 Sir, I didn't ask you a question.

00:12:57.840 Yes, ma'am.

00:12:58.280 Barry Weiss is a journalist.

00:12:59.760 I'm sorry, sir?

00:13:00.560 She's a journalist.

00:13:01.540 So you're in this as a threesome?

00:13:06.700 There was many more people involved than that.

00:13:09.840 Oh, my God.

00:13:10.820 I should correct myself.

00:13:11.940 That's Representative Garcia, Democrat from Texas. 1.00

00:13:14.320 She's the idiot. 1.00

00:13:15.360 She's the one who's the dope, who didn't know Barry and decided to go sexual. 1.00

00:13:18.320 Well, she's got somebody like Michael Schellenberger, who's got 10 times her intellect, decides to 0.94

00:13:23.580 lob that snarky comment in there, Dave, to cover up her own ignorance and not having any 1.00

00:13:29.060 idea who Barry Weiss is.

00:13:30.020 You'd think she would because Barry made her name at The New York Times, which presumably

00:13:33.500 this Democrat used to read at some point.

00:13:36.540 Yeah.

00:13:36.720 And also is a key figure in the entire Twitter file story.

00:13:40.440 I mean, did her did her staff not give her any information about this?

00:13:43.880 You know, I was really struck when Taibbi said, I'm not a so-called journalist.

00:13:48.840 And I wrote this in my column yesterday.

00:13:50.820 What I heard when he said that, I very distinctly heard at long last, have you left no sense of

00:13:57.640 decency?

00:13:58.600 Because this was a McCarthy hearing.

00:14:00.520 I mean, this was just as bad.

00:14:04.040 It's chilling.

00:14:05.380 You know, as a journalist, I was sitting there thinking like, you know, if I write something

00:14:09.000 the Democrats don't like in the Daily Mail or Fox News, like, are they coming after me?

00:14:12.980 I mean, that didn't stop me from writing my column.

00:14:14.860 But I mean, my goodness, this is frightening, frightening stuff.

00:14:19.560 Well, you just gave me a chill.

00:14:20.860 But you're exactly right, Stu.

00:14:22.040 It's it.

00:14:22.600 This is chilling.

00:14:23.560 It is physically, literally chilling to journalists where you get hauled in front of Congress.

00:14:28.880 Fine.

00:14:29.320 These Republicans wanted them to talk about what they found.

00:14:31.880 The Democrats were trying to smear them as liars available for purchase and dishonest

00:14:39.880 under oath based on nothing.

00:14:43.700 It's incredible.

00:14:44.860 I mean, could there be a less likable group of people than who we see in Congress?

00:14:50.160 They make me like Meghan Markle in comparison, which is saying quite a bit, particularly on

00:14:55.660 this program.

00:14:57.000 You know, it's funny because you're right.

00:14:58.600 Barry Weiss is from, you know, The New York Times.

00:15:00.640 Michael Schellenberger was named the environmentalist of the year.

00:15:05.280 He did documentaries on CNN.

00:15:07.900 Matt Taibbi was pissing off every conservative in America during the Bush administration and

00:15:13.400 onward and has been doing this for a very long time.

00:15:16.700 These people have, in a way, a similar career arc as Elon Musk in that, like, they were liberal

00:15:23.220 icons, liberal heroes, people that the left absolutely loved.

00:15:28.560 And then they took they were they had the audacity to step out of the narrative for just a couple

00:15:34.520 of seconds to just say, wait a minute, this part of this is not true.

00:15:38.700 I might still agree with you on tax rates and being pro-choice and a hundred different

00:15:43.780 other things.

00:15:44.320 But let's talk about the truth here.

00:15:46.700 We're we're supposed to be the liberals.

00:15:48.900 We're supposed to be the ones who love free speech.

00:15:51.320 At least that's what we were told a long time ago.

00:15:53.260 And you see that once you step out of that narrative and, you know, Elon Musk, what was

00:15:58.380 his step out of that narrative?

00:15:59.660 It was wanting to open up his electric car factory during covid.

00:16:04.580 Just that little step turned him from God to Satan in the in these people's eyes.

00:16:10.660 And you're right. 1.00

00:16:11.580 They just look like mean, petty, angry idiots. 1.00

00:16:16.480 And I'm right. 1.00

00:16:17.020 Like, dumb. 1.00

00:16:17.680 That's the true insult. 1.00

00:16:18.840 Like, stupid. 1.00

00:16:20.260 She didn't know who Barry was. 1.00

00:16:21.540 And then the ranking member from Virgin Islands, Stacey Plaskett, comes out and says, oh, it's

00:16:28.420 so-called journalist.

00:16:29.740 And Matt Taibbi corrects her, saying, I'm not a so-called journalist, starts listing a

00:16:32.980 few of his accolades.

00:16:34.300 And the listening audience can't see this.

00:16:36.200 But if you're watching this on YouTube, you can.

00:16:38.300 She totally ignores his answer.

00:16:40.180 She starts talking to an aide. 0.99

00:16:41.700 She's chit-chatting over here like she's not fucking even listening to him. 0.99

00:16:45.480 Sorry, Lent. 0.99

00:16:46.760 She's not listening.

00:16:47.880 She's not listening.

00:16:48.620 She doesn't care.

00:16:50.040 She's the whole goal was to upset and insult him. 1.00

00:16:53.920 Same as Debbie Washington Schultz.

00:16:55.340 I told the team to include that movement, that moment in the in the butted soundbite where

00:16:59.280 she asks a question.

00:17:01.460 He tries to answer.

00:17:03.380 She says, be quiet.

00:17:04.120 It's my time.

00:17:05.100 Wait, what am I doing here?

00:17:07.140 Isn't this supposed to be a Q&A?

00:17:08.940 If you only want to do the cues.

00:17:10.360 No problem.

00:17:11.100 I can leave.

00:17:11.900 I don't need to sit here as your puppet, Dave.

00:17:14.840 Yeah.

00:17:15.000 I mean, the other thing that was insidious when you when you got past the blatant insults,

00:17:19.900 you know, towards these journalists was several of the Democrats did say, oh, you know, we love free speech.

00:17:25.860 You know, of course we like free speech.

00:17:27.340 And the Democrats do love free speech unless there's an emergency.

00:17:31.300 And 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.

00:17:42.920 Right.

00:17:43.080 And that that came through and it was almost like the Democrats were giving testimony when they were speaking.

00:17:50.260 Right.

00:17:50.400 They weren't asking that many questions.

00:17:51.860 What they were really saying is, well, the government's working with Twitter to protect Americans from misinformation and dangerous speech.

00:18:00.060 Right.

00:18:00.700 How can that be bad?

00:18:01.840 And 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.

00:18:10.580 And it seems it just seems completely lost on these Democrat members of Congress.

00:18:15.260 And it's it's it's stunning.

00:18:17.300 It's because it was their program.

00:18:18.540 I 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. 0.51

00:18:39.820 Here's just a little bit more from Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

00:18:42.460 She's come on my show on the midday when I had the afternoon show at Fox America Live.

00:18:47.120 I submit to you, Jury, that she was not always this nuts or this nasty, but I could be wrong.

00:18:53.340 I could be wrong. 0.89

00:18:53.900 Maybe I was just in a different place mentally.

00:18:55.960 But here she is in her attempted cross-examination of Taibbi.

00:19:01.760 The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise integrity or credibility.

00:19:09.600 Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud of your object objectivity.

00:19:13.340 Journalists should avoid accepting spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it's likely to be slanted.

00:19:18.080 Would you agree with that?

00:19:21.120 I think it depends.

00:19:24.120 Really?

00:19:24.640 You 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?

00:19:34.400 Mrs. Congresswoman, I've done probably a dozen stories involving whistleblowers.

00:19:40.340 Every reported story that I've ever done across three decades involves sources who have motives.

00:19:46.680 You stated this on Joe Rogan's podcast about being spoon-fed information, and I quote,

00:19:51.480 I think that's true of any kind of journalism, and you'll see it behind me here.

00:19:55.620 I think that's true of any kind of journalism.

00:19:57.660 Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost.

00:20:00.800 They have you at that point, and you've got to get out of that habit.

00:20:03.800 You just can't cross that line.

00:20:05.840 Do you still believe what you told Mr. Rogan, yes or no?

00:20:10.020 Yes or no?

00:20:12.080 Yes.

00:20:12.780 Good.

00:20:13.700 Now, you crossed that line with the Twitter files.

00:20:16.620 No.

00:20:17.040 Elon Musk, it's my time.

00:20:18.680 Please do not interrupt me.

00:20:19.600 You violated your own standard, and you appear to have benefited from it.

00:20:26.940 Yeah.

00:20:27.660 What the audience can see was when she did that.

00:20:29.700 No, stop it.

00:20:30.600 Both my guests were like, everybody started shaking their head no.

00:20:34.080 Like, it's so offensive.

00:20:35.460 Who wants to take it?

00:20:37.740 Can you please, I got to say, Megan, it's Friday.

00:20:40.400 Please stop playing Debbie Wasserman Schultz clips.

00:20:42.540 You're ruining my weekend.

00:20:44.560 And this is just embarrassing.

00:20:46.420 You know, we all know that she's up there to make a speech. 0.88

00:20:48.520 But every piece of news that comes to a journalist, especially in a whistleblower case, comes from people who have agendas.

00:20:57.440 It'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.

00:21:08.000 That is how every story in Washington gets planted.

00:21:11.320 It doesn't, you know, people like to have this magical picture of, you know, people in parking garages talking to people in dark light.

00:21:17.820 They can't see who it is.

00:21:18.980 It's Watergate every single day.

00:21:21.180 Well, that's not true.

00:21:22.160 A lot of this stuff is just leaked to these people, and that's okay.

00:21:25.840 It might start them down a road that is really important.

00:21:28.220 Here we have a story that journalists typically would beg for.

00:21:33.960 You're getting access to thousands of internal documents that can help understand a major national story.

00:21:41.840 And 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.

00:21:53.580 I mean, in my view, this should be illegal, the stuff that they did here behind the scenes.

00:21:58.440 For government officials, for Adam Schiff's office to email Twitter and say, hey, can you pull these tweets down?

00:22:04.220 And some of it happened on the right as well.

00:22:05.740 It should be illegal.

00:22:06.920 It 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?

00:22:19.140 It's going to be something that you take seriously.

00:22:20.640 They're going to listen to it, even if they don't have Democratic leanings, as many times, of course, at Twitter, they really did.

00:22:27.240 They did. 0.98

00:22:27.640 So, Dave, the other thing Washington Schultz tried to do to Taibbi was suggest he's a money whore. 0.99

00:22:33.360 You made money, didn't you? 0.95

00:22:34.980 You had more Twitter followers as a result of this, didn't you?

00:22:39.280 And he was like, you know, I guess I had some more or whatever.

00:22:42.780 And she's like, so you made money.

00:22:43.760 You profited off of this.

00:22:44.920 And he said, actually, it was kind of a wash because I had to hire people to help me with it.

00:22:50.400 And she interrupted him, right?

00:22:51.600 Like, I don't want to hear that.

00:22:52.840 Like, 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.

00:23:02.080 Or 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.

00:23:12.780 He got more Twitter followers as a result. 0.96

00:23:14.780 Does she is he a money whore or like where is she going with this? 1.00

00:23:18.380 I don't know. 0.97

00:23:18.840 I 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.

00:23:26.620 But setting aside the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly has no idea how journalism works, she's a member of the federal government. 1.00

00:23:36.480 And 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? 0.99

00:23:48.100 Yes, thank you. 0.98

00:23:49.160 Thank you.

00:23:49.480 Have you have you read the First Amendment?

00:23:51.500 I mean, it's insane.

00:23:53.300 I mean, it's insane.

00:23:56.620 I tend to be pretty optimistic.

00:23:59.800 I really do.

00:24:01.900 Yesterday's one of my favorite writers, a guy over at the Federalist, David Harsany, and he tweeted this morning.

00:24:08.240 He's also an optimistic guy.

00:24:09.900 And he said, I'm too optimistic after watching this hearing.

00:24:12.500 And, yeah, it's it's I never thought I would see anything like this.

00:24:17.700 And, you know, to Stu's point, the underlying issue is is gravely important because clearly they want to violate the First Amendment.

00:24:25.800 Right. The government's not allowed to violate the First Amendment.

00:24:28.740 So what do they do?

00:24:29.380 They find a workaround.

00:24:30.580 They say, well, let's go get Twitter or Facebook to violate the First Amendment for us. 0.99

00:24:35.740 I mean, that's what's going on here.

00:24:37.100 And thankfully, Jordan and the Republicans on the panel were actually interested in that.

00:24:43.040 This is what Taibbi's been reporting.

00:24:46.060 He's talking about how the government used these NGOs, these non-governmental organizations to do what it wasn't really allowed to do directly.

00:24:56.320 And those NGOs funded in large part in many situations with taxpayer money.

00:25:04.000 Pressured Twitter and the other social media companies to suppress.

00:25:10.000 Heterodox voices on these issues when it came to covid in particular.

00:25:14.260 And that's not OK.

00:25:16.060 That's that's me paying to suppress my own voice.

00:25:20.260 I didn't agree to that.

00:25:21.320 I didn't put anybody in office who agreed to that.

00:25:24.060 And 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.

00:25:31.260 So this is deeply problematic.

00:25:32.940 And it goes well beyond, oh, you're a Russian bot and you're not real and you're trying to interfere with an election. 0.61

00:25:39.200 This is we don't Matt Taibbi was pointing out, Stu.

00:25:42.820 They 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.

00:26:00.000 They worried that it would diminish the number of people who would get the vaccines.

00:26:04.540 How is that any of their business?

00:26:06.220 It is not the NGOs business.

00:26:08.880 No, it's not.

00:26:09.720 And, 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.

00:26:17.820 And therefore, we shouldn't let them say that is a dark, dark road, especially for the government to be involved in.

00:26:23.840 But 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.

00:26:33.180 These 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.

00:26:41.860 And when some dissident voice comes out, even with the with great qualifications, they say something else is going on here.

00:26:49.180 This is important for people to talk about.

00:26:50.880 The 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?

00:27:00.660 They say no.

00:27:01.860 And then that other person becomes a conspiracy theorist as their life wiped out.

00:27:06.160 You 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.

00:27:14.540 I mean, Barry Weiss left the cushiest job in the world because of her standards. 0.93

00:27:20.100 She 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. 0.93

00:27:27.420 And 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.

00:27:38.800 And, you know, in The New York Times, when they bother to cover important stories, they still run ads next to them.

00:27:45.320 They still make me see Ronan Farrow's reporting behind a paywall.

00:27:49.340 CNN, 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.

00:28:02.660 This is the business of journalism.

00:28:04.540 I 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.

00:28:12.080 That is not a grift. That is not that is not benefiting off of of getting information leaked to you.

00:28:20.880 That'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.

00:28:28.680 Because 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.

00:28:39.640 We need to stop it before it goes any further.

00:28:42.080 No, 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.

00:28:48.720 You are convinced you have mesothelioma and you are definitely ready to buy gold.

00:28:53.840 Those two things are a guarantee. They all rely on advertisers to support the product.

00:29:00.240 I'm almost old enough to be able to check my zip code for extra Social Security and Medicare benefits.

00:29:05.720 We 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.

00:29:16.860 No matter what Chris Hayes says over, I've never checked the stock price of Comcast, but you check your ratings every night.

00:29:24.080 And why is that? Because you like your paycheck. And you know what happens to your paycheck if the advertisers all pull? It goes away.

00:29:30.240 So nobody's completely altruistic in this game. Not Matt, not Michael.

00:29:35.300 They wouldn't have purported otherwise. And certainly not Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

00:29:39.380 All 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.

00:29:48.480 And wait until you hear. Speaking of Meghan Markle, there's a little hint. 0.56

00:29:53.100 Wait until you hear who's actually running some of these organizations that Matt uncovered as having controlled our discussions on Twitter.

00:30:00.900 Stand by. More with Stu and Dave after this.

00:30:03.540 Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:30:06.380 Someone is trying to frame us.

00:30:08.900 Until our names are cleared.

00:30:11.360 We're fugitives from interval.

00:30:13.080 Like Bonnie and Clyde with better snacks.

00:30:15.320 Espionage? You still as good a shot as you used to be?

00:30:20.300 Better.

00:30:21.000 Is there love language?

00:30:22.460 We like to walk that fine line between techno-thriller and romantic comedy.

00:30:27.760 We make up our own rules.

00:30:29.560 NCIS Tony and Ziva. Now streaming on Paramount Plus.

00:30:36.920 Just another minute on the Taibbi reporting that got Debbie so upset.

00:30:40.700 And others and why she's, you know, she's got her face doing what it was doing there. 0.82

00:30:46.980 Taibbi talks about how it's working, like how the censorship regime.

00:30:50.480 He 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,

00:31:00.280 we first focused on the company, thinking that at times it was acting like a power above government.

00:31:05.400 Twitter was.

00:31:06.280 They said, but Twitter was actually more like a partner to government.

00:31:08.740 They worked hand in hand.

00:31:10.460 Along with other tech firms, Twitter had held regular industry meetings with the FBI, with DHS,

00:31:15.880 developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government.

00:31:20.040 HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police, all trying to control the conversation on Twitter and then goes on to say that.

00:31:27.360 And by the way, in some of these cases, they there were they weren't even claiming that misinformation was out there.

00:31:32.800 They just didn't like what people were saying or the messaging.

00:31:35.200 But the bulk of censorship requests, he writes, did not come from government directly.

00:31:40.540 They 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.

00:31:56.080 Who who are these NGOs?

00:31:57.580 What does it mean?

00:31:58.220 Like, who are these groups?

00:31:59.440 Well, he goes through it and he says it's groups like the National Endowment for Democracy,

00:32:05.140 the Atlantic Council's DFR lab, Hamilton 68's creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, most of which nobody's ever heard of.

00:32:13.220 Then he says the Aspen Institute, OK, receives millions of dollars from both the State Department and other U.S. governments.

00:32:19.940 It held a star studded confab in Aspen, August 2021, where they all went.

00:32:25.540 They were all there figuring out how they could censor our speech.

00:32:28.280 And the report ultimately produced was co-authored by somebody named Chris Krebs, who's the founder of DHS's cybersecurity, whatever group.

00:32:36.960 Katie Couric.

00:32:38.940 OK, Yoel Roth of Twitter.

00:32:41.960 We've already seen him freaking out over things like January 6th and COVID.

00:32:46.760 Wait for it, Stu.

00:32:48.140 Everything comes full circle.

00:32:50.080 Prince Harry.

00:32:51.740 Prince Harry was a commissioner of this group.

00:32:55.620 So 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.

00:33:09.400 There is no end to the nefariousness of this couple and where they use their limited powers to try to silence Americans.

00:33:15.840 And then they go on, he goes on to talk about how, hold on a second, I want to get the right quote.

00:33:25.040 OK, 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.

00:33:37.440 But 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.

00:33:52.900 You see how it works?

00:33:54.200 See how it works?

00:33:54.900 I got to say the Prince Harry thing was not expected, but everything else was.

00:33:59.100 I didn't see that one coming.

00:34:00.440 No, it is amazing, though.

00:34:02.700 This is what happens.

00:34:04.220 PolitiFact is a great example of this.

00:34:05.940 They'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.

00:34:18.800 They've been doing this forever.

00:34:20.660 They can select which quotes they want to fact-check, whatever claim they want to push the narrative, and they do this all the time.

00:34:29.300 And 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.

00:34:38.320 We want the group think thrust in our faces, or at least a lot of us do.

00:34:42.580 This 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.

00:34:51.860 And when people would come up with different answers or important questions, the person who was always there to answer was Anthony Fauci.

00:35:00.540 And then these NGOs would be there to collect signatories to a letter that said, well, the lab leak is totally a conspiracy theory.

00:35:07.540 And 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.

00:35:21.240 Well, that's not how you get to an answer.

00:35:23.840 It's certainly not how science works.

00:35:25.880 And 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.

00:35:38.860 It'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.

00:35:47.280 Like, 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.

00:35:56.720 Hey, the lab leak theory, that was wrong.

00:35:59.160 Hey, masking kids outdoors, that one was wrong.

00:36:02.100 We really screwed that up.

00:36:03.100 Here's how we're going to fix this next time.

00:36:04.900 Instead, they double and triple down, become more insular and more incestuous, and the cycle continues.

00:36:11.420 And I think it's spinning out of control at this point.

00:36:13.260 And still want to cloak themselves in the authority of, like, I will be the arbiter of what is and is not disinformation.

00:36:20.460 One 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.

00:36:35.420 Stanford 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.

00:36:43.260 I actually had one of the officials from that group.

00:36:46.540 Her name is Renee DiRestra on the show and asked her, like, what are you doing?

00:36:52.680 How does it work?

00:36:54.220 And most interestingly, do you have any conservatives whatsoever in your organization as you try to figure out what is disinformation and what is not?

00:37:04.340 Here's just a little sample of that exchange I had with her.

00:37:06.840 What was happening during COVID, even prior to the rollout of the vaccines, was you had this novel disease.

00:37:15.880 The health institutions were not producing good content.

00:37:18.940 They didn't want to surface the most popular content because oftentimes that was not medically reliable or it was from anti-vaccine groups.

00:37:26.940 What 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.

00:37:42.140 Fauci and Collins actually did try to suppress, like, the Great Barrington Declaration.

00:37:48.020 The 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.

00:37:57.760 I don't know what the solution is, but I see the problem very clearly.

00:38:00.020 I 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?

00:38:09.300 There was the dialogue there, but you also did the fact check right alongside it.

00:38:13.820 You have different ideologies on your team?

00:38:16.480 I would like us to have more conservatives.

00:38:19.520 I think that this is the kind of constant chronic challenge of, you know, of academia.

00:38:26.520 That woman right there, she's your daddy, Dave.

00:38:28.500 If that's your daddy, she's deciding what you get to talk about on the Internet right now.

00:38:33.480 Quite literally.

00:38:34.520 I have firsthand experience with this, and here's how it works, right?

00:38:39.740 You 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.

00:38:48.700 They'll say, oh, well, this outlet's story is wrong.

00:38:51.240 Then 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?

00:39:03.760 Now, some places I write for, like Daily Mail and Fox News, they've got eight gazillion lawyers, and this doesn't really affect them.

00:39:10.600 Other 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.

00:39:15.840 This 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.

00:39:27.000 And the end result is a chilling of speech.

00:39:30.500 I have literally spoken to editors who told me, especially about COVID, masking, things like that.

00:39:37.040 But 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.

00:39:50.540 So, unfortunately, these people are already winning.

00:39:53.100 Now, my answer is I think these people need to be regulated.

00:39:56.920 I 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.

00:40:05.040 No, there's rules.

00:40:05.860 These people need rules, and there's no rules right now, and they're clearly just punishing conservative speech.

00:40:11.220 I mean, that is literally their raison d'etre.

00:40:13.760 This is all they exist to do.

00:40:17.040 She 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,

00:40:33.140 oh, you should, you know, swallow the ink from a big pen.

00:40:36.660 You 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,

00:40:43.800 as opposed to hits from the Mayo Clinic, you know, the Cleveland Clinic and so on.

00:40:48.080 So, like, that I understood.

00:40:49.360 That 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.

00:41:01.320 All right, let me shift gears because this one's too delicious not to ask you about that.

00:41:04.100 If 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.

00:41:14.700 That's nobody else's job.

00:41:16.160 That's my job.

00:41:17.320 And I think, too, it would be one thing if they could keep these narratives straight.

00:41:20.940 They can't even remember what they're supposed to believe.

00:41:23.720 I mean, case in point is Elon Musk.

00:41:26.580 They 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.

00:41:33.120 I 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.

00:41:48.080 It was Alyssa Milano who said, I got rid of my Tesla and I traded in for a Volkswagen.

00:41:53.400 Yeah.

00:41:53.900 Oh, yeah, because they have a great history.

00:41:56.100 A simple Google search would have helped you out there, sister.

00:41:59.460 Whatever you do, don't Google that one, Alyssa.

00:42:01.540 All right, I got to ask you about this story, because this is a fun one.

00:42:04.320 The other one wasn't fun, but it was interesting.

00:42:07.440 Trump is going to be releasing a book on April 25th titled Letters to Trump.

00:42:14.220 It's going to cost $99, which is a lot.

00:42:17.700 Or if you pay $399, you could have a signed edition.

00:42:22.020 It'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.

00:42:43.160 Ah, even Oprah.

00:42:44.940 And here's the fun part of this.

00:42:47.500 Apparently, and this has taken me back to my law school days and copyright.

00:42:52.780 The 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.

00:43:00.880 The 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.

00:43:12.780 So I think Mr. Trump is about to get himself sued again by people like Oprah.

00:43:18.380 Dave, is this a good idea or not for 99 bucks?

00:43:22.060 Look, what what Trump's doing is is is interesting right now.

00:43:27.400 I 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.

00:43:38.920 And I have real concerns that that's going to backfire.

00:43:42.580 Right. I was down at CPAC and I'm, you know, I'm talking to people there.

00:43:46.620 And 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.

00:44:01.720 than they are of four more years of Joe Biden.

00:44:05.260 And 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.

00:44:12.940 I think everything that you're going to see Donald Trump do over the ensuing months is to set himself apart.

00:44:20.180 From 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.

00:44:32.440 Right. He's going to try to paint DeSantis as a return to Paul Ryan, a return to Mitt Romney.

00:44:38.140 The DeSantis people are pushing hard back against that.

00:44:41.220 But that's the dynamic that's starting to form.

00:44:43.520 And I think you're just going to see Trump go farther and farther outside of the mainstream and in whatever ways he can.

00:44:49.480 Yeah, 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.

00:44:58.540 Stu, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.

00:45:00.340 And 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.

00:45:12.160 Just prior to the 2016 election, it was paid.

00:45:14.680 She was paid money from Michael Cohen.

00:45:16.800 He says it was on behalf of Trump to keep her quiet.

00:45:19.480 About an alleged affair.

00:45:21.040 Trump denies that he had an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels and has said he would not have an affair.

00:45:28.580 He did not have an affair with Stormy Daniels and he would not have an affair.

00:45:31.860 Forgive me with I believe it was Stormy Horseface Daniels.

00:45:36.200 If that doesn't sum up Trump, what people love and hate about him in one sentence, I don't know what.

00:45:41.280 Anytime you can work a horse face into a response to a legal claim, it's always worth doing.

00:45:49.320 I honestly think the book itself is I think he'd love to get sued by Oprah Winfrey over this.

00:45:55.320 If there's anything there's nothing better that can come out of this book.

00:45:58.340 Him making a few extra hundred thousand dollars off of a book about letters is neither here nor there.

00:46:04.880 The 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.

00:46:13.220 He's a different guy.

00:46:14.220 He thinks differently on this stuff.

00:46:15.840 And 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.

00:46:25.440 He just wrote a book.

00:46:26.460 He was on our show on Students America and the Glenn Beck radio program this week talking about that book.

00:46:31.520 And it's a good book about a good run as a good governor.

00:46:34.860 And he did something that politicians do.

00:46:37.380 They write books before they run.

00:46:38.940 They explain what their vision is for the country.

00:46:40.880 And he did a good job doing it.

00:46:42.400 And then Donald Trump's like, look at this funny letter from Oprah.

00:46:45.880 He's just a totally different person.

00:46:48.520 And Stormy Horseface Daniels, which does speak to a certain portion of his base.

00:46:53.940 Yeah.

00:46:54.260 And, you know, it's tough.

00:46:55.280 It's easy to call your political opponent.

00:46:57.300 It's easy for, you know, Ron DeSantis to come out.

00:46:59.160 He can attack Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden with the best of them.

00:47:02.400 He'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.

00:47:11.280 Trump just doesn't care about that stuff.

00:47:12.800 He'll walk right through it.

00:47:13.920 You know, it reminds me of the documentary film Rocky 3 in which Rocky is facing Hulk Hogan, Thunder Lips, the ultimate male.

00:47:22.540 And they start this fight and Rocky's just going around.

00:47:25.480 He's kind of smiling.

00:47:26.440 He's throwing a few light jabs.

00:47:27.900 And then Thunder Lips gets his head and bashes him into the mat and throws him out of the ring.

00:47:34.280 And it wasn't until Rocky realized, I'm fighting for my life here.

00:47:38.360 I better get going.

00:47:39.640 And he gets back in the ring.

00:47:40.520 Turn that around.

00:47:41.160 Yeah.

00:47:41.440 Gets back in the ring and calls him on.

00:47:43.040 And 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.

00:47:52.600 Or he's just going to get overwhelmed and thrown out of the ring and it's going to be over.

00:47:56.600 That was a classic moment.

00:47:57.880 Yes, I have two boys.

00:47:59.020 And therefore, I am very familiar with all the ins and outs of the Rockies.

00:48:02.820 That was a classic moment.

00:48:04.960 Talia Shire was very good as the very concerned Adrian when he got thrown out of that ring. 1.00

00:48:09.020 You guys, what a fun combo.

00:48:10.860 I hope you guys will come back and do this again.

00:48:13.100 We'd love to make it.

00:48:13.760 Thanks for having us.

00:48:14.420 All right, Stu and Dave, we'll see you again soon.

00:48:16.860 And we will be right back with David Zweig on that insane story I told you about about out of California.

00:48:26.440 Listen to this, OK?

00:48:28.020 Government officials conducted an astonishing surveillance program to actually spy on churchgoers who dared to break COVID rules during the pandemic.

00:48:38.060 And just as bad as you think that may have been, it's even worse.

00:48:40.940 Journalist David Zweig joins us now to discuss his latest investigative report.

00:48:45.560 Welcome back to the show, David.

00:48:46.760 Great to have you.

00:48:47.400 So wait, just so just so we can make sure everybody knows where to find this.

00:48:49.720 Is it on your sub stack?

00:48:51.320 That's right.

00:48:52.140 I did the silent lunch.

00:48:53.800 Yep.

00:48:54.480 David Zweig dot sub stack.

00:48:56.500 OK, got it.

00:48:57.160 All right.

00:48:57.460 So let's first just start by setting up the conflict.

00:49:02.100 What who are the two groups and what put them at loggerheads?

00:49:05.080 OK, so the two parties in the lawsuits are a place called Calvary Chapel, which is a church.

00:49:12.840 And this is and they are in two lawsuits with Santa Clara County, California.

00:49:17.240 For those who don't know, this is northern California.

00:49:20.020 It's sort of the heart of Silicon Valley.

00:49:21.980 OK, so Calvary Chapel is out there.

00:49:25.700 And and what happened in Santa Clara County was they were proudly, I think, the first to lock everybody down in March of 2020.

00:49:38.220 That's right.

00:49:39.200 Santa Clara County was the first among with a half dozen other counties, the first ones to issue lockdown orders on March 16th.

00:49:48.280 And 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.

00:50:04.540 So this is San Francisco Bay Area.

00:50:06.240 It's very, very, very progressive area. 0.99

00:50:08.120 And so they're like, we're locking shit down like we are locking it up. 0.98

00:50:11.180 We're locking up everything, everything, including the churches. 0.97

00:50:13.620 Well, 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.

00:50:23.200 And 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.

00:50:36.420 And they started fining him like there was a great line in your piece.

00:50:42.280 Hold on.

00:50:42.560 I want to get it.

00:50:43.020 You said the church was accruing fines like John Bender racking up detentions in the breakfast club for breaching various orders.

00:50:50.360 It was it was like that.

00:50:52.060 Describe that.

00:50:53.540 Yeah.

00:50:53.660 So they had, as I mentioned, just an incredibly punitive fine system that they put in place.

00:51:00.560 An interesting side note is the fines were technically for businesses, for commercial entities.

00:51:07.780 And I've been speaking with the attorney for Calvary Chapel.

00:51:10.940 And as most people would probably categorize a church as a not as a commercial entity.

00:51:16.200 So that's a whole important piece of the case.

00:51:19.180 But setting that aside, they Mike McClure, as you mentioned, that the pastor, he opened up the church in May.

00:51:26.600 And once that happened, it really set off this collision course between the two parties.

00:51:32.720 And each day they accrued fines.

00:51:36.440 And the penalties was they had this thing where they basically kept compounding, where you maxed out at $5,000 a day for each penalty.

00:51:46.720 And very, very quickly, the fines ballooned.

00:51:49.580 I think by the middle of October, they were already at $350,000.

00:51:54.340 And ultimately, the fines totaled something like $4 million against this one church.

00:52:00.360 The county rolled it back for some complicated reasons.

00:52:04.260 And now the current lawsuit, as it stands, they are seeking $2.87 million in fines.

00:52:11.360 It became funny money.

00:52:12.420 The church can't pay us.

00:52:13.900 Quoting from your piece, by one analysis, as of March of 2021, so a year later, the dispute's ongoing,

00:52:19.800 the county had issued an astonishing $4.9 million in fines to nearly 400 businesses and other entities for pandemic rules infractions.

00:52:28.320 By comparison, six other Bay Area counties combined had collected just $82,000.

00:52:34.060 So they were fine happy in Santa Clara.

00:52:37.460 And this was their favorite target of all.

00:52:41.500 Then they did what we saw in too many cases throughout the pandemic.

00:52:45.160 They 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.

00:52:55.420 And some people did indeed report on Calvary Church.

00:52:59.720 That's right.

00:53:00.820 The county encouraged citizens to basically tattle on each other for if they saw entities or individuals breaking various public health rules.

00:53:11.080 And someone filed a complaint against Calvary Chapel.

00:53:14.740 So 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.

00:53:27.860 They had something I think I believe it was at least nine or 10, possibly more people whose job was to function as enforcement officers.

00:53:36.620 So they sent the enforcement officers over to Calvary Chapel and they observed people gathering, not wearing masks, and they began issuing fines.

00:53:48.940 And that sort of started it on on the the course that they went.

00:53:52.360 It's amazing because as I understand, like Palo Alto is included in Santa Clara County.

00:53:56.600 I mean, like these are like the richest people on Earth.

00:53:58.120 They don't have they have no crime.

00:53:59.300 That's why they have 10 enforcement officers to go over there and police the churchgoers at Calvary Chapel.

00:54:04.100 So it started with them just looking at, oh, too many people are going in.

00:54:07.760 Oh, they're not wearing.

00:54:08.540 They were watching the live stream mass and they're like, oh, they're not wearing masks and started escalating, though.

00:54:14.100 It got I mean that we've heard reports about weirdnesses like that.

00:54:18.140 This went to a very dark, dystopic level.

00:54:22.700 Tell us what else they did to spy on these churchgoers.

00:54:25.740 Right.

00:54:25.880 So 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.

00:54:40.480 The county launched essentially this multi tiered surveillance campaign against churchgoers at this particular church.

00:54:49.320 One 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.

00:55:01.540 So they had to find another way to find out, to keep observing them.

00:55:05.940 So they got an agreement from the church next door to them at the property next door.

00:55:11.160 And they basically set up camp there and they conducted stakeouts.

00:55:14.320 They were peering through a chain link fence, writing the reports.

00:55:17.740 You almost imagine them using like a telephoto lens.

00:55:20.460 And the reports are extraordinary.

00:55:23.160 And I quote from them pretty extensively, these sort of minutia.

00:55:27.020 And 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.

00:55:38.860 And we observed a child hugging someone else or something like it's just report after report of this stuff.

00:55:45.820 It is remarkable.

00:55:47.200 But then something interesting happens.

00:55:49.600 My earpiece is coming out.

00:55:51.320 Then something interesting happened.

00:55:53.140 The one of the judges issued a temporary straining order and that gave the enforcement officers.

00:55:58.820 Against the church.

00:55:59.040 Against the church.

00:56:00.040 That's right.

00:56:00.520 That's correct.

00:56:01.840 Right.

00:56:02.560 So that empowered the enforcement officers to enter the church, whereas, you know, before that they were banned.

00:56:08.680 So you had all of this sort of stakeout surveillance that they were doing.

00:56:12.840 But then they went in the church.

00:56:14.340 And 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.

00:56:28.800 It became kind of creepy.

00:56:30.560 And you had these enforcement officers going into the church and they are observing a lot of these really intimate private events, baptisms.

00:56:39.040 There was a small prayer group that they were going in.

00:56:41.920 There was a special thing called Manna for Moms, where you have moms with young children.

00:56:47.140 These really intimate gatherings of people.

00:56:50.140 And you have officers from the government there monitoring them.

00:56:54.420 And, you know, presumably with a clipboard writing down in great detail.

00:56:58.160 There were 16 women in the hallway. 1.00

00:57:00.300 Three of them were unmasked.

00:57:01.940 One person was singing.

00:57:03.340 You know, and it's just it's just reporting to report.

00:57:06.720 Singing was also banned.

00:57:07.780 I mean, that was a real thing, just not for nothing.

00:57:09.280 But even at my daughter's school in New York, before we fled, singing was banned, even outside at recess.

00:57:15.080 And the girls at one point having absolutely nothing to do.

00:57:17.600 And, you know, there was they weren't allowed to have fun of any kind, decided to put on the play Hamilton just for themselves.

00:57:22.340 One one little creative girl knew all the lyrics and taught the others. 1.00

00:57:25.280 And the music teacher was out on the playground every other day telling them to shut up, stop singing.

00:57:29.380 So they had to whisper through their masks the lyrics of Hamilton.

00:57:33.500 This is what.

00:57:34.020 So, yes, I believe that they cracked down on singing inside the church.

00:57:38.860 And you're right.

00:57:39.240 It'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.

00:57:47.680 Right.

00:57:48.020 There's people sleeping, whatever.

00:57:49.700 But this went next level to where intimate gatherings, where people truly bear their souls.

00:57:56.900 I 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.

00:58:09.240 And where did some people choose to seek solace at this church?

00:58:14.940 That's right.

00:58:15.700 And 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.

00:58:22.540 And that's when I started diving in.

00:58:24.340 But while I was researching it, I found something really strange.

00:58:28.600 And I started looking up the various public health orders that were issued at different times.

00:58:34.000 And over and over, the church or churches in general, houses of worship, had far more restrictions on them than other entities.

00:58:42.060 So you have people completely barred from getting together inside of a church.

00:58:47.300 But yet malls and retail outlets could operate at 50 percent capacity.

00:58:52.660 And then ultimately, seven months, seven months after the initial ban on gathering in a church, they finally released it.

00:59:01.620 And they allowed 100 people or 25 percent, whichever was fewer, to go in churches.

00:59:06.900 But at that point, then they said, oh, by the way, malls, retail stores, no limits at all.

00:59:12.780 So 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?

00:59:27.460 But 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.

00:59:38.840 These were people, I interviewed a number of people, and I gave some examples in the article.

00:59:43.380 These were people who were really suffering, some of them.

00:59:46.060 People who rely on the church for their support system.

00:59:50.640 And 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.

01:00:00.320 And 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.

01:00:09.420 There was a gentleman who was working at a motorcycle dealership.

01:00:13.200 It closed because of the lockdowns.

01:00:15.800 And then, so he's out of work.

01:00:17.320 He had been struggling with alcohol.

01:00:18.820 He had nowhere to go.

01:00:20.840 Everything's closed.

01:00:22.140 No one wanted to get together, even outdoors.

01:00:25.020 He needed the church.

01:00:26.220 So 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.

01:00:37.200 These were law-abiding citizens before the pandemic, and they were pushed into essentially becoming criminals because they needed a support system for their health.

01:00:46.380 I mean, there's a reason that, you know, your right to do this is protected by the Bill of Rights.

01:00:52.560 Our founding fathers understood very well how important it was the right to assemble, the right to practice your religion.

01:00:57.680 So they, question for you, what's the denomination of the church?

01:01:01.840 What's the, what's the religion?

01:01:04.260 You know, I have to tell you, I'm not sure, because I guess to my mind, it's just never even-

01:01:08.100 Were they taking communion?

01:01:09.040 Do you know, are they taking communion?

01:01:10.860 I'm just curious.

01:01:11.740 Because I will say-

01:01:12.280 They're not Catholic.

01:01:12.900 I'll tell you that much.

01:01:14.000 Okay.

01:01:14.020 All right.

01:01:14.240 But 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? 0.99

01:01:30.520 Like, there is an intimate connection between you and God, and you need to get there.

01:01:35.120 Otherwise, you're just, your entire epicenter is upset.

01:01:38.340 The 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.

01:01:53.840 They need to be with people.

01:01:55.620 Again, we have to try to remember back, people were really isolated, and particularly in California, the rules were incredibly strict.

01:02:02.960 And that also is public health, that there is real harm.

01:02:07.200 There were people who had suicidal ideation.

01:02:10.180 There was a man I spoke with who had had a really hard breakup with someone.

01:02:15.100 And, 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.

01:02:22.420 And even as someone who's not religious, I completely understand why these support systems are also a necessary part of people's well-being.

01:02:31.600 And 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.

01:02:43.680 And again, there also is the bit of the hypocrisy that plenty of other things were open in society at the same time.

01:02:50.320 Like the liquor store.

01:02:50.840 So I just want to say two things.

01:02:52.500 One, my nana, she was raised a Lutheran, but she converted to Catholicism because my pop-up was Catholic right off the boat from Italy.

01:03:00.700 And, you know, like most converts, she had the fervor of a convert and was like a diehard Catholic for the rest of her life.

01:03:06.820 When my pop-up had a stroke at age 77 and started going downhill, he couldn't eat.

01:03:11.660 He couldn't really speak.

01:03:12.760 Like he, he too was a diehard Catholic.

01:03:15.880 The priest would come over to their house on Sundays and give my grandfather communion and he couldn't even get it down.

01:03:22.940 And the only way he could get, he could get it down was with pudding.

01:03:26.720 And 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.

01:03:33.180 And he was, he cried.

01:03:34.160 My nana cried and the priest did it.

01:03:36.140 But this is my point.

01:03:37.180 Like he couldn't, he couldn't go to church because he just had a stroke.

01:03:39.840 But my point is like the Sunday day of obligation, taking communion, paying your respects.

01:03:44.500 It's that important, right?

01:03:46.600 That you would be in tears over not being able to do it.

01:03:49.260 And who are these faithless bureaucrats who keep the liquor stores open to tell the faithful they can't be there?

01:03:56.320 So that's number one.

01:03:57.420 But number two is a bigger context, zooming out.

01:04:00.940 At this same time, they were not only letting, they were encouraging people to go to the BLM protest.

01:04:09.840 To say that, that, that's totally fine and healthy.

01:04:14.040 You can go line up by the thousands right next to each other and protest over BLM and George Floyd.

01:04:19.700 Nope.

01:04:20.000 That's literally the same time that this was happening.

01:04:22.340 Yeah, it's quite remarkable.

01:04:25.760 And 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.

01:04:43.020 Their values, and remember, these are not elected people.

01:04:47.200 This is someone who's appointed, you know, the head of the health department, Sarah Cody, the head of the health department there.

01:04:52.660 This is her value system.

01:04:54.600 She may not care about going to church, but other people do.

01:04:58.280 And it's more than just caring about going, as you, you know, so poignantly talked about with your family.

01:05:04.940 This is really meaningful to people.

01:05:07.140 And it's beyond just a spiritual meaning.

01:05:10.080 This also is a support system for people who are struggling with addiction.

01:05:13.780 And during the pandemic, in particular, people who are struggling with loneliness and isolation, who are experiencing depression, anxiety.

01:05:22.160 And the interesting thing is, the membership of the church exploded during the pandemic.

01:05:27.500 It went from, on a Sunday, they typically may have had 700 or 800 people before the pandemic.

01:05:33.280 It doubled to something like 1,600, 1,700 or more.

01:05:37.820 They went from doing 50 or 100 baptisms a year to doing 1,000.

01:05:42.280 And people were coming from all over.

01:05:44.760 Word was spreading.

01:05:45.960 There's this place.

01:05:46.980 There's a church that's open.

01:05:48.520 I need help.

01:05:49.400 I can go somewhere.

01:05:50.860 Because these other resources aren't available to me.

01:05:53.940 And this is meaningful to me in my life.

01:05:56.320 Some, you know, person who's been attending church every week for the past, you know, 30 years of their life.

01:06:01.260 And all of a sudden, it's shut off.

01:06:02.820 And again, it's so important to me to emphasize, this wasn't for two weeks.

01:06:06.820 It wasn't until October that she finally allowed them to meet indoors at a church.

01:06:13.460 That is an extraordinary length of time.

01:06:15.860 Only at a limited capacity.

01:06:17.520 Correct.

01:06:17.840 Yeah.

01:06:18.080 And even that was at this 100-person limit.

01:06:20.800 Megan, I-

01:06:21.140 But you mentioned that, you mentioned the baptisms.

01:06:23.140 I mean, that's big.

01:06:23.860 That's, like, when you think about these spies sitting in there.

01:06:27.520 So if that's one of the things you would really want done, you know, in the Catholic religion,

01:06:30.220 like, that's an important rite of passage.

01:06:32.500 I mean, parents will panic if something happens to their child before he or she has been baptized.

01:06:39.560 And to think of some government bureaucrat spy sitting in on a ceremony that's as holy and important as that,

01:06:48.320 or never mind a funeral, a wedding, all the rites of passage that we enjoy in the church,

01:06:52.980 is absolutely violating.

01:06:55.200 Not to mention the more intimate confessions of people who are struggling in prayer groups.

01:06:58.860 And at the daycare you mentioned there is, too, and the manna for moms, all this stuff.

01:07:03.860 But it went beyond that because your piece talks about they actually were tracking the

01:07:09.660 cell phone data of the churchgoers.

01:07:13.020 Right.

01:07:13.700 So earlier we were talking about, you know, the sort of what I call, what I think about

01:07:18.140 is like a three-prong attack on their sort of surveillance operation.

01:07:22.120 They were surveilling them, looking through the chain link fence from afar.

01:07:26.500 They were then going into the building itself.

01:07:29.600 But then on top of that, I came across this remarkable document within the legal documents,

01:07:36.080 the declaration.

01:07:37.280 And I found that the county was using cellular mobility data to track how many people were

01:07:44.940 going into the church.

01:07:46.180 In my article, I give this incredible photo or image.

01:07:50.800 They show, they created what they call a geofence.

01:07:53.180 It's essentially a digital border around the church.

01:07:56.880 And they could track any time a device, you know, a cellular device went through that border.

01:08:02.460 And the information was so granular that they even had separate borders around individual

01:08:08.760 buildings within the property.

01:08:10.220 So they knew how many people were going into the church.

01:08:12.940 And then they knew where they were going within the church property, which buildings and for

01:08:17.180 how long.

01:08:17.820 It was, it's mind-blowing.

01:08:20.860 I couldn't believe it when I came across this and how they then hired this.

01:08:25.380 It's like Mrs. Smith has been in the confessional every day for 12 days.

01:08:28.700 What's going on in the Smith house?

01:08:30.800 Right.

01:08:31.360 Well, they say that the data were anonymized.

01:08:34.480 And I'm not suggesting that the county, you know, tried to figure out who each of these

01:08:40.220 individuals were.

01:08:41.240 But I spoke with an expert on this, and it certainly would have been easy to figure out

01:08:44.960 who's going.

01:08:45.620 You just track the, whatever device is tracking into the property, you could easily track where

01:08:50.200 it's going at night.

01:08:51.040 And then you see the little dot on the map, you know, metaphorically is sitting there overnight.

01:08:55.360 You could find out where people live.

01:08:57.140 But I mean, the fact that they were conducting this multifaceted surveillance operation, tracking

01:09:04.720 the cellular data of people with such granularity, I mean, for masking violations, for singing,

01:09:12.980 I mean, this is a remarkable story about what has occurred in America.

01:09:19.300 And it has implications in my mind.

01:09:21.400 You have obviously the legal expertise, but I think it has legal implications about, you

01:09:26.640 know, the First Amendment violations.

01:09:29.000 I know the attorney is also talking about Eighth Amendment violations, which is related to the

01:09:33.260 excessive fines.

01:09:34.340 But pulling back even from legal stuff, Megan, I mean, it's just sort of more on an ethical

01:09:39.560 and societal basis is, you know, what type of society do we want to be in where we are

01:09:44.780 monitored to that degree for these sort of public health orders?

01:09:48.540 Yeah, by our fellow citizens who willingly not only comply, but then go along to be the 0.90

01:09:54.560 little enforcers of these pathetic government bureaucrats and the bureaucrats themselves who 0.87

01:09:59.740 don't value anybody else's choice and relationship with something as profound as God. 0.92

01:10:06.240 So thank God, I will say, for Pastor Mike McClure, because it's heroes like that that show the

01:10:11.780 rest of us how not to be a sheep, you know, how to be a lion when the stuff hits the fan.

01:10:17.540 And good for him for looking out for his congregation.

01:10:20.920 He did what was intended of him.

01:10:22.840 So now, unbelievably, despite the fact that the Supreme Court struck down California's ban

01:10:27.600 on gathering in churches, so they had to reduce the fines that they were going after Calvary

01:10:32.780 Chapel for as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.

01:10:36.080 They're still they didn't they didn't say, you know what?

01:10:38.380 No, let's move on.

01:10:39.200 They're still trying to get them for no masks.

01:10:43.080 I mean, it's like that's right.

01:10:44.920 They won't walk away.

01:10:45.820 It's a matter of principle or the other the other way for the county.

01:10:49.480 This is a remarkable development, which is, you know, in the midst of a lawsuit that,

01:10:54.660 as you mentioned, the Supreme Court struck down the state in California, their ban on gatherings

01:11:01.700 in churches.

01:11:02.240 So when that happened, yeah, they instead of dropping the case entirely, they said, OK,

01:11:07.120 we won't go after you for gathering.

01:11:09.620 Now we're just going to go after you for noncompliance with masking.

01:11:13.180 Now, remember, this is for cloth masks.

01:11:15.740 There is no requirement for a specific type of respirator, which some evidence shows is more

01:11:21.300 effective than cloth masks.

01:11:22.740 So we have this lawsuit that's continuing over people not wearing masks, which we know,

01:11:28.860 which every single public health authority at this point has admitted publicly and said,

01:11:33.960 look, there's no real evidence that cloth masks do much of anything at all.

01:11:38.240 So it's what a remarkable thing that they won't still won't drop the lawsuit.

01:11:42.480 And one of the judges actually admonished the county and said, look, what are you doing?

01:11:46.520 Like, this is not the hill you want to die on.

01:11:48.660 You're going after this church for millions of dollars, but they have not dropped it.

01:11:53.960 So where does it stand now?

01:11:55.040 Are they going to have a trial?

01:11:56.260 Are they like, what's next?

01:11:58.600 Right.

01:11:58.880 So they are moving toward a trial.

01:12:00.660 And there's also a federal lawsuit, which the church filed against the county.

01:12:05.980 And there's a bit of jockeying back and forth because depending which way the federal lawsuit

01:12:12.380 rules, that could have an effect on the state lawsuit that the county filed against the church.

01:12:17.800 So there's some maneuvering.

01:12:19.680 Supposedly some decisions or large things may happen this month in March, but, you know,

01:12:26.020 it remains to be seen.

01:12:27.680 It's just so remarkable on so many levels, not the least of which is there's no evidence

01:12:33.740 that any of this had any effect on transmission.

01:12:37.280 There was no evidence that churchgoers who went to Calvary Church had any higher incidence

01:12:43.180 of COVID than the general community.

01:12:46.100 These measures are effective potentially in a very short window of time.

01:12:51.620 And I've talked to a zillion experts over the last three years with my journalism on

01:12:56.380 this.

01:12:56.960 It's not that, of course, if you lock everyone at home for a week or two, that will reduce

01:13:01.220 things.

01:13:02.000 But the way implementation science works is over time, the more weeks and months that

01:13:07.240 go by, the less and less effective these types of measures are.

01:13:11.160 And the inability, the unwillingness of the county to kind of ease back a little bit shows

01:13:18.720 that they were just completely out of touch with a significant number of people who wanted

01:13:23.420 and needed these other things in their lives.

01:13:26.440 This wasn't on March 15th.

01:13:28.480 We're talking about month after month after month.

01:13:31.260 People have got to read the article.

01:13:34.380 The details are, as David says, at first, you're kind of amused.

01:13:38.320 You're kind of laughing at them.

01:13:39.320 And then you're horrified.

01:13:40.740 And then you're heartstruck.

01:13:42.480 And then you want you want to do something about it.

01:13:45.000 You know, you kind of feel like, all right, we got to watch this trial.

01:13:48.080 Make sure this comes out the right way or be prepared to write a bunch of letters and

01:13:51.080 do a public outcry because this can't happen again.

01:13:52.980 So how do they read the letters that give them the Substack again so everybody can check

01:13:56.160 it out, David?

01:13:57.020 Yeah.

01:13:57.360 So it's davidsweig.substack.com.

01:14:01.220 And that's how you can find me.

01:14:02.400 Z-W-E-I-G. 1.00

01:14:03.540 Z-W-E-I-G. 1.00

01:14:03.800 Yeah.

01:14:04.100 D-A-V-I-D. 0.96

01:14:05.400 Z-W-E-I-G.substack.com.

01:14:09.300 And it's a really in-depth story.

01:14:11.900 And there's a surprise, which you know, Megan, from reading the story about this electronic

01:14:17.240 surveillance of the mobility data.

01:14:19.060 Anyone who's watching this who might think, eh, they were churchgoers, they were breaking

01:14:24.020 the law, you'll be surprised to find out what this mobility data is used for tracking

01:14:29.420 other people, including some very progressive causes for people who are connected with that.

01:14:35.360 This affects everyone, regardless of your ideological or political or religious affiliation.

01:14:42.740 David Zweig, one of the truth tellers during COVID.

01:14:46.280 And that is a true badge of honor.

01:14:48.480 Great to have you.

01:14:49.720 Thanks, Megan.

01:14:50.980 All right.

01:14:51.460 We'll be back with another insane COVID story, a whistleblower of types.

01:14:56.680 She's getting a bunch of blowback for what she did, but it was pretty darn bold and pretty

01:15:01.060 darn brave.

01:15:02.080 And she's here to tell you what she found when she got access to this government officials 0.97

01:15:05.680 WhatsApp messages over in the UK.

01:15:09.280 Everything that's happening here was happening there, too.

01:15:11.300 Now, a journalist who is exposing the pandemic response inside one of America's closest allies

01:15:20.360 inside this country that we call the UK.

01:15:23.300 About a year ago, she started working with the former British health secretary.

01:15:27.780 All right.

01:15:27.920 This is a guy who was high up on his book.

01:15:30.680 He handed over some 100,000 WhatsApp messages to her that were between himself and the top

01:15:36.480 leaders over there talking about COVID, talking about the restrictions and so on.

01:15:39.360 His book was published, but then the journalist who worked with him broke her nondisclosure

01:15:45.040 agreement and made all those messages public by turning them over to a top newspaper inside the

01:15:52.660 messages, a treasure trove of information about why world leaders have been so scared to challenge

01:15:58.980 China about the lab leak theory and how the government decided to enforce restrictions like

01:16:04.640 quarantine hotels, masking school disclosures without giving two dams about the people those

01:16:12.380 policies were affecting or about the data that may or may not have supported their decisions.

01:16:18.360 Joining me now, the journalist at the center of all of this, her name is Isabel Oakshot.

01:16:22.260 And she's the international editor at Talk TV.

01:16:25.800 Isabel, so nice to have you here.

01:16:26.960 Thanks for being on.

01:16:28.400 Oh, thank you for having me.

01:16:29.720 And it was extraordinary to hear your previous report from David there about those horrific

01:16:35.360 surveillance tactics that were used on churchgoers.

01:16:39.360 And so much of what you discussed happened here, too, I'm afraid to say.

01:16:44.160 Well, that's why I mean, I see you getting blowback by some probably more on the left in the

01:16:49.160 UK for disclosing the WhatsApp messages.

01:16:52.120 But I have to confess, and I get the controversy as a journalist, but I have to confess, I've

01:16:56.060 been cheering you.

01:16:57.000 I've been cheering you because.

01:16:58.340 So what are how are we to know if the government's doing something like they're doing at that church 0.93

01:17:04.060 or like this guy Hancock was doing with the other government officials in the UK laughing

01:17:08.140 at the people who they were sticking in these hotels or just shrugging their shoulders about

01:17:12.120 the harm to children that would come from the masking?

01:17:14.480 They didn't care at all.

01:17:15.680 How are we going to know unless people bend the rules here or there?

01:17:20.660 Well, that's exactly the point.

01:17:22.680 So we have here a plan for a so-called public inquiry.

01:17:26.880 That's kind of like the formal investigation where all of the key players will be invited

01:17:32.580 to give evidence.

01:17:34.260 And, you know, one of the criticisms that's aimed at me is that this is inappropriate for

01:17:39.580 me to do this because all this is going to come out in the proper and due place, which

01:17:44.340 is the public inquiry.

01:17:46.040 But wait for this.

01:17:47.460 This public inquiry, which was officially started some years ago, has not yet properly got

01:17:54.860 underway and crucially, it has no deadline whatsoever.

01:18:00.860 And previous public inquiries into much smaller challenging things that this country has faced

01:18:07.640 have taken up to 10 years.

01:18:10.400 I've looked at the remit, the terms of reference for this judge-led inquiry.

01:18:15.160 I have no hope or expectation that that inquiry will produce any conclusions within the next decade.

01:18:22.800 So it seemed to me incumbent and the morally right thing to do for me to put this correspondence

01:18:30.220 in the public domain because we could have another pandemic next month.

01:18:35.360 And I don't think that anyone wants to go through what we all went through again.

01:18:41.360 There was, among the other revelations, something that reminded me, and it's near and dear to my

01:18:45.800 own heart, my friend Janice Dean, who's a meteorologist at Fox News, has been raising the alarm about

01:18:50.800 what Governor Cuomo did in New York, where he sent COVID-positive patients into nursing

01:18:54.620 homes.

01:18:55.320 You guys call them care homes.

01:18:57.720 And he mandated that they be taken and that they not be tested.

01:19:01.560 So it's like he didn't care that he was sending COVID-positive patients into the most vulnerable

01:19:05.700 places with the most vulnerable patients.

01:19:08.500 Similar scandal unveiled in these WhatsApp messages.

01:19:12.520 Can you tell us what you saw?

01:19:13.680 So care homes has been a really super sensitive issue here, not just about whether patients

01:19:21.760 were discharged from hospitals or the community into care homes without appropriate testing,

01:19:28.700 but also the arrangements around what visitors were and weren't allowed in care homes during

01:19:35.620 this very long period.

01:19:37.020 I mean, there are still significant restrictions on visiting in many care homes today.

01:19:42.340 And one of the issues I personally found most horrifying during the pandemic was the isolation

01:19:49.360 of very elderly, very vulnerable people who were not allowed to see their relatives at all

01:19:56.800 in many cases.

01:19:58.640 We even had settings in which married couples were in the same care home and were still not

01:20:05.800 allowed to see each other.

01:20:07.040 The man and the woman accommodated in different parts of the same residential facility.

01:20:12.340 Barred from seeing each other.

01:20:14.720 This is heartbreaking stuff.

01:20:16.860 And what you see in the WhatsApps is the kind of casualness with which these restrictions

01:20:23.440 were repeatedly extended when they really weren't necessary.

01:20:28.420 So you can see one of our junior politicians who worked in the health department at that time

01:20:34.400 and had responsibility for that particular policy area, lobbying the health secretary, so the

01:20:42.340 politician at the top who was in charge of the decision, saying to him, look, you know,

01:20:46.540 these people are likely exceptionally lonely.

01:20:51.400 You know, the only thing that brings their lives meaning at this point is to see their loved

01:20:56.220 ones, please, please, can we open up these care homes to some extent, please, can we relax

01:21:02.760 restrictions?

01:21:03.680 I'm not quoting here, I'm paraphrasing.

01:21:06.480 And you see the health secretary repeatedly pushing back on no real grounds other than basically

01:21:13.100 covering his own back here.

01:21:14.900 And then finally, he gives in very casually.

01:21:18.960 He just sort of says, oh, OK, then you win.

01:21:22.400 And that is a quote.

01:21:23.560 Oh, you win.

01:21:25.180 And, you know, it reminded me of that incredible movie, Gladiator, in which the Roman emperor,

01:21:31.160 you know, puts his thumb up or thumb down to signal whether the losing gladiator lives or

01:21:37.460 dies.

01:21:37.880 You know, the casualness, the flippancy with which decisions were taken, which profoundly

01:21:44.980 affected millions and millions of lives, I think is utterly shocking.

01:21:49.960 And I think it had to be put in the public domain.

01:21:53.920 It was the two the two things that stood out to me, because it does show the smugness.

01:21:58.900 They couldn't have cared less about how these policies were actually going to affect people

01:22:03.420 were forcing the people who came into the UK, who came back home to the UK into hotels and 0.95

01:22:10.120 how they were laughing.

01:22:11.280 The permanent secretary at 10 Downing talking with Van Hancock, the health secretary, who

01:22:16.060 you were that's that's the guy who from who you got the WhatsApp messages.

01:22:20.700 Hancock says we're giving big families all the suites and putting pop stars in the box

01:22:26.080 rooms.

01:22:26.420 And Simon K's permanent secretary at Downing Street says, I just want to see some of the faces

01:22:30.500 of people coming out of first class and into a premier in shoebox.

01:22:35.000 Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?

01:22:38.220 Hancock says none.

01:22:39.140 But one forty nine chose to enter the country and are now in quarantine hotels due to their

01:22:42.480 own free will.

01:22:43.520 Simon K's hilarious.

01:22:45.440 And here's the worst one for me, Isabel, because this this gets into my my worst issue.

01:22:51.380 Face masks.

01:22:53.060 Boris Johnson.

01:22:54.360 I mean, a lot of people over here think, OK, he's conservative.

01:22:56.920 Oh, great.

01:22:57.400 We like.

01:22:57.720 No, Boris Johnson.

01:22:59.880 This is shameful what he did.

01:23:02.140 He put those face masks on those kids in school, even though he knew that there was no data

01:23:07.400 to support the health effects of it.

01:23:09.820 Tell us why.

01:23:11.860 Well, I agree with you about face masks.

01:23:14.060 That really gets me, too.

01:23:16.140 And what we learn from these messages is that one of the reasons that that policy of continuing

01:23:23.820 to enforce face masks on children here in the UK was extended was because the government

01:23:31.640 of England did not want to fall out with the government of Scotland.

01:23:35.720 And there's a lot of kind of petty politics here, really.

01:23:40.640 Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, was always trying to be one step ahead of Westminster,

01:23:46.740 was always trying to promote her agenda of separation for Scotland by showing just how 0.97

01:23:53.820 how tough she was.

01:23:55.760 And she is a very formidable and very effective politician.

01:23:59.260 And frankly, I think Downing Street was pretty afraid of how well she was doing.

01:24:04.360 The Scots were lapping it up in large part.

01:24:06.620 They were as terrified as people were down here in England by the fear of propaganda.

01:24:11.500 And Downing Street chose essentially when Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland said she was going to

01:24:18.140 make children wear masks.

01:24:19.860 Downing Street didn't really fancy picking a fight with her.

01:24:23.280 And I want to pick up on that exchange between the top civil servant in Downing Street, who's

01:24:29.600 supposed to be apolitical, by the way, and the health secretary about the quarantine policy

01:24:35.440 and how funny they found it.

01:24:37.840 And I think what these WhatsApps show is a lot about power.

01:24:43.060 This is a story of what happens when a very small number of people acquire, in fact, basically

01:24:50.820 seize an enormous amount of power to control extraordinary detail of our everyday lives and how entrenched

01:25:01.000 they become and how messianic they become about the agenda they've decided is the right one.

01:25:06.900 And I'm sure that they absolutely felt that they were somehow doing the right thing.

01:25:12.380 But I think they got carried away by their own heroic roles in this crusade.

01:25:18.560 To me, what was so jarring was just how little they actually cared about how it was going to

01:25:23.820 affect people from the nursing care homes to the masking issue.

01:25:28.760 And as the mother of three kids, that one hurt personally.

01:25:32.240 And this is an exchange that Lee Cain, the prime minister's director of communications,

01:25:36.600 is talking with Boris Johnson, writing with him about whether they should have masks in

01:25:41.820 schools and extend that policy.

01:25:43.720 And Lee Cain writes, considering Scotland is just confirmed, it will.

01:25:48.000 I find it hard to believe we'll hold the line.

01:25:50.600 And then he goes on to say, also, why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in

01:25:56.040 certain school settings?

01:25:56.860 Does he have kids?

01:25:59.400 Does he ask any parent with children on why you want to have that fight?

01:26:05.120 There are so many good reasons he couldn't care less than thousands of children wound up with

01:26:09.680 his hand effectively over their mouths because he didn't have the will to fight.

01:26:15.220 I couldn't agree with you more.

01:26:17.000 You know, I'm the mother of three children myself, three youngish children.

01:26:21.400 And the impact of the pandemic on children is one of the things I feel most strongly about.

01:26:28.220 Here in the UK, schools were repeatedly closed down on the flimsiest of bases.

01:26:35.140 We know now, we knew pretty early on, that this virus did not present a very serious risk

01:26:41.900 at all to the vast majority of children.

01:26:45.100 And yet they were shut out of schools.

01:26:46.980 And here in the UK, tens of thousands of children have never returned to education.

01:26:54.540 And the impact of those restrictions continues to affect families so profoundly.

01:27:00.580 And one of the lovely things about this expose, because I have taken many brickbats,

01:27:07.560 has been the number of people writing to me, ordinary people, widows, parents, elderly people

01:27:14.220 who suffered loneliness and so on.

01:27:16.320 And the letters that move me the most are those of the mothers.

01:27:21.140 And I received one letter from a contact from a lady, a single mother living in very,

01:27:28.980 very tough circumstance, very poor family in a city area in the north.

01:27:35.680 And she described how she found herself stuck in very inadequate accommodation with two children,

01:27:42.720 a five-year-old with attention deficit disorder, so very hyperactive five-year-old,

01:27:48.380 and a teenage boy.

01:27:50.460 And the five-year-old, they don't have their own garden in that property.

01:27:55.380 And the place he really needed to go to let off steam was the local play park.

01:28:00.340 That was closed off by these crazy zealots in the local authority.

01:28:06.120 And she found she had nowhere to take her little boy to run off his energy.

01:28:10.760 So she decided to move house, seeing that probably there were going to be more lockdowns.

01:28:16.480 And they moved to a different part of England, where she found she was unable to get a school

01:28:21.820 place for her teenage son, who was then 14 or 15.

01:28:26.420 And by this stage in this country, so-called home education, online learning,

01:28:31.860 had become such an easy default for the government, where the government couldn't be bothered

01:28:37.160 to look after people properly.

01:28:39.300 It just, oh, well, you can do it all online.

01:28:42.320 And this teenage boy became increasingly isolated.

01:28:46.620 He wasn't playing sport anymore.

01:28:48.400 He piled on weight.

01:28:50.200 He became obese.

01:28:52.040 He got more and more lonely and paranoid about all the propaganda of more variants coming.

01:29:00.520 And the fear just took over him to the point that he wouldn't even open his bedroom window

01:29:07.120 because he thought the virus was going to come and get him.

01:29:11.820 And eventually, three days before Christmas, he told his mother that he was going out to buy

01:29:17.460 some groceries and that child never came home.

01:29:22.500 He went to the woods and he hung himself.

01:29:26.300 Isn't that just the most damning indictment on this reckless policy?

01:29:33.360 He was just a statistic that our government did not care about.

01:29:38.300 They only cared about compliance statistics,

01:29:42.260 not the children like that of parents who had no agency and who suffered every additional

01:29:49.720 day of unnecessary lockdown.

01:29:52.360 Oh, my God.

01:29:53.420 That in a just world, that story would be on the front of every newspaper covering your reporting

01:30:00.320 right next to that that official's quote.

01:30:03.900 Why do we want the fight?

01:30:06.060 Why?

01:30:06.400 Why do we want the fight?

01:30:07.400 That's why.

01:30:08.380 I mean, I get it.

01:30:09.460 I get it.

01:30:10.180 The way we came to see all this information is controversial, but it's just that's not

01:30:13.600 the story that is.

01:30:14.880 That is a footnote to the story.

01:30:16.220 What you just said is the story and any honest media would be covering it accordingly.

01:30:21.440 It's been infuriating to watch them try to get you.

01:30:24.300 I've seen it.

01:30:25.380 And I mean, I wasn't familiar with your work before, but I've become very familiar and I've

01:30:29.840 become a fan watching you argue with these people who are trying to get you for having

01:30:34.820 reported the thing.

01:30:35.540 It's like, why don't they want to know about this boy?

01:30:38.480 Why aren't they concerned about what their government did to them?

01:30:42.040 The story is not me.

01:30:43.840 And actually, the story isn't Matt Hancock as an individual.

01:30:47.420 The story is the collateral damage.

01:30:50.100 And it is as much about what is not in these WhatsApps as what is in them.

01:30:56.120 So I don't see anywhere in 2.3 million words of messages, I don't see anywhere the key people

01:31:05.200 asking what might be the collateral damage here?

01:31:10.100 What is the balance of damage and risk here?

01:31:13.820 What will be the impact on people, on millions of people?

01:31:18.400 If we basically turn our health service here into a COVID service and they kept on telling

01:31:25.940 us that we had to protect the NHS, which is our publicly funded health service.

01:31:32.080 In reality, the absolute opposite happened.

01:31:36.120 We now have record high waiting lists for operations and cancer cares.

01:31:41.620 Oh, yeah.

01:31:42.100 We have the same.

01:31:43.940 Let me just only have two minutes.

01:31:46.020 So I want to get a couple of things in.

01:31:47.220 First, breaking news here.

01:31:48.320 The House has voted unanimously here in the States for the Biden administration to declassify

01:31:52.240 all information related to the origins of COVID.

01:31:55.980 Yes.

01:31:56.780 The vote passed 419 to zero on Friday.

01:31:59.180 That's after it was unanimously passed in the Senate.

01:32:01.580 The bill will now head to President Biden's desk for his signature and we'll see whether

01:32:06.820 they actually are interested in getting to the bottom of the origins of COVID.

01:32:11.220 I know that was part of the scandal you unfolded there, too.

01:32:14.600 Like here, they were terrified of seeming racist if they said we think it originated in

01:32:19.660 a lab.

01:32:20.740 I cannot end without telling people about the one piece that made all the news.

01:32:24.640 You have Matt Hancock in this exchange agreeing that the plan will be, quote, we frighten the

01:32:30.020 pants off everyone with the new strain, meaning variant.

01:32:33.600 And the other official responds saying, yep, that's what we get proper behavior change.

01:32:39.160 This is what you're trying to expose.

01:32:41.480 I've got to ask you woman to woman, reporter to reporter.

01:32:43.900 Was it scary?

01:32:45.520 Forgive the but like, was it scary to have the access and actually turn it over the telegraph

01:32:51.260 and realize what what was going to happen in your own life once you did it?

01:32:56.940 Well, yes, I'm very tough, very resilient.

01:33:00.060 And I've broken some difficult stories before, but this is not and was not an easy decision.

01:33:06.420 But in the end, the public interest is overwhelming and people can try to intimidate me or smear me

01:33:13.580 or shut me up. 0.61

01:33:14.600 But this had to get out there.

01:33:16.660 People deserve to know the truth and never, ever again should we casually go down this

01:33:23.200 route.

01:33:23.620 And if I've done a tiny thing to help in that agenda, then it's worth anything that anyone

01:33:30.540 says about me.

01:33:32.260 Is he coming after you?

01:33:34.460 Is he I know you said to Piers Morgan, he sent you a menacing message.

01:33:38.520 I would imagine he's threatening a lawsuit.

01:33:41.120 It wasn't that menacing.

01:33:42.460 He did message me a few hours after the story broke, saying that I had made a very big mistake.

01:33:49.340 I don't believe I have done.

01:33:51.300 I've since had an eight page legal letter from one of the most prominent law firms in

01:33:56.820 this country.

01:33:57.800 It doesn't really, in my view, add up to a row of beans.

01:34:01.040 I'm ready to fight it if need be.

01:34:03.380 This was definitely worth it.

01:34:05.400 You know what?

01:34:05.660 You'll probably get a law firm.

01:34:06.800 I mean, maybe the telegraph will help you and defend you.

01:34:09.900 But you'll probably get a law firm that would volunteer to defend you just based on the

01:34:14.100 principles that you're that you're offering.

01:34:16.260 And I don't know.

01:34:16.600 I mean, like the damages I'm violating what I assume is your nondisclosure.

01:34:20.180 How big how big could those possibly be?

01:34:22.600 I've got questions about how well that lawsuit is going to go.

01:34:26.400 All my legal advice has been that there is no case to answer here.

01:34:29.840 There's an overwhelming public interest defense in this release.

01:34:33.540 I don't actually think he's going to carry this all the way.

01:34:36.580 But if he does, I've certainly had offers of crowdfunding.

01:34:40.440 And of course, the Telegraph will be defending their position very robustly as well.

01:34:46.040 Yeah.

01:34:46.300 Yeah.

01:34:46.740 Now, I imagine your career as a ghostwriter of books is probably end it.

01:34:52.080 That's that's probably over.

01:34:54.200 But your journalism career will flourish.

01:34:57.400 Well, you know, it's a funny one.

01:34:59.020 I've got another ghostwritten book coming out soon.

01:35:01.260 I spoke to that client today and he was like, I just am full square behind you on this.

01:35:07.520 Matt Hancock was never a commercial client of mine.

01:35:10.500 I worked for him pro bono.

01:35:12.380 So I may yet write books, but, you know, 10 books in 10 years.

01:35:16.100 I've kind of done that for a while now, I think.

01:35:18.500 You know, here's my advice.

01:35:19.640 If you are a good person, you can work with Isabel.

01:35:22.040 No problem.

01:35:22.720 If you are a shady person, you should probably find somebody else. 0.89

01:35:26.340 Exactly that. 0.94

01:35:27.140 I'm not going to keep your secrets, but I will tell your story.

01:35:29.880 Isabel, thank you so much.

01:35:32.240 I'd love to have you back on.

01:35:33.460 I really enjoyed our conversation.

01:35:34.780 All the best.

01:35:35.320 Thank you so much.

01:35:36.440 Bye.

01:35:37.320 Wow.

01:35:37.800 Unbelievable.

01:35:38.380 And The Telegraph continues to release a reporting day after day so you can go online

01:35:41.340 and check it out for yourself firsthand.

01:35:43.440 You see the theme of the show, don't you?

01:35:44.700 You see the problems.

01:35:46.180 They're still with us.

01:35:47.040 And thank God we get to end it on a good note with that vote.

01:35:49.900 We'll see what President Biden does.

01:35:53.640 Oh, we have so many thoughts.

01:35:54.940 The team and I talking about today is kind of a covid show.

01:35:57.260 And I'd love to get your thoughts on the stories you heard today.

01:35:59.340 Email me, will you?

01:36:00.580 Megan, M-E-G-Y-N, at MeganKelley.com.

01:36:04.700 Love to hear from you.

01:36:05.460 May feature one of your mails in our mailbag segment we do each week.

01:36:09.560 And check it out for yourself.

01:36:10.760 Have a great, great weekend.

01:36:11.800 And we'll see you Monday.

The Megyn Kelly Show - March 10, 2023

Democrats Against Journalism, and COVID Truth Revealed, with Stu Burguiere, Dave Marcus, David Zweig, and Isabel Oakeshott ｜ Ep. 509

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