A new study suggests that almost half of those hospitalized with COVID are not as sick as we've been told, and might not even be there because of COVID. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and author of the Great Barrington Declaration, joins me to talk about it.
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00:00:31.000Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:42.400Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:00:46.140First up today, I want to discuss with you a new COVID study that virtually all of the media will likely ignore.
00:00:53.160Why? It suggests almost half of those hospitalized with COVID, you know,
00:00:58.100they keep trying to scare us with these hospitalization increases and look at the numbers and blah, blah, blah.
00:01:02.700Might not be as sick as we've been led to believe and might not even be there because of COVID.
00:01:09.420It may be one of those situations like we discussed the other day with David Zweig about hospitalized because of COVID or just with COVID, right?
00:01:20.540Here to talk with me about it today is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
00:01:25.200Jay is a professor of medicine at Stanford University.
00:01:27.660He was also one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated months ago for easing lockdowns and focusing on protecting the most vulnerable.
00:02:02.120And now we learn that it's that they're overstating the numbers of people who are in hospitals right now because of COVID and overstating how sick they are.
00:02:17.260So actually, this is a result that goes back a ways.
00:02:19.840There was an audit in Santa Clara County and in Alameda County of death certificates, for instance, and found that in 25 percent of cases that were coded as COVID deaths,
00:02:29.780actually, 25 percent of the time there were other factors that were probably more important in those deaths than COVID.
00:02:36.280COVID in hospitals have had a very strong incentive to diagnose COVID.
00:02:41.960Going back to the CARES Act last year, some hospitals got more than $50,000 additional per COVID patient that they had.
00:02:50.600So there's a mix of things going on here.
00:02:53.680But I think there's a really important public health point here, which is that these cases have been used to scare the public.
00:03:00.280Scare the public into thinking that we're running out of hospital resources or health care resources.
00:03:05.700Scare the public into thinking that COVID is more dangerous than it is.
00:03:08.840It is dangerous, especially for an older, vulnerable population, as we've talked about many times.
00:03:15.240But it's not 3 percent mortality like we heard in the early days of the epidemic.
00:03:20.540It's much closer to 0.2 percent infection fatality rate, again, unless you're older, in which case it's much higher.
00:03:26.620So I think that's really the upshot of this study for me, is that as the media, I think, has an obligation to put the COVID numbers in perspective rather than using it to stoke fear.
00:03:41.220And this study suggests that that's exactly a careful analysis of the data, which is what this study is trying to do to say, OK, distinguish between you have COVID and died from COVID versus it's incidental.
00:03:53.740It's really important to start to put those numbers in perspective.
00:03:56.600And I hope the media sort of responsibly takes this and helps people allay some of the fears they may have about COVID.
00:04:07.540But I mean, I got this originally from, again, David Zweig, who had been on the other day.
00:04:13.620And and it says that the study suggests almost half of those hospitalized, almost half with COVID-19 have mild or asymptomatic cases that what we're seeing is these folks in hospital with fairly mild symptoms.
00:04:29.940They've been admitted either for further observation on account of their comorbidities or because they reported feeling short of breath.
00:04:37.580But they're in a lot of them are in the hospital for something totally unrelated to COVID.
00:05:17.760Why would we incentivize hospitals to state the or why at a minimum?
00:05:22.800What wouldn't that be a big asterisk on every media report when we get these naked hospitalization numbers out?
00:05:29.820Yeah, I mean, I think in the early days of the pandemic, that's when the CARES Act was passed.
00:05:33.200The thought was, well, these hospitals are basically they're going bankrupt because people were so scared to go to the hospital for for actual things that they needed.
00:05:42.760Many, many hospitals around the country essentially were empty, waiting for COVID patients to never arrive in the early days of the epidemic.
00:05:50.840And I think partly it was it was aimed at addressing the the the the financial crisis caused by that sort of panic around around COVID.
00:05:59.820I mean, I think that was the initial impetus behind the behind the policy.
00:06:03.160But I think it has had this unfortunate effect of a sort of I mean, it's it's it's it's it's kind of a catastrophe, right?
00:06:08.840Like you have you have this well-intentioned policy to keep hospitals afloat, but it results essentially in overdiagnosis and induced panic.
00:06:18.220And I don't think people have thought through all of the downstream consequences when the policy is put in place.
00:06:23.660Well, and two other things to note about the study.
00:06:25.380OK, so nearly half of those hospitalized with COVID may have been admitted for another reason entirely or have had only a mild presentation of the disease.
00:06:36.480The increase was even bigger for vaccinated hospital patients, of whom 57 percent.
00:06:43.200So if you're keep in mind, so when you hear these hospitalization numbers, so 57 percent of those who have been vaccinated and are in the hospital with COVID had only mild or were asymptomatic entirely.
00:06:56.880They've been totally demonized by Biden and others.
00:06:59.800And this study found that 45 percent of the cases with the unvaccinated were mild or totally asymptomatic since January 21st.
00:07:09.240So it's once again, it's not as awful as they'd lead us to believe.
00:07:14.340But how do we square that, Doc, with headlines like this one?
00:07:17.640COVID hospitalizations hit crisis levels in southern ICUs.
00:07:22.200This is one of the lead stories right now in The New York Times.
00:07:24.640Hospitals in the southern U.S. are running dangerously low on space in intensive care units.
00:07:29.720One in four hospitals now reports more than 95 percent of the ICU beds occupied, up from one in five last month.
00:07:35.520Alabama, Texas, Florida talking about problems there.
00:07:38.480So how do we square those those two things?
00:07:41.220Well, I mean, I think that actually actually hospitalization numbers like in Florida with COVID are plummeting right now.
00:07:46.960So it's it's I think the HHS actually tracks this.
00:07:51.460You can go to a website called HHS protect and see what fraction of beds are occupied by COVID patients.
00:07:57.640And the headlines often don't square with what HHS is reporting.
00:08:01.060I'm not sure why the media aren't using those those those like official numbers to track it.
00:08:05.740I think there's another sort of a problem how people think about this.
00:08:09.960Hospitals are not single entities that operate simply by themselves.
00:08:13.600They're part of systems. So when one hospital gets crowded or one hospital gets stressed, patients get moved to other hospitals.
00:08:21.740They're part of a system. And the question isn't whether a particular hospital is overcrowded or stressed.
00:08:28.260The question is whether the system as a whole has capacity to address the health needs of a population.
00:08:33.720I think there have been times during the epidemic where some hospital systems have been pushed to the brink.
00:08:39.460But I don't think that as a whole of the American health care system has been overwhelmed by by by COVID patients.
00:08:47.820I think it's been stressed. And again, some some places near the brink.
00:08:52.520And in that sense, American health care system has actually operated better than many other health care systems around the world, which have been which have been have been overwhelmed with patients.
00:09:01.240I mean, this is a real disease. It's it for a subset of patients, it actually does result in the need for for ICU beds and and and and and hospitalization.
00:09:11.200I do think that the I mean, there are costs that in addition to the monetary costs, there are health costs also from overdiagnosis or over reliance on hospitalizations for asymptomatic COVID patients.
00:09:21.280Because there are, you know, those hospital beds could be used better used for other patients.
00:09:26.060What do you make of this? We ran a soundbite earlier this week from Dr. Fauci, who was asked by Sanjay Gupta about this study out of Israel, suggesting you have much better and longer lasting immunity if you've had COVID versus if you've just had a vaccine.
00:09:42.180And he said, you know, what are we to make of that? And Fauci basically said, oh, I don't know.
00:09:46.200I don't really know. It's a great question, Sanjay. I don't really know what to make of it.
00:09:50.300And it's infuriating because people don't want to lose their jobs who have had COVID who don't think they need a vaccine.
00:09:58.300And now they're going to thanks to Biden's executive order.
00:10:01.980And this is a question that needs to get answered. Right. As a result of that, in particular, for those who have had COVID.
00:10:07.420So the Israeli study showed that you could hold on, I want to get my facts in front of me, that natural immunity was 27 times more effective than vaccinated immunity in preventing symptomatic infections.
00:10:22.460But apparently the CDC put out its own study on natural immunity, and it suggested the opposite, that vaccinated immunity is 2.3 times better than natural immunity.
00:10:32.960So it appears we have conflicting studies. What do we make of that?
00:10:36.180So there isn't any conflict. So the question between the CDC study and the Israeli study is three groups, actually.
00:10:43.880People who have recovered from COVID and then got the vaccine, people who just got the vaccine, and people who just recovered from COVID.
00:10:52.360And the Israeli study suggests that if you just recover from COVID, you have a very, very high, sort of better protection against both infection and severe disease than people who just get the vaccine.
00:11:03.840Now, the vaccine actually is fantastic against severe disease.
00:11:06.780That actually is an important point. I think this is why the messaging is so messed up.
00:11:10.800Is there people, the public health people like Dr. Fauci are afraid that if you acknowledge the fact that natural, that recovery from COVID confers very strong protection against both infection and disease, severe disease, people won't get the vaccine.
00:11:25.660But I don't think people are like that. If you tell people the truth, which is that if you're older and you're vulnerable and you have not either been recovered from COVID or you have not got the vaccine, the vaccine is very, very important to protect you against severe disease.
00:11:38.080So, like with this, this CDC study is comparing the, I think, the people who have recovered from COVID alone versus the people who got recovered from COVID and got the vaccine.
00:11:49.080It's a little misleading because the vaccine-mediated immunity, there's two sort of things you should think about.
00:11:55.820One is, does it protect you against all infections? And the other is, does it protect you against severe disease?
00:12:00.660The vaccines protect you against severe disease for over a long period of time. There's a fantastic study of Qatar, for instance, that demonstrates this.
00:12:09.220But it does not protect you against all infections. After about maybe three, four, five months, the protection against all infections effectively goes away.
00:12:17.540And this is why you're seeing in many countries that are highly vaccinated, like Iceland or Israel, actually United States, you're seeing a resurgence of cases of COVID because vaccinated people can actually,
00:12:30.660still spread COVID. The vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine that makes it so that you know you can't get infected at all.
00:12:38.640What it does do is protect you against severe disease. So, that's why I've always been telling people to get vaccinated, especially if you're vulnerable, because that's what we really care about, right, Megan?
00:12:48.680We don't care. It's not so much, if I take the vaccine, I can protect myself against being hospitalized, against dying from COVID.
00:12:54.820I can worry about COVID much less. And the other thing about vaccine, about these facts is that it has implications for vaccine passports and vaccine mandates.
00:13:04.380The vaccine protects me from when I take it. After a couple of, after a few months, it no longer protects anybody else.
00:13:11.100The vaccine then is a private decision with private consequences and much less a public, a private decision with public consequences.
00:13:18.020There are many fewer public consequences than people make up for the vaccine.
00:13:21.820So, and I think that a lot of the thinking around vaccine passports and mandates is that it has some public implications.
00:13:27.060You need me to be vaccinated to protect you. But that's not what the scientific evidence is suggesting.
00:13:31.860Why are you saying after a few months? Because I thought that you could even, even two months out of getting your vaccines,
00:13:37.460you could still potentially get COVID and spread COVID.
00:13:41.360You would just always have the protection, you know, the greater level of protection against hospitalization or death.
00:13:45.940Yeah. So like the data out of Qatar, for instance, says that about three, the peaks, the protection against all infection peaks around three months after you've got the second dose.
00:13:53.880And it's about 70%. So it's still possible to, but there's still some protection against all infection at three months.
00:13:59.400But by six months or five months, it's all gone. There's like, there's almost no protection against infection alone from the vaccine.
00:14:07.380The vaccine still protects you against severe disease though. So that's, that's the, that's the, that's the basis for my recommendation to take the vaccine.
00:14:13.720I mean, do you see us going to a place where we acknowledge this, this, you know, the reality about people who've had COVID and natural immunity and stop swooping them into all these mandates?
00:14:23.800I'm against the mandates to begin with, but it seems to me like at least that group should be exempted.
00:14:30.620Yeah. I mean, I think, and I think tying the, the, the, these taking the vaccine to your job, especially it's so, when it's so irrational, you've had COVID, you've recovered.
00:14:40.140You're not, you're actually at less danger to someone who's just vaccinated alone to others.
00:14:45.740Cause you actually have recovering from COVID actually does protect you against subsequent infection.
00:14:50.700So for a long period of time, I think a longer than the vaccine.
00:14:53.980So I think, I think this is one of these things where like this is a huge failure of public health.
00:14:58.960Essentially we've demonized a large class of people.
00:15:01.380You know, the funny thing is a lot of those folks were essential workers.
00:15:05.080We said, okay, you guys are holding society up.
00:15:08.200They went out, did their job, kept society together, got COVID and recovered.
00:15:13.080And now we've turned on them because they're like rationally saying, well, why do I, do I really need the vaccine?
00:15:17.940I mean, I, and they don't trust public health, right?
00:15:19.980Because public health is sort of becloned itself.
00:15:22.920And so they're rationally saying, look, do I really need the vaccine when I've already recovered from COVID?
00:15:27.400And the, and public health basically says, oh no, no, no, there's no such thing as, as, as recover as, as immunity to COVID after you've recovered.
00:15:35.460When public health denies basic science results, it's, it's no surprise that people start mistrusting public health.
00:15:44.120No, I was just going to say, you're right.
00:15:45.180Cause these people, they've been working with patients in the hospital setting.
00:15:49.240And the reason that people felt comfortable with that is because they knew that a lot of these folks had COVID and weren't going to get it and weren't at risk.
00:15:55.760And now we're going to turn around and say, not only must you get this vaccine that you don't need, but if you don't, you're fired and then you'll lose your medical benefits, your paycheck.
00:16:07.880So doctors and nurses now they're going to be the ones without health, without a health coverage, without a paycheck, because they actually do see the science.
00:16:15.200And even though we trusted them for months to be in the hospital setting, taking care of patients.
00:16:19.040Now we've just decided we trust no more.
00:16:22.660I mean, I think you actually bring up a really important additional point, just to tie back to what we talked about earlier.
00:16:28.980If a lot of nurses who basically decide, I don't want the vaccine.
00:16:33.500So I'm going to, I'm just going to go on.
00:16:35.260Essentially, I'm going to say, I'm not going to take it and then get fired or let go.
00:16:39.280Well, you're going to have staffing shortages at hospitals.
00:16:41.560It's going to actually make treating COVID patients and other patients more difficult.
00:16:44.940I don't think this policy has been well thought through and it's going to undermine, I think it already has undermined confidence in public health and also in vaccines generally.
00:16:53.360Because people are saying, well, if people, if they're, if they're doing this to me with this vaccine, well, what about other vaccines?
00:16:59.340And that's really unfortunate because vaccines are probably the single most important invention, medical intervention I think I know I've ever learned about.
00:17:08.640The MMR vaccines, the DPV vaccines is really important for health of children, of the populations at large.
00:17:14.860And they've public confidence in vaccines, which used to be, you know, the anti-vax movement used to be this fringe movement.
00:17:22.620Now, what, what public health has done is it's turned anti-vax movement into a mainstream movement by this denial of natural immunity, by like this coerciveness.
00:17:31.720I think I really recommend that public health go back to sort of the more compassionate ways that it maybe once had.
00:17:38.080Respect people, tell people the truth about what the science is actually saying.
00:17:43.440People can sense that and you'll just get much better results.
00:17:46.180Yeah, like they're doing in the UK, like they're doing in Israel, which is where we now have to look for real information because our government likes to lie to us, likes to mislead us and likes to treat us like we're two.
00:17:56.000Listen, we appreciate your straight shooting right from the beginning.
00:17:59.200Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, great to see you again.
00:18:30.400Welcome back, everyone, to The Megyn Kelly Show.
00:18:32.660Well, in recent weeks, we have seen a mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan during the debacle of a pullout that Biden orchestrated,
00:18:39.220suspended from Instagram and having her Facebook page shut down for speaking out against President Biden.
00:18:46.860And then just more recently, Chase Banks sent a letter to General Michael Flynn's wife telling her they were canceling her credit card because they consider her a, quote, reputational risk.
00:18:56.220Both companies later backed off and did a 180 after it became public.
00:19:33.140And in like a couple of years, the company was worth billions.
00:19:36.840And you were suddenly basking in money and thought, what to yourself about your journey as an American citizen?
00:19:43.820Well, look, I was actually steeped in building a company for the first six years.
00:19:47.560You're going to build something from the ground up.
00:19:48.860You don't have much of a chance to pay attention to much else.
00:19:51.920And by 2019, the company was running on its own two feet.
00:19:54.340And as I sort of came up for air, I noticed a trend that really bothered me, Megan, which was all of my peers, elite investors, CEOs, et cetera, around 2019, suddenly started issuing carbon copy statements about how they were now not just going to serve their shareholders, but they were going to also serve societal interests and all stakeholders and disempowered communities.
00:20:14.600And on the face of it, there's nothing objectionable about it.
00:20:17.300But it smacked of a certain inauthenticity to me that really bothered me.
00:20:21.560And Milton Friedman had criticized the same trend of stakeholder capitalism years ago, thinking that was going to make businesses run less efficiently.
00:20:28.240But that wasn't quite the thing that bothered me.
00:20:30.400So I spent some time reflecting on it.
00:20:32.000The thing that really bothered me, Megan, was the idea that people like me, people who occupied seats of corporate power, were suddenly going to exercise power not just in the marketplace of products, but in the marketplace of ideas.
00:20:43.740And to me, that was a real violation of democracy.
00:20:46.240It belied the vision of democracy that I thought defined this country, where every person's voice and vote counted equally, whether they're my neighbor here in Ohio or whether they were my neighbor in the corner office of the suite where I used to work in my suite in Manhattan.
00:21:00.220And I think that that principle, I think, was what was at stake that really bothered me at my core.
00:21:04.840So I wrote one op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about it.
00:21:08.200And that ended up getting blown out into a book.
00:21:10.780And that led me on the journey that ultimately led me to step down as CEO this January so that I could really speak freely about these issues.
00:21:17.420Because if there's one thing that I learned, I wasn't actually free to do that while I was the CEO of a major company.
00:21:22.180I really needed to separate my voice as a citizen from my voice as a CEO.
00:21:29.940Because maybe you would have felt differently about stakeholder capitalism or people, you know, these companies trying to sort of take more political viewpoints.
00:21:37.900If you'd seen a greater diversity of thought, but they've all gone one way.
00:21:42.540And anybody who deigns to go in a more conservative direction with their viewpoints or whatever becomes a national news story, becomes the scourge of the media, whether it's the old version of Chick-fil-A or SoulCycle.
00:21:54.440Having been outed for, you know, doing some fundraising for President Trump, the CEO, you get punished if you come out the one way and you get lauded only if you come out on the left and in support of these woke ideals.
00:22:07.780We live in a moment with not a monopoly on products in the marketplace of products, but with a monopoly on ideas.
00:22:13.340And whether you call it a monopoly or an ideological cartel, that's where we live in corporate America.
00:22:18.500Now, I don't want to portray myself as some kind of victim.
00:22:20.520I've done perfectly fine for myself in the system of American capitalism.
00:22:23.760I'm able to not have to worry about putting food on the dinner table in a way that so many others are when they're afraid of being able to speak out.
00:22:30.560And so I felt with that privilege came some responsibility to be able to speak with candor from the inside.
00:22:37.320If I was spouting out left-leaning views like CEOs like Mark Benioff tend to do, maybe that would benefit my business.
00:22:42.960In my case, I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this January, making the case against big tech censorship, making the case that they ought to be treated.
00:22:50.040I think you were familiar with this op-ed.
00:22:51.300They ought to be treated as state actors when they're acting in coordination with the state.
00:22:55.480A relatively technical point that I wrote with a former law professor of mine.
00:22:59.320Yet after I wrote that, I kid you not, Megan, in the wake of January 6th, the country was in such a heated place that three of the advisors to my company actually resigned that week on the back of me publishing that op-ed.
00:23:10.200But to me, that was a wake-up call, telling me that actually, if I was going to speak in an uninhibited way as a citizen, even though it was completely separate from my capacity as a CEO, it risked having backlash for my business.
00:23:21.640That's part of why I thought the responsible choice to make was to be able to separate in my own identity what I think America needs to separate in its identity.
00:23:31.160Separate one's commercial activities from one's civic duties.
00:23:33.880And right now, I've taken a break, in large part a break of my commercial activities, to be able to carry out what I see as a civic duty, which is to be able to speak out with candor in an unabashed, unapologetic way about what I think of as one of the challenging issues of our time.
00:23:48.360The way in which this new postmodern dogma has really infected one institution after another, starting in corporate America, but extending to our universities and beyond as well.
00:23:56.840I understand it. I understand it. I feel like people like journalists like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Barry Weiss, yours truly, all of us who had been, I think, much more reticent about sharing opinions or sort of making cultural issues more personal, have done something similar to what you've been doing, which is to speak out in a way we normally wouldn't have, because this is the issue of our time.
00:24:20.380I mean, this really this culture war goes to the very heart of what America is and ought to be, and it requires extraordinary action.
00:24:28.000You've been very brave. I'm not going to embarrass you by telling everybody what you've done, but I just want them to know that privately I've seen you help a lot of people who get unfairly targeted, both with your time and with your dollars.
00:24:38.580And so I've been your big admirer. But I think that you raise a good point about what could be done to stop what's happening with big tech, big tech and its censorship.
00:24:48.780And so before we keep going down the woke line, I'd love to stop and just spend a minute on that January op ed, which I loved.
00:24:54.020And we covered on this podcast was you and Jed Rubenfeld, who was your professor at Yale Law School.
00:24:58.080He's married to Amy Chua, Tiger mom, who I love as well. They're getting unfairly targeted right now at Yale.
00:25:02.760It's BS. But and she's fighting back, which is awesome to see. But you and he wrote this very powerful op ed about why Facebook shouldn't be allowed to censor anybody with a conservative viewpoint from Trump on down, why it's not appropriate for Amazon to kick off parlor, why we should be treating them, even though they're private actors and therefore not covered by the First Amendment, which only covers a state actor.
00:25:24.040Why we should be treating them like they are state actors covered by the First Amendment legally and otherwise, which would remove their ability to discriminate based on viewpoint.
00:25:33.560Can you explain what you what you wrote?
00:25:36.200Yeah, sure. So conventional wisdom definitely says, Megan, that private actors are free to decide what does and doesn't show up on their websites when they're behaving as private actors.
00:25:44.740But the essence of what's actually happening today is a little bit different than that. You have private actors working hand in glove with big government to determine what views can and can't be represented today is that the party in power today, the Democratic Party is effectively using a combination of threats and inducements to be able to get private companies to do through the back door what government cannot directly do through the front door under the Constitution, namely to censor political speech directly.
00:26:10.320And so the party in power says that if you don't take down hate speech and misinformation, as we the government define it, then we're going to come after you as private companies, we're going to regulate you, we're going to break you up, we're going to make it aggressive, we're going to make it swift.
00:26:21.920Almost all of those are exact quotes from congressional hearings over the course of the last year.
00:26:26.540And then these big tech titans do exactly what government has threatened them to do when government also wraps around them the inducement, a special shield of immunity, Section 230 immunity, that preempts any state action at the state level against these companies through the private tort system.
00:26:41.100So that combination of carrots and sticks, the threats and inducements, which now have taken on a new form, even over the course of the last 12 months, Megan, of direct coordination, willful participation in a joint activity between the government and private companies to be able to censor COVID misinformation as they define it, that creates state action in disguise.
00:26:59.380And the core case we made in that op-ed, Megan, was that if it is state action in disguise, then actually the Constitution still applies.
00:27:07.760It's a relatively technical argument, draws on a lot of Supreme Court precedents in favor of finding state action when the government induces private parties to do something independently.
00:27:16.120There's a Supreme Court case called Brentwood, which says that there's one of three bases for finding state action in the action of a private company.
00:27:22.380It could be either threats made by the government or inducements by the government or, as the term I used before, willful participation in a joint activity.
00:27:31.940Ironically, in the case of big tech censorship today, we have not just one of those conditions, but all three of those conditions where these companies are definitely responsive to threats.
00:28:07.640But yes, I think that's that's that's the spirit of what he's getting at.
00:28:10.300I believe I have reason to believe that he might have drawn from the principles in our op-ed.
00:28:14.820I actually wrote another op-ed under my sole name a little bit later.
00:28:17.720You know, I wouldn't say critiquing the Trump lawsuit, but pointing out some of the ways in which it fell short, but the ways in which he still has a path to victory if he actually makes the claims in the right way.
00:28:26.540And I think that if he does make his claims in the right way, it could be one of the defining cases of our time.
00:28:31.620Forty-fifth president of the United States silenced.
00:28:34.140You know, Herbert Hoover once actually said this is about consolidation in a different industry, the radio and telecommunications industry, where he said that no president should be stopped from being able to communicate to the people by a private actor who sits in between.
00:28:45.340I mean, he is rolling over in his grave.
00:28:47.260I believe he was the thirty third president.
00:28:49.040Now, the forty fifth president takes his case to court.
00:28:51.100Actually, I think it could be one of the historic cases of our time.
00:28:53.540The asterisk to that is he actually needs to argue it with discipline in the right way.
00:28:57.340And to me, the jury's still out on whether he's able to do that.
00:28:59.820But but I think he has the potential to actually even make the case that Section 230 is unconstitutional as applied to protecting cases, big tech behavior in cases like that against him.
00:29:11.920And just just explain Section 230, because not everybody knows what that is.
00:29:17.240So Section 230 is basically a statute that has two parts.
00:29:20.540I'm going to focus on the second part of it, what's called 230 C2, which effectively says that these companies have no immunity under state law, have no liability under state law for removing content.
00:29:33.600And here's text from the statute, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
00:29:39.220So that's Congress saying there's constitutionally protected material that we can't, as Congress, legislate out, that we, the government, can't ban, but that private companies who take down that content will be immunized in return for doing so.
00:29:53.980Their vision, Megan, was actually applying that doctrine to soft core pornography, certain types of pornography that might have been constitutionally protected under the First Amendment that Congress still wanted to deputize these private companies to be unafraid in taking down.
00:30:07.180Now you have statutes coming up in states like Florida that effectively pass non-discrimination statutes that say that actually social media companies cannot engage in political discrimination online.
00:30:17.500And what you have is a debate that says that actually Section 230 preempts that law, that is, federal law overrides state law to say that actually the federal law wins when the two are in conflict, that that law is now actually on hold.
00:30:29.660It's being stayed by a district court judge when big tech pushed back and said that Section 230 would preempt that statute.
00:30:35.420Well, one of the cases I would make is that Section 230 is arguably unconstitutional if it preempts a state statute that reinforces a constitutional right.
00:30:45.300So those are the kinds of arguments that I think President Trump could take all the way to the Supreme Court.
00:30:49.520He could, that's under Florida law, but he could make it a part of the claim of the federal case that he's bringing against, against the big tech titans through supplemental jurisdiction.
00:30:57.740It's so great. It's so rich. If you, if you think about what DeSantis and the Floridians did, they sort of made big tech own its bias.
00:31:04.860It's like, no, you can't discriminate against political viewpoints. And the, and big tech was basically like, well, we want to, and we're allowed to, and we're going to continue to, because we're allowed to, thanks to 230.
00:31:14.600I mean, that is what they're doing. It's, it's the same thing as your complaint about, you know, what you've seen. And when it comes to stakeholder capitalism, as long as your bias goes one way, you're fine.
00:31:25.820The 230 bias that's being executed by these big tech companies is always 90% of the time one way. It stifles the conservative viewpoint, not the other.
00:31:35.780It is. And Megan, if I may, for a second, just because it's really topical, a lot of the liberal outrage against the recent Texas abortion law was the fact that it actually deputized private actors to do through the backdoor, through the civil system, what the government could not directly do under Roe v. Wade as a doctrine.
00:31:51.820Well, if you're on the left and you find something offensive about that, in the case of the Texas anti-abortion statute, then I think that there's no basis for you not to see the same issue in spades with what the government is actually doing with respect to restrictions on free speech.
00:32:05.560If you think that whatever you think of Roe v. Wade, if you think it was a constitutional right to be able to get an abortion because of a, you know, I think a poorly decided case, but let's put that to one side.
00:32:14.980You ought to agree that the first amendment of the constitution of the United States can't be evaded by the government delegating its dirty work to private actors there either.
00:32:21.120Yet that's exactly what's happening every day.
00:32:23.020And so it's actually a tool that could be dangerously used by both sides.
00:32:26.500I don't think this is a liberal or a conservative issue.
00:32:28.640We do not want to live in a society where the government is able to sidestep the constitutional constraints by deputizing private mercenaries to do its bidding instead.
00:32:36.820And whether you're on the left or the right, I think you should see a problem with that.
00:32:39.640And here's like getting back to the other sort of track, which is this stakeholder capitalism and how it's manifesting, because corporate America is just one of the lanes that's been taken over by the woke.
00:32:49.520You know, we've seen it in sports. We've seen it in media. We've seen it in Hollywood.
00:32:52.120But the surrender of corporate America to this was, I have to say, a little surprising to me.
00:32:56.140I thought they'd have more backbone. I thought they'd be more like the Michael Jordan, you know, conservatives buy sneakers to Republicans buy sneakers to, you know, they haven't.
00:33:04.320They've surrendered. I mean, they have taken the knee when it comes to these woke activists who try to tell them you will be anti-racist or else.
00:33:10.700And they've gone along with it. And one of the points you make in your book, Woke Inc. is it's a lie. It's a scam.
00:33:18.460It's a defining scam of our time, Megan.
00:33:20.560And it's not so surprising to me when I got my first job out of college right before the 2008 financial crisis at a hedge fund in New York City.
00:33:30.060I had a front row seat to the 2008 crisis and the aftermath. But the hedge fund I worked for was mentioned in the big short.
00:33:35.960You know, I was kind of pretty close to what happened then and the aftermath of it.
00:33:40.360And I'll tell you, after the 08 crisis, what happened was corporate America was really scared of the Occupy Wall Street left,
00:33:47.400the newly nascent ascendant movement in the left that wanted to reorder economic power structures in this country,
00:33:52.960take money from those wealthy corporations, redistribute it to poor people.
00:33:56.000Agree or not, that is what the old left had to say. But there was this birth of this new woke left around the same time
00:34:02.940that said, actually, the real problem wasn't economic injustice or poverty quite.
00:34:07.720It was racial injustice and misogyny and bigotry and so on.
00:34:11.800And that presented the opportunity of a generation for big business in this country to go from being possibly the bad guys
00:34:17.820to being the good guys if they just said the right things.
00:34:21.420Applaud diversity and inclusion. Put token minorities on your boards.