The Twitter Files are the grift that keeps on giving. This week, Derek and Julian look at Alex Berenson's recent appearance on Russell Brand's Rumble channel to talk about the conspiracies that only exists in their heads—and the misinformation they share along the way. Show NotesThe Pandemic’s Wrongest ManRussell Brand: Elites Are Using Liberal Ideas to Justify InequalityHow anti-vaxxers monetize misinformationURGENT: A federal database offers more evidence the mRNA Covid jabs may have serious cardiovascular risksFor red and blue America, a glaring divide in COVID-19 death rates persists 2 years laterScathing evaluation of Sweden's COVID response reveals 'failures' to control the virusLarge, real-world study finds COVID-19 vaccination more effective than natural immunity in protecting against all causes of death, hospitalization and emergency department visits
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Well, Derek, each time we think we're finished with the so-called Twitter files, they pull us back in!
Here we are, again, to discuss Alex Berenson's appearance this time on Russell Brand's show, Continuing the Theme, where he discussed his much-hyped Twitter thread drop.
I know you've been paying attention to the first of these trumped-up new GOP-led congressional hearings on the Twitter files, of course.
What I've noticed is that these have been met by some left-leaning indie media figures joining in now on the right-wing chorus that what we're seeing is evidence of appalling partisan government censorship, of free speech. And this is usually accompanied by the
fashionable poo-pooing of Mueller's report on what he called sweeping and systemic Russian
interference in the 2016 election, along with the 34 people indicted, some of whom were key
Trump cronies.
And there's also often this outright dismissal of the open letter from 51 American intelligence officials.
These were the ones who assessed the Hunter Biden laptop story as highly likely to be Russian disinformation.
For us, this dovetails with the intensely data-driven work of the Center for Countering Digital Hate in identifying the disinformation dozen and the network of pandemic profiteering, which all, of course, rides on the phenomenon described by Tristan Harris in the Social Dilemma documentary, as well as Facebook whistleblower revelations from Frances Haugen, not to mention how the proliferation of the big lie led to January 6th.
So, The misinformation crisis is real and it's complicated and it's messy and it goes beyond quaint 20th century free speech absolutism.
But I'll get off my pedestal right now.
I'll get off my soapbox.
Twitter recognized their blocking of the New York Post account and the Hunter Biden story as a mistake, and they apologized within the span of two weeks.
And that was all in time for the 2020 election.
And the drama they created probably made the story even more visible.
So, as we get into this episode, we're going to be reviewing clips of Alex Berenson talking to Russell Brand.
Prior to the interview with Berenson, Russell talks to a correspondent he has visiting Davos for the WEF annual meeting.
And the really hard-hitting journalism here consists entirely in a caricaturing of Klaus Schwab by doing impressions of a comical German accent and decrying the pro-vaccine and anti-disinformation sessions at the conference on the basis of them perpetuating the so-called mainstream narrative.
When we get to Berenson, he starts off talking about how he sued Twitter successfully for banning him in the summer of 2021, and he got a San Francisco judge to force pre-Elon Musk Twitter to reinstate his account.
But why was he originally kicked off?
Well, that's not entirely true, which I'll get to, and I'm going to answer the question of why it was kicked off.
But first, let me point out the shitshow day in Congress last Wednesday, which you hinted at above, which is when the Republicans tried to hold former Twitter employees to account, only to discover that Twitter had actually been saving the Trump administration's requests To censor posts.
And they had been in communications with the Trump administration, not with the Democrats.
So once again, the GOP proves to be guilty of what they accuse the Democrats of.
And also, let me add, just watching Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene up there grilling employees about their personal accounts.
I mean, this is what taxpayer money is going to.
It is so depressing that these people are representing us in any capacity.
And even though all of this is out in the open and people can watch C-SPAN or the news to find out this information, I doubt it's going to change anyone's minds.
Now, as a prelude to this latest Rumble video, And let me point out that for all the take-down-the-corporate-globalist talk that Russell does, I find it rather humorous that on this specific episode we're covering today, he has a new sponsor, and that sponsor is McDonald's.
I'm loving it!
And I kid you not, Russell says, I think it's healthy, before he pivots into this, watching him stop To placate McDonald's in the middle of his talk about how everyone's conspiring against you, you can't write better parodies.
You really can't.
All right, let's get to Berenson.
I want to do a 101 because listeners might not know about his history.
He was born in New York City and he grew up in my home country of New Jersey.
He's a Yale grad and he has a degree in history and economics.
I want to point out that he does not have a degree in epidemiology or any sort of sciences, because that's going to play into his takes on the vaccines.
Now, he started his career out as a business reporter at the Denver Post in 94, and he briefly worked for The Street, which was An early financial news website that was founded by Jim Cramer.
Anyone involved in finance at all knows who Jim Cramer is.
He was very early on in adopting the internet.
He's also a charlatan and a huckster, as is well known.
And that was around 96 that Berenson worked for him.
And then he became a business investigative reporter for the New York Times in 99.
Now, in the mid-aughts, he covered the pharmaceutical industry and dangerous drugs for the New York Times, and this might have rightly informed him about the problems of healthcare and pharmaceutical lobbying.
So there is some background there to be skeptical of this industry.
And then he had a career pivot.
He left The Times in 2010 to become a full-time novelist.
This is important, in my opinion.
Beginning in 2006, he started publishing and writing spy novels.
His first was called The Faithful Spy.
It became a New York Times bestseller, as many of his books did, but this was, I believe, the only one to go to number one.
Now in this book, his protagonist is a CIA agent named John Wells who ends up becoming his character through all of his dozen spy novels.
And John Wells was working undercover inside of Al-Qaeda.
And in the book, he interacted with one Al-Qaeda scientist who's growing a plague bacteria that he wants to spread across the United States.
Wells becomes infected himself, but of course, as these novels go, he emerges as the hero after killing the infected terrorists and thwarting their plans.
So, I wonder if this contrarian author has been getting high on his own supply, as he accuses the CDC and government agencies of in some of the clips that we'll hear in a little while.
That's his exact phrase, and that is pretty fascinating, that he may have cast himself now in the starring role in one of his own stories.
Yes, exactly.
And he continued working on spy novels with a lot of success, and then in 2019 he wrote a book called Tell Your Children the Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.
Now, I don't know the totality of Berenson's feelings on cannabis or drugs in general, but let's just say that a number of scientists came out after this book was published because he drew many inappropriate conclusions.
I mean, a hundred scholars and clinicians published an open letter criticizing his book after it was published.
Mainstream narrative.
Mainstream narrative.
Now, I had to laugh as the researcher he claimed to cite about cannabis causing psychosis and violence is named Ziva Cooper.
She happens to be an old friend of mine from New York City.
She worked at Columbia back when I knew her.
She's now at UCLA and is a leading cannabis researcher in this country.
But she said that her work that Berenson cites had found a correlation, not causation, between cannabis use and schizophrenia.
And this was based on research That looked at how genetics impact people with schizophrenia and cannabis use.
But the way that Berenson framed it was that cannabis went to schizophrenia, not genetics, right?
That's how he cited it.
So again, here's the contrarian historian fudging medical studies well before COVID was even a thing.
So you have his spy novel where he's the hero, you know, stopping the plague in America, and now you have someone who's A former New York Times reporter who's consciously fudging studies, and again, all these clinicians came out about it.
Now, that brings us up to the pandemic.
This is when, early on in the pandemic, Derek Thompson, who's a fantastic staff writer at The Atlantic, called Berenson the pandemic's wrongest man.
And that's the name of The Atlantic article that I'm going to cite some claims from now, and I'll link to it in the show notes.
This was published in April in 2021.
So in 2020, Berenson claimed that the media was overestimating the risk of the pandemic.
Obviously he was wrong.
In May of 2020, he was signed to host a Fox News TV show called, I kid you not, COVID Contrarian on Fox's streaming service.
