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Aug. 26, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:01:04
Joe Rogan Experience #1864 - Alex Berenson
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a
alex berenson
02:05:04
j
joe rogan
50:42
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a
anthony fauci
00:46
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unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Smell that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's vindication.
You are the sweet smell of vindication.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Not yet, my friend, not yet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Not yet, but it's definitely in the air.
Has there ever been a person that has gone to court and got back on Twitter besides you?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
There has not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's pretty impressive.
That's pretty impressive.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
There's more common.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There's more?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So explain the process.
So you were...
What was the exact definition of what they kicked you off for?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Are we live?
unidentified
Yeah, we're live.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, good, good.
We're rolling.
Okay.
All right.
So it was almost exactly this time last year, Joe.
It was August 28th, 2021. I wrote a tweet that began, It doesn't stop infection or transmission.
And they banned me.
I went on to say, this is not a vaccine or don't think of it as a vaccine.
Think of it as a therapeutic, meaning a drug that has side effects and that you have to dose in advance of illness.
And then the last line was, and we want to mandate it?
Insanity.
Okay.
I would say that that's been pretty well vindicated by events.
unidentified
That's vindication.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So they banned me.
They said that was my fifth strike and that I was not allowed to tweet anymore and my account was not available to anybody.
All the previous tweets were gone.
The 300,000 people, too bad.
So I sued them in December.
And it gets interesting and tricky.
So other people have sued Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and Wikipedia, actually all these companies, and said, you know, you've banned us.
I just want to be able to use your platform.
I haven't done anything wrong.
And the companies say, we can do whatever we want.
We can ban you.
We can attach labels to your tweets, this, that, and the other.
And there's a law called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
It's a federal law from 1998, I want to say, maybe 96, that basically was intended for two purposes.
Purpose one was We don't want these companies to get sued over stuff that people are saying on them.
So in other words, I go on and I say, you know, terrible things, defamatory things about Joe Rogan.
Or I say terrible things about my ex-wife.
Whatever.
Or I say, you know, go shoot the president.
Whatever it is that I'm saying, I'm saying something that's harassing or hateful or illegal.
We can't expect...
A bulletin board or Facebook or Twitter or whoever to police all that stuff.
There's too much of it.
It's not fair.
So we're going to give them complete protection from that.
And that makes total sense, by the way.
You can't have these people policing everything that's uploaded or downloaded.
It's not within their capability.
The second idea was we want these folks to be able...
To give their users a better experience.
And so we're going to give them some protection, limited protection, to moderate the content that's posted.
Meaning, let's say I'm posting tons of pornography, and I'm posting it to a Christian website that's advertising itself as a family-friendly place.
The idea was the 230 is going to allow me to take action against that user in good faith for harassing or objectionable content.
So I'm going to be allowed to ban stuff or to age restrict it.
And that was really intended when you look back at the statute for pornography especially.
Okay.
What happened was the companies, with the help of the Ninth Circuit, which is the federal judges in California, which is where most of these companies are based, California and the West Coast, managed to get...
Bigger protection.
And this really, this was happening for a while and then it really happened in 2015. There was this case where a group of Sikhs, you know, an Indian minority group, the government of India went to Facebook and said, we don't like these people.
They're protesting against us.
You got to ban them.
You got to ban their group website.
And Facebook said, okay.
And pulled them.
They sued Facebook.
They said, this is not right.
And by the way, this was a classic example of a government not wanting dissent.
The Indian government didn't want to deal with this group, so they told Facebook to ban it.
The Ninth Circuit said, that 230 protection that allows you Complete immunity, if Alex Berenson says, you know, here's naked pictures of my ex-girlfriend, that also allows you to ban whoever you want, whenever you want.
They called it first party, third party.
They said there's no distinction in the statute between the immunity you get for this defamation that Alex might be doing versus your own decision to ban these people who don't want to be banned.
And ever since then, 230 has been a beast.
And every time somebody has sued, the companies have said, Look at Sikhs versus Facebook.
We win.
And that's basically been how it's been.
They've been allowed to do whatever they want.
And so, by the way, I know I'm not even talking about my case yet, but this is the legal background.
So sometimes when conservatives say, hey, we need to ban 230, we need to repeal 230, That's actually not true.
You just need to have the courts interpret 230 the right way, which is you don't get to sue Facebook or Twitter for these defamatory or harassing or illegal posts that other people are putting up.
But at the same time, they shouldn't have blanket protection for their own decisions.
So they've had the best of both worlds.
They call themselves publishers when they want.
And as a publisher, I have the protection to publish who I like, not publish who I like.
But I'm not a publisher from the point of view.
I'm more like a telephone company if somebody does something bad over my airwaves.
Does that make sense?
That's how they've gotten.
unidentified
Okay.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Okay.
All right.
So, fast forward.
Berenson sues.
Berenson v.
Twitter.
Here's what I had.
I had...
I had emails from a guy inside Twitter named Brandon Borman, who is a pretty senior executive.
He was their vice president of communications, telling me explicitly, hey, we know what you're saying.
We are in favor of encouraging debate about COVID. That was in 2020. And then in early 2021, he even went on to say, we're encouraging debate about the vaccines.
And we don't think you're doing anything wrong.
So I said...
Not only are they violating my rights as an American and the California constitution actually has additional free speech protections and I think they're violating those too.
They're specifically, they made these promises to me.
They modified their contract with me.
And there's a broader point that's important to everybody.
When they say we have a COVID misinformation policy or we have a election misinformation policy or, you know, pretty soon they'll probably have a climate change misinformation policy, whatever these policies are that govern what you can and can't say on their platform.
They have to follow those.
So even if they say their contract – and, you know, if you sign up for Twitter, you know, you click on something at the end and you've signed a contract with them basically.
And that contract is written by their lawyers.
It's very favorable to them, very unfavorable to you as the user.
They're modifying that.
Okay?
That was our argument.
They are modifying that when they put out a COVID-19 misinformation policy.
They don't have to have a COVID-19 misinformation policy.
They could say, hey, we're Twitter.
We're going to ban you whenever we want for whatever reason.
But they did have that policy.
And our argument was they have to now follow it.
And the judge, his name is Judge William Alsup.
He was in California.
And he is not a Trump appointee.
He's not a George Bush appointee.
He is a Bill Clinton appointee known for being a smart guy who kind of plays it down the middle.
He, in April of this year, just a couple months ago, said, I think Berenson's got a case.
I'm going to allow this lawsuit to proceed.
I'm not going to dismiss it.
And that was a major event, you know, in sort of the point of view of internet law.
Because, again, even though I did have these communications with Borman that other people don't have, this broader issue...
Of whether or not these platforms, when they tell you, we're going to have this strike policy, we're going to do these things, do they have to follow that?
That's the question.
Again, if the argument is, I'm Twitter or I'm Facebook, I'm all powerful, I operate under 230, and I'm going to kick you off whenever they want, they've got to tell people that.
Instead, it's like, well, as long as you play within the rules and you color by our guidelines, it's okay.
And then they don't even do that.
Now you can sue them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So you sue and then did they settle?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So I sue in December.
In April, we get this ruling.
And the judge doesn't allow everything to proceed, which from my point of view is sort of unfortunate.
He didn't allow my big claims on the First Amendment or my California claims to proceed.
And frankly, I still think there's a chance...
Whether it's me or, you know, it's not me, but whether it's somebody else going forward might be able to have a good claim on California constitutional law.
Because, again, Twitter is based in California and the California Constitution is even more protective of free speech than the U.S. Constitution.
It actually says, for example, the way it's been interpreted in California, the California Constitution, if you own a mall...
You have to let people come in and protest.
Even if they're, you know, like from the Vietnam War on, even though that's a private facility, you, because you're running this place that's open to the public and that a lot of people who, you know, go to, it becomes almost a public facility for the purposes of the California Constitution.
And my argument, my lawyer's argument is Twitter is...
Twitter is a huge public space.
It's referred to itself as a public square many times.
It should be forced to do the same thing under California law.
And if the federal law, if 230 blocks that, now we have an issue of, you know, does the federal law go too far and sort of hurt First Amendment protections?
But put all that aside.
Judge didn't allow any of that stuff.
But what he did allow was my breach of contract claim to proceed, and he did something else, Joe.
He said, this guy's going to get discovery.
So discovery is a legal term.
It means that the two parties have to exchange information in a civil lawsuit.
And it's actually kind of amazing, if you think about this, that this is how this works.
The lawyers for Twitter were going to go to Twitter and say, you've got to give us all your documents where Alex Berenson is named, whether that's internal or whether that's Pfizer emailing about him or whatever it is.
And we're going to hand that over to his lawyers so he can help sue us.
And I had to do the same thing.
I mean, for me, it's not a big deal.
You know, it's like me and my phone or whatever.
And then he said, the judge said...
I would get to depose two Twitter executives.
And that could be anybody.
He didn't put any limits on it.
So that could have been like Jack Dorsey.
Okay?
So if you're a big company, that's a nightmare for you.
You do not want that.
You do not want to have to go through discovery.
You do not want to have to go through depositions.
You just want...
You want a lawsuit to go away.
Okay?
So...
And my position was...
Look, the judge gave me this stuff.
I'm not backing off.
I want those depositions.
I want this discovery.
And I want the right to make it public.
And so Twitter, I did not think we were going to be able to settle.
But Twitter and I, in June, we had this long mediation, and I can't sort of talk about how that went specifically, but I can tell you that at the end of, well, July 6th, they reinstated me to the platform.
We settled.
I guess you could argue they didn't apologize, but they acknowledged they were wrong to have taken me off last August.
And, and this is the really good part, since then I've been publishing internal documents where Twitter says that they came under pressure from the federal government to ban me.
So, this to me, so people said when I settled, and it's funny, it was actually people on the right, they said, this guy, he took all this money to sue Twitter.
He didn't care.
He just wanted to get back on the platform.
He just wanted to be able to tweet.
He wanted some money from Twitter.
That's what he got.
He promised you he'd get discovery.
He didn't get it.
Nothing's ever going to happen with this.
Well...
Screw those people too, okay?
Because I've now been publishing documents that show that the White House wanted me banned.
And that is the biggest part of all of this, okay?
That's where the story is going now.
That people inside the White House...
And this is Twitter employees talking to each other about a meeting that they had in April of 2021 before Twitter had ever done anything to me where they said that the White House said, why is this guy still allowed to tweet?
And at that time, they were saying to each other, these Twitter employees, we think he's fine.
We don't think he's doing anything wrong.
Well, you fast forward to July of 2021, just over a year ago, and Joe Biden says anybody who debates the vaccines, if social media platforms allow that, they are, quote unquote, killing people.
And then less or barely a month after that, four hours after that, I should say, Twitter puts a strike against me.
They begin the process of deplatforming me.
Six weeks later, they deplatform me.
So my position—and I'm going to sue.
I've said I'm going to sue the White House, and I'm going to sue a guy named Andy Slavitt, who's named in these documents, who was working at the White House at the time— My position is that there are people inside the Biden administration who violated my rights as an American citizen, violated my First Amendment rights, tried to get Twitter to suppress me personally.
That's where this is going.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And what was their basis?
Like when they said, did they have a very specific thing that they were accusing you of where they wanted you to remove from Twitter?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's not clear from the documents that they had anything specific.
They, I mean, the term they use is misinformation.
So vaccine misinformation.
And in fact, they specifically said, again, this is according to these Twitter employees who are talking about this meeting, that I was influencing persuadable people.
So you got to remember.
You've got to remember what the landscape was last year.
The beginning of the year, January through June, it was, hey, we're going to vaccinate a lot of people.
This is going to go away.
And yeah, there's people like Berenson who are out there talking about this VAERS data and they're talking about side effects and they're a pain in our ass.
But ultimately, all those mouth-breathing anti-vaxxers, they're going to see their buddies die and they're going to see how well this thing works.
And we're going to get 90 or 95% of the country vaccinated.
Okay, we're going to win.
And so there was pressure from the White House, but they felt they were in a really good position.
A lot of people have been vaccinated, and it did look like the vaccines worked for a period of time in the spring.
I don't know if you remember, but cases, especially in Israel, Israel was always the leader on this.
Cases in Israel went down almost to zero.
They'd been in the thousands.
And then they went to zero.
Deaths had been, you know, close to 100 a day in Israel.
They went to zero.
Okay.
That was the spring.
That was April.
They were upset about me and people like me.
You know, disinformation, misinformation, to me, it's journalism, okay?
If I'm pointing to you to government statistics and data, and I'm saying, here's questions, and I'm saying, here's some questions about the clinical trial and how long it went and who was included in it and whether or not it actually shows the vaccines work as well as you've been told, that's journalism.
One man's reporter is another, you know, is another man's disinformation specialist, okay?
Just like one man's terrorist, another man's freedom fighter.
That was April, May.
Then something happened in June and July and August.
The worst case scenario from the point of view of these people.
What happened was cases started to go back up in Israel, in the UK, and then in the US. And they had known if they had any sense that the vaccines weren't going to be permanently protected.
But I guarantee you they did not think that that was going to happen in a matter of months.
And that set them up to do two things.
First of all, they were going to start to push for boosters, okay?
Now maybe if all you watch is MSNBC, you could get convinced that boosters were, you know, that was always a part of the plan.
Almost nobody who got a vaccine in, let's say, February or March or April thought that they were going to need another one by the end of the summer or the fall.
So they knew that they were changing the narrative.
Second, mandates.
And this was really the worst part, Joe.
This was, we are going to tie this to your job.
We're going to basically force almost every American adult of working age to get one of these who isn't self-employed or who isn't an illegal immigrant.
Like, they don't have to get it.
But most Americans who work are going to need this for their jobs.
And every healthcare worker and every government employee, I mean, they pushed a lot of people last fall.
And the anger they stirred was intense.
And, you know, still intense.
At that point, I was a problem for them.
I'd been a problem in the spring, but I was a problem in the summer.
Because it was starting to look like I was right, and it was starting to look like this wasn't going to be something you could just...
I don't know if you remember the shot in a beer, the lotteries.
There was all this sort of quasi-coercive crap going on in the spring.
By the summer of 2021, it was different.
It was...
You want to fly?
Maybe we're going to make you get vaccinated.
They never did that, but they talked about it.
And in Canada, they actually did do it.
You want to work?
You're damn well going to need to be vaccinated.
You want to go to a restaurant?
You want to go to a movie in New York City?
You're going to need to be vaccinated.
You want your kids to go to school?
Guess what?
We're going to make you get them vaccinated.
That was talked about, too.
They don't even want to pretend they said that.
But everybody from Gavin Newsom on down said that.
So I was a problem for them.
And Twitter cracked.
Twitter had defended me.
And they clearly internally, at least into April, did not think I was saying anything wrong.
And I can tell you, I did not change my reporting standards.
I did not ever say anything.
I did not talk about...
I always stuck to the data.
Twitter cracked.
They banned me.
And now we know that the White House was leaning on them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So where do you go from here?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I'm back on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You're back on.
And now I should point out that the things that you got in trouble for are now...
YouTube has amended their policy.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They sure did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So now YouTube is allowing you to say that masks don't stop the spread.
They don't protect you.
They're also allowing you to say that the vaccines do not stop you from catching COVID or from spreading COVID. Yep.
Because that's true.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Because that's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And this is something that you said a year ago.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
A year ago.
But unfortunately, now we're at a whole different set of questions, unfortunately.
So where do I go?
Where do I go on Twitter and the Biden administration?
Well, I'm going to keep pushing.
I mean, I'm going to sue.
I have my lawyer, James Lawrence, who I really like, who You know, who handled my lawsuit against Twitter.
And we're going to be putting together a case against, again, the Biden administration.
The only question, you know, you got to do it.
You got to make sure it's right.
You got to make sure it's nailed down.
You know, which documents do we include?
What are our legal arguments?
We have people, very smart lawyers who want to be involved in this and help.
You know, do we sue in New York?
Do we sue in D.C.? A lot of different questions.
But that's going to happen.
And then, so that's A. But the other question, unfortunately, we're done talking about whether the vaccines help stop infection or transmission.
We know the answer to that.
They don't.
There's two big questions now.
One is, do the vaccines actually increase your risk of getting Omicron?
And do they increase or decrease your risk of serious illness if you do?
And in some ways, because Omicron's pretty mild, and because we've all gotten it at least once, maybe twice, Assuming nothing terrible happens to the virus itself going forward, in other words, assuming the virus doesn't somehow mutate again to become more virulent, it's going to be what we thought it was going to be two years ago, which is ultimately winds up as a cold for everybody.
It's just another, you know, virus that you get from time to time.
And eventually they'll stop counting the cases and they'll stop counting deaths, in part because they don't want to admit the vaccines do nothing.
So the easiest way to move past that is to just stop collecting the data.
And you can already see the data is being collected less frequently.
It's certainly being publicized less.
So that's question A.
And I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful basically that we will get to a point where whether or not the vaccines do any good, the virus itself is essentially, you know, not a big threat.
Not that it doesn't kill some people, but that it's not a big threat societally.
Okay.
But there's a bigger, even bigger issue that no one will talk about right now.
And that is what is happening to all-cause mortality and to birth rates in countries that use these mRNA and DNA COVID vaccines very heavily.
So essentially Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the United States, Canada, there is this notable increase in death rates in a lot of countries.
And in the last couple months, although the data is less clear, there's been a notable decrease in birth rates in some of them.
Now, I don't want to overstate this.
I'm not talking about, like, deaths are doubling or tripling or births have gone to zero.
When I say notable increase, I mean it looks to me, and I actually just wrote a substack on this that I posted Thursday morning, all-cause deaths might be up 10%.
And when I say all-cause, that's literally what it sounds like.
It's like, how many people died in Germany this week?
How many people died in the UK this week?
And other countries are better at collecting this data than we are.
They collect it more rapidly.
They publish it more rapidly.
And then, you know, some people are still dying of COVID, a few.
So how many, when you X out those deaths, you just say, if nobody died of COVID, would all cause deaths still be above normal?
And the answer is yes.
They'd be about 10% above normal.
Now, I don't know whether 10% sounds like a lot or a little to you.
Sounds like a lot.
It's enough that for COVID, COVID caused a 10% increase.
We shut down the world for that increase.
And 10% in the U.S., really.
Less worldwide.
With births, the data's a little more kind of all over the map, but what's so striking is birth rates in some of these countries started dropping almost exactly nine months to the day after they started mass vaccinating women of childbearing age.
Now, we know the vaccines can cause some menstrual irregularities and it looks like they can cause a drop in sperm count.
It's not clear whether that's temporary or not.
It's possible that this is just sort of a temporary thing and births will come back to normal.
Let's hope.
But that's where I'm going.
On the data, that's what I'm pursuing.
I'm pursuing...
Is this happening?
It appears to be happening.
Next question, why is it happening?
And you can come up with plenty of explanations that don't involve the vaccines.
For example, you could say, well, I think deaths are increasing because during the lockdown, people didn't go to the doctor.
They didn't get medical care.
Maybe they didn't get exercise.
They put on 20 pounds.
That's increased their risk of a heart attack.
And so now we're just seeing this downstream effect.
You could say, well, I think deaths in people who are 30 are increasing because those folks, you know, they were forced to be home.
Now they're making up for it by partying a lot more.
They're doing drugs or they're drinking and driving.
And so those kinds of deaths are increasing.
So there are stories you can tell that don't involve the vaccines to explain this.
But my argument is...
We need to be talking about this, and the same people who were screaming about deaths during COVID need to be acknowledging this and looking into the reasons why.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What do you make of these bizarre stories that you see that get published that are starting to blame an increase in heart attacks on climate change?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's a joke.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's strange.
It's strange because journalists are publishing these things in legitimate places.
Like ABC had one the other day that was widely mocked.
Because it's so crazy for them to say that.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
It's bizarre.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Like, how much climate change are we talking about?
Shouldn't the sky be on fire?
I mean, what the fuck are you talking about?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I will say this.
It is true that when you have these extreme heat waves, especially in Europe where they don't have air conditioning, some old folks are just going to die, basically.
You know, they're going to be in their apartments and they're just not going to be able to get out of bed and they're going to die.
But that's not what you're talking about.
You're talking about these stories where it's like some 30-year-old had a heart attack.
No, it's absurd.
It's absurd.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It is absurd, but are they being influenced?
Why is someone publishing a story like that?
What is going on?
What are the processes in place that would allow someone to publish a story that's that ludicrous?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
This is a good thing about talking news.
You pull me back, because I can get lost in the weeds in the details of this is what the deaths in Germany were last week.
You get me, or you think sort of more holistically.
So here's what we've learned in the last couple of years.
We've learned that the media, broadly, the elite media as I generally call it, but you know, it's the New York Times and it's CNN. Corporations.
Corporations.
But it's more than corporations.
It's a group of people Who all live in Brooklyn and DC, who tend to be politically liberal, who all went to the same schools.
By the way, one reason they hate me is because I went to one of those schools, right?
So I'm a traitor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And you were for the New York Times.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And I worked for the New York Times.
So I'm a class traitor, okay?
They have engaged in the last several years in a coordinated effort to sort of present stories in a way that I don't think ever really happened before 2016, before Donald Trump was elected.
So these people, when Trump beat Hillary, it was a shock to the system.
They couldn't believe that America had betrayed them this way.
And there's a famous Onion headline from 2015. The Onion is always the best.
And the headline was something like, Hillary Clinton tells America, don't fuck this up for me.
And there was a sort of idea there was going to be this baton death march where it was going to end with our first female president.
God help it.
It didn't matter that no one on earth liked her.
She was going to be the president.
And it didn't work out that way.
And these people decided, if this country is stupid enough to elect Donald Trump, we can't trust it.
And we better work together to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
So you saw really coordinated stories about how Russia had elected Trump, which turned out to be complete nonsense.
And then, you know, Mueller was going to take Trump down.
And they...
I don't know whether they had actual meetings over that stuff, but when COVID came along in 2020, they did have actual meetings.
There was something called the Trusted News Initiative, okay?
The Trusted News Initiative was a group of organizations, which I think at the time actually didn't initially include Twitter, which is sort of interesting.
It included Facebook and the Washington Post and the BBC and Reuters and a lot of other news organizations.
And it was, we're going to combat misinformation together.
This was a mistake.
News organizations should not be working with one another to set the agenda.
They're better when they're independent, chasing their own stuff.
And this is now happening with climate change.
It's clear.
The same people...
Who, you know, who were wrong about Donald Trump and Russian collusion, who were wrong about lockdowns and COVID and the effect of school closures, and I would say wrong completely about vaccines.
Now we can talk about where we actually stand right now, but fine.
They think that climate change is an existential threat.
They have convinced each other that climate change is an existential threat.
And, oh, by the way, they also think that, you know, like, letting hundreds of thousands of people out of jail would have no effect on crime rates, which turns out not to be so true either.
But, so they are going to present the same stories over and over again.
They're going to find, you know, they're dying for a good hurricane.
They would love a good hurricane to hit New Orleans or Miami, but they haven't been able to get one in 20 years.
So they're stuck writing about, you know, flash floods in St. Louis or whatever.
They're going to look for any extreme weather event they can, and they're going to talk about how it's all climate change related and the, you know, sort of the...
The ultimate example of this is trying to blame some random heart attack on climate change.
It's nonsense.
You know, pretty soon they're going to be blaming fentanyl overdoses on climate change.
They just...
And it is.
You're right.
Like, this didn't happen until the last few years because they didn't do this.
They didn't work together this way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Can this ship be turned back around at this point?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I don't know.
I mean...
There's people like you, there's people on Substack, but it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, but I'm not a good example of this.
I'm not chasing stories and that's not what I do.
I'm just talking to people.
So the fact that I can get something that's widely spread and I can have this podcast and have conversations with people like you and some other controversial folks that have been telling the truth and have been suppressed, it's great.
But, you know, clearly I'm not a journalist.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Right.
And you do need, like, these, you know, when you have war reporters in Ukraine, okay, or you have reporters willing to spend a month chasing a story, really doing high-end news work is expensive and difficult and it requires editors and requires trained, you know, there's a skill to it, a legit skill to it.
And there's only so many organizations that can do it.
And how we break them out of their monoculture, I don't know.
One of the sad things about this is that there are many stories you could write, for example, about the vaccines that wouldn't necessarily be like, all the vaccines are terrible and they're going to kill you all.
You could have written about, you know, like whether or not enough old people were included in the clinical trials.
OK, that would have been a legitimate question that once upon a time, the New York Times would have seen we can write stories questioning the development and pricing, let's say, of the vaccines.
We can question whether the United States should be putting tens of billions of dollars in profit into the companies, you know, when this is a public health emergency.
And those would have been legitimate questions.
But because it became so politicized and polarized and ideological, they fell down even on asking those questions.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You can't even bring up whether or not the vaccine related injuries are real.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They won't even discuss it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You don't hear legitimate stories about the numbers of people that have suffered strokes and blood clots and all the various ailments and people that have pacemakers now, they're in their 30s.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
Let me give you, to me, what is a really good example of that.
Diabetes, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 diabetes used to be called childhood diabetes and type 2 was adult.
And the reason it was called childhood was it's an autoimmune disease essentially, right?
So type 2 diabetes you just eat and eat and eat and you overwhelm your pancreas and your insulin.
You basically eat so much you destroy your ability to process all that food.
But type 1 is different.
Type 1 is your pancreas, you stop making enough insulin as a kid.
It's an autoimmune disease.
So there are legitimate cases in peer-reviewed journals Of people getting type 1 diabetes as adults following mRNA vaccination.
Now, to me, that's a giant red flag.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What are these numbers?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They're not a lot of cases.
It's like four cases in Japan, two cases in Turkey.
It's what you would call in epidemiology or medicine a signal event.
It's a signal that should be followed up on.
By the way, you never see these case reports coming out of the U.S. because U.S. doctors are I think they've decided it's not in their career interest to write too much about vaccine side effects.
So to me, okay, that doesn't mean that a million people are going to get type 1 diabetes following the mRNA vaccinations.
What it means is these are really biologically active compounds that we've given to a lot of people, and we owe it to them to figure out what some of these dangers might be.
And we are not doing that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do you think that maybe with time, as more of these instances arise and more people come forward about their injuries and all the ailments that they've acquired since being vaccinated, that this will somehow or another bring people back to where they were before, where they're very skeptical about pharmaceutical companies and what they do with their studies and how they disseminate that information?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I don't know.
I mean, I think it goes back to the question you asked before, which is how do we get the news media to take this more seriously?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, they're captured, right?
There's a lot of issues.
One of the big ones is the amount of money that gets pumped into advertising.
We brought it up on the podcast before, but it bears repeating.
75% of all television advertising is pharmaceutical companies.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Is it that big?
unidentified
Yes.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's a big number, I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
75%.
And they think that in news, it's higher, which is fucking bonkers.
I mean, you've seen the clip, brought to you by Pfizer.
Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer.
You can't say something that's going to destroy the profits of those companies when the profits are literally what's funding your organization.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So, again, maybe it's because I was on the inside.
I do see it more as this cultural issue.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think it's both.
I think it's both.
I think the cultural issue with the Donald Trump thing, as you brought it up before, I think that emboldens people and it makes them justified in their actions, that the overall good is more valuable than being completely square with all the data.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
Yeah, right?
Like, we're gonna cut some corners here, but it's because we want you to get this vaccine.
It's good for you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right, because it's gonna save people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, you know, I mean, Rachel Maddow famously said, the virus stops with you.
You get vaccinated, that's it.
The virus can't spread, you can't catch it.
It's not true.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
There's going to be a lot of rewriting history in the next few months, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But they're already doing it.
I mean, there was a smash cut of Fauci.
Did you see that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, I did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What he actually had.
See if you can find that, Jamie.
What he actually claimed he said versus what he actually said.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You know, that he said he never said shut anything down.
But he's 81 or whatever he is.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Are we giving him a pass because he's 81?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No, but I'm saying maybe his memory sucks.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, his memory's fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think it's pretty good.
I'm giving him a pass.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Somebody referred to it as the Shaggy clip.
It wasn't me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Shaggy?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, you know that video?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yo, you remember that song.
It wasn't me.
He gets caught by his girlfriend.
He even caught me in the shower.
It wasn't me.
That's Fauci.
It wasn't me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think these guys operated in a day before the internet, and they became accustomed to these sort of patterns of just, like, repeating a narrative over and over again, and then this is the official story, and that's what they did during the HIV crisis, that's what they're doing now.
It's the same thing, but now people will go back and pull up clips and make these little edits.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
Here's why it's not going to work, though.
Here's why.
So...
And I'm going to give you this right now, and I'm giving it to you for a reason.
This is a whiskey, and it's a distillery near where I live in the Hudson Valley of New York.
But the reason I'm picking it specifically isn't just that it's delicious whiskey.
The guy who runs the place emailed me a few months ago.
He said, I'm on your side.
I know it's been a long, you know, 18 months.
Can I send you some whiskey?
I said, please do.
I said, send me the strongest stuff you got.
And so he sent me a couple bottles.
But that guy, he hasn't forgotten that they tried to make him get vaccinated.
I haven't forgotten.
You haven't forgotten.
There's a lot of pissed off people out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Let's play this.
unidentified
Do you regret, particularly the last one, the shutdown, the sweeping shutdown that some said made things worse?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, I don't, Neil.
anthony fauci ▲ ● ▼
And in fact, I think we need to make sure that your listeners understand I didn't shut down anything.
I recommended to the president that we shut the country down.
unidentified
And the only way to do that is by draconian means of essentially shutting down a country.
We know that we can do that if we shut down.
Well, I think one of the things you really need to do, to the extent that you can shut down temporarily, the country I think is important.
anthony fauci ▲ ● ▼
Well, if I knew at the time that shutting down would have such a dramatic effect, On controlling the spread, obviously, we would have shut down earlier.
There were those who say, you shut down destructive things by disrupting the economy.
unidentified
And others say, well, if you save so many infections by shutting down, why didn't you shut down two weeks earlier?
anthony fauci ▲ ● ▼
But I don't regret saying that the only way we could have really stopped the explosion of infection was by essentially, I want to say shutting down, I mean essentially having the physical separation and the kinds of recommendations that we've made.
unidentified
You've been a big fan of Cuomo and the shutdown in New York.
You've lauded New York for their policy.
New York had the highest death rate in the world.
How could we possibly be jumping up and down and saying, oh, Governor Cuomo did a great job.
He had the worst death rate in the world.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, you misconstrued that, Senator.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Yeah.
Why is he leaving?
Do you think he's in trouble?
Do you think he realizes that the tide has turned?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I think he doesn't want to have to sit for subpoenas.
unidentified
He would only have to do that if he stayed?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, he doesn't have to do it this year because the Democrats are protecting him.
The Democrats control Congress.
If the Republicans win, and I think...
People still think they'll definitely take the House and possibly the Senate, although that's not as assured as it was a few months ago.
But if the Democrats win, they will definitely be targeting him.
I'm sorry, if the Republicans win.
And, you know, he's such a megalomaniac.
He is trying to stay as long as he possibly can.
So, you know, a couple years ago he said, oh, maybe I'll stay until the end of the Biden administration.
Now he's saying I'm going to stay until December.
So he's got to, you know, he wants to stay until three minutes before the Republicans take the House.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Will that save him?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I think it makes it, and this is, like, I'm not an expert on what, I don't think they can subpoena him or the process is much more complicated if he's not a federal employee.
They have to negotiate and get him to testify.
Remember, there's three separate issues for Fauci, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Gain-of-function research.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Gain-of-function research, which he's definitely on the hook about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
On the hook.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, that one's the clearest.
This came out of a Chinese lab.
I'm not even sure too many people even argue that anymore.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There's still articles.
There's still articles, and they're preposterous.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They're preposterous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There's no animal host.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
They have this mapping data that claims, oh, because most of the cases the Chinese reported first were in the vicinity of the market.
It must have been the market.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which is also the vicinity of the Wuhan lab.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And by the way, the Chinese knew exactly what they were doing when they were collecting that data.
So it's totally compromised data.
You can't trust it at all.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, we've never trusted their data in the past.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which is so bizarre.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So there's gain of function, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
There's the lockdowns and, you know, his pushing.
Now, he's probably got actually the best defense on that one, right?
Because that's about, you know, we didn't know exactly what was happening and I didn't make the decision.
I just made my best recommendation.
It was these governors who did it and we all agreed.
It's okay.
But nonetheless, he could get some heat for that.
And then the third issue is the vaccines, right?
And that one's interesting because NIH, National Institutes of Health, they were basically a direct partner with Moderna.
Not on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but there are two mRNA vaccines.
And, you know, the federal government, you know, was basically more than a handshake partner, a partner of Moderna on that vaccine.
And so there's going to, assuming we ever start asking real questions about what the data shows about the vaccine, he might be on the hook for that too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
How much of an impediment is this agreement that they had where they're not allowed to be held liable?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's a huge impediment.
So, it's a huge impediment for a few reasons.
Now, as my lawsuit with Twitter shows, If you sue, the civil litigation process is very powerful.
It's not as powerful as a subpoena from a prosecutor.
It's still very powerful.
You get these companies to hand over documents so you can see what they were thinking.
And for the most part, it's actually kind of hard to believe, but the companies do comply with this.
They will, whether it's because their lawyers make them or whether it's because they don't really know what they're giving you or whether it's Because they actually believe in, you know, the American justice system.
That's probably the least likely.
They give you the documents so you can actually see them.
No litigation or immunity means no liability means there's no...
A, there's no way to get the documents and B, the really good trial lawyers aren't interested because there's no money for them.
It also means Wall Street doesn't care because Wall Street...
From their point of view, if there's no liability issue, it's not going to hurt the company's stock.
So they don't care either.
So two very powerful forces that could help kind of keep the companies on a straight path are gone.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It was so strange to me to watch people blindly believe the pharmaceutical companies given their history.
Given the history that they have of being fined insane amounts, causing tens of thousands of deaths that could have been prevented, causing the opioid crisis.
All the things that we know that they lied about, hid data, distorted data.
And yet still people were getting Pfizer tattoos.
Yeah.
It was a strange thing to watch, this sort of...
What does Robert Malone call it?
Mass formation psychosis?
And people are like, that's not a thing.
But what about...
Forget what he called it.
That thing is clearly real and happening.
We saw people that just put all of their...
All of their suspicions, all of their misgivings aside from the past, and now blindly trust the same organizations that they had widely disparaged just a few months before that.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
Yeah, look, I mean, you can call lots of things.
Look, I play poker, okay?
And I think of myself as a pretty good poker player.
But a few days ago, I was at the casino.
It's about an hour from our house.
And I was not having a good night.
And I was in a hand.
And somebody made a bet.
And I was like, I am so beaten here.
Like, I'm just beaten.
And I called.
And then that was the turn card, the fourth card.
The river card came.
The guy made another big bet.
And I called again.
Okay?
I was destroyed, okay?
People make bad decisions.
They double down.
They fall in love with a hand or with a product, and they can't rethink it.
And, you know, Tucker would say it's a lack of faith, right?
It's the crisis of we don't believe in God anymore.
We're all terribly scared of our own mortality.
We're looking for some product that will save us.
Yeah.
You know, I think that's part of it.
I don't know if that's all of it.
I think it's part of it.
Certainly, vaccines became an object of secular veneration on the left.
I'm going to give you my other present for you now.
This is Pandemia.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
The book.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The book.
And there's an inscription for you in there.
So the second copy, anybody who wants in the office can have, but I will just read to you very quickly.
Here's Here's a couple of the things that people were saying about the vaccines.
This is Lindsey Graham.
Thank God for nurses who help people in need and know how to use a needle.
Thank God for those who produce these vaccines.
If enough of us take it, we will get back to normal lives.
Help is on the way.
And then here's a guy named Robbie Suave, I think that's how you pronounce his last name, who's a libertarian, okay?
Okay.
People who say, well, the vaccine doesn't actually prevent infection are wrong.
The vaccine almost certainly prevents infection.
It is akin to a cure.
If you got it, you don't have to wear a mask.
You will neither contract nor spread the disease.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They believed that, though.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They believed it, yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's not like there was just a giant group of people that were lying.
They did believe it.
And then when they looked at the Israeli data, particularly the early data, they thought they were right.
So this would cause this all in the beginning.
And in the beginning, it did seem to offer protection.
It did seem to help people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But what I'm saying is people were primed to believe.
One more.
This is from somebody on the left.
This is a woman named Molly Jongfast, who was like the voice of the terrified Brooklyn left throughout 2020. This is what these people thought of the vaccine.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I spent my first Thanksgiving without any of my 70-something parents in the hope of keeping them safe.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I told myself as I look ahead to what will be an even lonelier Christmas.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I tell my father who hasn't seen his grandchildren in months.
Yes, the vaccine is coming, I silently mouth as I look into my children's bedrooms as they stare into the blue lights of their computer screens, deprived of school, friends, family, and what used to be called normal life.
Now, that wasn't my 2020, okay?
And I suspect it wasn't yours either.
But for these people who had terrified themselves about COVID, who had told themselves that, you know, COVID really was the Black Plague, they needed to believe in something.
And they believed in the vaccines.
And let me tell you, even now, it is hard for them to accept the truth.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It is hard.
I mean, I have friends that were against my perspective initially, and they thought that I was being ignorant and foolish, that I was believing conspiracy theories, and now they're like, fuck, how did I buy into it?
The same people, and some of them are vaccinated, and some of them have real problems now because of the vaccine.
And I know a lot of people that got vaccinated had zero issues.
None.
And I know a lot of people that got vaccinated that never got COVID. And they're okay.
They're fine.
And I think that's most people.
And if you looked at the overall positive net benefit of the vaccine, I think it saved lives.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I will give you the best bull case for the vaccines.
So last year, Delta.
Delta was clearly a worse variant than Omicron.
For a period of months, in the spring, probably into the summer of 2020, the vaccines probably reduced the infection rate substantially.
That's what they do for a period, you know, a few months.
They really do.
And then I think the booster in the fall probably helps some, not as much, because there's definitely...
Your first hit is your best hit.
There's definitely a limited sort of benefit from boosting.
But let's say that last year in 2021, there was a substantial decrease in the number of Delta infections.
Now, all those people wound up getting Omicron this year.
But Omicron is not as dangerous as Delta.
And we have Paxlovid now.
So even just by delaying a few months...
You can argue that the lives of some 70- and 80-year-olds were saved.
Some of those people who got infected this year and were fine might have gotten Delta last year and died.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Particularly older folks.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Particularly older folks.
And I think there's a legit case to be made about that.
I've actually been meaning to write a substack about that because I think it's important that people understand that.
But that doesn't mean that this benefited anybody under 50 or 60. And unfortunately, certainly with the myocarditis, which is this heart infection you can get that can actually be quite dangerous and in some cases deadly to younger people, especially men, the risk is the other way.
The younger you are, the worse the risk seems to be.
So here's what we should have done.
First of all, we should have tested the vaccines for longer.
And we should have made sure that we tested them on old people who are the most at risk.
We didn't do either of those things.
But okay, they wanted to get this out very quickly in the winter of 2020, January 2021. Fine.
They should have said, okay, we think we have something good here, but because it's been tested for such a short period of time, And because the technology is so novel, we're going to limit its use to the people who are really at risk from COVID. We know who those people are.
You know, over 70, maybe if you're under 70 and you're really severe comorbidities, go get your vaccine, can't hurt you.
The rest of us, we're going to wait and we're going to see.
And probably if they had done that, they could have had whatever benefits they did have last year without any of the problems that seemed to be getting worse.
And again, this is why we have to talk about all-cause deaths, okay?
Because those numbers shouldn't be where they are right now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Now, these people that were convinced early on that the vaccine was the savior, and that, you know, these people would have resisted that narrative, that you were going to vaccinate the older folks and the other people are going to wait.
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They didn't want to wait.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, they were desperate to get vaccinated.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But there was also this narrative that kept being promoted, safe and effective.
Those were the two words that they used, you know.
And it was so prevalent.
It was everywhere.
And if you resisted that, somehow or another, you were an enemy of the future.
You're an anti-vaxxer!
Yeah, you're an anti-vaxxer, which is a...
That pejorative that they used over and over again, it's like...
It didn't matter if you had every other vaccine there was.
If you didn't believe in this one thing that you stated, and I think accurately so, that you should think of more of as a therapeutic, it's a gene therapy, correct?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
We can argue about that.
But what I meant by therapeutic was it had a limited window of working.
It worked for three, four months.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, there were certainly people that were resisting the idea that it was a leaky vaccine, which was crazy, because there was already indications that people were...
And remember in the early days, it was breakthrough infections are very rare.
It was breakthrough infections.
These were these aberrations, these rare outlier cases, and they're not to be taken into consideration.
And now, all of a sudden, it's just the norm.
And they've changed the goalposts in this weird way where everybody just didn't want to admit that they were wrong.
Everybody didn't want to admit they got duped.
So they started saying it, too.
We've always known.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yep.
Total life.
Total life.
And by the way, I will argue this, you know, and this gets complicated epidemiologically.
I don't think the vaccines work very well.
Once they stop working against infection, remember, they have this period when they do work against infection.
I think that once they stop working against infection, the protection they offer against serious disease and death is actually pretty limited, too.
And I think that's really true for Omicron.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it gets complicated.
They didn't want to release the data on boosters for people 18 to 49 because they said it would increase vaccine hesitancy.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What the fuck does that mean?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, if telling the truth indicates that you're going to have a problem with vaccine hesitancy, the problem is the vaccine, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right.
The problem is never the truth.
That's right.
That's bonkers.
That's right.
It's a very bizarre time to be going through this because there was such a social push and so many people were upset.
And I've seen so many of those people come around now when they've had friends that have had strokes or they've had their own personal issues with it.
And then they've also got it and they got COVID. Yep.
I had a very good friend of mine who was all about the vaccine, and then he got COVID recently, and I'm the first fucking person he called.
And I sent a nurse to him, and I had him taken care of.
We got him monoclonal antibodies.
That was another thing that was very bizarre, was the not just limited distribution, but preventing people from getting monoclonal antibodies.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, well, the Biden administration was playing a game with Ron DeSantis.
They, you know, they were trying to get, you know, DeSantis has been the smartest politician about all of this from the beginning.
And he knew that the antibodies were a good idea.
And he tried to get a lot of them for, you know, people in Florida and the Biden administration tried to stand in his way.
Not a great moment for the Biden administration.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, they were also trying to limit the distribution of them, saying that it was based on the earlier strains.
Meanwhile, they were trying to increase the distribution of the vaccine, which was also based on the earlier strains.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, absolutely correct.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's just how the fuck did we get here?
It's so disconcerting and it just makes you distrust the very foundation of truth that we supposedly operate under.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So I wrote a substack a few days ago where I said we need a name for this phenomenon.
This phenomenon of I don't really – I used to be somebody – I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I used to think, hey, if the government says this is a safe drug or safe medicine, I'm going to take it if my doctor tells me to.
I believe in the system broadly.
I know it's not perfect, but I believe in it.
And a lot of people, including me, now don't believe in the system broadly.
And there needs to be a name for that.
The way I described it is, you're on the plane, the plane's taken off, and you suddenly realize that the guy, the cockpit, the captain, the voice you heard coming out of the cockpit, is the voice of somebody who you saw doing some shots.
The night before in the bar.
And it's like, oh man, maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was.
Not that he's drunk right now, but maybe I'm not as safe as I thought I was.
It's that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's that.
It's the knowledge that the system is run by humans.
Humans that have a very clear interest in pushing a very specific narrative and they pushed it early on and One of the things you'll find about people in the media that's really bizarre They have a complete total unwillingness to admit any incorrect information They won't admit that they've made mistakes.
They won't admit that they were incorrect They won't admit that they were misled or confused or just flat-out wrong Because if they do, it opens them up to liabilities.
It opens them up to not being trusted.
It opens them up to saying, well, if you're the expert and you were wrong, well, you're not an expert.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Don't we all have that?
Isn't that human nature to not want to admit you're wrong?
I mean, I'm guilty of it too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't know, man.
I'm a big proponent of admitting you're wrong.
I think it's very important.
I think it doesn't mean that you're...
If you are wrong and you don't admit you're wrong, now you're wrong again.
Now you're wrong more.
And I know it.
If you are wrong and you admit you're wrong, I just know you're a human.
And if you say, I'm sorry, I thought this is what I thought, this is why I thought it, this turns out to not be correct.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
This is one reason cancel culture is such...
Actually, you know, you did admit you were wrong back in January.
But you were big enough...
I mean, not just big enough, but like big enough and important enough culturally, they couldn't cancel you.
They were trying to cancel you.
And your apology meant nothing to them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, it's not about whether or not someone's wrong or right.
It's about someone being inconvenient and someone being a problem.
And the fact that my platform is not controlled by any corporation.
So I can have a guy like Robert Malone on, who owns the patent for nine patents in the invention of MRNA technology.
I mean, he's a guy who fucking knows what he's talking about.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh yeah, he knows what he's talking about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And they tried to make him out to be a kook.
I mean, this is a guy with a rock-solid reputation outside of that.
I mean...
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But back to you, right?
Like, I don't remember the exact words that you used, but you admitted you'd made a mistake.
You'd used a word that, you know, was not a good word.
And unfortunately, it didn't satisfy the people criticizing you.
That's part of the problem, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, but you're always going to have people who hate you.
They're always going to be there.
And they're not going to want to forgive you.
That's just them.
That's on them.
Now, if I don't like someone but someone comes out and says they made a mistake, I admire that because I think that's an admirable human quality.
The ability to swallow your pride and also the ability to want to be forthcoming with truth.
And just say, this is where I am.
This is who I am.
This is what I did.
I shouldn't have done that.
And I recognize that.
And if I hurt your feelings, I'm sorry.
Or if I misled you, I'm sorry.
If I gave you information that made you act in a certain way or go and make a certain choice because you thought that I was informed and I was correct...
I feel like you have an obligation if your job is to distribute the truth.
That's what you're doing.
If you're a journalist, if that's what you're doing, if you're a pundit, if you're someone on television and you're speaking from a position where you supposedly have some sort of authority or at least some sort of reasonable research basis to say these things.
You should come out and say it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, look, I basically agree.
Look, you know, I just said a few minutes ago, I think there's a case to be made.
The vaccine saved lives last year.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think there's a case to be made, too.
See, I'm not a black and white person.
I'm not a one or zero.
I'm not binary on these things.
I think it's a very messy situation.
And I think part of the problem is that we were so indoctrinated with this propaganda.
It was so shoved down everyone's throats that people were very reluctantly to abandon their earliest notions.
And a lot of their earliest notions were based in anger on people who weren't doing the right thing, who weren't spreading the right thing.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
We're doing what they're told.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
We're doing what they're told.
But they thought that doing what they were told was doing the right thing.
And I think there's a lot of people that did it with noble intentions.
I really do believe that.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So here's what I would...
Now we're actually pull back again, right?
Here's what I would argue.
Even if the vaccines worked...
Even if they'd worked perfectly, the way that people like me were treated last year was wrong and are treated now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's wrong, okay?
The fact they didn't work is just the icing on the cake.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But when Joe Biden says a pandemic of the unvaccinated, and if you're not vaccinated, you're going to be sick or dying, and you're going to fill our hospitals, it was...
It was demonizing a lot of people for a personal medical decision.
It's wrong.
Not allowing Novak Djokovic to play in the U.S. Open because he's not vaccinated.
It's wrong.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's now.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right now they're doing that, which is fucking insane.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's insane.
I mean, he's one of the healthiest human beings alive on Earth.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And he's had COVID twice.
Leave him alone.
Let him play tennis.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's what's even crazier.
He has the antibodies.
His body's recovered.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And it wasn't a big deal for him either.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Of course, because he's a fucking super athlete.
I mean, it's really crazy that we want everyone held to the same standards, but we're still not telling people to lose weight.
I mean, if the government cared about you, they would say, hey, you know, one of the things we found out 78% of the people who are admitted to the ICU with COVID are obese.
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And that's a giant problem with your immune system and we have to fix that collectively as a country.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And here's what we need to do.
We need to avoid all these things that, you know, are terrible for you and the things that people are addicted to.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I mean, they're doing it with monkeypox, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They tried.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
The data came out and everybody's like, hey, hey, hey, hold the fuck on.
First of all, no one's dead.
No one.
Second of all, it's 98% unprotected gay sex.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And the other 2% are liars.
That's a joke.
That's just a joke, folks.
unidentified
I got it and maybe you can get it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's not a lot of people.
It's not a lot of people.
It's an unfortunate disease that people are getting for getting reckless.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And look, listen, it's a free country, okay?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Get reckless if you want to.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
But let's be honest with these folks about, you know, they're the ones at risk.
And, you know, by the way, this is what happened with HIV the first few years, too.
They wouldn't tell the truth about that.
And then eventually the gay community said, look, we're the ones who are dying here.
We have to be honest with each other, and we want the government to be honest, too.
And hopefully that will happen with monkeypox.
But the idea that the public health establishment, their first inclination is to lie...
And to not tell you who's really at risk, I don't understand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, the conversation that I had with one of my friends who's a doctor, and it was a very quiet conversation, where he was like, I can't tell people what I really think about these things.
I cannot.
I can't say it.
I can't talk about the people that I've treated that have had real issues after being vaccinated.
I can't.
You know, I can tell you that I know a lot of people who got COVID who really got fucked up by it, really bad.
But I can't tell you that most of them were fat and old.
I can't say that.
I can't say you, a guy who works out six days a week, you're probably going to be okay.
You, a guy who regularly takes vitamins, has all sorts of things you do for your health, You are supposed to be treated the same way as that fat old guy, which is bonkers.
And one of the things that drove me nuts about when they were so mad at me about COVID, forget about the fact that CNN literally used a filter on my face to make me look jaundiced.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Is that true?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Oh yeah, 100%.
We've showed side-by-side clips of the original video that I posted on Instagram, which is just me standing in front of my sauna with my iPhone going, I feel pretty good.
And then they took that and put it through a filter that made me look yellow.
Have you seen it?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
See, pull it up, because it's so strange.
But all those people are gone now, which is hilarious.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Brian Stelter, boop!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, they're all on the chopping block.
Don Lemon's on the chopping block, Jim Costa.
They're all on the way out, which is hilarious.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Look, I shouldn't laugh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But they should be because they suck at their job.
It has nothing to do with what they did to me.
But look at this.
That's the picture on the bottom.
That's the real me.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You look like the Hulk!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's crazy.
They wanted to make me look like dog shit.
unidentified
They wanted to make me look like I've been smoking- Oh, I remember that!
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Horse dewormer!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Praise his horse dewormer.
Meanwhile, I didn't praise it.
This is what I did.
I listed the things that I took, and I said I'm way better.
Right.
In three days.
In five days, I was negative.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No one cared about that.
Six days later, I did ten rounds in the bag.
I didn't get that sick.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And I wasn't vaccinated, and I was 54. You didn't get it because you're in good shape.
Yes, but this is the thing that they don't want you to say.
They wanted it to be, this is something that everyone has to do, and if you don't do it, you're not doing the right thing.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Listen, there's data, and this is one of the sort of storylines that I need to pursue going forward.
You're talking about what's going to happen.
There's this whole behavioral psychology movement that governments and private NGOs funded.
It started a few years ago, but it really took off with COVID. This idea of how do we nudge and persuade people?
How do we get healthy people to stay home?
Because they're not really at risk and some of them are aware of that.
So is the best way to try to scare them?
Is the best way social pressure?
Is the best way to shut stuff down so they just can't go anywhere?
How do we get people without actually doing sort of Chinese style?
We're just going to take your rights away.
How do we get people to surrender their rights?
I don't think I've said this to you in the past, but the email that I got was just a couple lines a few months ago that stuck with me more than any of the, you know, obviously a lot of people contact me over the last couple years.
This guy said to me, he said, I thought love and hate were the two most powerful emotions, but it turns out I was wrong.
It turns out the most powerful emotion is fear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Fear.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And it's true.
If you can scare people, you can get them to do whatever you want.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, hate dissipates.
Fear lingers.
And especially during a pandemic.
And there's a certain level of anxiety that many people in this country already had.
And they had a hard time with just regular, everyday life before the pandemic.
And then the pandemic came along and that shit got ramped up to 11. And we got to see a lot of very frail, psychologically frail people completely fall apart.
And you saw them on Twitter calling people that were unvaccinated.
They called them plague rats.
I mean, it's just wild.
And this othering of other people.
The same people that when Roe v.
Wade was overturned, they're my body, my choice.
The same people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Which, by the way, I think you and I, I mean, we talked about that briefly the last time I was on.
I mean, I think we both agree about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That people, you know, that banning abortion is a mistake.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Clearly.
You're not going to get women not to have abortions.
You're just going to make them miserable.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You're going to make it more dangerous.
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You're going to make it horrible.
It's a horrible health choice.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And, you know, there's conversations to be had, particularly about late-term abortions.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And there's certainly some conversations to be had about cases of rape and certainly underage people.
It's like the idea that you're going to flat-out ban that from those people, it's horrifying.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
And, you know, look, I think, as in a lot of things, the Europeans have found sort of this, you know, it's 15 weeks or whatever.
There's reasonable ways you can do this.
But I think you, I mean...
I'm consistent.
I didn't want to force people to be vaccinated, and I don't want to force people to have an abortion or not to have an abortion.
And I hate abortion, okay?
Anybody who has kids knows that anybody who's seen the sonogram...
Abortion is murder.
It's the murder of a living child, okay?
It doesn't mean you can ban it.
I wrote something about this a few months ago, the day after that decision got leaked.
Just because it's horrible...
Doesn't mean you can ban it.
And, you know, all I ask, I guess, of myself is to try to be consistent ideologically.
And, you know, if I don't believe that I should have vaccinated, you know, that I should have to be vaccinated, Or that you need to be vaccinated because I want you to be, then it's the same thing with abortion.
It's a personal decision, even if I think it's a horrible one.
I guess the one thing people would argue with me about is that I'm not consistent about drugs, that I'm anti-drug use.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No, I don't think you are.
And you know, you and I had this conversation with Dr. Mike Hart from Canada, and I brought you on here because even though I am a proponent of cannabis, I'm a regular user of cannabis, I think you're correct.
And that is, in many ways, in opposition to my desire to have it legalized.
I think it should be legalized, because I think people should have the choice and the decision.
But for me, it's not that problem.
For some people, it clearly causes schizophrenic breaks.
It's doing something.
At the very least, there's a correlation between cannabis use and, I think, edibles in general, or in particular, rather.
I think there's a connection, and I've personally witnessed it.
I've seen it.
I know people that went over and didn't come back.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, I remember we talked about this.
It's funny.
I now feel like we have had a conversation that's gone on for years about various topics.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
We have.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You know, my problem with cannabis use and with sort of drug use in general, whether it's cocaine or methamphetamine, is that these drugs have risks that most people use We're good to go.
But to their families.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They can destroy families.
But this is the case with alcohol.
We both just had a drink.
It's the case with many, many, many things that people regularly consume.
But human beings are not identical.
We're not bio-identical.
The things that affect you might not affect Jamie.
It's just the way it is with being a human being.
And to deny that nuance I think is ridiculous.
And for me, As a person who uses cannabis, there were so many people that were upset at me that were cannabis users.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Just for having me on, huh?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Not just for having you on, but agreeing with you.
And they were like, what are you doing?
And I'm like, I'm telling the fucking truth.
This is a part of it.
And it didn't stop me from smoking pot, because it doesn't do that to me.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it doesn't stop me from eating peanuts either.
I'm not allergic to them.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like we need reality and we need data and we need all the truth laid out in front of us so that we can make informed decisions.
You can't make informed decisions if the truth is hidden.
You can't make it if these inconvenient truths bother some people and they would rather you deny reality and, you know, remove facts from the conversation.
That's not the way to do things.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's why I admired the way you handled that and that's why I admired the way you handled COVID because I know the pressure that was on you was substantial.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The shittiest thing that's happened to me, and I would actually guess this hasn't happened to you, is that I've lost a lot of friends.
And I didn't have that many friends.
And, you know, I'm not like that social a guy.
And, you know, some of my best friends are not my friends anymore because of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's because you live in New York.
If you lived in Texas, you'd have the same friends.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I guess so.
I guess so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
This place is different, man.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It is shitty to realize that there are people who, you know, who will let their political views or their feelings about.
I mean, and I feel strongly.
I feel strongly.
First of all, I feel strongly right about the lockdowns and right about the vaccines.
I also feel strongly that even if I'd been wrong, it's my right as an American to be wrong and to be publicly wrong.
And I feel like taking people's rights to, you know, whether it's to go outside and play in a playground or the choice to be vaccinated on, that is just as wrong as can be.
Even if it works, it's wrong.
OK, unless, I mean, if you're dealing with something that's going to kill, you know, 98 percent of the world or whatever.
By the way, then you wouldn't have to have any rules.
People would stay inside, you know, till the end of time.
But it was striking and upsetting to me that people who I'd known for years would say to me basically, screw you.
I don't like the way you think.
I don't like the way you've been talking about this.
And I'm not going to talk to you anymore.
I mean, that's your right.
But God, like, what does it say about what our relationship was?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's not a good relationship, and you're better off without those people.
You got off light.
You don't want those people in your life.
They're weak.
Look, there was a lot of people that were very pro-vaccine, that were very anti what I was doing that I still am friends with.
And my God, so many of them turned around.
My God.
I mean, the numbers are crazy.
The numbers of people that have emailed me or texted me or called me.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So people come, they say to you, hey, you were right about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, comics in particular.
Comics that really thought that this was their way back to touring.
And they would text me, hey man, I think what you're doing is bad for us because we need to tour and this and that.
Dude, if you get vaccinated, if this really works, you shouldn't care about me because I can't give it to you.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What are you talking about?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So I have to do it so it protects you?
I have to wear a condom so your wife doesn't get pregnant when you have sex with her?
It doesn't make any sense.
What you're saying is nonsense.
But it's a narrative.
And it's a narrative that was based on fear.
And I understand their perspective.
Look, I came within a moment of getting the vaccine.
The only reason why I didn't get the vaccine was because the UFC allocated a certain amount of vaccines for their employees.
I showed up on the day of the fights, and I was going to get vaccinated right before I called the fights.
I didn't think it was a big deal.
I'm like, maybe I'll be tired.
I don't give a shit.
I can do this.
So I showed up and I said, hey, can I get the vaccine?
And they said, yeah, let me work this out.
We'll call you right back.
And then they said, because I called Dana White and I said, hey, we got them for everybody who got one for you.
I go, great, let's do it.
And so then they said I had to go to the clinic, and I said, well, I can't now because it's Saturday.
They said, can you come back on Monday?
And I said, I'm back home on Monday.
I said, but I'll be back in two weeks.
We'll do it then.
I said, good.
So I was like, okay, good, in two weeks.
Within that time period, two people I know had strokes.
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Was this spring of last year?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
This was a full-on pandemic, right when the vaccine started getting distributed to regular people.
It was old people at first.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Must have been February, March.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Somewhere around then.
Somewhere around then.
And it was a weird moment where I was like, whoa.
And then a couple of people that I knew that were fit.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So these were folks who'd gotten vaccinated and then almost immediately had strokes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Within 10, 15 days.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
Now, I didn't know if that was the case, but one of them was a fit guy who was in his 50s, and the other one was in his 40s.
It was weird, and it got me like, whoa.
And then it brought me back to all of my thoughts that I'd always had about pharmaceutical companies and studies, and what I understand from talking to people.
From talking to researchers when they would describe how they were allowed to throw out studies that didn't fit their narrative.
And that they would do 10 studies and then they'd have two bias studies that showed, you know, oh, 100% effective because, you know, two people got it in the control, but four people got it in the COVID. So that means, you know, it was weird fucking, it was weird monkeying of data.
The opposite.
Two people got it in the...
But the weird monkeying of data that they're allowed to do.
It's not, like, transparent.
Then I talked to John Abramson, and John Abramson told me that when...
And this is where it got really strange.
Like, John Abramson was explaining how these studies work.
And he was explaining how they're funded.
And you just realize all the shenanigans that take place in these things.
And how they're allowed to manipulate data.
Yeah.
And also that the scientists that are doing peer-reviewed research on the data, they don't get access to the raw data.
They get access to the data from the review by the pharmaceutical companies.
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which is just fucking crazy.
You're trusting the people that make the product to give you the data instead of the scientists having access to all the data and them being able to make their own informed decisions.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So there's a, and I, you know, I don't like talking about stuff when I have not read it myself, when I haven't sort of reviewed it myself, but there's a, one of the people in the Pfizer trial, there's a case report, I believe she had a heart attack and died.
And it was a few days.
I would love if we could pull it up, but I can't remember it.
I'm not going to make you try to find it.
She had a heart attack a few days, I believe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It was a young girl.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, no, this is somebody else.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Oh, the different one.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
She had a heart attack and died after the second shot, I think it was.
And the reviewers said...
I think they said, you know, she had had, maybe she'd had, you know, cardiac disease before.
We're classifying this as not related to the vaccine, okay?
So the way that works is when the FDA then publishes the report on their sort of like review of the vaccine, and when the pharmaceutical company, when Pfizer writes about it, when their researchers write about it for the New England Journal of Medicine, they say...
There were X deaths in the trial.
None were related to the vaccine.
And only because there was this FOIA request of the FDA, a Freedom of Information Act request of the FDA, that forced the FDA to disclose lots of documents, including these documents that showed the underlying cases of the people who had died, do we know that Okay, the reviewer said this wasn't related to the vaccine, but in fact, it was really just a few days after that second dose was given.
Now, do I have her autopsy report?
No.
I don't even know if an autopsy was done.
I don't know more than what they said.
But the reason I mention this to you is this is an example of how you make problematic data go away.
Your researcher, for whatever reason, says, I don't think this was related to the vaccine.
It didn't happen five minutes after, and this woman did have heart disease, and sometimes people have heart disease, have heart attacks, and die.
I classify this as unrelated.
By the time it gets to the public through the FDA, All you hear is there were no deaths related to the vaccine.
And technically, nobody's lying because that's what the reviewer said.
We just don't know and wouldn't have known if not for this Freedom of Information Act request.
Maybe it's more complicated than that, and maybe there was somebody who—well, we know there was somebody who had a heart attack and died post-vaccine, and it was pretty close, but the company just decided to say, no, it wasn't related.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What's the data when it comes to the VAERS report?
How much of it is published versus—how much of it is reported versus how much of it is actually taking place?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So it's a great question.
We don't know the answer to that.
There's clearly underreporting of specific events.
And I suspect at this point with COVID, first of all, almost no COVID vaccines are being given.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Can I stop you there?
Is it possible that it's overreported?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, it is not possible it's overreported.
It's possible that here's what the vaccine advocates would tell you.
They would say, there's a lot of public attention given to this particular vaccine.
And as a result, people who had side effects were more likely to report those.
If I got the flu vaccine, maybe three days later I had a headache, I wouldn't report that.
So that would mean less under-reporting.
But it wouldn't mean over-reporting.
Does that make sense?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So, no, here's the other thing they would say.
And here's an interesting situation.
So I actually wrote about this a few days ago.
There's a woman in Miami, 64 years old, got the vaccine, got a second dose.
It was last April.
In May, she was in her car and she had a terrible panic attack.
She basically just forgot where she was, okay?
You can imagine, you're driving, all of a sudden, it's like you're having an amnesia attack.
Over the next few days, her symptoms worsened.
She started having headaches.
She goes to the hospital.
They don't know what's wrong.
By mid-June, this is less than a month later, it's two months after the vaccine, she's hospitalized.
She has something called CJD, Kreutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
Terrible.
It's a brain disease.
It's invariably fatable.
What's that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Prion disease.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
Exactly.
She dies.
She dies in July of 2021. Her doctors actually wrote up this report because it was so striking to them.
It was so closely related to the timing of the vaccine.
Okay.
And this was published on HCA, which is the Hospital Corporation of America, the biggest for-profit hospital chain in the world.
They have an academic website.
They put up stuff from their researchers.
And then they actually pulled the report, but they claim they're going to repost it.
They said they pulled it because too many people had downloaded it, which is an interesting explanation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, we don't want that.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, we don't want people to know about our research.
So, okay, here's the thing.
It is possible, Joe, and I would actually say it's likely that this is a coincidence, okay?
People – CJD is very rare.
About three – actually, last year, I think the numbers have been going up slightly, but about 400 or 500 people a year in the United States get it, okay?
There's 350 million people in the United States, 330 million.
That's one per million, maybe a bit more.
But we vaccinated everybody, okay?
So some people are going to wind up getting CJD or being diagnosed with it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They would have had it anyway.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
A few days after the vaccine.
And it's just coincidence.
I don't know.
And at this point, no one can prove that there's a relationship there.
And here's the thing about VAERS. You can make that argument about practically any case in VAERS. Even if it's five minutes after, you could say, well, this person, they were going to have a heart attack anyway.
Now, at some point, if enough doctors who are sort of medical experts in a field write enough case reports and there's enough of an outlier, with the myocarditis, okay?
Myocarditis in young people is rare.
And there were so many extra cases following vaccination that even the CDC and the FDA and Rochelle Walensky and all the vaccine fanatics, they couldn't argue about it anymore.
They had to admit that this was a problem, that this was happening.
But for something like strokes especially, the more common the illness is, Even if there's a big increase, any one case, it's going to be hard to argue.
And the increase has to be really big before it stands out.
So if you had Peter Hotez or some vaccine advocate on, he would be saying to you, well, Joe, I'm really sorry your friend's had strokes.
But we can't know that that's related to the vaccine.
And Berenson, that Berenson character pointing at the VAERS data, he was just putting out things to try to discourage people from getting vaccinated.
And that's wrong.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's...
It's so weird to hear you say these things because it sounds so logical, but it's more acceptable now for some strange reason.
It seems like the tide is turning and then the numbers of people that are upset about the fact that they had been misled and the fact that the data was somewhat I mean, absolutely filtered.
It's such a confusing time because I don't remember a time where there was this much pushback against data, this much pushback against analyzing something that could be a significant factor in the rest of people's lives.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, I agree.
I mean, again, I do think there's It'll be interesting to see how it goes in the next few months and years because there are people and not a small number of people who are angry now that they were forced to be vaccinated.
They feel they were forced, right, at risk of losing their jobs.
And I hear from them.
They are angry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I know people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
And I know people with vaccine injuries that were forced.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, tell them to email me.
I'll write about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, well, get ready.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But, you know, here's how we know, or here's how I know that the zeitgeist has changed more than people even admit publicly.
Look at the data on kids.
Look at how few children under five have gotten this thing since it was approved in June.
And I don't know if Jimmy can pull up the number, but 95% of kids under five have not gotten a single shot.
And what's even more stunning to me is that even in that group, that 5% group that got the first shot, 80% of those kids didn't get a second shot yet, even though most of them are eligible at this point.
So 99% 99% of children under 5 are not vaccinated against COVID. And you're a parent, I'm a parent, if we believed that that was good for our kids, or even not bad for them, we'd go do it tomorrow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So people know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's where people are freaking out, right?
When you come for their kids.
The data on children was so undeniable in terms of what happens when they actually get it.
I mean, I have anecdotal data because both of my children got it and it was nothing.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Nothing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I mean, one kid had a headache, the other kid, she just didn't feel good for a couple of days.
And I've seen her way worse with the flu.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yep.
It feels much worse for kids.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
For kids.
It's, you know, my parents, on the other hand, were terrified of it.
You know, I didn't see them for a year, and they're, you know, they're hardline Democrats.
My parents are hippies.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, that's interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And they were all in on the vaccine, and they thought I was wrong.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
How do they feel now?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They, you know, they're reluctant to change, unfortunately.
But I think they recognized clearly when I got better so quick that at least for my own personal choice I was correct.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Have they gotten COVID? Yes.
And they've been fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I had them taken care of too.
It's one of those things, man.
People have these belief systems that they've adhered to, and they don't want to let it go.
And that gave them comfort during the early days of COVID, and it's going to be a slow erosion of that faith that they have.
And I don't know what's going to turn the tide for everybody, but I feel like in the future, when the dust settles and we get a chance to look at this accurately, I think people are going to have a very different view than they had when this all was going down.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I hope you are right.
I mean, you and I are both old enough to remember the Berlin Wall and remember the Berlin Wall coming down.
And there was this moment afterwards when the Soviet archives opened up and it was like, we got the truth.
We always knew the Soviet was bad and they did X, Y, and Z and these camps and whatever.
But to see the internal documents and to realize, like...
They, here's what they were saying inside that government.
It was, I think, you know, especially if you lived over there, it was this moment of great relief.
Like the truth came out.
You know, we always knew they lied to us.
We always knew that they were terrible and they cheated us and everything else.
But here's the truth.
And so, you know, I'd like to believe that maybe we'll have that moment with this.
I'm not so sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think the people that stick to the original narrative are going to feel so foolish.
I really do.
I think they're going to push back against it for as long as they can, and they're going to stop talking about it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They're claiming that the vaccine saved 20 million lives last year, which is a joke, Joe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
How many do you think it saved?
Maybe saved a million?
How many old people?
How many fat people?
I mean, it has to have saved people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Again, I think it is...
Again, the math gets really complicated.
First of all...
It's not an accident that both in the U.S. and the U.K., and Israel, deaths went up in January 2021 because there is this period of time after you get the first shot, you are definitely more vulnerable.
That's why you don't vaccinate for the flu in the middle of flu season.
You try to vaccinate out of season.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's what they always have said in the past about pandemics.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But they didn't do it in this case.
So, A, there was that period.
Then you had this, what I call in the book and what I've always called the happy vaccine valley.
You get this period where it actually works for a few months.
That's where the lives were saved, the spring of 2021. I don't know how many lives that would be.
Then it started to break down.
They gave people a booster.
They got a couple more months.
Then Omicron came along.
Since Omicron, the vaccines are useless.
Useless, if not negative.
And I am promising you that it's against infection.
The data is clear.
And I would, again, argue against serious disease and death, also useless.
It's a complicated data argument.
I'm not going to bore you with it.
At the least, they're not very useful against Omicron.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Is that because they believe that Omicron is a vaccine escape variant?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
Probably because we gave it a billion-person target of people who all had the exact same immunity.
No anti-N antibody immunity, just the spike and a very specific version of the spike.
We gave the virus a target and the virus, you know, it's going to mutate in the way that it gets the greatest benefit.
All right.
So the vaccines are now useless.
They're useless now.
There was this moment in January of 2021. I don't think they did any good because, again, you have that first month or the first couple weeks of where infections actually appeared to rise.
You have a few months of protection.
How many people got saved?
I don't know.
How many of those people were under 50?
Almost none.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do we have any data on why they tried to stop the distribution of the antibodies?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, yeah, because they said they didn't work against Omicron.
So, again, you made the point.
If the antibodies don't work against Omicron, why are we giving people this vaccine that causes your body to produce the old spike?
And I'll tell you something else.
This Omicron booster, it's basically BS. It's basically PR. Okay?
Because anybody who got vaccinated with the original, their body...
It's called original antigenic sin.
It's called immune imprinting.
Your body is going to be focused on the original, even if you get the new vaccine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And this is the theory as to why Omicron evades it.
Because your body's looking for something that's not there, and then this other virus comes in and gets...
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The spike is different in shape.
The simple coronavirus, it looks like a fist with these spikes sticking out.
But the spike itself is actually this incredibly complicated, essentially, coil of proteins.
And Omicron has different proteins in various places, so the coil looks different.
It's subtle, but it's different.
And that means that these antibodies that you're making when your body recognizes it's been infected again, don't attach to it the same way.
They don't, quote, the term is neutralized.
They don't neutralize it in the same way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Now, what is this?
Conspiracy theorists love to cling on to...
I can't believe I used that pejorative, but that's it.
They love to cling on to this notion that COVID has not been isolated.
What does that mean?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I don't know.
I don't know what they're talking about.
We know we have the genetic formula for COVID. We know exactly what it looks like.
They've taken electron microscope pictures of it.
It's been isolated.
They say the same thing about HIV, that HIV doesn't really exist.
HIV exists.
These viruses exist.
They kill people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, why do you think they say that it hasn't been isolated?
What's the purpose of that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So I believe that it's sort of a corruption of the argument, which I think actually is true, that the Chinese never provided the original virions.
So when they isolated the original virus in Wuhan, in Hunan province, they didn't give us copies of that.
They just gave us the molecular formula.
I think that's where that complaint comes from.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So, where it stands with you now is that you are in the process of preparing to sue the federal government?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The United States government.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Now, what specific branch?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I'm going to sue the president.
Maybe it's technically the United States or maybe it's actually Biden himself.
I'm going to sue Andy Slavitt.
I'm going to say they violated my First Amendment rights by attempting to Twitter is a private company.
So, again, we can argue about what the California Constitution might give, what rights it might give me.
But putting that aside, the First Amendment does not apply to private companies, right?
So Spotify, they want to carry you or they want to carry me or they want to carry Rachel Maddow or whoever, right?
They're a private company.
They have the right to do what they want.
Twitter, the argument is Twitter is just a bigger version of that.
So if they want to dump me, they have the First Amendment right to do that.
And again, we can argue about whether California actually stops them from doing that, but put that aside.
The federal government doesn't have the right to stop me from speaking.
Unless I'm screaming harassment at somebody for six hours, then I'm committing a crime.
But it doesn't have the right to stop me from being outside and speaking or speaking in my house.
I have the right for freedom of speech.
And when whoever it was in the White House told Twitter, and again, we could pull up the exact language, but Twitter employees said to each other after this meeting, They had a very tough question about why Alex Berenson is still on the platform.
Okay?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So this is like third hand?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, not third hand.
It was somebody at the meeting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Somebody at the meeting.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Talking to somebody else at the meeting.
And then they said they were very interested in Alex Berenson.
That's another direct quote from this meeting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And what human being was saying that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I don't know that.
I... The...
The discovery that I have obtained in this lawsuit doesn't include the names of certain Twitter employees.
So Twitter, for example, if it was Jack Dorsey, I would know.
But junior employees, I don't care who said it.
In other words, I'm not in this to damage some junior Twitter employee.
So I don't care whether it was person X or person Y. I know he or she worked for Twitter.
I know they were having a Slack channel conversation.
And I know this is what they said.
So my argument's going to be – and by the way, I have more discovery on the way.
I keep publishing new documents.
You know, last week or just a couple days ago, I published something showing that Oliver Darcy of our favorite network, CNN, went to Twitter to complain about me and basically tried to get me banned.
Although he didn't use those words.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What specific claim had you said that he was in opposition to?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I can't remember.
I think he complained to them a couple of times about me.
Once he's mentioned my name and then once it just says a CNN reporter.
This was in July and August.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why would a CNN reporter?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Because they don't believe in free speech for anybody but themselves.
I don't know.
Ask him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But how strange is that, that a journalist would contact a social media platform?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I agree.
On the substack, I said journalists who hate journalism.
That was the headline.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it's not just that.
It's like, what weird overstep is that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You know, it's phrased as, are you going to do anything about this because this guy's spreading misinformation?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, is that because they were doing an interview with this person and they were trying to figure out like...
unidentified
No, no, no.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's just about a tweet.
No, no, no.
It was me saying stuff that people didn't like that they call misinformation and then they go to Twitter and say, this guy's using your platform for evil.
You need to do something.
Or are you going to do anything about it, Twitter?
That's how they phrase it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
When The Atlantic wrote that article about you, the wrongest man of the pandemic, how many of those things that they said turned out to be absolutely true?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's a good question.
The single best thing in there, and I'd have to go back and look, is they said, Berenson claims that infections increased after vaccination.
That's totally wrong.
Infections decreased after vaccination.
Well, that sentence has proven not to be so accurate in the last 18 months.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What was their other claims that you'd said?
Were they right about anything?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Were they right?
Well, we've got to go back and look.
I mean, there were a couple of things they were sort of focused on that I didn't really say.
They were talking about how cases were counted during the clinical trials, which was something I didn't care about.
I can't remember what else they said.
I think if you went back and looked, you would say a couple of their points have not been proven wrong and a couple have at this point.
But the tenor of the piece was this guy's an idiot or worse than an idiot.
He's spreading lies and the vaccines really work and are going to get us out of this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And it was also that you're a grifter.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, I don't think they called me a grifter at that point because that was pre-substack.
So the grifting stuff really started after the stack because I didn't get paid to be on Twitter.
Although I did write those booklets.
I don't know.
I can't remember if they used the word grifter.
I hate that word, but what can I do about it?
But the last line in the piece, Joe, was something like, the case for the vaccines is built on scientific evidence.
The case against the vaccines is a steaming pile of horseshit.
So that's, you know what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Here's the problem with that term scientific evidence, is now that we know where the evidence is coming from and how the evidence is actually being relayed to the people that are reviewing the evidence, it's not raw data.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I mean, it's more...
A vaccine, sort of by its nature, is supposed to be a long-term solution, right?
So one of the points that I made was because we rushed this out and then because we blew up these clinical trials.
In other words, we gave everyone who had the placebo the vaccine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why did they do that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, this is a legitimate—I think it was a terrible idea, but this was the argument.
The argument was, we know these work, and we have a couple months of data showing that they're not dangerous, and so it's unethical to deny these people who took a risk, you know, because we don't—you know, when they went into the trial, we didn't know how well the vaccine would work.
Now we know it works.
We have to allow them to be vaccinated.
And since we're rolling this out to everybody, as a practical matter, they're going to go get the vaccine anyway.
So we might as well offer it to them.
And the FDA agreed with that.
But what it meant was we don't have any long-term safety data that's really clean.
And now that all these – the strokes, the myocarditis, and worst of all, this increase in all-cause deaths that no one has been able to explain – Now that this stuff is piling up, if we had this group, if we had continued the trials and said to those 20,000 people who'd gotten the placebo, you can't get the vaccine.
We need you to continue to be in this control group so that we can compare your outcomes to the vaccinated people for the next five years.
I'm sorry.
We just need you to do this.
It's important for it's important because we're going to give this thing to a lot of people and we need a clean group.
We would be able to say, OK, right now, if 50 people in the vaccinated group had died of anything and 100 people in the placebo group had died of anything, I'd feel pretty confident saying to you, hey, vaccines are pretty safe.
Even if it was 50-50.
Say, okay, you know what?
Yeah, we have this weird thing happening with all these deaths, but in this really good sample, there doesn't seem to be any problem.
You know what?
So Berenson's just, he's just firing flares, okay?
On the other hand, if it was 100 people who'd been vaccinated had died and 20 in the placebo group, then we say, this is not good.
And we really need to look at what might be causing this, whether or not the companies want us to or not.
The problem is we don't have either of those.
We don't have any of those because we blew up the placebo group.
So we are operating in a – it's not an information vacuum.
It's worse than that.
This is why, if you were a doctor in 1965, if you were somebody who operated on lungs, or you were an oncologist of any kind, You knew.
You knew that cigarettes were poison.
Okay?
You'd seen too many cases.
All right?
By the 50s, the late 50s, the early 60s.
And the epidemiology was very clear.
All right?
Cigarettes are not good for you.
You smoked for a long time, they're not good for your lungs.
I can't believe that, you know.
unidentified
Duh.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Duh.
Right?
unidentified
Right?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Joe, it took 35 years for that to become the public consensus and for people to stop smoking.
And that was something that was like a 25 to 1 risk ratio.
Everybody who got lung cancer after the 1960s was a smoker.
Didn't matter.
It took forever.
And the companies threw up every single obstacle they could.
Oh, people have a genetic predisposition that makes them smoke and makes them have lung cancer.
There's no chemicals that, you know, we burn all these chemicals that you find in here, so it's not there.
I can't even remember.
They had all these excuses.
It took a long time.
And so with this, it's going to be worse.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why are things going to be worse?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Because the risks are seemingly marginal, although a marginal risk over a huge group of people can still be a lot of injuries and death, because it's not just that the companies don't want to do any research, it's that the governments...
Encourage this.
So they're not going to want to find out the answer.
I mean, I wrote something like this a few weeks ago where I said, the problem for the public health authorities is that even announcing an inquiry, even saying, you know what, we're concerned about this rise in all-cause deaths, we're going to look, would throw into doubt the last 18 months.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
Is there any data that's being done on the all-cause mortality increase?
Or is there any studies?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, there's been some reports, you know, so like, you know, the UK government reports the data each week and they break it out.
The Australian government has been reporting the data monthly and they actually have said, you know, here's the baskets, right?
So here's the people who died of diabetes and that's been a big increase.
Here's the people who died of Alzheimer's, that's been a big increase.
Beyond that, no, not really.
There's not been this...
You know, I sort of outlined what would have to happen.
This is a national level problem.
So the analogy that I use is like, so there are some problems that like you can solve as a person.
There are some problems you can solve with like civil litigation and regulation.
There are some problems that you need a subpoena and a gun and a badge to solve, right?
And then there's problems that are bigger than that.
No, despite what Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone or Chris Evans can't fly to Ukraine and get the Russians out.
That's a national level problem, which requires a government or group of governments to figure out.
The vaccine issue is now a national level issue, right?
It would require enormous data collection, somebody in charge asking the right questions, and a decision that we're going to find out the answer, even if it's really unpleasant.
Maybe it won't be unpleasant, maybe it will, but we're going to find out the answer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Is there any possible connection to people getting COVID and developing heart issues and that leading to the all-cause mortality increase?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So that, I think, is going to be the case that's made.
I don't see it.
So there's this long COVID thing, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There's this idea you get long COVID. What is long COVID? Has it been defined?
It's people who still suffer physically after having had COVID. Not always physically.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Sometimes psychologically, psychiatrically.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Psychiatrically.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, yeah.
So here, look.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's what they're calling long COVID? Oh, no, no, no.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's brain fog.
It's fatigue.
It's anxiety.
No, no.
Here, look.
So, those people...
I can believe they have post-COVID symptoms, but that's not what we're talking about mainly when we're talking about long COVID. It is a group of I get in trouble, but I'm just going to say it because it's true.
It's a group of middle-aged women, generally, with anxiety disorders or, you know, other moderate psychiatric syndromes who oftentimes had other sort of ill-defined, whether it was fibromyalgia or irritable bowel, you know, this is stuff that's been...
That doesn't really get worse or better.
It kind of comes and goes.
It's not easy to define or treat.
These are the people who say they have long COVID. Not always, but mostly.
And it is very hard to connect those illnesses, whether it's fatigue or uterine fibroids or whatever the...
Whatever the syndrome of the week is with serious strokes and heart attacks and the stuff that actually kills people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Now, when we talk about myocarditis, what is the data in terms of people who got COVID and got myocarditis versus people who got vaccinated and got myocarditis?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So the argument people will make, sort of the vaccine community will make, is that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Is there a community of vaccines?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The vaccine advocacy community.
Sometimes I think they are actually vaccines.
They love vaccines so much.
Is that, you know, there's very high rates of myocarditis in people who got COVID. So the problem is, you know, when you really dive into the data, it's not clear.
I'm not even going to argue.
Let's just assume that's true.
Here's the real problem.
The problem is the people who get myocarditis after getting COVID are old, generally.
People who get myocarditis after a COVID vaccine are young, generally.
So, once again, it's an issue of why did we vaccinate these people who aren't at risk from COVID with a shot that is bad for them?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, they didn't think it was bad when they first got it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They shouldn't...
The default should have been, this is a technology that has been used in a few hundred, a couple thousand people in clinical trials In the last five years, we've been unable to advance any of these drugs out of phase one or two testing.
Why on earth are we telling a healthy 20-year-old or 10-year-old or 30-year-old who's at zero risk of serious complications from COVID to get this shot?
And it shouldn't be, by the way, it shouldn't be to make grandma feel better.
You do not make people get medical care to make somebody else's life better.
That's not how it was supposed to work.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Particularly after the wide distribution of the vaccines for those people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Because if it did offer the protection that they were advertising, it should have been a non-issue.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It should have been like, well, you didn't listen and now you have COVID and now you're sick and I'm not.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Because I did the right thing.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Another wonderful aspect of last year that all these people want to forget.
The, I'm going to deny you medical care.
You didn't get vaccinated, so screw you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Everything, including children who needed heart transplants.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Wild.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Wild shit, because with what we know about the potential risks of the vaccine, giving that to a child who's already compromised doesn't seem like a wise choice anyway.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
I mean, look, so, for example, in Denmark now, they're not giving the vaccine to any kids under five, except if those kids are really sick.
So the idea is, you know...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Immune compromised people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, and maybe COVID is a risk for you, so we're going to hope that the vaccine is a better alternative for you.
So...
Like, again, I get that.
The problem with that is that then they should have tested the vaccine on more of those people before, you know, making these assumptions.
But at least that's like a reasonable way to look at it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do they have a theory?
And, you know, I know Dr. Peter McCullough has a theory.
Well, he has his opinion on this.
But what do they think is causing these adverse reactions?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So the best guess is that it's often autoimmune.
So again, this is what the diabetes points to.
There's cases of shingles and sort of bad psoriatic arthritis, bad, in some cases, rheumatoid arthritis.
These are all autoimmune conditions.
So your body is attacking itself.
Your immune system is going haywire, going into overdrive.
Well, what does the vaccine do?
The vaccine is designed to encourage your immune system to ramp it up in case you are infected with COVID. So is it possible that that is having off target effects in some people?
Again, as you said, we're not all the same.
It's not everybody has a peanut allergy.
Maybe some people, for whatever reason, have these bad autoimmune reactions.
Now, there's another theory that it is simply the spike protein that your body – you make the vaccine, makes your body produce the spike protein.
And so if – what we were told, and I believe the CDC has now taken this off its website, is that the spike protein would be very, very localized.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They just took it off their website.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
So they're now admitting that that's not always true.
And maybe the spike itself, even if it's unconnected to the rest, the coronavirus can have especially heart problems.
So those are sort of the two primary theories.
What I will say is this is where like, you know, like an A-team of immunologists and virologists and people who are like specialized in organic chemistry, like this is where we need those people to be operating outside of Pfizer immediately.
And to be coming in clean and to be really looking for what the answer is.
And maybe the answer is, you know what, we've looked for a year and we really actually don't think the vaccines cause any of these problems.
But I would feel way better if it weren't the same people who'd been saying since December of 2020, the vaccines are perfect, saying that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why is it affecting young boys and young men so much?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So, you know, another great question.
You know, one theory is that the analogy that I've heard is that so, like, if you're a young athlete, for example, you know, you're the equivalent of a fast car, right?
So, you know, if the engine is going to blow, it's going to be more obvious in the case of a car that's, you know, 10,000 RPMs a minute, you know.
Than, you know, most of us who are semi-sedentary.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Hence the soccer players.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Exactly.
So that, you know, essentially that there's going to be other people who've had heart damage.
It just hasn't shown up.
Now, I want to say one positive thing about the myocarditis, which is, you know, the studies that have been done seem to show that after a few months, you don't see long-term heart damage.
Now, I would say...
I would say, you know, have they looked really, really hard?
They haven't looked really, really hard, but they've looked pretty hard, and they seem fairly confident that whatever, you know, adverse impact doesn't necessarily last that long.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's good news.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And this is good news for the young people that suffered from it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Including one of my friend's sons, who was 21. They forced him to get it, and he had a terrible reaction.
This...
This data that they have on the long term, what is it based on?
How are they measuring the myocarditis?
Are they seeing a dissipation of the myocarditis?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You go back and look at what somebody's ejection fraction is and how well their heart is pumping.
You can image the heart now.
In some ways, medicine is just absolutely amazing what they can do.
And so they're not seeing long-term heart damage.
They're not seeing necessarily elevated enzymes.
If your heart starts to deteriorate, you get CK and troponin and these other enzymes that they can measure.
So there's all these ways to measure how well your heart's working.
And again, I'm not a cardiologist, but my strong impression is that the data shows that after a few months, people seem to be better.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's good news.
unidentified
Paxlovid.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Paxlovid I like.
People hate me for liking it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why do they hate you for liking it?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Because I love Ivermectin.
My readers love Ivermectin, which I think is fine, but basically a placebo.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Really?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, pretty much.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Why do you think that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's complicated.
Didn't we get into this last time?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it's worth it for people that didn't listen.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Not everyone listens all eight hours?
I don't think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think most people don't.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I'm actually amazed how many people will come back to me and quote me something that I said like two hours.
I'm like, wow, you listened to the whole thing.
I think ivermectin...
First of all, I don't think it's particularly dangerous, and I think anybody who wants it should be allowed to use it under a doctor's care.
I don't think there's a great theoretical justification for it, and I think that the data, when they've tried to do prospective trials...
You can go look at a bunch of people who got it and say, oh, they did really well, and we're going to find an equal group of people who didn't get it and see how they did.
But there's always a little bit of...
There's always a little bit of cloudiness around how good that data really is.
The best way to do it is to take 1,000 people, say, I'm going to give 500 of you ivermectin and 500 of you nothing, and we're going to see how you are a week later.
And there have been a couple of those trials done, and they haven't shown great results for ivermectin.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And is it the dosage that's recommended by the FLCC? Because that's what I've heard.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Here's my argument.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's the pushback.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
If the drug works, you're going to see an effect.
There may be an ideal dosing level, but if the drug broadly works...
Look, if you take antibiotics, if you have some nasty infection, you take antibiotics, you skip a day?
You know, you skip day six out of the 10 days or even day four and days eight or whatever, you're going to get infection cleared up.
If a drug broadly works, it works, okay?
And you can start to argue about, you know, the dosing wasn't perfect.
People have to make guesses going in.
And, you know, as far as I, and I have done some work on this, The people who conducted those trials discussed the correct dosing with some of the very big ivermectin advocates on the way in.
So they didn't get the results that the ivermectin people were hoping for, and now the advocates say that the trials weren't properly conducted.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What do you think about the assertion that it is prophylactic?
Viral replication in vitro was stopped by ivermectin, right?
So there's a mechanism.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You can stop viral replication in a test tube with a lot of things.
It doesn't mean it works in a human being.
I'm just broadly unconvinced.
Paxlovid, they ran a clinical trial, and it had very, very positive results.
We could find it, but zero deaths versus eight deaths in the unvaccinated, and a big decrease in hospitalizations.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What's the mechanism?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's called a protease inhibitor.
This is well-known.
It blocks viral replication.
Okay.
And I know people have said, well, ivermectin is also a protease inhibitor.
But what's funny is that until Paxlovid came along, they weren't saying that was the mechanism of action for ivermectin.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it still is.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, but they had a different theory before Paxlovid worked.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Did they have a different theory or did they have a different narrative?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think in this case – Because once they brought up the – the way I understood it is once they brought up the fact that Paxlova was a protease inhibitor, then people started saying, yeah, well, yes, but so is ivermectin.
unidentified
Right.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But you can't – if you're going to say ivermectin works because it blocks entry of the virus into the cell, which I think was the original theory, and then some other drug comes along that works really well and has a different mechanism of action, It seems to me bad faith that all of a sudden you say your drug is just like that other drug.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But is ivermectin a protease inhibitor?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, people have said to me, look, here's this paper showing that it does have this effect as well.
Again, this is a level of complexity of sort of...
I would say virology complexity that I don't claim to be an expert.
I don't claim to be able to say, having read this paper, I can tell you that ivermectin works as well as a protease inhibitor as Paxlovid did and does.
What I can say, this is what I am good at, Joe, is saying, you guys are changing your story on this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And that's what I say to anybody on any side.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right, right.
You're very consistent.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So that's why I'm skeptical.
Now, the other argument about Paxlovid is, well, they tested in the unvaccinated.
They didn't test it in the vaccinated.
So how do we know it actually works in the vaccinated?
unidentified
Right.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, there was a pretty good retrospective trial where they looked at two groups of people with Omicron.
And once again, they had very positive results for the Paxlovid group.
Now, if you want to say to me, you just said to me, that's not a good kind of trial to do.
You discounted all the positive ivermectin trials that had that kind of study where you go back and look instead of going in at the beginning and then measuring the two groups.
I will say to you, you're correct.
But what we don't have for ivermectin that we do have for pexlovin is a prospective trial with the same good results.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And is that just because they haven't been conducted?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, no, no.
There's been ivermectin prospective trials.
This is the one we're talking about where they supposedly didn't use the right amount.
So at some point, you got to stop making excuses for your drug.
And here's what I say.
When people try to tell me Ivermectin works.
I know all these people who took ivermectin and didn't get sick.
My argument to you, and I say this about all these things, in most people, COVID is just not that dangerous.
I think I got in trouble because what I said was I could give you Alpo and you'd probably recover from COVID if you were healthy.
This is why you've got to test the vaccines in people that are high risk.
You got to test Paxlovin in people that are high risk, which they did.
You got to test the monoclonals in people that are high risk, which they did.
You got to test ivermectin in people who are high risk, which they did.
And they didn't find a good result when they did it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I've seen recent articles that have started to promote this narrative that Trump is to blame.
Yes.
Because he fast tracked the COVID vaccines.
Which is really fascinating, because if the COVID vaccines were what you were reporting, not you, but what these people were reporting, that means it's safe and effective.
So why are you upset that he fast-tracked something that was proven to be safe and effective?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
See if you can find some of those articles, because it's just started to roll out.
And to me, that...
Knowing that the government did come in contact and even CNN came in contact with Twitter about you, I wonder what kind of influence is causing these new articles to be released.
Trump White House, this is on Politico.
Trump White House exerted pressure on FDA for COVID-19 emergency use authorization, House report fines.
Trump officials tried to bully FDA over COVID treatments, House panel says.
This is The Guardian.
So this is a recent narrative that it's one of those, you know, trusted news source initiative, weird things that you just, like, you realize that, okay, there's a signal.
Like, where's the signal coming from?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Right.
Is it that they're starting to realize they're going to just have to drop the idea that the vaccine's worked at all?
And who's to blame for that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
It's a good question.
I mean, I do wonder this fall, is anybody even get this booster?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think a lot of people are going to get it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Do you?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Sure.
There's a lot of people that are all in still.
Yeah.
There's people that are all in that I know that are all in.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I guess so.
Are any of them under 50?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Most of them are not.
Yeah, I think most of them are not.
You know, there's a thing of B cell and T cell immunity that's imparted by the vaccine that people find comfort in, right?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, yeah, that's a...
The really good research that's been done suggests that it doesn't...
The T-cells that you gain don't work very well against Omicron, which is another reason that I think that this notion that the vaccines give you any help against severe disease is nonsense.
And one of the things that you see, if you look at New Zealand and Australia, which are very interesting cases because those countries locked down hard, right?
New Zealand's a couple little islands.
Australia's a big, big island, continent-sized island.
They were able to control COVID for two years, right?
Really control it.
And so they had almost nobody who was infected.
You know, they were going to be the great success story.
The ones that showed how terrible Donald Trump was, how terrible I am.
They got through it with no deaths.
No deaths in 2020, almost no deaths in 2021. Then they got everybody vaccinated.
They win.
There's only one problem.
They've had terrible COVID outbreaks the last seven, eight months, basically continuing the whole time.
And bad in January, which is their summer.
Bad in May, June, July, August, their winter.
And a lot of deaths.
Now, not as many deaths as we had.
I mean, I'm talking about relative population.
Not as many deaths as we had at our peaks.
Not even close.
But this is Omicron.
Omicron is less virulent.
And it's gone on and on and on.
And they've had a bad flu outbreak.
And their hospitals have been pretty overwhelmed.
And their all-cause mortality has been terrible this year.
So if you want to tell me that they are the great success story, it doesn't look like it did a year ago.
It does not look like there's any free lunch.
It looks like you're going to get your COVID outbreak.
If you lock down hard, eventually you're going to have to let up and you're going to get COVID. It's very interesting.
Here's another fascinating thing that you never hear about.
Chinese, okay?
And we don't really know what's going on in China.
We never have...
And who knows if we ever will.
But they were first.
Then they got scared.
They locked down really hard.
They've been basically isolating themselves for two years.
Two things.
They have completely avoided the mRNA vaccines.
Completely.
They've had contracts to have those vaccines in their country for more than a year.
They've refused.
They haven't given anybody mRNA vaccines.
They, for whatever reason, are continuing to stick with this, to my mind, bizarre strategy of zero COVID. So, at some point, I mean, presumably, they're going to have to let it out.
And it will be very interesting to see what their experience is without the mRNAs.
Whether they have a lot of deaths, a few deaths, we will see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
As a journalist, what has this been like for you?
You were never involved in any real significant controversies about the things that you reported or data or you being called a grifter or promoter of misinformation and disinformation.
What has this been like for you?
unidentified
It's been pretty great, actually.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
The shitty part has been, you know, the personal stuff with my friends, and it hasn't been great for my marriage either, but as a reporter, it's been great in two ways.
First of all, first of all, I have all these great stories and no one else writes about them.
So I get to, I mean, it's like, it's like this is the most important story in the world and I'm coming at it and like there should be 15 people out there, good investigative reporters who are competing with me to break news about the vaccines and everything else.
And there's none.
So if you're a whistleblower, you've got some data from a health insurance company, you're coming to me.
You're a pilot, you want to talk about somebody who dropped dead in a cockpit, you're coming to me.
You've got nobody else.
And by the way, you folks, if you're out there, I'm very findable.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What is the data on pilots?
Because pilots are, that's a unique case, right?
Particularly like fighter jet pilots.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, so I don't know what the data is on fighter jet pilots.
I mean, and I'm...
Here's what I know.
A lot of pilots didn't want to get vaccinated last year, and a lot of them did under pressure.
And at least one major airline, disability claims are way up this year.
Now, from pilots, I mean.
Now listen, that may be because they're just sick of, you know, being screamed at by passengers or whatever, and they want out.
But it's certainly an interesting data point.
So, just to go back to the reporting question.
So, first off, I feel like I've got a great story and I have a big audience that's interested.
I mean, you know, it's not a Joe Rogan size audience, but it's a good audience.
And, you know, some of those people are willing to pay.
You know, my sub stack, most people who subscribe don't pay, but enough people pay that, you know, I'm doing well.
Which, by the way, I think is one other reason that a lot of people at the New York Times and elsewhere don't like me because, you know, the idea is if you ever leave the Times, you know, you're never going to be able to support yourself as a journalist.
And I've managed to do that pretty well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So has Barry Weiss, so many others.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, Glenn, that's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's a weird world now, right?
Because I think people are recognizing the influence that corporations have on information.
Yes.
And they don't like it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, they don't.
So far, Substack's been good.
Let's see.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Substack is fantastic.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Let's hope they can stay that way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think they can.
I mean, as long as they don't get bought out.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
As long as they don't get bought out and as long as they can generate enough money from their 10% to support.
But they seem truly committed to free speech.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They do.
And I think that this also opens the door for similar platforms.
And there have been some copycat Substacks out there.
And I think that's great.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And by the way, I think the fact that Spotify supported you the way it did is very significant.
And, you know, and hopefully, you know, that's been to their benefit commercially, because you want that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, during the height of the cancellation, I gained 2 million subscribers.
unidentified
Wow!
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
See?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It was wild.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's amazing.
I mean, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
But fortunately, you know, they're not an American company.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Right.
Swedish, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So that's A, is that I have this great story to myself.
But B, and you may have had this experience too.
I was talking to somebody about this a few days ago.
So there's a reporter, I think his last name is Ryan, Ben Ryan.
And he's a science journalist, and he's gay, and he's been writing a lot about monkeypox.
And he's gotten kind of upset with the public health authorities.
You see it on Twitter.
He's, you know, why aren't you telling the truth?
Why aren't you telling gay men who are most at risk?
Didn't we learn anything from HIV? And he's gotten some pushback.
And what I was saying is what I think he has seen is what I've seen and maybe what you've seen.
If you are telling the truth, if you're doing your job, And you believe you're telling the truth and trying to get the word out on whatever the issue is.
And people start lying about you and attacking you personally and calling you a grifter.
It doesn't make you want to stop.
It makes you want to push.
Because it becomes personal.
You're attacking my skills.
You're attacking my integrity.
You're attacking my family in some cases.
I'm not backing off.
I know what I'm doing.
Look, right or wrong, and I think I've been pretty right, I've done this to the best of my ability for the last two years.
And I am not going to let somebody say, you know, I'm not going to let somebody intimidate me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What have you been wrong about?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
What have I been wrong about?
I've been wrong that...
The number one thing I was wrong about that I can remember is that in 2020, in the summer, I thought that we might be getting close to herd immunity.
I thought there was this possibility, because the waves seemed to come and go without everybody being infected, that there would be this sort of – people speculated there would be what was called cross-T cell immunity, that people who had been exposed to other coronaviruses couldn't get sick with SARS-CoV-2.
And that that's why, you know, in New York, there had been this big fall off in cases.
And that's why in the Sunbelt states, there was a big rise and a big fall.
That turned out not to be true.
Basically, everybody had to get infected with SARS-CoV-2, either the original or Delta or Omicron.
There's no cross immunity, it seems like.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What about the people that got vaccinated that never got it?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, they'll get it.
I mean, there may be some fraction of people who've never got it, but I suspect almost everybody's gotten it at this point.
And if you think you didn't get it, you probably just didn't get symptoms.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There are people that I know that didn't think they got it, and we brought them in here because, you know, we do antibody testing here.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And did they...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They got it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
A lot of people got it.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So actually, the last time I was in here, I had still negative antibodies.
And I don't know that I've had it since then.
I haven't had a positive test.
I've really stopped testing myself, basically.
But I think it's possible if I had gotten an antibody test, it would show that I'm positive.
Everybody gets it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So I was wrong about that.
Yeah.
I mean, I publicly said I thought 600,000 people would die.
We're at a million now.
I mean, 600,000, when I put it out there, that was considered a big number.
So, was I wrong?
Yeah, I was wrong.
I don't know how many people predicted a million.
unidentified
And when they say died, With versus from, the whole thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What is the actual number?
When you take away people that are already on death's door, when you take away people that are already morbidly obese, I think amongst the people that died, there was a significant number, like a huge number, that had at least four comorbidities, right?
What was that number?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I want to say the average number was four, so it would be at least half.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right, but what was the percentage of people who died from COVID that had four comorbidities?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So over 50% of those.
So in other words, of the million who died, if you look at the comorbidities, I think at least half of those had four or more comorbidities.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which means, comorbidities means things that were killing you already.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, you know...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Comorbidities.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
They're morbidities.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
But it's not necessarily going to kill you tomorrow.
So you can be 400 pounds and live another 10 years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But you're significantly weakened.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
So look, there was a group of people who have COVID on their death certificates who didn't die from COVID, right?
Right.
Then there's this bigger group of people who were in this group, who wouldn't have died today if they didn't have COVID, but who weren't very healthy.
And how many of those people were there?
There were, I mean, a lot, but those are still people who died from COVID, you would say, I think.
But here's what's so screwed up about the excess mortality.
I know I keep coming back to this, and I know it's sort of complicated and mushy.
In 2020, in early 2021, the people who were looking at the numbers the hardest were all saying the same thing, which was, okay, we got all these people dying.
COVID's going to go away and we're going to have fewer deaths for a while because COVID pulled forward.
They actually referred to it.
There's a company called Service Corporation of America.
It's the biggest funeral home operator.
They own like 15% of funeral homes in the United States.
They call it pull forward.
What they were talking about was pulling death forward.
So, COVID was killing people who were going to die in 2022 in 2020. You were going to die in 2021. COVID killed you in 2020. So, they were actually sort of warning their investors, we're getting more funerals now.
We're going to get fewer funerals later.
That didn't happen.
We have excess deaths now, even though people predicted we would have fewer deaths now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What do you think is causing the excess deaths?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I think it's some problem with the vaccines, okay?
I don't know more than that.
But to me, the most likely...
The reason is the billion people we gave this technology to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And if you look at 10% increase in all-cause mortality, what are the numbers we're looking at nationally?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's several hundred thousand people in the US, several hundred thousand people a year in Europe.
I mean, it's a big number.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And has this been consistent?
Has it dropped off?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So, last fall was a big increase.
Now, it's interesting.
So, the better data, again, comes out of Europe.
Because, among other things, Europe doesn't have a terrible opioid epidemic, so the numbers are cleaner.
So last fall in Europe, UK, Germany, they were having big increases in mortality, some of which was COVID, some of which was not.
That was about three months.
It started about three months after the mass vaccination campaigns.
It was increase in deaths in cancer, increase in deaths in Alzheimer's, sort of broad, broad, not huge in each category, but broad.
Come the winter, That increase went away.
For just a couple months, we had zero extra all-cause mortality in these countries.
And I thought to myself, this is good.
Whatever was happening, it went away.
What else happened in the winter?
Well, they pushed the boosters.
They had widespread booster campaigns.
About three months after those booster campaigns, all-cause mortality started to rise again.
And that was sort of in March and April.
And it has not come down since.
We're now five, six months in.
So again, this is non-COVID. These countries, just like the U.S., still have COVID deaths.
Nobody talks about it anymore because it's inconvenient.
They still have plenty of COVID deaths.
Even when you factor those out, they have all-cause mortality.
Above normal on COVID deaths and 5% to 10% additionally above normal on other deaths.
So they're running about 15% above normal on all-cause mortality, which in a country like the United States, 400,000 or 500,000 deaths a year.
Across Europe, about the same number.
So you add those up, you get close to a million.
A million here, a million there, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Is there any legitimate reporting other than people like yourself that are independent?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So the British, a couple British newspapers have started to note this.
Now, what they mainly say is it looks like this is lockdown related.
So again, there's this theory, people didn't get medical care, so now you're seeing an increase.
And, you know, other people, a little more speculative, they'll say long COVID. So there's been a couple places that have talked about it.
My impression is that this is so unpleasant to even consider that nobody wants to consider it.
You can't get unvaccinated, Joe.
You're just living with whatever it is.
And I also want to be clear, even if it's a million people, We gave all the COVID vaccines worldwide to billions of people.
We gave these mRNAs to a billion people.
So it could be a very small...
Absolute increase per person in your risk still leading to a lot of deaths just because so many people got it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What is the relationship between the mRNA vaccines versus the adenovirus vaccines?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They're just completely different.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Right, but I mean in terms of like all-cause mortality, in terms of health complications.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So the AAVs, actually, by the way, look a little bit better now against COVID. It looks like they, like, interestingly, if you got one dose of J&J, your protection wasn't as great initially, but it looks like it lasts longer.
They kind of look like better vaccines as vaccines.
They definitely can cause what's called thromboembolic events.
They can cause nasty, nasty clots in people that lead to strokes.
You know, this is another great question that if we had a real investigative reporting community would be asked.
Somehow, for reasons that are not clear to me, the mRNAs won.
Okay?
They won commercially.
They won in public view.
Normally...
Public health authorities wouldn't take a strong position on one vaccine versus another, but they did in this case.
You basically can't get J&J anymore in the U.S., and you can't really get the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, they pulled the J&J vaccine.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They basically pulled it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
This is, by the way, right in the same time period that I was going to get vaccinated.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, it was back in April of last year.
Now, it is not clear to me at all that the overall safety profile of the DNA vaccines is worse than the mRNA.
But for some reason, a decision was made inside the governments and inside the public health authorities.
We're going to lean on the mRNAs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Now, you said DNA versus mRNA?
unidentified
Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So the adenovirus vaccine is a DNA? That's right.
Or is it adenovirus, is that how you say it?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Adenovirus, yes.
So what it is is it delivers DNA to your cells, this virus.
It's a cold virus.
It delivers it to your cells.
Your cells process that DNA into RNA, actually, and then cause your body to produce the spike.
So whereas the mRNA is a little bit of this mRNA, which is actually not the same RNA that's in nature.
It's been modified in a specific way.
That's inside a tiny little ball of fat.
That then delivers that RNA to your cells that causes you to make the spike.
The outcome is the same in both.
Both the DNA and the mRNA vaccines cause your body to make the spike protein.
That was the great...
Innovation.
We're going to turn your body into a little cell or into a little factory to make the spike protein.
The Novavax vaccine, by the way, is actually just them injecting the spike protein into you.
And then the other vaccines are more old school, where it's basically just the virus itself that's been changed so it doesn't replicate, and that's injected in.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And which viruses, or excuse me, which vaccines are those?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Those are not allowed.
They're not used in the US. They're the Chinese and the Indian vaccines.
Which have actually been given to more people worldwide than the more advanced, quote unquote, advanced vaccines.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And why are they not allowed in the United States?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's a really good question, Joe.
They were never tested here.
The argument was basically that the mRNAs would be better, that they would cause your body to have a stronger immune response.
And, you know, inactivated flu vaccines don't work very well.
And the belief was that the same would be true for the coronavirus.
So we're just going to go with this new, better technology.
But you ask a very good question.
Why haven't we even looked at those?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
The Novavax, is that the new one?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
The Novavax, which nobody...
It's a proof, but nobody's...
I mean, Novavax stock actually crashed a few weeks ago because they basically acknowledged nobody was using it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And why do you think that is?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, nobody wants to get...
I mean, anybody who's going to be vaccinated has been vaccinated at this point.
There's not a big audience.
And, you know, it's funny.
Every, I would say, I guess a few times a week, I get emails from people that are like, hey, can you tell me about Novavax?
And I'm sort of like, I don't have time to talk about this because nobody's getting it.
The public health authorities...
They don't want Novavax.
They don't want the J&J or AstraZeneca.
They certainly don't want Covaxin or the Chinese vaccines.
They want you to get mRNAs.
And look, I think it should be clear to everybody at this point, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I would love to know, I would love to be a fly on the wall when Pfizer is talking to the NIH about why that is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do you think that any of this was done in good faith?
Do you think that they believed the data?
Do you think that they believed that this was going to be the panacea to everybody?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I think they hoped it.
I think that they got fooled by the clinical trial data in November and December of 2020, and then they got fooled, as you said, by the Israeli data and the British data in the spring.
If you look at what Fauci said, what Walensky said, I mean, what they said wasn't that different than what our friend Rachel Maddow said.
You know, like, Fauci was talking about elimination of the virus.
And they were all talking about herd immunity.
And that's just a remarkably stupid thing to have said in the light of what happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
There's a few things that he said that were remarkably stupid.
One of the things that he said is that lockdowns are designed to increase vaccination.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which is just- Did he say that?
Yeah, he did.
He said the quiet part out loud.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I missed that.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of what they did was, right?
So like with the, you know, when the Canadians wouldn't, I mean, you know, Canada's a bigger country than the United States, they wouldn't let unvaccinated people on planes.
They were clearly trying to punish those of us who are unvaccinated, force us to do this.
It's wrong.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's also wild how many of them wound up getting COVID. They all got COVID! It's wild.
Biden got it twice.
Jill Biden's got it.
Fauci got it.
Everyone got it.
Did you see that Birx said that she knew that the vaccines were not going to stop the spread of the virus?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, it's funny because that's not what she said two years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But it's wild that she said it.
Why do you think she said that?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I talked to somebody who...
Who knows her?
And he said he thought she wanted to be right about something.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
unidentified
Jesus Christ.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I know we joked around about you being vindicated, but you are, you have been.
Is this a net good, do you think, that people like you exist and that...
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
You're going to ask me if I think it's good, I think?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, but you know what I'm saying?
You're a courageous guy in a lot of ways.
What you did, you talked about the personal cost of this in terms of relationships that you've had, and I know the attacks aren't fun.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I mean, look, I think it's, you know, if somebody, this got taken out of context, I said it, maybe I said it to you last year, but even if I were wrong about all of it, it would be good that there's somebody on the red team, right?
It'd be good that there's somebody raising these questions.
From the point of view of society, it would be better if I were wrong about all of it.
It would be better if we had no COVID right now and the vaccines actually worked.
And I were saying to you, you know what, Joe?
I was wrong.
I'm going to end this show by going to the vaccine clinic and getting a vaccine.
Instead, I feel one of the best decisions I've ever made is not being vaccinated.
You know, with this vaccine, okay?
I got all the normal childhood vaccines.
I think it's really bad...
That journalists have lost their skepticism about either tech or the pharmaceutical industry.
I don't understand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't understand.
Yeah, it's bizarre.
It's bizarre to watch because these are the people that are supposed to be uncovering corruption and undue influence and following the money and they just didn't do it.
They got captured.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
These are the biggest, most profitable pharmaceutical products ever made.
They're some of the most profitable products made in history.
And here's another thing, by the way.
The penny may drop in 2026, 2027. It'll be nice to see the first journals asking why there's no other mRNA product.
unidentified
Approved.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Which I will bet you there isn't at that time.
I mean, you know what?
That's something I could be wrong about in five years.
But...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, they've talked about using it for cancer.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Oh, yeah.
But guess what?
It's really hard to use multiple doses.
And it doesn't...
I'm talking about...
I'm actually talking about a vaccine.
There's a flu vaccine or Ebola vaccine or, you know, dengue vaccine.
I think...
I think it's going to be very hard to prove mRNAs under a normal development process because the side effects are too complex.
But that's all right.
We gave it to a billion people.
We did our best.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What a strange time to be alive.
And as a journalist, this must be almost kind of bittersweet, right?
Because what you do is chase these kind of stories.
I mean, these kind of stories can make or break a journalist's career.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, I guess it's both made and broken mind.
I ain't going back to the New York Times.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't think you need to.
And I think the rise of independent journalism, and that's one of the reasons why I praise Substack so much, and giving people like yourself and other independent voices who are legitimate journalists who do the work and really are chasing down the truth of the story and not this culturally convenient narrative.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But they're pushing back.
These folks would get me banned again on Twitter tomorrow if they could.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But they can't.
But the thing is, what you're saying is accurate, which is so crazy.
They shouldn't want to ban you.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They shouldn't, but they won't even write!
You don't want to write that I survived my motion to dismiss back in April.
You don't want to write even that Twitter put me back on, which is a pretty big deal.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's a fucking huge deal.
Did anybody write about it?
No one.
Washington Post?
No one?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No.
Okay.
You don't want to write about that.
You think that's...
He's just one schmo with 300,000 followers.
We're not going to write about it.
Two weeks ago, Joe...
Maybe we should pull it up so people could see it for themselves.
Two weeks ago, on my stack, I published, in black and white, Twitter employees, what they said about what the White House had told them to do.
Okay?
It is about as clear...
Yeah, this one.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
The White House privately demanded Twitter ban me months before the company did so.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Federal officials targeted me specifically when they met with Twitter in 2021. They really wanted to know about Alex Ferguson.
Go down and you'll see what they said.
There it is.
There it is.
How was WH? That next thing is just an emoji.
Overall, pretty good.
They had one really tough question about why Alex Berenson hasn't been kicked off the platform.
Otherwise, their questions were pointed but fair, and mercifully we had answers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Mercifully.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Mercifully!
By the way, that's not the comment of somebody who's confident that they can stand up to the White House.
They're saying we are lucky we had answers.
Here's another one.
High level takeaways from the meeting.
Anything we should keep an eye out for.
They really wanted to know about Alex Berenson.
All right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Andy Slavitt suggested they had seen data viz that had showed he was the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
At the time, employees said internally they did not believe I had broken the company's rules.
I've taken a pretty close look at his account and I don't think any of it's violative, said an employee wrote on the Slack conversation a few minutes after the really tough question about why Alex Berenson hadn't been kicked off.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
So you try to imagine if the Trump White House had done that to a journalist at the New York Times, okay?
I mean, it would be front page news for days.
They won't even write one story about this.
That's how much they hate me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, well, you're inconvenient.
Journalists are supposed to be inconvenient to the powers that be when the powers that be are not doing what they're saying they're doing and that are withholding information or are being unduly influenced by massive amounts of money.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And also their initial choices.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yep.
We're supposed to be inconvenient.
That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
What's next for you?
How is this book selling?
It's available now.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's available now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It's everywhere.
It's a legitimate publisher.
How hard was that, by the way?
We talked about that last time, but it bears repeating.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
So it's Regnery, which is a real publisher, but conservative.
They actually want me to write another book, which I would love to do.
I don't have time right now.
sort of about how screwed up teenagers are these days and whether it's, you know, ADHD drugs or whether it's, you know, bad over parenting or whatever it is that's causing these terrible anxiety disorders among teenagers, which I think is a really good book. bad over parenting or whatever it is that's causing these And I would like to write, you know, because in some ways it ties into COVID, right?
It's like the great lie of COVID is if you just listen to us, everything will be fine.
No one will ever die again.
And this is sort of what we tell our kids, right?
Like, we can make everything perfect for you.
There's a pill for this.
Hey, you don't like your gender?
We'll just change it for you.
You know, you don't have to be anxious.
And unfortunately, that's a lie.
And when they realize it's a lie, it makes them more anxious.
So that's a book Regnery wants me to write.
But no, you know, Simon& Schuster or Putnam, all these places that publish my earlier books and my novels, I don't think they're going to publish anything for me anymore.
I am outside the mainstream media.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do you think that's permanent?
I do.
Some of this vindication, though, has to open people's eyes.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It would be better if I had been wrong.
If I had been wrong, I could apologize and ask to be forgiven.
unidentified
Wow.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I'm pretty sure.
Other people say to me it's not permanent.
I think it's permanent.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
So you just resigned to this independent life.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I got the stack.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You're doing great.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I get to come on with you once a year.
I got a publisher who can put out a pretty good-looking book and hardcover.
I'm okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Do they carry these at Barnes& Noble in the front when you walked in at the airport?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
They couldn't get much distribution at BNN, but they did get a little bit.
You know, it didn't get reviewed.
All those places refused to review.
Even, so there's, I don't know, have you written a book?
No.
One day you'll write your memoirs, and there's something called these pre-pump places.
There's Kirkus, Publishers Weekly.
They review everything.
That's just what they do.
They wouldn't review it.
I mean, I'm lucky in a way.
I don't live in Brooklyn.
I don't live in Manhattan.
I live in upstate with my family.
Our life is our life.
But, I mean, I've been shut out personally and professionally from the people who should be my peers.
I guess they're not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But you must have gotten some support from people.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Very little.
Much more support from people like cops or pilots.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No.
People, you know, inside journalism, people say to me, oh, you must have a lot of people contacting you quietly from the Times and elsewhere.
Not really.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Really?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, I'm not surprised about The Times.
The Times is strange.
It's captivated by our current culture in a weird way that I don't think I've ever seen before.
I never thought I would see.
I thought that the ethics of journalism was always supposed to be objective analysis of data, and if it's inconvenient and uncomfortable for people, that's sort of the point.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
unidentified
Yep.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It turns out it's comfort the Democrats and afflict the Republicans.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
Which is not- Are you a Democrat?
Are you independent?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
What are you?
I'm an independent.
And as I say in pandemia, I didn't vote for Biden and I didn't vote for Trump.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Nor did I. I mean, yeah.
I mean, given everything that's happened, how do you feel bad about that decision?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
No.
No, everything I said was true.
The thing that I said when, you know, I got famously canceled when I had Eric Weinstein on the podcast and he said, I can't vote for Biden.
I just can't.
And he was like, I can't vote for Trump.
And I said, I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.
I didn't vote for either.
But I said that because I realized that Biden was...
He's deteriorating in front of our eyes, and to deny that was crazy.
And now that we're seeing it, we're seeing him fall down walking upstairs, we're seeing him ramble on in these run-on conversations, forget where he is, come off stage, try to shake hands with people who aren't there.
There's something really, really wrong.
And if he was Trump, they would be on the top of every building with bullhorns, screaming to remove him from office.
And these people are all blacking out from all the gaslighting.
unidentified
It's wild to watch.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
If it's Trump versus Biden in 2024, are you going to vote?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think I'd still vote independent.
I really wish there was an independent option.
I think that the problem is human nature tends towards tribalism, and we have these people on one side that think that Trump is the devil and that having him in place, regardless of whether or not his economic policies were more effective, that Trump is bad for our culture and bad for society and divides us.
I think they're right though, aren't they?
Yes, yes, and that's what I've said, and that's why I didn't want to have him on.
I don't want to support that.
I don't think that's good for people.
I don't think that's good for our culture.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Do you think you'd be able to challenge him?
I wonder if you actually had him for two hours.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I'd have to have him for six.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I'd have to wait for the Adderall to wear off.
I don't know if he's on Adorama.
I'm kidding, Donald.
Don't sue me.
I think, unfortunately, I'd probably have fun with him.
He's a funny guy.
He says some wild shit.
He's a bombastic, huge character.
And I think people would probably get a chance to see a side of him, a fucking around side, that they would like.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I don't know if it would be the worst thing in the world if you had him on.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
It probably wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
I just don't want to be involved in that.
I don't want to be involved in helping political figures.
I think Tulsi Gabbard should be president.
She's the only one that makes any sense to me.
I think she's a powerful, independent voice who speaks her mind on a variety of subjects and makes a lot of sense, exhibits real leadership capability.
She's a little crazy, is she not?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
In what way?
Well, that's a good question.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
That's a great narrative, right?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
But I'm crazy, too.
I mean, you're right.
When you actually say that to me, I actually realize I don't know very much about her, ultimately.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
The problem is that's what people like to say.
I think she's a woman of character, and I think it's everything that everybody wants.
You want a woman president, you got one.
You want a woman of noble character who displays excellent leadership capability, you got one.
You got someone who reaches across the aisle and communicates to people on both sides, you got one.
You got someone who served overseas twice.
And she was in these medical units helping people that were blown up from the fucking war.
I mean, that's why she has that grey streak in her hair.
She got that grey streak when she was serving overseas.
You got a person who exposes, on her side, corruption and evil acts of politicians.
One of them that's now the Vice President of the United States.
You know, I don't think there's a better person out there to run for president than her.
And a person that's loved by people on the right as well.
I mean, she is a longtime Democrat.
But, you know, she's a person who substitutes for Tucker Carlson when he's out of town, which is wild.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Fair enough!
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
But they don't want her.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, that's definitely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Which is wild, because she's a woman of color, right?
She's from Hawaii.
She's got all the things that supposedly you're looking for if you want diversity.
All the things.
I mean, she could be our first woman president.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Interesting.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
See, I don't know, really, as I hear you say, I realize I know almost nothing about That's the problem is that everybody has this thing in their head, oh, Tulsi Gabbard's crazy.
Okay, why?
Why is she crazy?
And wouldn't you be crazy if you were her?
Wouldn't you be crazy if you've experienced what she's experienced?
Just how the DNC tried to shut her out and wouldn't let her debate?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, one thing I think that you've managed to avoid, and I'd like to think I've managed to avoid, is getting too angry.
And by the way, I'm not saying this about Tulsi Gabbard.
I see it with, just from the outside, I don't know him at all, with Glenn Greenwald, that I feel he's gotten really angry.
At sort of the establishment.
And now maybe he's acting in ways that don't help him long term.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
How so?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think the thing with Alex Jones...
I mean, you and I may disagree about Alex Jones.
I just think Alex Jones is a bad guy.
I think what he said about the Sandy Hook stuff was pretty unforgivable.
And for Glenn to get on stage with him, I don't love that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I don't know what happened there.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I'm not aware of that. - So this was just a few weeks ago.
Alex Jones had this documentary that came out about him.
I think he was involved in the making of it and Glenn interviewed him about it and said basically something like, I'm not here to really push you about Sandy Hook.
I may have the language wrong.
I don't want to say exactly what he said.
But my impression was that he certainly didn't challenge him in the way that was proper for a journalist to...
You know, maybe I have a visceral reaction to Sandy Hook because we live, you know, like 15 minutes away from there on the other side of the Connecticut, you know, on the New York side of the border.
But, like, that happened, okay?
And it's pretty terrible to have done what Alex Jones did about that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think it's terrible that he said it and I think he thinks it's terrible that he said it and I think he was also going through a mental health breakdown and You know Alex has had problems in the past with substances and he's had problems with he He's a guy who had significant head trauma when he was younger.
And I attribute that to some of the issues that he has.
And I think excess drinking also attributed...
And it's also the fact that he keeps finding things that are true.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
The problem is you find things that are true and you're alone.
And that's what I think Alex was.
He was alone.
You know, Alex, when I first met him, was a guy who was showing up at George Bush rallies.
And calling him a criminal.
And this is when Bush was running for president.
And that's when I, at first, was aware of him.
This is when he was protesting against what they were doing with the World Trade Organization, where they were stopping any kind of dissent where you couldn't even have a WTO badge on your backpack with a line through it and go and cross these lines.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
This was in Seattle back...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yes.
And he also was the first to expose the agent provocateurs and that they use government agents to smash buildings and light things on fire so they could say this is not a peaceful protest and then they could go in with force and stop the protests.
He exposed a lot of things that are true.
He told me about Epstein's Island.
When I thought that was the craziest fucking thing I'd ever heard from him.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
100% true, of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
100% true.
You know, when someone like him tells you there's an island that they take influential people and they have sex with underage people, you'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about?
And then if you told me years later that the guy, Epstein, would, first of all, go to jail for doing that very thing, for having sex with underage people, Then, still be able to court people like Bill Gates and be able to have them and travel with them and go places with them and then years later he would be suicided in some way where all the cameras stopped working and no one ever got brought to justice for it in any significant way and
that years after that Ghislaine Maxwell would be arrested, that she would be tried, that she'd be convicted and that the list of the people That engaged in this illegal activity would never be released.
I would say that is a banana republic bullshit thing.
That's not going to happen in the United States of America.
People are going to be brought to justice.
I don't care how powerful they are.
But that's not the case.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, that's basically accurate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
This is why Alex went crazy.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And by the way...
It's true.
I'm thinking, like, we've never had a report on the—right?
Has there ever been a sort of government—any kind of independent report on what happened to Maxwell or to Epstein in the prison?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Well, no, other than that one guy, Michael Baden, who was an autopsy specialist.
The guy was in the autopsy show on HBO who reviewed the case.
And said that his injuries were indicative of someone who was strangled.
Not indicative of someone who hung himself.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, fair enough.
I mean, yes.
I can...
I mean, where we sort of started this whole line of conversation is, like, you've got to know that stuff and still keep your bearings, right?
So, like, I'm not out there saying, like, Pfizer and Bill Gates are trying to kill everybody in the world, right?
And I think that's why I'm kind of valuable, and I think that's why I'm kind of dangerous to some of these people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think so, too.
I think you are what I like in a journalist.
You're objective and reasonable, even when it's inconvenient.
And that's a thing that escaped a lot of people during this time.
And I hope people can find their way back again to what they wanted to be when they started out to become journalists.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yes, but I hope Glenn will break some national security news in the next year.
I hope he'll get a new WikiLeaks or whatever, you know, a new Snowden documents or whatever.
Whatever it is, I'd love to see him go back to that.
Because you can spend all your time feeling ill-treated, and it doesn't do anybody any good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
I know what you're saying.
And that's a natural aspect of human nature.
You dig your heels in and you get angry.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Make it about you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I mean, believe me, I get it.
It's easy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I mean, look, you've got to understand what that guy was exposed to when he did release Ed Snowden's information.
I mean, that had to be horrific.
I mean, his life has been threatened on multiple occasions.
Yep.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
No, I mean, they threatened to go after him with the Espionage Act.
No, there's a reason he's basically in Brazil, although he obviously comes back from time to time.
And honestly, that was an amazing piece of journalism, right?
Seeing the extent of the federal government and the NSA's surveillance efforts and everything they could do.
It's certainly among the more important pieces of journalism in the last 20 years.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
And it's so bizarre that that wasn't met with the kind of outrage in this country that I felt it should be met with.
That this was done under the guise of protecting us from terrorism.
I want to know how much terrorism has that actually stopped?
And how many people have been violated?
How many people have had their rights violated because of this?
This thing that's not supposed to be legal in this country.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
I mean, again, because the media has been so focused on trying to get Donald Trump the last six years, all those stories don't count anymore.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
He's a giant problem in that way, right?
Because he represents this thing that's so easy to label as evil and must be stopped that it justifies so much.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
And, you know, I mean, as I said, he's, you know, I always keep quoting my own stuff.
I wrote this a few weeks ago.
He's ruined journalism, right?
He ruined it because he made it all about him.
And the idea was, we'll do whatever we have to do.
We'll go with any rumor just to get him.
And, of course, it didn't work.
And now I fear, and we'll find out more about this raid last month, but I fear he's ruined, I guess it was earlier this month, but he's ruined law enforcement.
You know, those guys have even, you know, they have real strict ethical guidelines because the stakes are so high.
And, you know...
To raid the ex-president and possibly future president's house because of some boxes of papers he took home, you better have...
I hope they have more than that.
I mean, I do.
Because Trump has a way of making everyone crazy and making people violate their own standards.
And that is not good for anyone.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
On both sides, right?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
On both sides.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
Anything else?
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
It's been a pleasure.
I appreciate you, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I really do.
I appreciate you.
I know you take a lot of shit, but I appreciate you.
I appreciated you when I first had you on to talk about cannabis, because I think it's a very important thing.
And I don't think if someone thinks that some parts of something are good, you should ignore the bad parts.
And I think there was this sort of...
There's this widespread belief amongst people that love cannabis that it's this wonder drug that's nothing but good and a net positive for everybody.
But I think we have to look at reality.
And I think that what you did in publishing that, Tell Your Children, is very important.
And I think people should be aware of it.
And I think that what you've done with all this information in the pandemic and the way you've distributed it, I think it's very valuable.
And I think a lot of people appreciate you.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Listen, I hope so.
I know...
You know, I wish people I were close to could see it that way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
You probably shouldn't be close to those folks.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
I hate when somebody's been a friend for 30 years, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I know.
I get it, man.
Maybe they'll come back.
Maybe they'll get it eventually, ultimately.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
I hope so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
I think what you did, you did for the right reasons.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, that's true.
Right or wrong, I did it for the right reasons.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Yeah.
I don't think you're wrong.
alex berenson ▲ ● ▼
Well, I'm going to keep publishing.
Can I mention the Substack?
Yes, please.
It's called Unreported Truths.
It's at alexberenson.substack.com.
I hope and expect to have a lot more to say from the Twitter documents very soon.
I believe, I've sort of promised it and I do think it's going to happen.
I'm going to be suing Biden and Andy Slavitt.
We'll see what happens with that.
And the book, if you can find the final remaining copy of Barnes& Noble, it's Pandemia.
But look, I hope at this time next year, or whatever time, I hope obviously I'll come down and I'll come on with you anytime, we are talking about sort of...
Twitter and big tech and all that stuff.
I'd much rather be talking about that than some, you know, wave of deaths, you know, all-cause mortality.
Let's just hope that goes away.
I truly would love for that not to be a story in a few months.
unidentified
As would I. As would I. Alex Branson, thank you very much.
Thank you, sir.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼
Appreciate you, brother.
All right.
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