The Megyn Kelly Show - 20230310_democrats-against-journalism-and-covid-truth-revea
Aired: 2023-03-10
Duration: 01:36:12


=== Michael Schellenberger's Bold Whistleblowing (15:07) ===

[00:00:10]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:22]  Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:24]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, and happy Friday.
[00:00:27]  COVID may no longer be affecting most of our daily lives.
[00:00:31]  I mean, if you're sane, you've moved on.
[00:00:34]  You might be severely immunocompromised and having to deal with it.
[00:00:38]  I understand that there is that small strain of the population, but let's be honest, these morons riding around with their masks on inside their cars alone, there's no helping them.
[00:00:46]  They'll never move on.
[00:00:47]  Nonetheless, revelations keep coming out day after day about how governments around the world lied to us, leaned into authoritarianism, and it's not just our own.
[00:00:59]  It's really disturbing.
[00:01:01]  And the deep dive on how they did it and how so many of us allowed it and how some few heroes, in my view, fought back is educational, instructional, and important so that we never repeat these mistakes.
[00:01:15]  Joining us ahead, journalist David Zweig.
[00:01:18]  He's been so great, hasn't he?
[00:01:19]  You guys have seen him on the show and heard him on this show many times, pushing back on the nonsense science they were trying to shove on us over mask mandates.
[00:01:27]  He's one of the few who actually took a hard look at these studies they were saying justified those mandates and saw how flawed they were and pointed them out.
[00:01:36]  This is a guy who writes for places like New York Magazine and yet was willing to tell the truth.
[00:01:41]  He joins us today to discuss his latest investigation into how a California county began to spy on, spy on churchgoers who refused to stay home, who refused to obey what was later ruled to be an unconstitutional edict that they not attend church.
[00:02:01]  You will not believe what these tiny little bureaucrats with the big egos and the small brains did to the churchgoers.
[00:02:12]  We're talking the infiltration of prayer groups.
[00:02:15]  Ever been to a prayer group?
[00:02:17]  It can involve very private, personal discussions about your struggles, your relationship with God.
[00:02:24]  Can you imagine some county loser in there surveilling you, taking notes on what you said so you could report it back to corporate?
[00:02:34]  Some guy wearing a three-piece suit in his just, you can just picture it's like a two big body and a two little suit trying to keep eyes on you and your church.
[00:02:43]  It's worse than you knew.
[00:02:45]  And then we'll speak with another journalist over in the UK who blew the lid off of what the government over there really thought about its citizens during the pandemic.
[00:02:53]  This woman did something extraordinary.
[00:02:56]  She was hired by one of the government officials to ghostwrite his book.
[00:03:01]  And she got to look at all of his WhatsApp messages talking about how, oh, yeah, we'll unleash a new strain on people to force compliance with our mandates.
[00:03:09]  And you know what she did?
[00:03:10]  She betrayed her confidence of this guy, his confidence in her, the private agreement, and she went public with the WhatsApp messages.
[00:03:19]  It's unbelievable.
[00:03:20]  She's here.
[00:03:21]  But we begin today with Democrats on Capitol Hill showing their complete disdain for actual journalism yesterday.
[00:03:29]  Can I just tell you, this is why, this is why you don't look at Congress and say, that might be a cool thing to do.
[00:03:36]  Maybe I'll encourage my child to consider running for office.
[00:03:39]  You don't because of people like Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
[00:03:42]  That woman alone is a reason not to join that body.
[00:03:45]  I know you could say, get in there and fight her.
[00:03:48]  Who would want to be associated with her?
[00:03:50]  It's like, well, I could also join the KKK and the white supremacists and fight David Duke, but I don't really want to be associated with that organization.
[00:03:59]  No, Congress is not the KKK, but they're disgusting.
[00:04:02]  They have stupid, self-aggrandizing, lazy, hard partisans who don't care about America.
[00:04:10]  That was on display yesterday in full measure.
[00:04:13]  Turning me now to discuss it and walk you through what happened.
[00:04:16]  Stu Bergier, he's host of Stu Does America over on Blaze TV and a great guy.
[00:04:21]  And Dave Marcus, another great guy who's a journalist and author.
[00:04:24]  He writes for the Daily Wire, for the Daily Mail, for Fox News.
[00:04:28]  Guys, great to have you both here.
[00:04:30]  Thanks, Megan.
[00:04:31]  Appreciate it.
[00:04:32]  Right?
[00:04:33]  Isn't it, remember when you were a kid and it was like, oh, Congress, that's cool.
[00:04:36]  Yeah, like you get a little pen.
[00:04:39]  You represent the government.
[00:04:40]  Remember when you used to have respect for Congress people?
[00:04:43]  I mean, just like, think back.
[00:04:44]  I know it takes a bit.
[00:04:46]  Dave, you're almost exactly my age, I think.
[00:04:47]  Do you remember those days?
[00:04:49]  Yeah, you know, you'd see them sitting on the, you know, in some convertible or the neighborhood St. Patrick's Day parade and they seemed relatively inoffensive, right?
[00:04:57]  It was a different age.
[00:04:59]  Right, right.
[00:05:00]  They are not relatively inoffensive, Stu.
[00:05:03]  I mean, what we saw yesterday was an absolute travesty.
[00:05:07]  We're going to get into it, but do you want to set it up?
[00:05:09]  We saw Matt Taibbi take the stand.
[00:05:13]  We saw Michael Schellenberger, who's amazing.
[00:05:15]  Michael Schellenberger, you'd think they'd like these two.
[00:05:18]  They're actually of the left originally.
[00:05:21]  They're heterodox in their views.
[00:05:23]  They're great journalists, but you'd think, you know, they maybe would have a benefit of the doubt with somebody like Adebbie Wasserman Schultz, Stu.
[00:05:29]  It wasn't the case.
[00:05:31]  I think you're talking about these so-called journalists, Megan.
[00:05:35]  Tell the audience what they were doing there just so they understand our story.
[00:05:38]  Yeah, I mean, it's incredible.
[00:05:39]  Here they are just trying to go through what we've learned from the Twitter files.
[00:05:43]  This is something that has not been covered by the mainstream media really at all.
[00:05:47]  And these are a couple of journalists who have just been able to get access to these internal documents.
[00:05:54]  These are the type of things that usually the media drools over to get internal company documents of an important public company.
[00:06:01]  Of course, we need to look at that.
[00:06:03]  They're not looking at it.
[00:06:04]  Only people like Schellenberger and Taibbi and Barry Weiss have actually been able to look at these things and present them to the public in a way that is understandable and shows the scope of the influence from not only media figures, but government figures trying to control people's free speech.
[00:06:23]  And this is the type of thing that has, I don't think, ever happened before.
[00:06:27]  We've seen whistleblowers inside of companies before release internal emails, of course, but never has the whistleblower been a guy who paid $44 billion for the company, who seems to be much more interested in exposing these negative behaviors and just getting us toward free speech than he is the actual financial future of his company.
[00:06:48]  He doesn't mind if his company takes a hit.
[00:06:50]  If we can get to something real here, and thank God he's done this.
[00:06:54]  Of course, as you point out, the people in Congress don't seem to have the same interest.
[00:06:57]  Oh, my God.
[00:06:57]  You know, what occurred to me was, can't there be anything where people across the aisle say, I'm just going to listen.
[00:07:03]  I'm just going to listen.
[00:07:04]  I'm going to try to learn.
[00:07:06]  And I'm not just going to resort to, well, the Republicans put this guy on, so I must be against him.
[00:07:11]  You know, like, what if what this guy is saying is of interest to your constituents, these Democrats who pounded Taibbi and Schellenberger?
[00:07:19]  What if they actually have something alarm like deeply alarming to your fundamental principles as an American?
[00:07:24]  Just to set it up, Dave, because you had a great piece on this yesterday.
[00:07:28]  This was the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government.
[00:07:33]  Two witnesses, Matt Taibbi, longtime journalist from Rolling Stone, now he's independent, and Michael Schellenberger, who I love his backstory.
[00:07:40]  He used to work for Greenpeace.
[00:07:42]  He was out there on the boats trying to get people to, you know, help save the environment.
[00:07:46]  And then he worked for Solyndra to try to get those panels in all of our houses.
[00:07:50]  And during the Obama administration was trying to get those grants and green energy, hardcore green energy guy.
[00:07:57]  And from the inside realized, oh, wait, this stuff is not actually great at all for the environment.
[00:08:04]  It doesn't work.
[00:08:05]  There are serious downsides.
[00:08:06]  Why did we demonize nuclear?
[00:08:08]  That's something that could protect the land and really help clean up things.
[00:08:11]  Why isn't the left listening to me?
[00:08:13]  Wrote Apocalypse Never has done on fire TED Talks, ran for government governor in California, but is not a hard partisan guy.
[00:08:20]  And he's been doing great reporting now for Barry Weiss and others.
[00:08:24]  Okay, so those are the two guys.
[00:08:25]  So they take the witness stand to talk about what they found at Twitter in terms of the government cooperation, or really, you know, it was willing cooperation before Musk with and Twitter to suppress views on vaccines, on anything the government was shoving out there that Twitter and the government thought needed to be accepted wholesale without any questioning.
[00:08:51]  Yeah, I mean, this is one of my beats.
[00:08:54]  So, I mean, I've been covering the Twitter files as they come out.
[00:08:58]  So, you know, I tuned into the hearing and I knew that there would be pushback from the Democrats because it doesn't make the Biden administration look good.
[00:09:07]  When Representative Plaskett, in her opening remarks, I mean, these guys hadn't said a word yet.
[00:09:13]  And the opening remarks called them so-called journalists.
[00:09:17]  It was amazing.
[00:09:19]  I mean, I was stunned.
[00:09:20]  Did you see the two of them?
[00:09:21]  I mean, Tavia and Schellenberger looked at each other like, did she really just say that?
[00:09:25]  Like, is this actually happening?
[00:09:27]  And it just kind of, so this is a delegate, Stacey Plaskett, Democrat, U.S. Virgin Islands.
[00:09:34]  Okay, first of all, like, take a seat until you represent an actual state.
[00:09:37]  Okay.
[00:09:38]  It was like an actual county or somebody who has actual voting rights on the floor.
[00:09:42]  She didn't even know who Barry Weiss was.
[00:09:44]  She's an idiot.
[00:09:44]  She's obviously not well read.
[00:09:46]  She hasn't done her homework.
[00:09:47]  So like, I don't know why she's the ranking member, why this person gets to question people like Matt and Michael.
[00:09:52]  I know not, Dave.
[00:09:55]  It was absolutely unbelievable.
[00:09:57]  And I mean, so-called journalist is not something you throw around.
[00:10:01]  That's not like if you go to a restaurant and you don't like your meal and you say, I don't think the chef is very good.
[00:10:06]  So-called journalist means you're a liar, right?
[00:10:09]  It means you are intentionally deceiving people.
[00:10:14]  It's a horrible thing to say.
[00:10:15]  And no evidence was presented whatsoever.
[00:10:19]  She just didn't like their journalists.
[00:10:21]  She didn't like what they had concluded in their actual reporting.
[00:10:24]  So here's a sample, just to set it up.
[00:10:26]  We've made the audience wait long enough, 10 minutes in.
[00:10:28]  Here is a sample of what these Dems did to Taibbi and Schellenberger when they tried to reveal what they had found inside these Twitter files over the past couple of months.
[00:10:40]  Republicans have brought in two of Elon Musk's public scribes, these so-called journalists, to release cherry-picked, out-of-context emails.
[00:10:50]  Ranking member Plaskett, I'm not a so-called journalist.
[00:10:53]  I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books, including four New York Times, New York Times bestsellers.
[00:11:03]  Who was the individual that gave you permission to access the emails?
[00:11:07]  Well, the attribution from my story is sources at Twitter, and that's what I'm going to refer to.
[00:11:11]  Are you trying to get journalists to do that?
[00:11:12]  No, I'm not trying to get journalists.
[00:11:13]  No, I'm not.
[00:11:14]  So what we're getting is your dissemination, your decision as to what was important and not important in that, correct?
[00:11:21]  Which is true in every news story.
[00:11:22]  Now, the ranking member of the Committee on the Weaponization of Government is asking for your sources.
[00:11:28]  I never asked them for their sources.
[00:11:30]  I did not ask for sources.
[00:11:32]  I asked if they were talking to Elon Musk.
[00:11:35]  I just need a date, sir.
[00:11:37]  But I can't give it to you, unfortunately, because this is a question of sourcing.
[00:11:41]  So you're not going to tell us when Musk first approached you.
[00:11:46]  Again, Congressman, when you're asking me to, you're asking your journalists to reveal a story.
[00:11:50]  Well, sir, I just don't understand.
[00:11:51]  You can't have it both ways, but let's move on because no, he can't.
[00:11:54]  He's a journalist.
[00:11:55]  He can't because either Musk is the source and he can't talk about it, or Musk is not the source.
[00:12:00]  And if Musk is not the source, then he can discuss.
[00:12:03]  No one has yielded.
[00:12:04]  The gentlelady's out of order.
[00:12:05]  You don't get to talk about it.
[00:12:06]  The gentleman is not recognized.
[00:12:07]  The gentlelady's not recognizing that.
[00:12:08]  You're not recognizing that.
[00:12:10]  He has not said that.
[00:12:11]  What he has said is he's not going to reveal his source.
[00:12:14]  I ask you this because before you became Elon Musk's hand-picked journalist, and pardon the Oxymoron, he crossed that line with the Twitter files.
[00:12:22]  No.
[00:12:22]  Elon Musk, it's my time.
[00:12:24]  Please do not interrupt me.
[00:12:25]  You also said that you were invited by a friend, Barry Weiss.
[00:12:29]  My friend Barry Weiss.
[00:12:31]  So this friend works for Twitter, or what is her?
[00:12:35]  She's a journalist.
[00:12:36]  Sir, I didn't ask you a question.
[00:12:37]  Yes, ma'am.
[00:12:38]  Barry Weiss is a journalist.
[00:12:39]  I'm sorry, sir.
[00:12:40]  She's a journalist.
[00:12:41]  So you're in this as a threesome.
[00:12:46]  There were many more people involved than that.
[00:12:49]  Oh, my God.
[00:12:50]  I should correct myself.
[00:12:51]  That's Representative Garcia, Democrat from Texas.
[00:12:54]  She's the idiot.
[00:12:55]  She's the one who's the dope who didn't know Barry and decided to go sexual.
[00:12:58]  Well, she's got somebody like Michael Schellenberger, who's got 10 times her intellect, decides to lob that snarky comment in there, Dave, to cover up her own ignorance and not having any idea who Barry Weiss is.
[00:13:10]  You'd think she would because Barry made her name at the New York Times, which presumably this Democrat used to read at some point.
[00:13:16]  Yeah, and also is a key figure in the entire Twitter file story.
[00:13:20]  I mean, did her staff not give her any information about this?
[00:13:24]  You know, I was really struck when Taibbi said, I'm not a so-called journalist.
[00:13:28]  And I wrote this in my column yesterday.
[00:13:30]  What I heard when he said that, I very distinctly heard at long last, have you left no sense of decency?
[00:13:38]  Because this was a McCarthy hearing.
[00:13:40]  I mean, this was just as bad.
[00:13:44]  It's chilling.
[00:13:45]  You know, as a journalist, I was sitting there thinking, like, you know, if I write something that Democrats don't like in the Daily Mail or Fox News, like, are they coming after me?
[00:13:53]  I mean, that didn't stop me from writing my column, but I mean, my goodness, this is frightening, frightening stuff.
[00:13:59]  Oh, it just gave me a chill, but you're exactly right, Stu.
[00:14:02]  This is chilling.
[00:14:03]  It is physically, literally chilling to journalists where you get hauled in front of Congress.
[00:14:08]  Fine.
[00:14:09]  These Republicans wanted them to talk about what they found.
[00:14:12]  The Democrats were trying to smear them as liars available for purchase and dishonest under oath, based on nothing.
[00:14:23]  It's incredible.
[00:14:24]  I mean, could there be a less likable group of people than who we see in Congress?
[00:14:30]  They make me like Megan Markle in comparison, which is say incredible, particularly on this program.
[00:14:36]  You know, it's funny because you're right.
[00:14:38]  Barry Weiss is from the New York Times.
[00:14:40]  Michael Schellenberger was named the environmentalist of the year.
[00:14:45]  He did documentaries on CNN.
[00:14:47]  Matt Taibbi was pissing off every conservative in America during the Bush administration and onward and has been doing this for a very long time.
[00:14:56]  These people have, in a way, a similar career arc as Elon Musk, and that like they were liberal icons, liberal heroes, people that the left absolutely loved.
[00:15:08]  And then they took, they were, they had the audacity to step out of the narrative for just a couple of seconds to just say, wait a minute, this part of this is not true.

=== The Business of Leaked Journalism (14:14) ===

[00:15:18]  I might still agree with you on tax rates and being pro-choice and 100 different other things, but let's talk about the truth here.
[00:15:26]  We're supposed to be the liberals.
[00:15:29]  We're supposed to be the ones who love free speech.
[00:15:31]  At least that's what we were told a long time ago.
[00:15:33]  And you see that once you step out of that narrative and Elon Musk, what was his step out of that narrative?
[00:15:39]  It was wanting to open up his electric car factory during COVID.
[00:15:44]  Just that little step turned him from God to Satan in these people's eyes.
[00:15:50]  And you're right.
[00:15:51]  They just look like mean, petty, angry idiots.
[00:15:56]  And Ella Wright, like dumb.
[00:15:57]  That's the true insult, like stupid.
[00:16:00]  She didn't know who Barry was.
[00:16:01]  And then the ranking member from Virgin Islands, Stacey Plaskett, comes out and says, oh, so-called journalist.
[00:16:09]  And Matt Taibbi corrects her, saying, I'm not a so-called journalist, starts listing a few of his accolades.
[00:16:14]  And the listening audience can't see this, but if you're watching this on YouTube, you can.
[00:16:18]  She totally ignores his answer.
[00:16:20]  She starts talking to an age.
[00:16:21]  She's chit-chatting over here.
[00:16:23]  Like she's not fucking even listening to it.
[00:16:25]  Sorry, I lent.
[00:16:26]  She's not listening.
[00:16:27]  She's not listening.
[00:16:28]  She doesn't care.
[00:16:30]  The whole goal was to upset and insult him.
[00:16:34]  Same as Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
[00:16:35]  I told the team to include that moment in the butted soundbite where she asks a question.
[00:16:41]  He tries to answer.
[00:16:43]  She says, be quiet.
[00:16:44]  It's my time.
[00:16:45]  Wait, what am I doing here?
[00:16:47]  Isn't this, it's supposed to be a Q ⁇ A?
[00:16:48]  If you only want to do the cues, no problem.
[00:16:51]  I can leave.
[00:16:51]  I don't need to sit here as your puppet, Dave.
[00:16:54]  Yeah, I mean, the other thing that was insidious when you got past the blatant insults towards these journalists was several of the Democrats did say, oh, you know, we love free speech.
[00:17:05]  You know, of course we like free speech.
[00:17:07]  And the Democrats do love free speech unless there's an emergency.
[00:17:11]  And by an emergency, they mean climate change denialism or transphobia or racism or as we know, anything having to do with COVID or Hunter Biden, right?
[00:17:24]  And that came through in, it was almost like the Democrats were giving testimony when they were speaking, right?
[00:17:30]  They weren't asking that many questions.
[00:17:32]  What they were really saying is, well, the government's working with Twitter to protect Americans from misinformation and dangerous speech, right?
[00:17:40]  How can that be bad?
[00:17:42]  And Taibbi and Schellenberger were both trying to explain to them what all of us knew as fifth graders, which is you can't have a democracy without this.
[00:17:50]  And it just seems completely lost on these Democrat members of Congress.
[00:17:55]  And it's stunning.
[00:17:57]  Because it was their program.
[00:17:58]  I mean, they're the ones doing it, you know, working with Twitter and the other social media companies to snuff out any tweets by the so-called disinformation dozen, including people like RFK Jr., Dr. Mercola.
[00:18:13]  Any narrative that countered their narrative was to be disallowed, which is un-American.
[00:18:19]  Here's just a little bit more from Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
[00:18:22]  She used to come on my show in the midday when I had the afternoon show at Fox America Live.
[00:18:27]  I submit to you, Jury, that she was not always this nuts or this nasty.
[00:18:32]  But I could be wrong.
[00:18:33]  I could be wrong.
[00:18:33]  Maybe I was just in a different place mentally.
[00:18:36]  But here she is in her attempted cross-examination of Taibbi.
[00:18:42]  The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics asserts that journalists should avoid political activities that can compromise integrity or credibility.
[00:18:49]  Being a Republican witness today certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity.
[00:18:53]  Journalists should avoid accepting spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it's likely to be slanted.
[00:18:58]  Would you agree with that?
[00:19:01]  I think it depends.
[00:19:04]  Really?
[00:19:04]  You wouldn't agree that a journalist should avoid spoon-fed, cherry-picked information if it's likely to be slanted, incomplete, or designed to reach a foregone, easily disputed, or invalid conclusion?
[00:19:14]  Mrs. Congresswoman, I've done probably a dozen stories involving whistleblowers.
[00:19:20]  Every reported story that I've ever done across three decades involves sources who have motives.
[00:19:26]  You stated this on Joe Rogan's podcast about being spoon-fed information.
[00:19:31]  And I quote, I think that's true of any kind of journalism.
[00:19:34]  And you'll see it behind me here.
[00:19:35]  I think that's true of any kind of journalism.
[00:19:37]  Once you start getting handed things, then you've lost.
[00:19:40]  They have you at that point.
[00:19:42]  And you got to get out of that habit.
[00:19:43]  You just can't cross that line.
[00:19:45]  Do you still believe what you told Mr. Rogan?
[00:19:48]  Yes or no?
[00:19:50]  Yes or no?
[00:19:52]  Yes.
[00:19:52]  Good.
[00:19:53]  Now, you crossed that line with the Twitter files.
[00:19:56]  No.
[00:19:56]  Elon Musk, it's my time.
[00:19:58]  Please do not interrupt me.
[00:20:00]  You violated your own standard and you appear to have benefited from it.
[00:20:07]  Yeah.
[00:20:07]  What the audience can see was when she did that.
[00:20:09]  No, stop it.
[00:20:10]  Both my guests were like, everybody started shaking their head.
[00:20:13]  No, like, it's so offensive.
[00:20:15]  Who wants to take it?
[00:20:17]  Can you please, I got to say, Megan, it's Friday.
[00:20:20]  Please stop playing Debbie Washerman Schultz clips.
[00:20:22]  You're ruining my weekend.
[00:20:24]  And this is just embarrassing.
[00:20:26]  You know, we all know that she's up there to make a speech, but every piece of news that comes to a journalist, especially in a whistleblower case, comes from people who have agendas.
[00:20:37]  It's your job as a journalist to sift through that, to check it, to understand those perspectives and see what parts of it you can corroborate and what parts of it you need to move on from.
[00:20:48]  That is how every story in Washington gets planted.
[00:20:51]  It doesn't, you know, people like to have this, this magical picture of, you know, people in parking garages talking to people in dark light.
[00:20:57]  They can't see who it is.
[00:20:59]  It's Watergate every single day.
[00:21:01]  Well, that's not true.
[00:21:02]  A lot of this stuff is just leaked to these people, and that's okay.
[00:21:05]  It might start them down a road that is really important.
[00:21:08]  Here we have a story that journalists typically would beg for.
[00:21:13]  You're getting access to thousands of internal documents that can help understand a major national story.
[00:21:22]  And all the government can do here is shun the journalists who took the time to bother to care enough to sift through this and make it understandable for people to go through.
[00:21:33]  I mean, in my view, this should be illegal, the stuff that they did here behind the scenes for government officials, for Adam Schiff's office to email Twitter and say, hey, can you pull these tweets down?
[00:21:44]  And some of it happened on the right as well.
[00:21:45]  It should be illegal.
[00:21:46]  It might not be an official request, but how is someone inside of Twitter going to take that request when it comes from a guy who you see on CNN every day blabbing about how people should be fired and censored and impeached?
[00:21:59]  It's going to be something that he takes seriously.
[00:22:00]  They're going to listen to it, even if they don't have Democratic leanings, as many times, of course, at Twitter, they really did.
[00:22:07]  They did.
[00:22:07]  So, Dave, the other thing Washman Schultz tried to do to Taibbi was suggest, he's a money whore.
[00:22:13]  You made money, didn't you?
[00:22:15]  You had more Twitter followers as a result of this, didn't you?
[00:22:19]  And he was like, you know, I guess I had some more or whatever.
[00:22:22]  And she's like, so you made money, you profited off of this.
[00:22:26]  And he said, actually, it was kind of a wash because I had to hire people to help me with it.
[00:22:30]  And she interrupted him, right?
[00:22:31]  Like, I don't want to hear that.
[00:22:32]  Like, so I guess if you, I mean, the same could be said of Glenn Greenwald, right?
[00:22:38]  Who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Snowden.
[00:22:42]  Or let's take somebody who she probably likes, Ronan Farrell, who also, I think he won a Pulitzer too for the Me Too reporting he did on Harvey Weinstein.
[00:22:52]  He got more Twitter followers as a result.
[00:22:54]  Does she, is he a money whore?
[00:22:56]  Or like, where's she going with this?
[00:22:58]  I don't know.
[00:22:58]  I mean, maybe only independently wealthy people are allowed to be journalists because, you know, if you make any money doing it, then, you know, you're clearly whoring yourself out.
[00:23:08]  Setting aside the fact that Debbie Wasserman Schultz clearly has no idea how journalism works, she's a member of the federal government.
[00:23:16]  And as a journalist, when I see a member of the federal government lecturing us about how we're supposed to do our job, I mean, it's like, who the fuck do you think you are?
[00:23:28]  Yes, thank you.
[00:23:29]  Thank you.
[00:23:29]  Have you read the First Amendment?
[00:23:31]  I mean, it's insane.
[00:23:37]  I tend to be pretty optimistic.
[00:23:39]  I really do.
[00:23:41]  Yesterday's, one of my favorite writers, a guy over at the Federalist, David Harsani, and he tweeted this morning.
[00:23:48]  He's also an optimistic guy.
[00:23:49]  And he said, I'm too optimistic after watching this hearing.
[00:23:52]  And yeah, it's, it's, I never thought I would see anything like this.
[00:23:57]  And, you know, to Stu's point, the underlying issue is gravely important because clearly they want to violate the First Amendment, right?
[00:24:06]  The government's not allowed to violate the First Amendment.
[00:24:08]  So what do they do?
[00:24:09]  They find a workaround.
[00:24:10]  They say, well, let's go get Twitter or Facebook to violate the First Amendment for us.
[00:24:15]  I mean, that's what's going on here.
[00:24:17]  And thankfully, Jordan and the Republicans on the panel were actually interested in that.
[00:24:22]  This is what Taibbi's been reporting.
[00:24:26]  He's talking about how the government used these NGOs, these non-governmental organizations, to do what it wasn't really allowed to do directly.
[00:24:36]  And those NGOs funded in large part in many situations with taxpayer money, pressured Twitter and the other social media companies to suppress heterodox voices on these issues when it came to COVID in particular.
[00:24:54]  And that's not okay.
[00:24:56]  That's me paying to suppress my own voice.
[00:25:00]  I didn't agree to that.
[00:25:01]  I didn't put anybody in office who agreed to that.
[00:25:04]  And the government's not allowed under the First Amendment to punish speech in that way by silencing it because it doesn't like your viewpoint.
[00:25:11]  So this is deeply problematic.
[00:25:13]  And it goes well beyond, oh, you're a Russian bot and you're not real and you're trying to interfere with an election.
[00:25:19]  This is, we don't, Matt Taibbi was pointing out, Stu, they were suppressing even truthful commentary, like people saying how they, how they had negative consequences from the vaccine because they worried that these NGOs who were telling Twitter and others to stifle this conversation, they worried that it would diminish the number of people who would get the vaccines.
[00:25:44]  How is that any of their business?
[00:25:46]  It is not the NGO's business.
[00:25:48]  No, it's not.
[00:25:49]  And, you know, they've, they've created this term malinformation to be able to cover this stuff, which is stuff that's true, but kind of leads people down the wrong road.
[00:25:57]  And therefore, we shouldn't let them say.
[00:26:00]  That is a dark, dark road, especially for the government to be involved in.
[00:26:04]  But they are now increasingly using these workarounds where they go to these NGOs and they have the, it's a great little circle of grift that's going on here.
[00:26:13]  These NGOs are seen as the experts on any given topic, and they are the ones that the media goes to and asks what's going on.
[00:26:21]  And when some dissident voice comes out, even with the with great qualifications, they say something else is going on here.
[00:26:29]  This is important for people to talk about.
[00:26:31]  The media hears that claim, if they acknowledge it at all, and then go back to those same NGOs, those same glorified experts, and ask them, wait a minute, is that other person right?
[00:26:40]  They say no.
[00:26:41]  And then that other person becomes a conspiracy theorist and has their life wiped out.
[00:26:46]  You know, and it's funny because they mention all of the money supposedly going to people like Matt Taibbi and Barry Weiss.
[00:26:54]  I mean, Barry Weiss left the cushiest job in the world because of her standards.
[00:27:00]  She could have been absolutely sitting at the New York Times raking in money till the end of her life if she just stayed with the narrative.
[00:27:07]  And instead, she decided to leave on her own and go out completely on her own and create a completely new enterprise just to be able to talk about the truth.
[00:27:18]  And, you know, the New York Times, when they bother to cover important stories, they still run ads next to them.
[00:27:25]  They still make me see Ronan Farrow's reporting behind a paywall.
[00:27:29]  CNN, when they're running important stories on, you know, on Donald Trump, when they were raising their ratings on the back of Donald Trump, continued to run their metamusal ads every 10 seconds while that was going on.
[00:27:42]  This is the business of journalism.
[00:27:44]  I know these people don't like capitalism all that much, but it is an important part that you're actually able to pay people to help you with this research.
[00:27:52]  That is not a grift, that is not, that is not benefiting off of getting information leaked to you.
[00:28:00]  That's journalism.
[00:28:02]  And at least these people are uncovering things we didn't know, things that are important to the American people, and things we need to get to the bottom of because this is just one example.
[00:28:11]  But every story going forward, they're learning more and more on how to do this and get around the Constitution, get around these laws, get around the journalistic ethics.
[00:28:19]  We need to stop it before it goes any further.
[00:28:22]  No, I used to joke that if you spend one year working in cable news, where you have the TV on all the time, right?
[00:28:27]  You see all the ads, you see all the content, you are convinced you have mesothelioma and you are definitely ready to buy gold.
[00:28:34]  Those two things are guaranteed.
[00:28:36]  They all rely on advertisers to support the product.
[00:28:40]  I'm almost old enough to be able to check my zip code for extra social security and Medicare benefits.
[00:28:48]  We all get there eventually.
[00:28:50]  It's not a public service.
[00:28:51]  There is a public service element to journalism, but it is not a pure public service.
[00:28:55]  It is for money.
[00:28:57]  No matter what Chris Hayes says over, I've never checked the stock price of Comcast, but you check your ratings every night.
[00:29:04]  And why is that?
[00:29:04]  Because you like your paycheck.
[00:29:06]  And you know what happens to your paycheck?
[00:29:07]  If the advertisers all pull, it goes away.
[00:29:10]  So nobody's completely altruistic in this game.
[00:29:13]  Not Matt, not Michael.
[00:29:15]  They wouldn't have purported otherwise.
[00:29:17]  And certainly not Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
[00:29:19]  All right, there's more to discuss because they really zeroed in, Matt zeroed in on some of these NGOs and exactly how they're doing this at Twitter and other social media companies.
[00:29:29]  And wait until you hear, speaking of Megan Markle, there's a little hint.

=== Fact-Checking Prince Harry and Fauci (11:30) ===

[00:29:33]  Wait until you hear who's actually running some of these organizations that Matt uncovered as having controlled our discussions on Twitter.
[00:29:40]  Stand by.
[00:29:41]  More with Sue and Dave after this.
[00:29:46]  Now you're going to hear some surprise.
[00:29:48]  It costs you about 3-4 kroner a time to use a terrace warmer.
[00:29:52]  That means that some times with good friends will come at maybe 12 kroners or 15 kroners, if it's really fun.
[00:29:59]  That's what we think is fun to think about.
[00:30:00]  But we think everything with water is fun to think about.
[00:30:03]  And about that, now we have a canontillbud on the terrace warmer with the Electroimporters.
[00:30:09]  Light, warm, electric material and smart house.
[00:30:16]  Just another minute on the Taibbi reporting that got Debbie so upset and others, and why she's got her face feeling what it was doing there.
[00:30:25]  Um...
[00:30:26]  Taibbi talks about how it's working, like how the censorship result.
[00:30:30]  He calls it the censorship industrial complex, where he says, look, when Twitter files reporters were first given access to Twitter and the internal files last year, we first focused on the company, thinking that at times it was acting like a power above government, Twitter was.
[00:30:46]  They said, but Twitter was actually more like a partner to government.
[00:30:48]  They worked hand in hand.
[00:30:50]  Along with other tech firms, Twitter had held regular industry meetings with the FBI, with VHS, developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government, HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police, all trying to control the conversation on Twitter.
[00:31:06]  And then goes on to say that, and by the way, in some of these cases, they weren't even claiming that misinformation was out there.
[00:31:12]  They just didn't like what people were saying or the messaging.
[00:31:15]  But the bulk of censorship requests, he writes, did not come from government directly.
[00:31:21]  They came from state agencies like DHS, FBI, and so on, but also these NGOs, NGOs that are not academic, he said, which are, they turned out to be unexpectedly aggressive in trying to censor people.
[00:31:36]  Who are these NGOs?
[00:31:37]  What does it mean?
[00:31:38]  Like, who are these groups?
[00:31:39]  Well, he goes through it and he says it's groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council's DFR lab, Hamilton 68's creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, most of which nobody's ever heard of.
[00:31:53]  Then he says the Aspen Institute, okay, receives millions of dollars from both the State Department and other U.S. governments.
[00:32:00]  It held a star-studded confab in Aspen, August 2021, where they all went.
[00:32:05]  They were all there figuring out how they could censor our speech.
[00:32:08]  And the report ultimately produced was co-authored by somebody named Chris Krebs, who's the founder of DHS's cybersecurity whatever group.
[00:32:16]  Katie Couric, okay, Yoel Roth of Twitter.
[00:32:21]  We've already seen him freaking out over things like January 6th and COVID.
[00:32:26]  Wait for it, Stu, everything comes full circle.
[00:32:29]  Prince Harry.
[00:32:31]  Prince Harry was a commissioner of this group.
[00:32:36]  Prince Harry, who is on record as saying he thinks the First Amendment is, quote, bunkers, had his hand in putting, well, Twitter's hand over our mouths, over all of our mouths.
[00:32:49]  There is no end to the nefariousness of this couple and where they use their limited powers to try to silence Americans.
[00:32:56]  And then they go on, you know, he goes on to talk about how, hold on a second, I want to get the right quote.
[00:33:05]  Okay, Twitter sometimes push back on people like Prince Harry and these others telling them who is not a bot, what can be said and what cannot on things like vaccines or elections.
[00:33:18]  But they say in general, they instantly defer Twitter did to sites like PolitiFact, PolitiFact, which is funded by the very same names that fund those NGOs who were trying to silence us all in the first place.
[00:33:32]  You see how it works?
[00:33:34]  See how it works?
[00:33:35]  I got to say the Prince Harry thing was not expected, but everything else was.
[00:33:39]  I didn't see that one coming.
[00:33:40]  No, it is amazing, though.
[00:33:42]  This is what happens.
[00:33:44]  PolitiFact is a great example of this.
[00:33:46]  They've always had left-wing funding pouring into these to this organization, and they've been constantly fact-checking left-wing figures lightly and right-wing figures harshly.
[00:33:58]  And they've been doing this forever.
[00:34:00]  They can select which quotes they want to fact-check, whatever claim they want to push the narrative.
[00:34:07]  And they do this all the time.
[00:34:09]  And once they are elevated to this level, we've come in this country to a place where instead of thinking as individuals, we want to look to a constant authority figure.
[00:34:18]  We want the groupthink thrust in our faces, or at least a lot of us do.
[00:34:22]  This happened, of course, with COVID, where Anthony Fauci was coronated as king of all science.
[00:34:28]  And we all had to look to Anthony Fauci to find out what the right answers were.
[00:34:32]  And when people would come up with different answers or important questions, the person who was always there to answer was Anthony Fauci.
[00:34:40]  And then these NGOs would be there to collect signatories to a letter that said, well, the lab leak is totally a conspiracy theory.
[00:34:48]  And this would just go back and forth and back and forth with journalists going to Fauci and his allies and NGOs that supported the same thing and asking them to fact check the people they were disagreeing with.
[00:35:01]  Well, that's not how you get to an answer.
[00:35:03]  It's certainly not how science works.
[00:35:06]  And we've gone so far down this road now where I think just the credentialism, this circuitous form of credentialism that we're elevating in America is becoming really hurtful.
[00:35:19]  It's ruining people's lives.
[00:35:21]  And we are not getting those moments afterward where we all come together and say, wow, that was a mistake.
[00:35:28]  These newspapers, these media companies would really help themselves to just come out and say, hey, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop thing, we got that one wrong.
[00:35:36]  Hey, the lab leak theory, that was wrong.
[00:35:39]  Hey, masking kids outdoors.
[00:35:41]  That one was wrong.
[00:35:42]  We really screwed that up.
[00:35:43]  Here's how we're going to fix this next time.
[00:35:44]  Instead, they double and triple down, become more insular and more incestuous, and the cycle continues.
[00:35:51]  And I think it's spinning out of control at this point and still want to cloak themselves in the authority of, like, I will be the arbiter of what is and is not disinformation.
[00:36:00]  One of these groups, Dave, an NGO, came out of Stanford, the Stanford Internet Observatory, SIO, whose election integrity partnership is among the most voluminous flaggers in the Twitter files, reports Taibbi.
[00:36:15]  Stanford created this thing to try to police talk on the internet, in particular when it comes to elections, when it comes to COVID, and so on.
[00:36:23]  I actually had one of the officials from that group, her name is Renee DeRestra, on the show and asked her, What are you doing?
[00:36:32]  How does it work?
[00:36:34]  And most interestingly, do you have any conservatives whatsoever in your organization as you try to figure out what is disinformation and what is not?
[00:36:44]  Here's just a little sample of that exchange I had with her.
[00:36:49]  What was happening during COVID for even prior to the rollout of the vaccines was you had this novel disease.
[00:36:55]  The health institutions were not producing good content.
[00:36:58]  They didn't want to surface the most popular content because oftentimes that was not medically reliable, or it was from anti-vaccine groups.
[00:37:07]  What I'm not comfortable with is the idea that large accounts that get a lot of attention because they have a lot of followers that they've managed to accrue in a totally unrelated space should be the things that platforms surface just because they have a contrarian perspective about a disease.
[00:37:22]  Fauci and Collins actually did try to suppress like the Great Barrington Declaration.
[00:37:28]  The social media companies, the more they're on a side in making those decisions, the more aggravating they are, the more they infuriate people, the more people choose other forums.
[00:37:37]  I don't know what the solution is, but I see the problem very clearly.
[00:37:40]  I listened to your interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but what I thought was very interesting about your interview with him was that you had the conversation, right?
[00:37:49]  There was the dialogue there, but you also did the fact check right alongside it.
[00:37:53]  Do you have different ideologies on your team?
[00:37:56]  I would like us to have more conservatives.
[00:37:59]  I think that this is the kind of constant chronic challenge of, you know, of academia.
[00:38:06]  That woman right there, she's your daddy, Dave.
[00:38:09]  That's your daddy.
[00:38:10]  She's deciding what you get to talk about on the internet right now.
[00:38:13]  Quite literally.
[00:38:15]  I have first-hand experience with this.
[00:38:17]  And here's how it works: right?
[00:38:19]  You have these independent fact-checking organizations that sort of hire themselves out to social media and they say, you know, they'll flag a story.
[00:38:28]  They'll say, oh, well, this outlet story is wrong.
[00:38:31]  Then Twitter or Facebook will basically, you know, reduce the visibility or ban it, which means that advertising revenues are reduced for that given story, right?
[00:38:44]  Now, some places I write for, like Daily Mail and Fox News, they've got eight gazillion lawyers and this doesn't really affect them.
[00:38:50]  Other places that I write for that are smaller, I mean, when I was at the Federalist, I think we had a staff of 14, 15.
[00:38:57]  This can have a huge impact on basic revenue, not to mention that somebody then has to spend all day trying to refute the bogus fact check.
[00:39:07]  And the end result is a chilling of speech.
[00:39:10]  I have literally spoken to editors who told me, especially about COVID, masking, things like that.
[00:39:17]  There's true, accurate stories that we didn't run because we knew if we ran it, the news guard or one of these people were going to flag us.
[00:39:27]  It was going to cost us money and we were going to have to spend the whole day dealing with it.
[00:39:30]  So unfortunately, these people are already winning.
[00:39:33]  Now, my answer is: I think these people need to be regulated.
[00:39:37]  I can't just hang up a shingle and say I'm a stock analyst, right?
[00:39:42]  And then say, you should buy my buddy's company.
[00:39:44]  No, there's rules.
[00:39:46]  These people need rules and there's no rules right now.
[00:39:48]  And they're clearly just punishing conservative speech.
[00:39:51]  I mean, that is literally their raison d'etro.
[00:39:54]  This is all they exist to do.
[00:39:57]  She did raise a point that lured me in a little where she was saying one of the reasons it's important to control the algorithm is you can't have somebody type in how to cure breast cancer and what you and just have like some crackpot thing come up with like, oh, you should, you know, swallow the ink from a big pen.
[00:40:16]  You know, you, there, and if that turns out to be a very popular hit, it might come up if the algorithm is left to do its own thing, as opposed to hits from the Mayo clinic, you know, the Cleveland clinic and so on.
[00:40:28]  So like that, I understood.
[00:40:29]  That actually makes sense, some manipulation of search results.
[00:40:33]  But they've taken it to a very dark place.
[00:40:36]  And that's what Taibbi's proving, Barry, Schellenberger, and the others.
[00:40:41]  All right, let me shift gears because this one's too delicious not to ask you about that.
[00:40:44]  Let me just say that, as a free American citizen, that's my job to determine whether drinking the ink from the pen is going to cure cancer or not.
[00:40:54]  That's nobody else's job.
[00:40:56]  That's my job.
[00:40:57]  And I think too, like, it would be one thing if they could keep these narratives straight.
[00:41:00]  They can't even remember what they're supposed to believe.

=== DeSantis, Trump, and the Ron Destablishment (06:45) ===

[00:41:03]  I mean, case in point is Elon Musk.
[00:41:06]  They all believe he was the greatest person in the world up until, I don't know, six months ago.
[00:41:10]  And all of a sudden, now he's this bad guy.
[00:41:13]  I mean, I feel bad for someone like AOC who did the good liberal thing and went out and bought a Tesla a few years ago.
[00:41:18]  And now her principles have expired before her car payments.
[00:41:22]  And she has to keep driving around this car that Elon Musk built, even though he's the most evil person on the planet.
[00:41:27]  They can't do it.
[00:41:28]  It was Alyssa Milano who said, I got rid of my Tesla and I traded in for a Volkswagen.
[00:41:33]  Yeah.
[00:41:34]  Oh, yeah.
[00:41:34]  Because they have a great history.
[00:41:36]  Volkswagen.
[00:41:38]  Don't Google it.
[00:41:39]  Whatever you do, don't Google that one.
[00:41:41]  Alyssa.
[00:41:41]  All right.
[00:41:41]  I got to ask you about this story because this is a fun one.
[00:41:44]  The other one wasn't fun, but it was interesting.
[00:41:47]  Trump is going to be releasing a book April 25th titled Letters to Trump.
[00:41:54]  It's going to cost $99, which is a lot.
[00:41:57]  Or if you pay $399, you could have a signed edition.
[00:42:02]  It's going to reveal 150 letters that celebrities have sent him over the years, including Presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton is going to have a letter in there.
[00:42:17]  Michael Jackson, former Senator Ted Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Diana, even Oprah, even Oprah.
[00:42:25]  And here's the fun part of this.
[00:42:28]  Apparently, this is taking me back to my law school days in copyright.
[00:42:32]  The principle, quoting now, Jane C. Ginsburg, professor of literary and artistic property law at Columbia University School of Law in New York, who gave this quote to Newsweek: the principle that the writers of the letters, not the recipients of them, retain the copyright in the text has been well established in copyright law for hundreds of years.
[00:42:52]  So I think Mr. Trump is about to get himself sued again by people like Oprah.
[00:42:58]  Dave, is this a good idea or not for 99 bucks?
[00:43:02]  Look, what Trump's doing is interesting right now.
[00:43:07]  I mean, it's very clear from inside conservative media and I think from outside conservative media that pretty much everybody is in the bag for DeSantis right now.
[00:43:19]  And I have real concerns that that's going to backfire, right?
[00:43:23]  down at CPAC and I'm, you know, I'm talking to people there.
[00:43:27]  And there are a significant number of Trump supporters who are more fearful of career politicians, donors, and billionaire media moguls taking back control of the Republican Party than they are of four more years of Joe Biden.
[00:43:45]  And it makes a level of sense because their attitude is if we go back to the pre-Trump GOP, no one's fighting for us anyway.
[00:43:53]  I think everything that you're going to see Donald Trump do over the ensuing months is to set himself apart from anything that looks like the establishment getting sued, you know, by the estate of Princess Diana or something.
[00:44:08]  I mean, I don't know.
[00:44:10]  I mean, it might work for him, right?
[00:44:12]  He's going to try to paint DeSantis as a return to Paul Ryan, a return to Mitt Romney.
[00:44:18]  The DeSantis people are pushing hard back against that.
[00:44:21]  But that's the dynamic that's starting to form.
[00:44:23]  And I think you're just going to see Trump go farther and farther outside of the mainstream in whatever ways he can.
[00:44:29]  Yeah, well, it makes sense because one of his nicknames he's kicking around for DeSantis is Ron Destablishment, which would play right into that narrative you're saying.
[00:44:38]  Stu, I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
[00:44:40]  And also just to update the audience on it may be that Trump is facing maybe a lawsuit from Oprah, but also a possible indictment for an allegedly illegal campaign contribution to Stormy Daniels just prior to the 2016 election.
[00:44:54]  It was paid.
[00:44:54]  She was paid money from Michael Cohen.
[00:44:56]  He says it was on behalf of Trump to keep her quiet about an alleged affair.
[00:45:00]  Trump denies that he had an alleged affair with Stormy Daniels and has said he would not have an affair.
[00:45:08]  He did not have an affair with Stormy Daniels and he would not have an affair.
[00:45:11]  Forgive me with, I believe it was Stormy Horseface Daniels.
[00:45:16]  If that doesn't sum up Trump, what people love and hate about him in one sentence, I don't know what.
[00:45:22]  Anytime you can work horseface into a response to a legal claim, it's always worth doing.
[00:45:29]  I honestly think the book itself is, I think he'd love to get sued by Oprah Winfrey over this.
[00:45:35]  If there's anything, there's nothing better that can come out of this book.
[00:45:38]  Him making a few extra $100,000 off of a book about letters is neither here nor there.
[00:45:45]  The publicity that would come from all of these giant public figures taking time out of their day to sue Donald Trump is a dream come true to him.
[00:45:53]  He's a different guy.
[00:45:54]  He thinks differently on this stuff.
[00:45:56]  And I think that's one of the most interesting parts of this campaign, you know, if and when DeSantis jumps in, is DeSantis we've seen as a really competent, good governor.
[00:46:05]  He just wrote a book.
[00:46:06]  He was on our show on Studios America and the Glenbeck Radio program this week talking about that book.
[00:46:11]  And it's a good book about a good run as a good governor.
[00:46:15]  And he did something that politicians do.
[00:46:17]  They write books before they run.
[00:46:19]  They explain what their vision is for the country.
[00:46:21]  And he did a good job doing it.
[00:46:22]  And then Donald Trump's like, look at this funny letter from Oprah.
[00:46:25]  Like he's just a totally different person.
[00:46:28]  And Stormy Horseface Daniels, which is to a certain portion of his base.
[00:46:33]  Yeah.
[00:46:34]  And, you know, it's tough.
[00:46:35]  It's easy to call your political opponent.
[00:46:37]  It's easy for Ron DeSantis to come out and he can attack Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden with the best of them.
[00:46:42]  He's going to have to try to walk this line of attacking Donald Trump, but realizing that a lot of the people he needs to vote for him like Donald Trump still.
[00:46:51]  Trump just doesn't care about that stuff.
[00:46:52]  He'll walk right through it.
[00:46:54]  You know, it reminds me of the documentary film Rocky III in which Rocky is facing Hulk Hogan, Thunderlips, the ultimate male.
[00:47:02]  And they start this fight and Rocky's just going around.
[00:47:05]  He's kind of smiling.
[00:47:06]  He's throwing a few light jabs.
[00:47:08]  And then Thunderlips gets his head and bashes him into the mat and throws him out of the ring.
[00:47:14]  And it wasn't until Rocky realized, I'm fighting for my life here.
[00:47:18]  I better get going.
[00:47:19]  And he gets back to turn that around.
[00:47:21]  Yeah, gets back in the ring and calls him on.
[00:47:23]  And I think DeSantis is going to have to figure out a way to get to that point and make these attacks on someone that his audience and his voters still kind of remember fondly, or he's just going to get overwhelmed and thrown out of the ring and it's going to be over.
[00:47:36]  That was a classic moment.
[00:47:37]  Yes, I have two boys, and therefore I am very familiar with all the ins and outs of the Rockies.
[00:47:42]  That was a classic moment.
[00:47:44]  Talia Shire was very good as the very concerned Adrian when he got thrown out of that ring.

=== Santa Clara Officers and Church Enforcement (14:52) ===

[00:47:49]  You guys, what a fun combo.
[00:47:50]  I hope you guys will come back and do this again.
[00:47:52]  Would love to all right.
[00:47:55]  Stu and Dave, we'll see you again soon.
[00:47:56]  And we will be right back with David Zweig on that insane story I told you about about out of California.
[00:48:16]  Listen to this, okay?
[00:48:18]  Government officials conducted an astonishing surveillance program to actually spy on churchgoers who dared to break COVID rules during the pandemic.
[00:48:28]  And just as bad as you think that may have been, it's even worse.
[00:48:31]  Journalist David Zweig joins us now to discuss his latest investigative report.
[00:48:35]  Welcome back to the show, David.
[00:48:36]  Great to have you.
[00:48:37]  So wait, just so we can make sure everybody knows where to find this.
[00:48:39]  Is it on your sub stack?
[00:48:41]  That's right.
[00:48:42]  I did the silent lunch.
[00:48:44]  Yep.
[00:48:44]  DavidZweig.substack.
[00:48:46]  Okay, got it.
[00:48:47]  All right.
[00:48:47]  So let's first just start by setting up the conflict.
[00:48:52]  Who are the two groups and what put them at loggerheads?
[00:48:55]  Okay, so the two parties in the lawsuits are a place called Calvary Chapel, which is a church.
[00:49:02]  And they are in two lawsuits with Santa Clara County, California.
[00:49:07]  For those who don't know, this is Northern California.
[00:49:10]  It's sort of the heart of Silicon Valley.
[00:49:12]  Okay.
[00:49:13]  So Calvary Chapel is out there.
[00:49:16]  And what happened in Santa Clara County was they were proudly, I think, the first to lock everybody down in March of 2020.
[00:49:28]  That's right.
[00:49:29]  Santa Clara County was the first among with a half dozen other counties, the first ones to issue lockdown orders on March 16th.
[00:49:39]  And they really have the distinction of not only being the first, but being probably the most aggressive public health department in the country for enacting and importantly for punitively enforcing lockdown orders throughout the pandemic.
[00:49:54]  So this is San Francisco Bay Area.
[00:49:56]  It's very, very, very progressive area.
[00:49:58]  And so they're like, we're locking shit down.
[00:50:00]  Like we are locking it up.
[00:50:01]  We're locking up everything, everything, including the churches.
[00:50:04]  Well, unfortunately for them, San Jose's Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, quoting from your piece, Mike McClure, they had a different vision of how things should go.
[00:50:13]  And two months later, May 24th of 2020, the pastor said, I'm reopening this church and I am going to allow as many people in as want to come in and I will never close this church again.
[00:50:27]  And they started fining him.
[00:50:30]  Like, there was a great line in your piece.
[00:50:32]  Hold on.
[00:50:32]  I want to get it.
[00:50:33]  You said the church was accruing fines, like John Bender racking up detentions in the breakfast club for breaching various orders.
[00:50:40]  It was, it was like that.
[00:50:42]  Describe that.
[00:50:43]  Yeah.
[00:50:44]  So they had, as I mentioned, just an incredibly punitive fine system that they put in place.
[00:50:50]  An interesting side note is the fines were technically for businesses, for commercial entities.
[00:50:57]  And I've been speaking with the attorney for Calvary Chapel.
[00:51:01]  And as most people would probably categorize a church as a, not as a commercial entity.
[00:51:06]  So that's a whole important piece of the case.
[00:51:09]  But setting that aside, Mike McClure, as you mentioned, that the pastor, he opened up the church in May.
[00:51:17]  And once that happened, it really set off this collision course between the two parties.
[00:51:23]  And each day they accrued fines and the penalties was they had this thing where they basically kept compounding where you maxed out at $5,000 a day for each penalty.
[00:51:37]  And very, very quickly, the fines ballooned.
[00:51:39]  I think by the middle of October, they were already at $350,000.
[00:51:44]  And ultimately, the fines totaled something like $4 million against this one church.
[00:51:50]  The county rolled it back for some complicated reasons.
[00:51:54]  And now the current lawsuit, as it stands, they are seeking $2.87 million in fines.
[00:52:01]  It became funny money, the church campaign.
[00:52:04]  Quoting from your piece, by one analysis, as of March of 2021, so a year later, the dispute's ongoing, the county had issued an astonishing $4.9 million in fines to nearly 400 businesses and other entities for pandemic rules infractions.
[00:52:18]  By comparison, six other Bay Area counties combined had collected just 82,000.
[00:52:24]  So they were fine happy in Santa Clara.
[00:52:28]  And this was their favorite target of all.
[00:52:32]  Then they did what we saw in too many cases throughout the pandemic.
[00:52:35]  They decided to try to get citizens to be each other's little policemen and to start reporting on one another if they saw anybody violating the precious COVID rules.
[00:52:46]  And some people did indeed report on Calvary Church.
[00:52:50]  That's right.
[00:52:51]  The county encouraged citizens to basically tattle on each other for if they saw entities or individuals breaking various public health rules.
[00:53:01]  And someone filed a complaint against Calvary Chapel.
[00:53:05]  So the county had set up what they call like an enforcement unit with some sort of like, you know, SWAT team type unit within the within the public health department.
[00:53:18]  They had something, I think, I believe it was at least nine or 10, possibly more, people whose job was to function as enforcement officers.
[00:53:27]  So they sent the enforcement officers over to Calvary Chapel and they observed people gathering, not wearing masks, and they began issuing fines.
[00:53:39]  And that sort of started it on the course that they went.
[00:53:42]  It's amazing because as I understand, like Palo Alto is included in Santa Clara, County.
[00:53:46]  I mean, like, these are like the richest people on earth.
[00:53:48]  They don't have, they have no crime.
[00:53:49]  That's why they have 10 enforcement officers to go over there and police the churchgoers at Calvary Chapel.
[00:53:54]  So it started with them just looking at, oh, too many people are going in.
[00:53:57]  Oh, they're not wearing, they were watching the live stream mass.
[00:54:00]  And they're like, oh, they're not wearing masks.
[00:54:02]  And started escalating, though.
[00:54:04]  It got, I mean, that we've heard reports about weirdnesses like that.
[00:54:08]  This went to a very dark, dystopic level.
[00:54:12]  Tell us what else they did to spy on these churchgoers.
[00:54:15]  Right.
[00:54:16]  So what to me, what just blew my mind about this case and what drew me to it initially was that this is not just about the county finding out about a complaint and seeing some people not wearing masks or too many people gathering indoors.
[00:54:31]  The county launched essentially this multi-tiered surveillance campaign against churchgoers at this particular church.
[00:54:39]  One of the ways that they did this in this sort of like three-prong approach was they after they initialed this initial violation to the church, the church then barred them from entering.
[00:54:52]  So they had to find another way to find out, to keep observing them.
[00:54:56]  So they got an agreement from the church next door to them at the property next door, and they basically set up camp there and they conducted stakeouts.
[00:55:04]  They were peering through a chain link fence, writing their reports.
[00:55:07]  You almost imagine them using like a telephoto lens.
[00:55:10]  And the reports are extraordinary.
[00:55:13]  And I quote from them pretty extensively, these sort of minutia, and it almost sounds like it's out of like a cop comedy where you have these people there and they're writing about, we observe eight individuals, two of the greeters weren't wearing face coverings, and we observed a child hugging someone else.
[00:55:32]  Like it's just report after report of this stuff.
[00:55:36]  It is remarkable.
[00:55:37]  But then something interesting happens.
[00:55:40]  My earpiece is coming out.
[00:55:41]  Then something interesting happened.
[00:55:43]  The one of the judges issued a temporary restraining order and that gave the enforcement officer against the state.
[00:55:51]  Correct.
[00:55:52]  Right.
[00:55:52]  So that empowered the enforcement officers to enter the church, whereas before that they were banned.
[00:55:58]  So you had all this sort of stakeout surveillance that they were doing.
[00:56:03]  But then they went in the church.
[00:56:04]  And this is where things for me, as I was covering the story and I'm reading through just these hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents, it went from being kind of a sad, but still sort of like amusing novelty reading these crazy reports that they wrote up.
[00:56:19]  It became kind of creepy.
[00:56:20]  And you had these enforcement officers going into the church and they are observing a lot of these really intimate private events, baptisms.
[00:56:29]  There was a small prayer group that they were going in.
[00:56:32]  There was a special thing called manna for moms where you have moms with young children, these really intimate gatherings of people.
[00:56:40]  And you have officers from the government there monitoring them and, you know, presumably with a clipboard, writing down in great detail.
[00:56:48]  There were 16 women in the hallway.
[00:56:50]  Three of them were unmasked.
[00:56:52]  One person was singing.
[00:56:53]  And it's just, it's just singing was also banned.
[00:56:57]  I mean, that was a real thing, just not for nothing.
[00:56:59]  But even at my daughter's school in New York before we fled, singing was banned, even outside at recess.
[00:57:05]  And the girls at one point, having absolutely nothing to do and, you know, there was, they weren't allowed to have fun of any kind, decided to put on the play Hamilton, just for themselves.
[00:57:12]  One, one little creative girl knew all the lyrics and taught the others.
[00:57:15]  And the music teacher was out on the playground every other day telling them to shut up, stop singing.
[00:57:19]  So they had to whisper through their masks the lyrics of Hamilton.
[00:57:23]  This is what, so yes, I believe that they cracked down on singing inside the church.
[00:57:28]  And you're right.
[00:57:29]  It's all amusing to think of them looking through their little, you know, binoculars like, oh, if they saw my church, they'd be like, oh, there's a nine-year-old boy washing his hands in the holy water, right?
[00:57:38]  There are people sleeping, whatever.
[00:57:40]  But this went next level to where intimate gatherings where people truly bear their souls.
[00:57:47]  I mean, you write in a very heart-wrenching way about, let's not forget the stories of suicidality, of depression, of extreme anxiety and loneliness during the pandemic.
[00:57:59]  And where did some people choose to seek solace?
[00:58:02]  At this church.
[00:58:05]  That's right.
[00:58:06]  And one of the really important parts of the story, as I mentioned, what drew me to it was, you know, hearing about the surveillance component.
[00:58:12]  And that's when I started diving in.
[00:58:14]  But while I was researching it, I found something really strange.
[00:58:18]  And I started looking up the various public health orders that were issued at different times.
[00:58:24]  And over and over, the church or churches in general, houses of worship, had far more restrictions on them than other entities.
[00:58:32]  So you have people completely barred from getting together inside of a church, but yet malls and retail outlets could operate at 50% capacity.
[00:58:42]  And then ultimately, seven months, seven months after the initial ban on gathering in a church, they finally released it and they allowed 100 people or 25%, whichever was fewer, to go in churches.
[00:58:57]  But at that point, then they said, oh, by the way, malls, retail stores, no limits at all.
[00:59:03]  So you have just this wildly incongruent policies that if they were truly concerned about viral transmission, that is it appropriate for malls to be open, for people to go to a liquor store, to casinos.
[00:59:17]  But yet, and as you mentioned, Megan, and this ties into ultimately, these were not people who were demanding that the barber shops opened on March 17th, you know, and trying to cause a ruckus.
[00:59:29]  These were people, I interviewed a number of people and I gave some examples in the article.
[00:59:33]  These were people who were really suffering, some of them, people who rely on the church for their support system.
[00:59:41]  And it's funny, coming to someone, I'm not a churchgoer, but I instantly and very deeply empathized with what these people were going through.
[00:59:50]  And by the way, it's an irony in this, Megan, is that a lot of the problems caused for these people were from the lockdowns was people who, there was a gentleman who was working at a motorcycle dealership.
[01:00:03]  It closed because of the lockdowns.
[01:00:05]  And then so he's out of work.
[01:00:07]  He had been struggling with alcohol.
[01:00:09]  He had nowhere to go.
[01:00:10]  Everything's closed.
[01:00:12]  No one wanted to get together, even outdoors.
[01:00:15]  He needed the church.
[01:00:16]  So there are a number of examples that what the public health department didn't understand is that the church was not, you know, a mere novelty or just some thing that people were doing.
[01:00:27]  These were law-abiding citizens before the pandemic, and they were pushed into essentially becoming criminals because they needed a support system for their health.
[01:00:37]  I mean, there's a reason that your right to do this is protected by the Bill of Rights.
[01:00:42]  Our founding fathers understood very well how important it was, the right to assemble, the right to practice your religion.
[01:00:49]  So they, question for you, what's the denomination of the church?
[01:00:52]  What's the religion?
[01:00:54]  You know, I have to tell you, I'm not sure because I guess to my mind, it's just never.
[01:00:58]  Were they taking communion?
[01:00:59]  Do you know?
[01:00:59]  Are they taking communion?
[01:01:01]  I'm just curious because I wasn't.
[01:01:02]  They're not Catholic.
[01:01:03]  I'll tell you that.
[01:01:04]  All right, they're not Catholic.
[01:01:05]  But I mean, to me, I hear about these ordinances, and I think these are written by a bunch of non-believers because no faithful person would misunderstand how important it is to the faithful to meet their Sunday day of obligation or, you know, Saturday if you're Jewish and so on, right?
[01:01:20]  Like there is an intimate connection between you and God and you, and you need to get there.
[01:01:25]  Otherwise, you're just your entire epicenter is upset.
[01:01:29]  The people who I talk to, oftentimes, a number of them mentioned fellowship and how important it was for them to, you know, sitting in a car listening to like a radio version of the, you know, the church meeting, that that wasn't going to cut it.
[01:01:44]  They need to be with people.
[01:01:45]  Again, we have to try to remember back.
[01:01:48]  People were really isolated and particularly in California, the rules were incredibly strict.
[01:01:53]  And that also is public health, that there is real harm.
[01:01:57]  There were people who had suicidal ideation.
[01:02:00]  There was a man I spoke with who had had a really hard breakup with someone.
[01:02:05]  And, you know, this isn't, this is not trivial when you think about what some people were going through and they didn't have any resources to turn to.
[01:02:12]  And even as someone who's not religious, I completely understand why these support systems are also a necessary part of people's well-being.
[01:02:22]  And instead, this sort of myopic focus on trying to mitigate the spread of a virus without looking in a sort of more holistic view about what keeps people healthy.
[01:02:33]  And again, there also is the bit of the hypocrisy that plenty of other things were open in the society at the same time.
[01:02:40]  Like the liquor store.

=== Tracking Cell Data of Struggling People (07:15) ===

[01:02:41]  So I just want to say two things.
[01:02:42]  One, my Nana, she was raised a Lutheran, but she converted to Catholicism because my pop-up was Catholic right off the boat from Italy.
[01:02:50]  And, you know, like most converts, she had the fervor of a convert and was like a die-hard Catholic for the rest of her life.
[01:02:57]  When my pop-up had a stroke at age 77 and started going downhill, he couldn't eat.
[01:03:01]  He couldn't really speak.
[01:03:04]  He too was a diehard Catholic.
[01:03:06]  The priest would come over to their house on Sundays and give my grandfather communion and he couldn't get it down.
[01:03:13]  And the only way he could get it down was with pudding.
[01:03:17]  And at first the priest objected to it because you're not supposed to put the communion in anything other, you know, but he couldn't get it.
[01:03:22]  It was so important.
[01:03:23]  He cried.
[01:03:24]  My Nana cried and the priest did it.
[01:03:26]  But this is my point.
[01:03:27]  Like he couldn't, he couldn't go to church because he just had a stroke.
[01:03:30]  But my point is like the Sunday day of obligation, taking communion, paying your respects, it's that important, right?
[01:03:36]  That you would be in tears over not being able to do it.
[01:03:39]  And who are these faithless bureaucrats who keep the liquor stores open to tell the faithful they can't be there?
[01:03:46]  So that's number one.
[01:03:47]  But number two is a bigger context, zooming out.
[01:03:51]  At this same time, they were not only letting, they were encouraging people to go to the BLM protests to say that that, that's totally fine and healthy.
[01:04:04]  You can go line up by the thousands right next to each other and protest over BLM and George Floyd.
[01:04:10]  That's literally the same time that this was happening.
[01:04:13]  Yeah, it's quite remarkable.
[01:04:15]  And it shows, you know, there's a fair amount of research into this that, you know, and this is obvious, that the people who bake the rules, obviously their own lens through it through within which they view the world and how they live their lives has a profound influence on their, on what they think is appropriate, their values.
[01:04:35]  And remember, these are not elected people.
[01:04:37]  This is someone who's appointed, you know, the head of the health department, Sarah Cody, the head of the health department there.
[01:04:43]  This is her value system.
[01:04:44]  She may not care about going to church, but other people do.
[01:04:48]  And it's more than just caring about going.
[01:04:51]  As you so poignantly talked about with your family, this is really meaningful to people.
[01:04:57]  And it's beyond just a spiritual meaning.
[01:05:00]  This also is a support system for people who are struggling with addiction.
[01:05:04]  And during the pandemic in particular, people who are struggling with loneliness and isolation, who are experiencing depression, anxiety.
[01:05:12]  And the interesting thing is the membership of the church exploded during the pandemic.
[01:05:17]  It went from on a Sunday, they typically may have had seven or 800 people before the pandemic.
[01:05:23]  It doubled to something like 1600, 1700 or more.
[01:05:28]  They went from doing 50 or 100 baptisms a year to doing 1,000.
[01:05:32]  People were coming from all over.
[01:05:34]  Word was spreading.
[01:05:36]  There's this place.
[01:05:37]  There's a church that's open.
[01:05:38]  I need help.
[01:05:39]  I can go somewhere because these other resources aren't available to me.
[01:05:44]  And this is meaningful to me in my life.
[01:05:46]  Some person who's been attending church every week for the past 30 years of their life and all of a sudden it's shut off.
[01:05:52]  And again, it's so important to me to emphasize this wasn't for two weeks.
[01:05:57]  It wasn't until October that she finally allowed them to meet indoors at a church.
[01:06:03]  That is an ordinary time.
[01:06:05]  Only at a limited capacity.
[01:06:07]  Correct.
[01:06:08]  Yeah.
[01:06:08]  And even that was at this 100-person limit.
[01:06:10]  Megan.
[01:06:11]  But you mentioned that you mentioned the baptisms.
[01:06:13]  I mean, that's big.
[01:06:13]  That's like when you think about these spies sitting in there.
[01:06:17]  So if that's one of the things you would really want done, you know, in the Catholic religion, like that's an important rite of passage.
[01:06:22]  I mean, panics, parents will panic if something happens to their child before he or she has been baptized.
[01:06:29]  And to think of some government bureaucrat spy sitting in on a ceremony that's as holy and important as that.
[01:06:38]  Never mind, a funeral, a wedding, all the rites of passage that we enjoy in the church is absolutely violating.
[01:06:45]  Not to mention the more intimate confessions of people who are struggling in prayer groups.
[01:06:49]  And at the daycare, you mentioned there is too, and the man of her moms, all this stuff.
[01:06:54]  But it went beyond that because your piece talks about they actually were tracking the cell phone data of the churchgoers.
[01:07:03]  Right.
[01:07:03]  So earlier we were talking about, you know, the sort of what I call what I think about as like a three-pronged attack on their sort of surveillance operation.
[01:07:12]  They were surveilling them, looking through the chain link fence from afar.
[01:07:16]  They were then going into the building itself.
[01:07:19]  But then on top of that, I came across this remarkable document within the legal documents, the declaration.
[01:07:27]  And I found that the county was using cellular mobility data to track how many people were going into the church.
[01:07:36]  In my article, I give this incredible photo or image.
[01:07:41]  They show they created what they call a geofence.
[01:07:43]  It's essentially a digital border around the church.
[01:07:46]  And they could track anytime a device, you know, a cellular device went into through that border.
[01:07:52]  And the information was so granular that they even had separate borders around individual buildings within the property.
[01:08:00]  So they knew how many people were going into the church and then they knew where they were going within the church property, which buildings and for how long.
[01:08:08]  It was, it's mind-blowing.
[01:08:10]  I couldn't believe it when I came across this and how they then hired.
[01:08:15]  It's like Mrs. Smith has been in the confessional every day for 12 days.
[01:08:18]  What's going on in the Smith house?
[01:08:20]  Right.
[01:08:21]  Well, they say that the data were anonymized.
[01:08:25]  And I'm not suggesting that the county tried to figure out who each of these individuals were, but I spoke with an expert on this and it certainly would have been easy to figure out who's going.
[01:08:35]  You just track whatever device is tracking into the property.
[01:08:39]  You could easily track where it's going at night.
[01:08:41]  And then you see the little dot on the map, metaphorically is sitting there overnight.
[01:08:45]  You could find out where people live.
[01:08:47]  But I mean, the fact that they were conducting this multifaceted surveillance operation, tracking the cellular data of people with such granularity, I mean, for masking violations, for singing.
[01:09:03]  I mean, this is a remarkable story about what has occurred in America, and it has implications in my mind.
[01:09:11]  I mean, you have obviously the legal expertise, but I think it has legal implications about, you know, the First Amendment violations.
[01:09:19]  I know the attorney is also talking about Eighth Amendment violations, which is related to the excessive fines.
[01:09:24]  But pulling back even from legal stuff, Megan, I mean, it's just sort of more on an ethical and societal basis is, you know, what type of society do we want to be in where we are monitored to that degree for these sort of public health orders?
[01:09:39]  Yeah, by our fellow citizens who willingly not only comply, but then go along to be the little enforcers of these pathetic government bureaucrats and the bureaucrats themselves who don't value anybody else's choice and relationship with something as profound as God.

=== Supreme Court Trial on Mobility Measures (03:55) ===

[01:09:56]  So thank God, I will say for Pastor Mike McClure, because it's heroes like that that show the rest of us how not to be a sheep, you know, how to be a lion when the stuff hits the fan.
[01:10:08]  And good for him for looking out for his congregation.
[01:10:11]  He did what was intended of him.
[01:10:12]  So now, unbelievably, despite the fact that the Supreme Court struck down California's ban on gathering in churches, so they had to reduce the fines that they were going after Calvary Chapel for as a result of the Supreme Court ruling.
[01:10:26]  They're still, they didn't say, you know what, no, let's move on.
[01:10:29]  They're still trying to get them for no masks.
[01:10:33]  I mean, it's like they won't walk away.
[01:10:35]  It's a matter of principle the other way for the county.
[01:10:39]  This is a remarkable development, which is, you know, in the midst of the lawsuit that, as you mentioned, the Supreme Court struck down the state in California, their ban on gatherings in churches.
[01:10:52]  So when that happened, yeah, they instead of dropping the case entirely, they said, okay, we won't go after you for gathering.
[01:10:59]  Now we're just going to go after you for non-compliance with masking.
[01:11:03]  Now, remember, this is for cloth masks.
[01:11:05]  There is no requirement for a specific type of respirator, which some evidence shows is more effective than cloth masks.
[01:11:13]  So we have this lawsuit that's continuing over people not wearing masks, which we know, which.
[01:11:19]  every single public health authority at this point has admitted publicly and said, look, there's no real evidence that cloth masks do much of anything at all.
[01:11:28]  So it's what a remarkable thing that they won't still won't drop the lawsuit.
[01:11:32]  And one of the judges actually admonished the county and said, look, what are you doing?
[01:11:36]  Like, this is not the hill you want to die on.
[01:11:38]  You're going after this church for millions of dollars, but they have not dropped it.
[01:11:43]  So where does it stand now?
[01:11:45]  Are they going to have a trial?
[01:11:46]  Are they like, what's next?
[01:11:48]  Right.
[01:11:48]  So they are moving toward a trial.
[01:11:50]  And there's also a federal lawsuit, which the church filed against the county.
[01:11:56]  And there's a bit of jockeying back and forth because if depending which way the federal lawsuit rules, that could have an effect on the state lawsuit that the county filed against the church.
[01:12:08]  So there's some maneuvering.
[01:12:09]  Supposedly some decisions or large things may happen this month in March, but it remains to be seen.
[01:12:18]  It's just so remarkable on so many levels, not the least of which is there's no evidence that any of this had any effect on transmission.
[01:12:27]  There was no evidence that churchgoers who went to Calvary Church had any higher incidence of COVID than the general community.
[01:12:36]  These measures are effective potentially in a very short window of time.
[01:12:41]  And I've talked to a zillion experts over the last three years with my journalism on this.
[01:12:47]  It's not that, of course, if you lock everyone at home for a week or two, that will reduce things.
[01:12:52]  But the way implementation science works is over time, the more weeks and months that go by, the less and less effective these types of measures are.
[01:13:01]  And the inability, the unwillingness of the county to kind of ease back a little bit shows that they were just completely out of touch with a significant number of people who wanted and needed these other things in their lives.
[01:13:16]  This wasn't on March 15th.
[01:13:18]  We're talking about month after month after month.
[01:13:23]  People have got to read the article.
[01:13:24]  The details are, as David says, at first you're kind of amused, you're kind of laughing at them, and then you're horrified, and then you're heartstruck, and then you want to do something about it.
[01:13:35]  You know, you kind of feel like, all right, we got to watch this trial, make sure this comes out the right way, or be prepared to write a bunch of letters and do a public outcry because this can't happen again.
[01:13:43]  So how do they read the letters?
[01:13:44]  Give them the substack again so everybody can check it out, David.
[01:13:47]  Yeah, so it's davidzwag.substack.com.
[01:13:51]  And that's how you do it.

=== Journalist Exposing Pandemic Response Secrets (03:22) ===

[01:13:52]  C-W-E-I-G.
[01:13:53]  Z-W-E-G.
[01:13:54]  Yeah, D-A-V-I-D, Z-W-E-I-G dot substack.com.
[01:13:59]  And it's a really in-depth story.
[01:14:02]  And there's a surprise, which you know, Megan, from reading the story, about this electronic surveillance of the mobility data.
[01:14:09]  Anyone who's watching this who might think, eh, they were churchgoers, they were breaking the law, you'll be surprised to find out what this mobility data is used for tracking other people, including some very progressive causes for people who are connected with that.
[01:14:25]  This affects everyone, regardless of your ideological or political or religious affiliation.
[01:14:33]  David Zwag, one of the truth tellers during COVID, and that is a true badge of honor.
[01:14:38]  Great to have you.
[01:14:39]  Thanks, Megan.
[01:14:41]  All right, we'll be back with another insane COVID story.
[01:14:44]  A whistleblower of types.
[01:14:46]  She's getting a bunch of blowback for what she did, but it was pretty darn bold and pretty darn brave.
[01:14:52]  And she's here to tell you what she found when she got access to this government official's WhatsApp messages over in the UK.
[01:14:59]  Everything that's happening here was happening there too.
[01:15:14]  Now, a journalist who is exposing the pandemic response inside one of America's closest allies inside this country that we call the UK.
[01:15:23]  About a year ago, she started working with the former British health secretary.
[01:15:27]  All right, this is a guy who was high up on his book.
[01:15:31]  He handed over some 100,000 WhatsApp messages to her that were between himself and the top leaders over there talking about COVID, talking about the restrictions and so on.
[01:15:40]  His book was published, but then the journalist who worked with him broke her non-disclosure agreement and made all those messages public by turning them over to a top newspaper.
[01:15:52]  Inside the messages, a treasure trove of information about why world leaders have been so scared to challenge China about the lab league theory and how the government decided to enforce restrictions like quarantine hotels, masking, school disclosures without giving two dams about the people those policies were affecting or about the data that may or may not have supported their decisions.
[01:16:18]  Joining me now, the journalist at the center of all of this.
[01:16:20]  Her name is Isabel Oakeshott, and she's the international editor at Talk TV.
[01:16:25]  Isabel, so nice to have you here.
[01:16:27]  Thanks for being on.
[01:16:28]  Oh, thank you for having me.
[01:16:29]  And it was extraordinary to hear your previous report from David there about those horrific surveillance tactics that were used on churchgoers.
[01:16:39]  And so much of what you discussed happened here, too, I'm afraid to say.
[01:16:44]  Well, that's why, I mean, I see you getting blown back by some, probably more on the left, in the UK for disclosing the WhatsApp messages.
[01:16:52]  But I have to confess, and I get the controversy as a journalist, but I have to confess, I've been cheering you.
[01:16:57]  I've been cheering you because, so, what are how are we to know if the government's doing something like they're doing at that church or like this guy Hancock was doing with the other government officials in the UK, laughing at the people who they were sticking in these hotels or just shrugging their shoulders about the harmed children that would come from the masking?

=== Care Home Policy and Downing Street (12:11) ===

[01:17:14]  They didn't care at all.
[01:17:15]  How are we going to know unless people bend the rules here or there?
[01:17:20]  Well, that's exactly the point.
[01:17:22]  So, we have here a plan for a so-called public inquiry.
[01:17:27]  That's kind of like the formal investigation where all of the key players will be invited to give evidence.
[01:17:34]  And, you know, one of the criticisms that's aimed at me is that this is inappropriate for me to do this because all this is going to come out in the proper and due place, which is the public inquiry.
[01:17:46]  But wait for this.
[01:17:47]  This public inquiry, which was officially started some years ago, has not yet properly got underway.
[01:17:56]  And crucially, it has no deadline whatsoever.
[01:18:01]  And previous public inquiries into much smaller challenging things that this country has faced have taken up to 10 years.
[01:18:10]  I've looked at the remit, the terms of reference for this judge-led inquiry.
[01:18:15]  I have no hope or expectation that that inquiry will produce any conclusions within the next decade.
[01:18:23]  So it seemed to me incumbent and the morally right thing to do for me to put this correspondence in the public domain because we could have another pandemic next month.
[01:18:35]  And I don't think that anyone wants to go through what we all went through again.
[01:18:41]  There was, among the other revelations, something that reminded me that's near and dear to my own heart.
[01:18:46]  My friend Janice Dean, who's a meteorologist at Fox News, has been raising the alarm about what Governor Cuomo did in New York, where he sent COVID-positive patients into nursing homes.
[01:18:55]  You guys call them care homes.
[01:18:58]  And he mandated that they be taken and that they not be tested.
[01:19:01]  So it's like he didn't care that he was sending COVID positive patients into the most vulnerable places with the most vulnerable patients.
[01:19:08]  Similar scandal unveiled in these WhatsApp messages.
[01:19:12]  Can you tell us what you saw?
[01:19:15]  So care homes has been a really super sensitive issue here, not just about whether patients were discharged from hospitals or the community into care homes without appropriate testing, but also the arrangements around what visitors were and weren't allowed in care homes during this very long period.
[01:19:37]  I mean, there are still significant restrictions on visiting in many care homes today.
[01:19:43]  And one of the issues I personally found most horrifying during the pandemic was the isolation of very elderly, very vulnerable people who were not allowed to see their relatives at all in many cases.
[01:19:58]  We even had settings in which married couples were in the same care home and were still not allowed to see each other.
[01:20:07]  The man and the woman accommodated in different parts of the same residential facility, barred from seeing each other.
[01:20:15]  This is heartbreaking stuff.
[01:20:17]  And what you see in the WhatsApps is the kind of casualness with which these restrictions were repeatedly extended when they really weren't necessary.
[01:20:28]  So you can see one of our junior politicians who worked in the health department at that time and had responsibility for that particular policy area lobbying the health secretary.
[01:20:42]  So the politician at the top who was in charge of the decision, saying to him, look, you know, these people are likely exceptionally lonely.
[01:20:51]  You know, the only thing that brings their lives meaning at this point is to see their loved ones.
[01:20:57]  Please, please, can we open up these care homes to some extent?
[01:21:01]  Please, can we relax restrictions?
[01:21:04]  I'm not quoting here, I'm paraphrasing.
[01:21:06]  And you see the health secretary repeatedly pushing back on no real grounds other than basically covering his own back here.
[01:21:15]  And then finally, he gives in very casually.
[01:21:19]  He just sort of says, oh, okay, then you win.
[01:21:22]  And that is a quote.
[01:21:23]  Oh, oh, you win.
[01:21:25]  And, you know, it reminded me of that incredible movie, Gladiator, in which the Roman emperor, you know, puts his thumb up or thumb down to signal whether the losing gladiator lives or dies.
[01:21:38]  You know, the casualness, the flippancy with which decisions were taken, which profoundly affected millions and millions of lives, I think is utterly shocking.
[01:21:50]  And I think it had to be put in the public domain.
[01:21:54]  It was the two things that stood out to me, because it does show the smugness.
[01:21:59]  They couldn't have cared less about how these policies were actually going to affect people, were forcing the people who came into the UK, who came back home to the UK into hotels and how they were laughing.
[01:22:11]  The permanent secretary at 10 Downing talking with Van Hancock, the health secretary, who you were, you know, that's the guy from who you got the WhatsApp messages.
[01:22:20]  Hancock says, we're giving big families all the suites and putting pop stars in the box rooms.
[01:22:26]  And Simon Case, permanent secretary at Downing Street, says, I just want to see some of the faces of people coming out of first class and into a premiere in shoebox.
[01:22:35]  Any idea how many people we locked up in hotels yesterday?
[01:22:38]  Hancock says, none, but 149 chose to enter the country and are now in quarantine hotels due to their own free will.
[01:22:43]  Simon Case, hilarious.
[01:22:45]  And here's the worst one for me, Isabel, because this gets into my worst issue.
[01:22:51]  Face masks.
[01:22:53]  Boris Johnson.
[01:22:54]  I mean, a lot of people over here think, okay, he's conservative.
[01:22:57]  Oh, great.
[01:22:57]  We like it.
[01:22:58]  No, Boris Johnson, this is shameful what he did.
[01:23:02]  He put those face masks on those kids in school, even though he knew that there was no data to support the health effects of it.
[01:23:09]  Tell us why.
[01:23:11]  Well, I agree with you about face masks.
[01:23:14]  That really gets me too.
[01:23:16]  And what we learn from these messages is that one of the reasons that that policy of continuing to enforce face masks on children here in the UK was extended was because the government of England did not want to fall out with the government of Scotland.
[01:23:37]  And there's a lot of kind of petty politics here, really.
[01:23:40]  Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, was always trying to be one step ahead of Westminster, was always trying to promote her agenda of separation for Scotland by showing just how tough she was.
[01:23:55]  And she is a very formidable and very effective politician.
[01:23:59]  And frankly, I think Downing Street was pretty afraid of how well she was doing.
[01:24:04]  The Scots were lapping it up in large part.
[01:24:06]  They were as terrified as people were down here in England by the fear propaganda.
[01:24:12]  And Downing Street chose essentially when Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland said she was going to make children wear masks, Downing Street didn't really fancy picking a fight with her.
[01:24:23]  And I want to pick up on that exchange between the top civil servant in Downing Street, who's supposed to be apolitical, by the way, and the health secretary about the quarantine policy and how funny they found it.
[01:24:38]  And I think what these WhatsApps show is a lot about power.
[01:24:43]  This is a story of what happens when a very small number of people acquire, in fact, basically seize an enormous amount of power to control extraordinary detail of our everyday lives and how entrenched they become and how messianic they become about the agenda they've decided is the right one.
[01:25:07]  And I'm sure that they absolutely felt that they were somehow doing the right thing, but I think they got carried away by their own heroic roles in this crusade.
[01:25:19]  To me, what was so jarring was just how little they actually cared about how it was going to affect people from the nursing care homes to this, the masking issue.
[01:25:28]  And as the mother of three kids, that one hurt personally.
[01:25:33]  And this is an exchange.
[01:25:34]  Lee Kane, the Prime Minister's Director of Communications, is talking with Boris Johnson, writing with him about whether they should have masks in schools and extend that policy.
[01:25:43]  And Lee Kane writes, considering Scotland has just confirmed it will, I find it hard to believe we'll hold the line.
[01:25:51]  And then he goes on to say, also, why do we want to have the fight on not having masks in certain school settings?
[01:25:58]  Does he have kids?
[01:26:00]  Ask any parent with children on why you want to have that fight.
[01:26:05]  There are so many good reasons he couldn't care less and thousands of children wound up with his hand effectively over their mouths because he didn't have the will to fight.
[01:26:15]  I couldn't agree with you more.
[01:26:17]  You know, I'm the mother of three children myself, three youngish children.
[01:26:22]  And the impact of the pandemic on children is one of the things I feel most strongly about.
[01:26:28]  Here in the UK, schools were repeatedly closed down on the flimsiest of bases.
[01:26:35]  We know now, we knew pretty early on that this virus did not present a very serious risk at all to the vast majority of children.
[01:26:45]  And yet they were shut out of schools, and here in the UK tens of thousands of children have never returned to education, and the impact of those restrictions continues to affect families so profoundly.
[01:27:00]  And one of the lovely things about this expose because I have taken many brick bats has been the number of people writing to me ordinary people widows parents, elderly people who suffered loneliness, and so on.
[01:27:16]  And the letters that move me the most are those of the mothers.
[01:27:21]  And I received one letter from a contact from a lady, a single mother living in very, very tough circumstances, very poor family in a inner city area in the north.
[01:27:36]  And she described how she found herself stuck in very inadequate accommodation with two children, a five-year-old with attention deficit disorder, so a very hyperactive five-year-old and a teenaged boy.
[01:27:50]  And the five-year-old, they don't have their own garden in that property.
[01:27:55]  And the place he really needed to go to let off steam was the local play park.
[01:28:01]  That was closed off by these crazy zealots in the local authority.
[01:28:06]  And she found she had nowhere to take her little boy to run off his energy.
[01:28:11]  So she decided to move house, seeing that probably there were going to be more lockdowns.
[01:28:16]  And they moved to a different part of England where she found she was unable to get a school place for her teenage son, who was then 14 or 15.
[01:28:26]  And by this stage in this country, so-called home education, online learning, had become such an easy default for the government, where the government couldn't be bothered to look after people properly.
[01:28:39]  It just, oh, well, you can do it all online.
[01:28:42]  And this teenage boy became increasingly isolated.
[01:28:46]  He wasn't playing sport anymore.
[01:28:48]  He piled on weight.
[01:28:50]  He became obese.
[01:28:52]  He got more and more lonely and paranoid about all the propaganda of more variants coming.
[01:29:00]  And the fear just took over him to the point that he wouldn't even open his bedroom window because he thought the virus was going to come and get him.
[01:29:11]  And eventually, three days before Christmas, he told his mother that he was going out to buy some groceries.
[01:29:19]  And that child never came home.
[01:29:22]  He went to the woods and he hung himself.

=== Matt Hancock's Telegraph Story Damage (06:45) ===

[01:29:26]  Isn't that just the most damning indictment on this reckless policy?
[01:29:33]  He was just a statistic that our government did not care about.
[01:29:38]  They only cared about compliance statistics, not the children like that of parents who had no agency and who suffered every additional day of unnecessary lockdown.
[01:29:52]  Oh my God, that in a just world, that story would be on the front of every newspaper covering your reporting right next to that official's quote.
[01:30:04]  Why do we want the fight?
[01:30:06]  Why do we want the fight?
[01:30:07]  That's why.
[01:30:08]  I mean, I get it.
[01:30:09]  I get it.
[01:30:10]  The way we came to see all this information is controversial, but it's just, that's not the story.
[01:30:15]  That is a footnote to the story.
[01:30:16]  What you just said is the story, and any honest media would be covering it accordingly.
[01:30:21]  It's been infuriating to watch them try to get you.
[01:30:24]  I've seen it.
[01:30:25]  And I mean, I wasn't familiar with your work before, but I've been become very familiar and I've become a fan watching you argue with these people who are trying to like get you for having reported the thing.
[01:30:35]  It's like, why aren't you, why don't they want to know about this boy?
[01:30:38]  Why aren't they concerned about what their government did to them?
[01:30:42]  The story is not me.
[01:30:44]  And actually, the story isn't Matt Hancock as an individual.
[01:30:47]  The story is the collateral damage.
[01:30:50]  And it is as much about what is not in these WhatsApps as what is in them.
[01:30:56]  So I don't see anywhere in 2.3 million words of messages.
[01:31:02]  I don't see anywhere the key people asking what might be the collateral damage here.
[01:31:10]  What is the balance of damage and risk here?
[01:31:14]  What will be the impact on people, on millions of people, if we basically turn our health service here into a COVID service?
[01:31:24]  And they kept on telling us that we had to protect the NHS, which is our publicly funded health service.
[01:31:32]  In reality, the absolute opposite happened.
[01:31:36]  We now have record high waiting lists for operations and cancer care.
[01:31:41]  Oh, yeah.
[01:31:42]  And we have the same steps.
[01:31:44]  Let me just only have two minutes.
[01:31:46]  So I want to get a couple of things in.
[01:31:47]  First, breaking news here, the House has voted unanimously here in the States for the Biden administration to declassify all information related to the origins of COVID.
[01:31:56]  Yes, the vote passed 419 to zero on Friday.
[01:31:59]  That's after it was unanimously passed in the Senate.
[01:32:02]  The bill will now head to President Biden's desk for his signature.
[01:32:05]  And we'll see whether they actually are interested in getting to the bottom of the origins of COVID.
[01:32:11]  I know that was part of the scandal you unfolded there too.
[01:32:14]  Like here, they were terrified of seeming racist.
[01:32:17]  If they said we think it originated in a lab, I cannot end without telling people about the one piece that made all the news.
[01:32:25]  You have Matt Hancock in this exchange agreeing that the plan will be, quote, we frighten the pants off everyone with the new strain, meaning variant.
[01:32:34]  And the other official responds saying, yep, that's what we'll get proper behavior change.
[01:32:39]  This is what you're trying to expose.
[01:32:41]  I've got to ask you, woman to woman, reporter to reporter, was it scary?
[01:32:45]  Forgive the, but like, was it scary to have the access and actually turn it over to the telegraph and realize what was going to happen in your own life once you did it?
[01:32:57]  Well, yes, I'm very tough, very resilient, and I've broken some difficult stories before, but this is not and was not an easy decision.
[01:33:06]  But in the end, the public interest is overwhelming and people can try to intimidate me or smear me or shut me up.
[01:33:15]  But this had to get out there.
[01:33:17]  People deserve to know the truth.
[01:33:19]  And never, ever again should we casually go down this route.
[01:33:23]  And if I've done a tiny thing to help in that agenda, then it's worth anything that anyone says about me.
[01:33:33]  Is he coming after you?
[01:33:35]  I know you said to Piers Morgan, he sent you a menacing message.
[01:33:39]  I would imagine he's threatening a lawsuit.
[01:33:41]  It wasn't that menacing.
[01:33:43]  He did message me a few hours after the story broke saying that I had made a very big mistake.
[01:33:49]  I don't believe I have done.
[01:33:51]  I've since had an eight-page legal letter from one of the most prominent law firms in this country.
[01:33:57]  It doesn't really, in my view, add up to a row of beans.
[01:34:01]  I'm ready to fight it if needs be.
[01:34:03]  This was definitely worth it.
[01:34:05]  You know, you'll probably get a law firm.
[01:34:07]  I mean, maybe the Telegraph will help you and defend you, but you'll probably get a law firm that would volunteer to defend you just based on the principles that you're offering.
[01:34:16]  And I don't know.
[01:34:16]  I mean, like the damages on violating what I assume, you know, is your non-disclosure.
[01:34:20]  How big could those possibly be?
[01:34:23]  I've got questions about how well that lawsuit's going to go.
[01:34:26]  Legal advice has been that there is no case to answer here.
[01:34:30]  There's an overwhelming public interest defense in this release.
[01:34:33]  I don't actually think he's going to carry this all the way.
[01:34:37]  But if he does, I've certainly had offers of crowdfunding.
[01:34:40]  And of course, the Telegraph will be defending their position very robustly as well.
[01:34:46]  Yeah.
[01:34:46]  Yeah.
[01:34:46]  Now, I imagine your career as a ghostwriter of books is probably ended.
[01:34:53]  That's probably over, but your journalism career will flourish.
[01:34:57]  Well, you know, it's a funny one.
[01:34:59]  I've got another ghost written book coming out soon.
[01:35:01]  I spoke to that client today and he was like, I just am full square behind you on this.
[01:35:07]  Matt Hancock was never a commercial client of mine.
[01:35:10]  I worked for him pro bono.
[01:35:12]  So I may yet write books, but you know, 10 books in 10 years, I've kind of done that for a while now, I think.
[01:35:18]  You know, here's my advice.
[01:35:19]  If you are a good person, you can work with Isabel, no problem.
[01:35:22]  If you are a shady person, you should probably find somebody else.
[01:35:26]  Exactly that.
[01:35:27]  I'm not going to keep your secrets, but I will tell your story.
[01:35:30]  Isabel, thank you so much.
[01:35:32]  I'd love to have you back on.
[01:35:33]  I really enjoyed our conversation.
[01:35:34]  All the best.
[01:35:35]  Thank you so much.
[01:35:36]  Bye.
[01:35:37]  Wow.
[01:35:37]  Unbelievable.
[01:35:38]  And the Telegraph continues to release her reporting day after day.
[01:35:40]  So you can go online and check it out for yourself firsthand.
[01:35:43]  You see the theme of the show, don't you?
[01:35:45]  You see the problems.
[01:35:46]  They're still with us.
[01:35:47]  And thank God we get to end it on a good note with that vote.
[01:35:50]  We'll see what President Biden does.
[01:35:53]  Oh, we have so many thoughts the team and I are talking about today.
[01:35:56]  It was kind of a COVID show, and I'd love to get your thoughts on the stories you heard today.
[01:35:59]  Email me, will you?
[01:36:00]  Megan, M-E-G-Y-N at megankelly.com.
[01:36:04]  Love to hear from you.
[01:36:05]  May feature one of your mails in our mailbag segment we do each week.
[01:36:09]  And check it out for yourself.
[01:36:11]  Have a great weekend and we'll see you