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May 16, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
17:08
Big Tech Censorship with Steve Kirsch

Steve Kirsch discusses censorship from Big Tech and a lawsuit against Facebook in this episode.

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Hey, everybody.
I got my buddy on today, Steve Kirsch, my comrade from the front line of the trenches.
And I asked you to come on, Steve, because we're both doing this Facebook rally.
We're going to be speaking at it, this censorship rally against Facebook at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, Thursday, Thursday.
May 19th, 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock p.m.
Please come.
I want to talk to people about why I'm doing this, but my voice is so screwed up today.
I asked you to come on because you've been censored, I think, almost as much as I have, and you're even more pissed off about it than I am.
Let's tell people why we're doing this.
And what your background is, because you were a normal guy before you got sucked into this.
So were you, a normal guy, before you got sucked into it too.
You got sucked into it a lot.
A lot longer ago than I did.
But my story is that I was a believer of what I was being told about a year ago.
I had gotten both vaccines, both the first dose and second dose of the Moderna vaccine, because I believe what the FDA was saying.
Totally.
I'm a high-tech entrepreneur.
I've started about seven companies.
I used to be able to count because I had a LinkedIn profile, but LinkedIn canceled my account permanently and gave me absolutely no access.
I had a LinkedIn account for, I'm sure it was over a decade.
I don't even remember because they wiped it out.
I had a Twitter account for about 13 years, and they wiped it out.
And then they reincarnated me, and then they wiped it out again, basically permanently banning me twice on exactly the same account, which is something that I think few people can't.
A stature in life that few people ever achieve.
And what turned me into this...
You also have been banned by your alma mater, MIT, from speaking at all that you funded.
Well, look, to be fair, on MIT, I donated two and a half million dollars 24 years ago to fund an auditorium named in my honor.
And then I asked to speak in the auditorium and they said, no, we can't find a faculty member who's willing to sponsor you.
But their excuse, and I only found out this later when I confronted the Dean of Science, is that the excuse is that in order to speak at MIT, you have to be sponsored by a faculty member.
And in order for a faculty member to sponsor you, they have to be familiar with the body of work that you do and agree with it.
Now, I mean, that's a fairly reasonable position for them to take because they don't want to be promoting misinformation.
So because nobody on the MIT staff in electrical engineering, which is the department I asked, agreed with me, then this is why they weren't able to find a sponsor.
I can understand that.
But you see, somebody in the science department should say, look, you know, this guy has some valid points, and he's using data, and nobody's been able to counter the data, and he should be allowed to speak and express his point of views.
And if he's wrong, the audience would shut him down.
But they refused to do that.
But I found a professor at MIT, Retza Flevi, who is...
Probably best known, actually, for the paper that he recently published on the 25% increase in the number of ambulance calls relating to cardiac events.
And that's a little bit hard for anybody to explain if it wasn't due to the vaccine.
So all these things that are happening.
Anyway.
You're getting off the...
The point is that after I got jabbed, I discovered that my friends were dying, that I had one friend who had three relatives who died a week after getting the vaccine, and all three of them were perfectly healthy.
I have another friend who's 28 years old.
He says he's got seven friends Younger than he is who died after getting the vaccine.
He says that's never happened before.
So I hear these amazing stories from my friends about what's going on with the vaccines.
And there's no way that those stories are consistent with the vaccines are safe and effective.
So I looked at the VAERS data, and it was very clear from the VAERS data that we were being had and were being lied to.
And then when I tried to speak out, then I became persona non grata.
I went from, what I say, from hero to zero.
And people like my, if you look at my Wikipedia page, I'm a terrible person because I'm spreading all this misinformation.
And I used to have a National Caring Award, which was given to me by Hillary Clinton in Washington, D.C., one of the highest honors that you can get.
And that National Caring Award was erased.
Erased from my Wikipedia profile.
So this is, it's not just censoring you, but it's actively manipulating the information about you to make you look like you're an evil person.
And then when I tried to complain, then Wikipedia banned me from even commenting to the people who are responsible for Creating the text on my page that they're wrong.
So I couldn't even, I can't even complain anymore.
So what's going on is this unfair censorship where, you know, Twitter banned me twice, LinkedIn banned me, Medium banned me for life.
Facebook hasn't banned me, though.
Now, the reason Facebook hasn't banned me is I don't post on Facebook anymore.
After I got banned on all these other platforms, I said, okay, fine.
You know, the only thing I'm going to post on Facebook is cat pictures.
We have this adorable cat, but that's what we're reduced to.
And what I love about you, Steve, is that you're really a data-driven guy.
I'm so cynical about government officials having done this now for 18 years, and it's really refreshing for me to talk with With you, because you have this very fresh sense of outrage and indignation about,
you know, the fact that because you actually expect government officials to tell the truth, you expect the science to be data-driven, you believe in empiricism, and You are furious when people don't do it.
And you made a deep dive not only into theirs.
You know, people read your subs.
I read it faithfully now because it's always...
There's always something fantastic and you're a very, very reliable source of data.
And as you know, you know, there's a few people out there that we rely on.
You know, Robert Malone is one.
People are very, very careful.
Alex Berenson, who...
Many people are angry at, but Alex is very careful with this data, and I rely on him for data on many of these things, and you, you're very careful, you understand, and you have offered people millions of dollars to debate you, and nobody will do it, and that alone should inform people about what's happening.
But I really, I'm very, very happy that you're going to speak.
You know, you and I are speaking together with Peter McCulloch and a bunch of other really good speakers at this event.
We're going to talk about these internet titans who have censored criticism of government policies of lockdowns that have made them billions and billions of dollars richer.
And that is, it's something that should inspire outrage and indignation in every American.
Oh, yeah.
The difference between us and them is that, I mean, from our point of view, we, you know, like I look at the federal government officials as spreaders of misinformation, because that's what they're doing.
They're telling people that masks work, which is completely false.
Nobody will debate me on that.
But I'm not calling for government officials to be silenced.
I'm not calling for their Twitter accounts to be taken down.
I'm saying, hey, look, you know, everybody should be allowed to speak, even if we disagree with them.
And even if they're spreading misinformation, that you should have the ability to speak and be heard.
And, you It's not like when I do a tweet that everybody sees it.
The only people that see my tweets are the people who follow me to say, well, you have to be censored so that we protect the people following you from yourself.
I mean, the people are following me because they agree with what I'm saying.
So what's the point of censoring me On Twitter or on Facebook, since we're doing this at Facebook headquarters, I mean, the people who I'm posting to are all people who want to hear what I have to say.
And, you know, it used to be we were in America where there was freedom of speech and your speech wasn't censored and you're allowed to be heard.
And these platforms, these social media platforms are becoming the new public square where people should be allowed to express their opinions.
Now, you know, of course, the First Amendment, you know, people think that that means that you're allowed to say anything, you know, you want and there's no censorship.
But the First Amendment only applies to government censorship.
It says that the federal government or the state governments and so forth, that government in general cannot censor your speech.
That would be unconstitutional.
But the Constitution says nothing about whether...
Private companies like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and YouTube can censor your speech.
And so they're silent on that.
So that when these companies, they're all acting in coordination.
They're all suppressing things like early treatments and so forth.
And they're all taking their cues from the NIH. And whether they're doing this in coordination with the government, I think there is coordination with the government because I've heard stories about that.
But the point is that what's really going on here is essentially the government is censoring our speech, and they're doing it indirectly through these companies, and that shouldn't happen.
And these companies, which are very big, should be punished for censoring speech, especially Speech that is truthful.
So that when I say, hey, you know, here's the ONS data from the UK, the Office of National Statistics in the UK, I should be allowed to be able to publish that.
In fact, I published an article on Substack about that, and people tried to put it on Twitter, and they got like 10,000 likes, and Twitter then suspended the Hey, look, Facebook, I mean, like, I invite any Facebook censor or Twitter censor who believes that I got it wrong to show me how I got it wrong because...
Nobody's willing to do that.
So it's just an example of just how corrupt these organizations are in suppressing speech.
And so I think it'd be great for anyone who's in the Bay Area.
It's Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park.
It's on Willow Road.
It's that you go over the bridge and it's right before you get to the Dumbarton Bridge as to where it is.
And as you said, Bobby Kennedy will be there.
He will be there.
I will be there, and Peter McCullough and other folks will be there.
So come meet us and join us and protest these platforms doing what they're doing, because it's terribly wrong.
Yeah, let me just kind of brief people, because I am doing, you know, we are suing Facebook, and I am doing the argument with my co-counsel, Jed Rubinfeld, next week in front of the Ninth Circuit, Court of Appeals, Federal Court of Appeals.
And here's how the First Amendment works.
If you own a printing press, you can write anything you want.
You can publish lies all day.
That is your right.
You're free to say anything that you want with some limited exceptions.
You can't push out of fire.
In a crowded theater, you can't incite violence.
You can't incite criminal acts like pedophilia, particularly those kind of things.
And there should be bans on that, on those activities.
But generally speaking, you can write anything you want.
And Facebook...
We're like a printing press.
Nobody can censor us.
And they're probably right about that.
In fact, the courts are right.
There is an argument that you brought up, which is that these internet platforms are now so huge that they occupy the entire public square.
And at some point, if you occupy the entire public square, do you become a quasi-governmental agency?
And there's some case law that says that, for example, private malls during the 1970s were these huge malls going up, which for certain communities, that was the only public space.
And Vietnam War protesters started going on that private property protest, and the mall owners ejected them for trespassing, and the federal court said, wait a minute, because you occupy so much of the public space, you essentially have made yourself a public square.
And you people who want to use that space to express themselves have a right to do so under the First Amendment right to assembly.
Well, there is some case law that's possible that sometime in the future that may be applied to Facebook and Google, etc.
But right now, that's not where the law is.
However, as you pointed out, If they can censor you, they can eject you, but not if the government tells them to do it, and not if they're coordinating their activities with the government.
And they admit that they are, and we have the emails with Tony Fauci, and we have the White House telling them to censor this information to us, which includes me.
And once that happens, it's called the government actor exception.
Which is if they're acting as a surrogate to censor people on behalf of the government, that implicates the First Amendment.
And that's what we're arguing in front of the Ninth Circuit.
People can tune in and see that argument next week.
But the most important thing is to show up At the Facebook protest, this is your one chance to tell Mark Zuckerberg that you do not want him deciding what facts you can hear and what facts you can't hear.
You live in a democracy.
You're an American citizen.
Our democracy relies on the free flow of information, the capacity for ideas to be annealed in the furnace of debate.
And then triumph in the marketplace of ideas in order to become public policies.
And that's the whole theory about how and why a democracy works.
And we had a war in this country beginning in 1776 in which Americans stood for one proposition above all others that we ought to be able to criticize our government officials.
No other nation in the world could do that.
We were the first nation, and by 1865 there were six other nations that allowed it.
Today there's nations that supposedly allow it, and they're all based upon our model.
We are the exemplary nation.
We were the example for that new system.
And now Mark Zuckerberg is shutting that down right here in the United States of America.
And we need to go to Facebook.
We need, you know, those people who showed up in 1776, they showed up.
They showed up at Lexington and Concord.
They showed up at battlefields in Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina.
They put their lives at stake.
We need you to show up at Facebook.
We're not asking you to face firings of a squad or weapons, but you need to come and have your voice heard.
So please come and see Steve and myself and many, many other great speakers May 19th, Thursday afternoons, 3 o'clock to 6 o'clock.
We'll see you there.
Thank you, Steve.
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