BUCK: Thanks for rolling with us and our special guest today, friend of the show. We’ve been with him in the bunker dealing with the onslaught of Fauciite madness now from the very beginning of the Clay and Buck show — and before that on Clay’s show and The Buck Sexton Show, our two shows respectively — and he’s had a big win. Alex Berenson with us now, author of so many things, a great Substack, Unreported Truths about Covid-19, Pandemia is his book — and apparently, sir, you have a Twitter account again.
BERENSON: I do! I’m back from the dead. I’m no longer a hungry ghost.
BUCK: Tell everybody why it’s a big deal because for those of you who work in the media, we’re like, “Wow. They actually let him have his Twitter account back.”
BERENSON: So last August, 28, I was banned, Twitter’s banned other people, but I was banned, I got my fifth strike supposedly for covid misinformation. And, you know, that leads to a permanent suspension. And, you know, other people — many other people — have been suspended, mostly on the right. I mean, I don’t consider myself, you know, conservative, but most people, you know, either on the right or who’ve raised questions about covid and the vaccines have been suspended in the last couple years.
There’s also been trans, you know, anti-trans or people who, you know, raised questions about trans issues have been suspended. Okay. In general, when people have been suspended, there’s been no route back for them. You know, Donald Trump was suspended, famously had 90 million followers, president of the United States, he couldn’t get back on. He sued. His suit was dismissed. This has been the case for basically everybody. I sued last December, and my suit in April survived the motion to dismiss, which Twitter filed.
Twitter tried to get it dismissed. Now, this is… I had some communications with a Twitter executive in which he told me, “Hey, you know, we are — we are basically okay with what you’re doing,” for a while, and then that stopped. But. But here’s why this is so significant. So other people don’t have those communications. They don’t have representatives from Twitter saying, “You know what? Like, we’re okay.” But the real reason the judge allowed my lawsuit to go forward wasn’t just that.
It was that he said, “Look. If Twitter’s gonna have a five-strike policy about misinformation, then it has to show that it applied that. Now, if Twitter’s gonna say, ‘We can just kick you off whatever we want for no good reason; it doesn’t matter how many followers you have. We’re Twitter or we’re Facebook, we can do whatever we want under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which is a federal law that protects these companies,’ then okay, then they’re gonna say that.
“But if they’re gonna say, ‘We actually have rules. We don’t do things randomly,’ then they have to follow those rules, and I’m gonna say that it looks like this guy’s shown that, you know, he has a case, at least, that you didn’t follow your own rules.” And so I’m gonna allow this lawsuit to proceed. And that led… And I can’t talk very much about the settlement, but that led Twitter and me to settlement discussions, and those settlement discussions have now concluded and I’m back on the platform.
And they have acknowledged — this is very important — that they shouldn’t have kicked me off. So, to me, even though I have this sort of special communication with Twitter that, you know, that was helpful to me, this precedent that I have set, that Twitter needs — or, you know, or Facebook or Instagram. If they’re gonna have rules, they need to apply those rules fairly, I think and hope that that’s a bigger issue going forward. So I think this is not just important for me; I think it’s important for anybody who feels they were kicked off unfairly.
You know, look, if you start, you know, doxing your girlfriend or, you know, posting, you know, that every member of the Supreme Court should be shot, like, you can expect to be suspended. And I understand that. But if — but if there are things that, you know, reasonable people are trying to debate and discuss, I think the platforms have a responsibility to follow their own rules, and that’s what this is about.
CLAY: Alex, couple things. One, people should know, all of your old tweets are now back up, right?
CLAY: So not only did they return you, it’s not like they wiped everything you had said clean. It appears everything that you have ever tweeted has been returned, as well as it appears your old followers are back. Now, a big part, allegedly, of your lawsuit was that the government may have been involved in encouraging Twitter to take this action against you. Is that part of the lawsuit still in play? What can you tell us about a potential — ’cause this is what’s scary to a lot of people, myself, Buck, certainly many of our listeners out there as well is the idea that the government could go to a social media company, say, “We don’t like what this guy or what this girl is saying, and we want you to take action against them,” which is potentially a part of why Twitter acted as well. What can you tell us about that?
BERENSON: Yeah. So, in the initial — my initial — claim, my initial lawsuit against Twitter, I raised those issues and I raised them on both federal grounds and California State grounds, actually, ’cause the California constitution is quite friendly to free speech. The judge looked at those claims in August — I’m sorry, in April. He allowed the lawsuit to proceed on a breach of contract basis. But simultaneously he said, “We’re gonna allow — or I’m gonna. I’m gonna force Twitter to give up all its third-party communication with the government and with other people about you.”
So, in other words, Twitter’s posture towards me changed dramatically last summer. And we still don’t know why that is at this point, okay. But Twitter was gonna have to provide a lot of what’s called discovery, in legal terms meaning literally, like, “I’m gonna discover what they knew and what they know.” Now, I cannot talk about specifics of the settlement, but here’s what I can say. I said very publicly last month, a month ago today on my Substack, “I am not gonna settle this claim unless Twitter provides discovery and the right for me to publish.” Okay? And I’ve now settled the claim. So, in the next month or couple months I hope to have more to say about this. Right now, I am constrained.
CLAY: Okay. The only thing I’ll ask you is this. Have you been able or will you be able to potentially review that discovery yourself in a way that could allow you to write or talk about it in the future?
BERENSON: I will go back to what I said, which is that I wouldn’t settle the lawsuit unless I had the right or the discovery and to publish.
BUCK: Speaking to Alex Berenson, author of Pandemia; he’s got a Substack, Unreported Truths about covid. I want to take us back to covid, ’cause Clay and I refuse to let this stuff go, especially with an election looming. Put aside the crappy economy and all the Biden idiocy that people are now becoming all too familiar with. I would vote against anybody who was wrong with covid on that issue only and feel good about it.
I would vote against people that pushed vaccine mandates, and I would argue that anybody else who’s being sane should vote against mask mandate, vaccine mandate, lockdown lunatics. That all said, I was just in Asheville, Alex — you’re not on Twitter; so you didn’t see this — it was trending nationally because I just remarked on how, “Wow. Everybody in the stores here is wearing N95 masks. What the heck is going on?”
It caused a firestorm. All the blue-haired libs freaked out. And I think it was a reminder not just to me but anybody who was paying attention to that ruckus that there are a lot of people for whom nothing has changed. They’re ready to get the three rounds of shots. They’re ready for more masks. What can you tell us about that? What’s the latest on the shots and on the masks?
BERENSON: I mean, I don’t know if it’s a lot, though. I think it might be 10 to 20% of the population. Now, it’s overrepresented in the media, in the political class, you know, sort of in the culture-making classes, but, but —
BUCK: Well, 20% is 60 million people, right? So, you know.
BERENSON: Right. And it’s more than that in the people who, you know, determine what you see on TV, your elite, right? So, it is a lot of people, a significant number. Here’s how you know that this is just BS and feeder, okay? The shots for kids came out — I mean little kids, kids under 5, came out — about 10 days ago. One percent of kids under 5 have gotten the shot, okay?
CLAY: Wow.
BERENSON: Right?
CLAY: Wow.
BERENSON: I mean, if that is not a resounding rejection of everything that’s gone on… Everybody’s knows, okay, everybody knows the shots don’t work. And this incredibly cynical game they’re playing of, oh, this Omicron-specific booster is gonna make a difference. They know very well it makes no difference, okay? You get a few extra antibodies against Omicron.
You still don’t get nearly as many antibodies against Omicron with the Omicron shot as you did against the original variant with the original shot. Okay? That’s just a fact. They know it. They know this isn’t gonna work against Omicron. It’s just an excuse to try to get this, like, sad, pathetic 20% of the population happy enough to get out of their houses and, you know, even worse, the people who wouldn’t let their kids do anything normal for the last two years. Those people are the only ones who got shots.
BERENSON: No.
BUCK: You know, that’s a big question that it feels like we haven’t gotten an answer to yet.
BERENSON: We don’t. I mean, it is such a… The mortality data is so messy and confused right now because certainly Omicron is milder. People die with it rather than from it. Second of all, Paxlovid, I think, actually has some — that’s the Pfizer drug, anti-retroviral drug. That actually I think works to some extent, so that has saved some lives and then you have people with previous immunity.
And given the fact that in the United States where we have had multiple waves of this over the last couple years, the most vulnerable people, unfortunately, a lot of them have died. So, I think it’s very hard to know both what the, you know, real mortality rate of Omicron is and whether vaccines do any good at stopping that. I just… You will never hear that, though. They will never admit this. It’s the last bastion. It’s, “Oh, yeah, they don’t work against infection or transmission at all, these shoots, but they do help prevent you from dying or, you know, being hospitalized,” and because the data is so messy, they’re gonna be able to say that forever, and they will say it forever.
CLAY: So, what is it gonna look like? I know predicting anything covid has been a huge challenge, but I believe now the dominant strain is BA.5, if I’m not mistaken?
BERENSON: BA.5.
CLAY: Okay.
BERENSON: Yes.
CLAY: So, what does it look like —
BERENSON: BA.5 is just gonna keep infecting people, and I think it actually preferentially infects people who’ve been vaccinated. Again, the data on that is not great.
CLAY: But it’s starting to look like, Alex… That’s what I was gonna lead to. It’s starting to look like the people who get covid shots are now way more likely to get covid than the people who either have natural immunity or just have chosen not to get these shots.
BERENSON: It certainly looks that way. And there’s good reason to believe that might be the case because the shots do hinder your development of anti-N antibodies, which is another part of the virus. And even though that’s not on the shell of the virus, it does seem that having anti-N antibodies and T-cells that can recognize the N protein is an important part of your immune response, and these people who’ve been vaccinated don’t seem to get that/those as much because the vaccine so biases their immune system towards the spike protein.
CLAY: You mentioned 1% of kids. The New York Times, obviously, covered this as if it were a new birth of freedom, that 6-month-old to 5-year-old they had all these shots.
BERENSON: (laughing)
CLAY: I feel so bad for these kids but they had all these parents who said, “I haven’t let my kid play a sport in two years! They barely left the house. We haven’t been to a restaurant. We haven’t been to a family, you know, affair or anything that a young kid would love and enjoy.” Only 1%, according to your data, in the first 10 days are actually getting that, getting the shot. What does this suggest the percentages are going to be and, Alex, New York City, Eric Adams is talking about maybe mandating that all kids have the covid shot in order to go to school. Certainly, this is something Gavin Newsom in California has said. What sort of battles are we looking like we may have to fight based on this?
BERENSON: I don’t think that’s gonna happen. You know, California came the closest and they backed off. You can’t mandate something that’s been rejected by parents. You can say, okay, a 6-month-old, they’re not going to school. But 5- to 11-year-old, only I think about 30% of those kids have been vaccinated, and those are all school-age kids. So, it is impossible… I mean, you know, I joked but it wasn’t really a joke. There would have to be tanks in the streets, you know, to force school mask mandates.
And California’s already basically backed off that, and I think… I think New York is not gonna do it. I mean, the public schools are in enough trouble. They don’t need this trouble on top of it. And the teachers unions, you know, I, you know, I think their noses are a little bit bloody. I think they’re gonna back off. You know, I’d like to say something. okay? It’s easy for those of us who were not jabbed, and people who were, to forget what happened last summer, okay, last summer and last fall.
But there was really an effort in the United States — and really all over the Western world — to take rights away from those of us who chose not to get what was basically an experimental vaccine, and that was after it had become clear to people who are watching closely that the vaccines were much less effecting than advertised.
BUCK: Yeah. It was medical fascism — let’s call it what it is — and Biden pushed it on everybody, and the Supreme Court had to step in, and it was atrocious.
BERENSON: That’s right, and it cannot be forgotten, and should never, ever happen again.
CLAY: Amen.
BUCK: Alex Berenson. Guys, go subscribe to his Substack, and if you’re on Twitter, @AlexBerenson on Twitter!
BERENSON: (laughs)
BUCK: Congrats, sir.
BERENSON: Thank you, guys. Thanks so much.
CLAY: Big win for Alex Berenson. Welcome back to the Twitter universe — that is, if you want to be there.
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