Morning Wire XX
[0] The Fifth Circuit Court ruled recently that the White House, the FBI, and the CDC likely violated the First Amendment when they pressured social media companies to censor posts related to COVID.
[1] The ruling means the Biden administration is barred from communicating with platforms like Facebook and Twitter or X. In response, the White House has filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, and the outcome is pending.
[2] For this episode of Morning Wire, Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham, interviews Stanford epidemiologist Dr. J. Badachar.
[3] one of the plaintiffs in the case.
[4] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[5] It's September 24th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
[6] The following is an interview between Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham and Stanford epidemiologist Dr. J. Badacharya.
[7] Well, thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Batacharya.
[8] Oh, it's my pleasure to join Megan.
[9] Well, many of our listeners are going to be aware of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, of course, at the height of COVID, offered some alternative.
[10] alternative medical opinions on how the government could approach the pandemic.
[11] And, of course, in particular, it argued against widespread lockdowns.
[12] Now, I think a lot of people are aware of the Twitter files and what they revealed regarding government involvement in those content moderation decisions.
[13] But for those who have not been specifically tracking this lawsuit, can you review how federal agencies were involved in censoring you?
[14] I mean, it's really shocking what we found.
[15] So this lawsuit, this Missouri v. Biden case, we, in the court proceedings, managed to get permission to depose a dozen federal employees, including Tony Fauci himself, including people in the White House.
[16] And we also got to read emails between the White House and of these social media companies.
[17] What it showed is a pattern of essentially threats by the White House where they would say things like, in effect, if you don't take down these posts, If you don't censor these people, then your company is going to go kaput.
[18] I mean, we're going to go use regulatory action against you.
[19] And even when there was like a friendly interaction, the implied threat was there.
[20] And the reason it's so concerning is because it didn't matter if the White House was trying to suppress actual false things on the web.
[21] They wanted to suppress even true statements.
[22] As long as it contradicted the government's pandemic policies, the White House thought it was fair game to get rid of.
[23] Even true facts.
[24] You know, facts like you actually have some, you know, substantial immunity after COVID recovery.
[25] I mean, that's a fact.
[26] The fact that the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting COVID.
[27] That is a fact.
[28] These are the kinds of things the White House told social media companies to suppress or vaccine injuries.
[29] You know, like Facebook suppressed vaccine injury groups where patients wouldn't talk to each other and, you know, provide consolation for each other and advice for each other.
[30] They took those down at the express force of the White House.
[31] I think I saw that the Fifth Circuit Court actually sort of, you know, gently, but compared the White House to the mob.
[32] They did.
[33] They compared to the Al Capone.
[34] I mean, that's better than what the district court did, which was they compared the White House to the Orwell's Ministry of Truth in 1984.
[35] I mean, I think these kinds of like analogies are not flattering to the White House.
[36] And I just, I wonder if they understand that what they did was so at odds with the, American commitment to free speech.
[37] I never thought in my life that this would become a partisan issue.
[38] Did it surprise you to see the list of agencies, obviously the White House was included in that, that were involved in this content moderation?
[39] I mean, it was very long.
[40] I mean, I did not expect to see the FBI on that list.
[41] I did not expect to see the State Department on that list.
[42] I did not expect to see even the White House itself.
[43] I mean, this is a pretty broad government effort, all of government effort from all across the federal government to suppress American speech.
[44] So I am shocked that an American government of any political stripe would engage in this kind of behavior.
[45] The American First Amendment, I thought, was something that every single American agreed with.
[46] It's part of the American civic religion, I think, that we are committed to free speech.
[47] I mean, in some ways, it's the extent of American support for free speech makes us different than many, many other nations.
[48] And so it stunned me that there would be a government that was so brazenly decide that free speech wasn't important, that in fact they knew science so well that they could suppress people who were putting forward opposing ideas.
[49] You know, the First Amendment protects both true and false speech.
[50] It's not a question of whether it's true or false.
[51] I mean, no American government should ever act this way.
[52] The irony is that, in fact, what the government was doing was suppressing true speech.
[53] simply because it was inconvenient to the policies that the government itself wanted to put forward.
[54] So you're a highly credentialed American citizen, but an average American citizen.
[55] You find yourself in these Twitter files.
[56] You find that these massive bureaucracies, these authorities, the DOJ is taking an interest in what you're saying.
[57] Is that intimidating?
[58] I mean, I guess I still have this naive faith that things like that eventually America corrects itself.
[59] We do have a history where governments have overreached on this.
[60] You can go back and read Sidney Hook's diary and memoirs when we reminisces about the restrictions of speech during World War I. Of course, the most famous thing is probably the suppression of speech by the House on American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy saying, you know, like, were you ever a communist?
[61] Those kinds of suppression of speech in American history have generally been rejected by Americans looking back soberly.
[62] And I guess I still have this naive faith in America that we will reject this kind of overreach and history will judge them very, very poorly.
[63] If you could sit down in a room with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, a surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, what would you tell them about how this impacted you professionally, personally, to have your medical, very valid medical, opinions censored in this way?
[64] I mean, the kinds of activities they engaged in, in effect, what it did is it made it impossible for me to get a fair hearing in the scientific community, even though many of the things I was saying were absolutely correct and important for COVID policy.
[65] And in fact, personally, what it did is it engaged a whole group of people that didn't know scientific evidence very well, but that were certain that what I was saying was so dangerous that I shouldn't be allowed to say it.
[66] you know, after I wrote the Grandson Declaration and this propaganda campaign started up by Tony Fauci, I started getting death threats.
[67] For the first time of my life, I got emails of essentially racist emails saying, you know, go back to your home country.
[68] It made my life very, very difficult.
[69] I mean, there was a lot of stress around that.
[70] But the other thing that I saw happen, and I knew this because a lot of scientists were writing to me, so they were thanking me for keeping on speaking, but they were saying that they couldn't speak because they were afraid for their careers.
[71] And they saw the example of what me, Martin Koldorf from Harvard and Sinatra Gupta, the three of us who wrote the Great Pansion Declaration, what we were going through.
[72] And they didn't want to go through that.
[73] I mean, completely reasonably, like who wants to go through that?
[74] And so they stayed silent.
[75] In effect, the purpose of this was to silence everybody, not just me. To make an example of me, it's not me. My stupidity was I kept talking.
[76] If I just stayed silent, they wouldn't have gone after me. I think it's just the kind of thing that's very in cities.
[77] Censorship isn't just like, okay, I'm going to stop you from speaking.
[78] The purpose of censorship is to silence other people and then to destroy the reputations of people that are speaking against what the government wants so that no one would speak in it.
[79] And even the ideas themselves, even if you can get it in front of the public, people will say, oh, gosh, it's that weird fringe guy speaking.
[80] It's the kind of thing that you would see an authoritarian country do, but never you would think that an American government would engage in it.
[81] But that's exactly what happen, Megan.
[82] In this country, in this United States, during the pandemic, the American government acted to make sure that outside critics of their policies, scientific critics with credentials, couldn't speak up, wouldn't seek up.
[83] Had you ever seen anything like this before in your scientific background?
[84] Never.
[85] This is unique.
[86] I mean, I never imagine it would be possible.
[87] And I never imagined that this kind of suppression could happen.
[88] That, of course, not in the United States, but also just generally within science, science works because of freedom of speech.
[89] If a scientist can't say what their ideas are, then you can't have science.
[90] Science operates by people making hypotheses that contradict current ideas.
[91] Science operates by people collecting data and then discussing it with other scientists who may disagree with them about the interpretation of the data.
[92] If you don't have free speech, if you have a preferred position, you know, a narrative that has to be said no matter what, whether you agree or disagree, well, you don't have science.
[93] is essentially a return to a dark age where, you know, you have a high pope of science like Tony Fauci, dictating from on high, this is true, this is not true.
[94] And if you say something that contradicts them, well, you're not simply contradicting a man, you're contradicting science itself, as he actually said in an interview.
[95] And what that means, then, is that you are not a scientist.
[96] You're something else altogether.
[97] Well, so what do you think, then, about the Fifth Circuit narrowing the scope of the district court's injunction to allow SISA to continue flagging posts for review on social media.
[98] Yeah, I think that's problematic.
[99] I mean, I think it's what Siza, this Department of Homeland Security group does, is it engages with nonprofits, including, for instance, the Stanford Internet Observatory.
[100] And what these nonprofits do is that they get paid based on grants from the government, they identify things that they call misinformation.
[101] In this case, they are identifying things that were even true.
[102] It's just, you know, a government hit list of ideas they in the like.
[103] And then that sets the agenda for the censorship regime.
[104] I think that the government should not be engaging these groups.
[105] That is, I think it should be prohibited activity.
[106] I'm disappointed with the district court that it sort of carved that part of it out.
[107] But what the district court did do is they said, look, that hit list, Sizer can't then go to the companies, the Facebook, to Google, to whoever, and say, look, you have to, sense of these.
[108] people and these ideas on this hit list, which we've developed, or we've gotten through our engagement with these non -process.
[109] So at least the teeth of it is that they can't actually use that as an official hit list.
[110] They can still put it out, right?
[111] They can still say, we think these people are misinforming.
[112] I mean, they can essentially launder defamation by these groups, which is unfortunate.
[113] I mean, I think that that should not be something the government should be permitted to do.
[114] It's kind of within the range of things that limit speech that I think the First Amendment should protect against.
[115] So hopefully that'll either get fixed by legislation, which legislation would say to the government, look, this is not the kind of thing we're going to do.
[116] We're not going to launder definition generate hit lists that are aimed at figuring out who should speak and who shouldn't speak online.
[117] But this is still an important ruling.
[118] The ruling basically says that they can't go to the companies and threaten them.
[119] The companies now can just go tell the government, go pound sand, go away.
[120] We're not going to listen to you.
[121] And there's nothing the government can do about it now.
[122] So what do you say to the White House when they say, and I think this was part of their statement, we have an interest and a responsibility to protect the health and safety of our citizens.
[123] So that is what we were doing.
[124] Yeah, they do have a responsibility to protect the health and well -being of the citizens.
[125] And the way you do that is by free speech.
[126] The censorship ended up killing people.
[127] I mean, I don't mean to be overwroughted to this.
[128] I mean, I literally mean that.
[129] Like, I think we adopted policies that both in the short run and the long run will have harmed the health and well -being of our populace.
[130] Just to take one example, the school closures in, especially in blue states lasted way, way, way too long, far out of line with, for instance, what was happening in Europe or Scandinavia, and far out of line what the scientific evidence was saying.
[131] Yet you weren't really a lot that if you said that, you know, my colleague Martin Kulorf would post that, the evidence from Scandinavia about school closures, and his post would get suppressed.
[132] He would actually got some caution of when he post something about math, again, consistent what the scientific evidence was saying.
[133] The effect of that school closure is, according to the scientific closure from before the pandemic, keeping kids out of school is very bad for their long run and short run health.
[134] The evidence from, you know, for instance, some states in the 20th century would increase the number of required years of schooling from age 15 to 816 or something.
[135] People will look and say, okay, if you look at the states that are bordering each other with different policies for that, what happens to the kids that are required to stay in school longer?
[136] Well, turns out they live longer lives.
[137] They live healthier lives.
[138] They're less likely to be poor.
[139] schooling is absolutely essential the long run health and well -being of our kids and so because we were not allowed to speak these schools stayed closed far beyond what the scientific evidence was saying and as a result our kids are going to suffer especially specifically asked you about Missouri v. Biden and how this tech censorship impacted you that you think our listeners should know about.
[140] Well, I think the key thing I want to get across the listeners, it's not just about the plaintiffs in the case.
[141] It's not just about me or Martin Kudorff or Aaron Kariotti or Louisiana, Health Freedom Roots.
[142] It's about all Americans.
[143] This is the kind of thing that should never have happened in the United States.
[144] And every American's rights were violated.
[145] If you posted something on Facebook, and got tagged as misinformation.
[146] Or if you were afraid to post something on Facebook because you were afraid that, well, what is somebody tagged this?
[147] And you were seen by your friends as posting misinformation.
[148] If you felt this sense of dread that you couldn't say what you wanted to say during the pandemic, you weren't imagining it.
[149] And it was an explicit government policy that made that happen.
[150] It's an environment that generally you might find in an authoritarian country, not in a free country like the United States.
[151] And it is entirely at odds with what should have happened in the United States.
[152] And I hope that every American listening this knows that this case is for you.
[153] It's not primarily about us.
[154] Very well stated.
[155] Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Bottacharya.
[156] We very much appreciate your time.
[157] Thank you, Megan.
[158] That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham, interviewing Stanford medical professor, Dr. J. Bottacharia.
[159] And this was your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.