The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 354. Lockdown Horror: Targeting Children, Churches, and Your Freedom | David Zweig

Episode Date: May 4, 2023

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and journalist David Zweig discuss his role in breaking the Twitter Files, government censorship in society, the extent to which lockdowns were effective, how they affected children in particular, and how one renegade church would not bow to overzealous regulation. David Zweig is a writer and journalist, with multiple books published, such as “Invisibles” in 2014 and the upcoming “Abundance of Caution” that centers on the effects of the COVID-19 response on schools and children. He was also one of the journalists who helped break the Twitter Files, focusing on the suppression of information to the satisfaction of the U.S. government and the public health establishment.  - Links - For David Zweig: Substack: https://davidzweig.substack.com/Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidzweigWebsite: https://davidzweig.com/ Read David’s article that we discussed in the episode: “When a Renegade Church and a Zealous County Health Department Collide”https://davidzweig.substack.com/p/when-a-renegade-church-and-a-zealous 

Today, I'm speaking with journalist and writer David Swag about, among other topics, his involvement in the Twitter files, the culture of silence and fear and suppression around discussing COVID-19 related stories and the detrimental effects of lockdowns on a generation of children. So David, one of the things I really wanted to talk to you today, I think it'd be interesting to go behind the scenes with regards to the Twitter files.

I mean, the Twitter, so-called Twitter files with Matt Taibe, particularly leading the charge in my understanding, didn't get a lot of legacy media coverage, surprise, surprise, and that story was downplayed, but of course it was a viral occurrence online, particularly on Twitter, and rightly so as far as I was concerned, because my sense was that it indicated illustrated, demonstrated a tremendous degree of behind-the-scenes collusion between

most worrisomely government officials and Twitter in particular, but media in general, with regards so-called to crafting the narrative around COVID. And I'm not very impressed by government media collusion efforts to craft narratives. That's certainly not the media's role. That's 100% certain to craft narratives with the government. And I don't think that that's justified, even in the face of a so-called emergency. In fact, that might be the time when it's

most important for the media to not collude with the government so that we can be sure that the response to the emergency isn't worse than the bloody emergency or isn't ill-founded in some other grounds because it often is. It's not like we're necessarily going to respond to an emergency in the proper manner, even if we want to. And critics need to abound in emergency situations even more so than under normal circumstances. So you were there. Will you walk us through how you were there and what you saw. Let's start with that.

And then we'll branch out into all the other tentacles we can attack. Sure. Yeah. So I was there basically at the request of Barry Weiss, who I had known for a while and I had written for her publication. And I knew that Barry was one of the two journalists who had access to the Twitter files and just being friendly and because I knew them, I emailed Barry and one of her editors saying, hey guys, in case you're looking up COVID stuff, as they knew, this was my area of expertise for the past number of years.

If you want to look at COVID stuff, here's what you might want to look at. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then basically an hour later, I get a response, can you drop everything and get on a plane to San Francisco for us? So I was not expecting that. I was just trying to be helpful, but when they asked me to go out there, I was like, of course, there was no doubt as a writer, as someone interested in this issue.

For years, there was, there was a no-brainer. So I went out to San Francisco, basically under Barry's umbrella. There are a few other journals there, while I was there, Michael Schellenberger, Layton Woodhouse, Lee Fong. While I was there, it was the four of us, and I was there for a few days. It was quite remarkable just to be at the center

of this thing that I had been observing. I had no personal interaction with Elon Musk. I saw him while I was there, but I didn't communicate with him. I know a lot of people. I think this has been said a bunch of times, but worth saying again, at least from, I can only speak to my personal experience, but I believe this is the case for everyone. I had absolutely zero restraints at all on anything that I was able to to report on or find. You know, whatever I was able to find, I could report on it. The only contingency was we had to report first on Twitter.

It had to, whatever information that you're publishing, publish it on Twitter first, and then a short while later, you can publish it on whatever platform. That was the only restraint, because there's been a lot of speculation, or people saying that we were given certain material, and not given other material. That was not the case. Okay, let me ask you both out, because obviously obviously in some sense, you were given certain material, not other material, because you're not going to get access to absolutely everything Twitter has. So there's always, there's an element of pre-selection, but your sense was that that

wasn't forced or manipulated. What did you have access to, and then what did you not have access to, nor need access to, you know, how did you, and how did you make the determination of what material was relevant, and what form was that material in? And well, and how much of it was there. Right, these are all good questions. So, there were basically two different channels of information that we could access. One was the sort of, what I would call maybe, I guess, the back end of Twitter, where there was an engineer in the room with us

on a special laptop. And we would tell this person what specific accounts we wanted to look up to see if there were any special flags or marks on these accounts or on specific tweets. This person could look that up. And I was basically looking over this person's shoulder as they were performing these searches. We had absolutely no access to no visibility to any personal information on people, like their private account information.

And actually, the people at Twitter were very concerned about this. So I think there were a lot of lawyers involved and other things to make sure that the journalists had no ability to view anything that was private or personal in anyone's account. What we were able to view was the log files within Twitter that showed if a specific tweet or specific accounts had certain flags on them. So that was one thing that we could look up. The other thing was we could have them perform searches for us in the internal Slack channels

and in emails on specific employees at Twitter. And we would send in a request. This was not performed in the room. It was somewhere off site. I think they could have been next door for all I know, where they performed that. And then some time later, they would then bring back a different person

coming in a room with a different special laptop where there would be, it could be thousands of emails for a particular employee. And then we had a very limited window of time where we had to search through it. So one of the things that I think people may not be aware of and then we had a very limited window of time where we had to search through it. So one of the things that I think people may not be aware of is that, you know, I had a very limited amount of time

to sift through an extraordinary amount of information. So it was very challenging. People, why didn't you find this or that? Well, you know, it's hard. This was not something where we could just go, you know, digging into the files for weeks and weeks on end. I think Matt Taibi and some others had far more access and they were there much longer than I was

and on many trips, but for me, it was quite limited. So when I arrived, I came there with a list of people and things that I already knew that I wanted to look for. Basically, for me, it's someone who's been writing about, thinking about and researching matters related to COVID, since the very beginning of the pandemic, I had observed many things that took place on Twitter during those years.

And I basically wanted to kind of reverse engineer, well, how did that happen when I saw this Twitter, that tweet was labeled as misleading? How did that happen when I saw this Twitter, that tweet, was labeled as misleading? How did that happen? So I went to Twitter with a list of accounts and tweets that I knew that were flagged, that I observed, and I wanted to deconstruct. How did we get to that place? And that's what I tried to do.

And who were you? Who were you particularly interested in? I mean, there were people like Jay Bada Sharer, who were particularly nailed during the, you know, for spreading COVID misinformation. I mean, so you had a list, a priori, and I guess that's also why Barry thought you would be a good person to throw into the mix.

So you contacted her. Now, you said you had been working in the background on COVID-related material. So what do you tell everybody? What made you the person that Barry decided to put in San Francisco? And then tell us who you were particularly interested in tracking down, you know, because you said you had a list. And so walk us through that, like why you and then who you were particularly interested in investigating, let's say. So I'm considered, I think, by a lot of people. I'm the first journalist in America to write for a major publication very early. I think it was the first week of May to call for, to question the

idea that schools should remain closed in America. And that kind of launched me on the path that I've been on until today speaking with you. That was when? When did you do that? This was, I think, the first week in May. I published this piece. So in April, I started... May of, sorry, may of what? Oh, I'm sorry, 2020. So the very beginning... May of 2020.

Correct. Yeah. I, you know, like anyone else, there was no such thing as a COVID beat, I mean, prior to the pandemic, but I observed very early on that something seemed off to me. Initially, I was very nervous. I, I, we, I wasn't cavalier about what was happening with the pandemic, but by the middle of April, we started observing, I live right outside New York City, we started observing that cases began to drop precipitously. And we also began getting information from Europe that schools were beginning to open at the end of April and they were projected

to open in the beginning of May in many locations. Coupled with that, there was a lot of data coming out of China, out of Italy, and elsewhere, and it was unanimous that children were at extraordinarily low risk. So all these factors coming together, and I'm like, well, wait a minute. Why is the school still closed? I'm trying to understand this, particularly once they were opening elsewhere. And so I come from a background as a fact checker. This is before fact checking became kind of politicized. The way it is now where there are these special fact checking websites.

But I worked for Condé Nast magazine's for a number of years. And that sort of training, I think, and also just my own personal disposition, I'm always skeptical about things that's just for blessing and a curse. And you kept hearing about the experts are saying this, the experts are saying that. And my go to, because when you fact check an article,

you always have to go to the source, or at least that's the ideal thing. You never just take someone's word for it. You know, or you don't take us, oh, something's printed in the New York Times. That's never sufficient, or at least it's not ideal. Well, I don't want to pick on the Times, but any publication, you want to go as close as you can, you're never done in a way.

So even if someone says something, first you have to fact check, well, did that person actually say it? But then even if that's true, you don't want to say, well, is what they are saying true? And then you have to go layers deeper. So anyway, that kind of mindset has, that's always been how I view the world. And I started observing these things and something seemed to off to me. And to my amazement, no one seemed to be writing about this, at least not in any of the major publications that I typically read. And I couldn't understand what was going on. I've written for the Atlantic,

the New York Times, the New York magazine, a whole, a lot of, I guess, what are terms, sort of legacy, you know, of legacy media outlets for many years. So I had contacts at these places. I knew editors and I started reaching out to people saying, hey, why aren't you writing about this? I've put together this compendium of research. I mean, it was like a bullet list, a mile long of all the data about children, all the stuff, and no one seemed to be writing about this.

I couldn't figure out what was going on. I was turned down by every publication just about, except for one editor at Wired, who said, you know what, everything you wrote here, you know, in my pitch to him, this all checks out. Like, I try to make, like everyone, I make mistakes. I'm sure in every article there's something wrong, but I try to be very meticulous,

and I try to make my case almost like a lawyer, airtight. And when I presented... Why do you think you were turned down so universally apart from, I mean, look, it's not that, it's the default to a suggestion for an article is to be turned down. So we'll start with the fact that it's a high baseline probability, but you seem to be indicating

that in this particular case, the baseline was a little bit higher than normal, even though you had quite a compendium of facts and it was a germane prop. Correct. It's a very good point, you know, an independent writer that the default is to be turned down. However,

this was really solid. Like, you know, you have a sense as a writer, at least I do after a while, like, I'm going to, I could sell this like that. I had a month earlier, a few weeks earlier, I'd written a piece that I think was the number one red piece in the New York Times. It was about this newlywed couple who were stranded in the Maldives. I have a good sense of when something's real and when it can hit. And I was kind of astonished that I was like, I found this special thing. I found a lane for myself. No one seems to be writing about this.

All the stuff is true. This is my lane. Like I'm definitely going to nail this because that's what, you know, it's exciting sometimes about journalism. When you find this thing that's important, that's true, that's interesting, and no one else is doing it. And that's what happened.

And so we could talk about it later. I could speculate now about why I was turned down, but ultimately what happened was I was able to write this piece for Wired, and that kind of set me on a path where now I've been known as this quote, contrarian, which, you know, I don't even know what that means, these labels. I've just been following means journalist, right?

Right, to my mind, journalists is supposed to generally be a very adversarial type of relationship between me and the powers that be or me and what's being said rather than working simply as an amplifier or a megaphone. So when we were told all of this information, these models that they were putting out, Imperial College and IHME, these places, I'm like, well, none of these models seem to be checking out. They seem to be wrong. Well, what are the inputs in these models?

How are they putting these things together? No one seemed to be asking these questions, or at least not what I was observing. Why are my kids and 50 million other children in America locked out of their school buildings when kids are starting to go back in Europe? So all of these were, to me, very interesting and incredibly important questions that I didn't seem to be getting adequate answers to anywhere else. So I said, okay, I'm gonna have to do this myself. It was a very strange feeling because I was in the middle of writing another book, which I'm still in the process of writing at the time. But I found I was unable to concentrate on the book.

I mean, I eventually had my agent contact, my editor, and they were kind enough to say, okay, he can put this aside for while. I mean, this was a pandemic. The schools were closed. I could not concentrate. So that sent me on my path. And after that point, I just wrote a stream of articles beginning and wired.

And then I migrated to other places like The Atlantic and New York Magazine, where I think most of what I was writing challenged a lot of the sort of what we call mainstream narrative, the establishment narrative from both the media as well as the public health establishment in America about what was real or what wasn't real. And so everything from school closures, which has been my focus, but I looked into my record. I think I was the first person or one of the first people to interview the lead scientist in Israel

who put out the very first report. I don't even know how I did it, but I got this guy on the phone. I said, send me the report. I have to see this. So I wrote about that very early on. And just all of these things, there's so many,

these areas that things seemed a little bit off. And I want to say, I don't want to ascribe ill will to anyone. I don't think there's something in like a nefarious conspiratorial thing happening. Or at least that's not how I approach it. I simply approach everything of what is the truth here? What is this sort of like empirical underlying data to support whatever we are being told? And I just keep digging and digging and digging to see if it seems true or not. And that ultimately, so that's the sort of both long and short of how I got to Twitter

ultimately as someone that Barry thought I was a good person in particular. How did you get, how did you get, how did you establish relationship with Barry? Had you known her at the New York Times? How did you guys get together? I had written a piece for Barry's website for her publication. I forget how much earlier. So we knew each other through that.

I forget how I got in touch with Barry initially, but I wrote a piece, I think it was about the vaccines and children and how I interviewed a member of the committee who, one of the advisory committees for the CDC, it's a pretty remarkable interview. So I had written that for, so I knew Barry and I knew some of her editors from that experience. And again, I was just trying to be helpful and I reached out to them just saying, because I think at that point, Matt, Taibe had written one or several Twitter files

and Barry had done one or two, but I don't think anyone had really written about COVID-related material. I didn't know what the story was with the Twitter files. All I was saying, hey, I know you. I've done a lot of reporting on COVID. I have no all these people who are scientists, who have their tweets mislabeled,

and labeled as misleading in some manner or they were suspended from Twitter. I had all this information that the average journalist just simply wouldn't have just because I've been so deep in this role. I have a role, Dex, you know, a mile long of infectious disease specialists and others who I've been talking to for years now. So I just had all these people in this information and I was just trying to be helpful saying, here are some things that you might want to look for in case you're sending someone there, you're going back. And then they said, David, just get on a plane and please do it yourself. So you had to establish this role of Dex and you'd been tracking scientists. And so when you

went to San Francisco, there was a set of accounts and tweets that you were particularly interested in investigating. Who were some of the people, the cardinal people on that list, and why did you focus on them? Right, so again, I had observed over the prior, you know, a couple years, a number of tweets or accounts having their information, their content suppressed in some way, and content that I knew as a writer and someone who had done

lots of research on this and spoken experts, content that I knew as a writer and someone who had done lots of research on this and spoken experts, content that I knew was perfectly legitimate. There are things that experts can or even should disagree on. That's different from saying it's, quote, misinformation. But so someone like Martin Coldorf, who wrote the Great Bank of Declaration with Jay Bottichari and Sunatric Gupta, I knew that Martin had a particular tweet that I saw that was flagged as misleading. He was talking about saying, I don't remember the precise language,

but it was children, it's not necessary to require the vaccine of children at this point. I don't see why that's like, you know, he was giving his opinion. This guy is one of the most renowned infectious disease experts in the world, perfectly reasonable for him to give his view on this matter. And that was flagged as misleading. And I wanted to find out why. How did that happen?

There were some other people, Andrew Bostom, and some other physicians and others who had tweets, I know Andy had tweeted something about. There was a study that's found, I think there is a low sperm count, following one or two of the doses of the vaccine. This is published in a peer review journal. Now, what is the quality of that study? I have no idea, but the bar should be, if something is published in a legitimate peer-reviewed medical journal and you're citing it in a tweet, that's reasonable in my mind to not be suppressed in any manner. So there were a handful of things like that and I wanted to work backwards and understand.

And basically I found there were, why do you think this stood out for you? You said you were occupied with a book at the time. I mean, you had other things to do. And, but this issue of particularly the suppression of this information made itself obvious to you as a problem. Do you have any sense of what it was about what you were doing that made that particularly relevant to you and why you decided to pursue it? Because you said it gripped you in some way, right?

It even dislodged you out of your book. Right. And then ultimately, and now I'm writing another book on the closures of the American school closures during the pandemic. And I guess specifically with the Twitter suppression that gripped me, perhaps that's sort of emblematic of the broader topic that grit me, which is

the information environment that we all live within, and trying to understand why some ideas were considered okay, and other ideas were considered not okay. And we saw that play out in the mainstream media or legacy press. And I'm someone who had written for a number of these publications that I guess would be considered prestige publications or left wing or whatever terminology people want to use. And all of a sudden these places, so I have no, this is not political for me.

I had no specific political affiliation to one thing or another to be true or to not be true. And I think my prior experience is writing for these places shows that. I'm not coming from this from political angle yet nevertheless. I found myself suddenly in this sort of outside this group that roughly I'd been within professionally and personally for basically most of my adult life. And it was a source of endless fascination and consternation to me. Like, how is this possible? Why is this happening?

Why am I viewing this differently from so many of my neighbors and other people? Yet I know from speaking to scientists around the world, I'm not crazy. I wasn't talking to some lunatic in their basement. These are people at the most prestigious institutions in the world, and they were in agreement. We were also being censored. Okay, so let me get that into that. Let me get into that a little bit.

Well, let's give the devil a stew. We have, before the pandemic, a substantial amount of public trust in vaccines, and a general consensus that vaccines were miraculous in many ways, and that they were particularly useful for the protection of children, and that we could trust the public health authorities to insist upon what was best for children, and that that's what they were doing and that they were a good intermediary

between the pharmaceutical companies and their financial interest in the health of children and we trusted the public health authorities. So there's a lot of good will towards the vaccine enterprise as such. And so that would be the baseline and so people would assume and rightly so that if we were being told by public health

authorities to vaccinate children, that they believed that that was actually in the best interest of the children and that that was reliable. And so you could imagine there would be resistance to any counter narrative that would question that fundamental set of presumptions. Now there were people who were beating the anti-vax drum before the pandemic, but not very many, and generally ignored. The problem here, it seems to me. Please correct me if I'm wrong or if this doesn't, isn't in accord with what happened

to you. The problem I had very early on was that I didn't see there was any evidence at all. The children were actually at risk for any particularly serious consequences in relationship to COVID. You could make a case perhaps that they could get vaccinated like they might get vaccinated for a flu,

but the morbidity, mortality risk for children was no higher than it was for the flu. So that big, the first question it begged was, well, should children be getting vaccinated at all? And the second question, it's certainly big, was, well, is there any reason whatsoever to make such vaccines mandatory for children, especially because that's so much in the financial interest, it's so egregiously in the financial interest of pharmaceutical companies to have that enforced, or at least in their short-term interest. So, you know, it's that terrible combination of the trust that the public had in the public health authorities and the financial gain that was sitting there ready for the pharmaceuticals to capitalize on.

I think that made this such a toxic, let's say a toxic brew, and also why the narrative emerged that you had to push back against. That's how it looked to me. What do you think about that as a set of hypotheses? Right. So I think that the way I think about the vaccine policy, in particular for children, to me, that's all of a piece of dovetails with the policy regarding school closures and a variety of other factors. They're all part of the same idea, which is a very kind of myopic focus

on the suppression or attempted suppression of the transmission of a virus. But we were led to believe that there was this conflation that suppressing a virus is not the same thing as human flourishing. It can be or societal flourishing, and it's reasonable in the very early stages when no one knew or few people knew what was happening or at least there was some degree of uncertainty in chaos that people want to be particularly careful to try to avoid transmission, to try to figure out

what's happening. And I was that way myself, personally. But I think very early on, we needed to also acknowledge that there would be profound harms and damages from the mitigation efforts that were put into place. Setting aside whether these mitigation efforts would be successful, that's a whole separate issue. But even if they were successful, what are the downsides of this?

And very early, I think those were both not acknowledged and recognized by many of the authorities number one and number two, the wildly disproportionate burden that working class people were going to absorb from those measures was not acknowledged. So we had a, what we had, so there's a biological parallel here and a set of observations on cognitive oversimplification that are relevant. So the biological parallel, which I think is a very good one, is that in a disease process there are two risks. There's the risk of the disease.

And then there's the risk of the overreaction of the immune system. And so the immune system can overreact and cause all sorts of diseases. So autoimmune diseases are like that, arthritis is like that. And excess information is like that. And you can get a cascade of immunological responses that are fatal when the disease itself would be unlikely to be fatal. And so the threat of immune overreaction is a real one. Now, there is a set of behaviors known as the extended immune system,

the behavioral immune system, and that's the manifestation of the biological defenses against infection that manifests themselves behaviorally. And so a couple of those are, well, discussed is one of those, the emotion of discussed, the sense of contamination, the gag reflex, the repulsion that we feel for things that are disgusting. And that's the way the immune system, in some sense, has reached up into the higher stratosphere of cognitive and behavioral proclivity to protect us at the macro scale against pathogens.

And that's extremely important because pathogen transmission is extremely dangerous. You may know, you likely know, that when the Europeans came to the Western hemisphere, 95% of the Native Americans died within about 150 years of contact. And they died because they had no resistance whatsoever to mumps, measles, and smallpox. And that resistance had been bred in European cities where we were in close quarters with animals. And so pathogen transmission is extremely deadly, obviously, and we've evolved

all sorts of mechanisms. Now, at a political level, the behavioral immune system also extends itself, and it extended itself, and you might say in this this situation into the entire panoply of authoritarian pandemic responses and that was spearheaded by China. And the danger there is, its parallel danger, is that the response will be more pathological than the pathogen. And the way it was more pathological as far as I could tell was that we hyper-focused on the potential danger posed by the pathogen, and we eliminated all consideration whatsoever for the potential side effects of all of the amelioration strategies. So the politicians abdicated their responsibility to so-called experts, and the public health experts who were concerned with pathogen control had no idea how to contemplate all the other risks, like the risks to the education of children, the risks to the working class,

the risks to the bloody supply chain, the risks to fundamental liberties, like politicians should have been calculating the balance of risks there instead of focusing maniacally and monomaniacally on a single problem, and also defaulting their damn responsibility to so-called public health experts who aren't politicians or economists who don't have a broad purview. And so we stepped into a social behavior or immune over response. And I think some of that was also driven by the financial machinations of the pharmaceutical companies themselves. And, you know, I mean, they were trying to make vaccines, and hypothetically, we needed the vaccines, but God, it was so much in their financial interest to push this narrative.

And they're so effective at lobbying. I mean, and all things considered as the left once new. If you had to rank order globalist companies in terms of public corruption, you'd have to put the bloody pharmaceutical companies near to the top. If you use no other measure than size of lawsuits in the past, they've had the biggest, the most and the biggest lawsuits for malfeasance levied against them. I think of any corporate entities ever in the history of capitalism. And so, well, so that's the perfect storm. Well, I mean, you made a bunch of very good salient points.

And I would say that, you know, the overreaction of the human immune system, I think, is a decent metaphor for the overreaction of the human immune system, I think is a decent metaphor for the overreaction of society of what happened. And the, as we were saying, this focus on this one thing does not take into account all these ancillary things, these sort of second order effects that are going to happen. And while public health professionals, Anthony Fachi, on down, may have an expertise in a particular lane.

They are not experts on the world. And one of the things that I've always found so irritating and ridiculous is when there's been certain epidemiologists or others who say, you know, stay in your lane to whether it's a journalist and he con have, there name Emily Oster, who's an economist out of brown, who did a lot of early research related to schools and other matters. And people just immediately dismissed her. Well, she's an economist, what does she know?

And I'm thinking that that's who we need to be looking at some of these things. You need economists, we need psychologists, we need people who under who educators, we need people in a whole range of fields of human endeavor to try to understand and discuss what are going to be the first, second, and third order effects of all these interventions we are imposing. So, and I met this New York Times reporter who's done

some science reporting at a party a while back, and I met this New York Times reporter who's done some science reporting at a party a while back, and I remember speaking with her about this, and she immediately dismissed Emily Oster as well, she's just an economist, and it gave me this window into, I mean, I had already observed this anyway, just by reading the media news outlets, but to speak to someone who's actually reporting on this, okay, this confirmed what we already could see, that there is this viewpoint that unless you had an infectious disease physician or an epidemiologist, that your view was somehow not relevant. But this made no sense.

Someone who understands disease spread does not have an expertise in childhood nutrition necessarily or in education or in psychology or in the economics, because all of these things, of course, are interconnected. If you have someone who's been running a mom and pop business and then the business gets closed, they lose their insurance, they're depressed and lonely, they're barred from seeing their friends,

all of these things, well guess what? That also has an effect on someone's health. Obviously, that's not as bad as dying from a virus, but not everyone was necessarily at extreme risk of dying from the virus, and we certainly knew this after a few months as time wore on. And to me, one of the biggest problems

is that there was never any sort of sunset clause on any of these things. There's one of the things we know from implementation science is it's very hard to de-implement. So once the wheels are in motion, it is very hard. Physicians continue to prescribe an antibiotic prophylactically, even though there's lots of studies that show post-op, it's not necessarily beneficial in certain circumstances, but they'll continue to do it anyway, because it's just this force of habit, and then on a much broader scale, when you have politicians involved,

then it's not just a clinician, like a doctor, but you have a politician who puts some sort of policy in place, or you have a school superintendent, it is very hard to unwind these things. And there was no mechanism in place early on saying, we need to have some sort of review of what's happening. Instead, there was a bunch of people basically making up arbitrary benchmarks for different oil. When it reaches 5%, we can do this. When it reaches 3%, we can do this. When it reaches 3%, you can do that. But even just a cursory review of the literature on this show,

that these were hardly grounded in any sort of like scientific reasoning, a lot of these benchmarks. And besides, every city and every school system was doing different things anyway. When people are presented with too much information or too many options, let's say, you could even say too much untrammeled so-called freedom, it's really chaos, they get anxious because anxiety is a signal of pathway complexity, too many things to choose between. So there's a real drive to desire a simple and unidimensional solution.

And so if you don't wanna be bothered thinking, then if someone offers you a reduction of the problem to a single dimension, and then a virtuous pathway forward, it's extremely tempting psychologically to seize that, because then you can, well, you could have said, well, I can ignore all this COVID nonsense and go back to my book, for example, and people can think, well, the experts have it, and I don't have to think about it. Okay, the problem is, as you've pointed out, this could get us into the conversation about the church in California and the issue of liberties.

The problem is, is that there is an irreducible amount of complexity in the world. And if you oversimplify, you pay a price somewhere else, somewhere invisible, but somewhere else. And so then you might ask yourself, well, what guarantees do we have against that temptation to oversimplify? You know, because we could say, well, every time there's a new illness, we'll just lock everybody up. Well, everyone who has any sense knows that that's a bad idea. The reason it's a bad idea is because locking everybody up violates our fundamental liberties,

our natural rights, let's say. And then you might say, well, why the hell do we have those natural rights to begin with? And the answer is something like societies have evolved and computed that there's a certain set of inviolable freedoms that actually constitute the best solution to irreducible complexity. So the idea is something like this. All things considered, and that would be all, even all the things you couldn't even consider, because you don't have enough time, all things considered. It's better to let people say what they need to say, right?

In terms of total balance of risks, there's no better solution. And maybe that's because of information dissemination. All things considered, it's better to leave people to assemble freely, right, and to own their own property and and and husband it according to their dictates. And the reason for that is because even in emergencies, those are the best policies. And that's why those rights are supposed to be inviolable. And what we did instead, especially because we copied totalitarian China so rapidly, which is extraordinarily interesting to me from a psychological perspective, is we set all those intrinsic rights aside.

We said, no, we're going to collapse this multi-dimensional problem to one dimension. We're going to call virtue one pathway forward, which is don't transmit the disease. And everything else is going to go by the wayside. Well, we're still paying the price for violating those fundamental rights. We've destroyed public trust in the public health enterprise. We've compromised the supply chain terribly. God only knows how many people we've killed. There's a tremendous decrement in vaccine uptake now around the world because

people are very skeptical about vaccines and the probability that we'll kill more kids by not vaccinating them with vaccines that actually work, then we saved with the COVID vaccine, which was unnecessary for children, is extremely high. We're paying the invisible price for violating all of those rights. Now, we talked a little bit before we started our conversation about a particular case in California that you wanted to concentrate on.

Case of a church that has just been levied and immense fine by the civil authorities that wanted to stay open during COVID. And we probably use that as an example of this totalitarian tendency to undermine natural rights in the service, hypothetical service of social cohesion and safety and, and you know, dig in from there. So do you want to lay out that case? Sure. Yeah. And the church case is interesting to me because it echoes to my mind, I had been writing about schools and children for so long that what I observed

happened with this church seemed very, very familiar to me instantly. The same sort of dynamic was in place. And you know, just as sort of like macro framing on this when you're talking about whether it's a vaccine or school closures. In medicine, the default is to not intervene unless you can prove, you know, that the saying from the FDA is, you know, safe and effective. So the default in America is for children to be in school and to be able to go to school. That's the default. So in order to prevent them from going to school, that's the intervention, is preventing

them. That's not the default, but yet something flipped, we're keeping them barred from school, became the default. But this is not how medicine typically functions. So that, I think, is also broadly how we could think about all sorts of other civil liberties. I should say, I don't think there is a scenario, I don't think it's just never appropriate

for an authority or public health authority to infringe on some of our liberties, but the bar to reach that should be quite high, of course, and there should also be some sort of limits on that. So this stuff with kids and schools and what they want to talk about vaccines or even the information environment on social media and elsewhere, all of these things sort of flipped what we feel sothically and ethically tend to think of as the default, that the default then became the intervention.

But the default should never be the intervention without strong evidence that the intervention's going to provide a net benefit rather than a net harm. Well, surety, one of the hallmarks for that, there's a claim among scientists, I think Carl Sagan first said this, at least formalized it, although it was known implicitly, is that extraordinarily, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And an extraordinary claim is one that violates a fundamental precept. And the most fundamental precepts in our culture are embedded in the domain of natural rights, right? They're self-evident, even outside the constitutional framework. There is nothing more fundamental to the functioning

of our culture than that set of natural rights. And so if your solution to a problem is what we have to violate one or more natural rights, then it should be incumbent on you to demonstrate that you have a body of proof that is sufficient to justify moving something that is fundamentally immobile. And certainly that standard of proof wasn't met in this particular case because we didn't even have good data on, well, what the actual mortality rate was for the COVID infection, especially when it was segregated by different age groups. I mean, it was obvious. It was early. It was obvious pretty damn early on that the death rate

among children was vanishingly small. And so, look, I mean, yeah, more children die drowning every year than they did from COVID in any individual year in America, for example. We don't bar swimming, and we had data very early on that, you know, and some people, legitimately so, so what about the teachers? Fine, maybe the kids are okay. We had data early on from studies at a Sweden country that did not close the lower schools. Their teachers were at no higher risk than other professionals. They were far below the risk that they found in, I think, like pizza, bakers, and bus drivers or taxi drivers.

So there was no elevated risk for teachers they found. And this is a real place, and it's not, you know, this wasn't one little town. We're talking about more than a million children who are in school there, tens of thousands of teachers. And this is what they found. That evidence was dismissed and ignored. So, the thing with the schools, then, to me, all that...

Yeah, well, you put your finger on something there too, that's very much relevant, which is, well, how much risk justifies intervention, and one good rule of thumb is, well, you obviously don't intervene if the risk that's posed is no greater at risk than risk that people will voluntarily undertake, voluntarily undertake in many activities that are necessary to their daily life that are already factored in. And I would say paramount above those, among those, would be driving, because there really isn't anything we ever do that's more dangerous than driving. I mean, it's not that dangerous per unit of travel, but it's very dangerous.

It kills lots of people. And so you could say, well, if a given enterprise poses no more risk than driving, then it can be factored in as acceptable level of risk. And that was certainly the case with the COVID deaths, certainly among children. And as you said, the Swedish data was there extraordinarily early on. And so then of course that begs the question again, is like then given that,

why the hell the school closures and lockdowns, because that was a very peculiar response. Well, and I think that the driving is an example, I think of often, because it's applicable to school closures. It's applicable to this church story, which we can talk about in a moment, which is that one of the arguments that people would make is people who oppose what I'm saying. My viewpoint, they would say, well, this isn't just about your personal risk. This is about you putting up. We have a societal,

you know, we have an obligation to other people. And I don't disagree, however, in society, we balance our own personal freedoms with risk to others. And we traditionally have a certain high tolerance for risk we all impose upon each other. And driving is a perfect example where because there's been a lot of argument about mass and I've written a few very large investigative pieces about the evidence on masks, and specifically for

mandating them in schools. And one of these things people would say is, well, it's not just about your own kid, it's about some other kid. But here's the thing. If we think about in America, most of the highways have a speed limit of 55 or 65. We could make all the highways speed limit at 35 miles per hour. And there would definitely be fewer accidents,

fewer serious injuries and deaths. Most likely, if everyone was forced to drive slower, we know when you're driving fast that there is a greater risk of serious injury or death. But we choose as a society to allow a higher speed limit because we value getting places faster more than whatever that risk. That's just, well, we do that partly.

We should point out, too. Part of the reason we do that is so that people don't die other ways, right? Because if you're more other, well, you can make more, well, so, so, and this, this issue of risk is an interesting one in that regard because it's no, there is no doubt whatsoever. That human beings are dangerous to one another as potential carriers of pathogens. But there's also no doubt that we're extremely valuable to each other as sources of cooperative enterprise and sources of information. of cooperative enterprise and sources of information. And there's a huge battle biologically between the risk posed by interpersonal communication. You can think about this sexually, like there's no people without sex, but there's no shortage

of sexually transmitted diseases. It's exactly the same problem. And so one way of getting rid of sexually transmitted diseases is to forbid sex. And that's the end of that problem. But well, then there aren't any people. And that actually turns out to be a worse solution than, like a worth pathogen, so to speak, than the sexual diseases are pathogens.

And so we are always faced, it's really interesting, because to some degree, the evidence suggests that the difference in political type, it's got twisted up in COVID, is actually a difference between pathogen restriction and information freedom. So, classically, before whatever's happened in the last five years, the more liberal types were freedom of information advocates, like we should move around, we should speak freely, we should transmit information, and we should accept the risks.

And conservatives, even temperamentally speaking, were the ones who would say, well, you have to be careful when you're freely interacting, because pathogens of various sorts, biological, but also ideological, can be transmitted, And that's an eternal risk. And the political landscape is actually a battle between walls and doors. And the liberals say doors and the conservatives say walls. And the truth of the matter is that walls and doors are both necessary, because things have to be let in and kept out.

And there's no way of ever getting that right. So you have to argue about it forever. But in the COVID overreaction, we decided that it was gonna be all walls and so oddly, the liberals in particular gravitated in that direction. And that is really kind of a, it's a miracle of paradox.

I don't understand it yet. There's typically people in the sort of professional classes, and certainly journalists, at least, that's the ideal, is that they challenge these sort of power structures within society, corporations, and big business, government, the military, religion, all these institutions, yet during the pandemic, by my view, there is this astonishing lack of curiosity from journalists and the broader public within this certain sort of elite sphere

of influencer class or professional class people that has blown my mind. Again, I keep coming back to this thing where I'm like, what is the empirical evidence for X, Y, or Z? And let me try to find it. But there is this lack of interest, this lack of curiosity. Oh, well, the experts told me this. If you look at evidence-based medicine, they have this pyramid, this hierarchy of, which

you're probably familiar with, the hierarchy of evidence. And in evidence-based medicine, expert opinion is at the bottom. That's like the last thing you want to look at. It's not irrelevant. It's something we should consider, but it's far more important to have actual observational evidence than higher from that. There's randomized control trials. There are these mechanisms that we can use through scientific method to actually get real evidence

that we can look at and try to ascertain what's going on. But what I found in most of the reporting is that there was merely Anthony Fauci says X or the experts say, or they'll get in, and oftentimes the expert wasn't even an expert on this. There's an emergency room physician who's quoted constantly in the New York Times

and other news outlets who had no expertise in necessarily related to infectious diseases, yet this person was repeatedly giving her opinion on things. It went unchallenged, she was just printed in the newspaper or elsewhere. This was fascinating to me. How could this be happening? And I'm just an independent journalist. These are places with a machine behind them.

The enormous editorial staffs, they have the resources to send people places. You could get any expert you want if you write for some of these prestigious media outlets. Yet they went to the same crew of people over and over and they not only did they go the same people over and over, but it was the same lack of challenging these quotes, this idea that an expert's view in and of itself,

there's a reason why people get a second opinion when you go to the doctor. Experts disagree on this often times. So it's so interesting that in many ways, the same people who were so vehemently opposed to Trump's plan, let's say, to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, just a few years earlier, were absolutely 100% gung-ho to build walls absolutely everywhere throughout society in this particular instance. You know, it's such a perverse flip.

Now, before we go on to the church issue, I have one remaining question from the Twitter files. I will. Oh, yeah, we got hanging. Yeah, that's okay, but we covered most of it. But you went to San Francisco armed with a dossier, let's say, of names and Twitter accounts that you wanted to look into.

But you also, while you were there, you looked into the identities of the people who were actually doing the censoring, right? So there were Twitter accounts, but then there were the Twitter response and the people responsible for that. And so there were people like Joel Roth, whose name came up repeatedly in the TIVI investigations. And so let's just tie that off, and then we'll move into the California situation. So what was your sense about the sophistication

and the fourth thought, the sophistication that characterized and the fourth thought that went into the sensorial activity at Twitter? Who was doing that? How was it orchestrated? Was it professional and warranted in any manner? What was your sense of that when you looked into it? Right. So there were sort of three different avenues as I frame it about how the suppression and censorship took place. And one of them was that they set up this system, and I'll get to the people, but I'm gonna work backwards to get there.

One of them was that there was a system of bots set up that, where they essentially crawl through the system. And the bots were given certain, they were trained, they were given certain information whether it's keywords or other things to look for. And a bot would flag a certain tweet or a certain account based on it setting off certain triggers within whatever they're teaching the bots. So that's one avenue of how certain tweets were flagged. Another one is they had independent contractors, oftentimes in places like the Philippines or elsewhere

where you have someone essentially sitting in a cube farm, some person who they were given a decision tree and I show this in my reporting. It's quite interesting that, okay, this tweet involves myocarditis. You check one thing, then a drop down menu. It says, and there's five different options, then you check that. There's this whole decision tree on how some random person and the notion that those systems never were. Excellent. The notion that's like that never were.

Right. Some guy sitting in a cube in the Philippines is going to adjudicate the validity of a tweet about myocarditis and whether that works with, what are the results say about, you know, late-gadolinium enhancement? I mean, there's no way that they're going to be able to adjudicate this. So you have that happening, and then the third thing is you have people themselves at Twitter.

But all that comes, but the other two areas, the independent contractor using a decision tree and the bots, those of course stem from the people. All those things that initiate with human beings, making choices about what we value or what we think is or is not acceptable on our platform. Now, I think most people would say they don't want to be on a platform that's just overrun with pornography and violence and crazy stuff.

I think it's not unreasonable, and people may disagree with me. I think it's not unreasonable for a platform like Twitter or others to put very hard limits on the type of content that's going to be on the platform, because there's a reason why not everyone goes on forechan or whatever, because there are limits to what most people want to be exposed to. Let me make a technical comment about that,

because there's been a fair bit of psychological research done on this. Well, so psychologists have started to look into, like you could call it troll behavior. I call it troll demon behavior, because the people who are on social media platforms aren't exactly humans. They're human machine hybrids, right? As soon as we're interacting with a huge social network, we have a reach that far extends

our biological reach. So we're machine human hybrids on social media. And those machine human hybrids are very bizarre creatures. We don't know what to make of them. But we do know something about the human beings behind the more trouble-making posters. So psychologists have identified a constellation of traits, manipulativeness, macchivalonism, narcissism, and that's the sort of desire for attention without merit, psychopathy, that's predatory parasitism, and sadism, which is added relatively recently, which is positive

delight in the unnecessary suffering of others. And those four characteristics make a set, you could say, called the dark tetrad. And it would be associated with anti-social behavior, criminal behavior, exploitation of others, including on the sexual front, not least on the sexual front. Now, people who are characterized by that constellation make up about 3% of the population, stably across cultures in time. And that's because there's a niche for predatory parasites, like a permanent biological niche.

Now, the problem is, so they're 3% is not everyone, it's a tiny minority, and they don't tend to be very successful, although they're not entirely unsuccessful. Right? So they propagate. The problem is that any social enterprise of any sort can be and often will be destabilized

by the dark tetra types despite their minority status. And so then when we set up a communicative system like Twitter, which is basically a cooperative system, the parasites, the predatory parasites can invade it and demolish it. And they can do the same thing to whole societies. You know, the number of people who organized the Russian Revolution after the Zara's period was infinitesimally small. A tiny minority of people can cause a tremendous amount of trouble.

I talked to Andy Know, for example, about Antifa, which is not exactly an organization. It's more like a loose quasi terrorist cell phenomenon. There's no centralized bureaucracy. There's no full-time employees. And so it's easy even to dismiss its existence. And I had talked to a lot of Democrats who had done exactly that. So I asked Andy at one point, how many Antifa organizations he thought were

extant in the United States, and he said about 40. And I said, well, how many full-time equivalent employees, so to speak, do they have? And he thought, well, maybe 20 each. It's 800 people. It's one in 400,000. That's all. So in a city of a million people, you're going to have like two people like that. But the tariff, so that's like no people, right?

It's like, well, they don't exist. Two in a million. Who cares? Ah, there's the rub. Two people in a million who are hell-bent on causing nothing but trouble, partly because they like trouble, partly because they like hurting people. They can cause an awful lot of trouble. And societies forever have wrestled with the problem of the free riders or the predatory parasites. And so, and then that brings up the terrible spectrum of censorship. Like you said, well, nobody wants to go on Twitter.

If it's completely overrun by child porn distributing hyper violent predators and fair enough. So that has to be controlled. But then the line of control becomes extraordinarily difficult to establish. And that's a universal human problem of regulation of social environments, not just a problem that's emerged in social media. We don't know how to regulate that in social media. So in normal life, if you meet someone like that, there are control mechanisms.

They tend to get beat up, for example. They tend to get beat up, for example. They tend to get suppressed physically, but online, zero, there's almost zero ways of controlling. And so, yeah, anyways, that's a little bit of a detail, but you get the point. No, I do, and the thing is, people have asked me, I don't have the answer about where the line should be drawn. I don't think there's no line, as we were discussing.

I think there should be some parameters. What my job, as I saw it, as a journalist going to Twitter was, I simply want to expose to the public what happened. There can be a broader conversation about where lines should or shouldn't be drawn, but that's not my job. My job is sunlight. Let me just explain to people what happened. They may not be aware. And so, and the people you mentioned, you all Roth and others, I have to say, leading through lots of these internal Slack channel communications and emails, a lot of the people at Twitter really were trying their best to do what they felt was right.

These were not by and large people who were, you know, seeking harm on others. Sometimes they went overboard for sure. not by and large people who were seeking harm on others. Sometimes they went overboard for sure. And I think there seemed to be, I can't prove it because it's impossible to do a fully systematic review of everything on Twitter, but there certainly was, to my mind, an overly heavy hand on suppressing important information.

And that heavy hand always seemed to go in one direction. You could say nothing was too extreme as far as locking down, that's fine. But if you have a prominent scientist from Harvard who says, you know, maybe we shouldn't require the vaccine on kids, that was unacceptable. There was a person who's, she's just a regular citizen who had quoted some statistics from the CDC that were unfavorable, you know, as far as the in-communian narrative. That tweet got labeled as misleading. And this

was data from the CDC itself. So it was very clear that now some people can argue. Do you think, do you think, here's one of the things I noticed in Toronto, which really scared me, was that when the, and I should have known that this was the case, because of other things I knew, but it still unsettled me. One of the terrible things that happened was that during the lockdown there was an opportunity for people to inform on their neighbors. And I certainly saw people in my neighborhood extraordinarily positive delight in that. You know, when you remember in places like East Germany, under the Soviets, a third of

the people were government informers. And I think there was a poll, I don't exactly understand it, but there was a poll to that desire for authoritarian control, especially if you could wield it yourself, that added a degree of attractiveness, because your mystery, as you said, like, oh, there were lots of people at Twitter, and they were trying to do their best. But, when push came to shove, all the controls seemed to be seeded to the players who wanted control. Like they couldn't go too far, but everyone else could go too far. And so that begs the question. It's like even though those people were trying hard to do the right thing, when they aired, they aired on the side of the authoritarians, so to speak. And so that's a real mystery.

That's the fascinating point to me is that they aired on the side of the government and aired on the side of the public health establishment. And there are plenty of people would say, well, that's reasonable in a time of chaos and you know, lots of information. But I mean, if you just take a little bit of a step back, not even a full step, but just a half step back again. These are the things that liberals traditionally are incredibly, they have their antennae up, they're very worried about. You know, all of a sudden, I think that the head of New Zealand at one point, she had said, we are the truth.

There's something that's about a fact, you know. Absolutely. Right. I mean, these are astonishing statements. We, we of course don't want, quote, misinformation to get out there as people. And there are plenty of people with crazy, QAnon crazy stuff, the Bill Gates

is putting a microchip in you with the fine. But I saw no evidence that that was overrun. This sort of boogie man, this idea of some, maybe it's part of the 3% you're talking about or some other people who are prone to believing certain conspiratorial things or what have you or things that are outlandish, that did not drive all this.

That was amplified by the media saying that this was the most dangerous thing, but we have to have some degree of trust in people to be able to be given information. And it's, to me, was incredibly dangerous when regular citizens, but especially fully accredited scientists, people with medical degrees were nevertheless had what they had to say suppressed in some manner, either specifically on a place like Twitter or on a more indirect sense by not being given a voice in a lot of media outlets,

where it was always the kind of establishment people, whether within the government or those who wanted to be in the government, many of them, what you could observe Jordan was, there were certain people who on Twitter and elsewhere, very early on were saying lots of things that some people suspect they knew weren't quite true, but they were supportive of what the administration liked.

And lo and behold, they ended up getting jobs in the administration later on. And what's going to happen to them when they leave the administration? Maybe they'll go on the board of Pfizer, who knows? But you could observe that these things going on where there is this establishment of people saying something and it doesn't mean the establishments wrong automatically. We should have enough confidence in the veracity of what some experts are telling us. They should have that they are not intimidated

by other experts and credential people or regular people saying something different. If something like a microchip is being inserted into me through a syringe that's so outlandish, they should not be frightened by this. That let people say crazy stuff. We have to air on the side of letting people, that's exactly right, because every once in a while

some of that crazy shit is true. And that's some of the things. So, and that's the thing, and you have to, to my mind, you have to, there should be a line drawn somewhere, but you have to err on the side of more leniency, more latitude for voices, not fewer voices. Especially if you're liberal. Especially if you're liberal. Especially if you're liberal.

Right. That's what happened on a platform like Twitter that they weren't trying to like crush everyone. These were people who for a whole number of complex reasons said, we're going to go with whatever the CDC says, that's the truth. And if someone says something against what the CDC says, then that might be labeled as misleading. In fact, we might even suspend that account. But again, getting even though Twitter is a global platform,

it gets back to that American-centric idea. There are many things from pediatric vaccine policies, to school closures, to a whole host of other things, that other countries were doing very differently from the United States. But yet, is that misinformation if the head of some health department in some country in Western Europe, are they automatically sweet, warming people? I didn't say sweet, but yes, Sweden, I mean, people don't realize Iceland as well.

Those are different cultures. I get it. It doesn't mean everything people don't realize Iceland as well. Those are different cultures. I get it. It doesn't mean everything's exactly the same in my book. Then I was doing, I did an intensive analysis. I worked with an epidemiologist on this where we looked at, when you go city by city, you look at all the, the idea that this place was so foreign and so different is such an absurdity. Again, because this was done without real evidence. All of this was based on assumptions.

Assumptions built upon assumptions built upon assumptions. That's how modeling works. And you, to, to, this sort of like, there is this epistemological confusion where we were valuing assumptions over empirical evidence. Well, people, it's hard for people. See, the thing about models is that it's easy for lay people and for scientists, because most scientists really aren't scientists, you know. It's very easy for them to confuse model with data. Like, model is hypothesis, and your point with models is extraordinarily well taken. It's not only our models hypotheses, they're multi-layered hypotheses.

And all of the layers. All of them, a study. And I'm like, that's not a study. But all the time, conflate the terms. And the average reader has no clue. But the data is. Yeah, well, and if the model is generated by an extremely powerful computer, it's even more,

it's even easier to succumb to the temptation that the model is actually data. It's like, no, the model is a hypothesis, a multi-layer hypothesis with many assumptions. And that is a hard thing for people to grasp methodologically. And so you see that also with the climate models, the same problem obtains.

I view that as almost a sort of techno-solutionism, they call it as a term, where it's this idea, well, the more high tech of our solution, the more accurate it must be. But that's not the case. That's a fallacy to view everything in that manner. So, but the technology could be a supercomputer or it could be, you know, using the word technology a little more broadly,

it could be this idea of these interventions. A mask is a technology. So the idea of doing something is very much comes, I think, from a good place and a lot of people, particularly people in public health or in the medical field, that there's a whole bunch of, the compendium of literature about this, about people,

the urge, the instinct to do something. But, you know, in emergency rooms, they have an expression that says, don't just do something, stand there. And sometimes it's more wise to not always intervene, but there's just this instinct that's so powerful. And while it's dangerous to worship that technocratic solution, you know, that old story of the Tower of Babel is exactly that, right? It's a cardinal threat to erect a technological edifice and then assume that that can reach

to heaven. That's a big mistake. Everyone ends up unable to talk to each other. Most interventions don't work. That's the story of most medications. Most things are not beneficial, or if they work, they're not a net gain. It's quite hard to get something approved, or it should be, typically, because most things don't meet that bar. Yet, the evidentiary basis for these things was not no one held it up to that standard for a lot of these interventions that we did. And as I mentioned before,

and then I don't know if we have time for the church thing, but it all wraps together that... Well, let's try that. Let's go there now. Let's go to the church, for example, because it concretizes it. That's right. The people in charge who are making these decisions, like everyone, see the world through their own lens.

They are not, no one is this omniscient, you know, being who understands the kaleidoscope of society. So I understand that they are individuals, but they have their own biases as we all do. And so what happened in California, again, echoing what happened with kids with schools was churches in this particular county, this is in California, again, echoing what happened with kids with schools was churches in this particular county, this is in Santa Clara County, that's the real, the heart of Silicon

Valley. And these people were not allowed to attend church. And I could under, that seems to me, others may disagree, perfectly reasonable in spring of 2020. We're not sure what's happening, information's still coming in. There's a bit of chaos going on. But very quickly after that, things began opening. Remember, some significant portion of society was always out and about working. Because guess what? People still needed food delivered to their door.

The slaughterhouses were open. People were still working the cashiers at various places, etc. So it's not that society's no one pulled a switch where everything was shut. Things were still happening. And once that happens, what we know from implementation science, what we know is that people's ability to comply

with interventions, wanes over time, particularly things that are very uncomfortable like wearing a mask or not being able to see friends and relatives. And I'm not religious at all. I don't go to church, but I recognized that these people, when I interviewed them, they needed that. And the church wasn't closed for a couple weeks.

It wasn't even closed. We're talking about for seven months. People were not allowed to gather indoors and do this thing that they did. And again, this is something that I don't do myself. I have no personal skin in the game, but I recognize, I get emotional thinking about it. These are people who suffer from addiction.

These are people who were profoundly lonely. You might have some 70-year-old person who lives alone and they were told you are not allowed to get out of your apartment. You're not allowed to see anybody, and maybe this person went to church every week for the past 20 years, that's gone, that's over. You're not allowed to go there and have this experience that's meaningful to you,

and there were people who wanted to commit suicide because the profound sadness and loneliness, everyone's different. Some people may tolerate the idea of being home and watching Netflix. That may be totally fine for them. And the laptop class who were able to continue to make a good living while they could work from home

and their computer, that may have been fine. And for many kids that may have been fine. But for some people, it wasn't fine. And these people, but yet at the same time, while the church, while these people were unable to go there, guess what, the malls were open, museums were open. They were open at varying capacities, depending which time,

but it was always more than the capacity they allowed at the church. What a profound statement that was on the values of the people who were pulling the levers of society. And again, so it's not like they can't even pretend that this was all about, well, we need to mitigate the spread of the virus. Well, if you were really that concerned about it,

then why were the casinos open? Why was someone able to go to a liquor store where you're gonna have people circulating in and out all day long? That's not a low impact environment either. So you have all these things where they were picking and choosing what things could be open and what things couldn't be open. And to me, I've recognized that for some of these people, they needed this badly, so much so that they were attempting

commit suicide, some of these people. Others fell back into addiction and it's not a place that I would go, but the idea that to not have the empathy and the understanding that we are a vast society where we all have different needs and we all have different interests and things we like. And even though that's not my need or my interest, I recognize the profound importance that that place and that experience has for some people. And maybe some 70 year old lady said, you know what, I don't wanna get COVID, I don't wanna die, but I'm willing to take that risk

of an additional exposure to go to church because this is what's meaningful to me. And I think it's a, you know, and I don't know where the line gets drawn, but the idea that people could go to a museum, but not go to church inside and meet with people, to me seems wrong. And I think some of what I hope is wrong.

It's got to be wrong. Look, if both epidemiologically and ethically wrong. Well, if people have the right to do anything, they should have the right to do what they regard as most fundamental. And you know, you say you came at this problem from the perspective of an atheist, but an atheist who's observing this phenomenon, who's thinking coherently would think, well, these people are attempting to re- to establish and maintain contact with what they believe to be most fundamental. It might be their

community. It might be their beliefs. And there's, there's, there has to be most fundamental. It might be their community, it might be their beliefs. There has to be extraordinary, extraordinary evidence before that can be forgotten, and maybe it should never be forgotten. I think you could make that case quite strongly, because it's also the case that historically, the Churches have been veritable epicenters of positive response to epidemic realities, for example. And so you close them down not only at the peril of the people who attend the churches, but you close them down at broad or social peril. And so it's interesting that that, even though, as you said, you don't practice religious practice yourself, at least not church going, that this is something that really deeply

struck you. It instantly, because I've been writing about kids and I have, I try not to get into what they would call like a victim porn, but the stories that I've been told by educators and by parents about children when you have autistic kids who were denied treatment and care from professionals that they counted on and their families didn't have any money or support system to know how to handle them. The child abuse claims that went up, kids being beaten with a wire at home and the reports coming in because they rely on teachers and going to school as that's a main mechanism

for reporting. We're teacher spot this. The school serve an enormously important role in people's lives far beyond merely the education, you know, from books. And similarly, while it does not place eye to eye, church fulfills that role for many people as well. And the idea that these people were denied something that was critical for their well-being, because that's health, too. Not wanting to kill yourself, that's health, that matters. And they're also, without getting into the weeds, there was no evidence that this intervention

had any benefit whatsoever. Again, two weeks, something like that, if we pull the lever, that may work. But what we see is over time, people aren't complying with staying home. We can see that with the Google travel data, when they can look at the data of people moving around, people were out and about regardless.

Schools that were in a hybrid model, or the towns that were schools were closed, they had no fewer cases than places, or no more cases. It's all over the map, the data. The society is complicated. And as you said, you know, quite a while ago, this idea of taking something incredibly vast and complex and distilling it down into this simple thing,

do this and you are a virtuous person. And if you don't do that, you're a piece of garbage. For me to even question any of this stuff, I was a lunatic, all of a sudden I'm some right wing, crazy person because I'm looking at data and pointing something out and saying, wait a minute, kids are back to school and this in such and such country, why aren't they here?

I'm talking to people all of a sudden, I am the villain. And in the path, well, you're actually technically you're the pathogen. You're the pathogen. You bet. You're the pathogen that the behavioral immune system is now responding to. And that's extraordinarily dangerous.

There is a little limitation. If you eliminate pathogens, well, you know, people often say, well, you vilify someone because you're afraid of them. It's like, no, you don't. You vilify someone because you identified them as a pathogen, and then you're motivated not to avoid them, which is what you do if you're afraid, but to eradicate them, because that's what you do with pathogens. You know, I read Hitler's table talk, for example, which was a collection of his spontaneous

speeches at dinner times collected over four years. And all the language he used to describe the Jews was pathogen language, pure blood of the Aryans, the parasitical nature of the Jewish interlopers, the disease spreading capacity of the ghettos. It was 100% public health pathogen language, and it's way more toxic than mere fear, because people say, well Hitler was afraid of the Jews. It's like, no, he wasn't. It was discussed, contempt, and pathogen language. And that's way worse, because you burned out sources of infection. That's, there's no, right? What, you don't offer sympathy to a pathogen.

Right. And there's the level of disgust and control with, you know, with, we reached a point where the county health department hired special officers who spied on church members. They surveilled them. I mean, I wrote it into my mind. It almost was like this dark comedy.

They were peering at them through a chain link fence on an adjacent property watching church members. They then, once they got a, there was an order from the court that eventually allowed the officers to enter the church. So they were monitoring these very intimate, personal events. They went in, there was a thing called Manifor Moms. I remember was one of the events that the church so they were monitoring these very intimate personal events. They went in, there was a thing called Manifor Moms.

I remember was one of the events that the church did. This is like a really personal thing that the moms were doing together. Here come the health inspectors to watch us doing this. And you read, and I wrote this in my article on my sub-stack where you can read about, you know, there were eight women present in the room, two of them embraced.

One woman was not wearing a mask. I mean, just this like list, it was crazy making. And then the, to me, and then the ultimate thing was they also monitored their cellular phone data. That they could see that there was a very sophisticated analysis done by the Stanford professor that they included in that I found in the court documents where you could see they drew a geofence around the church. It's this like digital border. And you could see they could monitor how many people

were entering and leaving the property. And even on a granular level, different buildings within the property, they could see how long people were within each spot. This was happening in America. spot. This was happening in America, like in the present tense, monitoring people. That is something that has gone so far beyond anything that I think any regular person would think is reasonable. And what I would hope is that we have some sort of legislative mechanisms, I guess, put in place to try to put some sort of breaks on something like this happening. Again, whether it's for a pandemic or some other, because there's always an emergency, whether there's some other thing that's going to happen, there needs to be some process in place that was completely absent during the pandemic in my view from preventing this type of behavior.

Is this the same church that has been fined? this type of behavior. Is this the same church that has been fined? So it's same- Millions of dollars- That's right, unreal. So I wrote about the whole case because I had access to the court files. And it's all in there and I do a lot of screenshots from the things that are in, that are a part of the discovery and part of the court documents.

But millions of dollars of fines is, I have all the details where it was something like, up to $5,000 a day and it just kept accruing. I mean, this would make a loan shark blush if they saw the fines that were levied against the church. And look, the church was, you know, thumb in their nose at the authorities and boy did they not like it. And I understand again, in the beginning,

how people may have said, hey, we need to keep everything closed, but once it was a few weeks and then a month and then two months and then three months, the months just kept rolling by. While remember, you could go to a liquor store, you could go to a museum, you could go to the mall, you could go to a casino.

All these other... You could go to a Black Lives Matter march? That's right. Exactly. So they were picking and choosing which elements of people's lives were worthy of doing and which ones weren't. And a lot of these decisions,

not only is that an ethical choice that they were making for regular citizens, but it was not grounded in any sort of real epidemiological evidence to do these things. There was no evidence in the end that people at this church had an elevated rate of cases than anyone else in society. Because with the high, as you know from talking with Jay,

Vatacharya, a highly contagious respiratory virus, you're not gonna stop this thing. You might have, there might be an effect early on for a very transient period of time with everything is closed, but society will grind to a halt if that happens. So over time, the benefit of any of these interventions just goes down like that, because the longer

time goes on, the more people need to circulate and mix with society. And you know who needs to most, who has to, the people who are forced to, the plumber, the cashier, the orderly in the hospital, while someone else can sit home on their laptop, in their home, maybe their children have a beautiful room where they can learn, you know, do remote learning, maybe they hired some extra tutors or started a pod program, that was fine for them, and then that was virtuous as well.

It's very, very convenient, it's nice. That not only is this comfortable for us, I am also a more virtuous person. You, you dirty person, you wanna go to church? That's bad, you're a bad person. So this wildly overly simplified binary of good and bad, remarkable because remember George Bush back in the day, you're either with us or against us

and liberals mocked him. What a absurdly simplistic view of society, but to my mind, there was very much that same type of dynamic that same lens of this bifurcated lens was the same view on a lot of the pandemic response. It doesn't mean we should have done nothing at all. It doesn't mean that we should not care about how we may infect other people. All of those things are important. What it does mean is the way that this was handled,

the way that it was done both with the mechanics of the different interventions, but also with the ethical, the highly subjective, ethical choices that were made about what people could and could not do were profoundly inequitable. And the irony is that this is something that progressives profess to care about the most, is quote, equity, these sort of equality of outcome

or even equality of opportunity, yet the children who were harmed the most were the ones who depend on school most, the rich kids. They suffered too, and plenty of them, I don't wanna dismiss it for kids who are more well off financially or whatever because everyone's different has their own experience. But the kids who really suffered were the ones who didn't have all of these resources. Similar to some guy who I spoke with in California, the person who really suffered as someone

who suffers from addiction relied on the church for him. That was his support system, and that was denied from him. So you have all these people who were denied these support systems that they required, that they needed to flourish as people, and there was no evidence that this denial in the end had any benefit for society. That's a good place to end, but I want to ask you one more question anyways. You've been looking into this pattern of hyperunit-dimensional, virtuous signaling hyper-response for a number of years. You said early on that alienated you to some degree from the organizations and maybe even

the class of people that you had been easily as and profitably and positively associating with before. What's changed for you personally and politically as a consequence of having waited through this? How do you view the world differently now psychologically, but also politically and socially, then let's say six, seven years ago. Profound, profound change. And I'll tell you the one positive part about this. I've chatted about this with a few friends

who've been similar to me, these sort of like, you know, politically homeless, so to speak, people, is that I never thought that at my age, 48, I never thought that I would have an experience in my life that would completely alter how I view the world, how I view myself, that would flip me off this axis that I was on. I had those experiences as a teenager in my early 20s when I'm exposed. I'm reading the beat poets. I'm doing these things.

My mind was getting blown on a regular basis. I'm being turned on to all these different ideas. I'm reading Marshall McCluen. Oh my God. The medium is the message. All these things were blowing my mind. But as I got older, which I think is typical, that stopped happening. There were things that still interested me, that I still was pursuing.

But the idea of like my whole frame of reference being changed, that that was no longer happening. There were things that still interested me that I still was pursuing, but the idea of my whole frame of reference being changed, that that was no longer happening. And it's the one upside is that it's both unsettling but also kind of amazing that that happened to me as like a middle-aged adult. And I had always seen myself and my tribe as, if not more virtuous than certainly at least maybe more intelligent, more wise, more reasonable.

And what I observed has completely changed how I view people in different political tribes. I still think plenty of people on the right are completely insane and foolish. And I still think people on the far left are completely foolish and insane in many circumstances. But I no longer have this dismissive view of people, particularly on the right that I used to have. I hate even using these terms left and right because like most people, I have a complex range of feelings and opinions on a complex range of topics. So I don't sit myself in one camp or another, but I've always felt a little bit alienated

as a person just psychologically. And this experience has made that sense of alienation profound in a way. But in a way that's also, that livens me in a way as well, because wow, to learn something new when you're old or getting older, it's quite remarkable. So as destabilizing as this has been, it's also energizing. And that's why this topic has been so interesting to me, because now things see, I see them differently,

and I can see, I used to find it absurd, you know, when people, the elitist Democrats, and the something like, oh, be quiet, whatever. Now it's so obvious, the smugness that I can see in the way some people speak and the dismissiveness. So it took this event to sort of pull the cloth back on certain things that I wasn't able to see before. Some of my views are the same as they always were, and some of them have changed.

But rather than political views changing, I don't even know what terminology to use, but more of my sort of social or societal view has changed. Different from maybe my core political beliefs, but just, there's a degree of equanimity that I think people need to embody, that I still need to as well, but that I've been able to turn the dial up on that wasn't there before. So, I don't know if that answers your question, but it's just been like a bizarre and remarkable experience.

The one nice thing is, there is, I don't know how, I was going to use the word small, and it is small. I don't know how large or how small it is. It's a minority, but there is a group of people who I found who are kind of like me. Now maybe they were always liberals or progressives and then they found themselves sort of a drift. Maybe they were always a conservative, but these people who I've connected with, the amount of doctors who out of the blue out, get an email. This is early on in the pandemic in like spring 2020 And the email would always start with,

I didn't vote for Trump, but dot, dot, dot. And these conversations would always start that way where everyone has to sort of apologize. You have to kind of clear your throat first and say, and but all these people who felt homeless, who felt afraid to say something out loud or even confused, and other people who I met in my small town where I live. There was always this sense of while I lost other people and some friends who I think I

lost and people who think I've gone crazy, I've made other friends along the way of people who also felt unmoored. I also said, hey, wait a minute, some of this stuff doesn't seem quite right. So that's been a wonderful thing as well, to use some sort of cliche whenever the door closes, a window opens, whatever it may be. Something's closed down, but maybe there's some sort of equilibrium that happens

that something else then opens in a way. All right, well that's a good place to end, I would say. There was lots of other things that we could talk about. I wanted to talk about, but we covered a lot of material. And maybe we can get a chance to do that at some point. In the future, we didn't cover gain of function research, for example, which I would have loved to have delved into. But that might be a topic for an entirely separate conversation.

Yeah, yeah. That's not, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and, and, and, it's great. The work that you've done on this front, which, you know, you were an early canary in the coal mine, so to speak, and, you know, that's not an easy thing to do, even though it's an exciting thing to do, and maybe too exciting, you know, as you said to you, you're obviously a case in point that an old dog can learn new tricks.

And maybe then not be such an old dog for a while again, too, you know, because that's kind of an interesting consequence. And so to everybody who's watching and listening, thank you very much, as I say frequently, your time and attention isn't presumed or taken for granted. I'm very happy that people are tuning into this podcast and watching and listening. He's complicated conversations and to the Daily Wire Plus people, thank you for facilitating the recording on both ends, which you do. I'm in Portugal today in Lisbon and we have a nice studio set up here to make this possible and that's not an easy thing to arrange at a moment's notice.

And David, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. It's much appreciated. Yeah, this is terrific. Thanks, Jordan. All right, so just so everybody remembers, I'm going to talk to David for another half an hour behind the daily wireless plus platform. Firewall, who will talk a little bit about the development of his journalistic interests across time and maybe delve into some of the other things that we didn't have quite enough time to touch on in this conversation if you're inclined to participate in that and you'd like to support the daily wire plus endeavor find what they're doing worthwhile. They've certainly been useful for me and and fun to work with, which is quite interesting. And so join us over there. And other than that, Chow will join you all again on another podcast in the very near future. Thanks, David.

Hello, everyone. I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com. www.caliburacolus.com