The Megyn Kelly Show - Bret Weinstein on Tech Censorship, The Value of Conversation, and COVID Treatments | Ep. 124

Episode Date: July 5, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Bret Weinstein, co-host of the DarkHorse Podcast, to talk about the ramifications of tech censorship and what led to his YouTube demonetization, the value of conversation, obligation to truth and principles, COVID treatments and vaccines, what happened to him at Evergreen State College, his infamous Clubhouse appearance, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, by popular demand, including my own, Brett Weinstein. You know Brett. He's got a hugely successful podcast and YouTube show, though that one's been temporarily shut down. It's still on there, but they're not letting him monetize it. It's a whole thing. We're going to get into it because of his COVID coverage. He's got two, actually, the Dark Horse podcasts.

One does clips. One is Brett and his wife interviewing people, talking about things, doing sort of live streams and so on. And I first noticed this guy when I saw the movie, which you probably know by this point, I love No Safe Spaces by Mark Joseph. It follows Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla around as they go on these college campuses. And one of the campuses they highlight was Evergreen. And that was Brett Weinstein's campus. He was a professor there who got in trouble over nothing, nothing. And they tried to ruin the guy. And he came back and in a big way and his influence, his national influence has grown profoundly. And he continues to push back against

narratives that don't make sense to him and including on COVID, whether it was him pushing the lab leak theory, not pushing, but saying, look, I think this makes sense. And I think it's the likely explanation at a time when you weren't allowed to say that. And we're talking about spring of 2020. And now it's on things like ivermectin. Oh, I said it. And vaccine side effects and whether the vaccines are safe. Oh, I said more. And he's been saying a whole lot. And the folks at YouTube don't like it. So Brett, for a lot of reasons, has been sort of a personal hero of mine. And we just had an amazing discussion. You're going to love this discussion. It's tense at times.

When it was over, he described it as tough, but excellent. I'll take it. I like that. And I think you guys are going to like it too. So we'll get to Brett in one second. First this. How are you? I'm doing well. It is a pleasure to finally meet you, sort of. Oh, it's I know it's a weird way to meet, but it's an honor. I'm such an admirer of yours. And I have a long story to tell you, but I'll we can get into it when we get to what happened at Evergreen. But suffice to say for now, deeply, deeply admire you and have such empathy for what you went through and now still are going through even today. All right, let's start with the news about you, which is this just happened a couple of days ago, June 28th. I've been following your saga with YouTube, how they

continue to crack down on your show, on your episodes, demonetizing this episode, that episode. And now it seems to me that on June 28th, they demonetized both of your YouTube channels. Am I up to date on the latest? Well, I don't know if you're up to date on the latest, but that's the latest I know. Yes, they demonetized both channels, which took out more than half my family's income in a matter of minutes. That's DEF CON 1. That's a good way to put it.

That is harsh. Can it be undone? Well, they seem to be making up the rules as they go along with us. I don't think anyone else has seen this pattern yet. What they said is that we are demonetized and that we are entitled to reapply in a month, effectively drawing a line in the sand where presumably if we were to agree with the limits that they wish to establish about what can be discussed on the channel, then we could restore our capacity to earn on YouTube. But if we insist on evaluating the evidence on questions where they would rather not have it evaluated, then it is permanent. If you will just be a good boy and cover COVID the way YouTube sees fit, you can get your platform back. Right. In fact, the predicament is I more or less have to not do what I am professionally trained to do, which is to evaluate evidence and see where it leads. And instead, I have to start with the conclusion that has been handed down

by the CDC, an agency that has obviously been wrong on one question after another since the beginning of COVID. This is so maddening. I mean, I'll start with this. I understand YouTube doesn't want to put out dangerous misinformation that could hurt people. I get that. But there's a line, right? I mean, let's start with the most extreme case. You're on the air, you're on YouTube and you're saying drinking a bottle of palm olive is the cure for COVID. Just drink a bottle of palm olive or antifreeze, antifreeze and COVID will go away. Of course, so will you. Your life will be over, which, you know, you then don't mention. OK, let's just say this weird hypothetical where you you're completely reckless. You agree YouTube

could demonetize that, could censor that. They obviously have legal rights to censor certain kinds of content. I don't think anybody disagrees with that. In this case, of course, we're talking not just about me, but my wife and i are both trained evolutionary biologists we are more than capable of evaluating evidence we have a long track record of doing so well and when we have made errors which is inevitable we go back and we cover those errors so that our audience is up to date. And the fact is, this idea that what we are saying on our channel could cost lives is true, but it has to be matched up with why we are doing this, which is that the current CDC conclusions will cost lives if we are correct. We are both deeply committed to doing what we believe is in the public's interest. And that means that at some level, this question has to

be navigated in some venue where it is possible for both sides to get a hearing. And I believe that if that happens, we will recognize that for one reason or another, the official CDC guidance is at odds with both the proper medical recommendations for individuals and at odds with the public health. So, I mean, back to my example, I will say YouTube could, I think, consistent with its ethical obligation, both to public health and just to fostering some sort of meaningful debate as a major information carrier of the country, it could censor that. I can understand. I can understand a policy that says we're not going to help you

put that out there to the world. If you want to find another way in which to say that to people, you can, but we're not going to facilitate that. In the same way, they have tried to crack down on Al Qaeda and ISIS operatives showing people how to make bombs. They don't do it perfectly, but they do try to keep things that can directly lead to harm in a way that's easy to see off of YouTube. The problem is, as I see it, you're nowhere near that line. They've used that responsibility in a way that's really irresponsible, right? They've said, you're like the ISIS bomb maker. And you're nothing like the

ISIS bomb maker. I mean, I've listened to these discussions you're having. I find them really interesting. I don't know whether they're all true. I've heard a lot of information that I've spent some time researching on my own. And I have found contradictory information. But that's only the beginning. That's how you get conversation going. That's how you get a discussion going and learning going. It's not to just tell one side that has questions about the information we're being spoon-fed to shut up. Well, I think it goes one level deeper. If you think about what the CDC is suggesting has concluded and what the social media platforms are now using as the basis for their censorship policy, it just so happens that it matches exactly what a pharmaceutical company might prefer if it was trying to administer the maximum number of doses

of vaccine. Now, that could be a coincidence, but it could also be that capture has taken over these platforms and that the CDC is being effectively used as cover for a policy that is not in the interest of the public. And my contention is that the only way for us to be safe from the possibility of the capture of something like the CDC is for us to be able to talk about the possibility that has been captured and to evaluate that question. And that is what we are forbidden to do. We are not allowed to look at the evidence and say, actually, the proper medical policy does not look like what the CDC is suggesting. And frankly, from the point of view- But it's not all the CDC. You're making it sound like it's just the CDC coming out and saying the

vaccines are safe. A lot of independent doctors have come out and studied this, and there's been a bunch of studies outside of the CDC saying they're safe and and you you can take them oh I'm not saying it's just the CDC saying that obviously a majority of people are saying that but it is the CDC that YouTube points to with respect to its claiming that we are spreading medical misinformation it is the fact that what we are saying is in conflict with what the CDC says that has them declaring it false, which obviously is preposterous on its face. That's absurd. Yes, that is absurd. I mean, that's one of the things that you were out in front on was the COVID lab leak theory. And you were you were saying, I think it was a year ago, I think it was either March or April of 2020 that you said, I believe there's a 90% chance this came as a result of a lab leak. And you were attacked back then as some sort of a quack, some sort of deliverer of misinformation.

And I'm amazed they didn't demonetize you back then, but you were just getting started at that point. And it turns out, it definitely appears that you were right. That's certainly the leading hypothesis now amongst anybody who's been paying attention. So it's not like you have a history of being some crazy crank. To the contrary, you've got a good history of predicting accuracies about this virus. Well, not only with respect to the lab leak, and I would point out that I believe there is 100% chance that we

are right about the lab leak because the way we presented it was this is a hypothesis and it is clearly a viable hypothesis in this case. Many people now agree with us that it is the most likely explanation. But yes, we were way ahead and we were demonized as conspiracy theorists. I agree with you. There's something interesting about the fact that they did not choose to demonetize us then. But of course, having been vindicated, you would imagine that they would now look at the question of repurposed drugs and hazards that may be associated with these current vaccines, and they would take a step back and ask themselves the question of whether or not we may again be ahead of the curve, but that is not what they're doing. And I guess I would just add that the lab leak is not the only question on the idea that the outdoor environment is safe and that actually one is probably best off not using a mask outdoors. We have been way ahead on a model of transmission in which one considers the volume of the room as a primary factor in the hazard posed by that room and adjusts it accordingly, opening windows, creating airflow. All of these things are places where our method of evaluating things has put our listeners ahead

of CDC and WHO guidance. And for YouTube to now come back at us as if these sources are beyond question is utterly preposterous. Let's talk about what the final straws were. As I see it, there was an episode on ivermectin that they took issue with. They said they were you advised. I think you aired it on June 11th and on June 12th. You were advised by YouTube that that post violates their misinformation policies about COVID-19 for promoting ivermectin as an effective treatment. That was June 12th. And I was following it then saying, OK, he's getting in trouble. Your podcast still lived on, but your YouTube was getting demonetized and threatened. And then, boom, you're gone.

It's the YouTube channel's gone. And was that because of the follow-up episode? Rather than cower in your corner, you came out with another show questioning the vaccines. It's like you wanted to poke the bear. And the next thing I know, you're gone. So did they tell you that it was the vaccine episode that was the last straw? Well, first of all, we're not gone. Our channel still exists.

And although we were unable to post to it for, I believe, a week, we are now able to post to it. But it is demonetized. It is, of course, under threat because each of our two channels has a strike. And at any point that YouTube wishes to do it, they can add more strikes and eliminate the channels permanently. So we're living in limbo. I would not say that I wanted to poke the bear, but I have an obligation, which is perhaps second only to my obligation to my family. And that is my obligation to humanity writ large. I trained to be able to evaluate evidence. It is a difficult job. And the evidence that is available to us is painting a relatively clear picture. Now, it is impossible to be precise about it. And I'm not claiming that I have been, and I'm not claiming that I have not

made some errors that is inherent to evaluating noisy data in a complex system. But what I am saying is that the picture is relatively clear and that imprecision does not change the final analysis. We are making errors with respect to the way we are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. And there is no question that that is putting human lives at stake. It is a sobering fact that when one speaks about this issue, it will very likely persuade people to change their decision about things like vaccines. And while I believe that people who listen to our podcast are liable to have their chances of remaining healthy increased, that will not be true for every individual. It is certainly true that somebody who, for example,

becomes aware of the adverse event signal surrounding the vaccines may decide not to get vaccinated. And if they don't get vaccinated, they could well contract COVID-19 where they would otherwise not have. They might die. They might pass it on to someone else who would die. That's not a responsibility I want, but it's one that I feel I have to take on because the analysis that matters is the net analysis. What is the best policy from the point of view of reducing the number of people lost to this disease and lost to adverse reactions to vaccines? Well, let me ask you a question about that, Brett, because I will tell you as a journalist,

I found the episode with the two guys, Kirsch and Malone, the guy who invented the mRNA technology, Malone, kind of frustrating, to be honest with you. And the reason is, you didn't have somebody from the other side. I wanted to hear somebody make all the points about how safe the vaccines are, and why these guys are off, and how Kirsch isn't really a doctor and just put science, you know, studies together and had been looking at it. But like, why should we listen to him? I'm from Johns Hopkins. I'm from Harvard. I'm from whatever. And so I didn't find, I didn't walk away convinced. I didn't because you didn't tee up the other side for me. You just had two guys, you know, throwing out concerns and you saying your concerns.

And then when I started researching, what did they say about, like, where did they get all this information? Where do these guys get this from? I found out it's from this one guy's study, Brian Brittle. He's an associate professor of viral immunology in the Department of Pathobiology at the University of Guelph in Canada. Guelph, that is. The guy does study vaccines for a living, so that is his area of expertise. And his information seems to have led to a lot of your conclusions. But I don't know anything about that guy. And I've seen a lot of smart scientists here in the United States, including somebody we had in the show from Johns Hopkins, Marty McCary, who's been pushing back on a lot of the CDC nonsense. It's not like he's team CDC. Push back on Brittle's research too, saying, well, so first of all, there, we are in the Wild West here, what we have is a an official narrative about the vaccines, about the testing that they went through in order to

reach the market about the emergency use authorizations under which they are administered about the immunity from liability enjoyed by the manufacturers. And the official story effectively has almost the entire landscape. So there's a question about whether or not it is fair to require of those who would point out that there is another analysis that they must instantly give equal time to an analysis that has almost all the bandwidth. I do agree. I don't think you have to do that. I just think it would have been more helpful. Well, I just think point counterpoint would have been more helpful. It would have been more persuasive. I agree. And you know, it's not the only thing about that podcast that frustrates me. I must say, I have been in contact with Dr. Bindel,

and he is quite credible. And I have checked on his credentials. It all adds up. So I'm not saying that he is the ultimate source. But it is interesting that the place so it is it is not the case that the podcast was basically built on his research. There is a couple of questions on which his work is central surrounding in particular, the toxicity of the spike protein, and the likely toxicity of the subunit that is used in all of these vaccines. And let me just interject there just to just to make it super clear, because you're very, very smart. And sometimes I don't totally follow, but I have looked up some of these terms. Yeah. So you did say you say on that podcast that the spike protein is very dangerous. It's cytotoxic, as you just said here. And that means it's toxic to living cells. Yes. And, cells. And I didn't know what that meant, to be honest. But having looked at what doctors I respect, McCary, I mentioned is just one of them. He's a Hopkins guy. He tweeted out an article fact checking that claim and saying,

quote, there is no evidence that the spike protein in the vaccines is cytotoxic. And the pushback on that point you guys spent a fair amount of time on is that there's a difference between the spike protein that happens from the virus and what happens when you're given the vaccine and that they made changes on purpose to the vaccine that would prevent the spike protein from being able to undergo binding to the receptor to a fusion and basically saying that the mRNA vaccines are more sophisticated and smarter than what happens to you when you just get COVID and they foresaw this problem and protected against it. Go ahead. Well, I believe that is a false story. It certainly contains many elements of the truth. What we know is that the vaccines have several design failures in them, and we can argue about whether or not those failures are consequential, but the vaccines are not remaining local to the injection site. The spike protein, which is the chosen antigen in all of the current vaccines, turns out to be toxic, the spike protein itself. And we will return to the question of whether or not that means that the version of the spike protein that the vaccines encode is also toxic. But it is also the case that it was designed to remain stuck to the surface of

the cells that produce it. So you're supposed to be injected. Your cells, in the case of the mRNA vaccines, take up the mRNA. They produce the spike protein, and the spike protein is supposed to move to the surface of the cells and stay there. And no doubt some of it does, but we now know that a lot of it does not. It floats freely. And so what this means is that you've got a vaccine in which effectively the brochure says that it works one way, but we know that in practice on three different counts, it does not do what its designers intended. Well, I just want to interject there and say my own research on this suggests you are right on that point, that even your critics have kind of infected person, and that it's not dangerous, it's not problematic, and that the results of even knowing that don't indicate that the vaccines are

dangerous. Well, I understand their argument, but I would point out that especially working downstream of an emergency use authorization, an accelerated testing schedule that does not allow even the normal level of assessment of safety. And in light of the immunity from liability that the manufacturers are under, that we have to proceed with extreme caution when we get the sign that these vaccines are not working as intended. But the core problem with the story about the spike protein, or more specifically, the S1 subunit that is being used or produced by these vaccines, is that the claim that it was locked open in order to make it safe, I believe is incorrect. It was locked open. What do you mean locked open? So imagine a protein that functions like, I'm trying to imagine what the analogy might be,

some kind of a clamp that automatically clamps shut when it reaches some target of a particular shape. So that's the normal spike protein. It's a protein that when it encounters a chemical of a particular shape, changes form. And that's part and parcel of how it functions when it meets the ACE2 receptor. In the version that is produced by the vaccines, it was chemically locked in the open position. So imagine you had like a pair of scissors and you welded the two pieces together so that they couldn't open and close anymore. My understanding from Dr. Malone is that the reason that it was locked open was not to

render it safe, but to leave the portion of the protein that is not naturally covered in sugars available to the immune system so that the immune system could effectively see it and create immunity. So there's nothing wrong with that plan. That's a good idea from the point of view of making an effective vaccine. But if it is true that locking it open renders the vaccine safe, that will be a lucky accident. So ultimately, I think what we have to say is when they say that there is no evidence that the spike protein encoded by the vaccines is dangerous, they are speaking with a level of precision most people don't detect. To say that there is no evidence does not mean that there is evidence that it is safe. It means that the evidence we have that this protein is dangerous comes from the natural wild type protein, and that we don't yet have the evidence on what the locked

open version of the protein is. But logically speaking, in the case where we are actually immunizing people with this protein, it would be wisest to presume that it has the same toxicity as the protein from which we derived it until it is proven to be safe. And in light of the adverse event signal- I get you. I get you. You see it? They do say, and I agree with you that if there's, I don't want to figure out how to say it, but no active proof of harm doesn't mean no chance that it's harmful. And you would argue there is proof of active harm. What I would say is that the natural presumption is if the protein on which it is modeled is dangerous and it is not established that locking it open renders it safe, then one should presume it is dangerous until proven safe. They, I mean, the people who defend it say not only, not only is it is it safe but they argue that it actually appears the

vaccines appear to inhibit the spike protein any injury from the spike protein injury to your blood vessels injury to your lymph nodes that they may actually prevent vascular damage so they actually are arguing that not only do they do no harm, they will protect you. And they say 890 million people worldwide have been vaccinated. The FDA is monitoring it. They paused J&J, which proves they have fully independent safety monitoring of these things. And they say they've looked at all these things. They're not so persuaded by the one guy in Canada. And there have been scientists from all over Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, people, again,

who I've had on this show as more heterodox thinkers when it comes to COVID saying, you're wrong. Well, so first of all, I think what you have is a situation in which you've got a confusing picture. And in light of the fact that we are injecting people with these vaccines, that we can know nothing about their long-term impact, in light of the fact that there is a very strong signal of adverse events, unprecedented, in fact, in the VAERS system, then we have to proceed with great caution. But if you'll allow me to change the focus just slightly. I will, but just hold that thought because I just hold that thought because I do want to hear what you're going to say. But just just to correct that record, there's a question

about how strong the adverse events evidence is. I know the VAERS system, you know, people who defend that system say, of course, that's not a system that's meant to capture everything because, you know, it's set up. Drug companies don't want a meaningful forum in which you can go on and say, let me tell you all the things this drug did to me. That's not good for them. They don't want their drug to take that kind of a hit. They don't want to get sued. They don't want class action lawyers, you know, pouring over that.

So I get that. But but people have defended some of the bad numbers on the VAERS system, saying a lot of the early vaccines were given to 90-year-olds and really old people. And you can't really say the deaths were caused by a vaccine so much as the initial vaccines were given to the very old or the very sick. Well, you can't establish really almost ever that any individual event is the direct result of the vaccination because, of course, people do occasionally spontaneously drop dead. But the signal does not involve just the old. So if you wanted to test the question of whether or not the alarmingly high rate of death following vaccination was the result of some sort of sampling error, as you're describing, you can test that question. And one way to do it is to

look at whether that's been the case for people in the age class that you're suggesting is responsible for the signal for other vaccinations. And my argument would be any way you slice the data, there is an alarming signal. Now, what critics of this perspective generally say is, yes, there is an alarming signal, but the number of people who have been saved by the vaccines far exceeds the number who have been lost no matter what number you use. And that is probably correct so far. However, is it all right for me now to pivot to what I think is the central question? Yeah. Yeah, go for it. The vaccines, all of the ones that we are administering, all depend on emergency use

authorizations. Those emergency use authorizations have a requirement that there not be a safe and effective treatment available. They should never have been granted safe and effective treatment available. They should never have been granted if such a treatment existed. And at the point that it is discovered that such a treatment does exist, they should have been withdrawn and administration of the vaccines should have ended. So this is why the question of ivermectin and the other repurposed drugs is so vital. It does not really make sense to talk about whether or not

it is acceptable to lose X number of thousand people to the hazards of the vaccine in order to save Y number of people from the COVID pandemic if there is a treatment that does not produce this massive adverse event signal and is highly effective at both treating the disease and crucially preventing it. Now, wait, before we get to ivermectin, I agree with that in principle. That's, that's to me seems like a no brainer. If you've got a, a very effective treatment, if you've got strep throat, you got penicillin, there it is. You don't have to have a vaccine against, against strep throat because we have the cure. So as a theoretical matter, yes, you're 100 percent right. Now we can get to whether ivermectin is that thing.

But I also think even before we get to is this ethical because there is potentially a drug available. The conclusion, the place we both just landed is, you know, maybe, maybe certainly some people have died after getting the vaccine. And, you know, was it as a result of the vaccine? We don't have all the information yet. And I think this is what leads reasonable scientists and doctors to say, all right, so then let's make a value judgment based on your risk. You know, if you're old, you're immunocompromised, and you're somebody who really could likely get killed by COVID, and that's a small, small, small percentage of the people, then this may be a smart risk for you to take. But if you're young, you're 18, it's a very different story, especially given that whether you agree with Brett on everything

he said about the spike protein and all that or not, you have to agree that we don't know everything we'd like to know about this vaccine. It just, it hasn't been around long enough for us to do long-term trials. You may have a very different risk calculation. And I mean, that, that's true. And I know we both agree on that. Yes. I would say the problem with the analysis, you know, I agree that for the young, it makes little sense to administer this if they tolerate COVID very well,

effectively, that it becomes a transfer of health between the young and the old. We are putting young people at risk with a vaccine that is clearly experimental, about which we know little about its long-term impacts. And we would be doing it to save older, infirm people. And I don't think a sane society does that. I agree with that. It's medically unethical. They're trying to boost herd immunity by using the young kids who don't need it and for whom

the implications are unclear because too many people won't get the vaccines for valid reasons. They have concerns, what have you. And they're trying to use my kid and yours to up the numbers. Yes. And I think it is absolutely unforgivable. On that point, though, I want to say that reasonable people could disagree. I actually don't think that's true. I think that reasonable people would all have to grant that we have an obligation to protect children, even at risk to older people. And I say that as somebody who's much closer to old than young. But there are other cases in which the picture is even clearer. For example, people who have clearly had COVID, people who have,

for example, tested positive and lost their sense of taste and smell. These people do not need a vaccination. They have effectively been vaccinated by nature. And the vaccination that they have gotten from nature is much more useful in all likelihood because it is much broader. So for us to recognize that there is an adverse events signal that let's say needs to be discussed, maybe it is the result of some phenomenon in the reporting system and it is not a medical fact, but we don't know that. So we have an indication that there might be a substantial hazard to the vaccines. And yet we are administering them to people for whom they are redundant.

We could instantly reduce those people's risk dramatically by simply saying a conclusive demonstration that you've had COVID is sufficient. And when you look at the CDC website as to why it is still recommending vaccination for people who have had COVID-19, what it says is because we don't know how long the immunity from the disease lasts, which is obvious nonsense. We also don't know how long the immunity from the vaccines last. And certainly if there was a risk that it was going to fail at the point that it becomes clear that people are losing their immunity, we could start vaccinating them then, but in the strong chance that the

vaccination or that the immunity from the disease itself is long lasting, possibly lifelong, we could simply keep those people out of harm's way, and yet we don't do it. And then of course, there's a third category, which is pregnant women for whom it would seem that we should be treating them with great caution in light of the extra risk to especially their unborn children. And yet we are behaving in a way that suggests that the driving objective is to administer as many doses of vaccine as possible rather than- Yes. Let me ask you that. Yeah. I don't totally understand why

they are insisting on vaccinating people who have had understand. I don't understand why. They are insisting on vaccinating people who have had covid, and that's one of the first things my own doctor who I trust, who's an infectious disease specialist, said, which was he said, not only should you not get the vaccine if you've had covid, you like not only do you not need it, he said, you shouldn't get it. You shouldn't get it. And he said that we've had some more adverse reactions to the vaccine with people who have had COVID. And by the way, what the hell is like the comfort of having had COVID? If you can't just say, at least I don't have to get the experimental vaccine. It's like, again, disincentivizing people on every front. They just don't know how to handle public relations, which is a front in this battle. Anyway, why? Why won't they just admit that they don't have to vaccinate

the people who have natural immunity? I don't that I don't understand the agenda. I know they lean into fear. I know they're trying to get herd immunity up, but that's a whole huge section of the population that's got it. So why? Well, you know, I can hear it in your voice. If you look at that question long enough, you are left scratching your head. And the problem is that I know only one answer that adds up. And the answer is that this isn't about public health and it isn't about individual health. It is about something else. It is about something like profits within the pharmaceutical industry. And I know how that sounds, but I also know that if we were to take this outside of the context of COVID, in general, people are aware that the

pharmaceutical industry has a perverse incentive to sell products that may not be in your interest to take. People are generally on their guard about that. And if one thinks about it for even a few minutes, it should be apparent that whatever problem exists from the perverse incentives of pharmaceutical companies gets far worse when we have immunity from liability. So I don't know. Maybe there's a good answer to your question, but I have yet to hear it. And I certainly haven't been able to come up with anything. And I've spent a tremendous amount of time looking for some alternative explanation. I don't want to conclude. a bunch of rubes, right? And they, it could be an instance of the experts thinking Americans, they can't, they can't handle nuance. If you tell them they don't have to get vaccinated because they had COVID, then, you know, the rubes are just going to wrongly assume that

they don't have to get vaccinated at all. They're not going to understand. So, you know, our, our big brother is going to take care of us dum-dums by just saying, everyone's got to get it, period. I don't, it could be your theory as well. Greed, you know, protection of these companies that have come up with these vaccines and making sure they get their payola. I don't know. But that one to me made absolutely no sense. Up next, we're going to get into the I word, ivermectin, the thing that cannot be said, according to YouTube and some of these other social media companies. But we're going to say it. We're going to talk about it and why it became such a problem for Brett right after this. I want to talk about ivermectin a little.

The word that shall not be mentioned because YouTube got so upset when you had a podcast about ivermectin. And I think it's kind of interesting. I mean, I will confess, I haven't bent that into the whole hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin debate. I just like, okay, if I get COVID, I mean, now I've been vaccinated, but if I had, if I get it now, or if I had gotten it before, I would have gone to my doctor and I would have said, what should we do? Do I, do I need a medicine at all? I'm relatively young. Like what? And if he had said, try ivermectin, I would have, I didn't really feel the need to sort of pronounce anything on it, but it's become a debate.

And for good reason, because if to your point, if we have what's essentially a cure, we should know it's cause for celebration. And here's my problem with it, with your discussion on it. You're not allowed to discuss it. You can't talk about ivermectin. Why not? What? I looked at it. I'm't talk about ivermectin. Why not? What? I looked at it.

I'm like, is Brett crazy? Is he is he out there? All the studies I saw that, you know, on my own, this is me with Canadian Debbie. She's my researcher doing our own, you know, sort of the stuff we would do to interview anybody. American Journal of Therapeutic Study, peer-reviewed meta-analysis study published June 17th, analyzed 24 randomized trials conducted in 15 countries, found that the drug ivermectin could reduce COVID-19 related deaths, found it reduced the risk of death in mild to moderate patients by an average of 62%. There was a study out of Australia. Researchers there show that treatment with ivermectin inhibited the COVID-19 virus within

24 to 48 hours of treatment. Preclinical data showed ivermectin prevented the virus's RNA from replicating. And still the FDA, I get it right now, they warn against unauthorized use of it. And I actually understand their warning. Okay. Because what they're saying is that clinical studies are underway. So kind of, we'll get back to you, but they take forever, which is why people have the conversations in the meantime and people are dying. But the FDA wants people to understand that there are some risks with ivermectin because when people just hear about a drug

and start pumping it into themselves without doing their homework, bad things can happen. Ivermectin, which I now know, treats rosacea. It can treat head lice. It can come in a tablet form or I think some sort of a lotion form. They give it to animals to prevent worms or treat worms. Okay. Don't take your horse's ivermectin. Don't take any medicine without running it by your doctor. Assess the

risks of any medication or the effectiveness of any medication with your doctor. We don't want people just, you know, self-diagnosing and self-medicating. But you tell me, Brett, why we can't discuss the fact that there are several studies showing this thing's amazing and it's actually doing some real good when it comes to the fight against COVID. Tremendous good in other parts of the world. But I'd like to reorient you a little bit, because again, I think that even as it's occurring to you that there is clearly utility in this drug, you're still subject to a false narrative about it. So the fact is we can both agree that there is some risk for having people self-medicate, that really using a drug off-label, meaning not for its original purpose, is something that should be done in consultation with your doctor.

But the FDA could be recommending to your doctor that they administer ivermectin cautiously to people who either have been exposed to COVID or have begun to show symptoms. We know that the drug works much better if it is given early, that delay is a problem. And we also know that this is one of the safest drugs that we have. It's been administered something like 4 billion times. It has been in use for four decades. It is among the safest drugs we have. And so what people should be comparing is if you show up at your doctor and you appear to have COVID, the current medical advice is to send you home to sicken in place. And if your lips begin to turn blue, then we take action. All of that time is lost. The fact that there is evidence, it may be noisy,

and we can talk about why it's noisy, statistically noisy, I mean, but the fact that there is evidence that this drug seems to work at very low risk and high effectiveness means that the Hippocratic oath effectively dictates that we should be giving it to people who appear to be exposed to COVID or have just come down with COVID, and we should be giving it to them as early as possible. Prescribing drugs off-label is something doctors do. It's something they're trained to do. And in this case, we have— That's why we have Botox, keeping away our wrinkles. That's not what it was designed for.

Indeed. And so there's no reason that I can come up with that we shouldn't be cautiously administering this drug. And if somehow, somehow the critics are right, and I can't imagine in light of the huge volume of evidence and the multiple different kinds of evidence that point to its effectiveness, but if they were somehow right and it does not work, we will not have harmed patients by administering it and we could stop administering it. So that is the difference, as I understand it, between ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which in studies actually did do some harm. It was causing some harm to people. And that's why they say they shut down

those studies and kind of shied away from that drug, which some people had touted as a miracle drug. But as I see the studies on ivermectin, they haven't gotten to that place. And even Vice, which took a shot at you and went off on this long thing, even they said, the studies show ivermectin is at best a mediocre treatment for COVID. That's an endorsement coming from Vice, which normally I would expect to be completely on the other side for whatever it's worth. Again, I asked my doctor who I trust. He's an older guy. He's been around a long time and he's infectious disease guy. And he said, there's no hard data to support the use of this drug.

He said, we need to adhere to a scientific model of proof to avoid injuring people or misdirecting them, i.e. giving them a false sense of security. Controlled experimentation is what is needed. And that experimentation, he said, should not be suspended in any sort of an emotional or frightened frenzy, right? And is there risk of that? That, I mean, maybe that is what happened with hydroxychloroquine, right? They suspended the testing. Well, I would like to see as much evidence collected as possible, but the studies have to be designed well.

And so, for example, there is this, ivermectin has been added to a trial at Oxford, but the design of the trial appears like it's being set up to fail. They're soliciting people up to 14 days past the onset of symptoms or past a positive COVID test. And while yes, it is true that if you just did that at random, you would get some people who had just contracted COVID, the later you give it, the less well it works. So this may sound counterintuitive, but a well-designed randomized controlled trial is excellent. A poorly designed randomized controlled trial is very misleading. What we have is a meta-analysis that is composed of many smaller trials. And the good thing about a meta-analysis

is that the flaws in one trial tend to be canceled out by the strengths of another. So although it- That's the one by Tess Laurie. Exactly. And the evidence there is very strong. It is plenty strong to administer a safe drug to people for whom we have no alternative. I would also point out though, that the story about ivermectin is distorted because people are far too focused on the treatment aspect of the drug. And the treatment aspect is A, complex. There's a question of what the appropriate dose is. There's a question about when it should be administered. And all of those things make the evidence around

it noisy. But it has a second value, which as far as I know, none of the other repurposed drugs do, and that is as a prophylactic for preventing COVID. And we really need to be thinking about the following question. the average effectiveness expected by the meta-analysis or the average effectiveness determined by the meta-analysis. That's a very high percentage of effectiveness. We have a study in Argentina, a very powerful study in which 1,200 people participated. They were frontline COVID workers, so they were being exposed to COVID. 800 of them were given the drug. None of them came down with COVID. And in the 400 member control group, 57% of these frontline workers contracted the disease. Now, either that study is outright fraud for which there is no evidence that it is, or it is very powerful evidence for the capacity of ivermectin to prevent people from contracting this disease. And my contention is, even if the

number that's borne out by wider use is the 86% number, that number is high enough to drive SARS-CoV-2 to extinction with no other tools. And so when we talk about things like the adverse event signal surrounding the vaccines, we need to talk about it not by comparing it to the risk to people with no preventive measures at all. We need to compare it to this preventive measure that we have at our disposal and say, if the numbers are what they appear to be, there's no reason to be exposing people to a large adverse event risk when we have a safe alternative that works similarly. And if I could just make one last point there, even if you think this is wrong, even if you think it is well-established that these vaccines are

safe and that the adverse event signal is going to turn out to be something about the way data is collected rather than about people being sickened. It still makes sense. If you're pro-vaccine because you want us to get to herd immunity in order to drive the pathogen to extinction, it makes sense for you also to be rooting for the administration of ivermectin to people who've been recently exposed or the use of it as a preventive measure because Some fraction of the population has had the vaccine and they are immune. And some fraction of the population is on ivermectin. And we can get that number above the critical threshold. We can drive the pathogen to extinction.

And our likelihood of doing that is far lower if we're not using all the tools at our disposal. I mean, I should say that the FDA definitely does not want you using ivermectin intended for horses. Don't fucking take your horse's medicine. Sorry, but that's a dumbass thing to do. Don't do that. Go to your doctor. Ask him if he likes ivermectin for you. That's it.

Don't listen to Brett. Don't listen to me. We're just trying to have a discussion about what are the arguments that are getting people talking about this? And Brett, he's got his feelings. And I've told you my doctor's feelings. I'm I'm open minded to what my doctor says, but I certainly would not be taking medicine or not taking it based on anything I heard on YouTube or on a podcast. You know, that's what we have physicians for.

What what what's bothering me about your situation is the censorship of discussion. And I understand that YouTube is going to say, no, no, no, this is like, we're trying to stop the guy from saying drink antifreeze, which by the way, will instantly kill you. Um, they're trying to say, we're not suppressing any science. You know, science is going on. Ivermectin is being studied, the vaccines and their side effects are being studied. But we are stopping what we think are potentially irresponsible discussions that could hurt people prior to us having all the answers. And the answer to that is, how do we get all the answers? We have to talk. And you're not some snake oil salesman. You, as you point out, are an evolutionary biologist who studies studies and studies

trends and knows how to read these studies in a way not every Joe Schmo knows how to. And you have responsible discussions. They may not always be conducted perfectly, according to Megyn Kelly. Who cares? I'm not your boss. And more and more, this is what's happening. Matt Taibbi made the point when Alex Jones got deplatformed, people wondered, is this a slippery slope, right?

Is it like, where is this going? And he said, you know, we're there. It is a slippery slope. And you're a great evidence of the fact that they've gotten too powerful and too quick to press the off button on people's microphones. Yeah, I would just add that capture of regulatory agencies is a well-known hazard. There's a question here as to whether or not capture has occurred, and it has somehow been extended to the social media platforms. In effect, their censorship policy is protecting the capturers, which in this case would likely be the pharmaceutical industry, and their proxies in the public health apparatus.

And the question that I would ask people is, maybe you don't believe that that has happened in this case. But if it were to happen, we would have to discuss it somewhere in order to figure out how to regain control so that the public health authorities can go back to protecting the public health. And if YouTube is going to prevent the discussion, then effectively, the capture is complete. So I really think that that's what we're fighting about ultimately, and that the examples here provide us a set of test cases. These are places where we have evidence. It's available to evaluate. Experts can talk about what it does and doesn't mean. People can listen in and contribute, and that's the healthy thing to do. The unhealthy thing to do is to assume that public health officials are automatically right because they hold those titles.

That's really true. And we've talked about on this show before deference to authority, whether it was the FBI, who would be deferential to James Comey, knowing now what we know about him, right? Or the CIA, talk to Glenn Greenwald, the NSA, right? Like talk to Glenn. Even the president, right? Like there's plenty of reason. Pick your poison. Obama, Trump, now Biden. Do you want to be deferential to that president? Any of them? Do you think they're thinking about you, whoever you are, or are they thinking about themselves? Question for you though. This I want to ask you about. There was a, you took down this tweet,

and I just want to ask you about it because it was June 24th, and you tweeted as follows. For months, I've asked everyone I talked to if they're vaccinated and what their experience was. Nearly all had scary symptoms, some terrifying. Question, so how could anyone doubt that there is a huge adverse event signal? Answer, most aren't talking unless asked.

Asked around. Ask around. We have a problem. But then the next day you tweeted out, my tweet was bad and I know it. Without presenting the background, it was alarmist in effect and not clarifying. I apologize. So what do you make of that? When I read that, I just thought, so he's taking anecdotal evidence and making it into a thing like it's a pronouncement on reality. And that you can't do that. Right. Like I, I could have responded. I, I, for months I've asked everyone if I talked to, if they're vaccinated and what their experience was nearly all had amazing experiences with zero symptoms. And we're really, really gratified to have the vaccine. That doesn't tell me you'd say

MK, that doesn't tell us anything. You haven't talked to the people I've talked to, right? So to me, I thought it was not really valuable. I don't know. But why did you take it down? Well, let's add a couple of things to what you've said about the story. I did bank the tweet. It is an honest account of my experience. Now, I will say in the aftermath of the tweet, I did think about all of the conversations I had had, and I did come up with a couple others of people who did not have remarkable symptoms. But in my sample, and there's nothing that says that my sample is representative, nor did I suggest that it was, but in my sample, the number of people who did have something alarming to report was shockingly high. Now, what you didn't say in describing this is I took the tweet down.

I then described why I am alarmed by certain symptoms that other people might well not be alarmed by. In other words, I don't find a headache alarming under normal circumstances, but a crippling headache, one that sends you to bed because you can't function any longer in the aftermath of a vaccination like this one in which we have a protein that we have strong evidence shreds the blood-brain barrier, that is alarming. So in any case- Again, that's denied by scientists we've had on the show and trust. What is denied? That it crosses the blood-brain barrier. Again, I read to you earlier that actually what they're

saying is these vaccines appear to prevent that kind of transmission. Well, what I said was that the spike protein shreds the blood brain barrier, perforates it. And we do have evidence of this, which I posted in my thread. When I took down, just so your listeners understand, when I took down my tweet, I did what I always do when I take down a tweet in a substantive way. You know, if I make a stupid mistake and I need to retype it, that's one thing. But if I make a substantive mistake and I take down a tweet, I always screenshot it and I post it because what I don't want is for my wrong tweet to spread, but I don't want to hide what I wrote.

I want people to be able to follow the history of it. And so in this case, what I did was I wrote a thread in which I included that screenshot, and I included the evidence for various things, including the perforation of the blood-brain barrier by the spike protein. So anyway, people can evaluate it as they like, but there is reason to be concerned about this, and there are symptoms, frankly, of the post-vaccine syndromes that many people are suffering, including something called brain fog, something that actually Dr. Malone reports that he, who is vaccinated, is suffering from. I've had several other friends of mine report a profound- That's anecdotal. That's anecdotal. Everybody I know who's gotten the vaccine loves that they've had none of that. You can't go by

anecdotal. No, no, no. Hold on a second. What the end of my tweet, which again, I'm not standing behind the suite. I took it down because I did think it was a bad tweet, as I said, quite clearly. But the point of my tweet was you should ask people in your circle. And it is interesting that somebody like you in your circle, you tell me that you asked and I take you at your word that you've asked people and you've only heard good reports. Right. I heard one problematic report, which I which I told my audience about before it was with the Johnson and Johnson. It was it was one of the women who got a blood clot, although she was not one of the ones who was identified. You know what? They remember they said we only had six and she was not one of the six. So that was somebody who I don't know, but I met at a party. But I have asked everybody. I live in New York. Everyone's been vaccinated and it's been uniformly positive.

But I, like you, understand that doesn't really mean anything. That's not a scientific example. It's not a scientific example. My point was that, I mean, the point of the tweet, if people want to go back and look at it, is that I believe that there is a bias against talking about the adverse events. And the reason I think that is because I've made a point of asking and people who said nothing, or if we were discussing it, and I said, are you vaccinated? They said yes. And then they didn't say anything about it. And then I said, okay, what was your experience? I get back these stories. It's not every time, but it is an alarming percentage of the people I have asked. And this includes- But you also don't know whether brain fog,

it was caused by the vaccine. You get the vaccine on Tuesday and you have brain fog on Wednesday. You have no idea whether you would have had the brain fog without the vaccine. Maybe you have low blood sugar that day. You skip breakfast. This is why we don't normally cite examples like that as relevant at all until they've been run through the scientific studies. Well, okay. But first of all, this is my area of expertise. What this is, is an observation. It's the first step in the scientific method. If you notice a pattern, right? You haven't taken data on it, but you see a pattern. Then you come up with a hypothesis about what might be causing that pattern. Then you make predictions from that hypothesis. And then you either run an experiment

in a laboratory or you collect data that would test the predictions in some natural context. And my point was, I've got an observation. That observation tells me that there is something to talk about. Now, if it was true that most people had the opposite, then yeah, that's going to suggest that my observations here are somehow subject to sampling error. I don't know why they would be, but it could be that there's something about my friend group. Well, there could be something about your own internal bias that you already decided that the vaccines are not safe.

And therefore you're looking to confirm your own bias. But I haven't decided that. Well, I mean, just having listened to your podcast, you're not, you're not pro vaccine. Oh, now I'm alarmed, but I did not start out that way. I started out enthusiastic. This was 6-24. It's not like this was six months ago. No, no. But what I was reporting in my tweet was that I had done this over a long period of time. So I wasn't initially even eligible for the vaccine. And so I was, and Heather and I talked early on in the vaccinations about the concern over the fact that we have no information about their long-term impact. We can't have that information. And so that is something that we need to be honest about, which is to the

extent that we can say something like these vaccines are safe, we are talking about in the short term and we are leaving the question of what happened. That is true. So I was interested in the question of whether or not something would show up over time. And so I did start asking early on. And I was initially concerned about what we didn't know long term, but I was rooting for the vaccines and expecting them to work. And in fact, in many ways, they have worked. They've been highly effective at preventing COVID infections. So that's a very good thing.

The question is, what else do they do? Up next, what I think is the most profound part of our interview, we get into Evergreen and Brett getting just pummeled on Clubhouse and why he does that and why he keeps going into the fray in this way. And is it worth engaging these woke warriors who are not proceeding in good faith? And the moment that made us both cry. Don't miss that. That's right after this. But first, before we get to that and our quick commercial, I want to bring you our feature called Asked and Answered, where we get after some of our listener mail. Steve Krakauer is our executive producer. He's got today's question.

Hey, Steve. Hey, Megan. This one comes to us at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. It's from James Benjamin and really relates to today's show, I think, in a lot of ways, because James says that his wife and him have different political views. Sometimes it can be a strain on their relationship. He leans right, she leans left. But besides politics, their relationship is great. But he says they're expecting their first child in September and he's wondering what advice you might offer for relational and parenting advice when raising a child with parents with two very different worldviews. Well, I think this is great. This is great for your kids because it's going to force you to offer reasoned arguments and expose them to both sides. Both sides-ism is somehow a dirty word today. Well, screw those people who say that.

People are complicated. Issues are complicated. They're not black and white. It's not perfectly clear. This is some of the stuff we're talking about and certainly political matters. And I think you do your kids a service by exposing them to arguments and ideas. That's what we try to do. And that's what you guys will necessarily do, because you're less likely to describe an issue in a way that's completely unfair to the other side if your wife happens to share that other side worldview. And so I think it's a great opportunity for you, even if your wife's not around, to describe an issue. Let's take one of the diciest, abortion, in a way that's fair to the other perspective. I do that with my kids all the time. I don't actually always tell them where I stand on an issue. I will. It's not like I'm

trying to keep it a secret, but I'm not really in the business of trying to make them share my worldview. I'm in the business of trying to teach them how to think, how to be critical thinkers. And so if that's your approach, then you're, even if your wife and you had the same views, you'd be talking about the other side fairly. So your kids can make up their own mind. And I actually make a conscious effort often to not put my thumb on the scale. You know, I don't know how my kids are going to come down on these issues. And I think they have to function in a world that's extremely woke and they pussyfoot around all these issues in a way I don't. So I don't really want to push them to be like me because it's a difficult existence. But I do want to push them to know how to think through things and to argue a logical point

and to look for the flaws in their own logic in order to make an argument. And so you have a great opportunity because you've got somebody right there who's going to hold your feet to the fire if you misstep or if you're too partisan or, you know, just unfair in the way you present an issue. So it's an opportunity to raise great critical thinkers. I just, I wish you good luck with it. And I think in discussing the items, whatever the items are of the day, remember that in describing the other view, they're held by somebody you really love and your kids really love too. So you don't want to say anything too personally diminishing and something that will keep your kids' minds open.

And then privately, when they get older over a beer, you can tell them how they need to think. You can tell them what the real answers are once they've had a chance to kick things around and come to their own opinions. And you can tell them why they're all wrong. And these colleges are teaching them the wrong things and they're not going to be limousine liberals. Wait, what? James, thank you for the question.

If anybody else has one, it's questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. Now back to Brett. The way I first got to know you is with what happened at Evergreen. I think that's how a lot of people first got to know you is with what happened at Evergreen. I think that's how a lot of people first got to know you and your name. What happened to you there was very unfair. And you don't know this, but on this show, we've talked about it many times because the

movie No Safe Spaces by Mark Joseph is it's truly like my Dianetics. It's that and Douglas Murray's book, The Madness of Crowds. I just think it was so revealing and it left me glued to my chair when it was over. I just couldn't move. And the part that brought me to tears, I actually had, I was weeping in the movie theater, was the part about your story and what happened at Evergreen and on the campus there to you and to the young black woman who tried to just speak with you about it. And it was publicly shamed and made to read aloud in front of everybody,

essentially an apology for Danny Davis speak to you, just trying to speak about what happened. And she was punished, humiliated. You and your wife were effectively forced out of your jobs. They paid you a pittance. It wasn't enough. And I just feel like you've been on this life mission of, forgive me because I hate this term, but speaking truth to power or just pushing back against narratives that don't ring true for you and wanting to know more. And that's, I'm sure this isn't where it started. You've probably led a life like this, but so the audience understands it quickly because they probably know you by this point, but you're a professor at Evergreen.

You're a Bernie Sanders supporter, you know, firm, progressive. And then one day you push back against a movement at the school to have sort of an annual sick out where people of color voluntarily chose not to attend. Just to bring the message of like, this is what life would be like without us until this one year where they switched it and said, now, how about you? Non people of color, white people. How about you don't come? And you publicly took a stance and said, this makes me uncomfortable. This is different. One race telling another, don't show up. I'm short forming. And all hell broke loose. You were under threat. Security campus police told you that they couldn't protect you. The university president didn't stand by you. You were treated like you showed up to do your class in a KKK hat and robe, as opposed to somebody who said like, is this the same? I don't know. It doesn't feel fair. It was so disturbing. And they swarmed the office of the administrator. They're not happy about you being there. They want you fired. They want everyone apologizing who's ever getting to speak to you. And we have a little abutted soundbite of some

of what happened when the protesters, the people who were upset, confronted the administration there. Listen. Ho, ho! These racist teachers have got to go! Hey, hey! Ho, ho! These racist teachers have got to go! Hey hey, ho ho, these racist teachers have got to go! Fuck you and fuck the police! That's how whiteness works! Whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breathe! While somebody's talking, you are not listening! In your head, if you're thinking of a response,

while somebody's talking, that is not listening! You need to listen it's not an accident that all of our administration is white right it's not an accident that shit is systematic as fuck the thing is that my ancestors were slaves and your ancestors were not your ancestors came here of free choice and decided to bring along my people of their not of their own free will to work and build this country okay and so i'm just letting you know that slavery still has repercussions in society today and that is what we're here about those repercussions it doesn't go away it's not over not over. I played that for Douglas Murray and he said, in response to that last point, we can all do that. We can all do that.

Now, everyone's got something in their history. You're Jewish. If you want to play the card of what happened to your ancestors, you absolutely can. It doesn't do anybody any good. But just listening to that now, I'm curious, do you feel like it was folly to believe you could have had a rational discussion with the particular mob that came for you there? You know, that's a very interesting question. I still, I feel like my values forced me to attempt to have that conversation, whether or not I think it's likely to work. And there's certainly many instances in the week of protests that quickly became riots in which there were hints of progress. And I would also point out, it took me months to realize what the protesters who showed up at my classroom as the whole thing began to unfold, what they were expecting. And I should point out for your listeners, none of the students who protested and demanded my firing or my resignation were students that I knew. My students stood by me, including numerous students of color. And I believe that that surprised the organizers of

the protest. I believe they were expecting my students to defect and they got quite the opposite. So was it folly to imagine that one could reason with such a mob? At one level, maybe. On the other hand, the demonstration that people who had direct knowledge of it might be natural to wonder whether that person is a bit tone deaf about race or might harbor some kind of prejudice. And then to discover that it's actually a totally false story because those who were engaged in the protesting and rioting filmed everything. And it becomes very clear in reviewing those films that the charge is false. That's a very interesting thing to be revealed. So while reasoning with the protesters arguably didn't work, revealing what the actual internal dynamics were was very successful. And yes, it did not save my job or my wife's job. But I do believe it was a victory for the values that are now being jeopardized and that we have to protect. That's so good. You're 100% right. That rings so true to me. I can honestly tell you, I don't think I'd be sitting here today doing this podcast

if I hadn't heard about this, if I hadn't seen it, if I hadn't been moved by it the way I was. It was just devastating to me as a window into what's happening in our country. The cruelty, the unfairness of it, the unreasonableness of some of the positioning and what happened to the young girl, a young black girl who tried to talk to you, you know, just wanted to ask you about the letter. And she was, she too was treated like she had the hat on. I mean, just for wanting to speak to you. And then they made her read a pre-written apology for that sin. And this was the moment. It's not the same listening to it now, forgive me, but people need to see this movie, No Safe Spaces, and you'll feel as I did with the buildup. But here's that

clip. I've demonstrated anti-blackness in the pigeon-holding, charging, and sentencing of two black trans disabled students based on false racially charged alleged allegations sorry they humiliated her she wasn't a good public speaker she had trouble reading their text she needed it didn't matter that she was a person of color. She had to be humiliated for her sin of wanting to speak about it. I, I just, to this moment, it makes me emotional. It has to stop. It's the reason I get up in the morning and do this show. It's the reason I don't care what people call me. I don't care what they say. The discussions have to go on. There should be no third rails. Ivermectin, vaccines, Black Lives Matter, trans kids running against cis kids, whatever it is, conversation is the key to solving it. Yeah, I agree. I must say when you play that clip, um, I am not somebody who cries easily. It's, it's fairly rare for me, but that clip,

the, um, there's something so horrifying about, and I think your listeners probably won't quite get the context, but she actually wanted to figure out, she'd never met me and she wanted to figure out if what was being said about me was true. And the way for her to figure it out was for her just to come talk to me. It's the most honorable, natural instinct you can imagine. And it went well, actually. It's one of the things about that week that was actually a sign of hope. We had this discussion and she and I did connect. And then to find her humiliated in front of a crowd, forced to read a statement.

My assumption is that maybe like me, she's dyslexic. Reading in front of a crowd, you know, forced to read a statement. My assumption is that maybe like me, she's dyslexic. Reading in front of a crowd is not easy. And to just put her to that cruel fate is so, it's almost indescribably upsetting. And yeah, I agree with you. You know, her story, I think you've hit the nail on the head. Her story indicates that the solution to many of these things begins with an honest, candid conversation. And that it's hard for me to think of an example where the people who are interested in shutting down conversation are in the right. Yeah. I see a connective strain. You're still out there doing it. I don't know whether you probably wouldn't be doing this if what happened at Evergreen hadn't happened because you'd be still teaching and not doing a podcast and YouTube show, but there's clearly something in you. You're a fighter in a way I admire and to some extent can relate to. I flatter myself, but I I see you sort of banging your head against that brick wall, no matter how hard it looks or how how bad the consequences could potentially be to you.

And I will. That brings me to another moment with you, Brett. I follow you. You went on Clubhouse, which I don't really get. I complained a long time ago that I hadn't been invited to go on Clubhouse and then everybody started inviting me. I never went on. I don't want to. It's not my thing. You went into this, I don't really understand how it works, but a room

that had been sort of taken over by Black Lives Matter activists, I guess it's fair to say they were but they're not just black lives but the trans stuff and all of it you they were railing on you i think before you even joined and then you joined them and brett it didn't go well and all i thought as your fan was what is he doing sitting here right now i actually understand better but let me play the clip and then i'd love to get your thoughts on it. Do you believe in white supremacy? Do you believe in white?

Are those sentiments that you stand by? People here are saying that you have spewed racism across this app. So can you speak to that? Can I, can I ask something of you before I answer your questions? Did you answer those questions? Do you support white supremacy? Are you anti-racist? And transphobia. Okay.

I'm happy to do all these things, but I would ask you to try to listen. No, listen, listen, white man. We're in charge here, okay? We asked you some questions. You can answer them or you can go. First of all, I'm not a classical liberal. I'm an actual liberal, okay?

Far left, have been my whole life. I am thoroughly anti-racist by any normal definition, but I don't like Kendi's definition of anti-racist. That doesn't make sense to me. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination, a white supremacist. As a matter of fact, I'm not even sure whether I qualify as white. I'm Jewish. It's a different thing. My people have been persecuted by Europeans. You are, Brett. You're just spicy white. But continue. So you saying that you are an evolutionary biologist does little to claim eugenicists was also a field in science. So your claims do not push the fact that you are not transphobic.

That's still a transphobic position to take. It's not transphobic. I's still a transphobic position to take. It's not transphobic. I'm interested in seeing trans people protected. How can you say that something is not transphobic when people are literally telling you that it's transphobic? Like, the privilege. So I don't understand how you think this works, okay?

We can have a disagreement. We can have a disagreement about whether or not I'm transphobic. No, we can have a disagreement. You can not i'm no we can't have a disagreement you're gonna have to go to the audience and you need to cash out everybody up here a thousand dollars for you coming back up next we just let you speak and that's exactly what you dispute white supremacy wrong not even a little and all i could think when I heard that was John McWhorter's advice, was about John McWhorter's advice, which is to do not engage with the woke in this way. It is a fruitless exercise. He's made the point of they need to be defeated, not engaged. But what,

why did you, why did you try? Well, so first of all, I didn't set out to have a confrontation with them. The way Clubhouse works, you go into a room and you listen. And then if you want to come up on stage, you raise your hand. And so I was interested to hear the discussion because part of what I'm about is understanding how things look from other people's perspectives. And especially if a perspective is one that you don't naturally understand, it makes sense. It's a privilege to be able to go listen to such a conversation and hear how people sound to themselves. So at some level, whether it sounds honorable or not, I think I was doing research. And then at the point that they noticed me, there's no way to be anonymous in Clubhouse. At the point that they noticed me, things unfolded as your listeners have now heard. But I would also say, you know, there's part of me that people come up to me all the time and they say certain things about what they see. First of all, in my experience in the last four years, almost every time somebody has come up to me and recognize me, they've said nice things,

right? On Twitter, I get hate, but in person, that's not what happens. They say nice things. And one of the things they say is that I'm brave. And I look at this and I think, I was in my own house and I walked into a quote unquote room of people who vehemently disagree with my perspective. And I tried to engage them. And, you know, I mean, this was a walk in the park compared to Evergreen. And frankly, Evergreen, as frightening as it was at times, is also likely to have been safer than what people have done throughout history confronting evil of various kinds. And so I wonder if we haven't just gotten soft and if I'm trying to find my way back to some level of willingness to confront things that actually stands a chance of leading to a solution.

So yeah, it wasn't my plan that that would happen. I didn't know that the event would become famous, but I also think it's not quite true that there's no point in having these conversations because they're the people I talk to. I don't think the people I talk to were likely to have been persuaded by anything. But then there are also a lot of people who heard the interaction in real time and then as it has been repeated across the internet. sounds like might awaken them that you can't just sign up for something where the label on the box says black lives matter. You have to check what's in the box and it doesn't match, right? This is not a, there's no future in this perspective. I just think to me, for me, I wouldn't, I would not engage in a discussion with people who were not proceeding in good faith. And to just dismiss you as a white supremacist, they called you a eugenicist because you're an evolutionary biologist. They really thought you were, they didn't sound particularly smart,

to be perfectly honest. And they, they were not there in good faith. They just wanted to beat you up. And to me, it was upsetting to listen to. And there's zero chance I would do that to myself. Even if it was for the greater good, it's like I only have a limited amount of time on this earth and mental, my own mental health would prevent me from, I was like, I could also go follow the number six bus and just inhale as much exhaust as it puts out from, you know, Broadway over to Columbus, but I have better things to do with my time. Okay. But I agree with this. And certainly it would not make sense to keep doing such things because there's diminishing returns and the amount one learns

from each new interaction is less and less. On the other hand, when you've been told that some other group misunderstands something and you've heard their perspective described, it makes sense to go check whether that is a match. And one of the things that gets said about what happened to my wife and me at Evergreen and in particular, what I said to the Congress about it when I testified, I said effectively that this wasn't a free speech issue, that it wasn't fundamentally about college campuses and that it would spill out. It was about power and control. Yes, it was about power.

It's about turning the tables of oppression or perceived oppression and that it would find its way into every part of society. And that has now happened. So how did I know that? I knew that because I had participated in enough of these discussions to know what they were made of, to know where they were headed. And so I think there is some value in doing that. And you can be surprised in both directions. Sometimes you tune into a conversation that you think is nonsense and you discover it isn't. So, you know, step outside your bubble. Well, that's interesting. I mean, if you're there as a researcher,

you know, as somebody who's observing human behavior and seeing what happens next, I guess that's one thing. I would say attempt to persuade. It's willful ignorance. They were not there to learn anything or open-minded in any way. And it was not a good faith receipt of your your good faith attempt to be there. But anyway a cult and the members of the cult think they're stopping oppression. But the leaders know what they're really doing is turning the table on oppression and eliminating due process and other protections in in the process. So the leaders are I think your point was that you were trying to make the leaders are fine with oppression just as long as they're on the right side of it. Yes, and they are very foolish to imagine that they will remain on the right side. What they're doing is inherently unstable. And unfortunately, they are going to take out the pillars of Western civilization before they discover that what they have achieved, even from their own perspective, is not going to last.

We can't let that happen. But in some sense, I think it does take people with maybe my strange instinct to walk towards these things and to engage with them in order to find out that that's true. I know so many people who were caught off guard by the woke revolution and its effectively capturing of institution after institution and they didn't have to be surprised. It was there. They could have seen it coming and arguably we could have prevented it if more people had understood that that was the case.

But at least now what we have is a prediction that turned out to be quickly, quickly borne out. And it raises the question of, OK, well, what's next? Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. You were ground zero. You really were. You were in the thick of it and saw it on the front lines before a lot of us did. And more accurately, because people knew that college campuses were really left and that some of this stuff was bubbling up, but didn't necessarily predict the complete takeover of academia, K-12, sports, corporate America. And on it goes the way we've seen in particular since George Floyd. I want to ask you about something you talked about on your podcast recently, and it was about an interview you had done about all of this, I think. And there was an interviewer

who asked you a great question. And I thought, oh, that's fascinating. And even you were like, it's a great question. And it was about whether you'd considered that martyrdom is like a drug. Can you talk about what that raised for you and how you process that question? Sure. That's from Lex Friedman's podcast. Right, right, Lex. And he asked the question, it caught me a little bit off guard, which is part of why it was so good. And I know he was asking in some sense, things related to what you've been getting at here, which is why is my instinct to engage where maybe I know that it's not going to work out? Why would I, for example, find myself in a conflict with YouTube when I can obviously calculate the

odds of winning a conflict with YouTube as well as anybody else can? And I guess what I told Lex and what I then thought more about and said on my podcast was that I don't think there's any part of me that is interested in martyrdom. That really we've got two phenomena that seem alike, but they're actually opposite. People who seek martyrdom are actually, they're needy. They have some thing that they're trying to do internally. And the confrontation with whatever the foe is, is like a drug. And then there are people who are willing to accept a risk in order to accomplish something, but it's not that they want something bad to happen to them, but they know that, well, in evolutionary terms, we would say that in order to get to a higher peak, you have to go through what we call an

adaptive valley. And that can be very dangerous. In fact, it can be fatal. But I also have to say, we are all mysteries to ourselves. It's possible there's something in me that I don't know is there. But when I do a thorough census, when I talk to people who know me well, it does not make sense that this is some compulsion on my part. It actually makes more sense that I feel an obligation to do something. And I guess the last thing I would say is that having been through a number of these events, and they don't actually start with Evergreen, they start much earlier than that for me, but having been through them, there is a skill set that gets built up where you learn, you know, just as if you put somebody on a battlefield who's never been there, presumably they freeze up, they don't know what to do. But if you take somebody who's been through many battles, they probably have a really good idea how not to get distracted by the huge risks that are present. So I think my trajectory in life

has allowed me to see some of these confrontations. Maybe I've just been lucky, or maybe I've been skillful, or maybe it's a combination of the two, almost certainly it's that, but I've survived them to this point. And so I do suspect I know something about how to engage these things. And it's not like one wins every time, but to see them, to expose them, to live to fight another day,

that seems like a worthy thing to invest in, especially when the stakes are as high as they seem to be. Well, I agree with that. I think having watched you, it's kind of the opposite of martyrdom because the way I see the way you've challenged, you've handled your challenges is it's not about you. It's about principle. You're a man of principle. And if you have to sacrifice the self in service of the greater principle, whether it's conversation, engaging, pushing back

against narratives, even if you're going to be called names or considered heterodox, standing up to bullies, you do it. Even if you will have to pay some price, not that you want to pay the price. It's just when you look at the hierarchy of principles, truth, conversation, learning, honesty, all that ranks high for you. That's how it seems. And, and also standing up to bullies who don't like somebody like that. They, you know, YouTube right now is bullying you to accept the narrative or else. And you could have stopped after your episode on ivermectin. They put your neck on the chopping block and you didn't. And I don't think it was because you wanted to poke the bear or you wanted to martyr yourself. It's because you have a greater commitment.

And if you're going down, you're going down swinging. So let's leave it at this. What now? How do we get YouTube to see it our way? I know you said we need Elon Musk to buy one of the vaccine companies, but short of Elon getting involved, how do we get YouTube to see it our way or at least behave better? Well, I'd like to say one thing in response to what you just said. You reminded me of something I haven't thought about in many years. I used to talk to students as the term privilege started to show up more and more.

I used to talk to them about what privilege actually is, and that privilege is kind of a bad term. It's not very useful, but unearned privilege is a useful term. That is to say, if you earn a privilege, then that's a reward for doing something good. And we shouldn't try to stamp that out because it actually makes civilization work better. But some of us, and I definitely include myself in this category, have some amount of privilege that didn't come from something we did. And my sense is it doesn't make sense to take it away, but it does make sense to think about whether or not having some of those privileges puts the onus on you to spend that privilege honorably.

And I hope that I am accurate in saying that what I think I am doing is recognizing that actually I'm tremendously lucky and that because I'm tremendously lucky, I can afford to take risks that others can't and that that's the tremendously lucky, I can afford to take risks that others can't and that that's the right thing to do. Oh, I appreciate that. You're going to be less able to afford it if YouTube stands by its decision. You still are without half of your family income.

Yes. We do need to reverse that. As successful as your podcast has been, the visual piece of it on YouTube is important. So I quite like your question, and I hope that this is a satisfying answer to it. I am resigned to the fact that in the short term, these battles are not really winnable. But I know most recently from the lab leak hypothesis and the turnaround that happened in the public narrative that somehow at the present moment, it is possible to embarrass the institutions into retreating and acknowledging certain things. And my hope

is that when people see that irrespective of where you come out on the evidence, that is to say the actual evidence, that there is sufficient evidence for anybody who looks at it to see that there is something wrong with the story regarding repurposed drugs. There is something wrong with respect to the story of the adverse event signal in the vaccines. And there was definitely something wrong in the claim that this virus had to have come directly from nature. And my hope is that sooner rather than later, people will start to notice this pattern, that they will recognize that on all of these different topics, the same people have sought to shut down discussion. They have turned out to be wrong in the end. And that that

says something really important about the state of our institutions and the jeopardy in which they are placing us. And I hope that it does not take 10 or 20 years to get there because frankly, I don't know what my family and I will do if it takes that long for the story to emerge. But one way or the other, we are going to have to confront what I think is the clear indication that these failures of narrative that put us in jeopardy are actually not the problem. They are the symptom of a problem that has no name, and it is one that must be our top priority. So I'm hoping that that happens soon and that we can get to the discussion about what to do with the failure of all of our institutions and how we can get

back to a society in which we move forward together and we believe in collective well-being. Well said. What a pleasure talking to you. Regards to your wife, Heather, who I know has been at your side and been through all of these with you. She co-hosts your shows and she was at Evergreen with you. So one day, I'd like to meet her as well. But all the best to you, Brett. We'll be watching and we'll continue covering it. Well, thanks so much. It was a tough but really terrific interview. And I look forward to our next conversation. Thank you. Same. Next up on the MK show, we've got a really interesting guest for you. Her name is Liesl Carpenter.

She's coming on to talk about the lawsuit she is pursuing against the Biden administration. She is a white rancher and she is going after them for this policy that he openly says is designed to help only farmers and ranchers of color. No farmers or ranchers who happen to have white skin will get any help from Joe Biden because they have the wrong melanin. Is that legal? Her story is fascinating. And how's the case going so far? That's next. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.