← Pod Force One
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- [00:02]
Miranda Devine
Joining us today on Pod Force One is Alex Berenson, a bestselling author, a top notch journalist, a former New York Times journalist, and just an all round great guy, a maverick, someone who's always challenged conventional wisdom when the facts show him that that's the way to go. He's a true journalist and have the utmost respect for him. Alex Berenson, welcome to Pod Force One.
- [00:31]
Alex Berenson
Well, it's a great pleasure. I mean, you usually have people like, you know, Donald Trump on. So I'm pleased to have snuck, snuck in.
- [00:39]
Miranda Devine
Well, I always add in my favorites and also people who have something to say and some wisdom to share. And I think you have buckets of it. And you've been in two of these sort of big, I don't know if they're cultural, sort of cultural battles, but really important battles that we've had. One of them being over censorship on social media, over your very early realization, I think, before a lot of other people, that the COVID 19 pandemic was, you know, overblown to say the least, and that the vaccines were not exactly vaccines. And so that's one whole aspect of your history that I want to get into. And Alex, you know, the hilarious thing is because it's just come out and just right on cue on Father's Day, the New York Times, and you wrote a terrific tweet about it. The New York Times had their fatherhood special. And tell us what they did.
- [01:46]
Alex Berenson
They had a trans dad. Okay. I mean, a woman turned man. Who is going to speak for fathers, okay. You know, you can't make that up. And I have to ask myself, as I, you know, as I asked in the, in the tweet, like, do they, are they so clueless that they didn't realize what they were saying? Or was this, you know, sort of an F you to, to, you know, to biological males who are dads. And I don't know the answer to that. You'd think it's the latter, right? You think they'd have to know that the pushback was coming. But the reason I think that might not be true, and I said this in another post on X, was if you look at the last month, they've had a number of stories about fatherhood and masculinity. They had an opinion conversation which featured two women and a childless man talking about fatherhood and masculinity. They had Frank Bruni writing a very nice piece, okay, but Frank Bruni is a gay man without kids writing about this. Then they had a woman named Darby Saxby writing about how fatherhood is great and, or, you know, the dad brain is different, but it's a good thing. Okay, I'm glad that they have, that they're saying positive things about fatherhood, but it is bizarre to me that they didn't find one, you know, biological male with children to talk about the virtues of fatherhood or the difficulties of fatherhood or whatever it is. And, and I do think that imagine the times having four opinion pieces about what it's like to be black in America and they don't have a single black person writing those pieces. The left would lose its mind. But because this is men and its fathers, somehow it's okay to disenfranchise them from talking about this themselves.
- [03:34]
Miranda Devine
I mean, why is that? Because I assume it comes from toxic masculinity vibe. And I mean, that has been disastrous on the left, particularly politically. You look at the Democrats now, they've chased out any red blooded men from voting for them or being part of their party. So they've had to go desperately seeking sort of what they think a man looks like. Like they started with Tim Waltz, they've got James Talafrico and then Graham Platner, who is vile, but he's the sort of left wing view of what a, I don't know, a white masculine male would look like. And he's a misogynist. Like he's, he's the epitome of toxic masculinity. And they think that's what all men are or something.
- [04:24]
Alex Berenson
That's right. If you don't have a Nazi tattoo, you can't speak to the white working class. I mean, that does seem to be what they think. It's, it's crazy. And one of the things I say in the fatherhood manifesto is in disenfranchising sort of normal fatherhood, in making men the butt of every joke and dads the butt of every joke for 30 years. You breed a backlash, right? You breed Andrew Tate, who I don't like and I know there's some people on the right who think he's honest or I think he's a bad guy.
- [04:54]
Miranda Devine
I understand him. I think he's disgusting.
- [04:57]
Alex Berenson
And by the way, there's a New Yorker.
- [04:59]
Miranda Devine
He's a predator.
- [05:00]
Alex Berenson
He's a predator. That's right. That's the word for him. Rapist or not, I don't know. But he's a predator 100%. And, and so, so there's a New Yorker article about him the other day where he's bragging about how many kids he has. All right, Andrew Tate is not a father. He's a sperm daughter, okay? He impregnating 12 women and, and barely knowing your kids names does not make you a father. But when we, when, when the left goes out of its way to mock men who are parenting and either say, you know, like, the only way to do this is essentially to be like mom number two, or if you're, you know, if you're the kind of dad who, who does, you know, you want to take your kids hunting or, you know, you want to, you want to be outside with them, that isn't good enough either, because that's, you know, hyper masculine or teaching the wrong traits. You know, the line I use in, in the, in the booklet is if you, if you're, if you're, if you make a dad wear a futurist female T shirt, do not be surprised when his son wakes up supporting Andrew Tate, even if he's involved, okay? Because there is gonna be a backlash there. So why the left is doing this? Look, I mean, I think there's a very interesting phenomenon in sort of elite feminism where women kind of go out of their way to talk about how terrible men are. And, and, and I don't know if that's from, you know, personally bad experience. I don't know. You know, and it reflects in a number of different ways. Okay? And this is something, you know, I've seen firsthand. I think a lot of men have seen firsthand and don't talk about which is, which is women will, Women will sort of valorize divorce and encourage each other to get divorced. There's a, you know, there's, there's, there literally has been a phenomenon of the divorce memoir, right. Of the last five years. And it's all women writing about how they needed to get out, they need break their marriages. Even if things weren't, you know, terrible, they, they weren't being beaten. You know, their, their husbands hadn't gained 300 pounds. They just were tired of it. Okay? And some cases, women have children. Now compare that to the reaction to strangers, okay? Which is, which is the Bell Burden book of, you know, that came out in January. And Bell Burden, you know, this very wealthy woman who sort of downplayed her wealth and, and, and claims in her book that she was at risk of losing two houses, her $12 million, you know, Tribeca loft and her $10 million house in Martha's Vineyard because her husband was going to fight her over money, which the New Yorker actually pretty convincingly demonstrated was not true. But what's really interesting isn't that Bell Burden made stuff up about, or, you know, or let's say, took the most favorable attitude in writing about her own divorce. Because, you know, people do that. Divorce is very painful and messy and, and I don't think you can expect the person involved to be completely honest ever. I just, it's just, it's, it's very hard to do that. What's interesting is that women have said, well, I don't really care if she lied because, because what he did in leaving her in, in ditching this 20 year marriage and in having an affair with a younger woman is, is so crummy and toxic that she's entitled to get everything. All right, fine. You want to take that attitude? Okay, then tell me why you're yelling that the divorce memoirs where women who are seeking their bliss and dumping their husbands, their perfectly decent husbands, is also okay. Pick a side. Either marriage is something that you have to put effort into and try to get through bad periods and, and especially when there are kids involved, or you're entitled to go off on your own and do whatever you want because you want to be happy. But the rules need to be the same for women or men. And I do, I think women have taught themselves. I mean, again, this is sort of an elite, you know, female phenomenon. This is a New York magazine reading Vogue, reading, you know, New York, L.A. but these people are really important because they set the culture and, and, and they've talked themselves into something that I think is really harmful for women, for men, for families. And, you know, I, I mean, I, I feel like I'm in a position for various reasons to talk about this in an honest way and, and to say no, like, this is not a good thing to be encouraging. And, and if you're gonna, if you're gonna pick on Henry Davis because he walked out on Bell Burden and their kids, I get that. But do not then tell me that Miranda July or whoever, you know, is a hero for leaving their, you know, not great, but not terrible marriage.
- [09:53]
Miranda Devine
Yeah, you're right. I mean, I have a friend that, that happened to, and he's a great guy and had done absolutely nothing wrong in the marriage. In fact, he was one of the people that always put his wife on a pedestal and, you know, would take her out to, like, to fancy dinners for a birthday and I. Anyway, he was a good dad and he was a good husband, and she just got decided because the mums at school were all bitching about their husbands. She just Thought that was a thing to do and then she regretted it when it was too late.
- [10:24]
Alex Berenson
The irony, yeah, is to be, you know, being a 50 year old woman versus a 50 year old man who's in the same social class. Like men tend to have more options. That's just a fact. Right. So women do regret this, I think oftentimes.
- [10:38]
Miranda Devine
And I mean, that might be driving the rage of women because, you know, you see women like Madonna, who is really trying to stretch her youth past the point of no return. And you know, men can be her age and it's kind of, they're still desirable really, especially if they're rich. And I mean, they don't even have to look good. But so maybe it's that, maybe it's sort of a backlash of that kind of women thing, it feeling discarded. So they're gonna, it's like reparations, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna pay you back, men. You poor, poor defenseless men. So the fatherhood manifesto, fantastic idea for a book, I think. And so just give us the sort of top lines for what your advice is. To be a good dad.
- [11:29]
Alex Berenson
To be a good dad, first of all, you gotta practice what you preach. And as a man, you have to work, okay? You gotta, you know, you've gotta, you can't be, you can't be the guy who's hanging out with the other semi employed dads, drinking coffee and saying you're an architect, okay? You, that's more acceptable for women. It's just more culturally acceptable. And I think it actually strains a marriage. I think it tends to be pretty difficult on both sides when the woman is the primary earner. Not that it can't work, but it requires a bit of patience and respect on both sides because men can feel that they need to demonstrate their masculinity by going out and finding other women who are attracted to them. And women can feel contempt for the man who isn't, you know, pulling his weight as a breadwinner. But so, but that's, that's almost more of a marriage issue. And, but I do think to you, to your children, you want to demonstrate that you're working. You know, again, this is a fairly obvious point. You, you, you, here's, here's one. You know, and again, there's 50 tips and then some of them are more obvious than others. But here's one that I think has been a surprise to people. What I say is you can get angry with your children, I get angry with my children. I don't. You Know, I don't get angry with them all the time, but if they've done something, you know, to each other or to somebody else that I view as, you know, bullying or problematic or whatever it is, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell them to stop. And if they don't stop, I'm going to level up, okay? I want my children, when I'm angry to know that I'm angry, to be frightened of my anger. And not of me, okay? But of my anger. And I want them to listen to me, okay? And I want them to know that once we've resolved this, it's passed, but I want them to know that there are going to be times when they've earned that anger and that it is just essentially, it is what they. And if I punish them for some reason, I want the punishment to be a significant thing to them. Something, you know, whether it's, you don't get to go practice, you know, playing soccer today. And I know that's something you. So you have to know your children well enough to know what punishments are going to stick and hurt them a little bit and use those, which means don't use them that often. Okay? On the other hand, I know parents, I see this with men that I know who constantly seem to be in a low level state of irritation with their children. Not anger, okay? But they almost bicker with their kids, and that is not okay. Okay? Bickering with your children is the sign that their behavior is frustrating to you on a sort of like constant or semi constant basis and you can't control it. So you have to figure out what it is that they're doing that is irritating you and does it need to change or is the problem on your end? So if the problem's on your end, then you just have to live with it or figure out, you know, maybe, maybe they're singing all the time or something. What, whatever it may be, okay? And you know, and they're. And they have terrible voices, whatever it is. But, but, but don't be irritable with your children because if you're irritable, either the behavior needs to change or you need to accept it. But it is okay to get angry with your children because that anger is a short term response to a specific problem. And so to me, this is, you know, I hate it when I see, again, these dads who are, again, bickering is the correct word for it. So that's, I think that's a tip that, you know, you might not hear anywhere else. And I Think it's a good one.
- [15:23]
Miranda Devine
So I just wanted to comment on that. That's so interesting. And I would never have thought of it, but I guess what it shows is, is that you really care about your kid because you got angry. And if you constantly irritated by them and you don't really like them very much, you don't like being around them.
- [15:41]
Alex Berenson
That's right.
- [15:42]
Miranda Devine
And also after you've been angry with anyone, like, it's sort of. It's like after a storm, everything's clear and pure.
- [15:50]
Alex Berenson
That's right. That's right. Another. Another one of the tips that I think is less, you know, sort of less obvious than go, go get a job is if you have the right relationship with your children, if they really respect you, they can joke about you. So in other words. And the jokes can get pretty personal sometimes. So the analogy I use is it's the jester making fun of the king, or it's the comedian making fun of the star athlete at a roast. You are in charge. And so when they're mocking you, it's okay because it's coming from a position of, you know, of love, but also of like, you're the boss. And so I can say things about you that are going to sting a little bit because you can, you can shrug them off and, you know, listen, if they go too far, then you can get involved and deal with that, but for the most part, they're not going to. So again, like, you should view yourself as the captain of this ship, as the, you know, as the captain of this infantry platoon. And, and, you know, you're going to. You're going to give orders sometimes, and those orders are going to be followed. And look, your wife has the same broad role. You know, your spouse has the same broad role, but she's going to be more loving and a little bit less authoritative on a daily basis. And so I think, I mean, look, it doesn't have to be that way, but I think a marriage and a family works best in that way. Or, you know, look again, people can find their own paths. But, but to me, that. That's sort of a. That's a good setup for a nuclear family.
- [17:29]
Miranda Devine
You just reminded me when we had our first son and he was about 2, and I'd come from a family of all girls. And so my natural instinct, maybe he was younger, he was just learning to walk. So he's about 1, and he fell over. So I immediately darted forward to pick him up. My father, my husband said, leave him alone. Let him get up on his own. And it was like, oh, okay. And I had to restrain myself, but I watched. And he was so right. And I never forgot that. I thought, what a great lesson. And, you know, if I. I thought I was a great mother, but if I'd just been left to my own devices without that whatever it is, that father cruelty or, you know, the way it felt to me, my little baby's fallen over. But he was absolutely right. And, you know, that's how to grow sons that are independent. And I guess daughters as well, only had sons.
- [18:24]
Alex Berenson
Yeah. I mean, you have to let your kids fail. First of all, they're gonna fail sometimes that you're not gonna be able to fix. But more importantly, you want them to fail both, because sometimes they're gonna overcome that failure. You know, you hope every time they're gonna overcome it. But even if they don't overcome it, you want them to feel the sting because that otherwise they will never. The world's a tough place. Okay. And you want them to be resilient. Right. You don't want them to be scared of the world, but you want them to know the world is not easy and they need to fight their way through it sometimes. And I think. I mean, that's another. You know, don't think your children are gentle. Think they're resilient. And. Yeah. So, you know, again, I don't think. I mean, it's funny to me that this even needs to be said, but, you know, there's a whole big movement, particularly in the United States, of gentle parenting. Never, you know, kind of like never tell your kids you're just going to do this because I say so. And I just think that's crazy.
- [19:19]
Miranda Devine
Well, it breeds. I mean, just like with animals, you look at. You know, we had to get a dog whisperer for our dog once, and. And he just said to us, he does. He's. He's anxious because he doesn't know who the boss is, because everyone was being sort of. No one was laying down the law to the dog. And so as soon as we did and made him eat after us, et cetera. And honestly, I don't think children are much different. They need boundaries. They need to know that adults are in charge. It's scary otherwise.
- [19:49]
Alex Berenson
That's right. That's right. They're not partners. You're not all equal partners in this. It's funny, though. I'm sure there's going to be somebody who's going to clip this and say, berenson, saying, yell at your kids. And Marie saying treat them like dogs, but you do kind of treat me dogs sometimes.
- [20:12]
Miranda Devine
Well, I mean, it's sort of basic human instinct. I think we know really how to do things, but we've. I don't know. Humans are so perverse that we've trained ourselves and civilized ourselves to such an extreme that we deny natural impulses.
- [20:32]
Alex Berenson
And now we have a large superstructure of mental health professionals who, you know, frankly, whether they recognize it or not, have a very strong financial interest in making everything the subject of therapy and making people who are in therapy never believe that they can stop doing that. And I think that those people, unfortunately, are so. They're so financially compromised, they can't even see it, if that makes sense. You know, one of the. And this is, you know, we talked about sort of substance, cannabis to substances generally, to medicines generally. You know, the therapy culture is even less, you know, sort of studied in a randomized way. We know, we know there's almost. There's almost no evidence that therapy does anybody any good. Right. Whether or not it's harmful. I think there's not that much evidence that way either. But this is just something that over the years has gotten bigger and bigger. And Obamacare, by the way, and making mental health coverage, giving it parity with physical health coverage, meant that there was another explosion in this industry without really any evidence that a lot of mental health tactics or therapies do anybody any good. But. But we now spend. I'm gonna, you know, I'm not gonna guess, but it's certainly in the tens of billions, if not the hundreds of billions of dollars on a lot of stuff that we haven't really studied at all.
- [22:11]
Miranda Devine
And I think it's very dangerous because people, when they're with their therapist, are very suggestible and, you know, malign people can. Or ideological people or whatever can really mess with society if enough people are pushed in a direction. And, I mean, I just think Trump derangement seems to me to be like borderline a mental illness. And, I mean, I'm sure all the people that are Trump deranged, there's a Venn diagram and almost completely overlaps that they're in therapy. So obviously the therapy isn't helping them. And Rosie o' Donnell says, who's incredibly Trump deranged. She went to Ireland and it was her Irish therapist who said, hey, you know, maybe it's not healthy for you to obsess about this, man. You don't know. Yes.
- [23:02]
Alex Berenson
Maybe it's not healthy for you to obsess about climate change. Maybe you Know, maybe it's not healthy. Right. It's really the same thing and it's the same people. Maybe it's not healthy for you to obsess about having long Covid when there's no evidence long Covid really exists.
- [23:16]
Miranda Devine
Or wearing masks.
- [23:17]
Alex Berenson
Or wearing masks.
- [23:18]
Miranda Devine
Still wearing masks. I see them in New York. It's unreal outside.
- [23:22]
Alex Berenson
Yes, it is A, you know, these are all essentially anxiety disorders. And the truth is the best way to treat an anxiety disorder, as far as I can tell. And you know, you know is like there's some decent evidence on cognitive behavioral therapy, but what that really means is just facing it head on rather than trying to run from it, rather than taking, you know, a pill that in the short run will make you feel better, but in the long run is going to lead to rebound anxiety. Right. Like so much of life comes down to just accepting your problems and facing them head on.
- [23:56]
Miranda Devine
Peanut allergies they found were basically created by keeping peanuts away from children. So they never developed an ability to, you know, I mean, I'm sure some peanut allergies are real, but this explosion of peanut allergies that happen, they found it's very simple. Just expose them to some peanuts and then they won't be allergic. And it's the same is all these things. Expose yourself to what you're afraid of and you'll find it's. You face your fears and you're not frightened anymore.
- [24:28]
Alex Berenson
That's exactly the. Yes, it's a great, it's a great, that's a great analogy because, you know, that's a physical allergy that really was developed by the medical profession in the early aughts and, and now that they've recognized the mistake, you know that the rates are going down.
- [24:48]
Miranda Devine
Hi, everyone. Miranda Devine here. If you want unapologetic conservative coverage from outside the Beltway, check out the Tony Kinnett cast from the Daily Signal. Every weeknight at 7pm Eastern, Tony brings a common sense Hoosier perspective to the biggest stories of the day with reporting, analysis and interviews that actually explain what Washington. Washington's decisions mean for your life. In his signature snarky style, if Podporse one gets you the conversation straight from the people in power, Tony breaks down exactly what it means for you and the rest of the country. You can watch the Tony Kinnit cast live on the Daily Signals YouTube channel or listen on your favourite podcast app. Just search the Tony Kinnit cast and subscribe. You've stood up for the truth and that's on and Something I share with you, a long standing antipathy to this sort of normalization and legalization of marijuana and just a rejection of the science. If people are being all scientific, that shows the harms. So on both those issues, I think you've been a really important voice. And although you get a lot of brick bats, you get lots of bouquets from me.
- [26:12]
Alex Berenson
So, I mean, the Daily Beast yesterday called me, former New York Times reporter turned right wing conspiracy theorist. And it's like, I'm neither right wing nor a conspiracy theorist, but that's how people on the left, including a lot of former friends of mine, view me. And they do it without bothering to actually engage with anything that I'm saying or even listen to it really. It's the reason that Covid, you know, it was, I'm not going to say like it was easy for me to stand up and stand out was, but it, but it was possible because, and you're totally right to connect it to the cannabis issue because I saw the group think, and I saw a bunch of people who thought they were really smart talking to each other without any knowledge of, on cannabis, of what the science really said and making arguments that were just completely false. And so that primed me when Covid hit to be skeptical of the, of the media, you know, group think, and the public health, in that case, group think.
- [27:14]
Miranda Devine
That's really interesting because I think we probably came to the same realization around the same time. I know you wrote your book in 2019, tell your children, which was about the dangers of cannabis, but I think you were, you were writing and thinking about this for many years beforehand. And I was doing the same in Australia, prompted by actually a doctor who told me that far from being harmless cannabis, marijuana was actually now with these longitudinal studies, including one, I think that went for 50 years in Sweden. Not 50 years, it went for, sorry, a long time in Sweden, but 50,000 sort of army recruits and it shows, showed that, you know, the risk of psychosis is way higher if you've been a user of marijuana. And that's before the current sort of crop of really high thc, high potency marijuana that only, you know, should exacerbate those harms. So let's talk about that and how you sort of woke up to the problem with cannabis. And was that your, I don't know, red pill moment when you realize that your other colleagues at the New York Times were not really about the truth?
- [28:38]
Alex Berenson
I mean, I would say that's broadly true. So I, you know, I, I mean, I'm Not a big user of cannabis. You know, I'm one of those people that makes me, the few times in my life I've used it, it sort of makes me a bit paranoid. I'm somebody who probably shouldn't use it, right. It's, you know, it's not good for me, you know, and clearly that's true of a lot of people. Right? There's a lot of people out there who actually don't like the cannabis high and then there's this group of people who really love it for whatever reason. I think it's a much more idiosyncratic drug than alcohol, which is one reason we have so much trouble dealing with it. But so, yeah, I mean, I didn't have a really strong position on this. And as I say, and tell your children. My wife, I'm now divorced, but my wife is a forensic psychiatrist. My ex wife is a forensic psychiatrist and she would tell me about all these terrible cases that involved cannabis use. And I obviously, like everybody else, said, oh, that's reefer madness, you know, that, that's the, I mean they must have been on PCP or whatever. And, and she actually knew the cases, so. And she said, no, you really should look at this. And I did and I was stunned by the, you know, the Swedish army study. There's a, there's a study that was run, a very long run study out of a place called Dunedin in, in on the south island of New Zealand. Studies from other European countries and really. And this was even, you know, as you say, this was the generally weaker, less potent stuff and it was still driving this. And you know, there was considerable evidence. And so, so I, look, I was aware that the cannabis issue, you know, had been framed in the United States in particular as an issue of racial justice. You know, black people don't use cannabis more than white people, but they're more arrested for it, by the way. That's even. Okay, that's kind of a lie in two ways. First of all, there, you know, there are, there, there is a, there's a group of people who use cannabis quite heavily who are both black and white, but in, you know, in black communities in the inner city, there's resistance to people using in public. Right. And that's not driven by the cops, that's driven by, you know, people in the community, older people in the community who don't love it. And that's one reason for the arrest differential. It's not the only reason, but it's
- [30:58]
Miranda Devine
one reason certainly that they've overcome that in Manhattan now.
- [31:02]
Alex Berenson
That's right. You can use anyone else. That's right. That's long, long gone. And the other thing is that by, by the time I wrote tell your children and now as well, even before formal legalization in places like New York or Massachusetts or California, there was, and I, when I say nobody, I mean literally nobody in jail for, you know, for simple cannabis possession or simple dealing. I mean, you had to, you had to truck this stuff by, by, you know, by like literally the trunk load, hundreds of pounds of it, to be facing even a year or two of time. And that's not really an exaggeration. And in the south, it's a little different. Okay, but, and by the way, one other thing that was clear to me and has become clear, I think, to other people since this happened was even legalization was not going to eliminate cannabis arrests because alcohol is legal and people get arrested for alcohol possession use all the time, for drinking in public, for drinking and driving, for drinking underage. And so even if the substance is legal, all the ways it's consumed aren't necessarily going to be legal. And so the public, the sort of. The racial justice issue was clearly a bit exaggerated. I could see that. But I could also see, and this was even, this was pre George Floyd, but It was the 20 teens. We were approaching peak woke. I knew there was going to be pushback on the book because of that. But what I thought was, hey, let's just focus on the science here. Let's just focus on the real psychosis issue. And if people still want to legalize, that's fine. I mean, it's not what I would do. But let's have a real conversation about the science and the book. When it came out in February 2019, a year before COVID was just trashed, or January, I should say January 2019, it was January. And people just simply refused to engage with me on these issues. NPR had a couple of interviews scheduled with me that they canceled. The Times refused to review the book. And I thought to myself, this is crazy. Like, I'm, I was a well respected reporter there. I left on good terms with the paper. This is a serious book about a serious issue. And I'm getting treated like, you know, I just said, let's put every, you know, black teenager in the world in prison. And which is not, you know, again, the book doesn't say that at all. So, so that was the, that was my red pill moment. It wasn't so much that, that the, it wasn't so much that I saw that My colleagues were wrong about the science or my former colleagues. It's that I was so stunned that they weren't willing to engage with it and that they were just going to try to say that I, you know, that I was an idiot or that I was racist or just, just kind of like name, name call on me for having the temerity to tell the truth about something that was politically unpleasant to them.
- [33:58]
Miranda Devine
So in Australia, the racial element was not there, but instead it was about medical marijuana, which was sort of the gateway. And so if you came out just doing what you did, then you were being cruel to cancer sufferers. They'd always wheel out some person with chronic pain know, and you were denying them their just. And of course, as soon as you allow medical marijuana, that's just immediately you've opened the door. And so why do you think there was a pushback? Whatever the pretext, you know, race, medical. Was it. Is it because there is just this enormous industry, certainly in the medical field. I felt like there were a lot of doctors or academics with, you know, a vested interest because they made their names and their careers on harm minimization and drug legalization and they went to all these international confabs and, you know, I mean, I don't want to be a conspiracy theory, but it seemed like there was money for it. So who was doing that?
- [35:13]
Alex Berenson
Well, so, I mean, I think there was money in it. There is money in it. There was a small group of doctors and I think I recall reading about this Australia, but it's been true everywhere when, yeah, like there's a, literally a handful of these guys who would write hundreds or thousands of prescriptions a year. Right. And so even if you were charging, let's say, a hundred dollars and you were writing, you know, 10,000 prescriptions in a year, that was a million dollars. Right. And, and, and, and I'm like, so, so there were a handful of people really profiting. There were clearly people in the industry who thought that they were going to be able to make billions of dollars.
- [35:51]
Miranda Devine
Yeah.
- [35:52]
Alex Berenson
But really it's, you know, there was a, there's a group of people who love cannabis. They love thc, they love being high. They truly think it's, it's. As I say, and tell your children, marijuana has a brand like no other drug. Okay. And people who drink all the time, I mean, you know, people who wake up with a whiskey bottle next to their bed stand, you know, on their bedstand, and they have to have a, you know, a hit in the morning to get out of bed. They don't advertise that. Okay, People who are using heroin don't advertise that. But people who smoke pot will talk to you about how great it is. And, and, and even now there are these, you know, I mean, it's stunning to me that, that, that there's this group of mothers out there who talk, you know, about, I need to, you know, use in the morning before I get my little kid to school, you know, to the, to kindergarten or whatever. Like you would not say I need a shot, you know, I need a glass of wine in the morning to get through the day like that. But, but somehow this group, I think they're either, I mean, they are addicted, but they're also addicted to this cultural idea that it's a plant, it's medicine, it's God's gift. And, and so it's very hard to have a reasonable conversation with them. So. Yeah, so for all those reasons, I mean, I think there's a broader issue and I've been trying for years now to get the time to write a bigger book about American drug use and American drug policy and because to me, this is much bigger than cannabis and it's much bigger even than legal or illegal drugs. Okay, it's ironically, and by the way, alcohol is a drug, Alcohol has lots of problems. But alcohol is the one drug right now where like, as a society we're trying to actually denormalize the use of it. Right? The drug that we have the most experience with and have used for the longest time is the one that's sort of under the most attack. Meanwhile, you know, there's still this, you know, they've tried to crack down on opioids and they have cracked down to some extent, but, but the US still uses much more opioid prescribed opioids of all kinds than almost any other country, including, including, you know, European countries, much less a country like Japan where it's just not normalized. I'm just one of like, and I'm sure you know tons of people who are on ADHD meds who, who take benzos like Xanax all the time. So it's not really about legal versus illegal, it's about a culture of a pill for every ill. And so I really think, you know, and if I'm going to be Mr. Uncool and like the guy who said pot stunk, like, you know, literally and figuratively, I might as well extend that and become the true, like everything. The joke that I'm gonna like is that the book's gonna be called Everyone hates drugs except for the drugs that they do.
- [38:42]
Miranda Devine
Look, I think that's a great idea because one of the things I, I've lived off and on in America all my life, but in this latest incarnation I arrived back in mid-2019. And one thing that struck me, and I'm not sure sure if I just wasn't aware of it before, but it certainly was, really seemed stark to me, was that whatever it was, you know, constipation, instead of just like eating some roughage, you take a pill, you know, whatever it is, a headache, you immediately go to a pill. Anything that's wrong with you, you get something prescribed.
- [39:21]
Alex Berenson
I mean, this is an even bigger issue and it's something that I've thought about with this book because yes, I. The pill for every ill is not just psychoactive drugs. It's not just drugs that get you high. You absolutely, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's everything from eczema to, you know, and listen, some of these conditions are OT now people are shooting up. That's right. And look, some of these conditions are painful. Some of these conditions, you know, are true medical, you know, crises. But a lot of them fall in the semi lifestyle category.
- [39:50]
Miranda Devine
And look, I mean, that's why I think ma. I think everyone realizes that my maha has been captured. Everyone's imagination. Because, you know, when you have unhealthy food and then your insides don't work, then you feel like you need a quick fix. So. But back to sort of marijuana. I mean, the other problem with it is that unlike alcohol, which you've got an easy breath test, you know, sobriety test, when people are driving. You see now like in the States, like Colorado, that decriminalized or legalised early, a real uptick in traffic deaths. And you know, I think you are very impaired when you're high with pot. I mean, you really are. And I don't know how people can function. And as you say, it's not socially acceptable to drink a shot of whiskey when you get out of bed in the morning or at one work to go outside in your break and, you know, drink some alcohol. But you can, you can smoke weed all day long and supposedly you're driving cars, you're operating heavy machinery. At Boeing, when they had those planes dropping out of the sky and all their disasters at one of their factories, they, the DEA went in, they went and did a big drug bust because there were drug dealers, they were high all day. No wonder things were falling apart. How can you have a society where that kind of impairment is normalized?
- [41:27]
Alex Berenson
No, you're absolutely correct. And I'll never forget, you know, after Tell youl Children came out, somebody who was, you know, kind of pro industry. Not. I mean, not terribly pro. Not a true, you know, proselytizer. But he said to me, look, you're overestimating the psychosis risk and the downstream violence risk. You're not talking about the real problem here, which is that, you know, pot just makes people completely motivated. It makes them sleepy, it makes them stupid, it screws up their memory. He's like, it just. It just kind of essentially locks them in place. And. And I personally know. And I'll bet, you know, people who essentially, you know, they went to college, they graduated, and at some point, either in college or in their 20s, started to use quite heavily and most of those people. And I know I'm talking about a half dozen people I know whose lives essentially stalled out. And now, you know, look, I'm on the other side of 50 now. You know, those people never got married. You know, they didn't have kids. They worked for a while, but then they kind of, you know, their job, their careers kind of went sideways. Some of them were able to, you know, they got a little money from their parents, or they bought a. You know, they bought an apartment in New York in the 90s or the early aughts. And so they've been able to live. Live off that. Like. Like, there are ways people, you know, kind of get by when they don't really want to work and they have a little money saved up. But, but. But it's true. Cannabis is not good for society. Okay? And Tyler Cowan, who writes for the Free Press and I think doesn't drink or smoke pot, was saying something like, you know, I didn't realize that I'd actually longed for the days of bar fights and sort of like, you know, alcohol disinhibits people. And it turns out that, like, maybe a little disinhibition is, you know, gets people to. To, you know, go home with each other and make the next generation. And, you know, and cannabis, that people just, I mean, I know iPhone, I know the phone and apps have screwed up dating and screwed up sex, but I do think that this is part of the issue as well. And so, you know, how we fix this, how we undo any of this, I have no idea. I. I think. I think there's a slight pushback, particularly in elite culture on this, because I think people have, you know, it's there's some, there's some, like, New York Times. There's some, some New York Times editor, you know, has a kid, you know, who, who, who's gone, you know, off his rocker, smoking. And like, I, I can't prove that, but I know it's true. And like, and so, and so, like, there, you know, there is that happening among people who thought, you know what, we can legalize this and it won't do any harm, but the culture as a whole is not, you know, has not really shifted back, and I think it'll be a long time before it does.
- [44:23]
Miranda Devine
But you make a point about the New York Times, because I was surprised, especially after the way your book had been treated by your former colleagues, to see a couple of really good, rigorous, tough, well reported articles about marijuana and the psychosis issue. And they addressed it, like, honestly. And they got a lot of pushback and anger from their readers, but they stuck to their guns.
- [44:51]
Alex Berenson
So this is why I, like, you know, I know, you know, there's a lot of people on the right who think the Times is just complete fiction and it's not okay. I think politically they make mistakes. I think, especially in those racial, you know, issues involved. It's very hard for them to report honestly, but on a lot of other stuff, they are willing to do the work and do reporting. Obviously, they hate Trump, too, in a way that, you know, has not been good for the reporting. But, but, but the Times is still kind of an essential institution. And I know they're, you know, I know some of my readers will hate me for, for saying that, but the fact that they can, that they can, you know, I wish they had done it six, seven years ago when I wrote the book. But, but the fact that they can honestly acknowledge that things have not gone as they expected in terms of legalization, I think is a really good thing.
- [45:39]
Miranda Devine
That brings us now full circle to one of my favorite topics, and that's, you know, the COVID craziness, Anthony Fauci, et cetera. Can we go back to your initial, like, when did you first smell a rat? When it came to Covid. And then how long did it take before you were censored?
- [46:00]
Alex Berenson
So very early on, I was nervous about it. There was these terrible videos coming out of China, and they were standing up these hospitals. It turned out they didn't really know how dangerous it was or wasn't either. But what happened was a guy named Neil Ferguson, an epidemiologist in London, who was very, you know, very high end, you know, connected to The World Health Organization, you know, connected to the British government, put out a report, I think it's called the Imperial College London report. Nine, I want to say nine. That could be wrong. But it came out on March 16th or 17th, just as the world was really shutting down. And it had these terrible figures in it. And the New York Times wrote a front page story about it. And it was clearly, they had been chopping this report around to France and to Italy and to Spain and sort of pushing the European countries to shut down. And if you looked hard at it, what you could see was, I mean, I think the headline number might have been 40 million people dying. Okay, if we don't do anything. The thing was, most of those estimates were based on the big number. The big headline number was a global number based on sort of Africa and China and India. And you could see that, I mean, they really were extrapolating from just a handful of cases. But more importantly than that, if you look at the age distribution in the US and the uk, where the numbers were more granular, almost all the cases and deaths, or almost all the deaths and hospitalizations were in people like 75 and over. 70, 75 and over. And I saw this and I thought to myself, nobody's really being honest about this. No one's really saying who's at risk here. And if this thing is so dangerous, why is it that the only people who are dying in any significant numbers in their own reports are these extremely old people? Look, we don't want anyone to die, but an 82 year old dying of respiratory illness is not the same thing as a five year old dying of the Spanish flu. It's just not. And obviously that's going to be an unpleasant thing to say out loud. But you know, you can't make policy or you shouldn't make policy based on a headline number that pretty clearly is biased in this way. Okay, so that was a. And then a couple days later, Neil Ferguson went to the British government and said, oh, you know what? Like I was off here. Like, the real number is going to be a lot smaller than I thought. And, and, and that, that didn't get very much attention. I thought, this is an amazing backtrack by this guy, considering he's the one who got the world shut down. So those two things happened. And then the third thing that happened was in New York, Cuomo was having these press conferences every day. And you know, there was tremendous fear in New York City and New York State. New York was the epicenter. It very rapidly became the World epicenter for Covid. And Cuomo was saying, you know, there are going to be 55,000 hospital beds needed in New York State in mid April. And, you know, the state had something like 15,000 beds. I mean, this was an apocalypse. A true apocalypse was being predicted. And I looked and I said, but, you know, he's saying this, but he's also saying that today, meaning today, March 31, April 1, April 2, we're going to need 12,000 hospital beds, and yet there are only 3,000 beds in use today, or whatever the gap was. I mean, it was roughly that. Okay? And so I'm thinking to myself, we're like making these incredibly apocalyptic predictions, but the baseline data is wrong. It's like he's like, he's just. He's just essentially making things up, whether he realizes it or not. And the media is too stupid and scared to do anything but talk about how in two weeks, wait, two weeks, and if we don't do anything, everyone in New York State is going to be dead. There's not going to be a hospital bed available. I mean, that's almost the tone. I mean, there are people, you know, we're going to need. We're going to need the Javits center, and we're going to need these hospital shifts, and they're going to be burying people at Central Park. I don't know if you remember that. None of it was true. None of it came true. And it was not.
- [50:45]
Miranda Devine
Because people around the world still think that happened. They still say that. They say, oh, they're buried. You know, they had all these open pits, the bodies.
- [50:53]
Alex Berenson
And I'm like, no, no, what happened was, listen, we're some, you know, there were a handful of city hospitals in, In Queens and the Bronx that, you know, were. They're badly run hospitals, okay? You know, you go to them now, you'll see they're not particularly well run hospitals. And. And by the way, when you encourage a bunch of people in New York City in March who have colds to stand in a line of thousands of people waiting to get tested for Covid, they're gonna pass a lot of stuff to each other. And by the way, there were, you know, there were a lot of deaths. You know, this happened in Spain and Italy. It also happened in New Jersey, where we panicked, you know, nursing home workers, and they essentially just like, let nursing home patients die. That happened, too. And it happened, you know, it happened in New York City, too. And so, so.
- [51:41]
Miranda Devine
And a lot of people died on respirators because People died on respirators early on. Yes, and they didn't need to be on respirators, but the respirators stopped them breathing out their droplets.
- [51:51]
Alex Berenson
That's. That's right. There was a real tremendous fear among healthcare workers that this, I'm going to get this and I'm going to die. And so they went with very aggressive, invasive procedures. Now, look, ultimately Covid, you know, especially if you were 400 pounds or if you were 85 years old, Covid killed people, okay?
- [52:09]
Miranda Devine
It did.
- [52:09]
Alex Berenson
It was a, you know, it's a, is a, it was, it really picked on the weak, okay? It, you know, for, for whatever reason, it was very, it was very toxic, you know, to people who were kind of near death to begin with. But, but, but that's not the way it was framed early on. And so, so what happened was I, you know, I started saying this stuff and people started saying to me, you can't say this as though, you know, I'm such a jerk that when people say to me, you can't say something, I say it twice as loudly. And I mean, it's interesting because one of the problems with the post Covid era is that those of us who are willing to speak out, you know, very early on, by which I mean kind of late March, early April, I think a lot of us are a little bit socially, you know, I don't know if autistic, Asperger, whatever you want to say on the spectrum, I mean, Elon Musk, same way. Okay, and so, and so.
- [53:09]
Miranda Devine
Or I like to think of it as ornery.
- [53:11]
Alex Berenson
Ornery is a nice way to say it. Yes, but what, but one of the things you've seen is that those people, there's an uncommon amount of post Covid infighting because we can't get along with each other either. And so I think that that has, I mean, look, people would have. People, People are done with COVID They're done with the vaccines, they don't want to hear about it. But if you go on X and you know, who's who, you can see these sort of like little internecine battles that are clearly personality driven.
- [53:45]
Miranda Devine
Like, I was first, not you, I was first.
- [53:47]
Alex Berenson
Or, or you're making fun of long Covid people or, you know, you're not acknowledging that the vax caused, you know, cancer in 80 million people. No, I'm not acknowledging that because I don't think it happened. But that's not to say that, you know, the MRNA's, you know, are a good product or we should be encouraging people to take them. But from my point of view, the people who are out there throwing out like enormous numbers for cancer, let's say, are doing a disservice to those of us who are pushing back in a more reasonable way against effects. Oh, here's a classic. Ivermectin, right? Like, like, like I've gotten in trouble because I think ivermectin is not a particularly interesting drug for Covid. Okay, so people hate me for that. But it's like, look, I'm allowed to have this opinion. It doesn't mean that, like Anthony Fauci got to me. But this is those of us who are willing to stand up to the pressure early on. And I don't know when, when exactly you did, but I think you were very early also. We did. There's a certain personality type willing to take the heat.
- [54:49]
Miranda Devine
I mean, the hydroxychloroquine was the one that I think I just spoke to a Yale professor the other day and he said that was really ivermectin, didn't do much. But he claims that hydroxychloroquine in the early, not after it mutated into omicron, but in those delta days when the deaths were really from the lungs filling up with fluid and because of the body going into, you know, hyper immune shock, it really worked. But that was the evil of those times was because everything was suppressed and censored and I don't know, Fauci, Biden, whoever, they did not want people using therapies that weren't the vaccine. Like, they didn't want therapies, they just wanted the so called vaccine that wasn't really a vaccine. Cause it didn't stop anyone getting Covid.
- [55:46]
Alex Berenson
They definitely fell in love with MRNA very, very early on. And they, you know, look, I don't think you can divorce this from Fauci's, you know, secret knowledge that. Or secret fear that this came out of the lab. Right. That, that he. And that the NIH and that he had been indirectly responsible for this. I'm not going to say directly, but indirectly responsible. And so he wanted to be the hero. And he thought the MRNA's were going to make him the hero. And to get to the MRNA's we had to lock down for nine months. And if that meant scaring the daylights out of people who were at very low risk for this, he was gonna do it. I mean, I don't think that makes me a conspiracy theorist. I think there's a lot of Evidence in the record showing that that's how this went in 2020. And by the way, all these people hated to go back to something else. They were talking about Trump derangement syndrome. They hated Trump, and they knew that making this look bad would hurt the stock market, would hurt. There were many people out of work in early 2020, and essentially, by May 2020, Trump had almost no chance of winning the 2020 election. And that's how it was stolen from him, by the way. To me, it was not about the ballots or anything. It was about creating a situation where the US could not function normally. And by the way, where Joe Biden had an excuse to stay in his basement for nine months.
- [57:13]
Miranda Devine
It was the perfect storm. Look, I have to say, Donald Trump didn't do himself any favors, because you contrast, even though Cuomo was an utter phony, but you contrast Cuomo's daily press conferences with Trump's, and Trump's, even if you weren't anxious, made you feel anxious for some reason.
- [57:31]
Alex Berenson
Trump is not Donald Trump's strong suit, let's be honest.
- [57:34]
Miranda Devine
Well, but he was. His instinct was right. I mean, it was our instinct, which was, look, I don't think this is really quite as serious as you're making out. And it's old people. And, you know, I mean, Ron DeSantis was one of the few that actually talked to real scientists openly and discovered that, well, you protect the old people and you let everyone else just live normally. And that's. That's the perfect way to handle it.
- [58:03]
Alex Berenson
Trump's gut is underrated by the left. He's not always right, but his gut is often true. And in the case of COVID that was a classic example of his gut being right, but then him essentially being forced into a policy, I would say, that he didn't really want to take. I mean, I think it was pretty clear he did not want to take
- [58:26]
Miranda Devine
that because he wanted to win an election.
- [58:28]
Alex Berenson
Yes, but he also was afraid to take on Fauci. Fauci took on such an extraordinary political
- [58:35]
Miranda Devine
role,
- [58:38]
Alex Berenson
not just in early 2020, but
- [58:40]
Miranda Devine
throughout 2020 and beyond, because he had Biden wrapped around his little finger. And it's interesting, I hadn't thought of that, but you're sort of pinpointing some sort of psychological reason for, obviously, he knew day one, and Peter Navarro has told me this, that they're sitting in the White House. I think it was even in the Situation Room talking about COVID and, you know, arguing about it, and Anthony Fauci knowing full well that he had funded the research or funded EcoHealth to fund the research at the Wuhan lab. And he knew it was gain of function research on bat coronaviruses. And he would know better than anybody the risks of that, because he knew the risks, because that's why he bypassed. Because he was fighting with the scientists that persuaded Obama to put the pause on gain of function research in America. And he was so hell bent on continuing with it that he decided he'd do a proxy research in China. So he knew better than anybody. And also, I think Tulsi Gabbard has shown that he was also in communication, let's say with the intelligence, with CIA, with the intelligence agencies that were also interested in the Wuhan lab because it was supposedly a Chinese military lab. So Anthony Fauci knew so much and he did not breathe a word of it. And, you know, that is a terrible secret to hold. And so it's sort of psychologically understandable that he would then want to turn himself into a hero.
- [60:20]
Alex Berenson
Yes. But by the way, Anthony Fauci didn't need any psychological prompting to want to be a hero. He's always been a hero. He's always been the hero of his own story. The best story to me, the best personal story to me about Anthony Fauci is he's like four feet tall. Right. I mean, I exaggerate, but he's five six, five, seven, 1 8. He's small guy. Right. And he was the starting guard on his high school basketball team one year, and the team was like 1 in 17 that year. So I mean, I mean, maybe they, maybe they would have had a better record if somebody who wasn't three feet tall was there, was the starting guard. But, you know, that's who, that's who Tony is. And so. And so. Yeah, like. But then on top of that. Yes. Having the knowledge that he had and not wanting to slash, not being able to tell anybody. Yeah. That. That, that must have spurred him even more. You must be right about that.
- [61:21]
Miranda Devine
Yeah. And so anyway, so you. You smell a rash and you start posting. I mean, and from memory, your. Your tweets were, you know, you put up scientific papers, you'd put up evidence, and it really angered people. And then we know now from the Twitter files that the Biden administration ordered you to be taken off Twitter.
- [61:46]
Alex Berenson
Yes. So I was, I was, I thought I was despised in 2020 when I was saying that, you know, Covid was overstated and we shouldn't have test and trace because it was useless. And nobody should wear masks because they were useless. And nobody we shouldn't lock down because it was useless. All the public health theater was useless, as it clearly was. And worst of all, the school closings. I mean, that's the one where to the extent people give me any credit and people on the left don't really give me any credit, a few people will acknowledge that I was completely correct. It's. Closing schools was just a disaster and unnecessary. Okay? I thought people didn't like me in 2020. No, people didn't like me in 2021, because what happened in 2021 was. So I, you know, I've been a reporter for the New York Times for a long time, and I mostly covered, or not mostly, but one of the things that I covered was the drug industry, big pharma. And so the thing about the drug industry that people don't understand is that it is really more than anything else, what those companies are in the business of doing is designing clinical trials. Okay? They are, they are brilliant at designing a trial in a way that makes their drug look as good as possible. Whether that's against placebo, whether it's against an older drug. They're very. They want a drug that, that can get through a trial that will, you know, will look good and they can then go sell to doctors. Okay? And so the, the vaccine clinical trials turned out to be a brilliant example of this because in late 2020, Eli Lilly, which is, you know, they're now known for their GLP drugs, they made an antibody treatment for Covid that actually worked very well to reduce deaths in older people. How did they know? Because I went to a bunch of nursing homes and they gave it to people who had Covid. And there was a profound imbalance in deaths. Okay? They showed it worked. The clinical trials for the MRNA vaccines were very large, but they included almost nobody at high risk from COVID And they only went on for a few weeks. Okay? So we didn't have long term safety data and we didn't have any proof that these vaccines actually helped. The only people we really cared about. What we knew, because, you know, Fauci and the companies sort of figured this out, was that in the very short term, against the initial strain of COVID they gave you a lot of antibodies. And so very briefly, but very effectively reduced your risk of COVID infection for a short period of time. And if you don't get Covid, you can't die from COVID doesn't mean you can't die from something else. And there was no actual overall protection from death that the trial showed, but they did show that you didn't get Covid. So, again, this was me not being a conspiracy theory, okay? I was not. One of these people was like, this is Bill Gates and nanoparticles. And like, this is the. You know, Klaus Schwab wants to control your brain. And this is. No, it's like, these companies are really clever, and this is how they got the drug or the vaccine approved so quickly, when in reality, we don't have any idea if it works long term. Okay? That was an incredibly unpopular position. It was unpopular on the left because these people were scared to death and they wanted a hot vac summer. And they wanted. They literally, like, these people literally were so desperate to get vaccinated, they would, like, pretend to be old so they could sign up and get a priority position. That was happening. But on the right, people were like, look, you know, the 95% is 95%. This looks good. Why don't we just all get it and shut everyone up about this and get back to normal? And it's like, Berenson, just stop. Okay, Again, people on the right about the. You were right about the school closures, but now you just don't want this to end. And so you're saying the vaccines don't work. It's like, no, that's actually not why I'm saying it. I'm saying it because I have this understanding of this game. And there aren't too many other reporters, there aren't too many other people outside the industry who really know how this works. And, like, there were other questions about the vaccines. There were a question, but we never tested. And to this day, we have never tested and we never will test the MRNA's against the older vaccines. In other words, against, like, the Chinese. Interestingly, the Chinese didn't use MRNA vaccines. They used what are called inactivated virus vaccines. That's very simple. That's what we do with the measles vaccine. You just essentially kill the virus and then give it to people with a little bit of aluminum or some adjuvant so that their immune system will. Will, you know, will sort of recognize that there's this foreign invader, because our immune systems are really smart. And if you just give people a dead virus, they don't respond to that, so you give them an adjuvant. But so the correct thing to do would have been to test all these various different kinds of vaccines and say, not just does this reduce infection, but does this reduce death or serious injury? So to this day, we don't have any idea which vaccine works the best in the short term, forget the long term. And we don't have any idea what the long term health effects of all this stuff is. That's why people are still fighting about this. And that's why I think the public health establishment is in so much trouble and has had such a hard time getting its. Getting respect back because ultimately they made a series of decisions in 2020 and 2021 that they can't really undo. And so again, I'm not in the position of saying, like, oh, everyone's got cancer because of the vaccines. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is these never really worked as promised. By early 2022, this is another thing people actually have forgotten. European countries, because the vaccines had failed and the boosters were starting to fail. Right? Because you could actually, you could do a chart, very. It's a very simple chart showing you how quickly the antibodies fade. Because. Because your body actually doesn't want to produce these supra normal levels of antibodies for a virus that, you know, it's not being presented with constantly. So the antibodies go down, you boost, they go up, they go down again. Okay. By early 2022, we've been through a cycle of MRNA Boost, MRNA Boost. People were still getting Covid and Austria and Germany and England were starting to talk about going back into lockdown. It is only because Omicron came along and Omicron was so much more contagious, thus exposing everybody to it, but at the same time less dangerous, that the, that the vaccine failure wasn't as apparent to everybody as it would otherwise had been. And again, I say this to you, you're willing to let me talk about it. Nobody cares, okay?
- [69:04]
Miranda Devine
I care hugely. But you're right. No, people don't want to know about it. They really don't.
- [69:10]
Alex Berenson
But they have a gut sense that they were lied to without knowing the details.
- [69:14]
Miranda Devine
But they're sort of, we all are sort of embarrassed a little that, that we allowed ourselves to be lied to and, you know, went along like sheep and got, you know, I got the vaccine not because I already had Covid and I was fine, but because I couldn't go out in New York. I couldn't go to work without putting something up my nose every day. You know, it was just.
- [69:37]
Alex Berenson
I did not get it, by the way. And I felt that pressure in the fall of 2021 in New York so deeply, so much.
- [69:46]
Miranda Devine
Yeah, I mean, no boosters, but, you know, by that stage, you're just Saying, this is ridiculous.
- [69:51]
Alex Berenson
Yes. Yes, it was.
- [69:53]
Miranda Devine
But it was like. So it is a little embarrassing to say, well, I succumbed to the peer pressure, but, I mean, I don't know what else it was possible to do and have a life.
- [70:02]
Alex Berenson
Yes. I mean, I didn't have much of a life. I didn't. I didn't have any friends. I wasn't allowed on Twitter. You know, I was ostracized. And, you know, I want to. And I'm still pursuing this lawsuit against. Well, now I've settled with the federal government, but I'm pursuing against two Pfizer executives. And I'm. And one of the things in. You know. So the Second Circuit is going to hear our appeal because the case was dismissed. But the key issue that we want the 2nd Circuit, that James Lawrence, my Laura, and I want the 2nd Circuit to consider is were the COVID unvaccinated A class for the purposes of federal civil rights litigation? In other words, was this a group that you can say shouldn't have been discriminated against? And that's an unpopular position, but one of the lines in the brief is that we were discriminated against.
- [70:55]
Miranda Devine
How many people do we know from federal government, FBI? I know a lot of them who were fired because they refused and they said, oh, we have religious objections. Whether they did or not didn't matter. They just were. They were. They. The mandates were so destructive of trust and everything.
- [71:13]
Alex Berenson
Yes. And Joe Biden said, our patience with the unvaccinated is running out. And so, you know, the Second Circuit, again, that covers New York City, New York State, it's sort of a famously liberal circuit, as you would expect. They've said that federal civil rights protection that the law that I'm saying applies to me applied to Arab and Muslim terrorists in the wake. Or alleged Arab and Muslim terrorists in the wake of September 11th. Okay. That's how they say, you know what? Like, even in times of trouble, even in times of a terrorist attack, people deserve their rights. And I agree with that. Okay. So what I am hoping is that they will say, you know what? Even though we all got vaccinated and we're nice liberals and we think you're an idiot, we're gonna recognize that this is a real class deserving of protection. So we'll see what happens. But, you know, to me, I really hope they do that. It will kind of restore my faith in injustice, being nonpartisan.
- [72:15]
Miranda Devine
So just wind back a little bit. When did you get censored by Twitter and when did you sue them?
- [72:22]
Alex Berenson
So I Was, okay, so I was censored by Twitter. I was banned from the platform August 2021, late August 2021. I sued them in December over the ban. And everybody on the left said, this guy's an idiot. He's a grifter. Nobody's ever won one of these ban lawsuits. There's something called section230 that gives the company great protection. And yet a judge, a Clinton appointed judge in San Francisco, a federal judge, said, you've got a real case here. And the reason is Twitter had made these promises to me. It was sort of like not in 2021, but in 2020. It was the last vestige of the Jack Dorsey free speech Twitter. And they said, you know what? We like the fact that you're bringing up the beat. So I had these assurances from Twitter and this judge said to me, it looks to me like they made you a promise. They essentially made a contract with you and they violated it. Okay, so that happened in April 2022. And then Twitter, not under Elon Musk, old Twitter, settled with me, acknowledged that they shouldn't have banned me, and put me back on the platform. That was July 2022. And as part of that, they turned over documents to me showing that the Biden administration and these Pfizer guys had been involved in the ban and that.
- [73:42]
Miranda Devine
And they named you. They named you.
- [73:44]
Alex Berenson
Named me.
- [73:45]
Miranda Devine
I read emails.
- [73:46]
Alex Berenson
Yeah, that's. That's right. By name. The only person by name. The they. Because they knew. They knew that I was not the guy talking about the, you know, the. Again, the quarter sticking to your skin or whatever. Like, they knew that I was bringing up these objections that people were taking seriously. So, so I sue the federal government, and in this case, I have to sue. In the Southern district of New York, obviously incredibly liberal district, the case was assigned to a judge appointed by Joe Biden, and last year she dismissed the case. Now, look, there's not, there's not. I don't have precedent saying, hey, the unvaccinated should be a protected class for the purposes of this. So this would be an extension of the law. I mean, let's be clear about that. And she didn't do me any favors. She didn't extend the law in that direction, and that's why we're going to appeal. But, but meanwhile, I settled with the federal government because the Trump administration was willing to admit that the Biden administration had done this, had coerced Twitter to ban me. As if you look at the factual record, there's no question about It. So that's where the case is right now. The people who are left in it are these two guys from Pfizer. And the reason that's good for me, from the federal government has tremendous protections against being sued. You wouldn't know it from the. All the, you know, injunctions that the Trump administration gets put on them all the time, but if you're trying to sue and get money damages from the government, which is. Or from in this case, which is what I'm trying to do, because this is something that happened in the past, there's not really injunctive relief available. It's really about, is somebody going to pay me for what happened. It's very hard to do that against the federal government. It's a lot easier to do that against another private defendant. And so I'm hopeful that if the Second Circuit rules for me, the case will move forward. And the most important thing, more than the money, is that I'll get discovery. What that means is that the Pfizer will have to turn over documents talking about their communications with the Biden administration. And to me, that would be huge.
- [75:50]
Miranda Devine
That would be huge because, I mean, when Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss and everyone got hold of the Twitter files after Elon Musk bought Twitter or X now, did you. Was that revelatory for you?
- [76:05]
Alex Berenson
Yes, it was. So I got some documents from old Twitter. I got some documents from the Twitter files. I got some documents later from Elon. He did me a great favor and essentially researched and found more documents. And I got some documents from the House investigation. And so I'm in my case, I have an unusual amount of evidence backing proof that there was this conspiracy to violate my rights.
- [76:32]
Miranda Devine
So what exactly did they do? So it was Andrew Bates, I think, from the Biden administration.
- [76:39]
Alex Berenson
Andrew Slavin.
- [76:41]
Miranda Devine
Oh, I do. Slavin. Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
- [76:43]
Alex Berenson
So Slavitt and, you know, to a lesser extent, guy named Rob Flaherty.
- [76:48]
Miranda Devine
Rob Flaherty. That was it. Yeah.
- [76:50]
Alex Berenson
These Biden administration officials, they were leaning on. Flaherty was more interested in Facebook. Slavo was more interested in Twitter and me. But they were directly pressuring these social media companies, saying, you're allowing vaccine misinformation, you're killing people. The company said, look, you know, these people have First Amendment right to talk, or we think they should be allowed to talk. And the government. And by the way, you're putting pressure on us. We don't like that. That seems to implicate the First Amendment. The Biden administration was just like, no, this is really bad. You're allowing it. If this continues, we may try to go after Section 230 protection, which is very valuable to social media companies.
- [77:30]
Miranda Devine
They really bullied them.
- [77:31]
Alex Berenson
They really bullied them. And Slavitt leaves the White House in June, but is still like, essentially in it. And for the purposes of a lawsuit, if it goes forward, that's something that a jury is going to have to look at. Was Slavitt what we call a state actor even after he officially left the White House? Okay, so Slavitt approaches a guy named Todd o', Boyle, who you've never heard of, but Todd o' Boyle was Twitter's White House lobbyist. And he talks about me. He's like, this guy. This guy. I want this. You know, why is this guy being allowed to tweet? Why? What is happening? And then Slavitt. Slavitt was friends with a guy named Scott Gottlieb. Scott Gottlieb is a doctor who probably has not practiced medicine since he graduated residency, but he is an MD Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and he was the FDA commissioner under Donald Trump. And he, for whatever reason, was friends with Slavitt. You know, they're both sort of in this, like, Washington, kind of swampy medical medico industrial complex. And. And Slavitt. The crucial part of this was Slavitt was also a director at Pfizer. They've paid him since 2018 at least $2 million. And Pfizer was in the midst of selling $100 billion of COVID shots worldwide. And Pfizer, for whatever reason, the Biden administration liked Pfizer better than Moderna. I think they. Pfizer had more capacity. They viewed Pfizer as a better partner even.
- [79:05]
Miranda Devine
Remember, Pfizer held back, allegedly, the discovery of the vaccine past the election.
- [79:13]
Alex Berenson
Not allegedly. You're totally right, Miranda. That's right. They did. And so I wrote about that, actually, a couple of years ago, and that was one of those stories where I was like, why didn't everybody cover this?
- [79:24]
Miranda Devine
So it was absolutely proven. Was it? Because I thought. But I mean, everyone's pushed back so much, it seems obvious.
- [79:30]
Alex Berenson
I'll send you the story. It's absolutely proven. They changed that. What's called why Am I Blank? Not the manifesto, the protocol. They changed the protocol for the trial so they wouldn't have to disclose the results before the election so that Trump
- [79:46]
Miranda Devine
wouldn't get a big boost from Operation Warp Speed.
- [79:49]
Alex Berenson
That's right, because they knew that it would be good for Trump, it would look good for Him. So, okay, Scott Gottlieb. So, yeah, that's actually probably the number one reason. I'd never put that together. That's probably the number one reason. The Biden administration love Pfizer, but. So Slavitt goes to Scott Gottlieb and says, you gotta talk to Todd o' Boyle also. Or he puts Scott Gottlieb in touch with Todd o', Boyle, this Twitter lobbyist. And Gottlieb also starts to talk about how I'm a menace to public health. I'm a menace to Tony Fauci. What is Twitter gonna do to me? And finally, after a month and a half of this and the Biden administration publicly saying the companies are killing people and we need to, you know, possibly look at section230, Twitter bans me. That happened. It is not a conspiracy theory. There is oceans of evidence in the filings that we have. It's undisputed. Now, can I get a legal case out of it? That's a more complicated issue, because what Pfizer says is, well, we had a First Amendment right to express our concerns about this guy. And by the way, the unvaccinated are not a protected class. And by the way, Scott or Andy Slavitt wasn't even working for the government. So, listen, they have very. They've got their $2,000 an hour lawyers fighting for, you know, fighting me. But in terms of the factual record, what I've outlined to you is what happened.
- [81:17]
Miranda Devine
And then we had Missouri versus Biden, which became Missouri versus Murphy. And I think your banning was part of that.
- [81:25]
Alex Berenson
No. So interestingly, it wasn't because I pursued my own case.
- [81:29]
Miranda Devine
Oh, that's right. Sorry.
- [81:30]
Alex Berenson
And I don't know what would have happened if my case had been bundled, because I had the best proof that I had been sort of personally attacked. So. But what I didn't have was that, you know, I didn't have, like, a dozen lawyers for Missouri and other, you know, states putting everything together. So, you know, listen, James Lawrence and I think we fought a really good fight, and we fought it in a difficult district. We fought it in the Southern District of New York. Missouri went to the Western district of Louisiana, and they won there, and they won at the Fifth Circuit. And then the Supreme Court said, hey, these guys don't have enough standing to move forward. I had a much better sort of factual basis for my case. And had the cases been bundled together? It's an unknowable question. Would the Supreme Court have said, hey, at least as the Berenson, this has gotta be allowed to move forward. I just don't know.
- [82:24]
Miranda Devine
Yeah, I mean, because obviously the Hunter Biden laptop censorship mirrored what was happening with you that we found, discovered afterwards with the Twitter files, how orchestrated that was by, you know, the FBI and the CIA and everybody trying to suppress it before the election. So it was slightly different.
- [82:44]
Alex Berenson
Successfully, right? They basically.
- [82:47]
Miranda Devine
Very successfully, absolutely. So, I mean, all you can get out of that is vindication in, you know, the judge's legal decision and, but also in, in the public knowing and in some sort of, you know, the, the Trump administration being very motivated to unwind it and expose it.
- [83:10]
Alex Berenson
Yes. And that, I mean, but, but if I can get this, you know, what's left of the case, even though I've settled with the federal government against Pfizer to move forward, it would be a significant win for me. Not just win for me, but a
- [83:25]
Miranda Devine
win for, like, for First Amendment, for
- [83:28]
Alex Berenson
the First Amendment and for this idea that, listen, unvaccinated people were punished in 2021. And we're going to acknowledge that. And this discovery, this. What was Pfizer in the summer of 2021 talking to the Biden administration about? Because it's not just about me. Right. It's about whether or not they knew the vaccines were failing, whether they thought a mandate was coming, how the conversations that the, that this company, which had a huge financial interest here and the government were having.
- [83:56]
Miranda Devine
You mean if they coerced the government into imposing the mandates by lying to them?
- [84:02]
Alex Berenson
Well, not so much that. It's more, it's more like, hey guys, we think that this needs to happen and it needs to happen quickly because the vaccines are failing more quickly than anybody realize. Is that what the conversation in July 2021 was? I don't know. And by the way, there are people out there yapping about this and you've got to shut them.
- [84:25]
Miranda Devine
It was a horrible, I mean, what a disgusting period in our history. And I mean, honestly, only in America where there are First Amendment for protections could any of this have been pushed back against. Because it certainly wasn't in Australia or England or anywhere else in the world. You know, America's unique like that. I just wanted to just briefly let everyone know a little bit about you and journalism, how you got into journalism, your experience at the New York Times. We've already sort of talked about. You don't think it's a write off, but what's gone wrong with journalism. I'm just thinking about, you know, Russiagate, the climate hoax is identical, I think in terms of the reliance on mathematical modeling, which is so bogus. I did a degree in maths. I know that it's all, you know,
- [85:20]
Alex Berenson
garbage in, garbage out.
- [85:22]
Miranda Devine
Garbage in, garbage out. Exactly. And. But somehow people believed it and it's moved mountains and changed the world and billions of dollars wasted and people terrified and lives ruined. And, you know, a country like Australia, I keep going on about it, but I mean, they've. And Europe, Germany did the same thing. You know, they've totally destroyed their own energy independence. Australia has as much natural energy resources as the United States and really hasn't exploited it. And is. Has two weeks of oil relying on Asia. Singapore doesn't even have any oil, you know, to refine it and send it over.
- [86:03]
Alex Berenson
So it's crazy when you see that. There's that chart that's popped up on X a few times recently where you see the carbon emissions of. Of India and China just exploding in the last 20 years. And, you know, Europe, they've. They've put themselves through misery. They've driven up their energy costs and, you know, they've reduced their emissions by a billion or, you know, a trillion tons of carbon dioxide a year, whatever it is. They've gone from six to five. Meanwhile, the Chinese have gone from two to 15. And it just, you know, it's like. It's like they've. They've committed kind of economic suicide for no reason at all. And you're absolutely right. There's a lot in common with COVID and the reliance on monetization modeling. Very quickly, about me. I was a reporter. I graduated in 1994 from Yale. I went to work for the Denver Post. I always liked being a reporter. Was there for a couple years. I went to something called thestreet.com, which is still around today. It was going to remake financial journalism. It was going to compete with the Wall Street Journal. It was an early Internet sort of adopter. And I went to the Times. I got to the Times very young. I was very fortunate. I did some interesting stories@the streets.com at 26in.in. I started at the very beginning of 2000, worked there for.
- [87:22]
Miranda Devine
Who was your. Who was your. Who was the editor then?
- [87:26]
Alex Berenson
The. The editor of the paper was Joe Lelyveld. I was a business reporter and worked for a guy named Glenn Craymond, a great guy. I had great. I had great editors at times. Another editor named Winnie o' Kelly became the deputy business editor. I really enjoyed working with her. I was mostly a financial reporter and business reporter. I did Go to Iraq a couple times for the paper. I, you know, I did some. I did a lot of interesting stuff. I have no regrets about my career at the Times. And I think the stories that I wrote there have some of them, like, still look pretty good 15 years later. So, you know, 15. So why later I left? Because I wrote a spy novel called the Faithful Spy that came out in 2006. And in 2008, it was sort of based a little bit on Iraq and my experiences there. Not. Not really, but, you know, that informed. And in 2008, I woke up one day and it was number one on the Times bestseller paperback list. And I was like, you know what? I might be writing some more of these.
- [88:27]
Miranda Devine
That's great. That's how I first got to read. That's where I first read you was just novels.
- [88:33]
Alex Berenson
That's funny. I mean, I still get these emails from people being like, are you going to write another John Wells novel? I was like, that's something else I would like to do. And so then I left The Times in 2010. I wrote novels. I wrote a novel a year for basically the next nine years. Then I wrote tell your children, got married, had kids, moved up to the Hudson Valley. Then after tell your children came out and Covid, then I became this right wing person, even though I'm not really a right wing person. And so now I'm in this kind of unique position. I feel like I have a very good audience. I mean, I don't really have a podcast, which my daughter actually saying to me, you should have done a podcast three years ago, but you should still do it today. And I mean, maybe, but there's so many people who do them and I feel like, right, so it's easy to. It's easy to look at ones like yours that are super successful and think like, oh, there's gold in them. There are Hills. But 99.999% of them aren't yours.
- [89:37]
Miranda Devine
But you're interesting and you have something always interesting to say and ideas. I think it would.
- [89:43]
Alex Berenson
Well, maybe. Maybe I should do it.
- [89:46]
Miranda Devine
Well, let's see how this one goes. I'll tell you how the episode goes.
- [89:49]
Alex Berenson
There you go. You got it. You got to. We don't have to share it publicly unless it's a great number. But you got to tell me if you watch and we've gone, by the way, we've been on for 90 minutes is crazy.
- [89:57]
Miranda Devine
Yeah, I know, I know.
- [89:58]
Alex Berenson
But so, so okay, just to go. So now I'm this person. I'm like, you know, I like, like I was just recently out with Tim Pool. Like, I mean, you know, do, do I agree with Tim Pool? There's a lot of things I disagree strongly with Tim Pool about. And we actually debated those things. But you dance with the people who dance with you, and people on the left just don't want to. But they want to pretend I don't exist. Okay? You asked one question about the Times. Look, the Times had been going to the left. Two things happened. One, Donald Trump won in 2016. Okay? And I'll never forget there was an Onion headline from 2016, back when the Onion was still funny sometimes that said, Hillary Clinton tells Nation, don't fuck this up for me. Okay? And that's literally what 2016 felt like. Like, we're gonna have a woman president. We're gonna have Hillary Clinton. She deserves it. She's put up with her jerk husband all these years. She's smart, she's secretly funny, even though she hides any positive aspects of her personality under this school marmy attitude. She deserves to be president.
- [91:11]
Miranda Devine
It's her turn.
- [91:12]
Alex Berenson
It's her turn. And I was in Hollywood the day after Trump beat Clinton in 2016, and I literally had meetings canceled because people were like, I need a mental health day. What am I going to tell my daughters? You're going to tell them you don't always get what you want. That's what you're going to tell them. But it was like, it was like, okay, that. So the New York Times, like, they were like, we can never let this happen again. We can never let Donald Trump do anything again. And if that means, like, constantly writing about how Russia got him elected, even though that was complete nonsense, that's what we're going to do. And so, and so that was one. Okay, so they lost their bearings with Trump. The other problem is more subtle, and it's something that all of us have, except actually maybe the New York Post. Most places back in the day were supported by advertising, okay? And it turns out that using advertising to fund media is actually not bad. Because, like, when I worked at the Denver Post, like, you could cover politics or you could. I mean, the only thing you couldn't really write negatively about was the big car dealership or the mall. Guess what? Like, those places actually aren't that important right now. You know, Craigslist started it and Google finished it. Like, there is no advertising support for most media organizations. Or, you know, I'm exaggerating, but, like, they are much more subscription based than they used to be. Okay. And it turns out that when you're subscriber based, you're subject to a much more pernicious form of capture. Audience capture, not advertising capture. And this is something I have to fight against all the time. I mean, I've actually managed somehow to convince my substack readers that like, even though I write stuff about Trump that you don't like, I'm actually trusting you to be, you know, that I'm telling you the truth. And my value to you is not telling you what you want, what you want to hear, but telling you the truth. And there's enough of them that believe that, that I'm able to do pretty well. But like, that's not a, that's not how most people go in this business. Mostly they go towards what the audience wants.
- [93:27]
Miranda Devine
And it's worse with, I mean, I think podcasters and so called citizen journalists are even more prone to audience capture.
- [93:35]
Alex Berenson
I would disagree with you. I think New York Times is just as prone to it, right? If anything, more prone because they have really sophisticated metrics, right? They're really watching how many seconds. I mean, I don't, you know, I guess I can get that data. But like the Times knows what people are reading and like it or not, they want to give people more of that and they've been very successful doing it.
- [94:02]
Miranda Devine
So, last question, because this is a theory that I've had based on absolutely no evidence. Okay? So I'm just going to run it by you subscription model. It would be very cheap for say China or somebody to buy in bulk, a huge number because New York Times does cheapies like a dollar a month or whatever every now and then. So, you know, you buy a million subscriptions and suddenly you have a big say in terms of, you can put bots in the comments and I don't know you. It's cheaper than buying a chunk of the New York Times, which you can't even buy.
- [94:41]
Alex Berenson
So that is something I think is more likely to be happening on substance. Right? There is this theory that, you know, people like Robert Reich, they're these, there's these like people who have massive, seemingly massive substack followings. And it's like your content is indistinguishable from the 18 other liberals who migrated to substack.
- [94:58]
Miranda Devine
They're very by their own substance.
- [94:59]
Alex Berenson
Maybe they're buying their own or maybe, you know, like some, you know, liberal nonprofit is buying them. But like, but, but, you know, I think the Times, I think it's more, more of just sort of organic audience Capture that. There's, you know, there's 5 million or whatever it is, you know, hyper, you know, liberal people in academia or wherever. And they all read the New York Times, and the Times is, you know, in. It's sort of a. This is going too far. But it's like fan service, right? It's like they're certain, you know, that's a Hollywood term where, like at the end of the series, you know, that's gone on for seven seasons, you give everybody a happy ending or whatever it is because you want. Right. And so. And so that was. I mean, there was a lot of fan service happening in 2024. First with the pretense that Biden or the pretense that Biden was, like, not a vegetable. And then second with, oh, the idea that, you know, Kamala was the person the Democrats would have chosen in Brad Summer. Yeah, Brad Summer. That's right. Oh, my God. Right? We went from hot back summer to brat summer.
- [96:08]
Miranda Devine
Look, it's been fantastic talking to you, Alex. We could go on forever, but you've
- [96:13]
Alex Berenson
got a flight to catch to Australia. Well, I shouldn't say that, right, Because Cut that out, because you're already there by the time this runs.
- [96:19]
Miranda Devine
But anyway, probably, yeah, I might be back.
- [96:23]
Alex Berenson
But no, this was great. And if I do start a substack, I'm going to blame you for it.
- [96:28]
Miranda Devine
Okay, fantastic. Thanks a lot, Alex.
- [96:31]
Alex Berenson
Thanks for having me.
- [96:32]
Miranda Devine
The pleasure. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit the like and subscribe buttons and put your comments below because I always read them. And we'll be back with more great interviews coming soon.