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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Welcome to Morning Wire, I'm Georgia Howe.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): And I'm John Bickley, Daily Wire editor-in-chief.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): It's September 24th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): Today, we're discussing the recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court that the White House, the FBI, and the CDC likely violated the First Amendment when they pressured social media companies to censor posts related to COVID.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Joining us is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham, who interviewed Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the plaintiffs in the case.
--:-- Megan Basham: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): Dr. Bhattacharya, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It's my pleasure to join.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, many of our listeners are going to be aware of the Great Barrington Declaration, which, of course, at the height of COVID, offered some alternative medical opinions on how the government could approach the pandemic. And of course, in particular, it argued against widespread lockdowns.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: That's right.
--:-- Megan Basham: Now, I think a lot of people are aware of the Twitter files and what they revealed regarding government involvement in those content moderation decisions. But for those who have not been specifically tracking this lawsuit, can you review how federal agencies were involved in censoring you?
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: So this lawsuit, this Missouri versus Biden case, we in the court proceedings managed to get permission to depose a dozen federal employees, including Tony Fauci himself, including people in the White House. And we also got to read emails between the White House and these social media companies.
--:-- Megan Basham: What it showed is a pattern of essentially threats by the White House where they would say things like, in effect, if you don't take down these posts, if you don't censor these people, then your company is going to go kaput.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, we're going to go use regulatory action against you. And even when there was like a friendly interaction, the implied threat was there.
--:-- Megan Basham: And the reason it's so concerning is because it didn't matter if the White House was trying to suppress actual false things on the web. They wanted to suppress even true statements.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: As long as it contradicted the government's pandemic policies, the White House thought it was fair game to get rid of even true facts.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, facts like that you actually have some substantial immunity after COVID recovery. I mean, that's a fact.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The fact that the vaccine doesn't stop you from getting COVID. That is a fact.
--:-- Megan Basham: These are the kinds of things the White House told social media companies to suppress or vaccine injuries.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: You know, Facebook suppressed vaccine injury groups where patients wouldn't talk to each other and provide consolation for each other and advice for each other.
--:-- Megan Basham: They took those down at the express force of the White House.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I think I saw that the Fifth Circuit Court actually sort of gently but compared the White House to the mob.
--:-- Megan Basham: They did. They compared to Al Capone.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: So I mean that better than what the district court did which was they compared the White House to Orwell Ministry of Truth in 1984.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean I think these kinds of analogies are not flattering to the White House.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And I just I wonder if they understand that what they did was so at odds with the American commitment to free speech.
--:-- Megan Basham: I never thought in my life that this would become a partisan issue.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Did it surprise you to see the list of agencies? Obviously, the White House was included in that that were involved in this content moderation.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, it was very long. I mean, I did not expect to see the FBI on that list.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I did not expect to see the State Department on that list.
--:-- Megan Basham: I did not expect to see even the White House itself.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, this is a pretty broad government effort, all of government effort, from all across the federal government to suppress American speech.
--:-- Megan Basham: So I am shocked that an American government of any political stripe would engage in this kind of behavior.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The American First Amendment, I thought, was something that every single American agreed with.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's part of the American civic religion, I think, that we are committed to free speech.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, in some ways, it's the extent of American support for free speech makes us different than many, many other nations.
--:-- Megan Basham: And so it stunned me that there would be a government that would so brazenly decide that free speech wasn't important.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: That, in fact, they knew science so well that they could suppress people who were putting forward opposing ideas.
--:-- Megan Basham: You know, the First Amendment protects both true and false speech.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It's not a question of whether it's true or false. I mean, no American government should ever act this way.
--:-- Megan Basham: The irony is that, in fact, what the government was doing was suppressing true speech simply because it was inconvenient to the policies that the government itself wanted to put forward.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: So you're a highly credentialed American citizen, but an average American citizen. You find yourself in these Twitter files.
--:-- Megan Basham: You find that these massive bureaucracies, these authorities, the DOJ is taking an interest in what you're saying.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Is that intimidating?
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, I guess I still have this naive faith that things like that eventually America corrects itself.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Like we do have a history where governments have overreached on this.
--:-- Megan Basham: Like you can go back and read Sidney Hook's diary memoirs from where he reminisces about the restrictions of speech during World War I.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Of course, the most famous thing is probably the suppression of speech by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy saying, you know, like, were you ever a communist?
--:-- Megan Basham: Those kinds of suppression of speech in American history have generally been rejected by Americans looking back soberly.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And I still I guess I still have this naive faith in America that we will reject this kind of overreach and history will judge them very, very poorly.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you could sit down in a room with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, what would you tell them about how this impacted you professionally, personally, to have your medical, very valid medical opinions censored in this way?
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, the kinds of activities they engaged in, in effect, what it did is it made it impossible for me to get a fair hearing in the scientific community, even though many of the things I was saying were absolutely correct and important for COVID policy.
--:-- Megan Basham: And in fact, personally, what it did is it engaged a whole group of people that didn't know scientific evidence very well, but that were certain that what I was saying was so dangerous, I shouldn't be allowed to say it.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: For the first time in my life, I got emails, essentially racist emails, saying, go back to your home country.
--:-- Megan Basham: It made my life very, very difficult.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, there was a lot of stress around that.
--:-- Megan Basham: But the other thing that I saw happen and I knew this because a lot of scientists were writing to me so they were thanking me for keeping on speaking but they were saying that they were afraid for their careers.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And they saw the example of what me Martin Kulldorff from Harvard and Sinatra Gupta, the three of us who wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, what we were going through.
--:-- Megan Basham: And they didn't want to go through that.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, completely reasonably, like who wants to go through that?
--:-- Megan Basham: And so they stayed silent.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: In effect, the purpose of this was to silence everybody, not just me.
--:-- Megan Basham: So to make an example of me, It's not made my stupidity was I kept talking.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: If I just stayed silent, they wouldn't have gone after me.
--:-- Megan Basham: I think it's just the kind of thing that's very insidious.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Censorship isn't just like, okay, I'm going to stop you from speaking.
--:-- Megan Basham: The purpose of censorship is to silence other people and then to destroy the reputations of people that are speaking against what the government wants.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: So that no one would speak and even the ideas themselves, even if you can get it in front of the public, people will say, oh, gosh, it's that weird fringe guy speaking.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's the kind of thing that you would see an authoritarian country do, but never you would think that an American government would engage in it.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: But that's exactly what happened, Megan.
--:-- Megan Basham: In this country, in this United States during the pandemic, the American government acted to make sure that outside critics of their policies, scientific critics with credentials, couldn't speak up, wouldn't speak up.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Had you ever seen anything like this before in your scientific background?
--:-- Megan Basham: Never.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: This is unique.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, I never imagined it would be possible.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And I never imagined that this kind of suppression could happen.
--:-- Megan Basham: Of course, not in the United States, but also just generally within science.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Science works because of freedom of speech.
--:-- Megan Basham: If a scientist can't say what their ideas are, then you can't have science.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Science operates by people making hypotheses that contradict current ideas.
--:-- Megan Basham: Science operates by people collecting data and then discussing it with other scientists who may disagree with them about the interpretation of the data.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: If you don't have free speech, if you have a preferred position, a narrative that has to be said no matter what, whether you agree or disagree, well, you don't have science.
--:-- Megan Basham: What you have is essentially a return to a dark age where you have a high pope of science like Tony Fauci dictating from on high, this is true, this is not true.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: If you say something that contradicts them, well, you're not simply contradicting a man.
--:-- Megan Basham: You're contradicting science itself, as he actually said in an interview.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And what that means then is that you are not a scientist.
--:-- Megan Basham: You're something else altogether.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: So what do you think then about the Fifth Circuit narrowing the scope of the district court's injunction to allow SISA to continue flagging posts for review on social media?
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, I think that's problematic.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, I think it's what SISA, this Department of Homeland Security group does, is it engages with nonprofits, including, for instance, the Stanford Internet Observatory.
--:-- Megan Basham: And what these nonprofits do is that they get paid based on grants from the government.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: They identify things that they call misinformation.
--:-- Megan Basham: In this case, they're identifying things that were even true.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It's just a government hit list of ideas they didn't like.
--:-- Megan Basham: And then that sets the agenda for the censorship regime.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I think that the government should not be engaging these groups.
--:-- Megan Basham: I think it should be a prohibited activity.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I'm disappointed with the district court that it sort of carved that part of it out.
--:-- Megan Basham: But what the district court did do is they said, look, that hit list, SISA can't then go to the companies, to Facebook, to Google, to whoever, and say, look, you have to defensive these people and these ideas on this hit list.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Which we've developed or we've gotten through our engagement with these nonprofits.
--:-- Megan Basham: So at least the piece of it is that they can't actually use that as an official hit list.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: They can still put it out, right?
--:-- Megan Basham: They can still say, we think these people are misinforming.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, they can essentially launder defamation by these groups, which is unfortunate.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, I think that that should not be something the government should be permitted to do.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: It kind of within the range of things that limit speech that I think the First Amendment should protect against.
--:-- Megan Basham: So hopefully that will either get fixed by legislation which legislation would say to the government look this is not the kind of thing we going to do.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: We're not going to launder defamation, generate hit lists that are aimed at figuring out who should speak and who shouldn't speak online.
--:-- Megan Basham: But this is still an important ruling.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The ruling basically says that they can't go to the companies and threaten them.
--:-- Megan Basham: The companies now can just go tell the government, go pound sand, go away.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: We're not going to listen to you.
--:-- Megan Basham: And there's nothing the government can do about it now.
--:-- Megan Basham: So what do you say to the White House when they say, and I think this was part of their statement, we have an interest and a responsibility to protect the health and safety of our citizens.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Yeah, they do have a responsibility to protect the health and well-being of the citizens.
--:-- Megan Basham: And the way you do that is by free speech.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The censorship ended up killing people.
--:-- Megan Basham: I mean, I don't mean to be overwrought to this.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: I mean, I literally mean that.
--:-- Megan Basham: Like, I think we adopted policies that both in the short run and the long run will have harmed the health and well-being of our populace.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Just to take one example, the school closures, especially in blue states, lasted way, way, way too long, far out of line with, for instance, what was happening in Europe or Scandinavia, and far out of line with the scientific evidence was saying.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yet you weren't really allowed to – if you said that, my colleague Martin Kulldorff would post that, the evidence from Scandinavia about school closures, and his post would get suppressed.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: He actually got some caution of when he posted something about math, again, consistent with what the scientific evidence was saying.
--:-- Megan Basham: The effect of that school closure is, according to the scientific literature from before the pandemic, keeping kids out of school is very bad for their long-run and short-run health.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The evidence from, for instance, some states in the 20th century would increase the number of required years of schooling from age 15 to age 16 or something.
--:-- Megan Basham: People will look and say, okay, if you look at the states that are bordering each other with different policies for that, what happens to the kids that are required to stay in school longer?
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Well, it turns out they live longer lives.
--:-- Megan Basham: They live healthier lives.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: They're less likely to be poor.
--:-- Megan Basham: Schooling is absolutely essential in the long run of health and well-being of our kids.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And so because we were not allowed to speak, these schools stayed closed far beyond what the scientific evidence was saying.
--:-- Megan Basham: And as a result, our kids are going to suffer, especially poor kids, especially minority kids.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: The censorship allowed bad policies to continue, harming the health and well-being of Americans.
--:-- Megan Basham: And the government itself, by engaging in it, is responsible for these bad health outcomes.
--:-- Megan Basham: Okay, last question then. Is there anything I haven't specifically asked you about Missouri v. Biden and how this tech censorship impacted you that you think our listeners should know about?
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Well, I think the key thing I want to get across to the listeners, it's not just about the plaintiffs in the case, not just about me or Martin Kulldorff or Aaron Cariotti or Louisiana, our freedom groups.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's about all Americans.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: This is the kind of thing that should never have happened in the United States.
--:-- Megan Basham: And every American's rights were violated.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: If you posted something on Facebook and got tagged as misinformation, or if you were afraid to post something on Facebook because you were afraid that, well, what if somebody tagged this and you were seen by your friends as posting misinformation?
--:-- Megan Basham: If you felt this sense of dread that you couldn't say what you wanted to say during the pandemic, you weren't imagining it.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And it was explicit government policy that made that happen.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's an environment that generally you might find in an authoritarian country, not in a free country like the United States.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: And it is entirely at odds with what should have happened in the United States.
--:-- Megan Basham: And I hope that every American listening to this knows that this case is for you.
--:-- Megan Basham: It's not primarily about us.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Very well stated.
--:-- Megan Basham: Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Bhattacharya.
--:-- Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: We very much appreciate your time.
--:-- Megan Basham: Thank you, Megan.
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--:-- Host (Georgia Howe): That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham interviewing Stanford medical professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.
--:-- Host (John Bickley): And this was your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
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