CLAY: Our friend, Alex Berenson, has gotten banned by Twitter. And the data that he had been talking about has all been proven to be true. In fact, today, Israel — which is one of the most vaccinated countries in the world — hit a new high for covid infections.

And so, here is why I think this is so significant going forward.

I think social media companies are going to have to be held accountable for not just being platforms, but for making editorial decisions. And they have been labeling people like Alex Berenson’s tweets as inaccurate, even though they have been proven to be scientifically accurate. And, Buck, this is a fascinating angle.

Alex is going to sue these companies now for defamation, arguing that they are claiming that he is telling lies, which goes directly to his ability to report. And you’re going to end up, I think, with a real battle in the scientific community over what is and what is not allowed and permissible to be said about covid, because the wild thing here is, if you wait and just let the data eventually tell a story, what is everybody starting to write?

The New York Times, CNN, the Daily Beast, all these left-wing outlets are now saying, “Hey, there’s major issues coming, because Israeli data is reflecting that the vaccines are not working as we were told they were going to.” There’s no other storyline when we end up with a new high for covid infections as is happening in Israel, which is one of the largest vaccinated countries in the world.

So Alex Berenson is, I think, important here in the context that he has been said to be lying, right? Twitter has been labeling his reports inaccurate, and they’re all actually ending up being accurate, which means I think Twitter may have some liability here.

BUCK: Twitter’s got a lot of money and a lot of lawyers is part of the problem.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So they’re not going be overly worried about one lawsuit like this. I think it’s more important for all of us just to know that this is what we are up against now. It used to be… There’s been a whole transformation of the communication infrastructure in this country over the last, let’s say, 15 years or so, give or take.

You could go back even five or ten years when social media was really getting going in a meaningful way, right? A lot of people here say, “When did you start using Facebook a lot for news? Not just to see a couple photos of your friends, but it started to become your feed? You know, for folks, maybe 10 years ago, something like that for a lot of them.

And there would be initial reports, early reports of being saying, “I think I’m shadow banned. I think there’s some games being played with the algorithms,” and while these social media companies were becoming larger and more powerful, while they were becoming really — monetarily and influence-wise — the most powerful media companies on earth; I don’t think there’s even an argument to counter that play, they would say, “Oh no we’re a neutral platform. We’re not doing any of this stuff that you think we’re doing behind the scenes.”

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: And then you had a couple of stories, “Hold on. Why is this conservative getting banned? Why is that conservative being suppressed in some way?” And they would say — you remember this — “Oh, it was a mistake.” Somehow it was always conservatives that were getting hit by this, but it was a mistake. What’s happened as a result of, I think, their frenzy against Trump…

Because Trump used social media so effectively, he turned that tool against the apparatus of the Democrat control. There was all of this pressure brought to bear — and I mean it — at the very top of Google, the very top of Twitter and Facebook, “You’ve got to do something. You can’t allow this to happen again!” So they said, “We used to do this with algorithms and shadow banning, fine.

“Now, we’re just going to go all out and we will be a part of the apparatus, of, let’s be honest, mind control that’s really going on here, controlling the national debate and conversation.” And they’re now open, Democrat-left institutions, partisans, operating in that way. That doesn’t mean obviously…You use Twitter; I use Twitter. It’s not that we’re all kicked off —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — because then you would force us to build the other platforms. No. It’s they control it where they have to, when they want to. And they reserve that right. And Alex is an interesting case study because on the data out of Israel, he was on solid ground the entire time. He was proven correct, and they never apologized, Clay, because for them it’s not about being right. It’s about everybody listening to what they tell them.

CLAY: And this is where I think — and this is me, again, putting my lawyer hat on — Twitter has actually said why they banned him. They gave him all these different strikes, and he’s talked about it on this program. And to me what is so utterly interesting about it is if he can go back and prove that all of their checks which led to his banning are not in any way inaccuracies of reporting by him, then it seems to me that Twitter’s entire method of policing content could blow up on itself.

What I’m talking about here in the big picture is, there’s a big difference between being a platform which allows everybody to say everything and editorializing. And what Twitter has been trying to pretend is that they don’t editorialize, that is they don’t pick the stories and maybe issues that they blow up to turn into a big story — and, look, this is also a flaw of the media.

But you got a ton of people sitting around all day checking to see what’s trending on Twitter as if it’s representative of the biggest stories that go on in the country on a day-to-day basis, and it creates this entire feeding frenzy.

And I want to play this from Fauci, if we could, because Fauci has used Twitter to get his message out, and he is in favor of all these ridiculous mandates.

And I think what you’re going to see is the collusion between Facebook and Fauci, and the collusion between Twitter and Fauci, and the collusion between Instagram and Fauci using Fauci as a stand-in for the lockdown government issues. Listen to Cut 19 here as Fauci talks about how he is in favor of all these mandates occurring at the local level that the federal government doesn’t have the authority to do themselves. This is about mind control, and they’re using big tech to coalesce with default state action through local governments and through businesses.

FAUCI: Guy, I’m very much in favor of mandating at the local level. I don’t think we’re going see real federal mandates except for certain agencies of the federal government. I mean, we’ve already seen that with the Veterans’ Administration. But now that we have the full approval, full stamp of approval — at least for the Pfizer vaccine — we are definitely going to see mandating for colleges if you want to attend in person at a college or a university, or places of business that employ large numbers of people.

BUCK: Places of business.

CLAY: This is crazy.

BUCK: This is why it would be so useful, so helpful to have some state or states that would come along and say, “We’re actually not going to allow you to fire people.”

CLAY: That is what you got into, for people out there, when you were talking to Kristi Noem is you want people to be protected in her state from being able to be fired over this.

BUCK: Opt out as a matter of conscience, I would like to see, because otherwise, folks, it’s just the rolling wave here of mandates that will wash over the entire country. Even in a place… Look, I have to check and see what the latest is down in Florida. I mean, DeSantis, he’s been holding the line in so many ways in so many places in a 50/50 state, basically, Democrat/Republican —

CLAY: Yes. Right.

BUCK: — which is a very different phenomenon than what you have in a heavily red state, where you could actually push these things more and be the laboratory. Use federalism to our advantage, be the laboratory for, “We can actually play offense in favor of liberty” instead what we’re going to see is everybody is going to start bending.

You’ll have to make decisions you don’t want to make; you’re gonna suffer. They’re going to to tell your kid he can’t go to school. Okay. It’s easy to say, “Oh, don’t get the shot.” Well, maybe you’re on a D1 scholarship for football. And now if you don’t get the shot, you can’t play. So now you will give up your education because of the state? You’re going to allow the Democrat mandate take that from you?

These are the kind of decisions people are going to have to make, and it’s not going to change any time soon. Remember, we’re heading into the winter season, folks. We have vaccines declining in efficacy. And we have the winter season coming. They’re already talking about boosters. It’s not like we’re going to get into October and they’re going to start to lighten up about this stuff.

No, they’re going go into even more of a panic mode. So we either establish some individual liberty protections against this, or it’s all going to be New York City. I know people say, “Oh, I would just never go to a restaurant or movie theater or send my kid to school or anything” if they lived in New York. How long would you last with that? You start to —

CLAY: And also, the question is how much enforcement are you seeing in New York. Are people actually checking this? I don’t know.

BUCK: It’s about 50/50 in restaurants.

CLAY: When you go to a restaurant?

BUCK: It’s about 50/50 they will check for it. Now, I do know, I’ve heard rumors — a little bit here, a little bit there. I don’t know who. I don’t know where. But I do know there are people that maybe have fakes.

CLAY: Yeah, we talked about this.

BUCK: Who are getting away with the fake thing very easily.

CLAY: But only about half of restaurants, in your experience — or bars — are checking whether or not you have a vaccine?

BUCK: Total coin flip.

CLAY: Yeah?

BUCK: Some come right up to you at the door they want to see your ID and they want to see your vaccine passports. And if you don’t have it, they say, “I’m sorry, you cannot dine here.” That’s where we are. By the way, Clay, that number’s only go up, because the actual enforcement doesn’t start by the City of New York until, I think, middle of September.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: It’s two weeks out. Some places have gotten ahead of it. And of course, the coffee shop on the corner of my block, they have a little book section; I’m not even kidding. The books are White Fragility. Michelle Obama’s biography. You know, just like the liberal cannon all together there.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And they still have a mask mandate and a vaccine mandate, even though it’s not required by the city. So this is what you have in certain places. But I’m telling everybody right now: I know the mandate mentality, and they’re coming.