CLAY: There’s a lot of talk about “misinformation,” which, again, disinformation, whatever you want to phrase it as, it isn’t actually established what is actually being spread about covid that is either misinformation or disinformation, which allows people to say things like Andrew Ross Sorkin did on CNBC, because people… Whenever somebody says, “I’m a big believer in the First Amendment, but,” that’s a big old “but” to drop into the middle of the sentence. Listen to this.

SORKIN: Here they are putting badges and other things on the material. Is it gonna be enough? I don’t know. Do I give Joe Rogan some semblance of credit for saying he’s gonna put somebody on the other side? Sure. But there… Y’know, the idea of putting certain types of controversial voices out there — and I’m a big believer in the First Amendment, but when the information is wrong and demonstrably wrong and can hurt and injure and in certain cases kill people, I think that there is a higher bar to clear.

BUCK: If you are making the claim… Speaking about a high bar to clear, Clay, if you’re gonna make the claim in a public forum that someone is responsible for information that is directly leading to deaths, it is absolutely dishonorable and disgraceful on a number of levels, by the way, not to identify what that is.

CLAY: Amen.

BUCK: This is the big game they’re playing. You know, in Russian they have something called “dezinformatsiya,” disinformation, right? They put this out there, and it’s intentionally dishonest information to bring about a certain result, a certain perception in the person receiving information, right? They do this all the time they do it for political reasons military intelligence reasons misinformation is essentially a play on this because again if it were lies, they would say lies.

If it were just factually inaccurate, they’d say it’s factually inaccurate. The reason they’re playing these games and saying these things is because what they mean by misinformation is actually you and me — and a lot of other people now, by the way — saying masking up kids in school is crazy. Now, that’s not an issue. That’s not an issue of fact so much as an issue of balancing out what we should be achieving for children in schools and what their risks are.

It’s a judgement call, right? It’s a judgment call. But they say it’s misinformation because it deviates from the consensus. If they explain this to people, though, Clay, then it doesn’t sound as scary, right? So what do they have to say? They can’t say Joe Rogan has people on who disagree with us on matters where people can and should disagree. They say, “If you listen to Joe Rogan, people are dying; therefore, we have to shut him down, based on that.” This is crazy.

CLAY: Yes. I think that’s really well said. And that is what needs to happen. What a rigorous media would do is they would actually say, “Okay. What has Joe Rogan said that has proven to be factually inaccurate?” Because, by the way, you want to talk about misinformation or disinformation? The CDC has consistently put out misinformation and disinformation! Can we grab, maybe, again the Rachel Maddow clip where she lectures her audience and says, “Hey, if you get this vaccine, you will never get covid, and you will never transmit it.”

Because that, by the way, is what the CDC was telling everybody in February and March. I’m old enough to remember early last year, Buck, in 2021, when to we were being lectured to by the CDC and by MSNBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN who were all just taking the government talking points — which, by the way, isn’t actually reporting. It’s propaganda.

If you take — uncritically — what government authorities are you telling you and disseminate it to your audience without analyzing any of the underlying data yourself, you are not a journalist; you are a government propagandist. And so this idea that you or me or anybody like Joe Rogan has been spreading disinformation or misinformation? Buck, since we took over this show in June of last year, I would put this show’s discussions of covid and our guests’ discussion of covid up against anyone in media, period.

Right? If you went back and listened to every conversation we had, analyzed it within the context of what existing data said and showed at that time — I’m not talking about looking at something that was said in June of last year and comparing it to what we know now with new data at this moment, I’m saying in the time that we had those conversations — I’m not sure that any show in the entire country has been more honest and transparent and factually rooted in data than this one in the entire country. I would take those odds. I bet you would, too.

BUCK: Yeah, of course.

CLAY: Can you think of any show out there? Television, radio, podcast, YouTube, any of them? I would put this show up against every single one of them.

BUCK: Yeah. I’m glad that some of the guests that we have end up getting on other big shows later on. I’m happy to be helping folks get pointed towards the truth, and that’s what really matters here is getting to the right answers and getting to what’s actually necessary for us to go forward.