Goodbye Berenson v (Joe) Biden.

Hello Berenson v (Albert) Bourla.

Today, the Trump Administration and I settled the federal government’s role in Berenson v Biden, my lawsuit against Biden Administration and Pfizer officials for violating my Constitutional rights and forcing Twitter to ban me in summer 2021.

After three hard-fought years, this settlement marks a massive win in my fight to hold the government and Pfizer accountable for their conspiracy to silence me. I could not have done it without your support. (Or Elon Musk’s.)

The agreement includes a six-figure payment and a statement “the Government did in fact violate the First Amendment by exerting substantial coercive pressure on social media companies such as Twitter to suppress disfavored speech like Plaintiff’s.”

James Lawrence, my (very able) lawyer, and I believe this settlement marks the first time any individual American has received a cash payment to resolve a lawsuit over government coercion of social media companies.

More importantly, the government’s admission may prove crucial as my suit moves ahead against its remaining defendants, Pfizer board member Dr. Scott Gottlieb and chairman Dr. Albert Bourla.

I am pleased the Trump administration recognized the Biden White House’s violations of my rights and chose to settle with me despite my recent criticism of Trump. At least in my case, the White House is practicing what it preaches on the First Amendment. A thank-you is in order.

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(I will never, never, NEVER stop fighting for the First Amendment and the truth. Join me.)

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The battle is won. But the war is not over.

While the settlement releases the government from the case, it leaves us open to pursue Bourla and Gottlieb for their role in the conspiracy. That conspiracy was not just against me, but against all unvaccinated people who were reading and listening to me as the Biden Administration prepared to force mRNA jabs on healthy adults.

And we are pushing ahead, by asking the federal Second Circuit of Appeals in New York City to find Covid unvaccinated people deserve the same First Amendment protections as a group as many other disfavored groups do.

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(Scott Gottlieb does his Scott Gottlieb thing. Yes, he was talking about me. Somehow he forgot to mention in this email that he was getting paid by company that sold about $100 billion in mRNA jabs. Oops!

Todd O’Boyle was Twitter’s top White House lobbyist in 2021. You can smell the swamp fumes from here. Or maybe that’s just Gottlieb’s hair oil.)

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The settlement came on the eve of the government’s deadline to file a response to our appeal, after Judge Jessica G.L. Clarke dismissed our lawsuit last fall.

Our complaint contained ample evidence Gottlieb worked with Biden administration officials to force Twitter to ban me in 2021, even as Twitter’s most senior executives questioned if I had done anything to violate the platform’s terms of service. Bourla contacted top officials at the same time, including a White House meeting with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff.

In fact, it was Gottlieb’s direct appeal to Twitter’s White House lobbyist over my famous Aug. 28, 2021 “It doesn’t stop infection” tweet that led directly to my ban.

In general, private companies and individuals cannot directly violate First Amendment rights. But a federal law known as 1985(3) gives plaintiffs the right to sue in federal courts over conspiracies that keep them from “having and exercising any right or privilege of a citizen of the United States.”

Federal courts have generally construed 1985(3) narrowly. But the conspiracy between Gottlieb, Bourla, and the federal government in 2021 is clearly the type of behavior for which the statute creates liability.

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(I hope so much that one day I’ll get to see Pfizer and Scott Gottlieb try to defend banning me over this tweet to a jury. Even a New York jury.)

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The question James Lawrence and I will ask the Second Circuit to answer is not whether federal or state governments may require vaccinations. It is whether unvaccinated people have the same rights to speak to each other as people who are vaccinated.1 And the government’s acknowledgement in its settlement that it did in fact violate those First Amendment rights makes my case stronger.

If we win at the Second Circuit, our lawsuit will be alive back in front of Judge Clarke. And we will get the discovery about the communications between the White House and Pfizer in summer 2021 I have been fighting to see for three years.

If we lose at the Second Circuit, we’ll go to the Supreme Court and try there.

Three years in, the fight has only begun.

But today is a good day. A very, very good day. The mainstream media might even have to take notice (though I’m not counting on it).

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(And any day is a good day to subscribe! Catch up on the paywalled history of Berenson v BidenBourla)

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Note: that six-figure settlement should cover us through the Second Circuit appeal.

But hopefully we will soon be back before Judge Clarke, fighting Pfizer for depositions, discovery, and the chance to get to a jury.

And over the last four years, beginning with Berenson v Twitter, I’ve realized many of you give because you want to stand with me in this fight.

If that’s how you feel, you can still donate:

Via GiveSendGo

Via GoFundMe

You can also Venmo me at Alex-Berenson-3

Or send a check to James Lawrence at Envisage Law, PO Box 30099
Raleigh, North Carolina 27622

Donations of all sizes welcome — this is about standing together.

Courtesy Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images

When I started this column late last year, one of the first studies I dug into was an analysis of a school phone ban in Florida. Some topics never go away for long. The most-discussed research this week again focused on screen time, kids, and related school policies.

First, our friends over at the Institute for Family Studies put out striking new survey results. The gist is that today’s kids have a lot of access to screens, but relatively little freedom in the real world. One indicator: by the age of 11, over 60 percent of kids have a smartphone, but around half still can’t leave the family’s property unaccompanied.

Meanwhile, a new working paper released through the National Bureau of Economic Research may provide the most rigorous assessment of school cell-phone policies yet—and it doubles as a bit of a Rorschach test, with results that lend themselves to varying interpretations.

As a certified screen-time hater (just ask my kids), I thought two findings in particular stood out. First, when schools aggressively lock down kids’ cell phones, teachers report seeing far less personal use of those devices during class—which in my view justifies such a policy all by itself, as kids obviously should not be messing around with their phones in class. And two, students’ overall wellbeing dips a little as they get used to the policy and then actually improves.

On the other hand, the researchers find only minimal effects on academic performance and student behavior—results some find a bit underwhelming.

Let’s back up and dig into the methods here.

Basically, a company called Yondr makes pouches that schools can use to contain their cell phone problems. The pouches lock magnetically, though they don’t block signals. Students can keep their (hopefully silenced) phones with them in these pouches without being able to use them, and they can unlock the pouches at dedicated stations in emergencies or when they go home. This stops short of a full-on ban while avoiding some of the enforcement problems inherent in, for example, a “no show” policy, where students carry their phones on them but officially are not allowed to take them out.

The authors have data on which schools throughout the country have purchased this product. On top of that, they have a wide variety of testing and administrative data about the schools, and they ran surveys of both teachers and students to track other policy changes and outcomes. This allows them to compare trends in schools that adopted these pouches with what happened at other, similar schools.

Student cell-phone distraction clearly fell. In their teacher survey, educators at Yondr schools estimated that in-class cell phone use for personal reasons fell from 61 percent of students to 13 percent following the change, though these are subjective guesses (and schools that made other policy changes also saw declines, if smaller ones). Phone “pings” recorded in schools fell too, by around 30 percent, but this includes the phones of teachers and staff, and phones can generate pings even from inside the pouches, making that a lower bound for the reduction in student cell-phone use.

Other outcomes, though, have more mixed results. As mentioned above, student wellbeing—measured through an index of self-reported positive and negative feelings—dips at first but ultimately rises, suggesting some admittedly modest long-term benefits to the policy. The authors peg the boost at 0.16 standard deviations in the second year after adoption, which implies the median kid, at the 50th percentile of wellbeing, would improve to what used to be the 56th percentile.

Meanwhile, the test-score results are small and inconsistent, with a possible increase for high school scores (especially math) and a possible decrease in middle school. Disciplinary incidents see a short-term increase, presumably reflecting an adjustment to the new rules, but this fades out. The authors report “little evidence of effects on school attendance, self-reported classroom attention, or perceived online bullying.”

A miracle cure for everything that ails American education? No. But a worthy policy change? Looks like it to me.

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From the Manhattan Institute

• Immigrant assimilation leads to lower marriage rates, writes Daniel Di Martino.

Other Work of Note

• Another study on kids and social media, asking why Australia’s youth social-media ban hasn’t been very effective.

• “This paper argues that smartphones changed how teens spend time with each other, and that this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility.” Also, do parents who divorce reduce their kids’ later fertility?

• Remember the famous political-science finding that public policy is almost totally unresponsive to the opinions of anyone but the rich? This paper says it’s driven by a subtle statistical problem.

• Some new modeling of what might happen if we taxed married people based on their individual- rather than couple-level earnings, an idea near and dear to my heart.

• “[R]esidential segregation … accounts for more than one third of marital sorting by class but less than 5% by race.”

• “We find that human capital at high school completion largely determines racial and ethnic differences in mid-life labor market outcomes, explaining up to 87% of gaps in some outcomes.”

• Who’s allowed to self-identify as black?

• Beth Akers on how to ensure colleges provide value. And which colleges face the highest stress from demographic and other new challenges?

• Some interesting history on how constitutional amendments have worked historically, focused on the question of whether the Equal Rights Amendment is now law despite missing its deadline years ago.

• Males’ pot use has hit all-time, er, highs.

• ICE arrests do not actually seem to spark much political action, at least in terms of voter registration and donations. And this study probes the effect on the labor market.

• Why people own guns.

• New analysis of gunshot-detection technology in Detroit. The results suggest a decrease in violent crime, but also an (odd) increase in property crime, lots more work for cops, and no change in clearance rates. See also my report from last year summarizing research on the technology.

• Detailed analysis of a century’s worth of suicide data.

• Using genetic data to help chart kids’ cognitive development.

• How the CBO estimates the budget effects of tariffs.

• Measuring corporate taxes’ effects on firms’ financial distress.

• How poverty fell.

• What do hospitals accomplish by hiring management consultants?

• The value of trust in the nation’s economic statistics.

• Some results from a survey on “political breakups,” where people end relationships or friendships over politics. More than a third of people have experienced one, and Democrats seem more likely to initiate one.

• “Evolvable AI: Threats of a new major transition in evolution.” And how the AI industry could regulate itself.

• Wind turbines don’t seem to affect the health of those living close by.

• Hate it all you want, but mandatory two-factor authentication seems to reduce fraud.

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