An Interview with Transcriber B (Part 1)
A Q&A session with the prolific Substacker who, since 2021, has diligently been transcribing Covid-related videos which might otherwise get deleted or forgotten
Transcriber B, I have been following you for about 2.5 years on Substack. Can you explain the purpose of your work to those who are not aware of what you do?
To establish a historical record by way of a broadly representative selection of transcripts of censored and shadow-banned videos pertaining to Covid and Covid policies which were posted online in English from 2021-2023.
More specifically, to gather a text record of video from:
experts;
the bereaved and the injured;
those who, for whatever reason, did not comply with official policies.
Even more specifically, I look for those videos, whether of testimonies, interviews, conversations, or speeches, that exemplify individual spirit in the face of medical tyranny. It might be of an expert giving counter-narrative testimony before a senator, it might be of a bereaved father in tears filming himself in his car, an injured woman talking about her chest pain and about how she got the medical gaslighting. It might be a doctor being escorted out of the hospital for having refused the jab, or a confrontation on the street, a rally speech, a rant, or a friendly interview via Zoom.
So my project is simple, it’s as per legal fair use, I do this on my own initiative, there is no financial interest (I give no money, I accept no money), and 2021-2023 is the time frame.
I plan to leave this archive online and in due time, when apt, donate the digital and paper files to institutional archives that will have them, and make them available for researchers.
Where does your name — Transcriber B — come from?
It just popped into my mind.
Are you a woman, as one might guess from your profile picture?
Yes.
And who is that woman in the profile picture?
It’s a 19th century portrait, sort of a random choice. I don’t look like her, but I like her expression, the way she might be looking down at her work, very focused, very determined.
Why do you choose to remain anonymous?
Tyrants tried to crush these people who spoke out, and so crush us all. As I see it, we are in a war — a strange war, a war primarily over the control of our minds, and on our awareness of who we are. The battlefields are here and now, but also in the future — including perhaps the far future. I believe that the most effective thing I can do personally in this war at this time is to simply help preserve the words of these people, each a unique individual, who spoke out when it counted, that they may be encountered and taken in on their own terms.
Another and related reason I choose to remain anonymous is that some of the testimonies are extremely personal and disturbing, especially those of the bereaved and the injured, and I feel that these individuals who so courageously spoke out, who so clearly wanted more people to hear what they had to say, deserve this purity of presentation — that the reader may encounter their words, and reflect upon them, without me, my opinions, all my body of work, in the way.
And this, by the way, is the very same reason I do not host a comments section on my Substack or Dreamwidth. (However I do note in every post how anyone can send me a comment via email.)
Are you able to share your views with friends and family in real life? Do any of them know that you are doing this work?
With counted exceptions, no.
In 2020 and especially in 2021 I took some hard lessons in accepting that most people in my personal and professional circles are unable to take in counter-“official narrative” information, nor are they able to engage in polite and rational discussion on anything to do with Covid. Many are highly intelligent and thoughtful people, but starting in 2020 and especially in 2021, their minds seem to have been plugged into a kind of groupthink-dream-logic. But of course this isn’t true of everyone, and we are finding each other. Meanwhile, I am certain that, sooner or later, the day will come when large numbers of intelligent and thoughtful people will be able to look at this criminal catastrophe with open and rational minds. And I would hope that these transcripts may assist them in that endeavor.
How long have you been transcribing interviews and audio from the Covid era?
Since 2021.
How long do you plan to continue?
I’m starting to wind it down now in 2025. As noted, the focus for the transcripts is videos filmed in 2021-2023; there were enough of them that, throughout 2024, I posted a transcript nearly every day. This winter 2025 I expect to continue posting but at a slower pace, about 2-4 times a week. By spring I expect to be tapering off further, posting maybe once or twice a week, or every other week.
In 2025 I also plan to continue preparing the index. I’ve gotten a running start on that, and I invite anyone interested in the List of Transcriptions to have a look:
https://transcriberb.dreamwidth.org/142176.html
What made you decide to do this work?
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I will say that in the past 2 years especially I felt a strong and consistent intuition that it was urgent that I get these made.
Was there a particular interview or audio you heard which first prompted the decision?
In September 2021 I happened upon a long video of the South Carolina State Senate Medical Affairs Committee hearings, and deep in there, I found the testimony of veteran pulmonary nurse, Albert Spence. Spence was extremely upset about what he had seen in the Covid wards. He flatly contradicted the official “narrative” about Covid and Covid hospital protocols, and as I listened to his testimony, with a rising sense of alarm, I realized that it wasn’t going to be covered in the mainstream media, and the video itself might even be lost. It occurred to me to transcribe it — although at that time, I had no idea what I might do with the transcription other than share it with family members. (I ended up posting it on John Michael Greer’s Covid forum, a forum for which I remain most grateful.) I also wanted to transcribe this testimony to simply sit with Spence’s voice, his presence, and to get my mind around the enormity of what he was saying.
At that point, it had been a year and a half since the start of the lockdowns and all the rest of the weird, continually shifting “official narrative.”
I knew that I was being lied to. I knew most people just swallowed whatever the mainstream media and their doctors told them, however nonsensical, no questions, no objections, dismissing anything else as “conspiracy theory” — and sometimes very angrily, very aggressively. And here was someone, a veteran pulmonary nurse who had worked in the Covid wards, very upset, and telling an entirely different and horrific story.
Soon thereafter, as I suspected it would, YouTube took that video down for “violating community standards.” I later found a clip of Spence’s testimony on Bitchute:
Nurse Albert Spence Testifies Before South Carolina State Senate: Covid Policy Was Killing Patients. | Video | TRANSCRIPT |
I assume the Substack platform was a deliberate choice to host these transcriptions. Please can you explain to somebody who might not be familiar with Substack why that is.
I think we who spend time on Substack tend to have a lot of enthusiasm for, and a swirl of big picture thoughts about, Substack — certainly many of the most important and interesting voices are here at the moment. And it is thanks to multiple Substacks that I have found many of the links to the censored and shadow-banned videos that I transcribe.
But to answer your question precisely, I was already using, and still use the Dreamwidth platform as the main site for the transcripts, not Substack. The rather prosaic reason that I turned to Substack was that I found Substack easier to use for posting screenshots1.
That’s basically all I do on Substack: post a screenshot (or two) from the video, a snippet of the transcript, and a link to the transcript on Dreamwidth.
Others writing on Substack, of course, have found the platform useful for providing a forum for conversations, debates, sharing information, and also for building a subscription list, and thereby earning income. Valuable as those purposes may be for many others, these are not my purposes for Transcriber B’s Substack, so I don’t have more comment to offer in that vein.
I should also note that, unlike Google and Facebook, as of this writing (January 2025) both Dreamwidth and Substack seem to be respecting free speech, and I sincerely appreciate and respect that.
I never bothered to post any transcripts on Blogger (which is Google), Facebook, LinkedIn, any of those corrupted Big Tech platforms. I knew they would take down my posts. Twitter, previously heavily censored, has opened up since Elon Musk took it over, and there’s always free-speech stalwart Gab, but I stay away from those because I prefer to spend my time making more transcripts.
How do you decide which interviews or audio to transcribe?
As I write in the introduction to the List of Transcriptions:
I see this archive as making a rough chronicle and a remarkably lively mosaic — a portrait — one portrait of what might be an infinite number of a time and place, and of a heterogeneous group of English-speaking people (and a few for whom English is a second language) whose voices would not have been suppressed in previous years, but were because they challenged ‘the narrative.’
So when considering a video, I ask myself:
Does this video add to that portrait?
Relatedly:
Do I want to sit with this voice for the time it takes to make a transcript?
It’s mainly an intuitive process; it just feels right or it doesn’t. I do have a work plan, say, next Tuesday I’m going to transcribe thus-and-such, however, oftentimes when I sit down to start transcribing on that particular day I find that I am inspired to work on an entirely different transcript.
That said, now that I’ve accumulated some several hundred transcripts and have started preparing an index, I am better able to take a bird’s eye view and identify where there might be some gaps. A few months ago, for example, I noticed that both military-related and Irish videos were scarce on my list, so I’ve been spending more time on those.
How much time do you spend doing this work? (# of hours a week or day).
Transcribing has been an important part of my day every day for over 3 years now. I don't keep track of the time I spend on it; my rough guess would be about an hour or so a day— some days less, other days more.
Do you have a job or a career independent of your transcribing work (which, as one can see, you do for no pay).
Yes.
Do you live in the States?
Yes.
If yes, do you live in a red or blue state?
I’ll just leave it at this: I live in a heavily jabbed neighborhood in a heavily jabbed urban area.
How were you personally affected by the Covid era policies?
I don’t want to get into my personal story but I will say that, in sum, my experience was a series of shocks. Sometimes a shock felt like the rug getting pulled out from under me, or, say, standing at cliff edge and seeing the earth just past my toes crumbling away into the void. That’s the best I can do to describe the feeling.2
Looking back over the years, however, I’m actually grateful for the opportunities that these shocks have given me to refine my sense of discernment and to improve my mental, emotional, physical and spiritual resilience. I’m tougher, I’m wiser, and I’m more resourceful than I was before Covid. But I am keenly aware of how many people were simply crushed by it all, left deeply traumatized, depressed, financially ruined, injured, or even killed, and it’s not something that we, as a civilization, should ever forget.
Of all the many crimes, let me put the spotlight on this one: in order to manipulate people into taking novel injections without fully-informed consent, governments stomped on the right to free speech of anyone, including a number of tenured faculty at top US medical schools, who did not in any way march in goose-step with “the narrative.”
Free speech is the first of the freedoms in the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights because all the other freedoms rest upon it. Once free speech is taken from you, tyrants can do whatever they want to you, take whatever they want from you, and what can you say? Nothing. Some of my own ancestors died fighting for freedom. All of us living in the US today have benefitted from all the many sacrifices of so many men and women to get our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. You know, the least I could do is bang out some transcripts.
Did you believe in the Covid narrative when it was first introduced in March 2020?
No. I got some education in both human immunology and statistics, although I don’t think that would have been necessary to have grokked that the lockdowns were baloney tyranny from the get-go. At the time, however, I did not foresee the push for the “vaccines,” so-called, and so in March of 2020 I couldn’t figure out why the health authorities were insisting on lockdowns, nor why, so it seemed, everyone was going along with it. I mean, think about it for two seconds and you’ll realize that, apart from devastating economic and financial damage and the reverberating consequences of that, lockdowns would prompt the deaths of uncounted numbers of vulnerable people, whether from neglect, abuse, or suicide. Lockdowns also make no sense for the human immune system, which needs for its functioning sunlight, fresh air, exercise, and interaction with people, animals, and the environment.
Also, I didn’t buy it that Covid was all that dangerous. Early on in 2020, when people around me came down with Covid (or at least what the PCR test they took labeled as Covid), it turned out to be just like the flu, sometimes with some peculiar symptoms (electric-like headaches, or losing the sense of smell for example), but oftentimes not even that. I did know two men in their 70s, both smokers, who died of organ failure with Covid in a hospital in 2020, but I now think what killed them was more likely the hospital protocol of isolation and neglect, sedation and venting, and Remdesivir.
Sadly, it’s normal for some people to die in any given year from the flu or from pneumonia, so why the lockdowns? We knew then — it was in the legacy media newspapers — that healthy kids were not at risk of dying from Covid. Why the school closures? It just did not add up.
Also, Dr. Fauci gave off mega weasel vibes.
Were you aware of any other big lies or “conspiracies” before Covid?
This is a rabbit hole I don’t want to go down as Transcriber B, but I will say that I am aware of some historical episodes that have been intentionally misrepresented for many years and about which solid documentation has since come to light.
What are your favorite Substacks to follow?
You know I always read Sane Francisco! Generally speaking, I read from a broad and ever-changing menu of Substacks and several other blogs and newsletters — too many to list here. But to list a few:
Outspoken by Naomi Wolf
Courageous Discourse with Dr. Peter McCullough (and his co-author John Leake)
Mark Oshinski’s Dispatches from a Scamdemic
Ask me tomorrow, I’ll give you a slightly different list.
Which doctors/scientists/experts do you appreciate for their courage in speaking out?
That would be a ginormous list, and it would have to include many Australians, New Zealanders, Irish, British, Canadians, and Americans — plus some Germans and even some other nationalities (though, again, my focus is English language).
I often hear it said that “no one spoke out against the tyranny,” but in fact — as the transcripts show — many, many doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers, scientists, and experts of various kinds did speak out. They may not have reached the mainstream media in 2021-2023, but their words are there preserved in video, on the record. They spoke out at rallies, they spoke out at conferences, in interviews, in “selfies” filmed in their cars, and at podiums before their elected representatives. I know, too, that in consequence, many of them lost their jobs and even their licenses to practice.
All who stood up for medical freedom, for free speech, for genuine science, in whatever way they could, have my heartfelt gratitude.
How do you feel now that so many conspiracy theories around Covid have become fact?
Appalled, but also in a way relieved because it’s like watching the pieces of a puzzle come together and start to form a recognizable picture.
Does this work affect you emotionally?
It is distressing to contemplate the scale of death and injury, sometimes truly hellish injury, that these transcripts show. Just as would anyone else, as I watch and listen to these videos I might feel horror, compassion, pity, sadness, and/ or anger. However, early on I learned to quickly let go of strong emotions, because what matters is not that I sit there and feel my feelings, but that I have the clarity of mind to make the transcript, and that I make it as accurately as I possibly can. So that’s what I strive to do.
How do you stay sane outside of this work?
Well, these days one person’s sane is as likely as not another person’s Totally OMG Crackers! I will say this: I’m a very even-tempered person and perhaps one reason why is that I am every day very grateful to be alive. There is also Monty Python.
Stay tuned for Part 2…
UPDATE April 11th, 2025: Part 2 is here.
So I was wrong in my assumption.
I couldn’t have described it better myself.
Dear Sane Franciscan, Thank you so much for this, it is an honor indeed. And I so appreciate your standing for medical freedom!
I very much appreciate Transcriber B and this interview. Transcriber B is performing an extremely valuable and important service with all this hard work. Thank you.