Episode 48: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

For us, the middle of the country are all the places, and the middle of the country starts at the Hudson River. All those places are central, and the places that do all the broadcasting are peripheral, and so we've got stories on things like RFK.

And this bobcat stalked this Iowa town. It would appear on people's fences, and it would scratch at their front doors trying to be let in. It might have been an alien in bobcat form, it's unclear.

We've got a story on the wheat harvest and a Native American in Oklahoma who has figured out almost alone how to grow wheat in drought conditions. We've got a story on just about everything. A legendary con man. It's kind of a historical piece. We've got a huge....

So we're not confining ourselves to the present, we do move a little into the past in order to understand the present. But it's got as much content this newspaper as any magazine out there. We may be rivaling the New Yorker.

It's printed on real paper, it's not going to appear on the internet, it's not going to be shareable on the internet. You have to either buy it at one of our outlets or subscribe to it. And it will lie around and accumulate far many more readers than there are subscribers. Because it's meant to last.

Wow, yeah. Each issue is in some ways topical and some ways up to date, but in other ways perennial and hopefully evergreen. So it's been a big undertaking. It's designed by the best design house in New York City.

It's printed in your home state of New Jersey on a real printing press, yeah.

And we're adding another physical object to the world, and we're subtracting something from the internet.

And so we left the design to experts. We recreated the look of a 19th century newspaper that Mark Twain might work for.

But what we're trying to do is take in the grassroots energy of America, widen the aperture.

Of discourse, keep you abreast of animal attacks, and generally amuse, entertain, inform, and do something different.

The other thing I want to refer to is that you see when you scan the page more than one story at a time, so you get the benefits of collage.

You get to see one headline out of the corner of your eye, another out of the other corner. And then the thing you're reading. If, if you're laughing, whoever is sitting next to you can take the newspaper and see what you're laughing at. It's not as private and tunnel vision and experience as reading on your phone.

I used to get a Boston Globe every morning, and I even delivered the paper too, and so I would read the sports section. They had a great sports section at the Boston Globe.

And with that, you know? All of the physical pleasures that go with reading a newspaper, I always thought, were really important to the reading experience. Which, you know how it feels is a little bit like, a little bit messy with the ink. It was a good quality and in like tablet style independent papers. If you could, if the Blue in the Village voice got off on your fingers, a little bit like I always thought, was cool, right? So this is.

But this is great because it, it, it, it reorients what the center of the world is. And I think that that needs to happen. Because just for too many people, it's, you know, it's a mythical place, that where everything is fictional and a lie, and that's that's that can't work.

And when we're not covering Arkansas, we're covering Utah, and when we're not covering Utah, we're covering those parts of New York that don't necessarily get covered by the New York Times. When you, when you add it all up, we've got 98 percent of the country geographically, all to ourselves.

It's all in our heads, but, you know, there may be people. I mean, puff Diddy, I'm not sure he'll be in there. Like I say, we have a huge music section, and I think about a third of the paper is devoted to music.

The thing that brings us all together. Allegedly, though. So yeah, Puff will be in there, Rappers will be in there. We're going to even treat the suburbs of L..A. as though they were the middle of the country.

So.

Yeah, I think County Highway is going to be a big success, I can't wait for it, thanks.

But, you know, at the end of last week, as you know Walter, I was in Memphis and I sort.

Of read a piece of this story that Schellenberger and his mates at public were working on. Which is the has to do with the private communications of the scientists who were working on the influential nature? Actually, nature Medicine paper called the proximal origins the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, which is the basically the paper that everybody held up as proof that there was no lab leak. It has a single line in there that says that it was improbable, and that became the thing that fact checkers use. But there's this whole trove of communications involving the primarily for scientists who worked on this paper, and it shows that they actually thought the exact opposite.

And it blows up probably half a dozen, or maybe even a dozen major media myths about Covid.

And I don't know. I thought it was an amazing story because, you know, when you get down to it, it. Essentially, people like Anthony Fauci and some of the senior health officials, and Francis Collins and some other folks. They basically steered the entire public away from, you know, investigating the origins of a disaster that killed 7 million people to date. And, you know, I think it's as big a media deception as we've had. But I don't know, did you get a chance to see any of the discussion? Because we can go through some of the funnier ones, I mean, they're amazing.

Who sent an email saying Hey, check it out, I'm going to play this New York Times reporter.

And I'm going to pretend that it's all in people's heads. And it's cloak and dagger and ridiculous to think that we're lying to them now. Watch me lie. And then reproduces the email he sent to the reporter, in which he quote, uses humor to allay the reporter's concerns that he might be being misled. So it was, Watch me do this here, I just did it.

What do you think?

Merry trickery.

They were the merry pranksters, playing one of the most deadly pranks ever, because deadly. In the sense that, though, I think you said on Twitter, you don't care whether where Covid came from, and neither do I. Was it from the woods, was it from a pangolin, a bat, some kind of raccoon, or was it from this high tech laboratory operating in somewhat?

Of coordinated fashion with American interests.

And indeed, we're finding out that that second scenario is far, far, far more likely. But all of their advice was predicated on a kind of innocence. That wasn't true. And had we known from the beginning that this was a cultured thing, that it came from a lab in China? I think our approach might have been different in all sorts of ways. We'll never know, of course.

The press has successfully coded this entire idea as a right wing fantasy. No one's going to take it seriously, no matter how many times they see it. Even though, when you look at what these researchers were saying, I mean, it's unbelievable. So just to give people some flavor of what some of these quotes were. Anderson, at one point, is saying the lab escape of this, the lab escape version of this is so frigging. Likely because they were already doing this work. The Wuhan Institute.

At another point, he says, You know, I'm all for gain of function research, but to do it at BSL-3 is nuts. He's talking about the biosafety level, in other words, he's saying the place is too unsafe to do gain of function research. Remember, everybody thought we were crazy to talk about gain of function research. And here are the primary scientists who were held up as authorities talking about this.

Another one, Bob Gary. He says. The major hang up I have is the polybasic cleavage site. We can get into this, but it's a unique sort of feature of the genetic sequence of this virus that has this thing called a fur and cleavage site, which is just unusual and appears.

That they just couldn't figure out how it could have gotten there. Naturally. It also appears in exactly the way that a researcher at the University of North Carolina described or proposed doing in a proposal to DARPA. Like a year before. So he also said it's not crackpot to suggest this could have happened, given the gain of function research we know is happening.

Ian Lipkin says Our paper does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the Institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of the BAT CoV research pursued there, we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess. Another doctor says to him, I agree. Seems to have been pre-adapted for human spread since the get go.

And, you know, it just goes on and on and on like this. And, as you say, they were talking about how to deal with Don McNeil, the reporter at The New York Times. Who, of course, you know, became famous, infamous for other reasons later, you know, in a very dark episode. But he was actually, I think, initially very supportive of the natural origin idea. At least it appeared that he leaned in that direction. I think he was very trusting of people like Fauci, but he was doing his job as a reporter.

You can see in his emails that he's saying, Hey, is there any way that this could have come from a lab? Yeah, I know that what conspiracy theorists are saying, but you know, is it possible? is it possible? This could have come from Wuhan? I have an editor who's got a government source who's talking about that.

And they sort of the doctors pass this letter around, and, you know, one of them says McNeil is very credible, but like any reporter, he can be misled and they essentially non-answer him. I just don't know how this isn't a massive scandal and why people aren't flipping out more about this. Maybe they're exhausted and that's the only thing I can think of.

Information Operation.

I mean, did they all reach the conclusion, simultaneously and organically, that they should play down the lab leak? Or did they get orders, or did they get sort of tacit orders suggestions?

And people like Collins Fauci, then the head of the Welcome Trust, I think Jeremy Farrar, was on the call. This is the one where the head of the C.D.C was actively left out of the call. And had to find out about it when it was published after a FOIA request by BuzzFeed. So after that call, you can see them having a change of heart. But when I went back and looked a second time and a third time. I'm convinced that this is actually sort of a textbook case of real doublethink, where they actually talked themselves into two simultaneous belief paths as time went on.

They were initially rejected by Nature Magazine, and Nature told them that we're not sure whether this article of yours is going to help or hinder the conspiracy theorists. So basically, telling them that you didn't do enough to close the door on lab leak. And Anderson angrily writes a letter back, saying, We considered it. But we would love to be able to do that and say it came from a pangolin, but we just can't. The data doesn't let us.

But in the weeks that follow, they rewrite the paper. They essentially whittle out everything that has to do with lab escape, one of the authors even says. I went back and I rejiggered it to take that out as a possibility. And then you can see them in their minds, sort of making fun of people who think it comes from a lab. They start talking about the lab origin conspiracy loons, as they themselves are saying the same thing.

It's not even something in the past, they're still saying it after they published the paper. So it's a fascinating thing because I think in their minds, they definitely had tremendous contempt for, say, Trump or Tom Cotton or Fox News. And even people on the left. They pick on Bernie, too in this piece.

One of the other doctors.

I'm sorry. First, he posts a letter from McNeil, then he says, I'm thinking of just replying and saying. I see nothing in the genome that would make me believe it has been genetically manipulated in a lab. So he's sort of not, it's sort of a non-denial, denial, right? That's when Dr. Gary says. Robert Gary says McNeil is very credible, but, like every reporter, can be misled. But your answer is good. Basic science.

Like, he says that right afterwards, which is, it's the exact opposite, right? I mean, this is they got it mixed up in their head. I think they genuinely got it mixed up in their heads. That you know what science is and what the political considerations are, which they talk about openly. I mean, Anderson at one point says, You know, I hate it when politics enters science, but in this case, it's unavoidable.

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