Episode 44: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

I did an event last night with Michael Schellenberger and Russell Brand on stage that was cool.

Like a little bit high school awkward, but very cool.

A lot of people there.

Stella Assange ended up on stage at one point.

Interesting people in the crowd, a lot of people from the, I guess you would call it

the international free speech movement and heard a lot of horror stories suggesting that

this thing that we've been whining about in the United States is everywhere and has dimensions

to it that freaked even me out to hear.

So that was very interesting.

But that's why I'm not in my usual decor today.

You know, the stories that have been suppressed in Italy, you know, there was that I talked

to a reporter today who had a pretty big story about emails from the government involving

their attitude towards COVID when it came out and they published them and it was not

picked up by anybody.

You know, that we went through with the Twitter files where there was just total unanimity

that, you know, that these things weren't going to be covered.

But also just things that are in Germany, that they're having these things that are

basically reporting hubs where you can turn people in.

Technically, it's for violations of anti-feminism, but you can just sort of call up your local

police officer and have them and rat somebody out for having said something.

And you know, that will go on your record here in England.

They have something they call the non-criminal thought offense, I think is what they call

it.

And you can be visited by a police officer who will check your thinking on this and that

issue.

So there's all kinds of stuff.

I'll write it up.

It was pretty weird.

The people who brought us Orwell are brainless.

These disinformation hubs, they're sort of like poison hotlines or something.

You call in, you what, leave a message or you speak to an agent or a counselor, whatever.

It was in a group meeting, but this was the German delegation basically was talking about

the stuff that they've been going through.

And they have, it sounds like some of the more aggressive programs out there, but it's

just amazing.

I mean, it's this general attitude of, you know, we have to keep you safe.

Somebody told the story about somebody who was asked the question on TV.

I think it was in England, some politician about the decision to ban Donald Trump from

Twitter and whether or not he should be allowed back on.

And when they got to this person in the panel and the question was, should Donald Trump

be allowed on Twitter?

The answer was, we want the safest internet in the world.

Like this is, they don't even bother with any of the specifics of it.

It's just, this has become this ingrained thing everywhere that safety equals.

We must have control over everything that people say.

And it's just, it's crazy.

But it was very heartening to see that there were a lot of people out there who were kind

of of similar mind about all this.

They don't love it.

Was it well attended in the vein of a rock concert as the new disinformation tour, just

drawing sort of popular excitement?

Or were these all expert types?

Well, I mean, I would say it was, yeah, it was a small, good band, I would say like that.

It was that kind of reception.

I mean, it did have Russell Brands.

Okay.

started, but this thing could go to Shea's, it could go to Shea's Stadium eventually.

I'll have to start wearing the Philadelphia Eagles jersey like Mick Jagger and do Veteran's

Stadium, although there's no Veteran's Stadium anymore.

Is it on online?

remarks, so I'm going to publish those, but it was fun.

And then tomorrow I'm going to do a, they're unveiling a statue to Assange and Snowden

here and Stella's going to be there.

And it's one of those things where you have to stand up and in the park and in London.

And so I'm going to give a speech for Assange tomorrow and I'll probably post that.

Or is it a papier-mâché statue that can be easily taken down when somebody calls the

disinformation?

I mean, I, I only got a chance to talk to them briefly and they told me to show up tomorrow.

I'll show up and, and see what happens.

But you know, she was, she was up there.

She was not in good spirits, I would say she was, she was depressed about the recent decision,

but you know, but there were a lot of people who were there supporting.

So, so that was all good.

But a lot of crazy stuff happened in, in America this week, which I guess is the name of our

show, isn't it?

I guess we should start with COVID, should we start with COVID?

So, so where do we go?

Where are we?

and I had, had published jointly a story basically naming the three scientists who, from the

WIV, who, you know, are reported to have been the first patients.

People were using terms like patient zero in the government to describe them, particularly

this one scientist, Ben, who, who oversaw gain-of-function research at the, at the WIV.

We published that story last week, we were a little nervous that it was going to die

on the vine and nobody would, would back it up.

But the Wall Street Journal did their own story, sort of quote-unquote confirming it.

This comes with a bit of an asterisk because the, one of the people on the, on the byline

is Michael Gordon, who, if you remember that name, he was the co-author of a lot of the

Judith Miller WMD stories.

So, so that, there is that, but look, here's the thing with the, with the, the lab leak

origin stories, this whole tale about the WIV scientists getting sick, it's not new,

it's been, it was first published two years ago by the Wall Street Journal and then by

NBC, they picked it up.

But what it is, what's new now is that people are talking about the names, obviously this

story is out there enough that a lot of people have this information and naturally you start

to wonder, well, why would that be?

Why would it suddenly be, you know, within reach of, of lots of different journalists

and even independent journalists to get this information?

Some people are suspicious of that.

They think it's what you need and what you would call a limited hangout, right?

Like it's, it's meant to distract the public.

I think actually this is just the first step in a gradual retreat, you know, from the very

aggressive campaign in the other direction that, you know, they just were not able to

sustain.

There's just too much information going in the other direction that they're going, that

can't explain away.

One thing I do regret a little bit is the use of the term patient zero.

It's true that some people, some of the sources we talked to use that term, but I think we

might find out that there were earlier cases.

In fact, I think that's probable that there were incidents in August, September, as well

as November.

Yeah.

Around the lab.

I think we're going to find that there were technicians at the lab who got sick in September,

and that this prompted things like the administrative changes, the change in the ventilation system,

that kind of stuff.

But it is a little bit heartening that the tide, I guess, is a little bit turned.

Is it turning on this?

I can't really tell.

First let's note the sort of structural similarity between the alleged leak of the virus from

the lab and now the leak of information.

They seem to be following similar patterns.

I don't know that we can, as we can't be certain that the first story is true, I don't know

that we can be certain that this one is.

These are two sets of leaks, and limited hangouts and information control are a sophisticated

strategy these days surrounding one of the greatest events of contemporary history, this

worldwide pandemic that may not have been innocent at all, but the result of a bioweapon

leak, or perhaps worse, can't be certain.

So I apply maximum skepticism to it all, as I have since the beginning.

There's a strange sensation for people like me who have been dubious since the start,

because as you say, we're now learning things in a sort of shocked manner that weren't all

that hard to find out originally, except maybe, as you say, in their specifics.

The motives for untruth around COVID are probably, and the incentives for untruth, as great as

they have ever been in human history.

$100 billion products, international relations, domestic politics, we're all affected here,

and everyone has something to hide.

Who has something to gain by disclosure?

I'm not sure.

I mean, independent journalists, obviously, maybe even journalism in general, might be

redeemed by truth about COVID.

But I'm still wary.

It's funny.

I was wary by the kind of reporting that went on in the first place, this is from bats,

this is from this wet market.

We mustn't question that.

And I'm wary about this now, because I don't see at what point things really changed.

Now that the vaccine is out there, now that this product has been sold worldwide, and

now that that 2020 election is over, and mail-in balloting is established, and now that we

seem to be on to other international conflict agendas, why is it that this is coming out

now, when all the things that it might have affected have already happened?

I think it's really notable that a lot of this investigation in this direction began

with a really small outfit called the US Right to Know, which is not right-wing, it's kind

of a lefty outfit that I think, if I'm not mistaken, is funded by some people in the

health food industry.

I can't remember exactly how it works, but they're a small independent investigative

group that issued a whole bunch of FOIA requests about Dr. Anthony Fauci and gain-of-function

research and a bunch of universities.

And this good old-fashioned kind of shoe-leather reporting, it's still basically the key information

that gives us some kind of a basis to try to understand what might have happened, right?

Like a plausible explanation for what happened.

Because really, the two explanations are, it happened naturally, somehow this virus

came from a bat cave 1,000 miles away and got transferred through an animal somehow.

And then the other one is they were working on what seems like it might have been an aerosolized

vaccine attempt, so it was easily transmissible and more or less asymptomatic.

There was research.

Because of these FOIA requests, we see that they were working on, or that there were proposals

about that kind of thing.

That kind of research is directly connected to this particular institution, the Wuhan

Institute.

So there's a lot of circumstantial evidence pointing to the idea that they were working

on something that they thought was going to be helpful to humanity, like an aerosolized

vaccine, maybe for troops, maybe not for all people.

This is, let's put this in the realm of rumor, but the source for it is quite high in the

biotech industry.

I heard that two years ago.

The scenario that I heard two years ago, and it's for what it's worth, is that the COVID

pandemic was stirred by a vaccine, an aerosolized vaccine, to a possible American bioweapon.

In other words, this bug that got out was an extremely contagious, but not particularly

virulent or deadly, counter to a more deadly.

That was the rumor I heard early, and as yet doesn't seem to have been dispelled by any

reporting that's come since.

It has its virtues as a theory, and it has its weaknesses, but in general, what seems

to be valid to say, given what we're learning, is that all of this happened in the context

of biowar, whether defensive biowar or offensive.

We know from past weapons or arms races that those things are mutually dependent.

You get missiles, you get Star Wars, you get this kind of nuke, you get that kind of nuke.

It seems that the world is in the grips of some kind of bio-arms race, or it was.

Maybe it's been halted, I don't know.

In that realm, somehow comes from that realm, somehow comes COVID.

One of the reasons that I am not optimistic about getting the truth is that when things

are in the realm of security and defense and weaponry and so on, you almost never get the

truth.

There are just too many incentives to keep the thing under various layers of true disinformation

and security and so on.

So, I wonder how far the plucky investigators are going to get on this, and I do actually

also note that there was heavy censorship of all of this talk early.

In ways, COVID was a platform for the real escalation of the censorship platforms.

Are we seeing similar censorship of these theories now?

Doesn't seem so, and I wonder why not.

want this to come out now.

So, was that true two years ago when it first came out in a limited way to a couple of reporters,

Ken Delanian, who, you know, that's another name, like Michael Gordon, that is sort of

well-known in the journalism community for, let's just say, having a good relationship

with the intelligence community.

But we're starting to hear lots of stories about intelligence agencies that were steered

away from looking at the lab leak hypothesis that it may not be a coincidence that the

Department of Energy and the FBI, which were the only two agencies to not use NIH researchers,

were the ones that came to the conclusion the earliest that the most likely origin of

this was a laboratory.

So, I mean, all of this, I think it coming out, it fits to me with, you know, the general

idea that there are a lot of people in these institutions that were mad about what happened

originally.

It just became too hard to suppress after a while.

And then there's just a lot of stuff that, a lot of factual stuff that just seems to

go with it.

You know, the thing that your source told you about the, you know, the aerosolized vaccine,

well, there's a program called Diffuse that the University of North Carolina applied to

DARPA for a grant to work on.

And they outlined basically exactly what that person was talking about, all the way down

to the molecular structure of what it would be.

They even talked about how they would design it in a way that it would make it difficult

to tell that it was bioengineered.

So, you know, I like stories where the Occam's razor version of something fits.

You know, this is greed.

This is somebody's, we know they were doing gain-of-function research, which I think is

crazy, but we know they were doing it.

Barack Obama banned it, but, you know, it looks like they were looking for ways to continue

doing it elsewhere.

And it's like they say in All the President's Men, you know, these aren't very bright guys

and things just got out of hand.

I always sort of default to that explanation.

And so that part of it is understandable.

But the other thing for me to consider is that this would happen and they would spend

years pushing everybody, not only pushing people away from the truth, but engaging in

this unbelievably aggressive campaign to believe a lie and to hate people who had some kind

of alternative question about it, you know, I mean, that was what distinguished the last

And it's the backdrop for something.

Another funny thing that happened this week, which is this debate that's not going to happen

apparently between Joe Rogan and this doctor named Peter Hotez.

Yes.

The idea was...

RFK Jr. and Hotez, right?

The idea was broached on Rogan and Rogan put up the purse for the hypothetical cage match

between the two of them.

It went from $100,000 to I don't know where it ended, but a lot more than that.

But a new principle has been established by Hotez in the name of the science, which is

that debate is no longer a useful tool in arriving at the truth when the science is

concerned.

Because once it's been settled and once you've gotten a sort of working consensus on something,

it's no longer helpful to dispute the fact.

It was also said as a sort of principle going forward that one doesn't debate conspiracy

theory.

I would think those would be the people you'd want to debate.

They would be the easiest to slay.

They would be the easiest to slay.

Their unfalsifiable reasoning could be exposed.

You might not win with the freaks, but you could certainly win with the general public,

the theorists, with all the facts and the ironclad arguments that have gone into your

scientific position.

But as science turns to Christian science, it no longer wants to brook any opposition,

any need to justify itself in the eyes of the public.

And this Hotez, who's a pretty risible character, I've got to say, I mean, he looks like...

He looks like he should be in a barbershop quartet for, you know, aged Iowans.

And the principles of non-debate that he espouses are really interesting.

Doesn't seem that his concern is that you might lose.

It's that you raise your opponent by merely being in the same room with him.

You elevate your opponent.

As though Hotez occupies some prestigious perch in the public mind that he could only,

you know, come down from.

Whereas in fact, if he were to best RFK Jr. in debate, I think he would, you know, go

to the stars because he really has nowhere to go but up.

Healthier conversations seem to be non-conversations, what we used to call lectures, because conversation

has that con-word in it, which means, you know, a couple of things coming together.

And they don't seem to want that at all.

So there was a spate of these news stories.

A typical one from Vox.

Joe Rogan wants a debate on vaccine science.

Don't give it to him.

They put debate in quotes.

And then the subhead is how to have better conversations about contentious scientific

subjects.

This Vox piece quotes a social scientist at Johns Hopkins named Rupali Limaye saying basically

that Hotez made the right choice because if you do do the debate, you're, quote, giving

individuals a platform to really promote something that goes against scientific consensus.

So again, it should be easy to knock them down if you've got scientific consensus behind

you and you're the scientist and you're the expert and they're not.

But this new idea is let's not have the debate because otherwise it ennobles and invalidates

the legitimacy of the questions that come from, you know, an inexpert person such as

RFK.

What I find interesting about this is that this is all happening in the context of a

gigantic anti-disinformation industry where nobody's an expert.

It's all run by people who just call themselves anti-disinformation experts, but they don't

have any expertise in anything.

So that's interesting, too.

Churches have someone near the top.

Most churches, a sort of esteemed and somewhat infallible individual who pronounces on doctrine

and then everyone down the line just enforces and disciplines orthodox.

And so disinformation people as orthodoxy enforcers can be neutral as to content.

They don't need to know anything except how to shut people up or how to neutralize their

presence in the conversation.

So we're going to have a rotating series of bishops or hierarchs like Hotez and everybody

else's job is going to be to clean up after them and make sure that heretics don't get

in the same room with them.

I'm reading a book right now, Gore Vidal's Julian, and it's about a it's about the process

by which the Roman gods gave way to the new Christian faith in the fifth century Constantinople,

basically.

teachings of what they call the Galilean.

And you see this spectacle of these theological conferences over the nature of the Trinity

and so on.

And they became absolutely deadly political conflicts.

Bishops are assassinating other bishops.

You know, monks are taking heretics in arms.

And you know, you're seeing exactly the same process take now as the science wishes now

to take itself out of this experimental or kind of partial phase into total control of

of the, quote, conversation.

And that means removing the other half of the conversation.

And not only does Hotez and all these people lined up behind him not want to debate, which

reminds me of a football team which refuses to play another football team and then gets

cheerleaders to go, yay, don't play, yay, don't go there.

You know, and this is a new form of sports.

Why should the teams even meet on the field?

They should have individual...

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