Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/22/23: Trump Arrest Imminent, Desantis Hits Trump On Covid, China Boosting Russia With Drones, Biden Vetoes Anti Woke Bill, Google Unveils AI, Republicans Split On Rail Safety, Virologist Explores Ebola Lab Leak,

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss Trump's imminent arrest, Desantis finally attacking Trump on Covid and White House chaos, China Boosts Russia's War Effort with new drones, Biden Vetoes Anti-Woke ESG Bill, Google unveils an AI Rival to Chat GPT called "Bard", Republicans split over bipartisan Rail Safety bill, and we're joined by Sam Husseini and Jonathan Latham to discuss the questions around the Ebola Lab Leak theory in wake of new evidence.To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Jashinsky. We've got

a lot to get into today. Former President Trump might go ahead and get himself arrested either later today or later this week. We've got rail safety legislation that we're going to get into. Google's coming out with its chat GPT. Huge news on the China and Russia front as the leaders met this week. There's a lot to break down when it comes to that. President Biden's first woke veto. That's right. And the Federal Reserve meets later today. For a long time, the Fed had been expected to hike rates by another half point. But the kind of tech bros taking down Silicon Valley Bank has trimmed the sails on the aspirations of the Fed a little bit. People are expecting now it'll be a quarter point increase, which actually amounts to billions of dollars in extra kind of

easing flowing into Silicon Valley. So job well done, taking that bank down. Heck of a job, Brownie. And there was some speculation that perhaps they wouldn't raise rates at all. But then there was reverse speculation saying, oh, but then that will panic people. Because then we're saying, wait a minute, if the Fed isn't raising rates at all,

how scared is the Fed about the state? What do they know? And then it sparks a run. So it is difficult. You have to, you know, it is very difficult dealing with humans. What you're saying is that you're glad you're not Powell. Well, it's probably a lot of fun, though, right? Just to have the fate of the world at your fingertips. Right. No, it sounds exhilarating.

Sure it is. So we'll wait for that. Speaking of things being exhilarating, big news in the Republican 2024 presidential campaign front as Ron DeSantis, Ron DeSanctimonious, Meatball Ron, you could go down the list, is talking about President Trump. I wouldn't say he's going on offense. I wouldn't say he's even hitting back that hard. He's been pressed by Piers Morgan in a new interview that's set to air on Thursday on Fox Nation. We have the first clip to show you right here. Take a look. What's your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far? Is it Ron the Sanctimonious or Meatball Ron? Well, I can't. Even he went off Meatball Ron. I can't. I don't know how to spell the Sanctimonious. I don't really know what it means, but I, you know, I kind of like it's long. It's got a lot of vowels. I mean, so we'd

go with that. That's fine. You know, you can call me, you can call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner. Okay. Right. The reason I say he's not pushing back too hard or going on offense is because Piers Morgan really is trying to pull this stuff out of him. It doesn't look like Ron DeSantis is super eager to be talking about Donald Trump, but he is. He is. This is the preview that we have of the DeSantis versus Trump campaign. This interview came a couple of hours after DeSantimonious had made his public comments making fun of Trump for having an affair with a porn star. So he was kind of worked up when an affair with a porn star. He sort of.

So he was kind of worked up when he sat down with Pierce. But this is my favorite kind of populism. When a Harvard and Yale graduate pretends that he doesn't know what words mean. And that there are lots of vowels. He said he did not spell De Sanctimonious, which to be fair, that's not. How do you spell De Sanctimonious? Because Donald Trump spells things in many different ways. My favorite was when somebody spelled Little Marco with T's. T's and Trump corrected me. No, no, no.

There's D's. It's little, little Marco. It's simply incorrect. So DeSantis also said, you know, he was asked what the differences are between him and Donald Trump. He says, well, I think there are a few things. The approach to COVID was different. I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his britches and I think he did a lot of damage The approach to COVID was different. I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his britches, and I think he did a lot of damage. And then he went on to say, you know, we don't have, if you bring your own agenda into my administration, you're gone. The way we run the government, I think, is no daily drama,

focuses on the big picture, and puts points on the board. And I think that's very important. Let's put the country first rather than worry about any personalities or any type of individual. Again, I don't think Ron DeSantis is super excited to have to make this contrast. I don't think either of them believes it's ideal that the other is in the race. And Ron DeSantis has been really careful about needling Trump, looking like he's needling Trump. This, to me, the big takeaway from this is that he's very close to an announcement. That would be my perspective. Yeah. And he told, he told

Piers Morgan who, how does he keep getting these interviews by the way? Piers Morgan? It's amazing. He just asks. Sure. I'll talk to Piers Morgan. So yeah, he told, he told Piers Morgan in this interview, which will air tomorrow on what is Fox nation or something like that, which is their attempt, like the CNN Plus of Fox. Except successful. It's on Thursday. People are parting with their money, apparently, for Fox Nation.

Said, stay tuned. So basically, he's going to, unless he backs out at the last minute. But in some ways, he's just no match for Trump when it comes to these insults. You watch at the end of that clip, he says, I don't care what you call me, just call me a winner. So cringe. Yeah.

But this is why nobody is a match for Trump. And I do think DeSantis is smart enough to have recognized that for months and months and months, which is what I think the big takeaway from this interview is really that. I mean, we kind of knew what this was going to look like with the contrast that DeSantis, DeSantis' vantage point at what the contrast is. We knew that what that was going to look like, the broad outlines of it. But I think the big takeaway here is that he's very close to making an official presidential announcement because he spent so much time avoiding exactly this. And again, I think he's not eager to do it in the same way that Trump is eager to go after him. And Kristalln Sager talked about some of the very interesting ways that's unfolding yesterday.

But I think he knows that nobody can really take on Donald Trump. We saw all of these candidates fall one after one after one after thinking they had. Finally, they'd figured out the way to go mano a mano with Donald Trump and it never panned out. So I think that's where you're seeing caution on DeSantis' part. But the fact that he finally took on some of these questions instead of deflecting them, which is when he had, it's not as though he hasn't gotten these questions in the past. He's just deflected them. So the fact that he's taken them, I think means he's about to make his announcement. Right. And to show how like poorly matches in this kind of fight, Trump responded to him. I don't know if we have this, but on his little truth social, he writes back. And this is just

a perfect way that just Trump ups it to nuclear level. He says, Rhonda Sanctimonious will probably find out about false accusations. Wait, how would we say this? About false accusations? I can't do a Trump. False accusations. How's your Trump? It's a little better. Sometime in the future. As he gets older, wiser, and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are underage, or possibly a man. Possibly a man! Parentheses, exclamation point.

I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do. So, it's like, okay, you don't like the name DeSanctimonious. How about I accuse you of partying with underage men? Of being gay. Yeah. This is so classic Donald Trump. I mean, where do you go from there? Like when he's ratcheted it up there. Right. He said, well, call me whatever you want. Make sure you call me a winner. Make sure you call me straight is where it's going next. So speaking of where things are going next, Donald Trump, we have all been waiting with breath in the media and in the country at large for a possible arrest if he is indicted by a grand

jury in New York that could come today. Reports seem to be suggesting that it actually will happen next week. Ryan, just on the timeline, let's pause here for a second. Donald Trump is the one who gave us the Tuesday date, which was yesterday. But that obviously didn't pan out. And now it looks like they heard from their last witness yesterday, which is why some people expect it could happen today. There are reports from the Daily Mail that it's going to happen next week. What do you make of this timeline? When do you think it's likely, if he is indicted, that an arrest takes place? And it seems like Trump's intel on a Tuesday arrest was coming from the fact that Monday was supposed to be a last, like you said, witness. Then the grand jury

has to vote. There's 23 members on the grand jury. As long as there's a majority vote, then a sealed indictment is produced. But then Bragg has to make decisions from there. It's not a fait accompli at that point that he's indicted. And it's not a fait accompli, actually, that Bragg will ask for an indictment. He could still decide, you know what, I'm actually not going to go forward with this. There's some reporting that there could be another witness that comes before the grand jury this afternoon. But there is speculation that there will be a vote this afternoon. But like you said, that doesn't immediately lead to Trump getting cuffed. Trump has said

that he will fly up from Mar-a-Lago, turn himself in, and then you'll go through this entire ritual of doing the fingerprints and the mugshot, which to me is just so strange that you would need a mugshot of former President Donald Trump. I think the government has a photo of him. I'm also not sure he's that much of a flight risk. He's the most recognizable man on the planet. Fingerprints, I suppose, then you can like check to see if he was handling these documents or something. But Bragg's case is all about the Stormy Daniels, where while you still have the documents case ongoing, there was a ruling in that just yesterday afternoon. They may

be back in court on that one today. That's in federal court. And then you have the Georgia grand jury that is still pursuing charges. And to me, the Georgia case is the only one that I get really interested in because it's about something substantial. It's about the stolen election. It's about Trump's effort to kind of steal it back to trigger, ultimately, January 6th. So that, to me, is something that is fair for Democrats to contest and for prosecutors to go after because it's so fundamental to the core value of democracy in the United States, to invent kind of a rationale to say that, well, this payoff to this porn star used campaign funds and you should have listed it in your billing records as this expense, but you actually listed it as this expense to Michael Cohen. So we're going to combine all these and call it a low level felony. When John Edwards was able to beat probably an even worse example of it, that doesn't clear the bar for me and

neither does like the document stuff. But that's because I'm more of a civil liberties person that thinks that there's too much that's over classified and you have to kind of see what the documents are. So I somewhat have an open mind there, but yeah, where do you, I mean, on principle, I think nobody's above the law. Right. And if you've got the goods on a foreign president, then you should prosecute him. Right. And you know, as you know, growing up, we were always taught like Richard Nixon wasn't above the law, except he did get a pardon. And that's, there's something beautiful about that fact that nobody is above the law, except he did get a pardon. And there's something beautiful about that fact that nobody is above the law. At the same time, you don't want to gin up a case just for politics, just to prove nobody's above the law.

I mean, if we want to start playing this game, you can do the show me the person, I'll show you the crime thing, depending on who's in charge of which prosecutor's office, who's in charge of the FBI at any given time. And by the way, we saw this with the raid on Trump that was framed by the media and the political establishment as a clear cut criminal case. And then when it came to Joe Biden, it was not, you know, came to Joe Biden in a similar situation. That same framing had just kind of tapered off. So I agree. I mean, I think anytime somebody is doing something wrong, whether it's unethical or unlawful, that is entirely fair game for people to investigate,

and it's entirely fair game for the media to scrutinize. But to ratchet something up to felony level is a really, really dangerous game. When I first saw this news, I think it was like last week that we were heading in this direction. I don't know about you, but my stomach just dropped. And there were these immediate, Trump talked about people taking to the streets and protesting and Republicans were really freaked out about that and said,

basically they're trying to ratchet this up, make these, heighten the tensions and heighten the contradictions and get you really ready to do something that's going to be problematic for your cause. And I don't know that it's intentional, but you can see that this would head in a very negative direction. Trump, according to a new report in the New York Times, is very, apparently telling people he's very ready for this to happen he thinks that there's some showmanship that can be uh played out if they he doesn't even mind according to

the times getting cuffed um and has sort of mused about whether it'd be better to smile what the right kind of stylistic approach would be to that very physical situation now if he does just turn himself in, Bragg doesn't have to go through that. They don't have to perp walk him. I think it's much better for the country that they don't. I think it's much better for the country that they don't create a felony charge, fabricate really a felony charge on an obscure legal theory that this constituted a felonious campaign finance violation, because that's where you get into banana republic territory and the power starts to really get wielded in terrifying ways.

And I would still love to see Trump prosecuted for something. But to me, what about selling U.S. foreign policy to Saudi Arabia for billions of dollars? You could make that case if you actually cared. But they don't want to make that case because Trump only did it on a more aggressive and more brazen scale than everybody in our kind of political ecosystem does it. So the thing that has protected him from more serious charges is the fact that he's the most brazen criminal among a gang of criminals in Washington. He is more brazen about it. But if you go after him, then you're like, well, wait a minute. What about this selling of our foreign policy for this amount of money?

Why don't we get that one too? Which I'd say, okay, roll them all up. Republicans on the Oversight Committee last week released bank records showing this transaction between a Chinese energy company, a Biden business associate, and then about a million dollars worth of payouts to different Bidens in the course of a couple months. And so, again, there is a difference in the brazenness. There's no question about it. But if we're going to start doing this, we're going to start doing this. There's no way around it. And I do think that the same standards should apply. I do think that,

you know, it's incredible for Joe Biden to be able to, that the media lets Joe Biden get away and Democrats get away with claiming the moral high ground on all of this, just because everybody hates Donald Trump. We look away from all of these other things. But when things are not at a felony level and you start looking at them that way, other things that aren't at a felony level are going to start being looked at that way. And it will feel like a banana republic. And one of my favorite political analysts, Chris Rock, if we can put up his comments here, this happened at some type of a private event. So unfortunately, we don't have- The Mark Twain Award for Adam Sandler, who absolutely deserves a Mark Twain Award and is an American treasure. And unfortunately,

we don't have video of this because... But we all know Chris Rock so well that you can actually just imagine him. The AI in your head can just kind of produce the video for you, but... Or you can do Michael Scott's impression of Chris Rock. There you go. So his argument that basically this is going to actually help Donald Trump. Right. Using the Tupac Shakur argument that he sold three million records while he was in prison. What's your guess? Trump, as you were saying, seems to believe that himself, that this might actually kind of rebound to his benefit. Do you think that's right or does it depend? I think it rebounds to Republicans' benefits,

but not to Trump's benefit because there's a, you know, if you're arrested and that image is sort of indelible in the public consciousness, I think that's really hard to get away with or get away from. So I just don't, I do like what Chris Rock says here. He says he slept with a porn star and paid off someone so his wife wouldn't find out. That's romantic. And Donald Trump is clearly not getting enough credit for being a romantic. That's true. It's really a soft side of Donald Trump.

In that sense, yes, it helps him. But no, I think it's- Humanizes him a little bit. Yeah. What a sweetheart he is. Right. But that's, you know, he's getting at why it's really hard to classify this as a campaign finance violation because you have to prove it was done in order to help your campaign and not your marriage. Well, ironically, the argument that Trump would have to make on his own behalf would be to say, I'm just such a flagrant cheater that you think that I actually care about my wife. No, this was purely about the campaign. And that was a harder argument for Edwards to make. And Edwards was trying to cover this up from his family and for reasons of personal embarrassment. Like that was,

that was clear, uh, that it wasn't just about the campaign. Donald Trump could be like, look, I'm a complete narcissist and kind of sociopath. I don't care what people think of me. Like I like bad news about me because it gets my name in the press. Like he could, and he could call all of the therapists that have talked to the Atlantic over the years and they'll come in and say, yep, we have actually diagnosed him in the pages of The Atlantic, has all the things he says. Expert witnesses. He does not care what you say about him as long as you say something about him. So the fact that he covered something up that would have been in the news suggests it must have been calculation about a campaign. It's the only answer. It's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the only reasonable explanation.

Now, Melania was pregnant at the time, and there is some evidence that that made him feel a little extra guilty. I don't know. So maybe there is something underneath that sociopathy, some human element that was touched. But this is why we can't trust the psychological experts, the armchair, in the Atlantic, because honestly, who knows? Yeah.

Who knows what goes on there? Turns out you can't trust the psychiatrists in the Atlantic just diagnosing off television. Who knew? It's honestly, it's a good lesson for all of us. But it is also true, by the way, just one final quick thought, that Trump, whether this hurts Trump or ultimately boosts him, I don't buy the argument it boosts him because I think it's possible that it sets him on an even more... We've seen his true social posts, which are, I think, a step up from his Twitter posts.

Actually getting arrested, the sort of psychological effect of that, not to be an armchair psychiatrist myself, but actually getting arrested, I think it's possible it will send him on a very different trajectory. And that's not one that'll be politically beneficial. It certainly wouldn't be beneficial for the country, is my assumption. But I don't know. He's full of surprises. As long as he's got a bootleg phone behind bars. One of these Androids. Yeah, right. He has to text to Twitter or whatever. Right. Which is how some of us had to do it in high school.

There you go. Back in the day. Back in the day. All right. So let's move on to the news out of Eastern Europe. There are new developments, obviously, in the war in Ukraine that came this week as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping met for a couple of days. Didn't have a lot to discuss about the war itself,

but certainly had a lot to discuss about the war itself, but certainly had a lot to discuss in general. The New York Times is reporting that the Biden administration vowed last month to crack down on companies that sell critical technologies to Russia as part of its efforts to curtail the country's war against Ukraine. But the continued flow of Chinese drones to the country explains why that will be hard. Now, China has sold more than 12 million in drones and drone parts to the country, according to official Russian customs data from a third party data provider. That's a reporting from the New York Times. Ryan, 12 million dollars in drones and drone parts to the country. Kind of a drop in the bucket when you look at the budget of this war

overall. What do you expect after this meeting that happened this week? Do you expect big increases? Right. U.S. support at this point, what, is closing in on $100 billion with a B. And if $12 million with an M from China over to Russia is going to tip the balance, then we might be in a match that we can't keep up with. Like that's, I can't even do the math. One one-thousandth, one-hundredth of the amount that we've invested so far. These drones have become kind of an iconic part of the battle between Ukraine and Russia. Even the smaller ones used to help troops see what's in front of them. Each one gets like a couple of flights max before it gets shot down by the other side, which is why you have to constantly replenish them. But as experts say in this New York Times article, this is not at this point

the kind of sophisticated technology that sanctions and other controls are going to be able to keep out of the hands of China and Russia. Like they can make a drone. You can practically make one in your garage at this point. And so it shows the limits of kind of the economic warfare tool that the United States is using. China's argument that it's making publicly was we should stop using the global economy as a weapon. And as a principle, that's a fairly persuasive argument. Because what you're doing is you're using the suffering of the world's people

as a diplomatic tool to try to find a solution for particular acute crises. And I think the bar to do that has to be extraordinarily high. Now, China's peace plan, I can understand why Ukraine is like, no, like China's peace plan was let's do a ceasefire and lift all sanctions on Russia. It's like, well, that's kind of exactly what Russia would prefer. And yet Russia didn't even actually say that they wanted that. Xi Jinping is not obviously promoting that charitable interpretation of what he's saying. To your point, he undercuts exactly what he's saying. And he undercuts, by the way, a lot of what he says about the West when he does these photo ops and these very substantial from all we can tell meetings with white wine.

With Vladimir Putin, did you see the picture of them toasting with the white wine? No, they're white wine drinkers. They're white wine drinkers. At least this week they are. But he undercuts a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of his credibility on the world stage when he's doing these photo ops

with somebody who is engaged in an act of aggression and invasion, the cost to civilians that have happened over the last war in the way that Vladimir Putin is right now. And does it make sense from a sort of real politic perspective that China is cozying up to Russia and that Russia is cozying up to China? absolutely, 100%. Xi Jinping has a vision of Chinese leadership on a global stage that goes beyond mere immediate day-to-day real politic right now or even this year. I don't know that this is entirely helpful as Xi Jinping then tries to take his vision to other world leaders in the future. But at the same time, maybe it signals that he realizes that's a lost cause at this point anyway.

And what's disturbing from kind of a humanitarian perspective is that it seems like the world's big powers, China and the United States, both feel like it's in their interest to have Ukraine and Russia going to war against each other, like for various reasons. The U.S. likes to see Russia's capacity and power on a global stage reduced. We like to be able to sell all kinds of material into this conflict, even if we're using, you know, borrowed or printed money to sell it into there. China, I think, likes to test out what a hot conflict looks like with NATO, with the West. And also China still deeply skeptical of Russia. So in the background is kind of happy to see them,

see them suffering and see them weakened. And also happy to create an ecosystem with Iran, Russia, China, to develop the muscles and the sinews of sanctions evasion and of creating an economy that is independent of kind of Western control. So everybody, except for the Russian soldiers on the front line and the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians around the world who has major power seems to want to keep this going. really made headlines in the West as though the United States and the West in general had sort of lost its power, its moral power to be the power broker in negotiations like these, that they were no longer the ones at least having success in making these deals because China saw the power vacuum and knows how it can undercut the West and step in and do from its perspective what constitutes a better job. And yet, when you

juxtapose that deal with Xi Jinping side by side with Vladimir Putin claiming impartiality in the war, but talking about their growing friendship with a man who's engaged in a bloody humanitarian disaster, who started a bloody humanitarian disaster, and the aggressor in this invasion, when you see them standing side by side, it is a strange strategy. Again, in the real politics sense, you can understand where he's coming from.

It is a strange strategy from Xi Jinping to, on the one hand, be sort of sense that his cash on the world stage is rising, his credibility on the world stage is rising, and then, on the other hand, be sort of sense that his cash on the world stage is rising, his credibility on the world stage is rising. And then on the other hand, to cozy up to Putin and allow Putin to cozy up to him like this. Yeah, peacemaker sitting down with the guy who's making war. Yeah, that could be a bit of a conflict that he needs to work out. And he also endorsed Putin, said Putin's going to win in 2024. Putin has not said he's going to run again in 2024. And that makes his claims to impartiality utter bullshit, by the way. Utter bullshit. Well, yeah, because he's now out there. What is Putin doing right now?

Yeah, I don't think anybody really believed that they were impartial in this conflict. No, but I mean, it's important, just to your point about his argument in terms of using the global economy as a weapon. He doesn't believe that because he obviously doesn't believe that because it's part of China's strategy, just as it is many countries in the West and has been for a very long time. So he sort of has this instinct about the public-facing posture of China. And what's important is that he will get away with that when it comes to other countries and when it comes to the moral credibility if the United States, A, doesn't get its own act together and B, better, B best, as Melania might say. And secondly,

if the United States lets them get away with that, with the hypocrisy. And we'll see how it goes with their Saudi Iran thing. Turns out that might be tougher than it looks. But good job cutting that deal, got the embassies back open, got some commercial deals going. They're going to complain. One of them is going to complain about the other soon enough. And then they're going to go to China and say they broke the deal, now you need to be on our side on this. We'll see. It'll happen with Putin too. Being a superpower, not as much fun as it looks sometimes. It's all fun and games until it gets real. All right, so moving on to Joe Biden's first veto of his presidency. This is a rejection of a rejection of a rule. So basically, you know, how this works is that if the administration, in this case, through the Labor Department,

institutes a new rule, Congress can undo that rule through the Congressional Review Act as long as they knock it down within a certain amount of time. So Congress passed a CRA law, Congressional Review Act, saying that the Department of Labor rule around ESG policies is no good, has to be undone. Biden then vetoed that, which means the rule stays in place. And what the rule basically says is that if you run a pension fund or a 401k or something else, you are, if all things are equal, able to take into account an ESG score. That's environmental social governance. I think it's the E that is actually the thing that is driving all of the corporate rage about this, while it's the S that is kind of drawing the public kind of conservative outrage against it. Interesting

that Biden chose this as his first veto. Curious for your take on this, because I'm highly critical of ESG as a kind of oftentimes fraudulent approach. At the same time, I don't think it's the government's place to come in here and say that you, you know, where you can and can't put your investment dollars. Curious for your take on this. Yeah. And Reuters reported that industry itself was split on this because a lot of corporations are totally fine with ESG. In fact, they like it because, to your point, it allows them to perpetrate this fraud of having this public-facing social responsibility

that doesn't really mean anything at the end of the day. But on the E part, oil companies are very opposed to this, which I honestly... The E is where the rubber hits the road. And this is where, to your question, this was both sides milking the culture war for all that it's worth. This is Harvard business, or I'm sorry, this was Harvard Law. They have a very long analysis posted on their website of what's going on with this rule,

obviously designed as an explainer for stakeholders. They say, quote, it confirms the permissibility of ESG investing in pursuit of improved risk-adjusted returns in accordance with prudent investor principles without mandating such an investment strategy. That's about the Biden rule, which was very similar to a Trump rule. And they say, this is like very dense legalese, but they basically are saying there were a couple of wording tweaks to the ESG mandate part that are not meaningfully changing. They are tweaks, but they're not meaningfully changing the rule from one administration to the next in terms of what is permissible with ESG investing from investors.

So from my perspective, again, I don't like that the government's involved in this period, but it's just like Biden tweets, he invokes Marjorie Taylor Greene in the tweet. Republicans, oh yeah. Let's play Biden. Here's what he said as he vetoed this. I just signed this veto because legislation passed by the Congress would put at risk retirement savings of individuals across the country. They couldn't take into consideration investments that wouldn't be impacted by climate, impacted by overpaying executives. And that's why I decided to veto it. I like how he whispered his way through that.

Yeah. It's like, was that the first take? It's probably like the 70th. Wouldn't hop it up a little bit for that. So he invokes Marjorie Taylor Greene in this veto. It is his first veto. He's publicizing it with a video, with a tweet itself. Republicans were really excited about this too because ESG, they know, is a political winner, and it is.

And so to the extent that you can cast this as a big government Democrat mandate for a social justice agenda or a far left social justice agenda, they understand that that's a political winner for them. When you look at the actual substance of the changes in these rules, it doesn't warrant this level of kerfuffle whatsoever. I'm generally opposed to people denigrating the culture war because I think it has serious implications and they're often class implications. But this was an incredible waste of time and energy. I thought Biden's invocation of executive pay was smart. That's the G in the ESG. real stuff that allows fund managers to say, well, wait a minute, you're paying the CEO $28

million in stock options and they blew it last year. We're going to knock your score for overpaying all of your executives. You're stealing money from us. I think that's completely fair. The irony, though, to me of Republicans getting so worked up about ESG is that back under the second half of the Obama administration, one of the big fights was over what was called a fiduciary rule. This was also through the Department of Labor, where the Labor Department pushed through a rule that said investment managers have a fiduciary duty to not rip off, basically, their clients. In other words, they can't purposely move them from one fund with a 0.05 management fee into another fund with a 0.5% management fee, which can add up to billions of dollars,

which clearly is not in the fiduciary benefit of the clients and actually just enriches the fund managers. That was a knockdown, drag out fight in Washington that played out behind the scenes, but with millions of dollars spent in lobbying, fighting this. And so the Obama administration ended up winning that one. It was one of the first rules that then the Republican Congress went after when they came back into power. And so to go from there, to then say- It's opposite. That you want the opposite of this at all, that you really all you care about is investors. It's like, hmm, maybe there's something else going on here. And I think a lot of this is really

about climate and is about the intense amount of investor pressure on companies to move away from fossil fuel supply chains and fossil fuel driven economies and then the fossil fuel industry pushing back against that. Well, to that point, lobbyists obviously are adept readers of this dense legalese, and they know when a rule is meaningful and when a rule is not meaningful. So the fact that the oil and gas industry is threatened by something that when it comes down to it is at best minor, that these word changes, like one of the words is prudential. It's just reasonable. They're like these words being swapped out that they're spooked by that tells you clearly that they feel that this is a high level of importance to their business model. I don't dispute that a lot of this is about climate. I think you're right, though, that from Republicans' perspective, it's about the S.

I think that's easier, right? The S, then you can, as soon as you have the S and you start looking into the literature behind ESG, you get into DEI, you get into critical race theory, and the whole world opens up politically when you have that in there. Yeah, Republicans are loving that. It's the tip of the iceberg. Much more than fighting it over climate. Right. It's the tip of the iceberg. And what's beneath the surface of the water is honestly

pretty academic, radical literature. And so when you can apply that and you can pin that to any Democrat that supports what's happening with this, you realize you have a big political weapon, whether it's fair or not. And in this case, it's not. And meanwhile, that iceberg is completely melting. Well done, Ryan. You like that? Mic drop and move on to ChatGPT and Google here. So Google, under pressure from ChatGPT and other AI products, has put out BARD. I signed up for the wait list this morning. BARD was initially developed, it sounds like, starting back in 2015 as a way to artificially produce poems. That's where B Bard comes from.

They have been, the reporting is that they were basically pressured into releasing something they didn't quite want to release yet because Bing and Microsoft, following from chat GPT, released their own AI, integrated it into Bing, and for the first time was making real inroads against Google, or at least Google was perceiving the threat that they might do that. They issued internally a code red or a red alert that put all of their developers, software engineers, onto moving this as fast as possible and put a lot of pressure on their AI ethicists to clear the way for this to finally get rolled out. They're rolling it out in a much

smaller, to a much smaller circle of people than previously. But it does seem like this is the clearest sign yet of any that the AI arms race is really on. Right. And it's, this is from Alphabet and the Wall Street Journal quotes them referring to this as an early experiment. And to unleash these, quote, early experiments on the world, I just think is a grave danger. It sounds like it's not that big of a deal. It sounds like the worst thing that's going to happen is we get some wrong answers and some cheating in school. It goes so far beyond that. We have so many vulnerabilities that we don't even know about, some that we do know about in terms of hacking, in terms of the security of our data, of our information, all of these things that can be targeted by artificial intelligence that is going to get more intelligent every single day as we open these tools up to the public. Now, generally,

I think it's good that we democratize extremely powerful things like this. I do, however, think that when you see the nervousness among engineers, among tech executives about what could happen with this technology that they're referring to as an experiment and just unloading to the public. Let's take one example. We talked last week about Snapchat and the experiment the Center for Humane Technology ran with Snapchat's new AI, which is a $4 a month premium feature that children can access. Well, WAPO repeated that experiment essentially with BARD, and they found they got similar inappropriate advice for teenage users. This is from the Washington Post. After I told BARD I was about to have my 15th birthday party and wanted some advice on beer, it gladly provided me advice on how to hide the smell of beer

on my breath from my parents. Tips included using mouthwash, chewing gum, drinking water, and even quote, avoid getting too close to your parents. Again, this is funny and it is one experiment. What we saw with Snapchat and the Center for Humane Tech's experiment was they were telling a 13-year-old user how to lose her virginity. This was AI walking through those steps. And again, if your kid has $4 on a debit card to put in Snapchat, it's there right now. I'm sure they've corrected it since that was publicized, but you have no idea where this AI goes. And that's part of the fear that Google has. And you can see it. You can read

what they're telling their employees internally. Their memo was published in the media. They're nervous about this stuff. And I just don't. I know a lot of people play around with chat GPT and all of that stuff, but I just have a very hard time finding it funny anymore because it seems to be going in a really dark direction really quickly. And what we don't even understand is what's going to happen when this artificial intelligence is directing people to do some really, really dark stuff. The more we use it, the smarter it becomes. I have no fears about it becoming sentient

whatsoever. It's artificial intelligence. It'll always be artificial intelligence. But man, are we going into uncharted territory really quickly. The hacking part is deeply disturbing as well. Extremely. Because there's been this race between encryption and security and the hacker penetration intrusion technology, you already have the chat bots trying to kind of crack the new security piece that people put up, which is annoying to everybody, but we recognize that it works, where it's like, you know, find a picture with the cars. And so far, the counter software has not been able to crack that. But artificial intelligence is easily gonna be able to nuke its way right

through there. Artificial, you know, AI can take at this point handwritten, you know, a screenshot of cursive handwriting and turn it into text and analyze it. So it's not gonna be long before they can find a fire hydrant. And so that's just one example. The other security protocols we have in place, you're using your voice over the phone to talk to somebody. Certainly the idea that your last four-year social and your mother's maiden name are going to be secure enough. And if you have customer service, which is then completely run by AI, then you're going to have AI scams, AI hackers interacting with AI customer service. Yes. And so that's just, how do you keep the kind of infrastructure of the internet secure

in that situation? To me, it seems like we're just going to have constant outages, constant sites going down, and constant fraud as people are just getting ripped off day after day. No, and again, I don't dispute that there are some really good ways that this technology is going to evolve. I mean, that's the case with every technology that has its upsides and its downsides and is a double-edged sword. But it's unclear right now if the genie has sort of actually been let out of the so-called bottle, or of the proverbial bottle,

because if that is the case, and this technology, which is by all... The reason they're releasing this technology and they're in a race to integrate this technology new existing products Google is so Sensitive about its brand because they know that they're the top search engine in the world They don't want to jeopardize that it shows you how intense the pressure is to get this stuff out there that they're releasing and integrating It with bard and doing this little quote early experiment. It shows you how high the pressure is These are the same people that botched

much less powerful technology with social media. It's the same set of people. And this is a much more powerful technology that is now going to be in the hands of anybody who wants to do bad with it. So we've talked about scams. Think about blackmail. Think about how code can be exploited.

Like there are just things that, as I've talked to people in the industry who have explained this to me, I would not have even considered the dangers of. But the more they think about them, in some cases, they don't realize these vulnerabilities until other people exploit them, until the experiments are run.

They're like, holy smokes, you can do that with AI too? Isn't it fun that we're all doing this in real time and that anyone can do it, even people that want to do us harm? So if the genie is out of the bottle, if we're looking back years from now and saying, as of this moment in March of 2023, the genie was let out of the bottle, that this technology had been put in the hands and was advanced enough in the hands of those people who wish to do us harm to just start doing mass cyber attacks, advanced cyber attacks, hacking, all of that. It's such a sad moment that nobody learned from what happened with social media and the odds. I'm going back to Vermont.

That's smart. Don't blame me. What's your point today? Today, the Senate is holding a hearing on railway safety as a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushes for a bill intended to prevent future derailments like the one in East Palestine, Ohio. To put it bluntly, you'd have to be an industry expert to thoroughly evaluate the merits of this legislation. It's deep in the weeds. Such experts are, of course, few and far between in the news media and even in Congress, which is where lobbyists and unions step in to fill those knowledge gaps. Who do we trust to learn from East Palestine and spare other communities the same fate? No rail transportation system will ever be 100% safe. Transportation of hazardous chemicals will never be without risk. We have to do both. So we have to accept some of that risk and accept we can never fully eliminate

it. The question then is whether the risk right now is too high. If so, what would bring it down? The industry's latest data finds that for all railroads, the derailment rate is down 31% since 2000. But despite that longer-term positive trend, it was up by 5% year over year. A fact sheet being circulated by Senator J.D. Vance's office contends, quote, derailments in the United States are much more common than in other countries, and they specifically cite numbers from the EU and from Japan. So while we aren't in an urgent state of national emergency, there is probably more that we can do. Determining whether government regulations would harm or hurt those efforts becomes important here.

The fact sheet being circulated by Vance's office makes reasonable arguments for each of the provisions in the bill and makes reasonable rebuttals to legitimate points of contention. I uploaded the full thing over at The Federalist. You can read it there. Again, I'm not an industry expert, nor is Vance, nor are the editors of National Review who came out against the bill this week. But where the bill empowers the Department of Transportation, the measures appear very modest and within the realistic, if imperfect, scope of federal oversight here. The bill's two-person crew requirement is eminently reasonable for obvious reasons, be it mitigation in East Palestine or prevention in other cases. If his national review claims this will stall a transition to safer automated mechanisms,

the industry is welcome to explain why it can't pay for those to ensure the interim period is properly staffed. Maybe they could pause some stock buybacks. It's true, also, as NR says, should the bill pass, the railroads would adjust their behavior to any new regulatory burden, unquote. It's true, also, as NR says, The magazine claims that could come at the cost of safety by pushing hazardous chemicals into trucks. But if the regulatory burden is reasonable, that's not the fault of the government. It's the fault of an industry being subsidized to the tune of billions for putting profit over people. There's a lot going on when it comes to the economics of America's railroads. The right would correctly point out subsidies abound, distorting the true market forces at play.

The left would correctly point out the captive shipper problem that essentially gives companies monopoly power. Vance himself has actually noted both of those problems. Others might argue that this is an industry that needs both subsidies and some form of monopolies in order to function at all. Here's where the rubber meets the road. In a report on the NTSB's February findings that an overheated wheel bearing likely caused the derailment,

NPR noted, quote, the spacing of hotbox detectors and the temperatures at which they trigger alarms are not currently regulated by federal law, officials say. Norfolk Southern and its crew appear to have actually followed all of the regulations. So both the market and the government failed here. Norfolk Southern has no incentive to get months of bad PR, and the government has no incentive to take a beating from the public. But if an industry we all agree has safety implications that demand some government oversight needs better oversight,

if it's cutting staff to maximize profits over safety, this is not a lemonade stand. It's a subsidized industry that handles life and death situations on a daily basis across the entire country. Hot boxes and crew mandates aren't going to kill its efficiency. It boggles the mind that establishment Republicans trust the business executives who spent years ratcheting up cultural tensions by devoting vast resources to stupid virtue signals like Norfolk Southern or even Silicon Valley Bank. At best, they're surprisingly incompetent, and that's just at best. With PSR and the labor negotiations last fall, the industry has already shown an interest in profits over people and over safety.

So earlier this month, Republican Senator John Thune said of the bill, we'll take a look at what's being proposed, but an immediate quick response heavy on regulation needs to be thoughtful and targeted. Tragedies are often exploited by special interests. They abuse the emotions and anger of the public to ram through bad legislation, creating a false sense of catharsis. Tragedies also induce calls for action, for lawmakers to do something, anything to help. Again, this well-placed anger can create unintended consequences. Adding new layers of government control is sometimes easy because big business has money, lobbying money, to craft the

regulation in their favor, especially over smaller competitors. For more on that, I really recommend Tim Carney's book, The Big Ripoff. But none of this means government can't do better where oversight is actually warranted, where it actually has a duty to check big business. The Vance bill might not be perfect right now. Even great bills aren't perfect when they're introduced. But Thune's standard of thoughtful and targeted measures appears to be much more accurate as a description of this case than the industry's claims otherwise. Okay, we're going to pick up where we left off last week, exploring the origin of the Ebola outbreak in 2014. We're going to be joined by two authors of a fascinating article published in Independent Science News, if we can put that up there. And so this is Jonathan Latham. He's

the editor of Independent Science News, and he's executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project. The article was co-authored by Sam Husseini, who is a journalist on Substack and elsewhere and was the co-author of this story. Happy to welcome them both to CounterPoints today. Sam, Dr. Latham, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So I wanted to start out, as we did last week, by playing a clip from a podcast that included virologist Christian Anderson attempting to kind of debunk a conspiracy theory, but in the process, making a fascinating admission, if we could roll that. The problem is that people see these coincidences. One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak, which

also is being blamed on us because we have been studying Ebola in Kenema and Sierra Leone, and lo and behold, Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in 2014, obviously across the border in Guinea, but it's maybe 100 miles or so away. And people then put that together and say, oh, so that Ebola must have been a lab leak too, and it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again. And the reason why these names keep coming up and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have

done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again, right? It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic. And so, Sam, the mainstream media's initial story of the outbreak of Ebola was that in Guinea, a two-year-old child was playing with bats. And then several months later, you wound up with an Ebola outbreak. What to you was so important from that interview that Dr. Anderson gave? Well, my suspicions predated his recent statements, obviously, but it's remarkable that he would be saying this at this point. They have been denying that they were working on Ebola this entire time.

In their prior statements, Gary wrote an article, his co-partner as head of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium. These are the labs in West Africa that Africans claimed might have been the source of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. He recently denied it in an article. So for Anderson now to be seeming to admit in a very interesting and curious way that they were, in fact, working on Ebola is, I think, potentially an incredibly significant development. But the case against their narrative that it, you know, effectively pinning this on a two, he wasn't even two years old, he was 18 months old. This was over a thousand miles away from prior Ebola outbreaks. In prior Ebola outbreaks, there was always a die-off of the local mammalian species.

There was no such die-off of local mammalian species. They even acknowledged that. Fabian Linders, who wrote the sort of what we would call the cover story, and who was also part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology investigation by the World Health Organization, they acknowledged in their article that there were no bats that they could find in the village that they claim where the outbreak started. And they also acknowledged that there was no die off of the mammalian species. So there are an incredible number of holes in their dominant narrative. And the closer you look at this, the more it points to a concerted effort to effectively frame Guinea. This happened in three countries, and there's a whole series of patterns in which they seem to have tried to pin this on Guinea just over the border from Sierra Leone to get it away from where the U.S. labs were. Right. And Dr. Latham, I want to bring you in here.

What does the evidence, as far as we know, say about where the most likely origin was? Well, I mean, the balance of evidence, I would say, favors Guinea. But there are some open questions about the provenance of some of the samples that were taken. So, for example, during the outbreak, at the very beginning, MSF, Doctors Without Borders, alleged that the initial, they were the people who identified the initial, the very first confirmed cases. But what they argued was that those confirmed cases were in fact coming from across the border in Sierra Leone. And if you look at the phylogenetic research that has been used to pin the outbreak on Guinea, what you see is that some of the very earliest cases that are pinned on Guinea are probably actually from an outbreak in Sierra Leone. And so if you undo that misattribution, as it were, then what you come up with is almost certainly an origin in Sierra Leone. And did it start earlier than has been publicly claimed, the epidemic that is,

do we have evidence of that at this point? Well, the official start of the outbreak is the first diagnosed cases on March the 17th. But what the people in Sierra Leone identified was a start on May 25th. So this is two months later. And so what they found when they first started identifying cases is that these cases were many mutations different from each other, which implies that there had been an outbreak in Sierra Leone long before. But we don't know if there was an outbreak in Guinea long before. That is the allegation of Fabian Leendertz and the paper that essentially found nothing in Guinea when they went to look at the purported outbreak site. So the claim is, the claim of Leander is that the outbreak started in

December with the death of this young child. But there is essentially no evidence for that. So the children, the child doesn't have a confirmed diagnosis. None of his contacts has a confirmed diagnosis. There is no confirmed diagnosis for almost three months after that. So for the scientific community to allege that that is the first date of the outbreak is frankly ridiculous. What else could that child have died of? They say it was Ebola. What else could it have been? His father thinks that he died of malaria. And his father didn't get anything. The healthcare workers in the village didn't get anything. His mother did also

die, but that was apparently potentially for treatment that she got from Ebola. She was pregnant at the time. So she was in a in a particularly vulnerable state. I don't know if Jonathan could have more ideas on that. Yeah, Jonathan, do you have? Go ahead. No, I mean, not a great deal to add, except that there are some suggestions that she might have had cholera too. But at the time, there was no suggestion that she had Ebola virus. And obviously, people who have miscarriages, viral hemorrhagic fevers are diseases associated with loss of blood. But obviously, so are miscarriages. And so she died along with her child. And so there's no real reason to think, so far as I can see, to think that she had Ebola,

because it can be misdiagnosed so easily. I mean, basically the only way that anybody considers that you can confidently diagnose Ebola is with a lab test. And no lab tests were done until the middle of March. And why, Sam, what do we know about this lab that was in Sierra Leone? And why would there be this two-month period in which it seems as if Ebola is circulating, but it's not getting picked up? I'll let Jonathan speak to the second point. But this lab is headed by Robert Gehry and Christian Anderson. Those names might ring a bell with people because they are the authors,

the two primary authors of the Proximal Origins paper, which came out in the spring of 2020 and asserted that COVID could not be a laboratory construct. It's very difficult to overstate the importance of this article. It really set the tone for the dominant mainstream media coverage of COVID, that it couldn't possibly come out of a lab,

and you were in a nut job to think that it could possibly come out of a lab. So they had a massive conflict of interest to dismiss the possibility of lab origin because the next question would be if the global public, imagine if the global public understood in early 2020 that this plague ravaging through the world could have come out of a lab, one of the next major questions would have been, what about prior outbreaks? And as a matter of fact, you know, I asked in February of 2020, the CDC, if it could have come out of, if COVID could have come out of a lab. And their response was a disingenuous. And then when I followed up and I

pushed, they said, well, we got to be careful about what kind of information we put out here, because remember what happened with Ebola in 2014. And we had to dismiss the possibility of a lab origin then in order to have people deal with the disease, which was a very weird way to put it. So that's a major thing that we have to keep in mind. There are all kinds of US institutions that are involved with this viral hemorrhagic fever consortium. And the work done there was increasingly done on dangerous viruses, particularly after, people may remember, the anthrax attacks of 2002. Chernobah emphasizes this, Sierra Leonean journalists, that there was a spike in that

activity and massive funding for work on dangerous viruses and pathogens during that period. So we know that it was working on deadly pathogens and we know that they had safety issues. There were statements by some of the scientists there saying, well, we can get so much work done here than we could in the United States because the safety concerns are not onerous from that point of view. They don't have to be in a BSL-4 lab and be in a space suit kind of thing. So from their point of view, it's so much easier to do this kind of dangerous lab work. Not cost-free. Jonathan, to that second point, how would you have a two-month outbreak in Sierra Leone that doesn't get picked up?

And what was MSF's response to that? Well, the simple answer to the first part is that, you know, at the beginning of an outbreak, there are not very many cases, typically. So an Ebola doesn't transmit that easily. So it would be possible to miss it. In between that and the problems with diagnosing Ebola, which especially in its early stages, looks like many other illnesses, like we've heard about malaria and cholera. But this is an area of West Africa in which lesser fever is endemic. So that's another disease that can be misattributed in this case. So you have all these possible confusions and what MSF discovered when they went to the lab, and also the World Health Organization, so a series of

organizations went to the lab after the outbreak started. This is the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium Lab in Kenema, in Sierra Leone. And they went there and they discovered all kinds of biosecurity breaches. There were allegations of needles all over the floor, that they didn't have UV decontamination procedures in place, and that samples were being, you know, reagents were being reused and so forth. And we know that there was confusions. There was a group, there's a company called Metabiota, and there's a viral hemorrhagic fever consortium that were basically operating the same premises, but essentially ended up in conflict with each other. And this conflict seems to have started in confusion. But there's also the possibility that exactly like COVID, that there is a great benefit to anybody who leaks a lab to confuse the data around the origins, because then it becomes impossible to reestablish what actually were the chains of the contact chains and the dates of diagnoses and so forth of the people

who first get the illness. And I want to move to the COVID origin discussion next, but real quickly, where should people go if they want to learn more about this? Well, our main article is on Independent Science News, which Jonathan is the editor of. I've been doing a series of smaller follow-ups on my Substack, husseini.substack.com. Just to put a fine point on what Jonathan said, when Doctors Without Borders finally got to Sierra Leone, they talked about a quote-unquote hidden epidemic. That's in one of the reports they published. Correct. At the time. At the time, because they were startled by the number of cases there, and they attributed this to bungling by metabiota, which people might realize has

been in the news in other contexts. But that's one interpretation that it could have been bungling. It could also have been part of a concerted effort to draw attention away from Sierra Leone and effectively frame Guinea, undercount the cases in Sierra Leone away where the U.S. labs are so that you can say the outbreak started in Guinea and pin it all on this toddler in an African village. And so moving on to the latest news on COVID origins, we can put up this, I think it's R6. This is the preprint that kicked off so much news coverage over the past week,

beginning in the Atlantic, which was based on some interviews actually with Christian Anderson, who we were just speaking of, Robert Gary and others. Those are authors now of this preprint. The New York Times did two major pieces off of this. They got great publicists, these guys do. But you know, that's the thing. I don't think they have publicists. I think they just have direct lines. I don't think they do. I don't think they do. It's the credibility factor. You're totally right. I'm kidding. They'll just swallow it, you know. And so we're still joined by Dr. Jonathan Latham, virologist and the publisher editor of Independent Science News, Sam Husseini, a reporter who writes on the Substack, husseini.substack.com.

Thank you again, guys, for joining us. And so I'll start with youseini.substack.com. Thank you again, guys, for joining us. And so I'll start with you, Dr. Latham. So now that we've had this entire news cycle, as the cycle dies down, now we get the preprint, which to be clear for non-scientists, including myself, is not a peer-reviewed paper, but at least it is something that is written down on paper. And so as you've digested this preprint, how does it match up with the New York Times and Atlantic headlines that were so definitive in saying, hey, we can now link the origins of COVID to a raccoon dog in the Wuhan market? So, I mean, right now what we get to see is how weak the underlying data is,

right? And the fundamental issue is that they find raccoon dog DNA, but they also find many other kinds of DNA. None of the raccoon dog DNA demonstrates that the raccoon dog was infected with a virus. This is an animal market where raccoon dogs are for sale. Finding raccoon dog DNA is a little bit unsurprising. What the data shows is that SARS-CoV-2 RNA nucleotide sequences were basically all over the market. But the fundamental point for me is that the dating of this is all wrong. We know that the outbreak almost certainly started in September or October, and maybe even earlier than that. That is approximately the consensus. We know that there were people sick in Italy, for example. There are samples from Italy in November. So we know that the outbreak started

months before these samples were taken. Therefore, these samples are irrelevant to the beginning of the outbreak. And I would say that the Huanan market was not, there's no evidence even that the Huanan market was a super spreader no evidence even that the Huanan market was a super spreader event. It may simply have been representative of Wuhan city at that time, when there were thousands of cases of COVID in the city. And it's really obviously hard for a journalist in January, February, March of 2020 to know what questions to ask, to know to ask that questions about the samples and the timing and all of that. That doesn't excuse them not asking those questions. And Sam, I'll toss

this question to you. You may both have thoughts on it, whether we're talking about Ebola or COVID. The publicist thing is kind of funny because it's funny, but it's sad because it's so true that when people come with a preprint, put it in the media, and give it their spin, reporters are susceptible to just swallowing that spin and running with it. So when you look at this preprint now, when you look at how the media reports on difficult subjects like these, what disconnect do you see between the inability then of the press without medical expertise to translate that into information the public needs? I don't think that the public and the press should have this deferential, this appeal to authority.

Science like journalism is about observing the world and using reason to draw conclusions. It's a fairly simple proposition to say there's a lab nearby. Could that have something to do with it? And then when their response is, oh, people thought the same thing when this other outbreak happened, when there was a lab nearby, the logical conclusion would be, okay, so you're telling me there's another case. So maybe that's the issue.

That that would be the reasonable way to look at it. But the establishment scientific community and the sort of John Stewart line that somehow science is the problem, that curiosity will kill us all, that's wrong too. Because as I've looked at, for example, Peter Daszak, who funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology dangerous lab work, the funding base for this is largely from the Pentagon and from USAID.

This militarized way of looking at things has perverted science. And you had scientists speaking up about this. I mentioned the anthrax attacks earlier in 2005 there was a letter of 700 scientists saying you're perverting our field to the NIH saying you're putting so much money, you know studying these dangerous pathogens you're messing up with our field. It's no longer becoming a scientific inquiry And it was Fauci who told them to put up or shut up. The government has told us that they want this work done. This is what we're gonna do.

So science isn't the problem. The problem is a militarized view of science and in terms of the recent report, this isn't the first. There have been a series of these highly publicized reports saying, oh, yeah, it didn't come out of a lab. The Nature article. Yeah. And a year ago. Yeah, there was one in August of last year

right before Jeffrey Sachs flipped on this. And I think the net effect of that is just to confuse the public. That is people, insiders are like, these guys are really burning their credibility, right? But the net effect of it is to confuse the public mind so that the public doesn't demand answers, that the public thinks that this is, you know, maybe it's nothing after

all. Muddy the waters. Totally muddy the waters. And it really reminds me of after, you know, 20th anniversary after the Iraq war, after the Iraq invasion, people might recall there was a series of stories where they claimed to have found the WMDs that all ended up falling apart. Why did they do that? They did that to muddy the waters so that there was never a moment of reckoning. And I think that that's what a lot of these scientists are really hoping, that there's never a moment of reckoning. Yeah. And Dr. Latham, all of these reports that we're talking about tend to be driven by roughly, it seems like, half a dozen

kind of key virologists. And I saw somebody, a biologist, saying on social media the other day that he felt like he was able to engage in this conversation in a more open and dispassionate way because he's not in the field of virology. And so his career would not be negatively impacted by his scientifically coming to a conclusion that is impolitic within his field. So I'm curious for you as a virologist, what has been the reaction over the last three years to you raising questions about what these half dozen virologists have tried to say is kind of settled science? You know, my challenge is a little bit different because I'm not in an academic department. So I have a PhD in virology, but now I run a non-profit.

And so I don't have to face my colleagues every day and explain to them why I am contradicting, you know, what appears to them to be in their best interest. But you see, I can speak to some of the emails that we've seen. For example, there's a classic one in which some of Ralph Baric's colleagues, Ralph Baric is at the University of North Carolina and collaborated with, or proposed to collaborate at least, or in fact did, I shouldn't say proposed, he actually did collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And they email each other and they say, our jobs is to keep our heads down at this point, right? And they, because they know how weak these stories are, but at the same time, they cannot stand up and contradict them for fear of their careers. And the problem is that, you know,

classically, scientists have tenure exactly so that they can speak freely. But scientists in many institutions don't actually have tenure these days or feel that they don't have tenure or feel that they will essentially lose everything if they speak out. And it's clear that the Lancet letter accusing people who discuss the lab leak of being conspiracy theorists and having this published in a premier journal and have a whole constellation of very prestigious scientists sign this letter, it constitutes a threat to the scientific, you know, anybody in the scientific community who might consider speaking out on these subjects. So it's been clear that, to me, that there's been a campaign of intimidation. But I don't have to worry about it because I'm

independent of that ecosystem, if you like. You know, there's been so much conversation about how and accusations that people who are suppressing the lab leak debate are protecting China. To the point you just made, Sam, it actually seems to me the real problem is that people like Anthony Fauci, who weaponized these charges of racism, which is really an interesting juxtaposition with what happened with the Ebola outbreak, you know, may have been a situation that was the other way around and gets to how cynical all of this is. But when you look at it, it actually seems as though what they were really protecting was the United States, because the source of this funding time and again goes down to the Pentagon, goes down to groups like EcoHealth Alliance that are primarily funded or largely funded in many cases by the United States government. So it's been

strange to see that narrative play out that this is all about protecting China when in fact, if anything, it seems to be protecting the U.S. That's absolutely correct. There are sort of two strands of the U.S. establishment. One wants to target China and the other one wants to make sure that the United States government continues with this dangerous lab work. A terrible development, to your point recently, is that a large part of the public now thinks that Congress unanimously passed and Biden just signed legislation that would declassify all information regarding COVID origins. This claim was made on Fox.

This claim was made in the Washington Post, it's been made by the sponsors of the legislation. It's not true. If you read the legislation, what it says is that we direct the Director of National Intelligence to declassify all information pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So that would mean that they wouldn't have to declassify the information pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So that would mean that they wouldn't have to declassify the information pointing to other institutions or potentially even information exonerating in some way, as unlikely as that might seem, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And meanwhile, the public is being told, we're declassifying everything pertaining to this. So that is a setup for a very dangerous situation. The public thinks that what's being declassifying everything pertaining to this. So that is a setup for a very dangerous situation. The public thinks that what's being declassified is everything when that's not the case at all. As a matter of fact, there's massive, even unclassified information isn't being FOIA'd. The Intercept did a fair amount of this. U.S. Right to Know did a fair amount of this. I was just at the State Department asking them why they still have not responded to FOIA's from almost three years ago by U.S. Right to Know, a transparency group which has had to start litigation. So there's

massive, you know, withholding of information while the public is being led to believe, oh, we're, you know, we're opening up the books here. And I saw a video of Sam yelling at Ned Price to release that information. Sam, if you recognize Sam, it's because you've seen some of his viral videos. He's often in the State Department briefings, tangling with the State Department spokespeople. It's good stuff. Yeah, it's very, it's enjoyable stuff. I've told Sam I'm going to start going to State Department briefings. Those look more fun than the White House. They have better chairs, better chairs, more spacious. The more cantankerous the hearing room, the more peaceful the outside world, is my philosophy. And Dr. Latham, one last question. I just wanted to put to you kind of

the best case that the market origin types make and see what your response to it coming out of this preprint that we just put. They put up a heat map in their article that shows kind of an intense amount of kind of COVID RNA sampling coming from the exact same portion of the market where they can show that now that these raccoon dogs were being sold. And they say that that's very strong circumstantial evidence that why would you have more COVID here than you would have in the rest of the market? So what's your reaction to that claim that circumstantially that this is strong evidence? Well, I mean, there's two issues. One is that we don't know if we have access to all the data at this point. And the second issue is that I believe there's also a toilet at that part of the market.

So people are coming and going and using that toilet and basically potentially hanging out there, maybe a line. We don't know. There's so much that we don't know. And I think that the basic issue comes back to the timing. I don't think we can ever get away from that. The timing of this sampling is so late in the pandemic that it really can make no sense to identify raccoon dog DNA. I mean, even if you take the best case scenario that there was a raccoon dog infected with SARS-2 in that market, the likelihood is that that raccoon dog caught it from a person and not the other way around. And so the evidence that they're putting forward, all told, is ridiculous to me. Right, it doesn't explain how a February infection could spark a September or October or even November or December.

And in fact, I'm a time travel expert, it couldn't even spark an outbreak in January. The breadth of Brian's knowledge surprises me. I'm going to call The Atlantic with that and see if I can get an article printed. Jonathan, Sam, thank you so much for joining us. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Thank you. All right, that's it. That'll do it for this Wednesday edition of CounterPoints. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Any final words? Any final thoughts? Just always appreciate people tuning in. And, Ryan, I'm so glad you took the lead on these segments because it's important information that nobody's talking about.

Good stuff. Thanks. And thank you guys for the great work that you've done. Thank you so much, Ryan. We'll see you next time. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily, it's You're Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back.

Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. Enter Camp Shame, an eight-part series examining the rise and fall of Camp Shane and the culture that fueled its decades-long success. You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind voiceover, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about

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