Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Counter Points #9: Midterm Polls, Housing Crisis, Semiconductor Crunch, CIA Spy Ops, Ukraine Diplomacy, Obesity Epidemic & MORE!

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Ryan and Emily give their commentary on midterm polls, the housing crisis, semiconductor battles, CIA spying, Ukraine diplomacy, American obesity, Lab Leak Theory & MORE!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/Ryan Grim: https://badnews.substack.com/ Emily Jashinsky: https://thefederalist.com/author/emilyjashinsky/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to help us out. I learned that Ryan actually has great eyesight, which he wears glasses a lot, but I guess it's for, like, when, teleprompters are really small. Right. Otherwise, I stay away from them. That's why I don't even have contacts. I was just telling you. But reading a teleprompter, like, forget it. I can't do it. Yeah.

It's not easy. All right. So there was some really good news for the economy and also some good news this week for Democrats. The narrative since mid-October, fairly, because you started seeing like a polling collapse, was that the red tsunami was back. The red wave was back. This week, you haven't seen a counter-narrative develop in the press, yet if the press wanted to concoct one, the numbers were all there. So Tom Bonior, a Democratic strategist, compiled these. Let's put that up. This is A1. He pulled up a bunch of different generic poll, congressional generic polling data. Generic ballot. so far that we've had. This one has not fallen apart. So I can put my glasses on here and read this for you guys can read it for yourself. And since he tweeted this, another one has come out that came out from Echelon Insights, which has Democrats up like plus two, plus three.

Recently, you've got Democrats up just across the board. You can see it plus four, plus four, plus four, plus five, plus three, plus five. Depending on likely voter register, voter moves it in some polls, doesn't move it in other polls. This is movement. When it's starting to get aggregated together like this, you're catching something. Do you think that this is just noise? Or do you think that something about gas prices collapsing the stock market again? Most people don't have money in the stock market, but it signals to people.

People take it as a proxy for employment, for confidence, for future. It's been rallying the last week or so, coinciding with these numbers coming out. Or is this just all nonsense? I think it's actually all nonsense. And I do appreciate what Tom is doing there because I think it's always helpful to challenge priors, especially with polling. When polling starts to congeal in one direction, I actually get nervous because, and we're going to talk about this in this very segment, I'm very nervous about the competence of the polling industry as the polling, I'm very nervous about the competence of the polling industry, as the polling industry itself is very nervous about its own competence,

per a New York Times report this week. So I think actually if you dig into some of those polls, one of them was an economist, Ipsos, and a Politico-Yugo poll. Those polls have had Democrats ahead by healthy margins with like one exception for months. And that, to me, where you're showing no movement is quite interesting and not necessarily a signal that there's a tick up for Democrats. And also if you look at the generic ballot aggregates, so RealClearPolitics generic ballot aggregate shows a little bit of movement over the last several days. Like over the last few days, it does show Democrats doing better on the congressional ballot. It still, though, has them down by a

decent margin, a respectable margin, if you're Republicans looking at and thinking what it indicates. And 538 also shows it sort of tightening over the summer until just about a few weeks ago, and it's still a pretty wide gap. So I think when you're looking at the aggregates, it's interesting, but to the question that I think Tom was kind of raising here, it's like, what does go into the creation of a narrative? What is the media looking at, right? So if X creates narrative Y, then why doesn't Z also create narrative Y? And that, I think, is a question worth asking. Right. And the polling industry, like you said, is getting very nervous. And you can tell that by, and we can put this second one up, story after story after story is coming out that is basically like blaring to readers and voters, do not trust us. We have no idea what's going on here. But if

you are going to put faith in any polls, and faith is going on here. But if you are going to put faith in any polls, and faith is the wrong word, but if you're going to put any stock in any polls, the national polls aren't that bad and haven't been that bad. So if you take 2020 and 2016, in general, the national polls on both Hillary Trump and also Biden Trump were pretty close. Hillary Trump was pretty bad. Well, she won by 3 million votes, and the polls had her up by a couple points. But they were saying— I guess you're right.

The electoral map was where they were getting that information. They got key states wrong, so it's when you drill down. But if you looked at the popular vote, they like nailed the popular vote, both 2016 and 2020. And they have nailed the generic congressional ballot pretty consistently. So if now they, the aggregate does, because obviously they're all over the map here. Democrats need to be like, what, plus two or so? You need to be up a bit to feel good, yeah. If it's even, because of the structural advantage that Republicans have, Republicans will control the House.

And that's why 538, that's one of the reasons 538 still has Republicans. It's something like an 81, 82% chance of holding the House, but a very close margin. And so movements in that generic poll, I think, are a lot more interesting than new polls coming out of Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Nevada or even Florida or Ohio. Those might be wildly off. We might find out they were off by 10 in Ohio or something like that. Well, I remember, I think it was a Washington Post poll in 2020 that said, what was it, Joe Biden was going to win by like 17 points. In Wisconsin, right?

In Wisconsin. And so the state level polls, it can be shocking. Right. And we saw a huge swing just in Wisconsin with that Marquette poll for Johnson and the Mandela Barnes race over the course of a couple that, again, it didn't seem to me like that was organically just where public opinion had moved, but that there was some error in the polling that was showing up in itself. But that is, the state-level races, though, the fact that we can't gauge them well is kind of insane. And from the pollster's perspective, it's insane that we would expect them to maintain the

same level of accuracy. When, if you look at some of the articles that we just put up on the board from the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight, they're talking about some really huge tectonic shifts in what they have to tackle. So, they have all of this technology upheaval. They have the question of Trump, people being like, are politics getting so bitter and divisive that people are afraid of saying who they're voting for? Or they have seen pollsters get it so wrong, they flat out don't want to be involved in their operation. But here's a quote from this massive sort of New York Times dive into polling just this week. It said, quote, spend several hours talking to them, pollsters,

and there's only one conclusion you can reach. The same cross currents of mistrust, misinformation, and polarization that divide our nation are also weakening our ability to see it for what it is. The stronger those forces grow, the worse our polling gets. There's a FiveThirtyEight article, Ryan, that you sent. Here's a quote from that. One big concern is that we have fewer surveys of individual contests in 2022 than in previous midterms, and a larger share of that smaller pie has been conducted by partisan pollsters and or sponsored by partisan organizations. And they did a big analysis to make that determination. So that leaves us, I think, in like, that's to your point about the congressional ballot being sort of what we have to go off of. That's what we have to go off of.

Until we don't. Right, right, right, right. And that's not a perfect metric, but when you're looking at people saying, you know, they know what's happening in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Arizona, well, a lot of what they think is happening is based on polls that even pollsters are worried are flawed. Right, because they're going to get turnout wrong a lot the more local you get. And so that's why when you do a national poll, a lot of the mistakes you make wash themselves out on each side. And so FiveThirtyEight had this fascinating look at, and we included it in that earlier one,

this fascinating look at people who aren't doing polls. And you start to read that story and you're like, well, this is an impossible story to do. How on earth could you do a story based on people who don't answer polls? How do you know who they are because they don't answer you? Well, the answer is, so they started out with this gigantic sample of people and then conducted a longitudinal study, which means they came back and they hit them every month or so to check in where they were. And so it's easier to get somebody in this first time. So they got thousands of people in for the first time. Then a bunch of people didn't show up for the second

round. Some more people didn't show up for the third round. But then it plateaued. Once you did the first two, you were in. So that gives you a characteristic of people who do polls and the characteristics of people who dropped off out of polls. One of the conventional things that people think they understand is that Trump supporters aren't going to, you know, are going to be less likely to take this poll. And they sort of did find that. Republicans in general now. Republicans in general now. Republicans in general were more likely to drop out. Weirdly, Fox News viewers were more likely to participate in the poll. It was Trump supporters who are primarily supportive of Trump and not the party

and who get their news from social media. Those were the ones that were, you know, the most likely to drop out in a disproportionate way to other ones. But the real people who dropped out, and this is a sad statement about our democracy,

but one that everybody I think watching this will understand, people who just aren't going to vote. Yeah. So it's not like the main people

who aren't taking political polls turn out to be people who are like, well, I'm not voting. Get away from me. Don't bother me with this. I don't want to talk about this.

Yeah. And they're like, why would I waste your time or my time? Yeah. I know I'm not going to vote. Right. But then again, so that metric aside, whether or not somebody is going to vote is also becoming harder for pollsters to gauge, and thus you have a huge difference between polls that just go with registered voters and polls that go with likely voters. And it's just like this huge, nerdy, somewhat nerdy distinction that has a just gargantuan effect on the quality of those polls. And I mean, it's just one thing that people forget,

or I guess maybe sort of want to not talk about in Washington is that when FiveThirtyEight is talking about those partisan polls, the more we're relying on partisan polls, the more we're allowing them to do what they're intended to do, which is influence these elections. Partisan polling is not just for personal information. There is a sort of influence ambition involved in all of that, too. And so the more we're relying on things like that, the less well off all of us are. But I think what's really, really noteworthy is that from all of those articles, that pollsters are very nervous about polls. And this is after half a decade of looking at dramatically big misses in some of those states, as you mentioned, Ryan. And what the pollsters have been trying to figure out is, are the people who we can't get to, which let's say it's the Trump-supporting social media users,

as they describe them, are those people similar enough to other Republicans, Fox News watching, main sources, Fox News, Republicans, that if we increase the weight that we give in a poll to the Republicans that we did talk to, are we going to be able to make up for the fact that we didn't talk to all these other Republicans? That's the big question, because if they're roughly the same category of people, then your numbers are going to be accurate, whether those people talk to you or not, because you know generally what they think. But they're not, I don't think. I think there are different types. People who get their news from different sources are going to end up voting differently. And so I think one of the key questions that hasn't gotten as you it was getting a lot of attention like a year ago but it's kind of dropped off is is the question of whether those voters these trump supporters who like trump more than they like the republican party and who are mostly just online

uh tend to be younger uh like itinerant voters are they going to show up for the midterms and for republicans right and is? And that's a huge question, by the way, because we know that there's a good handful of people who support Trump more than the Republican Party who had previously voted for Barack Obama. And these people are in swing states. And what do you think? You know these people better than me. Do you think they're showing up for Republicans? Well, I think I would have really been skeptical of that if it weren't for COVID, which I think changed the conversation and made a lot of people on the right feel like we are in a sort of political emergency. And that demands basically voting for Republicans from that perspective because of things like CRT, because of things like trans ideology in schools. People have seen what they see,

or they have been exposed to what they see as a sort of apocalyptic level threat. So you think Republicans have moved them enough away from just Trump? Yeah, I think so. And that's the question with Fetterman. Going back months, you can find us on the record pretty much talking about that Fetterman is a decent foil to Oz. I would not take back that I think John Fetterman is a good candidate. I think a healthy John Fetterman is up by eight points. A healthy John Fetterman, I think, is wildly underestimated by Republicans. That's not what ended up happening.

And so the race turned out differently. But I do think a healthy John Fetterman would have been a super interesting test. You're seeing a little bit of a test of that with Tim Ryan, but I think it's not panning out as he would have hoped. You're right, he's not tall enough. Doesn't wear shorts. That's right. Well, Ryan, part of the way we started this conversation is that you said there is a little bit of good news. But in all of that news, there's economic news that came out on that front on Thursday, but buried in all of that news, literally buried in a BEA PDF that you sent our way, is some news about the housing market. Right. So this is coming from the GDP report that you saw yesterday, the headline being that after two quarters of negative growth,

of the economy shrinking, it's back to growing at a 2.6% rate. We'll see if that gets adjusted in the future. But the biggest or one of the biggest drags on the economy was in housing. Now, this is to be expected from, you know, not just expected, but kind of done on purpose from what the Federal Reserve has been doing by tightening monetary policy. Matt Stoller would be very happy, I think, in some ways, sort of to see this, but not. What Matt wants to see is rents go down rather than a complete housing crash, and I don't know if you can get both. So,'s put up from this Bureau of Economic Analysis. Within residential fixed investment, the leading contributors to the decrease were new single-family construction and broker's commissions. And so broker's commissions is

obvious. That means people aren't buying and selling houses, which is going to push the prices of houses down, less demand. That pushes prices down. And you're already seeing rents start to come down. The other part is wild. So in other words, with mortgage rates at over 7% at this point, home builders are like, well, we're not building homes right now because you just crushed all of the demand. And so if you are trying to get prices down and you believe in supply and demand, basic supply and demand, there's two ways you can do that. Reduce demand so fewer people can buy homes or shrink the economy, which then reduces the supply. The other way to get prices down would be to increase the supply. So that now, instead of 10 houses in an area, there are 50 houses in an area. So all of a sudden now, those become more affordable.

That, with a growing population, would seem to be like the way that a sensible society would want to bring prices down. Because we're not going to have fewer people. Well, yeah, that's, I see housing as one of the weird, like sneaky and quiet things that affects a million other things in our politics, but that we absolutely never talk about. Like we're just not talking about any, even like culture warriors who want to talk about the fertility rate and want to talk about the marriage rate. Like housing is a huge aspect of that. And this is coming on the heels of something you hear very little about, at least in conservative circles. You hear a good amount about it on the left, although I would argue it's still too little.

Housing shortage that is like creating this totally out of touch aspect of what people consider the American dream, right? Young homeownership. That's your investment. That's your property, that's stability, and that's the sort of place that you build the rest from. That was already out of reach for a host of reasons, but one huge one of those reasons is that there's not enough housing and there's specifically not enough what people consider starter homes, which is like under 2,000 square feet. And I forget the price metric there. But like this is taking a really, really bad situation, not just for our politics,

but also for our culture and making it way worse. And there's an argument that, and plenty of people on the left would say this, that fewer single family homes is good. And if you look at Europe, they're like, what's going on over there? What are you guys doing with all these single, just endless homes? Why don't you guys live in row homes or in apartments or in multi-family housing? Where do you get all this

space? And so, it's not a given that everybody is going to have a starter home, is going to have their own home. That was kind of the American bargain. That was the American dream that was sold to people. Like, okay, we've got a lot of problems here. There's a lot of upward social mobility, a lot of downward social mobility. But we do have a contract here that basically if you work hard, you can own your own home and your children have a chance of doing better than you did.

That's the basic bargain. Now that we're pulling that bargain out, we're saying, actually, not so much. And the Fed, by turning this around, could create a kind of structural fundamental shift in construction that just says, you know, the single family homes we've got, that's what we're going to go with. From now on, we're doing, you know, multifamily homes, apartments, condos, row homes. Well, and so could lawmakers on the local level, like across the board. And obviously, they are deeply involved in zoning questions. Which we kind of need also. Yeah. But so the New York Times actually had a super interesting dive into basically the death of the starter home that they published last month. And here's a paragraph from

it. They wrote, from a builder's view, there's nothing particularly preferable about higher-end homes. The profit margins aren't generally higher. They demand more customization. They're riskier to build in economic downtimes. Entry-level housing, on the other hand, is invariably in deep demand. So, where did it go? But the demand question, I think, is interesting, too, because there are, I actually would totally believe that demand has gone down just because a lot of people have, people my age have been conditioned to see this as something that is out of reach, right? Like, since the Great Recession, it was, the talking point is that this is out of reach, and that's true for a lot of reasons.

But I think it's also sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy to that extent because people don't even look. I mean, I know there are jokes about Zillow now. Like SNL did a great sketch about like people scrolling Zillow. And listen, we've all done that. But the idea that you would actually sort of make a move on it is a totally different question. And I feel like a lot of people just genuinely see that as out of reach. So I think maybe there's a chunk of demand that probably isn't there where it used to be. But at the same time, the demand in your heart is different than demand coupled with the ability to pay. Yeah. And so if you're slowing down the economy, what that means is that people have less money, unemployment goes up, people are in deeper debt.

So demand isn't just like, that would be nice. It's like, that would be nice, but I can also afford it. Right. And did the Times say it was mostly about affordability or what was their takeaway? That it just is zoning reforms, basically. Like zoning law is one of the reasons that a lot of this hasn't happened and that it's just kind of a market. What's the best way to describe it? No man's land market kind of thing.

Yeah, it's just like falling through the cracks of the market, the idea of the starter home. And I thought it was particularly interesting that they're saying, well, it's not like it's worse for developers. It's not like developers are doing this because of the invisible hand. There actually is a market incentive for that, including demand. As they say, there's invariably deep demand for affordable starter homes. So it's a really serious problem.

It's the same thing, just coming from the a really serious problem. It's the same thing, like just coming from the perspective on the right, it's the same thing with student loans, right? Like we cannot be talking about marriage and children and not paying attention to the fact that people are drowning in student loan debt. You and I disagree on what the solution should be to that. But the fact that like it's the same thing with housing, student loans, there are all of these kind of financial issues that the right has for a really long time sort of shrugged and left to the market and said the market will sort of work this out. The invisible hand will sort of guide us to fitting all of these puzzle pieces together. But that has wreaked havoc on the culture, too.

It's wreaked havoc on things that Republicans really purport to care about right now. And again, like a lot of people probably disagree on what the solutions are. I'm just Republicans really purport to care about right now. And again, like a lot of people probably disagree on what the solutions are. I'm just saying they don't even talk about these things. Yeah. And I think one of the things that I think is going on is because they have kinked so much multifamily housing and so many apartments by the NIMBY blockages that there are a lot of single-family homes that are now occupied by lots of people. Yeah. Like, say you've got a group house with, like, four people in their 20s living in it who are all, you know, professionals or they're all, you know, they're, yeah, exactly.

You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, exactly. You know what I'm talking about. So if then you build more multifamily housing, you build more apartments that those people might prefer to live in because then they get their own space. Then you free up all of this other housing for actual families, single family housing for single families. So it's not necessarily an either or. If you're saying like, hey, we need more single family homes. Well, one way to free up more single family homes is to make it so that you're not packing so many people into so many of them. Give those people a place. And I think the broader point is that this indication that you pulled from the BEA, I think I have the exact sentence in front of me.

Yeah, real GDP turned up in the third quarter, increasing 2.6% after decreasing 0.6% in the second quarter. The upturn primarily reflected a smaller decrease in private inventory investment, an acceleration in non-residential fixed investment, and an upturn in federal government spending that were partly offset by a larger decrease in residential fixed investment and a deceleration in consumer spending. Imports turned down. That's the paragraph that you pulled out. And you can see how all of these things are happening on the surface. And then beneath that is lurking, I think, something pretty troubling. And this is throwing gasoline on that fire. I mean, I don't mean that with the sense of intentionality, but it's making a bad situation worse.

Although it is kind of intentional. Well, yeah. It's not like they don't know that with the sense of intentionality, but it's making a bad situation worse. Although it is kind of intentional. Well, yeah. It's not like they don't know that that's going to happen. Think about it. If the reduction in broker's fees can warrant a mention in the overall GDP, its impact on overall GDP, that is a massive reduction. Suck to be a real estate broker right now. Yeah. If you're watching this, I feel for you.

This must have been a rough couple months. And again, taking a bad situation and making it worse in ways that will ripple out. So we'll continue to pay attention to that. Should we move on to the CHIPS news? Let's do that. All right. Well, the CHIPS legislation has seemed to already have been yielding fruit.

I'm sure you remember what was passed to just this summer on a pretty bipartisan basis to incentivize chips manufacturers to reshore, to come back to the United States. A shockingly huge portion of semiconductors, which sounds again, like I was not paying attention at all to the semiconductor discourse until a couple of years ago. And when you like look at exactly how desperately we need semiconductors for our entire economy, let alone our military, that's not even getting into the national security implications. You realize how these chips are crucial to the health of the United States and a huge swath of them are manufactured in Taiwan. Last week, as the Congress convened over in China, Xi Jinping got his third term and basically signaled that he thinks he should be moving up that timeline on potentially moving in on Taiwan. At least that's the way a lot of China experts read his comments in regard to Taiwan last week, which I think were,

you know, they're sort of characteristically and predictably vague. But the China watchers who saw that, you know, said this is an indication that he seems itchy, even more itchy to move in on Taiwan. So the reshoring efforts in the United States need to happen a whole lot faster. And as it turns out, we don't have a lot of people who are qualified to work in the industry. Yeah. So we can put this element up, reporting here from Computer World, which dives into the labor shortage all across the board. The CEOs and the hiring managers interviewed in the story are like, we can't find people for anything.

We're getting killed. One guy's like, it took me a year searching the world to find this engineer for this position, and then it took nine months to get the visa approved. Nine months is fast. That guy's lucky that they got that through in nine months. Our immigration policy around this hasn't been updated in 30 years. There are quotas that we have that are capped, that once you've gotten a certain number of people in on these particular visas, that's it. You're done. Nobody else can get through. The backlog because of inadequate

funding, plus trying to manage a 1980s law in a 2020s economy, plus, and we've talked about this before, and it actually matters, no government has ever wanted to invest in like tech upkeep. So they're all running on like, you should see these like computer, like you think you're walking into the set of like a 1980s movie about like, like halt catch fire or something. But the technology is developed here. That's what's super frustrating.

The government can't buy it because they're like afraid that the Washington Post is going to catch them like spending money on computers or something. So a lot of the research— Just use Microsoft Word 1. It's fine. The research that people are using in Taiwan to manufacture these chips that are used in the United States or imported into the United States is American research for the most part. And that's per Computer World's reporting, which is like— Done largely by immigrants here at American universities. And it's just like an amazing, amazing cycle of just stupidity. It's just so dumb. And this is

what Computer World wrote in July. As Intel, Samsung, TSMC, and others move ahead with plans for new computer chip development and manufacturing plants in the US, those efforts are running into a new headwind. There aren't enough people with the skills needed to run facilities. As you mentioned, Ryan, Computer World followed up this month in a report exactly about that and said recent initiatives to bring tech manufacturing back to America are working, according to the reshoring initiative. In its report, the group predicted 2022 will see a record 350,000 new jobs directly related to domestic companies bringing work back stateside and offshore companies committing foreign direct investment to their U.S.-based

divisions and facilities. All right, so 350,000 new jobs is fantastic. We need people to work in those jobs and then to contribute to the American economy for that number to really be positive. Because if you have 350K new jobs and you can't fill them, well, I don't know what we're going to do because the Washington Post also just this week said, and the engineering shortage in the U.S. is frustrating the chips industry. Harvard Business Review, here's where it's also terrifying in a new review, said, we found that the time it would take the supply chain to recover or return to normal operations from a 10-day disruption of production at one fab would be nearly 12 months and would create

significant financial losses across all supply chain partners. Just a 10-day disruption. So imagine Xi Jinping moves in on Taiwan and manufacturing's, they're saying right now, 12 months, 12 months. We are not remotely equipped for that. We have been just pretending this problem isn't happening for years and years and years. And now we're in a situation where we're sending billions of money, billions of dollars to Ukraine and fixated either whether you think it's rightfully or wrongfully on that front. And Xi Jinping knows that. So this whole thing reminded me of this fascinating exchange between, and I was able to find it just now, between Trump and Bannon back in 2015. You might remember this interview. Trump was on on Bannon's Breitbart radio program. And they had a disagreement over immigration policy.

And I'm curious how you think this has shaken out in the seven years since then. It's a shame that so many kind of foreign-born Ivy League graduates aren't allowed to stay in America after they graduate because they would be, what he called, they would be job creators, as he says it. Which sounds like a common sense thing. Anyway, like, why did you spend all this money training somebody and then kick them out of the country so they can go take their talent elsewhere? Although they spend a lot of money getting trained here as well. It's a huge incentive for universities. Yeah, it's great. We win on every which way. And so then Trump sees Bannon kind of being skeptical. And Trump's like, we have to keep our talented people in this country. And Bannon says, um, I'm going to get the transcript here. And Trump says, I think you agree

with that. Do you agree with that? And then Bannon says, well, I got a tougher, you know, when two thirds or three quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think my point is a country is more like a country is more than an economy. We're a civic society. So Bannon's like, no, go home. So what that perspective misses is that you can walk and chew gum at the same time, meaning that, and that would mean basically that if you want one part of it, you have to have the other part of it. So we should have a strong civic culture

and we should do things to make that more robust. There's no question about it, but we don't have a choice. We really do not have a choice at this point. If we are at a situation a choice at this point. If we are at a situation right now, at this very moment, where if something were to disrupt for 10 days, just manufacturing of semiconductors, they are so, they're like, what's a good example? I mean, it's like a domino, right? Or just something that you pull that one thread out of the fabric and it all starts to unravel. That's what they are to our supply chain.

Even though they sound like this, you know, abstruse concept that tech people only care about, these things are crucial. There'll be a metaphor in the future. Yeah. People will be like, it'd be like taking the chip out. I don't want that to happen, but I think it's going to. So that's the point that you have to make to people who, and I think, again, there's sort of reasons for skepticism about contributing to the American project, the American economy, if you don't really care that much about America, if it's just all about money and that maybe what Steve Bannon thinks the situation is.

The bottom line is we don't have a choice and you can do more to cultivate that sense of sort of patriotism anyway. And so the CHIPS legislation is throwing money at it. And we'll see whether the multinational corporations involved here just keep the money or actually invest it here. There's some evidence that they're already sending it offshore. The second question is immigration. Can we get people here? The 2B would be, can we actually create more of a domestic supply of these workers? Can we actually start doing STEM education better? Can we make our own pipelines? But the third part is this rather radical move that Biden made just before Xi's speech.

And we've talked about, Chris and Sagar have talked about this here, but this is his export control ban on chip technology. People who follow this industry, just completely shocked to see such an aggressive move. It's saying these high-tech chips, which China does not yet have the tech capacity to produce, but is trying to, you cannot export these anymore. It's a huge, dramatic ratcheting up. Did we do that first to them? Well, yes. They mess around with us all the time. Yeah, yeah. They mess around with our solar panel stuff, but we have never done anything this severe around export controls. And it's giving, you cannot be exporting this technology

that will give them a quantum leap in their military and other economic capacity. Quick story, I know we're going to move on to the next one. So there's this book that I think is like everybody should read if they're curious about this, called The Long Game by this guy Rush Doshai that sketches out, yeah, that kind of takes a pretty hawkish, gives a hawkish lens to the U.S.-China relationship and really examines what it is that, you know, is the Chinese government's long-term strategy. And he's kind of so hard-edged and clear-eyed about it that a couple months ago, I was like, I got to have this guy. After I finished the book, I was like, I got to have this guy on my podcast. I want to hear from him.

So I reached out to somebody, actually to Stoller, who knows him. And he's like, oh, he's at the NSC now. So he now is the director of China policy at the National Security Council for Biden. And having read that book, it is a remarkable fact that the U.S., which has been so dovish from both parties for so long toward kind of cooperation with China, permanent trade relations, et cetera, has somebody with this kind of perspective on them. And so when this was announced, when Jake Sullivan announced this chip export ban, he said, this is 100% national security decision. This is not about an economic

decision. So we'll see if this becomes bipartisan, but this is a new kind of era in U.S.-China relations. Well, and that's what's pathetic is that it took essentially an emergency to wake the United States up. And reshoring should hopefully bring with it a host of economic and national security benefits and cultural benefits along with those economic benefits, meaning you can have more company towns organized around these areas that have really good jobs and that sort of have the ripple effect going out from there. But again, these things did not just go to China in a case of happenstance. This was an intentional thing, like Moving manufacturing of these to Taiwan, moving manufacturing or letting so much manufacturing

go to China, this stuff happened as... Doing it all on Taiwan, what are you thinking when you know where this is headed? Well, they did it. Nobody 30 years ago was like, are we sure? No, I mean...

Right off China's mainland that they claim with some legitimacy. I went back and... legitimacy is the place to put this semiconductor industry? I went back and read a New York Times article about what Bill Clinton was saying around the time of the WTO. And it is shocking what level of just incompetence informed that decision. And nobody wants to make their own country. They live in that country. Their grandchildren live in that country. And yeah, to, you know, make their own country. They live in that country. Their grandchildren live in that country. And yeah, if they have a bunch of money, they know they'll be fine. But at the same time, they want to have a good historical legacy. Like there's incentive to do a good job as president. And they really thought that was

a good decision. Truly thought that was a good decision. And that's because you have people chirping in your ear for whom it will immediately be a great decision. Yeah, it's good for some of them. Yeah, it's good for some of them. Yeah, it's good for some of them. And just right before, it's just a terrifying fact to end this on. I read an analysis this week that if you get a new chip company in the United States from point A to point B, so starting construction, opening up the doors, three years. Think about that.

And think about that in Xi Jinping's mind, because that doesn't leave us any room. And one thing I learned from Doshai's book back when Clinton was doing that, their strategy had a name. It was called hide capabilities and bide time. That's what they named it up through 2008. And after the 2008 financial crisis, like, all right, let's roll. Yeah, we did great on that. We's really red. We've hidden capabilities enough. So we saw right through that. All right, let's talk about the World Cup. Actually, I don't know if I've ever asked you, are you a soccer fan?

I played soccer in high school. Does that count? No, I'm not really a soccer fan. You're a football guy. Yeah. American football. American football, right. I mean, soccer's fine.

I don't hate it, like, watching it as much as some people do. No, I like soccer. But that said, this is not a happy soccer story at all. This is a sort of crazy story that will surely develop over the next few months. This is from the Associated Press. A former CIA officer who spied on Qatar's rivals to help the tiny Arab country land this year's World Cup is now under FBI scrutiny and newly obtained documents show he offered clandestine services that went beyond soccer to try to influence U.S. policy. That's according to their own investigation. They added

the months-long FBI probe focuses on whether Kevin Chalker's work for Qatar broke laws related to foreign lobbying, surveillance, and exporting sensitive technologies and tradecrafts, said two people with knowledge of the investigation. All right, so the FBI would not confirm or deny whether that investigation existed to the Associated Press. And there are all kinds of different parties wrapped up in this crazy story. Come back to Tom Barak and the United Arab Emirates lobbying, which Elliot Broidy is saying has something to do with this because UAE and Qatar. And it's just a mess. What did you make of it as it broke on Thursday? I wonder how much more of this we're going to find because the World Cup, the competition for the World Cup is one of the most corrupt things on the planet. And I think when it's a competition

among Gulf countries, it's going to take the corruption level up several notches. I did a story. But we're involved in it. That's the best part of the story. This is American lobbyists. I mean, we have the best spies. So if you're going to hire one, who better? Yeah. So I did a story a couple of years ago about the most audacious financial sabotage effort that I've ever come across. It was, I got documents, I got the entire presentation that was put together by a consulting firm and a particular bank in Europe for the United Arab Emirates on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, which was livid that Qatar had gotten the World Cup. This is like such a huge deal for Qatar. And the Emiratis wanted a piece of it. And so they concocted this scheme

where they were going to corner, and there is evidence that they actually carried this out or carried pieces of it out. So they were going to corner the Qatari currency using these various brokerage houses and transactions. And then they spell all this out. You can just Google the main words I'm saying here. You can go find the story. It's completely unbelievable. And then they were going to use that to say, like, look what a mess Cutter is.

Their currency is, like, flying out of control. And then they were going to go to Cutter. Also, they were going to sell it short, so they were going to make money on the side of it. Well, you've got to do that. Obviously, you're going to do that. You can't just leave it on the table. And then they're going to go they were going to sell it short so they were going to make money on the side of it. Well you got to do that. Obviously you're going to do that. You can't just leave it on the table.

And then they're going to go to Qatar and say look you want your currency back you have to have some of the games here in the UAE. That's what they want. They just wanted some games

in the UAE. Just a piece of the pie. Which is like you know what let them have a game. Who cares? Come on man. Give them a game.

I feel bad for them that they're willing to go to these extraordinary lengths to destroy the entire economy. Then Saudi and the UAE very nearly invaded Qatar during the Trump administration. Tillerson stopped them at the last minute. Kushner was, I think, quite annoyed that he stopped them. Kushner was siding with them all the time. But they were like within hours of like launching an actual invasion.

And that wasn't just about the World Cup, but the fact that Qatar had gotten the World Cup had them so worked up. Well, and this, I mean, this gets into, here's another quote from the AP, global risk advisor. So that's the firm that Kevin Chalker works for and founded, also created a detailed security plan in 2014 to install a surveillance system in Qatar that could track mobile phones in the country with extreme accuracy and allow analysts to isolate individual conversations and listen in real time, according to internal company records that include a draft contract. And so Kevin Chalker is accused,

based on the Associated Press report, which is based on documents the AP says that it has, of just selling his soul, basically. Like, what more, I should say, what a lot of people would consider to be pieces of your soul, you know, in being involved in that level of surveillance, being involved in that level of corruption and selling it as a service for personal profit to a foreign country is like really, really a remarkable thing to be accused of. And again, like these are allegations right now, but it just speaks to how much money is on the table. It's not just money on the table. It's not just people know about the World Cup corruption.

It's been a storyline for a while. But it's not just like what you see in the headlines. There's also all these lobbyists like working under the surface for themselves. And this is a great example of one of those. And Elliot Broidy, the RNC fundraiser who was pardoned by Trump, is actually suing global risk advisors. Yes. He accuses them of basically hacking his, I think his wife's emails and then getting into his own emails. And that's what led to Barrack, right? That's what led to...

There was some evidence there about Barrack's role? That's what led to... There was some evidence there about Barrack's role that helped come out. One of the people that reported on that was me, actually. And I've been subpoenaed as part of this. Part of the Broidy story

you're subpoenaed. Yeah, I got a subpoena. I didn't know that. Which we're not responding to. Stop. Was that under the Trump administration? Yes, and then he I didn't know that. Which we're not responding to. We're not. Because. Yep. Stop. Yep. And which goes back to like, look. Was that under the Trump administration? Yes. And then he got indicted.

And I think the case went away. But maybe now that he's gotten pardoned, maybe the case will come back. Yeah. But in general, like reporters are just not going to talk about sources. Don't subpoena journalists. Yeah. Yeah. And because also, I don't know.

Like somebody like an anonymous source gave us documents. We confirmed whether the documents were authentic or not. We reported on the documents. I don't know anything more than that. So even if they did drag me into court, which I wouldn't appear, but if they did, I'm like, I can't help you. I don't know. I mean, all this stuff becomes a question with the Associated Press report, too. It's like, how are they getting these documents right now when there's this really bitter battle between two of those parties?

It raises the question of what is going on here? What kind of sort of warfare is this? Right. And Brody has wanted to take these people down. I think he's got a vendetta. I mean, he blames them for ruining his life. So not surprising he would have a vendetta, but it looks like he may have gotten one. I mean, just a really basic tip.

Don't violate FARA and don't act unethically. But that's just too much to ask. There's more money. It's too much to ask. But they also always have the ethical calculus of like, well, this money is, you know, that's for my children. That's for comforts, et cetera, et cetera. Don't sell out your country. Pro tip.

Yeah, just stop. All right, Ryan. Oh, yeah, next to the points. Put those glasses on and have some water. The whole routine. There you go. Ryan, I don't know if people notice this when the show ends. He's still doing it. Just a reflex. Yeah, it's a reflex. But what's your point today? So my point today is this one. So if you needed a sign of just how flipped upside down our politics have gotten, this week saw the cause of peace and diplomacy championed by the most watched hosts on

Fox News, as well as the crew over at Pod Save America, while the Congressional Progressive Caucus beat such a quick retreat from it, beat such a quick retreat from a call for diplomacy, that now seems like there's practically no room inside the Democratic Party for anybody concerned about the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine. So on Monday, the CPC, that's the Congressional Progressive Caucus, had sent a cautiously worded letter to the White House urging Biden to engage Russia directly in diplomacy to stave off a nuclear catastrophe and bring an end to the war, but only on terms acceptable to the

Ukrainians. That moderate effort was intended to start a conversation, and it certainly did, though not the one that they were looking for. Amid criticism, CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal first, quote, clarified the letter, saying the progressives still unequivocally supported military aid to Ukraine, and the next day, she then fully withdrew the letter, blaming staff for sending it out unvetted and promising they would only support negotiations, quote, after Ukrainian victory, unquote. So that allowed Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard to say that Democrats had now become a home exclusively for war hawks. Progressives in the party, the liberals acting like liberals have acted for like 100 years and saying maybe we should, and I want to say I agree with them completely, we should try to get a peace

forged before we all die. And then they have to retract it. Why? Here at home and how it's negatively impacting gas prices, increasing inflation and so on. You know, these progressives in the letter, they didn't say stop sending aid to Ukraine. Now, all they said was, hey, President Biden, engage in diplomacy. And the response they got, of course, from the warmongers who control the Democrat Party in Washington was to immediately be smashed to pieces, so much so that these Democrat members of Congress cowered in the corner with fear and now have gone so far out of their way, apologizing profusely for having the audacity to call for diplomacy in this war that's putting us all at risk. But now everyone in the Democrat Party and the leadership in Washington is walking in lockstep as war hawks, no one daring to even step outside the line and say, hey, diplomacy, let's exercise diplomacy. So this kind of segment, which allows Tucker to be the voice of anybody

skeptical of war, is exactly what the Pod Save Boys had warned about earlier that day. So here's Ben Rhodes, a top Obama national security aide, and incidentally, the guy who coined the term the blob to describe the reflexively hawkish D.C. foreign policy establishment. You make the right point that what Biden's saying is, I won't negotiate around the settlement that Ukraine has to accept without them. That doesn't mean we don't have things to talk to the Russians about. It just means Biden's not going to sit there and say, well, maybe you can keep this part

of Ukraine and not that part of Ukraine. That's not going to happen. But to your point, if you don't create any space for kind of debate in the center here around this policy, you know where all the concerns about the war are going to go. They're going to go to where Kevin McCarthy took it, which is like, hey, I'm getting uncomfortable here. There's nuclear threats. Let's cut off the Ukrainians, right? It's a lot of money. So, you know, to some of you, like some of the Ukraine stands on Twitter or whatever, who like just, you know, pile on this stuff, you might be creating the outcome you don't want because by punishing anybody who says,

let's have diplomacy, the only alternative to your position is where Kevin McCarthy is going, which is like, hey, let's cut these – where Tucker Carlson is. Or Elon Musk. I mean, there's clearly a void of – There's a void of discussion. And Elon Musk is filling it. Or that guy David Sachs, some idiot tech investor, right-wing goober is filling it. It's like, why don't we have the CPC, the progressive in the House fill it, or at least try? That would be a very healthy place to fill.

So Jayapal's claim of a staff error was a terrible look, but it wasn't necessarily 100% wrong. The staff apparently didn't give the other offices a heads up that they would be sending this letter out after several months had been spent collecting signatures. But blaming her staff for that doesn't make much sense because Jayapal routinely sends out CPC statements without letting the rest of the CPC know that they're coming. In fact, her statement withdrawing the letter itself was not run by the other 29 members on whose behalf she was withdrawing it. The biggest error wasn't in the rollout. The mistake was in retreating. If she'd have stood her ground, the blowback would have died out by the end of the day. And there are a ton of unlikely places she can point to to say, look, what we're saying is just

common sense. Hell, here's Henry Kissinger. He said, quote, negotiations need to begin. How's your Henry Kissinger? Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond the point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself. Anyway, here's retired Rear Admiral Mike Mullen, who's former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We've been talking about since before this crisis started an off-ramp for him. I suspect it's in the east, if you will, with those four provinces

or some combination of them with respect to how it all ends. And that really is up to, I think, Tony Blinken and other diplomats to figure out a way to get both Zelensky and Putin to the table. And as is typical in any war, it's got to end. And usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner, the better. And here's Secretary of State Tony Blinken just one week ago. And we reaffirmed our commitment to meaningful diplomacy that can bring an end to the war,

even as Moscow continues to demonstrate through its escalatory actions that its claim to be open to diplomacy is as hollow as it's been since President Putin launched his invasion in February. And that's not surprising, given that the White House was actually fine with the letter that was later withdrawn. The Washington Post even reported, quote, the White House did not think the letter was a big deal when officials first received it, a White House aide said, noting that the lawmakers went to great pains to praise Biden's approach to Ukraine and express support for economic and military packages, unquote. Progressives could even also have found backup from the Pope, who said this last month, quote, after seven months of hostilities, let us use all diplomatic means, even those that may not have been used so far, to bring an end to this terrible tragedy. War in itself is an error and a horror. So Emily, you got Kissinger, you got the Pope, you got Mike Mullen, Obama on the pod save.

Well, I am going to be squinting a little bit, so bear with me. Just this week, Disney's new plus-size protagonist went viral. The internet debated one of Taylor Swift's new music videos and questioned whether it was fatphobic. So why are we arguing so much about weight?

Well, the answer is pretty simple, because it affects most Americans. Nearly three in four adults are overweight. Some 40% are obese. As of this year, 56% of Americans say they're trying to lose weight actively. Now, there's a critical class element to this as well that gets missed in a lot of the discussion. As the CDC notes, overall, men and women with college degrees had lower obesity prevalence compared with those with less education. Among women, a 2017 study found from the CDC, overall obesity prevalence decreased with increased levels of income and educational attainment.

So while food executives get rich off of questionable marketing practices at best, they lobby to get away with those, by the way. And magazine writers will cast fat phobia as a social justice issue between their spin classes. People who work three shifts, can't afford Pelotons, and live paycheck to paycheck are being told, well, it's not actually that important to prioritize diet and exercise. Those writers are putting up virtue signal points on their own boards at the expense of people who look to them for accurate information. Remember Cosmo's This is Healthy edition from the middle of the pandemic, a pandemic, by the way, that was targeting people who were dealing with obesity? The magazine, which is owned by Hearst UK, profiled women who wanted to, quote, open up about their personal journeys to reclaim healthy as their own.

And Cosmo wasn't alone. The, quote, fat but fit debate has really raged over the last decade, and many publications eager to score clicks in social justice points went out at the healthy-at-any-size limb. Now, to be fair, many outlets have done good coverage of research that suggests fat butt fit is generally a myth, and some people are absolutely part of a well-intentioned effort to help everyone struggling with their weight feel confident in their dignity as a human being. As more people struggle with weight, more people need to hear that message, of course, but it cannot be conflated with deadly and misleading body positivity messaging either.

And here's where we get to the big news. In early September, the journal Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology published a study titled, Is Early-Onset Cancer an Emerging Global Epidemic? Current Evidence and Future Implications. In that survey, researchers from Harvard reviewed global cancer data defined, as CNN reported, quote, that the incidence of early-onset cancers is rising rapidly for colorectal and 13 other types of cancers, many of which affect the digestive system. And this increase is happening across many middle- and high-income nations. All right, so is this because of increased screening? That's a question a lot of people might wonder. The researchers actually address it. Quote, increased use of screening programs has contributed to this phenomenon to a certain extent, although a genuine increase in

the incidence of early onset forms of several cancer types also seems to have emerged, they wrote. One of the researchers told CNN, quote, the spike is due to an unhealthy stew of risk factors that are probably working together, some of which are known and others that need to be investigated, saying, quote, many of these risks have established links to cancer like obesity, inactivity, diabetes, alcohol, smoking, environmental pollution, and western diets high in red meat and added sugars, not to mention shift work and lack of sleep. And, the researcher added, there are many unknown risk factors as well, like a pollutant or food additives.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Let's just focus on that point. CNN picked the study up in October, but few other media outlets focused on it at all. Regarding obesity, CNN wrote in its report on the study, quote, not only has it become more common to have a dangerously high body mass index, but people are becoming obese earlier in life, even in childhood. So these cancer risks are building decades earlier than they did for previous generations. So 40% of the adult population is obese.

That number is rising. Obesity is now causing suffering at a higher rate, like cancer and death. The causes are likely all around us in the food we eat, the air we breathe, the chemicals we consume and wear and use in our houses and offices. But just CNN is going to focus on the study from Harvard researchers. We talked last week about what Kevin McCarthy plans to do if Republicans win the House, which will heavily be focused on, quote, oversight, because that's pretty much what you can do in a divided government. Republicans plan to investigate some good stuff, the Biden family lobbying grift, the origins of

COVID. Just this week, though, the FDA issued yet another benzene recall, this time related to dry shampoo products. Benzene is a carcinogen. One expert said it is possible to refine the propane, butane, and isobutane, any of these propellants, to not contain detectable levels of benzene. So why can't corporations do that? Or why aren't they? There have been six benzene recalls this year, and this is just an example from one chemical. As we've emerged

from the pandemic with a new awareness of how obesity interacts with health outcomes more generally, I'd love to know what evidence major food companies have about their products. I think a lot of Democrats would love to know that too, and a lot of independents. Now that Republicans are boasting a little bit about their broken relationship with the Chamber of Commerce, they can, at least in theory, just take the gloves off in every arena of corporate corruption, even ones that they've never touched before. So what better place to start than the one that is directly killing millions of us and making life significantly worse for millions of people on a daily basis? Technology is new in a lot of these areas. We don't think of technology with food as being new. Technology is new in a lot of these areas. We don't think of technology

with food as being new. Technology with food... Big news out Thursday on the investigation of the origin of COVID. The HELP Committee, which is the Health, Education, Labor, Pensions Committee, put out an interim minority report that lays out much of what they've found so far in their investigation into what sparked the pandemic. If you can put up this element here, this is Dr. Richard Ebright, a microbiologist who has been skeptical of the zoonotic origin claim. He posts this from the report, quote, based on the analysis of the publicly available information, it appears reasonable to conclude that the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely than not the result of a research-related incident.

Okay, so we're joined now by Justin Goodman, who's Senior Vice President over at the White Coat Waste Project. And so, Justin, this was a fairly sober report. It did not kind of jump to any firm conclusions one way or another. What it does is it lays out the evidence behind the natural origin. It lays out the evidence against the natural origin. It lays out the evidence for the lab hypothesis, which they call a research-related incident, the evidence against that, relies on what has been made public so far. They also say that this is part of an ongoing bipartisan investigation, the results of which will be out at some point in the future, but they want to get this interim report out. So as somebody who's been tracking this for a long time, what did you make of this report? Well, I think this is the second authoritative report that's come out of Congress, the first coming out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,

documenting the evidence of taxpayers, according to Politico and Harvard polls, a majority of taxpayers, Republicans and Democrats, and Richard Ebright and other scientists, and firmly believing at this point that the evidence we do have points to a lab leak, which is what Richard Burr found in this report that was released today. I think that at this point, the best thing that any of us can be doing is looking forward and not looking backwards, because basically Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and others have given China a three-year head start on making sure that we never find out exactly what happened. That's exactly right. And the reason that we know so much

shady stuff was going on actually is because a lot of the work that your group, the White Coat Waste Project, and you yourself, Justin, has been doing over the course of the last several years to hold members of our government accountable for the research that they have been doing in terms of gain of function. And on that note, there was a story we covered here last week and that you've been following really closely out of Boston University, the research that there was something, again, we're getting into the sort of semantics about what is gain of function, but that there was, what was it, a strain of Omicron that was basically being- Grafted onto the Washington State virus, right?

And Justin, there was some evidence that, again, there was a government grant involved. And again, the government didn't know that this is what was happening with the grant. What did you make of that reporting? So first of all, there wasn't one government grant involved. I think there were five government grants involved, several coming from Anthony Fauci's division at the NIH and some core grants coming out of other divisions of the NIH. I mean, I think it just highlights what core grants coming out of other divisions of the NIH. I mean, I think it just highlights what a joke the current oversight of gain-of-function is. I mean, it's basically an honor system, and you simply cannot trust dishonest, mad scientists who are souping up coronaviruses and other dangerous viruses' labs to chase tax money. We can't

trust them to abide by the honor system, and they've proven time and again that they can't. Boston University is a great example. They took the Omicron strain, which had a 0% lethality in mice. They combined it with the Washington or the original strain that came out of Wuhan, which had 100% lethality. And they created a new strain of the virus that had 80% lethality in mice. So they took a 0% Omicron strain, souped up to be 80 percent. That is the definition of gain of function. Yet the NIH says they have no idea what was going on there. And BU insists that they didn't need any oversight and it's not gain of function. What's interesting about all of this is while this is unfolding, quietly, the Biden administration a couple of weeks ago released its biodefense strategy

for the next few years and repeatedly in this report indicate that a lab accident or an intentional release of a bioweapon from a lab like this could cause another pandemic. So while the administration has been loathe to really invest in the lab leak theory and Democrats have been kind of gun-shy about embracing it. Certainly, the administration thinks there's enough evidence that this pandemic was potentially caused by a lab leak, and there might be another one that may be revisiting how we oversee this research and whether it should be funded at all. Yeah, Justin, what did you make of that Biden report? Because a lot of people who, as you know, are very concerned about

lab safety, have become more concerned about lab safety in the wake of the pandemic, were really heartened by that report, like found it to be, you know, surprisingly strong. You know, there are people pushing to make it, you know, significantly stronger, but it wasn't a total whitewash. Where do you think that came from, and how does that clash with continuing to give these grants, continuing to, if you saw this one, there's a monkeypox gain-of-function project being done straight out of the NIH now? Straight out of Anthony Fauci's lab at the NIH. Yeah. So what do you make of that contrast that the Biden administration

itself seems to be at least waking up to some of these risks while the NIH isn't? And it seems kind of more important that the NIH wake up to it. Well, I think we could look at the history of this issue. I mean, in the Obama-Biden administration back in 2014, they essentially banned funding for gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses because they were too dangerous. And so a Democrat-led White House took action on that issue. And then that was quietly lifted in 2017 early in the Trump administration, apparently with very little knowledge of the White House, at the urging of Anthony Fauci. I think there's a culture that someone like Anthony Fauci specifically – and listen, I don't have any beef with Anthony Fauci. I think there's a culture that someone like Anthony Fauci specifically, and listen, I don't have any beef with Anthony Fauci outside of his position and involvement in animal testing. I think you could stand shoulder to shoulder with

Fauci on other coronavirus response issues and go toe to toe with him on gain of function and other horrible animal experiments on dogs and other things that we've revealed over the last few years so i don't have a problem with him outside of that i want to make that clear but i think he's created a culture at the nih where this type of dangerous experimentation is encouraged and oversight of it is diminished to the highest degree possible where there's basically free reign to do whatever you want and maybe report it and maybe not and hope for the best. But that's been happening since 2001 and the war on terror.

And there were billions of dollars dumped into Fauci's division at the NIH for bioweapons defense and research. And a lot of it has turned into this crazy gain of function experimentation that likely caused this pandemic. And as I promise you, going to cause another one if we don't do something about it. Justin, Republicans say, and Kevin McCarthy told me, in fact, that one of the things they plan to investigate if they win the House of Representatives and have a new Congress is the origins of COVID and the origins of the pandemic. And they're saying that's one of the big agenda items come January if they win the House. My question to you would be, who is the first person that you would call to testify? And what are some of the questions that you think absolutely need to be asked? Peter Daszak probably would be number one.

I mean, he was on boots on the ground in Wuhan. I mean, he was out there collecting bat samples, working with Batwoman, working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, you know, had a very close relationship with the Chinese Communist Party for a long time, spent a lot of time there, and did a lot of their bidding in terms of obstructing investigations into the virus, continues to until this day, and despite all that, continues to get funding. So I think, you know, for me, he's witness number one. Number two is Fauci, and finding out exactly what was happening in those early conversations, and how early he really knew about the potential lab leak. Because we now know through investigations, through FOIA's release to White Coat Waste Project and others that basically January of 2020, there were conversations happening about this thing looks suspicious.

Scientists who since it probably came from the wet market were saying back then that it looked like a lab leak. It was a very suspicious virus. The spike protein was suspicious. Yet somehow they all did an about face. And guess what? A lot of them have been rewarded for doing that with increased funding. Peter Daszak has received over $20 million in new taxpayer funding just since the pandemic began, including from NIH, including from USAID, including from the DOD. So there's been absolutely no accountability and transparency. I would love to see people who were involved in funding this research and obstructing investigations into the pandemic that's killed 6 million people held accountable. I think what we need to do at this point, and everyone,

Democrats and Republicans, should agree about this. This is what taxpayers want. Polls have repeatedly shown this. Pause gain-of-function again for another five years. There's a bipartisan bill introduced by Henry Cuellar, Buddy Carter, and Mike Gallagher to pause gain-of-function research for five years while we get our hands around how and if we can conduct this type of experimentation in a way that doesn't risk causing a pandemic. So ban gain-of-function and ban funding for animal labs in countries that are literally our enemies and don't have our best interests in mind,

like China and like Russia, where we've been sending tax money to animal labs with virtually no oversight about what's happening. So Richard Burr, the top Republican on the HELP Committee who signed this minority report, also, interestingly, used to be chair of the Intelligence Committee, and so presumably has some insight into this from that perspective. But I'm curious, what are your senses of where the Democrats are? I'm wondering, the fact that he said that they're still working in a bipartisan fashion with the HELP Committee Democrats was at least heartening,

because I haven't seen any much other public evidence that Democrats are even remotely interested in this. Have you gotten anywhere with Democrats on the Hill on this issue? So in terms of someone signing their name on the dotted line and actually doing something, Henry Cuellar is the only one who's actually done anything introducing legislation to put a pause on gain-of-function experiments for five years. Did he get protect our future money in his campaign? Protect our future is the Bankman-Fried super PAC, which actually is concerned. Their big thing is pandemic prevention. So that would be my explanation. I can't imagine why Henry Cuellar woke up one day and all of a sudden was looking into Cane and Fox.

Well, his voters probably are interested. Yeah, well, I mean, they should be. I mean, so that's possible. I mean, I've had conversations with committee staff, Republicans and Democrats, including on the Energy and Commerce Committee, saying that there has been interest in majority leadership on the Energy and Commerce Committee, saying that there has been interest in majority leadership on the Energy and Commerce Committee, except from Frank Pallone.

And he's been the one standing in the way of investigations on the House side. On the Senate side, according to the reports I saw, at least in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that broke later in the day today about the Senate report, report. Patty Murray did seem to indicate that there is bipartisan communication and cooperation happening, and they're still looking at finding common ground on investigating COVID origins. So I'm a little encouraged by that. It's frustrating because, again, this is a polled show that people believe this is a lab leak. I mean, it's not some far-fetched conspiracy theory like we were being labeled two years ago or two and a half years ago. I mean, the evidence is overwhelming. Circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that this came out of a lab. There's literally no evidence it came out of a wet mark. And even the papers saying that it came out of a wet mark are also

saying that there's actually no evidence it started here. Maybe it amplified here. Yet, we have a virus that's eerily similar in construction to what caused the pandemic sitting in the Wuhan lab, maybe brought there from Laos, maybe brought there from southern China by Peter Daszak and that lady. But I mean, I think, you know, the report that was released by the Senate today is pretty comprehensive in recapping what we know as of today and led them to the conclusion that it looks most likely they came out of a lab. So whether or not it did, the fact that the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, the FBI and others believe that it's likely a pandemic that killed

six and a half million people was caused by a lab leak should cause us to do everything in our power to make sure that doesn't happen again, including and not limited to banning gain-of-function research. And Justin, before we let you go, I actually... Also, let me stand up for Henry Cuarar's integrity. Please. He may be in bed with Azerbaijan, but he did not get any money from Protect Our Future that I can see. I forgot about the Azerbaijan thing.

And Justin, before we let you go, White Coat Waste is such an interesting project, and the way that you guys approach this issue is such an interesting project. We'll have to have you back sometime to talk specifically about animal cruelty and the way it all, the way your group was sort of formed and has evolved. But tell us actually just a little bit about the mission of White Coat Waste, because to Ryan's question about whether Democrats are standing on the dotted line, initially, what you guys have been looking at was, well, how do we get Republicans on board with this issue of animal cruelty? That's absolutely right.

I mean, White Coat Waste, we consider ourselves to be a taxpayer watchdog group, and we fight to end $20 billion a year in taxpayer funding for animal testing. The government actually outspends the private sector on animal testing two to one. And White Coat was started by my boss, our president and founder, Anthony Belotti, who was a Republican political operative. And he actually worked in an animal laboratory in high school for an internship and was so horrified by what he saw, he thought, I'm going to go get a toolkit in politics and then one day circle back around and use those tools to fight against animal experimentation funded by the government. So he started White Coat. I was the first employee.

And we take on federal agencies that are wasting tax dollars on cruel, dangerous, and in many cases just completely stupid experiments on animals. So we've actually met with the Trump administration. We met with the Trump White House in January 2020 to warn them about these labs in China, specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology, getting NIH money. We've been following, you know, we've been following, people say follow the science, we've been following the money, and that's how we ended up at Wuhan. That's how we exposed Beagle Gate, and that's how we're shutting some of these wasteful and cruel programs down. It's just, it's amazing how that positioned

you to be looking at what was happening in Wuhan through a mission like that one. And you're a former PETA guy, aren't you, Justin? Yeah, I spent 10 years at PETA working on, you know, their style of advocacy. But, you know, for me, they were not really attacking the root problem of animal experimentation, which is wasteful taxpayer spending. If the taxpayer money was cut from animal experimentation, we'd change the face of this problem completely. So our work is to unite. We call it, you know, we say uniting liberty lovers and animal lovers to fight against wasteful government spending that hurts animals. And everything we do is bipartisan. I mean, even the gain of function work, obviously, Henry Clayar is involved with bipartisan. And even if things don't have bipartisan support in Congress, every single

thing we do work on has bipartisan support from taxpayers. And that's who we're advocating for. I threw some blood on Ryan before we started recording today, but he brought another suit. No animals harmed in the taping of this. Justin, one quick question. Is there one place that has a kind of complete timeline and collection of all of the circumstantial evidence around both theories or around either theory?

Do we need to write that still? Like, what's the... So I think, sorry, there we go. U.S. Right to Know, our friends at U.S. Right to Know have a great COVID origins timeline that they've put together. I think the Senate, honestly, the Senate report that came out today is outstanding in terms of... It was good.

It didn't get enough i think into me into the circumstantial evidence around the diffuse grant the darpa grant like the the the roadmap that was built and then potentially like but it was i think they did an incredible job of laying out all the different lab accidents at wuhan um and in and in labs around the world so agree agree with you but yeah so you think u.s right to know has u.s right to know has a great one um i don't know and in labs around the world. So I agree with you. So you think U.S. Right to Know has... U.S. Right to Know has a great one. I don't know if it will have Diffuse and some of the other stuff

they haven't worked on directly. Obviously, most of the content we have up is related directly to things we've done. But if you're looking for a project on COVID origins, that'd probably be useful. All right. Well, Justin Goodman,

Senior Vice President over at the White Coat Waste Project, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And that does it for us today on this edition of CounterPoints Friday. I'm going to remember my glasses next time. We'll see about that.

Have a great weekend, everybody. See you, everyone. This is an iHeart Podcast.