The Eric Metaxas Show - Nicholas Wade

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Nicholas Wade, former science writer for The New York Times, gives us an idea of why the press may have been late to the party in their coverage of the killer virus that originated in China.

to the Eric Mettaxas show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Folks, welcome the program. We've got a lot of interesting guests today. But right now, we're talking to a journalist from Rebel News to talk about what's been going on with this pastor in Canada, Pastor Tim Stevens. Adam Seuss, am I pronouncing that right? That's right. That works.

Adam, what part of Canada are you? you in and how do you know have you been covering this situation with these Canadian pastors being oppressed, suppressed, persecuted by the Canadian government? Yeah, so I'm in Western Canada, not quite on the coast of Alberta, so we're kind of the Texas of Canada. And I'm in Calgary. So it's kind of the oil country of Canada. So very, very generally conservative kind of territory.

So I've been covering the story pretty closely. my colleague Sheila Gunn-Reed dealt with James Coates up at Grace Life Church. That's the church, as you likely saw, which was fully fenced off and completely shut down and the pastor spent 35 days in jail. Since that time, I've spent quite a bit of time with Pastor Artur Pavlowski. Of course, you've likely seen the viral video of him shouting, get out, get out, and the authorities fleeing rapidly. So I was intimately connected with that story.

And now most recently I've been on the story of Pastor Tim Stevens. So in our province alone, we have had had to be a story of Pastor. three pastors arrested simply for gathering for worship. Well, we've had this kind of thing going on in the United States, but we haven't had arrests. We've had persecution fines a lot of trouble. The idea of arresting a pastor seems to be, to us in the United States, to be extraordinary, bad optics. Why is the Canadian government, do you think, taking these kinds of horrific actions.

Well, one of the great ironies is that our premier, who's effectively like the governor of a state, the premier of our province, used to work in federal politics. And he was one of the great international sort of advocates for religious freedom. Now no one will remember that. Everyone will only remember him as the premier who locked up pastors. What is his name? Jason Kenny. Okay.

Yeah. So Jason Kenny, he's actually less popular than Justin Trudeau, our prime minister, in our extremely conservative province. So that tells you how upset people are about what's going on. It's really hard to put your finger on why they're doing this. It doesn't make much sense at all. Other groups are gathering and they seem not to bother them. There's other massive protests going on.

The police don't close in. But it seems if you're overtly critical of the government or if you're a Christian pastor, it's open season. Especially if you see some of the footage of these arrests of pastor being torn away from his family, in the case of Tim Stevens, or Pastor Art Polowski being arrested on the side of the highway, you'd almost think they're going for the worst optics possible. Maybe in their minds they're showing a strong sort of unifried front against opposition,

but clearly that's not the way the world is taking it. Do you think Jason Kenney has a particular animus toward Christians? And that's the vexing question is that he himself is a practicing Roman Catholic. So I don't think. Nothing. No, yeah. is a practicing Roman camp. They're not practicing hard enough.

Of course, no. And I mean, I think traditionally he would have been viewed as someone who adhered to Christian values. One of the thoughts that I've heard repeatedly is that no one's going to cry out discrimination or persecution against white Christians. So I feel like he feels he might be able to make an example of these people without other communities sort of decrying him as a bigot. So I've heard numerous people suggest that. But again, the entire instance is incredibly in vexing, particularly the malice with which they're going after these people. I can't explain to you. Tim Stevens, like Arthur Polowski is a very outgoing and strong and sort of, he can rub people the wrong way. I understand about him. Tim Stevens is a meek dove.

He's a gentle, gentle, loving man. And they had two, like, large swat van vehicles and about five police SUVs corner him and his family in the parking lot of their church as they were trying to leave to proceed with the arrest. Like two. officers could have walked up and arrested him. There's this ridiculous show of force that indicates to me a clear level of malice that's that's not warranted. So what are the people of Calgary have to say about this? Are they standing up? Are they willing to fight back? So, I mean, I think there's a different mentality in Canada, unfortunately. I think as we didn't really have to fight for our freedoms, obviously in wars and things like that, but we sort of ask for independence. I think we have this

mentality of like, oh, everything's going to be okay and we don't really have to fight for these freedoms. they sort of assume it's a baseline. So the province is extremely divided, and I think it's more divided than ever. And you have people saying let him rot in jail, good, put him away, he's risking lives. And on the other side, you have these people saying, leave the pastor alone. There's no cases of outbreaks in these three pastors, churches. It's just not based on scientific evidence. They're clearly being targeted.

So I think the province, to be honest, is more divided than ever, as is the country. So what is the state of Artur Pulaski right now? So, and it's a very life situation. For Pastor Archer Pavlowski, he's actually been released. And it's a very complicated legal letter. There was originally a court order put out on May 6th that basically stipulated that protest was illegal. It mentioned one specific instance. We've had our pastor rebellion.

We've also had a bit of a restaurant rebellion. Some restaurants are opening and flouting the sort of, of orders and they're just doing that intentionally as an act of defiance. So that court order specifically referenced a whistle stop cafe, which has been the sort of head of the restaurant rebellion here in Alberta. So that kind of took place. And this court order was mandated against them. But they added on that court order, including Jane and John Doe.

And authorities took that to meant anyone gathering anywhere can just be arrested. So you show up at a protest opposing this. You just get thrown in jail. And that has happened, unfortunately. So Pastor Artur Pulaski is one of the sort of cases that's fighting that. James Coates was before that, but Pastor Artur Povlowski's case pertains to that court order. That's why he was arrested. So he's released now, but he agreed to bail conditions for the time being to adhere to those rules.

So he's out of jail, but for the sake of his legal defense, he's not going against the rules. Next Thursday is his court date actually. No, Wednesday is his court date. No, Wednesday is his court date. And that's when he's going to fight in court to set the legal. precedent. For Pastor Tim Stevens, they actually offered to release him on Monday, and he refused on principle because he would not agree to those bail conditions because he found the memorial. And also the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, who is representing Tim Stevens,

said that the arrest was illegal in the first place. So we've just learned that this morning, Pastor Tim Stevens was also let go. And he basically has 24 hours to propose amendments to these bail conditions. So I know that's a lot of legal. jargon, but I think the context is important. Well, I think it's very important. I also think, you know, it's important to say that just because somebody, just because you don't have a culture of fighting back doesn't mean that it's not time to fight back. In other words, I think people have to really think these things through logically because we all

want to be nice, but, you know, when war comes to you, you have to fight. And this is really a war on basic liberties. I'm not familiar with the Canadian Constitution, but it seems to me that the idea of religious liberty, it's as basic as it gets. And so the idea that some of these folks would heavy, in a heavy-handed way, try to crush this kind of dissent, people have to push back however they can.

And what's jarring about that is a judge, there's actually Section 176-2 of the Canadian Charter that actually stipulates that it's categorically illegal. It's a charter right. you cannot interrupt ongoing worship. A judge actually signed off to waive that so that they could come arrest pastors in the middle of worship. That's a fundamentally enshrined Canadian charter right. And a judge said, no.

My Bonhofer book, I didn't, I don't like to think that some of the things that I wrote about happening in Germany in the 30s are actually happening in places like Canada. but I just want to say these things have happened before. If you don't fight back, bad things happen. Fortunately, my Bonhofer book has just recently been translated into Canadian. So if there are people in Canada who want to read it in Canadian English, they can do so. That was a joke, Adam. It was good. I was laughing.

Oh, good, good. I was just, I was scared that you were thinking that I'm really insane when I'm just making it. I'm faking it. No, but honestly, it is a chilling, chilling thing to talk about pastures being arrested. Again, it brings up Germany to me. This is what happened. People have to stand up. So we're really grateful to you for reporting on this.

Adam Seuss, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Hey there, folks. How many years have I been telling you about relief factor? What, like four? The truth is, I know there are millions of people. In fact, some say over 100 million people struggling with some kind of pain,

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I never argue with people. In fact, even if they're slightly unpleasant, I block them. I don't mute them. It's just a news feed, and I find tremendous things. And I found an article, a very long article by Nicholas Wade, who was the science writer for the New York Times for a very, very long time. It's a byline with which I'm quite familiar. And I read the article, and it really dealt with, I guess, ultimately, the issue of science. What do we do when science bumps up into uncomfortable narratives. Why do some people shrink from simply reporting the scientific truth? To whom do they owe fealty when they are reporting on something? It had to do with whether the COVID virus was naturally occurring, was something that had leapt from animals in the

wet market of Wuhan to humans, or whether we could say that it was. might have in fact been made in a lab. The article was really disturbing, principally because it was actual journalism, which is something that I'd almost forgotten what that was. I'm privileged to have Nicholas Wade himself on this program. Mr. Nicholas Wade, welcome. Thanks, sir.

Your article was published, let's start here, at your own website. it struck me that in another generation, it would have been published in installments in the New York Times and would have won a Pulitzer Prize. Do you have any thoughts on that? Well, not too many. I mean, it's...

By the way, if my wife is trying to reach you, don't tell her that we're having this conversation. I try to keep a career secret. It's wonderful that one has... a writer has available a place like a medium.com where you can write at whatever length you wish about any editor trying to change what you want to say. You're making it sound so positive that I think you're not protesting quite enough. It seems strange to me that an article as well, it was very vigorous article in the sense that you went to great lengths to be clear about the real science behind how we would know something is created in a lab or not.

And even though in the end, you cannot say for sure, nonetheless, the clues are rather clear. that it would have been made in a lab. And it seems that you're saying in the article, not only that, but that you're talking about, how is it that people with great positions in the world of science somehow seem to shrink from putting that narrative out there, even though it seemed at least overwhelmingly possible,

if not probable, if not certain? Well, I think that is a puzzle, which I tried to address in my article, and everything I wrote could have been written almost a year ago. And so I tried to address the problem of why it wasn't. And I think it's partly that virologists all around the world don't particularly want to have the public losing into what they're doing and into the possible dangers of some of the experiments they were doing.

Let's talk about that because this to me is, you know, it's right out of 1818, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I mean, these questions have been with us for a very long time, at least for two centuries now. What science can do and what science ought to do, ought to be two different things. That kind of moral thinking was not so problematic when we were talking about creating A-bombs or H-bombs. But today, it really, it seems that we're less willing, to have those conversations. And in your article, you begin at least to try to bring up that question. What are your conclusions? I don't remember, because it was a long article, I don't remember

where you come out on that. But I was a little bit mortified as not too strong a word to think that scientists are being so protective that neither they nor anyone seems to be able to get them to come clean on this? Well, my article was focused on the question where the virus came from, and I didn't get into this very interesting area you're alluding to of the wider misuse of biology. I mean, people have been saying for years

that biology is the poor man's A-bomb, and it's certainly true that you could create enormous havoc by messing around with viruses and bacteria. You know, people have really made a good start on that with the biological weapons programs that both the U.S. and Soviet Union have. Those were sort of brought under control. But the issue hasn't gone away. There are other governments out there. There are freelancers.

This is still a wide open area of great danger. Well, I felt that the article implied in your diffident English way, you nonetheless seem to, imply that it is not okay for people in the world of science to be so self-protective, that they have a larger responsibility to the science itself, but that with the narrative, the narrative or the various narratives around the issue of COVID had become politicized. Yes, that's absolutely true, but I think the scientific community has a sort of mixed record, although a largely positive one on this issue, if you look back in history, you can see several instances in the quite recent past where scientists have come across some technique,

which they think might be dangerous, they've called the public's attention to it, they've instituted safety procedures, which they shall relax gradually when the risk was better assessed. This has happened at least twice, maybe three times. Now, the virologists, I think, have been an exception to this rule, and perhaps an unfortunate one. they've been doing these really quite risky experiments without much public input. They've been under a moratorium for four years because the experiments are so obviously dangerous, but they haven't really come together, invited the public's input, so this is what we'd like to do, is it okay?

So I think they've left themselves vulnerable on that front. You don't see some kind of a conflict of interest with Dr. Fauci and his relationship. with the labs that you talk about in the article? Well, I don't think Dr. Fasch has a conflict of interest. But he has a very difficult public duty in that as head of the NIAID, he should be looking into these very dangerous viruses, particularly the coronaviruses, which are the source of two previous epidemics. And he also should be sponsoring research on them.

that's fine. Just a question is whether people to whom his grunts were subcontracted, were they taking sufficient safety precautions? And if indeed this virus did escape from the Willa Ham lab, I think the answer is going to be, hell no, they didn't. But when you have many millions of people dying and then a kind of a sense that we ought not to talk about this, to me it's very curious. I think that what has happened as a result of this initially a pandemic is that science itself has been undermined in the public mind.

In other words, that to me is one of the greatest casualties of what has happened in the last 18 months is that science itself and scientists have allowed themselves because of the politicization of it, because of the involvement of China, somehow science has taken a hit. People are, in my experience, just very skeptical of anything coming out because they can read the opposite or they can read articles like yours, that it really, it just seems that there's some kind of reckoning going on with science itself.

I think you're raising very important questions that are going to be heavily debated in the future, particularly, if it seems that the virus did escape from the lab. I mean, in the broadest terms, science has a sort of mixed record. The science may have created the virus. They also created the vaccine. I think if there's blame here,

it should focus more narrowly on the international community of virologists who basically sort of set the rules under which Dr. Shee at the Wuhan Institute of Biology was working, and those rules in retrospect were not sufficiently strong. true. Well, we're going to go to a break. It's just an important conversation, I think. I feel that in the last few years, a number of things that we would have taken for granted as kind of a bedrock, whether it's election integrity or the issue of science, that we're living through a strange time right now, and some of the things that were institutions, important institutions, are being questioned. We'll be right back.

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Visit their website, PD LabsRX.com for free health tips, podcasts, and their popular online store. Call 888-909-0-1-1-0. Ask for Ray and tell them Eric sent you. That's 888-909-0-1-1-0. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Nicholas Wade, who assures me that he's on this side of the pond, even though he sounds like he ultimately comes from the other side. It's fun to talk to you. We don't talk to many science writers on the program. But Nicholas Wade, in your article, you make it sound really clearly like the logic would dictate that if we're going to make any kind of assumption, overwhelmingly it looks like the COVID virus was something that escaped from a lab and that I think the Dr. She, you mentioned, was not using the higher level of protocol with regard to safety. So my question is, you know, in the quite long article,

You go into the details in such a way that you're very, very fair, but it seems overwhelmingly that if we're going to make a call, that we would say, yeah, this came out of a lab. So my question is always, why is it that people have been so afraid? It seems that the Chinese lobby, the World Health Organization, that they have been putting pressure on scientists, and on journalists not to say that it came out of a lab. It's become politically incorrect to state what the simple science would seem to indicate. I find that strange and mostly unprecedented. I think you're right. It has become very politicized, and that has muddied the waters and made it much harder for

everyone to see the truth. Now, the truth as I see it is, it has to be provisional because there's no direct evidence. either for the lab escape theory or for the natural emergence theory, which is its rival. But all you can say is that given the evidence we now have, it's much easier to explain it by lab escape than by natural emergence. So that is my feeling on present evidence lab escape is the most probable. Now, as to why that hasn't come up much earlier when it's been so obvious, I think you've put your finger on something very interesting. and I try and explain to him the article, but it starts with the virologists who, right from the start,

assured people, know this couldn't possibly read Laberscape. That's a conspiracy theory cooked up by China bashes. And then it also helped by President Trump's very unfortunate entry into the debate by saying, yeah, this came from the Wuhan Institute. But I'm pretty sure that what his intelligence agents were telling was simply that we can't rule out Laberscape. They said that to him, and they've said the same thing in the United States. Biden administration. Now the next sort of layer of this onion of why the story didn't get out

is the media. Most of the media tends to the left. They all bought the initial story that Lab Escape was crazy. And you know, it's very hard for anyone to change their mind. You get sort of embedded into a particular story, which most newspapers still have not left. Most newspapers still are favoring Lab Escape or else saying nothing. And so, I think it was a lot of you through inertia rather than positive cover-up that we find ourselves in this surprising position. But I guess the reason I used the adjective unprecedented earlier is that I can't remember when anything this important has been this politicized. Now, there was, it's strange to me that something that has killed literally millions of people

would be so cavalierly politicized by the chattering classes in D.C. and New York, that they wouldn't understand that there's a kind of a moral import to this that other questions might not have. That to me is, it seems to me a new level of protecting, well, protecting something. Protecting China, that's curious, especially for journalists who are in the United States. they ought to have the modicum of patriotism, I would think, and wonder if a hostile communist regime that has done unspeakable harsh to its own people, if they would in fact be capable of being nefarious in this, or at least, let's say, self-protective in a way that is scandalous, that we should talk about it. So when people call something a conspiracy theory,

it really does, I'm worried about that in a way that I have. haven't been before, that this does seem to me a new level or some kind of, it represents some kind of a shift is what I mean. Well, I think that's right. I think one reason why the conversation has gotten diverted is because our society has become so politicized. Everyone sees everything through a political lens, which I think is very destructive and unhelpful.

And I hope it goes away as soon as possible. The other thing is, most of the. issues in my article was scientific and were kind of technical. So they're difficult for most people to get interested in and to talk about. So it's much easier to talk about Trump lying or whatever and talk about where this virus came from. Yeah. Well, I guess that's what worries me. In other words, we can always say, oh, it's unfortunate that Trump said X. But then you think, well, you know, if the chattering classes think Trump's an idiot, why are they so concerned with what he said? Shouldn't they be concerned with what science writers are saying? Shouldn't they be

concerned with what our own NIH is saying. Shouldn't it? Why would they, why would they let him drive the narrative because they, he said something they consider impolitic? That's what strikes me as odd, that they are bending over backwards to, in a way, demonize him so much that it would, it would affect something as basic as this. It's like talking about math. It's extremely puzzling. And people just get sort of set into a mindset. The first decision you make is sort of hard to go back on. All the other things you mention, of course, are much more important. Why was the NIH funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

Why was it doing so during a moratorium imposed by the U.S. government? When we come back, I will let you complete those sentences. Very important. Folks, don't go away. One store's a way to get back home. Folks, I'm talking at Nicholas Wade, former science writer for many years for the New York Times. You just mentioned a number of questions.

I hope you can restate them because they struck me at the heart of where we were going with this. Well, there are so many so open questions that are clearly raised and yet have been ignored almost throughout the media. and the National Institutes of Health was so obviously concerned about this research that a moratorium was imposed on it from 2014 to 2017. And yet during all this time, the funding to the Wuhan Institute of Varrogy went straight ahead.

Now, surely that's something that any journalist would be quite interested in. We need an answer. No one took that up. No one laid out the basis for thinking Lab Escape was very plausible by looking at the grant abstracts from these NIH grants, which lay it all out. No journalists put those in front of its readers, at least for a general mainstream audience. So it's a very passing, something that I think you alluded to earlier, it's an institutional failure. And our society works best when all its institutions behave as they're meant to behave. but our media has not behaved as it should.

It's been asleep at the switch, basically. Our scientists have not sort of come forward to pursue an investigation to lab escape, which from the start was very plausible. Our politicians are sort of locked in stupid political debates about each other rather than trying to get it the truth. It's a sort of massive institutional failure, and it's kind of dangerous at a time when we're being pursued by a rival society that of China that is very focused, very organized, and very direct-it. And it's not committing any of

these foolishnesses, so it has its own problems. Where can we find the article? I want to make sure that I have your website correct. If people want to read it, it's a long article, and you need some science to get through it. But if you've got that, the willingness to do it, it's well worth looking at. Where can people find that? There are two places. One is on medium.com. I think if you Google, Medium.com and my name, the article should come up. And the other is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. So it's the same text in both, better illustrated in the bulletin. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is that what you said?

Yes. They've never published any of my articles. Congratulations. And Medium.com. But it was originally on your own website, yeah? No, it was on Medium.com. That's where it's first appeared. Okay. So I guess, you know, when we talk about China, it's a strange thing to me.

I feel that this goes back into the Cold War with the Soviets that the cultural elites, so to speak, always seem jaundiced about how people they perceive as conservatives deal with evil. In other words, there's this divide that they act as though, well, there's moral equivalence. yeah, the Soviets are not great, but we're not great. And when you need moral clarity, typically you're not going to get it. I wouldn't look for it in the New York Times typically. And yet here we have a situation where China is tremendously powerful. Their malevolence seems to me something we ought to assume. In other words, if people are coming from a communist worldview,

not the people, but the leaders, that they have. no qualms about anything. In other words, whether they can defeat the West or defeat America or weak in America. I don't know why ideologically they ought to have any qualms about it. They don't have the foundations that we do in this country. And so it seems to me it would be basic for us to worry about even working with them on things as dangerous as creating viruses. And so it strikes me as strange that Fauci and others wouldn't worry. about that or sort of would assume that they could do science with people like that? Well, I'm not an expert on international relations, but obviously, China is a country whom we have

to get along with. So there are going to be ups and downs and various disputes we have along the way. This virus is certainly one of them. Now, Fauci would conduct research and collaboration with them, because that's what the NIH does all over the world. So scientists are, in a sense, an international community. It's to everyone's good, I think, that they all cooperate. So I don't see anything about in that by itself. I think one way in which we can hope this gets resolved is that there's a very obvious face-saving formula out there. And that consists of the fact that it was the NIH who funded this research, and it was the Chinese who let the virus escape. So if both sides could kind of shared lane, then the Chinese could sort of open up their lab and admit to what happened

and to both sides ensuring it never happened again. Before we reach that point, however, the Chinese have to be shamed into telling us what we want to know into unlocking all their data. And my hope is that if enough people start to adopt the view that lab escape is more probable on present evidence, the Chinese will then realize that they gain nothing by continuing to stonewalk. Well, the problem is that's not happening, which is why I wanted you to come on the program. In other words, to me, it's not just, you know, slightly more probable that it escaped from a lab, but it's dramatically more probable. Just from reading your article,

it seems to me almost certain that that's what happened. We can't say for sure, but it seems almost certain based on the facts. And if you have the scientific and journalistic classes in the United States not willing to talk about that, I don't see why China would ever move from its position. No, you're actually right.

But what I hope is the tide is beginning to turn and the interest that people like yourself have focused on this issue will gradually turn opinion and people will start looking at the facts and forget about the stupid politics. And they will come to the conclusion you just announced that it's certainly more probable on present evidence that the virus escaped from a lab. That is what I hope will put pressure on China to change its course. When we come back, I just want to take a moment to talk to you about some of your recent and books. Science is very important. And I think that what we've been talking about is bad for

everybody when scientists aren't being clear and doing science and understanding that's their job or when journalists aren't reporting facts and understanding that's their job. We'll be right back. Folks, I'm talking to Nicholas Wade. Don't go away. Folks, just a few minutes left with Dr. Nicholas. I keep saying, Dr. Forgive me, Nicholas Wade, who is a science writer. We have to touch on your book that talks about race, because that got into some controversial waters. When did that book come out? What is the title first of the book? It's called A Troublesome Inheritance, and it came out in 2014.

And do you make the case in the book that there are clear genetic differences among the various races? I mean, is that the controversial thesis? I say that there is a biological basis to race, which I would think everyone could proceed is common sense, but it is controversial because there is a large group of academics on the left who promote the absurd position that there is no biological basis to race. It's all a social construct. So, sure, it is in part a social.

construct, but it's also biological. This is why a group of them got together and signed a round-robin letter attacking my book, but in their letter they could find no scientific error and no racist statement because they are known. And it reminded me of the story about Einstein, who was once told that 100 scientists had disputed something he'd said on a book, to which he replied, well, if I was wrong, one would have been enough. That's how science works. It only takes one person to say this is wrong. And the fact that these geneticists required, I'd know,

180 of them to come together on a letter, I think just proved how little they understand about the scientific process. Well, this is, I mean, this gets to the deeper subject of the politicization of not just science, facts. I mean, whether they're factors scientific or forensic, whatever it is, we really should be willing to deal with them, even if they're uncomfortable. I mean, I suppose they probably try to demonize you the way they did the author of The Bell

Curve. Well, it wasn't a sustained campaign such as Charles Marius had to deal with. This was a once-of letter that appeared sometime after the book had been unpublished. and they never returned to it, I think, because they realized they had no facts to go on. And moreover, my book was evidently fair and non-racist and was just presenting the public with the sort of new facts of streaming out of the genome about the population structure of the human species. Can we get you to hang on for another nine minutes, or do you have to go? Because I'd love to just follow this line of thinking.

I'm sure. All right. Well, then let me just leap in even in this segment. It's a fascinating thing to me when we're talking about these kinds of scientific facts. When you talk about the biological realities of race, for example, and you said that, of all things, one could argue both sides of this. In other words, that even the issue of race, to some extent, for sure, is a social construct, but there are biological realities, genetic realities. But again, this gets to the idea that some things are immediately become political. When you talk about the difference means men and women, this has now become dramatically politicized.

And there are these different narratives. One says everything is a social construct. If I say I am this or this or this, who's to say I'm not? But you've been a science writer for many decades and you say, well, the science can say that you're not. for the first time, this is a problem, at least in the modern West. Yes, I think it's a deep problem. The whole purpose of our universities is to tell us the truth, to be independent of politics,

and to provide the information that the public needs to decide difficult issues. This is another example of institutional failure. Our universities no longer believe in free speech. they countenance a system in which a small group of academics can bully all others. Forgive me, I keep having to cut you out from the most important moments. We'll be right back.