The Megyn Kelly Show - The COVID Cover-Up, with Josh Rogin, David Marcus, and Richard Muller | Ep. 114

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Josh Rogin, author of "Chaos Under Heaven," David Marcus, author of "Charade," and Richard Muller, physicist and co-author of a new Wall Street Journal column about the origins of COVID, to talk about what really happened in the Wuhan lab, what Dr. Fauci's emails reveal, what makes COVID-19 different from every other coronavirus we know, why and how the Wuhan lab leak theory was suppressed, lockdown hypocrisy and hypocrisy of America's elites and politicians, China's influence on the Wuhan theory and gain-of-function research, Fauci's failed oversight, the mistakes of trusting the "experts" about COVID, the state of the media, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Oh, we have a great show for you today that we're going to talk COVID, lab leak in particular, and how we forced China to give us real answers. We kick it off with a guy named Richard Muller. He's an emeritus professor of physics at UCAL Berkeley and a former senior scientist at this very well-known lab. And he worked with the State Department on trying to get to the bottom of where this virus came from. And it's a chilling interview. We're going to kick it off with him. And you will hear him say, not only does he believe the evidence is right there in the virus, that it was manipulated by the Chinese, that it was that it came from the lab, but he believes

it was being manipulated to be made into a biological weapon, that this was weaponry. And he'll explain to you why it's it's scary. I mean, it's a it's a chilling interview. So we're going to start with him. And I promise you're going to find him very compelling. Then we go to Josh Rogan. You remember him? Columnist for the Washington Post, author of the book Chaos Under Heaven, which is about COVID and the lab leak. And this is one of those guys has been saying all along, people open your eyes, open your eyes. We need to be looking

at whether this came from a COVID from a Wuhan lab and not from some pangolin in a wet market in China. And we're going to ask him about the revelations that have come out in the news thus far over the past couple of months since we have had him on and he published his book and what he thinks needs to be done to get real answers from China and the number of conflicts of interest we have stopping a real investigation from happening. And then one of my favorite people on Twitter, David Marcus, and columnist too for the Washington Post and from the Federalist, he's got a new book out called Charade, The COVID Lies That Crushed a Nation. And Dave Marcus speaks sense. We're going to get into the myths around this and why we couldn't say COVID lab for so long

and why mask wearing became this virtue signaling thing that was performatory. And what happened with Governor Cuomo. Anyway, he's done a lot of reporting and including on like what Trump was doing the first couple of months of this that people ignored and saying he did nothing. And I think you're going to love him when he sort of does cleanup for us in aisle seven and a lot of things that have been out there

that are untrue. So anyway, Richard Muller, Josh Rogan, and Dave Marcus, right after this. Thank you so much for doing this. All right, so you're going to explain this to us because I heard you say the other day, this virus is a whistleblower. How so? Whistleblowers in China cannot get the message out.

They are stopped by their government. They can't send a signal. They're completely stifled. The concept doesn't exist. But the virus got out. And it turns out the virus carries with it information in its very genes that tells the story. And this is scientific evidence. This is not circumstantial evidence. This is solid science.

And it is telling. In fact, it is revealing. It is the whistleblower. It tells the story and gives us the answers that so many people thought we would never get unless we had, like in the old Perry Mason show, a confession. China says, okay, okay, you caught me. Let me tell you why I did it. That will never happen. But the virus has come out of China

and it's carried with it this message. It has a genetic footprint in which you've found the answers. And you say that this genetic footprint is one that has never been observed before in a natural coronavirus. In other words, in one that was not manipulated by man. Now, if that's true... That's not strictly true.

It's never been observed before in the whole class of coronaviruses of which COVID is a member. A class is a big group in genetics. We're in the same class as all other mammals, for example. So within this huge class, these are the coronaviruses which sometimes share genes with other coronaviruses. And this sequence has never been observed naturally. Okay. So the sequence to which you refer is the double CGG. Double CGG. What is double CGG? Double C. Double C. Okay. So what is that? Okay. In the virus, there is a particular part on what's called the spike. If you see a picture of the virus, it's a sphere with these spikes

coming out. These spikes are what attach to the victim cell. Now, this spike in coronavirus has a particular feature. I can give you the scientific name for it, but let's skip that. Let's just say it has a feature that makes it extremely capable of attaching to a victim cell and injecting its virus particles very quickly. So this particular thing that appears in the spike protein, this is what is absent in all other coronaviruses in the same class. The MERS virus, the SARS virus, the things that hit in 2003, that hit in 2012. These things don't have this little feature. It's a feature that can make this

attachment to the cell and then open up the cell. Actually, what it does is it tells the cell, hey, open up. I'm something you want. Open up. It's just a code. It's like it's a language. It's like someone calling you and saying, trust me the cell trusts it and it opens up and says come on in You're obviously something good and it's a lie. So it comes in and it injects this information That tells us L. Okay. Here I am now start manufacturing more Coronaviruses and the cell says yes, sir And it goes ahead and starts manufacturing a million Coronaviruses within the cell and And finally, the cell breaks open,

and now you have a million of these things going out and attacking other cells. So this is the tricky mechanism. Some people say a virus isn't even alive. All it is is a set of instructions. It's like a computer virus. You send an instruction to the computer. The computer does all the work.

It's the one who shuts itself down. It's the one that encrypts itself for ransomware. And this is a little code that goes into the cell, and it just tells the cell what to do. It's a message, a written message. And the cell then does this, and the cell starts manufacturing more coronaviruses. And so this thing just expands and it starts doing its real damage. But to get in and to get in so quickly and so effectively is to be really infectious. It has this little code in it. And the little code is something that

has never been seen in this whole class of coronaviruses that include all the coronaviruses that have caused epidemics in the past. They're both SARS, which is famous, and MERS, the Mideast Respiratory Syndrome. Neither of those had this in it. So this is really, really something unexpected, unique, and it's inconceivable that this could have happened by accident. Is it man-made? Is double-sig necessarily man-made? It is not necessarily man-made because it does appear in other kinds of animals. And it's not just the double-sig. It's the double-sig with the stuff for ballet. It's actually not just CGG, CGG, but it's twice

as long as that. And this thing is put together in the laboratory, and then it is inserted into this gene. That is how it got in. The laboratory in Wuhan has done this in the past. They have actually inserted this double-sig into other coronaviruses. They've done it and they've published it. This was work that's part of what they're doing in their so-called gain-of-function. And so they have done this. It's been done around the world, I think, 11 or 12 times. Why would they do that? The excuse they give is that they want to examine the most virulent types of viruses in order to prepare for them.

So when they come about accidentally, they will already have laboratory experience. The argument they made is that this will be done in a very secure laboratory. There's no danger that this will be done in a very secure laboratory. There's no danger that this will get out. And it gives the scientists a way of examining the bad things that might happen in the future. That's the excuse. That was heavily debated in the United States. And under the Obama administration, it didn't sell. The community decided, nope, that's not good enough.

The dangers are too great. Shut down this kind of research. And it was officially shut down. But through some money laundering, the research actually continued in China. The U.S., some of the money from the National Institute of Health and the other funding organizations was put into the EcoHealth Alliance. And then the Eco, this is what I call money laundering. They didn't fund it directly. They gave it to the EcoHealth Alliance.

That's Peter Daszak's organization. Peter Daszak's, right. And so he got, he sent it to China. Now, nominally, they promised not to use this money for that purpose. But in interviews, we learned from Fauci that he said, so they promised they wouldn't do it. How do you know they didn't do it? Well, we generally trust them.

That's what he said on the air. Mistake. They're not open enough. They're not transparent enough so that we could see what they actually do with it. But they were doing gain of function. But you think that this is as close as we'll get to a smoking gun, seeing the double sig combo in this virus. And one of the interesting things about your piece in the journal was the so-called bat lady, the woman who runs the lab in Wuhan, she published a paper in February 2020 with the virus's partial genome, but she did not mention this special sequence that supercharges the virus or this rare double-sig section. She didn't mention it, but you say the fingerprint nonetheless was easily identified in the data accompanying the paper. Now, why

wouldn't she mention that that was in there, that that genome was in there? I have struggled with that question. How could she do this? There were other things in that paper that are also very suspicious. There are two fingerprints we talked about in our op-ed, and so far we've been talking about the first one, but there are three or four other things. So as I'm trying to imagine, how could she omit this? I can guess at scenarios, but these are total guesses. I can guess that she put it in there and the sensors said, no, when you put that in there, it gives it away. You can't mention that. So she cut it out, come up with a whimsy excuse to cut it out.

She only went so far in the genome to describe it and didn't do the whole thing. But within weeks, nature, oh, God bless nature, because they require not only that you write their paper, but that you archive the data that were used in determining this. So the data are archived. And that means any scientist in the world has access to it. Within a few weeks, people were saying, wait, why did she stop here? And they went a little bit further, and there is double CGG. I mean, as of March, a little over a year ago, this double CGG was found. And it was identified in a second published paper, not by the Chinese, saying this looks like anaphylactic function, that someone had stuck this in. And so this has been known for a year. Right, but covered up as we're now finding out.

We weren't releasing any new science. We were just focusing in on what are the scientific issues that are well-known and are undisputed and present enough evidence that this case is pretty much closed. Well, one of the things you pointed out, because you mentioned SARS and MERS, that those both were confirmed to have a natural origin. These are other coronaviruses. They evolved rapidly as they spread through humans until the most contagious forms dominated. The viruses got smarter. They got better.

And you say COVID-19 did not work that way. It appeared in humans already adapted into an extremely contagious version. No serious viral improvement took place until a minor variation occurred many months later in England. Such early optimization is unprecedented, and it suggests a long period of adaptation that predated its public spread. The theory being that the so-called bat lady and her colleagues had been making it better and better and better, and that the strong version was the first to emerge because it had grown in a lab and gotten stronger. I call it accelerated evolution. So people say, well, hey, this thing looks like it's totally natural. Well, yeah, it looks like it's natural and has evolved over

several years. But that natural evolution can take place in the laboratory. And that's what's called a gain of function. You take this thing and you don't expose it to humans, but you expose it to humanized cells. These are mice that have the same receptors in them that the human lungs have, that the human brain has. And so when you put this virus in on the mice, the ones that are most effective are the ones that spread the most. And then you take those and put those on other humanized mice and the ones that are most effective. So it's an accelerated, in humans, it might take weeks to go from one person to the next person and develop again. But in mice, you can do this in days. And so this accelerated evolution

mimics absolutely natural evolution. And people look at this thing and say, well, it looks like it evolved naturally. That means one of two things. Either it developed within humans, for which there's no evidence whatsoever, or that it developed in an accelerated evolution in a laboratory using gain-of-function. And we know that gain-of-function was being used by she, by Dr. She, the so-called bat lady. Bat lady, by the way, was a term that was invented by Scientific American when they interviewed her. It was meant to be a term of affection. Yeah, it's not derogatory. She likes it.

I don't know if she likes it anymore. So bottom line, what do you believe happened? What's your theory? It's clear to me that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was developing exceedingly virulent coronaviruses, that they did two things. They did gene splicing, which means putting in this little segment that doesn't exist in any other of the beta coronaviruses. They stuck that in. Secondly, they accelerated evolution and they got this thing and then it escaped somehow And wait, we have strong evidence that the Wuhan Institute was closed down in November for two weeks Something bad happened and it escaped and it got out into into humans

Why was it being developed? It was being developed secretly and that violates the Convention on biological weapons that China and the Convention on Biological Weapons that China and the U.S. have both signed. I got into this in part through the State Department, where I was a member of Dave Asher's team, looking into this. Because their concern was that the Secretary of State has to certify every year that China is in compliance with the Convention on Biological Warfare. And this seemed to be indication that it wasn't. They have a secret program going on there. This violates their agreement. It's supposed to be completely transparent.

We're supposed to be able to go in there and see everything they do. They're not letting us do it. And even worse, there's strong information indicating that the military, the People's Liberation Army, has taken over some of the work that's going on in that laboratory. This just violates the convention. We need to say China is in violation of this convention. In the United States law, you are innocent until proven guilty. In a biological weapons convention, you are required to prove your innocence. This means transparency. We don't have to find them guilty and then accuse them. No, they have to show us that they haven't done this. And that requires transparency,

and they have been violating that transparency. So when you say that the PLA, basically the military, was involved with this lab, do we know whether, because this is one of the big speculations, was she just working on making coronaviruses more dangerous so that she could develop an antibody or the effective means of protecting public health? Or was this a biological weapons lab that was not disclosed and partially funded by American dollars? The reason I think it was a bioweapons lab is because if you just do a plain gain-of-function, if you just do acceleration of evolution, you'll find things that might evolve within the humans. But there's no known way that this double CGG, double sig, could have been inserted through natural processes. So this was a departure. It increases the lethality and the speed of spread in a big jump in a way that we don't expect to happen naturally. And for that reason- Wait, but wait, but wait, but can I just clarify? So what you're saying is if they were just researching, let's take a coronavirus and make it as dangerous as it could naturally get so that we can figure out how to treat it,

we would not see double CGG? That's right. That's right. So to me, that's an indication that they were trying to go even further than what would happen naturally. And that departs then from the justification for doing the gain of function research. That's huge. If that's true, then you're telling me the data attached to her report showed us not only that this has been manipulated by humans in all likelihood, but that it had been manipulated beyond what would ever be necessary to provide for the public health that it suggested by a weapon. Well, I like to, what we said, we tried very carefully to say things that nobody could disagree with in our op-ed. And so what we wanted to present was that there are two strong genetic fingerprints in the virus itself that indicate it has been

manipulated in the laboratory. Now, what we didn't put in were our own opinions as to why this was done. And that was specifically left out because I would like for people to agree that this was done purposefully in the Wuhan laboratory. It's really hard for them to deny it, given these two pieces of evidence. What I don't want is for the argument to then say, oh, I disagree with you when you say it was done on purpose, because that's a point in which people could disagree. And we get into an argument, and it covers up the fact that these two pieces of evidence indicate that it was manipulated in the laboratory and that this did come out of a laboratory. It was not natural evolution. And that's a really big first step to have the world scientists finally say, okay,

we were wrong. And they have an excuse for being wrong. Back when these letters were written in Lancet and in Nature magazine, much of this information was not yet known scientifically. The experts wrote their letter at a, because they had been funding this research. So can we spend a moment on what that must have been like? I mean, the moment, because even if they were developing it as a bioweapon, it seems unlikely they just chose in November of 19 to unleash it, starting with their own scientists. I mean, it clearly appears to have been an accident that it got out. And the reporting is that these three lab technicians got very ill in November of 19, you know, a few months before it came here. I just, it's, I'm thinking of the movie version of this. How was everything not locked down once those people got sick?

How did they? It was too late. It was too late. It spread so fast. Remember, with COVID, you are a carrier and you are spreading the disease for a week or two before you show any symptoms. My guess is they got infected in the movie version. They got infected in the laboratory and they went around their daily lives. And this thing was spreading.

And then they got sick and then there was a panic. But it was too late. Yes, there would have been a panic. I mean, do we know who those people are? Have we ever found patient zero or gotten testimonials from the first people around Wuhan, whether it's from the lab or the alleged market? Oh, no, we don't have to. The Chinese took care of that. How so? Because I know they disappeared. They claim they did this, but no, we don't have to. The Chinese took care of that. How so? Because I know they disappeared. They claim they did this, but no, we don't have patient zero. There is some information as to who got sick, which is classified information in which many people are saying,

please declassify all this information. But it's a little bit dangerous because if you declassify this information, the Chinese will figure out who gave it to us. And we know what will happen to them. So we really have to be very cautious with sources. But who's patient zero? I think we have some evidence for that that we cannot disclose at this point. And I'm not sure it's that important. Right.

Well, I mean, if the guy works for the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it's much more interesting than, you know, random Chinese citizen who was at a wet market, right? There's like one proves something and one doesn't. There were three people who worked at the Wuhan Institute who got previously ill and went to the hospital with symptoms that are consistent with COVID. You can't say it's not flu symptoms, but the Chinese say, oh, in China, if you even get the flu, you go to the hospital. Okay. So they have their cover story. We know that. We also know that it's spread. There is a metro that goes right by the Wuhan Institute and goes to their other virology laboratory. And the other virology laboratory is 900 feet from the wet market. And all the early cases were along this metro. So this is all circumstantial evidence, but it will

lend to the movie version that you referred to, that someone at Wuhan got ill but didn't realize it didn't show symptoms. They were traveling on the metro line. Maybe they were commuting between the two laboratories. While they were there, they visited the wet market. This person was spreading the illness. What we do know is that all of the early hospitalizations happened to be along this one metro line. There are hospitals that are near the metro line, as if it was spread by people who live near this metro line. This is something that my co-author, Stephen Quay, uncovered. He's a remarkable person in looking at every single kind of evidence. So there's always other evidence.

It didn't come from the cave where the bats were, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles away. The reason I got interested in this in the first place is this strange coincidence that this disease just happens to break out right next to the one laboratory in China that is doing bat research and bat DNA function research. I mean, how could anybody ignore that? And yet, that's what people have been ignoring. That's what the... There are people in the United States who are deeply afraid, these are scientists, that the government is going to start supervising their research.

And nothing impedes research more than close government supervision. That's true. I know that in astrophysics. I hate to have them supervise me. In virology, they hate to have people supervise them. And so they're really afraid that they're really hoping that this was natural. And sometimes your hopes can cloud your judgment. But when you say that you were working with the State Department, I mean, what do you make it? Because the latest reporting, and in particular, I'm thinking about the Vanity Fair in-depth report, which has State Department officials on the record by name saying, early on, we had reason to believe this was a lab leak.

And we were told, be quiet, keep your mouth shut. That's opening up a can of worms. We've been funding gain of function research, and nobody wants to go there. I mean, is that, do you know anything about that? Oh yeah, that's true. Can you elaborate? Okay. Well, let me give you a personal story. So I have, I have many friends in science and several of them who are experts in virology. And I called them.

One person in particular who is an eminent virologist, I called him and said, there are these papers that came out. And I know freshman virology, but I would like to have a professional opinion on whether these papers are scientifically strong. And this one friend of mine said, well, you know, I don't think I'm in a position to do that myself. I said, well, what about people in your lab? Are there real experts in your lab? And he said, well, there are, but they would refuse to do it. Why would they refuse to do it? And there were fundamentally two reasons. One of them, less chilling than the other. They refused to do it because they didn't want to support Donald Trump. And Donald Trump had come out and said, this is a Chinese manufactured virus. And anything that supported him would perhaps make it more likely that he would be elected.

But the second reason was a really chilling one. And this is that if they got involved in a program that was questioning the truthfulness of China, that they would be blacklisted as enemies of China. And that meant that any further collaboration with Chinese virologists, which they all were doing, would be cut. They could no longer do work in collaboration with Chinese scientists. And Chinese scientists were some of the best in this business. They were doing advanced work. And this is really chilling because what it means is that the Chinese suppression of freedom of speech, freedom of information, freedom of

association, freedom of research had been spread. Their suppression of that had actually reached the United States. And people in the United States, scientists in the United States, were afraid to look into certain issues for fear that that would insult China. And that really bothers me. It still bothers me to this day. The idea that China has now managed by, through collaboration, managed to suppress our freedom of research in the United States is really chilling. I mean, we've got 3.7 million people dead, and it's time to stop worrying about your friends and your alliances with the lab buddies across the pond. Let's talk about next steps then, because I know in your piece, and I saw you on Fox too, saying we have to demand that China opens up the lab, that we have to put sanctions on them until they allow inspections. But they're not likely to. They've certainly not allowed it thus far.

Anything they would allow us to see would probably be controlled in a whitewash and not what's real is my feeling from here. So what could we meaningfully force at this point? Oh, economic sanctions. There's a lot that can be done. Dave Ashley, who led the State Department team, is an expert in this. He led the economic sanctions against Iran, which were very effective. He led the economic sanctions against North Korea, which were very effective. He's a super expert in this. And he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just two or three days before ours. And he goes through the things that can be done. He says what the Chinese fear most is that the U.S. say that unless you open up,

unless you give us complete transparency, you know, I'd love to have Xi Jinping come to the United States and be interviewed in private. I'd love to have that. Unless they open up, we can not only apply these sanctions, which include such things as tariffs, which President Trump was doing, but can even go to the extreme of saying, because you haven't opened up, you are in violation of the Biological Warfare Convention. And in violation of that, until you provide proof that you are not responsible for this, we will allow American citizens to sue you. Now, you think that's impossible. How can you sue China? China owns a great many assets in the United States. And they are, according to Dave, who is an expert in this, there's nothing they fear more than having US citizens who got ill

or whose family members died, suing the Bank of China. As you know, they have been buying up assets in the United States. People worry that China owns us. Okay, but that is an opportunity for us to provide, to really scare them. And what I'm hoping that will come about is they will recognize that President Biden is willing to do this. And if not, then maybe four years from now, a new president is willing to do this. And they will see they have no option other than to be transparent. And the key thing here is to stop them from doing this kind of work in the future. And that means utter transparency. We get to see everything in their laboratory, not just wait for their official publications, but we get to go to their laboratory and see what they're doing.

What if they're scrubbing it all now? I mean, wouldn't this all be gone? Wouldn't they have gotten rid of the evidence? Well, the evidence is in the genome. So, no, it's here. We can prove that they did it. What we want to do is stop them from doing it again. And that's the real danger that, you know, my guess is that this is being done as part of biological warfare, that it was a new kind of warfare.

It was not a hot war. It was a preparing for an economic war. And it's been enormously effective. It's slowing down the Western economy while letting the Chinese economy boom. Wait a minute. Does that suggest you think this was an intentional release? No, no. Because of the way it happened. If it was an intentional release, they would have carried it to someplace else. Would have started here. They would have brought it near Fort Detrick.

Yeah, exactly. And released it there. So everybody would believe it was Fort Detrick. But you're just saying it had its advantages for them as on leash you could see how what they might have had in mind. They certainly didn't want it released in Wuhan. Wuhan is the worst place. Because it was released in Wuhan, many of us were suspicious.

That's the tell. Yeah. So this was not deliberate. If it was deliberate, it was done in the most stupid way. And I don't believe that. So I think it was accidental. But it let out. I mean, it let out the information. It gave us the clues that we needed.

And we were kind of obtuse. And people didn't notice these clues. But once they did notice the clues, and everything we say in that op-ed article was known a year ago. We're not doing anything new. And we're not saying anything that is disputed by experts. Give an example. DASAC started tweeting about how our op-ed is all wrong. And then he listed a whole bunch of things, none of which were in the op-ed. He never mentioned the facts we had in the op-ed. He mentioned things that other people were saying about things.

That guy has no credibility. He's lost all credibility. But listen, I have to ask you this before I let you go. Can you just walk me through how you, how did you come to this? How did you come to work with the State Department? Because I see you were a physics professor at Berkeley, a former senior scientist at a very well-known lab, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. So how is it that you got involved in this? My layperson understanding of what a physicist does doesn't bring the two of you together, you and COVID research. Well, I had met and knew Dave Asher. I heard him give talks on the work that he's done for Iran and North Korea. I had enormous respect for him. And he was State Department under Trump and who else?

Obama. Obama too. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, he did some very important work for Obama and nonpartisan. Uh, the work he does is just really super good. I contacted him and I contacted a dozen other people. Uh, and you'll, you'll find this funny. It was, uh, I was suspicious because of the Wuhan laboratory being so close. And so as a scientist who loves to discover things, when you get a clue like that, it doesn't mean you come out and you start accusing people. What it means is you go deeper into it.

So I started reading all of the key papers in this field, which is not easy for me as a physicist. But I could quickly learn a lot of the virology. It's not that hard. We're talking about codes here. It's not something beyond what a physicist can do. So I started reading these things. Remarkably, I got a reference from Fox News of a paper that had come out. I said, oh, they gave the name of the author. Let me look it up online. I went to Google and I searched for this paper and I found 30 hits. Each one was to an article that was denying the paper, saying what was wrong with it. But where's the paper?

Maybe it's not available. Why do I get only hits? And then I thought, wait a minute, let me try a different search engine. So I went to Microsoft Bing and put in the name of the paper. And bing, it came up the first on the search list. And I realized, oh, my God, Google is suppressing this paper. What's going on here? That really got my chills up.

It was the first personal experience that I'd read about things in which the social media are suppressing things. But this is one that actually hit me at home. And I read this paper. And having read this paper, I started talking to virologists. And that's when I had this conversation about, no, nobody in my lab will do it. Of all the people I contacted, it was Dave Asher, who was most interested. And we talked. He had me brief the State Department, the top people in the State Department, on this issue.

And we started, he started going into it seriously because of the Biological Warfare Convention. Rich, thank you so much for your expertise and telling us the story. And it'll be interesting to see who plays you in the movie. But up next, Josh Rogan returns to the program with what I think is a victory lap for having apparently been right. Certainly right that we need to take a hard look at the Wuhan lab theory.

And it appears right that these scientists are conflicted and are protecting their own butts and not ours. He's next. It's been a couple of months since we first had you on. You literally wrote the book on this, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, She and the Battle for the 21st Century, in which you very seriously said, can we please take a hard look at the lab leaks theory? And let me tell you all the reasons why that makes sense. And you were on our show in April saying, let me walk you through it. Since then, the dam has broken. In fact, I think more people should be mentioning you as one of the dam breakers because you are, you know, mainstream. And I think you're one of the people who made it acceptable, indeed imperative to look at this as real. So let me just start with your reaction to these

Johnny-come-latelys who are like, well, now we should take a look at the lab leak. Now it's time. Sure, sure. So first of all, you're right. It's been crazy to watch after 14, 16, 18 months of silence, really. Shocking silence about a lack of curiosity and a lack of investigation into how we got into this mess and to how the pandemic started, which, by the way, is crucial information for making sure that we don't do this every year to make sure that we don't have another pandemic after this one right away. After all of that silence and silencing of people who dare to utter the words lab leak theory, all of a sudden it's become acceptable in the chattering class, especially in Washington, to be like, hey,

let's check out the bat coronavirus labs that are right next to the outbreak of the bat coronavirus, right? Which it doesn't sound like a crazy thing to say anymore, but just because I've been saying it for 18 months, it didn't suddenly become a credible theory. It didn't suddenly jump from something kooky to something acceptable. The theory has always been the same. It was the people who were refusing to acknowledge its plausibility who changed. And that includes scientists, it includes the media, it includes all sorts of people in government who, for whatever reason, and I'm telling you, Maggie, there were a bunch of different reasons. For some people, it was Trump derangement syndrome. For some people, it was confirmation bias. For some people, it was source bias. The reporters were biased towards their scientists sources who misled them on purpose to cover their own tushies. But for whatever reason, you got to the place where you had to somehow explain why you were wrong for a year. And now you can say that the lab leak theory is plausible and should be investigated all of those rationalizations are pretty much bs right and everyone's like you know

i can't like the fact checkers unchecking their facts and saying oh well we were right to be wrong but now we're right it doesn't make any sense right and the scientists who came out of those emails the fauci not just fauci but the other ones right who were like oh telling each other that the lab leak theory was plausible at the time and telling the public that it wasn't plausible at that same time and were revealed to be hypocrites and to be deceiving the public to the cost of our public health, by the way, which is how we got into this mess in the first place. Their hypocrisy is out in the public view. But I'm here to say that forget all that. Welcome to the party. If you're willing to join me and by the way not

just me i thank you for the credit but there were a lot of journalists and including you megan who are way ahead on this okay because they just decided to like acknowledge the obvious thing which is that if you got the bat coronavirus outbreak in the city with all the bat coronavirus labs we should check out those labs okay doesn't mean we know that came from a lab doesn't mean we know this is what happened it means we should check it out and so Okay. It doesn't mean we know that came from a lab. It doesn't mean we know this is what happened. It means we should check it out. And so now finally, we're going to,

it's acceptable to say we can check it out, but that doesn't actually mean we're checking it out. We still no plan to check it out. No one's checking it out. Yes, that's exactly right. It's like, okay,

great. Now, now we're being real. Can we check it out? Yeah. Yeah. We're like, let's do it.

And so here is the, the most I've heard on how we're going to do it or what we're going to do it, because all eyes are on China. That's where the information is. That's where the pressure needs to be exerted. And so we had Secretary of State Blinken asked about this on Axios' Sunday show on HBO. And here's as much as he would say. To do a proper investigation, you're going to need, the U.S. is going to need access to the labs. Will you demand that? Will you put teeth on it? Will you even go as far as sanctions on China if they keep inspectors out? I think the international community is clear that we have to have, the international community has to have access. It has to have information. It has to have meaningful interaction. So what's the real pressure the U.S. will put on China for access to the lab? If China denies the information, denies the access, denies the transparency that's needed... And you kind of respect that.

Well, let's see. That's been the history. Mike, at the end of the day, it's profoundly in China's interest to do this as well, because, look that, oh, we're going to use the tools of American power and influence to get Beijing to play along. You know, and that's kind of crazy because if you look at what just happened to the last year, the WHO tried the route of asking Beijing nicely. And look what happened. They rope-a-doped them for a year. Then they let them into Wuhan for two weeks and co-wrote the report, went to the lab for three hours. The lab scientists said we didn't do it. They said, OK, sorry to bother you. And then they told us we shouldn't

look into the lab. And then the head of WHO took a crap on his own WHO report while releasing the report because it was so ridiculous that he couldn't even defend it at the release of the report. That was a debacle. OK, and that wasted a year of our lives where the evidence is getting older and you know the biden people i'll be honest with you like i talk to them about this all the time and you know i i'm always bugging them behind i'm like listen you got to check this out it's not political it's not partisan it's not about blaming trump it's not even about blaming china it's about figuring this out and they're like yeah yeah but how are we going to do it it's going to be hard i'm like tough you know and then they're like beijing's not going to do it? It's going to be hard. I'm like, tough, you know, and then the investigation is not going to like it.

I'm like, they're not supposed to like it. You know what I mean? Like, do you imagine if, you know, like if you're prosecuting, let's just say like a murder, for example, and the defendant's like, no, I'm not going to let you into my house. They're like, OK, sorry. Well, that's the end of the investigation. It would be crazy because they're not supposed to. You know, the investigation is not supposed to depend on the kind graces of the person you're or entity you're investigating that doesn't make any sense okay so we're going to have to bring pressure to bear and what i say and what i think a growing number of lawmakers you'll see saying and lindsey graham actually put this to plink and got a non-answer as well uh sanction

the labs all of them all the virus labs in beijing and wuhan that won't even have zero because here's the thing even if they're it didn't come from the lab those labs have proven they can't be trusted because they during a crisis when we need to get out their books they won't give it to us right so there's zero accountability zero transparency that's what we know even before we know if the outbreak is uh coming from the labs or not, we know that we have to reevaluate our relationships with these labs, which gets us back to the other thing that you and I talked about last time, which is that, well, if we can't get into their labs, we can definitely get into our labs.

And our labs are run by people who work for the U.S. government, like Dr. Fauci and Francis Collins, and people who are contractors of the U.S. government, like Peter Daszak, all the guys who told us for a year that we shouldn't be looking into the labs. And now all of a sudden we're like, of course we should be looking into the labs. You're like, wait a second. That's not what you said. We're like, of course, that's what I said. They're like, no, you didn't. No, the Fauci email show that Daszak behind the scenes was like, thank you, Fauci. Thank you for defending against the lab leak theory.

Right. I mean, there was zero desire to look into it. In fact, now we know that there were tons of red flags being raised behind the scenes by people saying 100 percent. We need to look at that. Oh, wait, it would open up a can of worms. Wait, it's going to make us look bad. But it really looks like that's how it happened. Right. And guess what? It will open up a can of worms. And guess what? The Chinese Communist Party is not going to like it. They're not supposed to like it. And here's the crazy part is that, you know, we may never find a smoking gun, you know, and if the Chinese government found the smoking gun, they surely buried it along with anyone who knew about it. But we will if we actually do the investigation, which means, yes, pressuring the Chinese government, but also looking into the NIH, USAID, Homeland Security, all the Defense

Department contracts with EcoHealth Alliance, all of it. We got to see all of it. We can't trust these guys because they misled us for a year. I'm talking about the Americans now. So we're gonna have to see the the work okay that means congress that means hearings you know call it whatever you want call it a commission call it a committee just have you know let's see the the the paper on this and then we're gonna have to make a decision as a society and i'm telling you that that decision must include re-evaluating our relationships with all these labs we're clearly not good actors, who are not actually controlled by these very

nice Chinese scientists who just want to prevent pandemics. It's actually controlled by the party. And that's what the book is about. It's about the fact that the party is in control of everything. And that governs our relationships with China. And that's what we have to realize, that even on scientific collaboration, which should be the thing you could, I mean, if you can't cooperate with the Chinese government on pandemic prevention because they're going to weaponize it and build another part of the lab, the part that we didn't know about, the part that the Biden administration confirmed. Well, that's really bad. OK, we get we have don't want to disrupt you at delicate U.S.-China relations, what I say to that is like, well, five hundred ninety six thousand Americans died. If uncovering the truth

of that is not worth risking upsetting the delicate sensibilities of the CCP, then what is what would be the thing that we would go to Beijing and like this is important to us because I think this is important to us. Right. How weak can we be? This this the point because it's like, first of all, as an outsider, as somebody who's not involved in setting any sort of China policy, I think to myself, how do we trust an organization that's engaging in forced sterilization of people? You know, that's forced labor camps of the Uyghurs, of Muslim minorities over there. How do we say, yeah, they're trustworthy. I'm sure they're telling us the straight skinny when it comes to what they're doing in that lab that we're giving them funding for. And now, you know, there's your reporting. There was that piece in Vanity Fair last week. We have been funding gain of function research there in that lab where they take the bats out of the caves and take them. What was it? Fourteen hundred miles? How many miles to do research on them and to pull the coronaviruses out and gain of function means basically to make make them more dangerous to see ostensibly for our own good to see how to fight them but oh lo and behold the

lab which you point out in your book had suffered from safety protocol violations we had already flagged it on our radar as really not that airtight and that had been working with the chinese military to some extent um wasn't wasn't too reliable. And three people got sick, sick in November of 19. And now, according to the latest estimates from the WHO, 173 million people have had COVID, 173 million people worldwide, total deaths agree with all of it. It's really interesting that you focus on this gain of function research question because this has kind of become a political canard because, you know, what Fauci and Collins, Fauci, the head of the the the part of the government that funds all virus research, basically all virus research, including a lot of this stuff. And Collins, the head of the NIH, they have been thwarting congressional investigations. They've been refusing to answer basic questions from Congress members on both sides of the aisle and both chambers about the work that they were doing that was connected to these Wuhan labs, primarily the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And what Fauci, when he got into that tiff with Rand Paul that everyone

talks about, he said, well, we didn't fund gain of function research. And that was a heavily lawyered statement. And what he's saying is basically that whatever we were doing with those Wuhan labs, we didn't define as gain of function research. And what Rand Paul was saying is like, no, when you increase the function of a virus, that's gain of function, whether you call it it or not. And the reason that Fauci and Collins are playing that game is because they set up an oversight mechanism for gain of function research, and then they subverted it by defining everything as not gain of function research. In other words, they didn't use their own oversight mechanism, which sort of gets you back to the point, which I don't understand that. I don't understand that.

When Obama paused the gain of function research, the way that Fauci and Collins got it turned back on was they established a board to oversee gain-of-function research. And they told the world, if we have dangerous gain-of-function research, we're going to run it through this board. But they didn't run any of the Wuhan stuff through that board because they didn't call it gain-of-function research. They were like, this is not gain-of-function research. And what Rand Paul and a lot of other scientists say is like, no, you should have run it through that board. That's the whole point of the board. That's why you set up that board. It is for this. And you didn't do it because you didn't want to do it. But we were funded. We were funding other entities, right?

Like Daszak's lab that we're funding gain of function research. Yeah. Well, Daszak doesn't have a lab. He's not actually a virologist. He's a zoologist, you know? So that's one thing. By the way, Fauci's not a virologist either he's an immunologist the only virologist at the top of the u.s government during the outbreak was robert redfield he said it came from the lab and then he got canceled okay now now what what happened with the the people focus on the nih and what fauci and consul say well that was just one contract and that was a tiny bit of money and that wasn't the research that caused the pandemic. But what I'm saying is that it's not just that one contract. It was many, many parts of the U.S.

government, including USAID, the Defense Department, the intelligence community, funneling money into this network of Chinese labs under the theory that we were building them up to be really good partners. OK, so you're not going to be able to trace it to one Fauci contract. I think that's a standard that's not going to be met. In other words, money just goes into these labs and they do what they want with it. They didn't tell us what they were doing with it. And then they built another side of the lab, the side that we didn't know about. So it's not that Fauci funded the research that caused the pandemic. It's that he failed. He neglected to oversee this project to the extent that the Chinese government totally did something that they didn't tell us about. OK, and that's the problem, is that he trusted the Chinese scientists and he trusted the Chinese.

Even today, if you listen to Fauci, you'll say, I know these, and Daszak, I know these scientists so well. They're such nice people. They're just trying to do good science. Right. But he's not acknowledging the elephant in the room, which is the Chinese Communist Party, which will kill the scientists if they say the wrong thing or put them in a gulag or worse. OK, wait, can you just talk a little bit more about that? The other side of the lab? Because I never really pictured it like that. I just pictured it as the lab where the bat lady was doing the things. Right. So this is like really important because this is a lot of people, you know, come not you, but a lot of people out there who are just coming to this issue for the first time don't know this like horrible, tragic history of how the story got all messed up. Right.

Not everyone was following it as closely as you and I. Right. Because, you know, most people were like assumed that, you know, the U.S. government was on top of this and they weren't. OK. And basically what happened was the Trump administration put out a statement saying that there was this other side of the lab, sick researchers. They were doing military work with coronaviruses, undisclosed stuff Fauci didn't know about stuff. Robert Redfield didn't know about stuff. Peter Daszak didn't know about. And when Pompeo put out the statement, everyone was like, oh, that's a Trumpian conspiracy. But then the Biden administration confirmed the facts of the statement. Right.

In other words, if you think this is a conspiracy theory, then you have to look at the fact that that conspiracy would now have to involve Tony Blinken and Joe Biden, which doesn't in other words, that that's no longer a plausible thing to say. And Pompeo, Blinken, Trump and Biden are all in on it. Right. How could that be? Right. It doesn't make any sense. OK, so it can't be a conspiracy theory because there's no way that Lincoln went into a conspiracy with Pompeo. But anyway, put that aside. The point is that what both administrations have confirmed is that there was another side of the lab working with the PLA. And as soon as the outbreak hit, they fired the guy who or disappeared the guy

who was in charge of that lab, the whole WIV, not just the bat part, and they put a PLA general in charge of it. And now all decisions are made by the party, by the military, by the rulers, not by the scientists. That's why they closed down the science. Weirdly, they're not that excited about providing us real access. And so, I mean, I know that we're pushing for, you know, like we need to get over there and we need to have full access. Tom Cotton was saying this, full access to health records, inventories of animal test subjects, samples, viruses, the research conducted there. And I mean, I have to say, my feeling is we're never going to get that. Like the Chinese,

they're never going to give that to us, right? Are they? Is there some way of forcing it? So first of all, we don't know if we don't try. Okay. And it's been 18 months and nobody tried. So let's apply some pressure. And here's the beauty of the sanctions. You sanction all the labs. Well, why are we still giving those labs money?

They won't even let us in. Hey, here's a bunch of money. Can we come into the lab? No. Okay. Thank you. Here's some more money. You know, it makes us into schmucks.

Okay. We're the schmucks in this story. The United States of America for funding all these labs. And then when the pandemic was, hey, can we look at your public virus database that you mysteriously took offline a month before we knew the outbreak existed? No. OK, sorry. You know, and then we're like, oh, I guess we can't figure it out. Right. So we don't know if we don't try. And here's the best part. If the sanctions on the labs, which are an appropriate and proportional response to the labs refusals to allow an investigation if they don't allow the investigation then the sanctions have the effect of cutting off these labs and if we can't get basic investigations in labs that we need to get into then good riddance i say you know what

i mean uh but the truth is you're right megan we're never we might never find a spoken gun what we might end up with is a preponderance of the evidence. Again, think back to this murder trial. You very rarely have like O.J. on video with the knife holding up his I.D. card to the camera. Right. It's very unusual. Usually you have a standard of a reasonable doubt. Right. Sometimes you have a standard of a preponderance of evidence. That's what we're going to end up with here.

We're going to end up with a preponderance of evidence in one direction or the other. And now let's say that it points to the lab. Are we going to do nothing? Are we going to keep shoveling American taxpayer monies into these labs? Are we going to expand this work sixfold, which is the current plan? One point two billion dollars for the global viral project to have Peter Daszak dig up five hundred thousand more deadly viruses, according to the website. Five,000 deadly viruses. Is that a good idea? And take them into crowded cities. It's not like they're sitting in there and, you know, rural China. Exactly. And and so is that should we go ahead and fund that with our taxpayer money before we've even tried to check it out, before we even attempted to? You know, it would

be like if we had like 9-11 and then, you know, Al Qaeda was like, oh, no, I'm sorry, I'm not going to tell you everything. We're like, okay, forget it. Let's just sit around and not have a 9-11 commission and not look into our own failures. In other words, we have a lot to fix on our side no matter what. Look at the intelligence community, Megan. Just think about that. Totally missed it. Totally.

If it was the lab, we don't know. We need to check it out. But if this came from the lab, $86 billion of IC stuff every year pointed at like jihadis in Yemen and like Russian cyber hackers and nothing on this network of military labs in China that's doing all the risky coronavirus research. Nothing. Basically nothing. That's a scandal. That's why you can't trust the IC investigation to get to the bottom of this either. And the Biden administration may try to use this IC investigation, the new 90 day thing as an alibi for letting dropping the whole thing. But the part of this investigation has to be into our intelligence community. And that can't be done by our intelligence. They can't investigate themselves. So someone else is going to have to do it. Probably Congress. Now, you say that you say we already know a lot and it points to a deadly combination of Chinese negligence and malevolence. Can you describe the malevolence? You know, there's something about the Chinese Communist Party where they they do their they exert a level of cruelty in their policy that's beyond what's necessary. In other words, they take the amount of cruelty

and horrendousness and that they would need to maintain power and advance their interests, and then they add more of it. And that's sort of like the nature of these totalitarian dictatorships, is that they end up inevitably being worse than even they have to be. And the coronavirus pandemic throughout the pandemic has been a Chinese Communist Party putting that virtue on full display. And just think of the COVID origin investigation. When the Australians suggested, merely suggested that they would start their own investigation, the Chinese government cut off their beef and wine industries, crushing their farmers in the middle of a pandemic, crushing their economy further in the middle of a pandemic. Real people suffered under that, right? Not to protect China's economic interest, to protect the party's political interest, which tells you all you need to know about what we're dealing with. We're dealing with, it's essentially a mafia, it's a protection racket, right? It's like if the Gambinos ran the biggest country in the world, that's what they are, that's what the CCP is. You know, It's an extortion racket for the world.

Oh, nice country you got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. And there's no level. They have no moral compunction and no level to which they won't stoop to advance their goal, which is to protect the party. Not even China. Not even the Chinese people. The party. And wrapping your mind around that is a very serious thing because it implicate it has implications for what we do and how we treat them. And it doesn't mean we should have a Cold War. Doesn't mean we should have a hot war.

It doesn't mean we should decouple. It doesn't mean we have to, you know, decouple, you know, that's what you said. Go ahead. I'll drop her. No. Well, that's a different kind of decoupling. This would be a non-consensual decoupling i think hers was like more of a mutual conscious yeah a conscious yeah this would be a an unconscious but so but you know suffice to say that we can't get a divorce we're stuck together we're gonna be living in this world together. OK, us and China. So that just means we have to realize what we're dealing with and treat these guys like the mafia organization that they are. Right. Exactly. With wide eyes, open, open eyes on what we're dealing with. So what's your takeaway? Because I haven't talked

to you since the Fauci emails came out. Yeah. And the reporting, you know, that just it's starting to come out now about how inside the State Department they were very, very worried about gain of function research. And we shouldn't be kicking that. We shouldn't be looking underneath those those tarps because we weren't going to like what we found. What's your take on Fauci and what we've learned over the past couple of months about him? Right. So first question on the State Department. Listen, there were a lot of different covid origin investigations going on during the Trump administration. They weren't always perfectly lashed up with each other. You know, the left hand didn't always know what the right hand was doing. But there was a struggle between the political people who wanted to look into really uncomfortable questions. Like, here's a question. If you're building a bunch of virus labs with the PLA military, well, isn't that necessarily a bioweapons research

program? Which is not a shocking thing to say if you know anything about it, because we have a bioweapons research program. They have a bioweapons research program. The point is that, you know, this is something that was going on in Wuhan near the outbreak. Is that connected to this? Well, that's a really uncomfortable question, right? And so people who are raising that inside Pompeo's State Department, the bureaucrats are like,'t don't ask us that we don't want to know the answer to that you know and sure enough we don't know the answer you know and my point is like i just want to know the answer you know when it comes to fauci you know what the emails show is just that you know what him and a group of people again it wasn't just him because he's sort of like the head of a of a system and the system is actually his his

missionaries his his his you know disciples are all over the world and they're the ones and they built their careers on this idea of scooping up viruses and playing around with them and saying what's what that's their livelihood that's their funding that's their legacy okay and it's all called into question if the lab leak theory is true. Again, we don't know. We should just check it out. Why won't why don't tell me not to check it out. I don't know. You don't know. But if it turns out to be true, that whole system is going to have to totally change. OK. And their careers and legacies go from being the people who predicted pandemics to the people who caused the pandemic, which is definitely not a good look. Now that's huge. That's huge. It's huge. And so this is my way of saying about Anthony Fauci that

I'm not accusing him of doing anything illegal or necessarily against the rules. What I'm saying is that there's a good reason that he's been throwing cold water on the lab leak theory for a year with occasional bits of like, oh like oh sure we should check it out that's gonna be hard i guess we can't do it oh whoa you know what i mean he's playing a game with us where he's and that game is mostly implemented by his minions okay and that's dazic and this guy named kristen anderson who deleted his twitter account did you see this one he was in there he was in the emails this guy kristen andon who's like i don't get me wrong i've been getting harassed by these guys for a year like how dare you talk about the lab leak

theory and this guy was at the was one of them right and he's in the emails telling fauci in january hey this might be an engineered man-made manipulated virus and then he he's on the letter a couple weeks later saying that's a conspiracy theory that's crazy so and so then of course he gets called out on twitter and he deletes a bunch of tweets and then he says oh it auto deleted these tweets which like everyone's like that's bullshit you know what i mean like and then no one believes that then he takes his whole twitter offline and this is this is the kind of shenanigans that are going on and so it's not like fauci did everything he was just sort of like you know the head of a systemigans that are going on. And so it's not like Fauci did everything. He was just sort of like, you know, the head of a system. And a lot of these other guys were telling everyone, including reporters, by the way,

but also including intelligence analysts. Like, think about how crazy this is. I mean, the reporters who got snookered, who got misled by Daszak and these guys, when the IC guys have to go and figure out what's going on with the virus, they go to these same scientists, you know, so they're influencing bad intelligence analysis analysis. But where was the natural skepticism? Where was the IC's intelligence communities, natural skepticism?

They're, they're, they're known for their skepticism. They're conspiracy theorists, you know, that's what that, right. And reporters too. No, no, but I mean, that's how they get dismissed, you know, cause they see a conspiracy around every corner. Why not here when we needed it? What about reporters? You know, we check everything out, right? Your mother loves you. Well, let me check it out. Where was it? Where was that natural skepticism for Daszak and the others who were like, no, no, no, because now we see behind the scenes. They were like, oh, shit, definitely could have come from a lab. Exactly, exactly. And if we were doing an honest look at what happened last year, we would say, okay, well, listen, you know, as it turns out, media organizations are stabbed with human beings and they're flawed and they make mistakes. And let's take a look at that and fix it so it doesn't happen again.

They're too deferential to scientific authorities. Yes, and they had some anti-Trump bias that we have to acknowledge. And by the way, the intelligence community was at war with the Trump administration, too. They didn't want the Trump people using their analysis to get reelected, or at least some of them. And the intelligence community is not a monolith. But, you know, again, because, you know, the intelligence community has a lot of human

beings. They're flawed. They make mistakes. This is a problem. Got to get got to get over the human being thing. Yeah. I mean, but we're professionals, right? Professional journalists know that we're supposed to acknowledge our biases and account for them.

Right. But it's hard. Right. We don't always do it perfectly. Right. And when you combine that with what the group think and the fog of war and the anti-Trump bias and the scientists lying, you could almost see how this got all screwed up. And you could almost forgive all these people for going down the wrong narrative, which is that the lab leak theory is crazy. We shouldn't talk about it. But I can't forgive them because they won't admit. In other words, even now they're defending those positions. Even now they're saying, no, no, no, no. Pompeo was incredible. Therefore, I was right to be wrong. To which I said, no, no, no, you didn't have to take Pompeo's word for you. All you had to do is more reporting. Right. And the only reason that I got it more right than others is because I happen to be writing a book about this called Chaos Under

Heaven. And so I was steeped in the reporting. So I had a lot more reporting. That's why I could sort of see this happening in real time. But that's neither here nor there. To all of you scientists and journalists and intelligence community analysts listening right now, I don't care. I forgive you. OK, it doesn't matter. I don't care what you tweeted. I don't care. Like it doesn't like it doesn't it makes no difference because we all have the same mission, which is to not have another pandemic. So from here on out, let's call a truce and say, hey, let's investigate these labs, even if it's difficult, even if the Chinese Communist Party doesn't like it, even if we don't find a smoking gun. Let's just do that. If we can do that, then maybe we can, you know, rediscover our shared

American patriotism and our shared essential humanity and then protect our public health. So we don't have to do this every year. Otherwise, we're going to have to go out and buy some masks. You mentioned the 9-11 Commission, right? It's like, so we rightfully established this commission to look into how this happened and where we failed and how we could prevent it from happening again. And that was a great thing to do. Over 3,000 people died. 3.7 million people are dead now. Almost 600,000 Americans are dead. The numbers are huge. They dwarf 9-11, not in any way to diminish the horrificness of that attack, but they dwarf it and 600,000 Americans dead. Now this is a, this was a catastrophic failure. If this was a lab leak, it was a catastrophic one

on a level we've never seen before. And if this really was something that was covered up intentionally or totally missed by the media and by people like Fauci and so on, then it's the Chernobyl of public health. We will never look at public health or virology or any of these labs that are across the world the same way again, that procedures will have to change everywhere. Millions of people have died, millions. So this isn't just Fauci playing cute with Rand Paul.

It's far more serious than that. And finally, now the media is starting to get starting to act like they understand those are the stakes. But those are the stakes. Exactly. And thank you for putting it so clearly, because I think a lot of one of the things I think we're seeing right now, actually, is the repoliticization of this issue. In other words, what I think this is my prediction, what you're going to see is like we had like two weeks of like semi and i'm using that word sort of like you know liberally semi-constructive uh conversation about this like hey everybody we should check into these labs and already you could see all the like trump will come out and be like i told you so and then

the new york times is like no it was all trump's fault after all you know what i mean and i see it happening right and i'm like oh my god, we're not going to do this again, are we? We're not going to divide up. Stop it. Lab leak teams and non lab leak teams, are we? Because are we going to let you know what I mean? Because that would mean another year, another year of going down like who was to blame for what? That's why I say like, it's not really it's not about Trump. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you thought Trump was credible or a good president because the virus doesn't know who Trump is. OK, the virus is it's not really it's not about Trump. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if you thought Trump was credible or a good president because the virus doesn't know who Trump is. OK, the virus is it's not a political question. The virus is not a Republican. It's not a Democrat. It kills all of

us. OK, and it will keep killing all of us. And the next pandemic will not discriminate between those people who are pro Trump and anti Trump. So it doesn't matter. We need to investigate all the theories. And my proposal is that Peter Daszak goes and looks in caves in Indonesia for the magical palm civet or pangolin that he thinks exists. You know what I mean? Spend 10 years doing it.

Don't call us. We'll call you. You know what I mean? And meanwhile, somebody else has to look into these labs. Not the best friends of the lab. Not the WHO, because they tried for a year and they screwed it up and they got nowhere. Not the Chinese scientists looking into their own lab that's as some people have suggested because

that's that's crazy right independent investigation and then we got to look into our own labs and that has to be done in public in front of the people and this is the other part of the biden thing they're like we're going to be as transparent as we can no no no no no you have to be as transparent as as as you need to be not as you yeah it's not up to you we're gonna have to have whatever it is on a congress commission a select committee can i tell you something crazy there's a a coronavirus select committee in the house right now they're having hearings and they're not the origin of the coronavirus is not part of their investigation oh stop they're having hearings on

on you know what happened to this shipment of vaccines and you know how did this contract go out in dhs about math was the mass contract properly competed through the gfg through the process that's what they're having hearings about and and every once in a while in one of these hearings as i watch all of them somebody always a republican somebody will be like hey uh since that's what they're having hearings about and and every once in a while in one of these hearings as i watch all of them somebody always a republican somebody will be like hey uh since we have a select committee should we look into the origin anybody want to talk about that the gentleman's time has expired you know what i mean that's what we're so as much progress as we've made we're nowhere okay can you repeat the fact that you just said a minute ago about the amount we're about to devote more money to this type of coronavirus bat research and other gain of function like it's going up?

Sixfold, sixfold. Two hundred million dollars was spent in the USAID predict program. The primary investigator in China, which is like a big part of it, was Dr. Shizhong Li, the Wuhanuhan institute of virology bat woman she was funded by the u.s government not by peter daz getting eco health alliance only but by the u.s agency for international development right to go dig up bats and viruses from all over the wild and play with them now the current plan is for a global global virome project for 1.2 billion dollars and if you just go to the website right now, you'll see it says

our plan is to get 500,000 new viruses that are dangerous to humans and take them back to labs all over the world and see what's what. Does that sound like a good idea before we know? Before we have figured this out, before we even tried to figure it out? Well, and that's the thing. So it's like, let's say we determine somehow, yes, lab leak. I mean, then, of course, that begs the question, like, OK, how? How did it walk out of there? What procedures need to be in place to protect that from ever happening again before you do go back down to the bat caves? Nobody should be touching the bats until we have absolute security that we know.

I was saying this to my husband, Doug. You know, like the IBM clean rooms are more secure than this. When they make the little computer chips, the people are better protected. And they haven't killed 3.7 million people you remember when nbc went to the they're like we got into the lab right and they they send the nbc cameras into the wuhan institute of virology and they're put they put the camera up to the window of the lab right as if that's like you know what i mean like and the inside the lab are the people with like the the nasa spacesuits on they're like oh it looks good to us you know yeah and what i found most shocking about that was that uh they were looking at the wrong lab okay they were they had their they literally actually had their cameras pointed

at a completely different lab they might as well have been across the street okay and the majority of the bat research lab that was done at the wuhan institute was not at the bsl4 super super super super duper lab it was at the bsl3 which is like you know like a college or at the b Institute, was not at the BSL-4 super, super, super, super duper lab. It was at the BSL-3, which is like, you know, like a college, or at the BSL-2, which is like your dentist's office, okay? And so the NBC people go in and they're like, oh, look, oh, looks legit. I don't see any coronavirus leaked notes on the table.

You know, I don't, you know, I guess it's fine. They were at the wrong lab, okay? That's the level of absurdity that's going on in our discourse about this. They're going to stumble upon flow chart on how we did it. Right, right, right. Exactly. And so all I'm saying is that, you know, we have to be realistic. We may not find a smoking gun, but we have to take steps anyway, because if even if we don't know, but it's a possibility, that means the risk is there and we need to mitigate that risk. And no one can deny that now. And we don't mitigate that risk by expanding that research sixfold without any safeguards, without any checks whatsoever, which is which is the current plan, which is exactly what Daszak wants to do, because he would make a ton of money doing that. No, Dasik. I don't want to hear from Dasik anymore. That's that's the guy who was on the WHO commission who it's completely exonerated the Chinese. And and for good reason,

it's a conspiracy theory. He still says the lab leak is a conspiracy theory. I want our audience to know your book is called Chaos Under Heaven. It's well worth your time. This one actually will educate you on how we got here. And of all the brokers out there pushing information on coronavirus and this lab and so on, you're the one I trust. So, Josh Rogin, thank you for your expertise. I have a feeling you'll be back. Thank you for following the story, Meg. Up next, David Marcus of the New York Post, of The Federalist, and author of the new book, Charade, The COVID Lies That Crushed a Nation, will join us on the myths that got us into this mess and prevented us from accepting reality as it unfolded over the past 12 to 18 months. That's next.

Dave, how are you? Doing well, Megan. Thanks for having me on. My pleasure. I love you on Twitter because I feel like you, you're my spirit animal in many ways. You say so many things that I haven't found the words to say. And, you know, one of the things that's upsetting me now is that, yes, I'm pro-vaccine. I am not anti-vaccine. I got the vaccine.

I'm a New Yorker like you. New York got hit hard. But I am not giving my vaccine to my little kids, the vaccine. That is where I personally draw the line. It's just not an emergency for them. It hasn't been tested enough on them. And the news now is that, yay, this is how it's being celebrated. Yay. Moderna is already testing varying doses of its vaccine in children ages six months through 11, and that they are expecting that these vaccines are going to be, quote, available for children as young as six months old come the fall, which, you know, as well as I do, will translate into your kid doesn't get to do anything unless you put it in him.

And it's it's needless. You know, I so what confused me about the situation with the vaccine was I interviewed Dr. Monsef Slaoui, who was the head of Operation Warp Speed, a year ago, almost, back in July. And I very specifically asked him, right, because I come from a theater background, so I asked him, you know, once people have these vaccines, what about Broadway? Can we go to a packed Broadway show without masks? I mean, he didn't skip a beat. He said, yes, of course. And then all of a sudden people are getting vaccinated and we're hearing, well, keep your mask on. We're still not sure if you

can go back to places. And it was really out of nowhere. And all of this has just been meant to keep people afraid so that they'll do what they're told. And there are very few things that are as anti-American as that. Yes. So you're in your new book, which is called Charade. It's a great title. The COVID Lies That Crushed a Nation. Great subtitle. You say part of like there was this big, we're all in it together. We're in it together. And you write part of us being in it together, it turned out, was for us to accept without question what the leading or chosen scientists were telling us. Dr. Fauci, and to a lesser extent, Dr. Birx, were becoming folk heroes, never to be doubted. How wrong that was. was? That was a disaster. And I hold myself somewhat accountable because I'll be honest, in the first weeks of the lockdowns, I had some doubts. And I was talking to other journalists, sort of back channeling with other journalists who also had some doubts. And I'll only speak for myself, but I was worried. I was worried that if I didn't appear to be concerned enough about the virus itself, that I could get people hurt through my work. And in retrospect, that was a huge mistake. My job as a columnist was to tell what I believe the truth to be. And at least for a few weeks, I didn't do that. And the whole country didn't do

that. And yeah, I mean, you remember it. You remember if you questioned it at all, you were killing grandma and you were some horrible person. And I had friends, it's easier for me, my friend Bethany Mandel was another journalist like myself. She's, she's, she's wonderful. She's a former colleague of mine at the Federalist and, you know, it's so much worse for women. Um, as, as you know, well, um, you know, on Twitter and on all these places, um, you know, women just get, get so sort of brutally attacked. And I watched this happen to all these people who, who really were just asking basic questions. Like, when can my kid go back to school? Like, you have to be allowed to ask that without being accused of being a monster.

So, yeah, that was that was a huge mistake. Handing handing the keys to the government over to experts. There's a quote that I have in the book from George William Russell, the Irish writer from the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. And he said, experts should be on tap, not on top. And that's what we didn't do. Yes, of course, we needed the experts to give us information. But the experts didn't know anything about unemployment or the restaurant industry or education or suicide rates. And we just put all of that to one side as if it wasn't happening and had this myopic focus on stop the spread, stop the spread. And we destroyed a lot of lives. Well, and I think you pointed out that one of one of the worst parts of COVID is that it happened

during an election year when it was just guaranteed to be manipulated, lied about, exaggerated, downplayed. It was a like, who do I trust type moment that really mattered. The interest on both sides became so perverse because obviously, I mean, you know, I'm old enough to remember a time when this really would have become a we're all in this together moment, when all sides would have come together and said, we need to tackle this problem. People use the example of 9-11. There's others. of Biden's tweet after Trump closed the border with China. And what people pay attention to in that tweet was that Biden called Trump xenophobic. He didn't exactly call the policy xenophobic. He was very careful and left himself some wiggle room. But the other thing that he said in that tweet that got less attention was he accused Donald Trump of fear mongering. Now, that's very interesting because at the same time, Donald Trump of fear mongering. Now that's very interesting

because at the same time, Donald Trump is being accused of downplaying the virus. So how could he have been downplaying the virus and fear mongering at the same time? And really the answer to that question is that what any responsible politician would try to do, and I don't think anybody did this very successfully, was say, be honest to the American people. Yes, this is dangerous. We're taking a lot of precautions, but don't freak out. Let's be adults about this. And we weren't adults and we failed our children. Yeah. It was shutting down, like the Chinese travel ban was the best thing Trump did. I mean, in retrospect, this thing for which he took so much shit was like, that was actually really important. It was, but I actually think that he focused too much on that because, you know, the first,

every chapter in my book kind of breaks down a myth, right? We're all in this together was one of them that the idea that saying Chinese viruses was racist was another one. The very first myth that I tackle is the idea that like the month of January was wasted, that the Trump administration wasn't doing anything. In April of last year, I obtained from Health and Human Services a document, the whole thing's in my book, it's 12 pages long in the book. And it's just day by day in the month of January, what HHS and CDC and all these people were doing, we were starting work on a vaccine before China had reported one death.

Now, the Trump administration did a terrible job communicating this. There's a really interesting quote from Trump in September. I believe it was September when he was asked to grade himself on the handling of the virus. And I think it's no surprise on the handling, he gave himself an A. But then he said something interesting. He said, on public relations, I give myself a D plus. Now he put a caveat, he said, you know, and that's because we have fake news. But even with the caveat for Donald Trump to give himself a D plus in anything, kind of shows you, right, that he knows

there was something wrong here. And yeah, we didn't get that story. And so instead of Joe Biden and the Democrats saying, hey, look, we're making some progress, we're working on this, it turned into this complete lie that nothing had been done. And oh, we were so unprepared. The New York Times ran a piece in February, a glowing piece about how well prepared we were for a pandemic. And the reason I wrote the book is because all this stuff just got memory hole as if it never happened. Remember when Governor Kemp was committing human sacrifice in Georgia by opening the state? Oh, that's right. That's right. Although, you know, as you point out in the book as well, you were allowed to go out and vote in the Super Tuesday primaries, according to the Democrats. That was fine. Go and vote in person because we need those

votes. And of course, you were definitely allowed to protest BLM and mourn RBG and celebrate Biden's. Those are all fine. I mean, that that's just an easy target because their hypocrisy is so clear. But I love the chapter on Cuomo because it's not just about the state of New York where we both live. He became a national figure. I mean, people were talking about making him the Democratic nominee, even though he didn't have his hat in the ring for that contest. I don't think after Fauci, no one was lionized more than Andrew Cuomo. And yes, tone, it was good. His personality seemed matter of fact, he seemed like he was sharing us, you know, with us real information, good or bad in the early days, it was like, okay, a truth teller, that was the

impression, like our governor, he's going to get us through it. And man, talk about a fall from Greece. I mean, remarkable, right? And there was a point come last fall, especially after New York Attorney General Letitia James, who's a very progressive Democrat, began exposing some of this nursing home stuff, where the corporate media had no choice but to acknowledge that they had gotten this wrong. But there were people, you know, I interviewed Janice Dean for the book, and people like her were pointing this out months and months earlier. I mean, people who were paying attention in New York knew that this lionization was ill-placed, and not just Cuomo, but Newsom and Whitmer, right?

I mean, Whitmer was going to be the vice presidential. All these hypocrites, by the way, all these people you mentioned who violated the policies they set for the rest of us. Yeah, but you want to know what's interesting? Like the hypocrisy bothered me. And yeah, you know, politicians are hypocrites, but there was something deeper than the hypocrisy when you saw Nancy Pelosi getting her blowout

or when you saw Gavin Newsom at French Laundry. What struck me more than the hypocrisy was a political lesson that when government tries to enforce laws or edicts that run so counter to human nature, or at least American human nature, they're not even capable of abiding by them themselves. And that should really tip us off that our society was not really able to do these things. You know, one, one story I tell in the book is a few years ago being in Japan. Um, and I was walking over to like the Imperial palace or something. And I got to a little two way street straight as a pencil. I could see back and forth. There were no cars

coming, but the sign said, don't walk. And there were about 40 people on my side of the street, maybe 40 on the other, and nobody moved. And I'm a New Yorker. We have manifest destiny of the intersection. There's no cars. We go. And I'm standing there like, are we really doing this? And they were. I mean, nobody moved until that. And I was already smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk, which was illegal. So I don't want to draw attention to myself. But I thought about that when we started having these lockdowns and everyone said, oh, why can't we be more like Taiwan or something? Because we're not. We're not. That's not what our society is. So not only were the American people, for the most part, not able to follow these rules, but Newsom couldn't, and Cuomo couldn't, and Whitmer couldn't. It was absurd.

We're not, but we're becoming. That's the thing that's so disturbing is how easily we submitted and continue to submit to these draconian measures by these politicians who think they're Jesus. They're not mayors or governors and you know like the the the leaning into into fear is just i mean just just this week there was a there was a piece uh was it the washington post where they're saying there is no return to normal they were talking about for people who have lost loved ones to covid there's no return for normal and the cdc saying you don't have to wear masks outside was a punch in the stomach and it was the reopening of a wound. Talk about getting the story wrong. We understand if you lost somebody, you're mourning.

Of course we understand that. That doesn't make taking the mask mandate down a punch in the stomach and the reopening. What are they talking about? No mask is normal. That's the default. Yeah, but something happened with the masks. The masks were supposed to be a tool. And what happened was they turned into a symbol. And the reason that matters is that tools are very easily discarded. If you're doing a project around your house and you finish the project, you put the hammer or the saw away without a second thought. It's a tool. You don't need it anymore. The mask for too many people became a symbol and symbols are different. Symbols become a part of your identity. Symbols become a

part of your self work. And this is what started to happen with the mask. And we know that because we have these people now who say, you know, I'd like to take it off, but I don't want people to think I'm a Trump supporter. That's crazy. No, I don't think that. I just think you're an idiot. Right. But I put that at the feet of Joe Biden and a lot of people, but specifically Joe Biden, who performed the mask. I mean, what was it, a month and a half ago when he was on that Zoom call with world leaders and he had a mask on? That's not exhibiting good behavior. That's exhibiting paranoid and cultish behavior. And it rubbed off. And we're living with the consequences right now. And then they wonder why people don't want to get the vaccines. It's like, why would I? It's

experimental. You rushed it through. And my life doesn't change once I get it. Forget it. I'm not doing that. They set all the wrong examples. And don't forget that you had Andrew Cuomo saying, well, I might not let the vaccine into New York, right? But before the election, of course, right? Because nobody wanted to acknowledge that this might work because that might help Trump. So Cuomo said, no, I have to have my own experts look at the vaccine. What did Biden say? Biden said, I'll take the vaccine when Dr. Fauci says it's OK. Why? Oh, my gosh. Why? Right. Not the FDA, not a scientific consensus. When the oracle of HHS, Dr. Fauci tells me it's OK, I'll take it. That's a bizarre thing for a president of the United States to say. Yeah. Kamala Harris said the same, remember?

She's like, I don't trust Donald Trump. Like, oh, way to set the example. And then they scratched their head saying, don't understand why we're not at the vaccination rate that we wanna be. And they're trying to backfill it with our kids because they created this hesitancy among a lot of people. Now they wanna get their numbers up. So they're like, give me your six month old.

Well, no, I won't. And yet I can see the clash coming because the kids need to go to school and they control the schools. And they're going to say that we can't send our kids back to school unless we jab them with this experimental vaccine that is not justified on an emergency basis for children. They're going to have to be careful, though, because one of the things, you know, we've seen this rise in homeschooling. We've seen this rise in interest in, you know, private and parochial schools, not just because of this stuff, but also because of the craziness of critical race theory and the because like you know randy weingarten and joe biden saying recently that they were going to start you know a crusade to get the schools open

a crusade against who but you know you were you weren't the people who said no like who are you crusading against here um so i think they realize that when they go too far parents in the united states say you know what maybe there's another option for my kid. And, you know, if there's you know, if there's a silver lining here and I don't think there are many, that might be one. So I they better watch because if they go too far, there will be a backlash. Well, I mean, you're right, because we we still have our masks on. I mean, people are starting to take them off in New York, but inside virtually all the stores, it's still required. And not just New York, but blue states in general are not letting go of the masks or and some are talking about mandatory vaccines.

And I know you call it mask zealotry that that we've slipped into. And even here in New York, they said this is actually from The New York Post. Cuomo said that the covid restrictions will be lifted when 70% of New Yorkers are vaxxed. And so we'll get rid of restrictions on capacity limits and social distancing and disinfection protocols and health screenings and so on. Guess where we are right now? 68.6%. Could we round it? Yeah. And the key to what you just said there is Cuomo says. So, you know, early last summer, as I was covered, because I wrote the book and covered the story at the same time, right?

So I'm covering the story. And I called up Joe Borelli, who's a Staten Island city councilman. Some of your listeners might know him. He's on TV quite a bit and stuff. And he had been a state assemblyman. And I called him up. I said, Joe, how's the state being governed right now? And he said, David, he said, it's a, it's, it's, it's Cuomo's dictatorship. He said, the state legislature, uh, handed emergency power over to Cuomo, uh, and Cuomo can do whatever he wants. And I said, has this ever happened before for this period of time? And at the time, I was only talking about

a couple of months. And he said he didn't know what happened in World War II. But as far as he knew, no, this was completely unprecedented. And I think maybe the most underreported story of the entire pandemic is that in so many states, we've had governors ruling basically as kings for a year. And part of the problem with this is governors don't do constituent services, right? There were last summer, there were a bunch of, you know, a couple dozen restaurants in Staten Island that really wanted to reopen. And these poor guys, they did a lawn sign campaign, right? They're fighting against big tech. They're fighting against Cuomo.

This is all they could do. Now, if the state legislature had been running things, if they could get 500 people together to go up to Albany, Cuomo doesn't care. You get 500 people to go in front of a state assemblyman's office on a weekday, that gets attention, right? That's why we have a legislature, because these people are accessible. And that didn't, that just didn't happen. There was no one for us to go to. And really, we can never let that happen again. And I mean, it's scary. Again, that's the idea that my state has been has been run by one man for an entire year. You know, we need to talk about that more.

And he's not a good man. This is not a good person. But he isn't. Even if he was. No, but I think he is. Yes, we should. We should look at Pennsylvania because they just they became the first in the nation to curb their governor's emergency powers. They approved constitutional amendments saying you can't do this anymore, that you can't you can't have a governor just extend his in and have more power over disaster declarations and decide whether, you know, whether this is justified and whether whatever the emergency is, a pandemic or something else. We need more of that to happen in these states because we ceded too much.

And by the way, here in New York, not only was Cuomo signing orders to send a bunch of COVID positive patients back into the nursing homes, killing probably more than 10,000 seniors as a result of those orders. But now we know it was, oh, no one can get COVID tests except if your last name is Cuomo. And make sure you go out to the Hamptons to take care of my loser brother, Chris. Make sure he gets tested. Make sure he gets all the white glove treatment while he's pretending to emerge from his basement in some theater for a scene. I mean, just the Cuomo brother routine. There was an article in National Review just a week ago with Charles Cook, who I love, saying the guy, Chris Cuomo, must have the corporate offices laced with dynamite, he said, because he said, what else could explain their eternal tolerance for being embarrassed and degraded by this man? His ratings stink. His insights are

vacuous. His conduct is a stain on the like. Seriously, both of them have taken a massive hit. Yeah. And that was obviously pure performance. I mean, I remember when when Cuomo was doing his show from the basement. I mean, you and I have both done enough TV to know that if CNN wanted Chris Cuomo's show to look something like normal, there was obviously a way that they could have done that. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is eventually, you know, you couldn't, you know, normally when you do like a TV hit or pre-pandemic, they'd send a car for you, you go to the studio, you go do the hit, they send you back. So they stopped doing that. And they sent these sort of cool sprinter vans with little mobile studios in it. And I noticed that, you know, Fox News was very quick to adopt this because

they wanted a normal look, right? They wanted this to look like TV had always looked. CNN was sort of somewhere in the middle. MSNBC, it was like they wanted people to look like they were in a hostage video. Why? And the reason why is because that sends a very powerful message that no, things are not back to normal. You're still watching our guests on grainy Zoom feeds. So all of that stuff, the TV ads, right? Like, all of these things were a performance of the pandemic. And that was really troubling to watch that theater go on. As much as I love theater, I didn't love that theater. Well, that was the now famous Rand Paul, Dr. Fauci exchange where Rand was saying, why would you wear a mask after you've either had COVID or been vaccinated? That's just theater, isn't it? And Fauci said no. And then later, you know, within a week, Fauci admitted, yeah, you don't really need your I know who said this. And I've been saying it privately to my friends all along that the sort of fun, I don't know,

message mask was a bridge too far for you. I 100% Dave, I was like, my friends laugh because my close girlfriends all got like, they have sparkly rhinestones on their masks. They have fun things that keep them around their necks at all time. I'm like, I frankly wear the arm breast mask. They're an advertiser, the cloth mask or whatever, you know, the medical sort of mask that you can get at the drugstore or the arm breast, what have you. I refuse to make a fashion statement out of it. For me, it was a personal revolt against leaning into the masking. Oh, I look, I love the Brooklyn Nets, you know, and they're having a great playoff run. But, you know, I'll rock a James Harden jersey, but I'm not putting on a Brooklyn Nets mask.

And, you know, frankly, when I pick my son up from school, the first thing I do is say, take your mask off. Because I know how easy it is. The moment I describe in the book, I was it was a little before Election before election day and I was covering Pennsylvania with my colleague, Chris Bedford. And we were about to have dinner at the hotel. And I sat down and I forgot to take my mask off. And after like a minute or two, either he reminded me or I. And I said to myself, wow, I just forgot that I was even wearing this thing. I never want that to happen again. Because again, it's a tool, right? It's nothing more than that. And for that moment, I knew that in my own mind, this had become something more. This had become a part of me in a way that made me deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds. Thankfully, school's ending now, but it's been absurd. I was just telling my team that my daughter, that her little fourth grade classmates and she, in their free time, decided to put on the play Hamilton. They learned Hamilton. And they were singing the songs.

Yardley was Aaron Burr. It was really sweet. And their free time, when they're out, they call it on terrace, they were learning the songs and singing. And the music teacher, the music teacher came over to them and say, and they had masks on outdoors while they're practicing, that they weren't allowed to sing. They had to whisper. They had to whisper Hamilton so that they didn't spread COVID. This happened. It's unbelievable.

I mean, if I hear or read one more person tell me, you know, kids are tougher than we think, my head's going to explode. You know, this became clear to me last Halloween. I had picked my son's 11. He was 10 at the time. And I had picked him up from music school in the late afternoon, and we were walking back home.

And there was no trick-or-treating. I live in a very residential neighborhood in Brooklyn, southern Brooklyn. And, you know, some people had left bowls of candy on the stoop, which was very nice. But there was no trick-or-treating. Governor Cuomo said it wasn't allowed. Right. And my son looks up at me and he goes, dad, you know, it sucks that there's no trick or treating. And I said to him, yeah, you know, that, that does suck. I think, you know, by next year, things will be back to normal, but yeah, you know, that sucks. And I, you know, I, I, I put that on social media. It was, it was on Facebook where I have a lot of

progressive, a lot of sort of pro lockdown friends. And almost immediately there was this backlash of like, Dave, why do you always make it seem so bad? It's not that bad. Why do you always have the heart? And I was like, Whoa, guys, this is a 10 year old who wants to go trick or treating. Like, do you hear yourselves? That's what's normal. I don't think they did. Yes. That's what's normal. But this became, again,

this became such a part of these people's lives. And I think in a country where so few people have religious faith, where so few people sort of like, you know, go to church and have these things, this became very, very important to people. And, you know, one of the big disconnects, they couldn't understand why so many of us were so upset about not being able to go to church. You know, I'm a Catholic. So for me, having to go months and months and months without, you know, taking the Eucharist, you know, to a lot of people, they're like, you know, who cares, right? And they'd always say, well, you know, if there's a God, I'm sure that God would prefer that you be safe and keep others safe than actually, you know, go to church or take the

Eucharist. And I, you know, I wouldn't say these people like, do you understand that for 2000 years, the Catholic church has been debating this? I mean, the early Christians didn't stay home and stay safe. They got thrown to the lights. But you know as well as I do, in our media class, that's not important. And they don't get it. They don't understand why so many people were so hurt by the fact that they couldn't go to church. Yeah. No, it's like, let me put it in terms that you can understand. Imagine there's a BLM rally and you're not allowed to go.

How do you think you'd feel? This is how people feel in the Catholic church when they can't go to mass and not just in the Catholic church because it went beyond that, but that's their religion. Now, I could spend all day with you. I cannot let you go without talking about your love and mine of Morrissey. I didn't know what a big fan you were of Morrissey, but I see you tweet out his lyrics all the time. I'm in love with Morrissey. He's like a life changing artist and actually somebody who's kind of been demonized and not canceled.

But he is somebody who's he's not politically correct to like. You can't cancel him. You can't. And it's one of the really glorious things about Morrissey. It's like you try to cancel Morrissey. And like, even if you do like convince, first of all, like his big fan base is Gen Xers. And we don't do a whole lot of that to begin with. But even if you do like get some people to dislike him, like all of a sudden, like out of nowhere, he's got this like gigantic following in Mexico and Japan and just all over the world. Like I didn't know that you were a big Morrissey fan, but sometimes when it comes up, it's rare that people go, oh, yeah, no, I kind of like Morrissey. It's usually like, yeah, like, oh, I love Morrissey. And he's you know, I think he's a great singer. And, you know, obviously, Johnny Marr is a great guitar player with the Smiths and Bosbor is great.

But really, he's an enormously talented lyricist. And, you know, he dips back into the history of English literature so much, Irish literature. And, yeah, there's a lot of times in my life where I haven't felt great. And this will sound weird to people, but as mopey and depressing as he can be, there's always a light at the tunnel and he always makes me smile. So I'm glad to know you're a big fan. Yeah, I've been, you know, since I was a teenager, I had my big Morrissey posters on the wall. And yeah, he's my guy. I don't find him depressing at all. I just I find him meaningful. And I'm always moved by when I listen to his songs. And there are some that are very

upbeat. I love sing your life that gets your toes tapping. There's a rockabilly version, just YouTube, like sing your life rockabilly. There's a rockabilly version that's really like, I mean, the song the single itself of kill uncle is great. But this is a lot of fun, too. I'm writing it down right now. I always laugh because that's all I play over the single itself off Kill Uncle is great, but this is a lot of fun, too. I'm writing it down right now. I always laugh because that's all I play over the summer at my house in New Jersey at the Shore. And people are like, would you get out of, you know, would you get at least like the 21st century? I'm like, screw you. Go to another house.

Well, that's another thing we have in common because I love the Jersey Shore. And whenever people knock Jersey, you know, that's always my first line. You know, my dad grew up in Asbury Park, and I spent a lot of time down the Jersey Shore. So yeah, the Jersey Shore, Marcy and a Wawa hoagie, and I'm good all day. You know why? Because we're a man and woman of the people. Because we understand when we came and I do think it's it's I'm joking, but not really. Because I think one of the reasons that you've been such a successful journalist journalist and your columns resonate so strongly. And one of the reasons I've done well in this industry is because I never forgot who I was.

You didn't either. You never lost touch with the people and, you know, like your listeners, your readers, the people who are following you. And too many people have, you know, like that was certainly my experience. For example, when I went to the Today Show, they had been basking in sort of the accolades of millions of dollars and the bright lights for too long. And it manifested in the journalism. And the secret, I think, to people like us is that that didn't happen.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot about what being a columnist is because I haven't, you know, I've only been in journalism for, you know, five or six years, only like three or four full time. And so when I realized I was a columnist, I was like, okay, what's the job here? And a columnist is a really unique type of journalist in that your job is to see through the eyes of the people and to speak with the voice of the people in a way that a reporter's isn't, right? A reporter's really there to say, this is what it is. It's not about what you think. It's about, this is a columnist. And when you think of people like

Jeremy Breslin and John Cass out in Chicago, the really good columnists, they're able to do that. The best email, the second best email I ever get is if someone emails me and says, what you wrote is something that I've been thinking, but I haven't been able to express it. The best email I get is you wrote what I've been thinking and I was afraid to say it. And I think as a journalist, if you can tap into that, if you can find something that a lot of people are thinking, but they're not sure if they're allowed to say it. That's a column you should definitely be writing. So true. I'm sort of in this weird hybrid place now, you know, because I used to do all straight news and now in podcasting, it's definitely more opinion than I would have done before.

But I like it. And I do love that feeling because when you hear people say that they're afraid, people in our industry in particular, even media people say that they're afraid. You can tell they are. They don't want to talk about something or they're quick to apologize. I think, remember what it was like to be able to say what is real about a group like Black Lives Matter, for example, and not have to worry, you know, let the chips fall where they may. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And look, I think what we've learned over the past few years, especially during the era of Trump, is that this notion of objective journalism to begin with

is a little dicey. I mean, when you go back to the history of journalism, the concept of objective journalism is really like an invention of the early and mid 20th century when you had like the big three TV networks and you had a lot of gatekeepers, right? And it was objective in a sense, but on the other hand, you didn't report what JFK was up to, right? Yes, right. So the gatekeeper said, this is okay, this is not okay. And I think we're getting back to a position where, listen, you know what you're getting from CNN or the New York Times as opposed to Fox News or the Federalist. Nobody's under any illusion that any of these places are straight down the middle. And I think ultimately, it's because straight down the middle is a little

bit of a myth. Yeah, well, I think the goal is to find someone who is fair, right, who will treat the arguments fair, who will bring you the arguments from the other side in a way that is not a straw man, you know, so you can actually learn. But yeah, but owning one's bias, I feel like that's a new thing. We were all saying the news media could be trusted. Fox News wasn't saying that about the others, but we were pretending that CNN was unbiased for a very long time. And one of the gifts of President Trump is that's no longer, that's over. Wait, can I ask you, what were you doing before the last five or six years? I was in theater. So I my wife and I had a little theater company that we ran here in New York.

And, you know, I was a theater actor and stage manager. And, you know, if there was a thing to do in New York theater at some point between like 2000 and 2015, I did it. So, yeah, I was I was very immersed. Yeah, I was very immersed in the theater world. And now I'm immersed in a very different kind of theater world. But you know, not as different as you might think, you know, it's all storytelling. And I don't mean that in the sense of fabrication. I mean that in the sense of it's all telling people, you know, something about the world. That's what the job is. So, yeah, it's been an interesting transition.

Well, if you're looking to get back into it and you need a troop of 10-year-old girls who are really good at Alexander Hamilton, I can set you up. Well, my son loves it, too. So, you know, he might want to be Burr, but, you know, they can work that out. We could use some testosterone. It's all girls. There you go. That's good. Great. All right.

Short of that, everybody has got to support Dave's current career. And that means go out and buy his book right now. Charade is the name of the book. Charade. The COVID Lies Crushed a Nation. Such a pleasure talking to you, David Marcus. All the best. Thank you, Megan.

Great, great show. Don't miss our next show because it's got Jason Reilly. I've been talking about him since we launched, have I not? His book, Please Stop Helping Us. He came on my show seven years ago to discuss it. And I mean, I feel like I know it cover to cover now. He's brilliant. He's fearless. He's a Wall Street Journal columnist, among other things, Manhattan Institute fellow, but really fearless when it comes to the discussion of race. And you will hear truths from him that you will hear nowhere else. And if you don't already love him, you will by the end of our next show. So go ahead and subscribe. Download the show. Give me five stars and send me your thoughts on today's program. I'd love to hear them in our Apple reviews. Helps our show and helps me figure out where your heads are as well. We'll talk soon. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat

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