Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio ad staff, give you, guys, the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, Let's get to the show. All right,
Good morning, Welcome to Counterpoints. S'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Jashinsky. We've got a lot to get into today. Former President Trump might go ahead and get himself arrested either later today or later this week. We've got real safety legislation that we're going to get into. Google's coming out with this chat GPT, huge news on the China and Russia front as the leaders met this week. There's
a lot to breakdown when it comes to that. For President Biden's first woke veto the Federal Reserve meets later today. For a long time, the Fed had been expected to hike rates by another half point, but the kind of tech bros taking down Silicon Valley Bank has trimmed the sales on the aspirations the FED a little bit. People are expecting now it'll be a quarter point increase, which actually amounts to, you know, billions of dollars in extra
kind of easing flowing into Silicon Valley. So job well done. They taking that bank down. A job brownie. And you know, there was some speculation that perhaps they wouldn't raise rates at all, but then there was reverse speculation saying, oh, but then that will panic people because I only thinking, wait a minute, if the FED isn't raising rates at all, how scared is the FED about the what do they know? And then it sparks, it sparks a run. So it is difficult. You have to you know, it is very
difficult dealing with humans. You're what you're saying is that you're glad you're not Powell. Well it's probably a lot of fun though, right, just to have the fate of the world at your fingertips. Right, No, it sounds exhilarating, No, sure it is, so go to wait for that. Speaking of things being exhilarating, big news in the Republican twenty twenty four presidential campaign front as Ron DeSantis run to Sanctimonius run. You could go down the list is talking
about President Trump. I wouldn't say he's going on offense. I wouldn't say he's even hitting back that hard. He's been pressed by Piers Morgan in a new interview that's set to air on Thursday on Fox Nation. We have the first clip to show you right here. Take a look. He is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far? Is it run to sanctimonious or meat bull rong? Well? I can't even he went off meat bull wrong, but I can't. I don't know how to spell the sanctimonious.
I don't really know what it means. But you know, I kind of like it's long, it's got a lot of valve. I mean, so we go with that. That's fine. You know, you call me, you call me whatever you want. I mean, just as long as you, you know, also call me a winner, Okay. Right. The reason is that he's not pushing back too hard or going on offense is because Piers Morgan really is trying to pull this stuff out of him. It doesn't look like Ron DeSantis is super eager to be talking about Donald Trump, but
he is. He is. This is the preview that we have of the De Santas versus Trump campaign. This interview came a couple of hours after Dy Sanctimonious had made his public comments making fun of Trump for having an affair with a porn star. So he was kind of worked up when he sat down peers. But this is my favorite kind of populism, when a Harvard and Yale graduate pretends that he doesn't know what words mean and
that there are lots of vowels. He said he did not as spelled to Sanctimonious, which, to be fair, that's species because Donald Trump spells things in many different ways. My favorite was when somebody spelled little Marco with t's and trump correct and no, no no, no, there's d's. It's a little little Marco simply correct. So Desanta's has said, you know, he was asked what the differences are between him and Donald Trump. He says, well, I think there
are a few things. The approach to COVID was different. I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he got way too big for his breeches, and I think he did a lot of damage. And then he went on to say, you know, we don't have if you bring your own agenda into my administration, you're gone. The way we run the government, I think is no daily drama, focuses on the big picture and puts points on the board.
And I think that's very important. Let's put the country first rather than worry about any personalities or any type of individual. Again, I don't think Rodes Saints is super excited to have to make this contrast. I don't think either of them believes it's ideal that the other is in the race. But and Rodasants has been really careful about needling Trump, looking like he's needling Trump. This to me, the big takeaway from this is that he's very close
to an announcement. That would be my perspective. Yeah, and he told he told Pierce Morgan, how does he keep getting these interviews? By the way, he's amazing. He just asks about I'll so, Yeah, he told he told Pierce Morgan this interview which will air tomorrow on what is Fox Nation or something like that, which is their attempt like the CNN plus effects successful. It's unthirsty. People are partying with their money apparently for Fox Nation. He said,
stay tuned. So basically he's he's going to unless unless he backs out at the last minute, but in some ways he's just no match for Trump when it comes to these insults. You watch at the end of that clip, he says, I don't care what you call me, just
call me a winner. So cringe. Yeah. Really, but this is why nobody is a match for Trump, and I do think DeSantis is smart enough to have recognized that for months and months and months, which is why I think the big takeaway from this interview is really that, I mean, we kind of knew what this was going to look like with the contrast thattas DeSantis's vantage point at what the contrast is. We knew that what that was going to look like the broad outlines of it.
But I think the big takeaway here is that he's very close to making an official presidential announcement because he spent so much time avoiding exactly this, and again I don't I think he's not eager to do it in the same way that Trump is eager to go after him and crystln Zacer talked about some of the very interesting ways that's unfolding yesterday, But I think he knows
that nobody can really take on Donald Trump. We saw all of these candidates fall one after one after one, after thinking they had finally they'd figure out the way to go mono and mona with Donald Trump, and it never panned out. So I think that's where you're seeing caution on DeSantis's part. But the fact that he finally took on some of these questions instead of deflecting them, which is when he had. It's not as though he hasn't gotten these questions in the past, he's just deflected them.
So the fact that he's taken them, I think means he's about to make his announcement right and to show how like poorly matchis in this kind of fight. Trump responded to him, I don't know if we have this, but he on his little truth social he writes back, and this is just a perfect way that just Trump ups it to nuclear left. He says, Ronda sanctimonious will probably find out about false accusations. Wait, how would we say about false accusation? I can't do it, Trump, false accusations?
How's your Trump? It's a little better sometime in the future, as he gets older, wiser and better known, when he's unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that are underage or possibly a man parenthesis exclamation point. I'm sure he will want to fight these misfits just like I do. So it's like, Okay, you don't like to name the sanctimonious, how about I accuse you of partying with underage men, of being gay? Yeah? This is so
classic Donald Trump. But where do you go from there? Like when he's ratcheted up there? Right? Yeah, Well, call me whatever you want. Make sure you call me a winner, make sure you call me straight. Is where it's going next. So, speaking of where things are going next, Donald Trump, we have all been waiting with beta breath in the media and in the country at large for a possible arrest if he is indicted by a grand jury in New York. That could come today. Reports seem to be suggesting that
it actually will happen next week. Ryan, just on the timeline, let's pause here for a second. Donald Trump is the one who gave us the Tuesday Day, which was yesterday, but that obviously didn't pan out, and now looks like they heard from their last witness yesterday, which is why some people expect it could happen today. There are reports from the Daily Mail that it's going to happen next week. What do you make of this timeline? When do you think it's likely if he is indicted, that an arrest
takes place. And it seems like Trump's intel on a Tuesday arrest was coming from the fact that Monday was supposed to be a last like you said, witness, then the grand jury has to vote. There's twenty three members on a grand jury. As long as there's a majority vote, then a sealed indictment is produced. But then Bragg has to make decisions from there, like it's not a fata complete at that point that he's indicted, and it's not a fatal complete actually that Bragg will ask for an indictment.
He could still decide, you know what, I'm actually not going to go forward with this. There's some reporting that there could be another witness that comes before the grand jury this afternoon, but there is speculation that there will be a vote this afternoon. But like you said, that
doesn't immediately lead to, you know, Trump getting cuffed. Trump has said that he will fly up from mar A Lago turned himself in, and then you'll go through this entire ritual of doing the fingerprints and the mug shot which to me is just so strange that you would need a mug shot of former President Donald Trump. I think the government has a photo of him. I'm also not sure he's that much of a flight risk. He's
the most recognizable man on the planet. Fingerprints, I suppose then you can like check to see if he was handling these documents or something. But Bragg's case is all about the Stormy Daniels. While you still have the Document's case ongoing. There was a ruling in that just yesterday afternoon. They may be back in court on that one today. That's in federal court. And then you have the Georgia
grand jury right that is still pursuing charges. And to me, the Georgia case is the only one that I get really interested in because it's about something substantial. It's about the stolen election. It's about Trump's effort to kind of
steal it back to trigger ultimately January sixth. So that to me is something that is fair for Democrats to contest and for prosecutors to go after because it's so fundamental to the core value of democracy in the United States to invent kind of a rationale to say that, well, this payoff to this porn star used campaign funds, and you you should have listed it in your billing records as this expense, but you actually listed it as this
expense to Michael Cohen. So we're going to combine all these and call it a low level felony when John Edwards was able to beat probably an even worse example of it. That doesn't clear the bar for me, and neither does like the document stuff. But that's that's because I'm more of a civil liberties person that thinks that there's too much that's overclassified and you have to kind of see what the documents are, so like somewhat of
an open lind there. But yeah, where do you I mean, on principle, I think nobody's above the law, and if you've got the goods on a foreign president, then you should prosecute them. And you know, as you know, growing up, we were always taught like Richard Nixon wasn't above the law, except he did get a pardon, and that's there's something beautiful about that fact that nobody is above the law. At the same time, you don't want to gin up a case, right just be just for politics, just to
prove nobody's above the law. I mean, if we want to start this game, you can do this. Show me the person, I'll show you the crime thing, depending on who's in charge of which prosecutor's office, who's in charge of the FBI at any given time. And by the way, we saw this with the raid on Trump, that was framed by the media and the political establishment as a clear cut criminal case, and then when it came to
Joe Biden, it was not. You know, it came to Joe Biden in a similar situation, that same framing had just kind of tapered off. So I agree. I mean, I think anytime somebody is doing something wrong, whether it's unethical or unlawful, that is entirely fair game for people to investigate, and it's entirely a fair game for the media to scrutinize. But to ratchet something up to felony level is a really, really dangerous game. When I first saw this news, I think it was like last week
that we were heading in this direction. I don't know about you, but my stomach just dropped and there were these immediate you know, Trump talked about people taking the streets and protesting, and Republicans were really freaked out. About that and said, you know, basically, they're trying to ratchet this up, make these heighten the tensions and heighten the contradictions, and get you really ready to do something that's going
to be problematic for your cause. And I don't know that it's intentional, but you can see that this would head in a very negative direction. Trump, according to a new report in the New York Times, is very apparently telling people he's very ready for this to happen. He thinks that there's some showmanship that can be played out if they He doesn't even mind, according to the Times, getting cuffed, and has sort of mused about whether it be better to smile, what the right kind of stylistic
approach would be to that very physical situation. Now, if he does just turn himself in, Bragg doesn't have to go through that, they don't have to purp walk him. I think it's much better for the country that they don't.
I think it's much better for the country that they don't create a felony charge, abricate really a felony charge on an obscure legal theory that this constituted a felonious campaign finance violation, because that's where you get into Banana Republic territory and the power starts to really get wielded in terrifying ways. And I would still love to see Trump prosecuted for something. But to me, what about selling US foreign policy to Saudi Arabia for billions of dollars?
You could make that case if you actually cared, But they don't want to make that case because Trump only did it on a more aggressive and more brazen scale than everybody in our kind of political ecosystem does it. So I think the thing that has protected him from more serious charges is the fact that he's won. He's the most brazen criminal among a gang of criminals in Washington.
He is more brazen about it. But if you go after him, then you're like, well, wait a minute, what about what about this selling of our foreign policy for this amount of money? Now we get that one too,
which I'd say, okay, roll them all up. Republicans on the Oversight Committee last week released bank records showing this transaction between a Chinese energy company, a biden, a business associate, and then about a million dollars worth of payouts to different bidens in the course of a couple months, and so again, there is a difference in the brazen this, There's no question about it. But if we're going to start doing this, We're going to start doing this, There's
no way around it. And I do think that the same standard should apply. I do think that it's incredible for Joe Biden to be able to that. The media lets Joe Biden get away and Democrats get away with claiming the moral high ground on all of this just because everybody hates Donald Trump. We look away from all
of these other things. But when things are not at a felony level and you start looking at them that way, other things that aren't at a felony level are going to start being looked at that way, and it will feel like a banana Republic. And one of my favorite political analysts, Chris Rock, if we can put up his his comments here. This happened at some type of private event. So unfortunately we don't have the Mark Twain Awards for Adam Sandler, who absolutely deserves a Marked Award and is
an American treasure. And unfortunately we don't have video of this because but you can, we all know Chris Rock so well that you can actually just imagine him. The AI in your head can just kind of produce the video for you, but you can do Michael Scott's impression, there you go, there you go. So his argument that basically this is going to actually help Donald Trump, using the Tupac Shakur argument that he's sold three million records
while he was in prison, what's your guest? Trump's, as you were saying, seems to believe that himself, that this might actually kind of rebound to his benefit. Do you do you think that's right or does it depend? I think it rebounds to Republicans benefits, but not to Trump's benefit because there's a you know, if you're arrested, and that image is sort of indelible in the public consciousness. I think that's really hard to get away with or get away from. So I just don't I do like
what Chris Rock says here. He says he slept with a porn star and paid off someone so his wife wouldn't find out. That's romantic, and Donald Trump is clearly not getting enough credit for being a romantic. That's true. It's really a soft side. It's so Donald Trump in that sense, Yes, it helps him, but no, I think
it's it humanizes him. A little bit. Yeah, what a sweetheart he is, right, But that's you know, he's getting at why it's really hard to classify this as a campaign finance violation because you have to prove it was done in order to help your campaign and not your marriage. Well, ironically, the argument that Trump would have to make on his own behalf would be to say, I'm just such a flagrant cheater that you think that I actually care about
my wife. No, this was purely about the campaign campaign. And that was a harder argument for Edwards to make that because you know, and Edwards was trying to you'll cover this up from his family and for reasons of personal embarrassment like that was that was clear that it wasn't just about the campaign. Donald Trump could be like, look,
I'm a complete narcissist and kind of sociopath. I don't care what people think of me, Like I like bad news about me because it gets my name in the press, like he could, and he could call all of the therapists that have talked to the Atlantic over the years and they'll come in and say, yep, we have actually diagnosed him in the pages of the Atlantic. As all the things he says expert witnesses. He does not care what you say about him as long as you say
something about him. So the fact that he covered something up that would have been in the news suggests it must have been calculation about a campaign. It's the only answer, It's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the only reasonable explanation. Now, Alania was pregnant at the time, and there is some evidence that that made him feel a little extra guilty. So maybe there is something underneath
that sociopathy, that some human element that was touched. But this is why we can't trust the psychological experts the armchair in the Atlantic, because honestly, who knows, who knows what goes on there. It turns out you can't trust psychiatrist in the Atlantic just diagnosing off television who knew It's honestly, it's a good lesson for all of us.
But it is also true. By the way, just one final quick thought that Trump, whether this hurts Trump or ultimately boosts him, I don't buy the argument it boosts him because I think it's possible that it sets him on an even more. We've seen his true social posts, which are I think a step up from his Twitter posts.
Actually getting arrested this or psychological effect of that. Not to be an armchair psychiatrist myself, but actually getting arrested, I think it's possible sends him on a very different trajectory, and that's not one that'll be politically beneficial. It certainly wouldn't beneficial for the country, is my assumption. But I don't know. He's full of surprises as long as he's got a bootleg phone behind bars one of his androids. Yeah, text to Twitter or whatever, right, which is how some
of us had to do it in high school. There you go, back in the day, back in the day. All right. So let's move on to the news out of Eastern Europe. There are new developments, obviously in the war in Ukraine that came this week as Vladimir Putin and Hijinping met for a couple of days. It didn't have a lot to discuss about the war itself, but
certainly had a lot to discuss in general. The New York Times is reporting that the Biden administration vowed last month the crackdown on companies that sell critical technologies to Russia as part of its efforts to curtail the country's war against Ukraine, but the continued flow of Chinese drones
to the country explains why that will be hard. Now, China has sold more than twelve million in drones and drone parts to the country, according to official Russian customs data from a third party data provider that's reporting from the New York Times Ryan and twelve million dollars in drones and drone parts to the country kind of a drop in the bucket. When you look at the budget of this war overall, what do you expect after this meeting that happened this week? Do you expect big increases
right US support? At this point? What is closing in on one hundred billion dollars with a B and if twelve million dollars with an M, you know, from China over to Russia is going to tip the balance, then we might be in a match that we can't keep up with. Like that's I can't even do the mathm one one thousandth one hundredth of the amount that we've
invested so far. These drones have become kind of an iconic part of this of the battle between Ukraine and Russia, as even the smaller ones used to help, you know, troops see what's what's in front of them. Each one gets like a couple of flights max. Before it gets shot down by the other side, which is why you
have to constantly replenish them. But as experts saying that in this your Times article, this is not at this point the kind of sophisticated technology that sanctions and other controls are going to be able to keep out of the hands of China and Russia. Like they can make a drone like you can. You can practically make one in your garage at this point, and so it shows the limits of kind of the economic warfare tool that
the United States is using. China's argument, and it's that it's making publicly, was we should stop using the global economy as a weapon and as a principle. Uh That's that's a fairly persuasive argument, because what I mean, what you're doing is you're you're using the suffering of the world's people as as a diplomatic tool, uh to to try to find a solution for particular or acute crises. And I think the bar to do that has to
be extraordinarily high. Now China's peace plan, I can understand why Ukraine is like no, like China's peace plan was, let's do a cease five and lift all sanctions on Russia. It's like a world that's kind of exactly what Russia would prefer. And yet Russia didn't even actually say that they wanted that. That's Hijinping is not obviously promoting that
charitable interpretation of what he's on. What he's saying, to your point, he undercuts exactly what he's saying, and he undercuts, by the way, a lot of what he says about the West when he does these photo ops and these very substantial from all we can tell meetings with white wine with Vladimir Putin. Did you see the picture of them toasting with the white wine. They're white wine drinkers, their white wine drinkers, at least at least this week
they are. But he undercuts a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of his credibility on the world stage when he's doing these photo ops with somebody who is engaged in an act of aggression and an invasion, the cost to civilians that have happened over the last war in the way that Vladimir Putin is right now, and it doesn't makes sense from a sort of real politic perspective, that China is closing up to Russia and that Russia is closing up to China absolutely one hundred percent.
Xi Jinping has a vision of Chinese leadership on the global stage that goes beyond mere immediate day to day real politic right now or even this year. I don't know that this is a This is entirely helpful as as Xi Jinping then tries to take his tries to take his vision world to other world leaders in the future, but at the same time, maybe it signals that he
realizes that's a lost cause at this point anyway. And what's disturbing from kind of a humanitarian perspective is that it seems like the world's big powers, China and the United States, both feel like it's in their interests to have Ukraine and Russia going to war against each other. For various reasons. The US likes to see Russia's Russia's
capacity and power on a global stage reduced. We like to be able to sell all kinds of material uh into this into this conflict, even if we're using you borrowed or printed money to sell to sell it into their China I think likes to test out what a what a hot conflict looks like with NATO with the West.
And also China still deeply skeptical of Russia, so in the background is kind of happy to see them, uh, see them suffering and see them see them weakened, and also happy to create an ecosystem with Iran, Russia, China to to develop the muscles and the sinews of sanctions evasion and of kind of creating an economy that is
independent of kind of Western control. So everybody except for the the Russian soldiers on the front line and the Ukrainian soldiers and civilians around the world, who has major power,
seems to want to keep this going. Yeah. No, it's a great point because specifically, the news recently that China had broken the peace deal between the Saudis and Iran really made headlines in the West as though the United States and the Western general had sort of lost its power, its moral power to be the power broker in negotiations like these, that they were no longer the ones at least having success and making these deals because China saw the power vacuum and knows how it can undercut the
West and step in and do from its perspective, what constitutes a better job. And yet when you juxtapose that deal with hijinping side by side with Vladimir Putin claiming impartiality in the war, but talking about their growing friendship with a man who's engaged in a bloody humanitarian disaster, who started a bloody humanitarian disaster, and the aggressor in this invasion, When you see them standing side by side, it is a strange strategy. Again, in the real politics sense,
you can understand where he's coming from. It is a strange strategy from shi Jin Pang to on the one hand, be sort of sense that his cash on the world stage is rising, his credibility in the world stage is rising, and then on the other hand, to cozy up to Putin and allow Putin to cozy up to him like this, Yeah, peacemaker sitting down with the guy who's making war. Yeah, I think that could be a bit of a bit
of a conflict that he needs to work out. And he also endorsed Putin, said Putin's going to win in twenty twenty four. Putin has not said he's going to run again in twenty twenty four, and that makes his claims to impartiality utter bullshit, by the way, utter bullsh. Yeah, he's because he's now out there as that what is Putin doing right now. But yeah, I don't think anybody
really believed that they were impartial in this conflict. No, But I mean it's important just to your point about his argument in terms of using the global economy as a weapon. He doesn't believe that because he he obviously doesn't because as part of China's strategy just says it is many countries in the West and has been for a very long time. So he's he sort of has
this instinct about the public facing posture of China. And what's important is that he will get away with that when it comes to other countries and when it comes to the moral credibility if the United States a doesn't get its own act together and be better, be best, as Millennium might say. And secondly, if the United States lets them get away with that, with the hypocrisy, and we'll see how it goes with their like Saudi Iran thing turns out that might be tougher than it looks like.
Good job, Like cutting that deal got the embassy's back over and got some commercial deals going. They're gonna complain. One of them is going to complain about the other soon enough, and then they're going to go to China and say they broke the deal. Now you need to be on our side on this. We'll see. It'll happen with putin two being a superpower and not as much fun as it looks someting. It's all fun and games until it gets real, all right. So moving on to
Joe Biden's first veto of his presidency. This is a rejection of a rejection of a rule. So basically you know how this works is that if the if the administration in this case, through the Labor Department, institutes a new rule, Congress can undo that rule through through the kind of Congressional Review Act as long as they knock it down within a certain amount of time. So Congress passed a cr Law Congression Review Act saying that the Department of Labor rule around ESG policies is no good
has to be undone. Biden then vetoed that, which means the rule stays in place. And what the rule basically says is that if you run a pension fund or a four to one K or something else. You are, if all things are equal, able to take into account an ESG score that's environmental social government governance. I think it's the E that is actually the thing that is driving all of the corporate rage about this, while it's the S that is kind of drawing the public kind
of conservative outrage against it. Interesting that Biden chose this as his first veto. Curious for your take on this, because I'm highly critical of ESG as a kind of fraud oftentimes fraudulent approach. At the same time, I don't think it's the government's place to come in here and say that you you know where you can and can't
put your investment dollars. Curious for your take on this. Yeah, And Reuters reported that industry itself was split on this because a lot of corporations are totally fine with ESG. In fact, they like it because, to your point, it allows them to perpetrate this fraud of having this public facing social responsibility that doesn't really mean anything at the
end of the day. But on the E part, oil companies are very opposed to this, which I honestly where the rubber hits the road, and this is where to your question, this was both sides milking the culture war. For all that it's worth. This is Harvard Business or arm say, this is Harvard Law. They have a very long analysis posted on their website of what's going on with this rule, obviously designed as an explainer for stakeholders.
They say, quote, it confirms the permissibility of ESG investing in pursuit of improved risk adjusted returns in accordance with prudent investor principles without mandating such an investment strategy. That's about the Biden rule, which was very similar to a Trump rule, And they say this is like very dense legal lee, but they basically are saying there were a couple of wording tweaks to the ESG mandate part that
are not meaningfully changing. They are tweaks, but they're not meaningfully changing the rule from one administration to the next in terms of what a permissible with ESG investing from investors. So from my perspective, again, I don't like that the government's involved in this period. But it's just like Biden tweets. He invokes Marjorie Taylor Green in the tweet. Republicans, Oh yeah, yeah, let's play. Let's play Biden. Here's what he said as
he vetoed this. I just signed this veto because legislation passed by the Congress would put a risk retirement savings of individuals across the country. They couldn't take into consideration investments that wouldn't be impacted by climate impacted by overpaying executives. And that's why I decided to be to it. Like how he whispered his way through that, Yeah, that was at the first take. It's probably like the seventieth and top it up a little bit for that. So yeah,
So he invokes Marjorie Taylor Green in this veto. It is his first veto. He's publicizing it with a video with tweet itself. Republicans were really excited about this too, because he is they know, is a political winner and it is. And so to the extent that you can cast this as a big government Democrat mandate for a social justice agenda or for our left social justice agenda,
they understand that that's a political winner for them. When you look at the actual substance of the changes in these rules, it doesn't warrant this level of kerfuffle whatsoever. I'm generally opposed to people denigrating the culture War because I think it has serious implications, and they're often class implications. But this was an incredible waste of time and energy, and I thought Biden's invocation of executive pay was smart.
That's the G in the ESG. Within governance, you have some silly stuff, but then you also have some real stuff that allows fund managers say, well, wait a minute, you're paying the CEO twenty eight million dollars in stock options and they blew it last year, like we're going to knock at your score for overpaying all of your excs. You're just stealing money from us. I think that's completely fair.
The irony, though, to me, of Republicans getting so worked up about ESG is that back under the second half of the Obama administration, one of the big fights was over what was called a fiduciary rule. This is also through the Department of Labor, where the Labor Department pushed through a rule that said investment managers have a fiduciary
duty to not rip off basically their clients. In other words, they can't like purposely move them from one fund with a point zero five management fee into another fund with a point five percent management fee, which you can add up to billions of dollars, which clearly is not in the fiduciary benefit of the clients and actually just enriches
the fund managers. That was a knockdown, drag out fight in Washington that played out behind the scenes, but with millions of dollars spent in lobbying fighting this, and so the bo administration ended up winning that one. It was one of the first rules that then the Republican Congress went after when they when they came back into power, and so to go from there to then say it's opposite that you one the opposite of this, all that you really all you care about is investors. It's like,
maybe there's something else going on here. And I think a lot of this is really about climate and is about the intense amount of investor pressure on companies to move away from the fossil fuel supply chains and fossil fuel driven economies and and and then the fossil fuel industry pushing back against that. Well to that point, lobbyists obviously are are adept readers of this dense legalize and they know when a rule is meaningful and when a
rule is not meaningful. So the fact that the oil and gas industry is threatened by something that when it comes down to it is at basque minor that these word changes, like one of the words is prevent. It's just reasonable. They're like these words being swapped out that they're spooked by. That tells you clearly that they feel that this is a high level of importance to their business model. I don't just beate that a lot of
this is about climate. I think you're right though that from Republicans perspective, it's about the S, because I think that's easier, right, the S. Then you can as soon as you have the S and you start looking into the literature behind ESG, you get into DEI, you get into critical race theory, and the whole world opens up
politically when you have that in there. The climate right, it's the tip of the iceberg, and what's beneath the surface of the water is honestly pretty academic, radical literature. And so when you can apply that, and you can you can pin that to any Democrat that supports what's happening with this, you realize you have a big political weapon, whether it's fair or not. And in this case, it's
not meanwhile that Iceberg is completely melting. Well done, right, I like that Mike drop and move on to Chat GPT and Google Hair. So Google, under pressure from Chat, GPT and other AI products, has put out Barred. I signed up for the waitlist this morning. Bard was initially developed It sounds like starting back in twenty fifteen as a way to artificially produce poems. That's where Bard comes from.
They have been The reporting is that they were basically pressured into releasing something they didn't quite want to release yet because Bing and Microsoft, following from chat GPT, released their own AI integrated it into BING and for the first time it was making real inroads against Google, or at least Google was perceiving the threat that they might
do that. They issued internally what code read or a red alert that put all of their developers software engineers onto moving this as fast as possible and put a lot of pressure on their AI ethicists to clear the way for this to finally get rolled out. They're rolling it out in a much smaller to a much smaller
circle of people than previously. But it does seem like this is the clearest sign yet of any that the AI arms race is really on right, And this is from Alphabet in The Wall Street Journal quotes them referring to this as an early experiment, and to unleash these quote early experiments on the world. I just think is a grave danger. It sounds like it's not that big of a deal. It sounds like the worst thing that's going to happen is we get some wrong answers and
some cheating in school. It goes so far beyond that. We have so many vulnerabilities that we don't even know about, some that we do know about in terms of hacking, in terms of the security of our data, of our information, all of these things that can be targeted by artificial intelligence that is going to get more intelligent every single day as we open these tools up to the public. Now, generally, I think it's good that we democratize extremely powerful things
like this. I do, however, think that when you see the nervousness among engineers, among tech executives about what could happen with this technology that they're referring to as an experiment and just unloading to the public. Let's take one example. We talked last week about Snapchat. Snapchat and the experiment the Center for Humane Technology ran with Snapchat's new AI, which is a four dollars a month premium feature that
children can access. Well. Wappo repeated that experiment essentially with bart and they found they got similar inappropriate advice for teenaged users. This is from the Washington Post. After I told Bart I was about to have my fifteenth birthday party and wanted some advice on beer, it gladly provided me advice on how to hide the smell of beer and breath on my breath from my parents'. Tips included using mouthwashed, chewing gun, drinking water, and even quote avoid
getting too close to your parents. Again, this is funny, and it is one experiment. What we saw with Snapchat and the Center for Humane Text experiment was they were telling a thirteen year old that was a little less funny, how to lose her virginity. This was AI walking through those steps. And again, if your kid has four books on a debit card to put in the Snapchat, it's there right now. I'm sure they've corrected it since that was publicized. But you have no idea where this AI goes.
And that's part of the fear that Google has. And you can see it. You can read what they're telling their employees internally. Their memo was published, was published in the media. They're nervous about this stuff, and I just don't. I know a lot of people play around with chat, GPT and all of that stuff, but I just have a very hard time funny anymore because it seems to
be going in a really dark direction really quickly. And what we don't even understand is what's going to happen when this artificial intelligence is directing people to do some really really dark stuff. The more we use it, the smarter it becomes. I have no fears about it becoming sent SENTI it whatsoever. It's artificial intelligence. It will always be artificial intelligence. But man, are we going in uncharted
territory really quickly. The hacking part is deeply disturbing as well, extremely because there's been this race between encryption and security
and the you know, hacker penetration intrusion technology. You already have the chat bots trying to kind of crack the new security piece that people put up, which is annoying everybody, but we recognize that it works where it's like, you know, find a picture with the cars and so far, the counter software has not been able to crack that, but artificial intelligence is easily going to be able to nucod's
way right through there. Artificial you know, AI can take at this point handwritten a screw shot of cursive handwriting and turn it into text and analyze it. So it's not gonna be long before they can find a fire hydrant. And so that's that's just one example. The other security protocols that we have in place. Using your voice over the phone to talk to somebody, certainly the idea that you know last for your social and your mother's made the name are going to are going to be secure enough.
And if you have customer service, which is then you'll completely run by AI, then you're gonna have you know, AI scams, AI hackers interacting with AI customer service. And so that's that's just how how do you how do you keep the kind of infrastructure of the Internet secure in that situation. It's to me, it seems like we're just gonna have constant outages, constant sites going down, uh and and constant fraud as people are just getting ripped
off day after day. No, and again I don't dispute that there are some really good ways that this technology is going to evolve that. I mean, that's the case with every technology that has its upsides and its downsides, and there is a double edged sword. But it's unclear right now if the genie has sort of actually been let out of the so called bottle because or of
the proverbial bottle. Because if that is the case and this technology, which is by all the reason they're releasing this technology, and they're in a race to integrate this technology into existing products. Google is so sensitive about its brand because they know that they're the top search engine in the world. They don't want to jeopardize that. It shows you how intense the pressure is to get this stuff out there that they're releasing and integrating it with
Barred and doing this little quote early experiment. It shows you how high the pressure is. These are the same people that botched much less powerful technology with social media, and it's the same set of people and this is a much more powerful technology that is now going to be in the hands of anybody who wants to do bad with it. So we've talked about scams, think about blackmail,
think about how code can be exploited. Like there are just things that as I've talked to people in the industry who have explained this to me, I would not have even considered the dangers of but the more they think about them. In some cases, they don't realize these vulnerabilities until other people exploit them, until the experiments are run. They're like, holy smokes, you can do that with AI too. Isn't it fun that we're all doing this in real time and that anyone can do it, even people that
want to do us harm. So if the genie is out of the bottle, we're looking back years from now and saying, as of this moment in March of twenty twenty three, the genie was let out of the bottle, that this technology had been put in the hands and was advanced enough in the hands of those people who wish to do us harm to just start doing mass cyber attacks, advanced cyber attacks, hacking, all of that. It's such a sad moment that nobody learned from what happened
with social media in the odds. Yeah, I'm going back to Vermont. Yeah that smart. Don't blame me. What's your point? Today? Today, the Senate is holding a hearing on railway safety as a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushes for a bill intended to prevent future derailments like the one in East Palestine, Ohio. To put it bluntly, you'd have to be an industry expert to thoroughly evaluate the merits of this legislation. It's
deep in the weeds. Such experts are, of course few and far between in the news media and even in Congress, which is where lobbyists and unions step in to fill those knowledge gaps. Who do we trust to learn from East Palestine and spare other communities the same fate. No rail transportation system will ever be one hundred percent safe.
Transportation of hazardous chemicals will never be without risk. We have to do both, so we have to accept some of that risk and except we can never fully eliminate it. The question then, is whether the risk right now is too high? If so, what would bring it down. The industry's latest data finds that for all railroads, the derailment rate is down thirty one percent since two thousand, but despite that longer term positive trend, it was up by
five percent year over a year. A fact sheet being circulated by Senator jd Vance's office contends quote derailments in the United States are much more common than in other countries, and they specifically cite numbers from the EU and from Japan. So while we aren't in an urgent state of national emergency, there is probably more that we can do. Determining whether government regulations would harm or hurt those efforts becomes important here.
The fact sheet being circulated by Vance's office makes reasonable arguments for each of the provisions in the bill, and makes reasonable rebuttals to legitimate points of contention. I uploaded the full thing over at the Federalists. You can read it there. Again, I'm not an industry expert, nor is Vance, nor are the editors of National Review who came out against the bill this week. But where the bill empowers the Department of Transportation, the measures appear very modest and
within the real, realistic, if imperfect, scope of federal oversight. Here, the bill's two person crew requirement is eminently reasonable for obvious reasons, be it mitigation in East Palestine or prevention in other cases. If, as National Review claims, this will stall a transition to safer automated mechanisms, the industry is welcome to explain why it can't pay for those to ensure the interim period is properly staffed. Maybe they could
pause some stock buybacks. It's true also, as NR says, should the bill pass, the railroads would adjust their behavior to any new regulatory burden. Unquote. The magazine claims that could come at the cost of safety by pushing hazardous chemicals into trucks. But if the regulatory burden is reasonable, that's not the faults of the government. It's the faults of an industry being subsidized to the tune of billions for putting profit over people. There's a lot going on
when it comes to the economics of America's railroads. The right would correctly point out subsidies abound, distorting the true market forces at play. The left would correctly point out the cap of shipper problem that essentially gives companies monopoly power. Vance himself has actually noted both of those problems. Others might argue that this is an industry that needs both subsidies and some form of monopolies in order to function
at all. Here's where the rubber meets the road. In a report on the NTSB's February findings that an overheated wheelbarer bearing likely cause the derailment. NPR noted quote. The spacing of hotbox detectors and the temperatures at which they trigger alarms are not currently regulated by federal law. Officials say Norfolk Southern and its crew appear to have actually followed all of the regulations. So both the market and
the government failed here. Norfolk Southern has no incentive to get months of bad PR, and the government has no incentive to take a baiting from the public. But if an industry we all agree has safety implications that demand some government oversight, needs better oversight if it's cutting staff to maximize profits over safety. This is not a lemonade stand. It's a subsidized industry that handles life and death situations on a daily basis across the entire country. Hot boxes
and crew mandates aren't going to kill its efficiency. It boggles the mind that establishment Republicans trust the business executives who spent years ratcheting up cultural tensions by devoting vast resources to stupid virtue signals like Norfolk Southern or even Silicon Valley Bank. At best, they're surprisingly incompetent, and that's just at best. With PSR and the labor negotiations lost fall. The industry has already shown in interests in profits over
people and over safety. So earlier this month, Republican Senator John Thunstead of the bill. We'll take a look at what's being proposed, but an immediate, quick response heavy on regulation needs to be thoughtful and targeted. Tragedies are often exploited by special interests. They abuse the emotions and anger of the public to ram through bad legislation, creating a false sense of Catharsis also induce calls for action, for lawmakers to do something anything to help. Again, this web
placed anger can create unintended consequences. Adding new layers of government control is sometimes easy because big business has money lobbying money to craft the regulation in their favor, especially over smaller competitors. For more on that, I really recommend him Carney's book The Big Ripoff. But none of this means government can't do better where oversight is actually warranted, where it actually has a duty to check big business.
The Vance bill might not be perfect right now. Even great bills aren't perfect when they're introduced, but thoon standard of thoughtful and targeted measures appears to be much more accurate as a description of this case than the industry's claims. Otherwise. Hey, we're going to pick up where we left off last week exploring the origin of the Ebola outbreak in twenty fourteen.
We're going to be joined by two authors of a fascinating article published in Independent Scized News, if we can put that up there, and so, this is Jonathan Latham. He's the editor of Independent Science News and he's executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project. The article was co authored by Sam Husseini, who is a journalist on Substack and elsewhere and was the co author of this story. Happy to welcome them both to Counterpoints today. Sam, doctor Latham,
thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So. I wanted to start out as we did last week by playing a clip from a podcast that included virologist Christian Anderson attempting to kind of debunk a conspiracy theory, but in the process making a fascinating admission. If we could roll that. The problem is that people see these coincidences.
One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak, which also is being blamed on us because we have been studying Ebola in Canaman Sierra Leone and Lo and behold, Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in twenty fourteen, right obviously across the border Guinea, but it's maybe one hundred miles or so away. And people then put that together and saying, oh, so that Ebola must have been reliably too, And it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again.
And the reason why these names keep coming up, and the reason why we get grant money to study infectious diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done so for many, many decades. And that's why the names keep coming up again. Right, It's not because there's some major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic,
and so sam. The mainstream media's initial story of the outbreak of Ebola was that in Guinea, a two year old child was playing with bats, and then several months later you wound up with an ebola outbreak. What to you was so important from that interview that doctor Anderson gave, Well, my suspicions predated his recent statements of obviously, but it's remarkable that he would be saying this. At this point, they have been denying that they were working on Ebola
this entire time. In their prior statements, Gary wrote an article his co partner as head of the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium. These are the labs in West Africa that Africans claimed might have been the source of the twenty fourteen Ebola outbreak. He recently denied it in an article. So for Anderson now to be seeming to admit in a very interesting and curious way that they were in fact working on Ebola is I think potentially an incredibly
significant development. But the case against their narrative that it effectively pinning this on a to He wasn't even two years old. He was eighteen minutes old. This was over a thousand miles away from prior Ebola outbreaks. In prior Ebola outbreaks, there was always a die off of the local mammalian species. There was no such dieoff of local
mammalian species. They even acknowledged that Fabian Lenders, who wrote the sort of what we would call the cover story, and who was also part of the Huhan Institute of Neurology investigation by the World Health organization. They acknowledged in their article that there were no bats that they could find in the village that they claim where the outbreak started, and they also acknowledged that there was no die off of the mammalian species. So there are an incredible number
of holes in their dominant narrative. And the closer you look at this, the more it points to a concerted effort to effectively frame Guinea. Is this happened in you know, three countries, and there's a whole series of patterns in which they seem to have tried to pin this on Guinea just over the border from Sarah Leone to get
it away from where the US labs were. Right, and doctor Latham want to bring you in here, what did What does the evidence as far as we know say about the where the most likely origin was, Well, I mean, the balance of evidence I would say favors Guinea, but there are some open questions about the provenance of some of the samples that were taken. So, for example, during the outbreak at the very beginning, MSF doctors without Borders alleged that the initial they were the people who identified
the initial the very first confirmed cases. But what they argued was that those confirmed cases were in fact coming from across the border in Sierra Leone. And if you look at the phylogenetic research that has been used to pin the outbreak on Guinea, what you see is that some of the very earliest cases that are pinned on Guinea are probably actually from an outbreak in Sierra Leone. And so if you if you undo that misattribution as it were, then what you come up with is almost
certainly an origin in Sierra Leone. And did it start earlier than has been publicly claimed the epidemic that is,
or do we have evidence of that at this point? Well, the official start of the outbreak is the first diagnosed cases on March seventeenth, but what the people in Sierra Leoned identified was a start on May twenty fifth, so this is two months later, and they so they they for what they found when they first started identifying cases is that these cases were many mutations different from each other, which implies that there have been an outbreak in Sierra
Leoned long before, But we don't know if there was an outbreak in Guinea long before that. That is the allegation of fabian Lean Dirts and the paper that that essentially found nothing in Guinea when they went to look at the purported outbreak site. So the claim is, the claim of Leanders, is that the outbreak started in December with the death of this young child. But there is
essentially no evidence for that. So the children, the child doesn't have a confirmed diagnosis, none of his contacts has a confirmed diagnosis. There is no confirmed diagnosis for almost three months after that. So so for the scientific community to allege that that is the first date of the outbreak is frankly ridiculous. What else? What else could that child have died of? Like they say it was a bowler,
what else could it have been? His father thinks that he died of malaria, and you know that his father didn't get anything. The healthcare workers in the village didn't get anything. His mother did also die, but that was apparently potentially for treatment that she got from and Bull. She was pregnant at the time, so she was in a vulnerable, particularly vulnerable state. I don't know if Jonathan could have more ideas on that. Yeah, Johnathan, do you
have go ahead? No? I mean a great deal to add except that there are some suggestions that she might have had cholera too, but at the time there was no suggestion that she had a Bola virus. And obviously, you know people who had miscarriages. You know, viral hemorrhagic fevers are diseases associated with loss of blood, but obviously so are miscarriages, and so she died along with her child.
And so so there's no real reason to think, so far as I can see that, to think that she had a Bola, because it can be misdiagnosed so easily. I mean, basically, the only way that anybody considers that you can confidently diagnose the bola is with a lab test, and no lab tests were done. And tell the middle of mind, and why, Sam, what do we know about this lab that was in SI early on? And why would there be this two month period in which it seems as if a bowl is circulating but it's not
getting picked up. I'll let Jonathan speak to the second point. But this lab is headed by Robert Gary and Christian Andersen. Those names might ring about with people because they are the authors the two primary authors of the Proximal Origins paper, which came out in the spring of twenty twenty and asserted that COVID could not be a laboratory construct. It's
very difficult to overstate the importance of this article. It really set the tone for the dominant mainstream media coverage of COVID that it couldn't possibly come out of a lab, and you were a nut job to think that it could possibly come out of a lab. So they had a massive confidence of interest to dismiss the possibility of lab origin, because the next question would be if the
if the global public. Imagine if the global public understood in early twenty twenty that this plague ravaging through the world could have come out of a lab, one of the next major questions would have been what about prior outbreaks?
And as a matter of fact, you know, I asked in February of twenty twenty the CDC if it could have come out of if COVID could have come out of a lab, and their response was a disingenuous And then when I followed up and I pushed, they said, well, we got to be careful about what kind of information we put out here, because remember what happened with the ebola in twenty fourteen, and we had to dismiss the possibility of the lab origin then in order to have
people deal with the disease, which was a very weird way to put it. So that's a major thing that we have to keep in mind. There are all kinds of US institutions that are involved with this viral Hemorrhagic vi Consortium, and the the work done there was increasingly done on dangerous viruses, particularly after people might remember the
anthrax attacks of two thousand and two. Turn O ba emphasizes this uh Serallionian journalists that there was a spike in that activity and massive funding for work on dangerous viruses and pathogens during that period. So we know that it was working on deadly pathogens, and we know that
that they had safety issues. There were statements by some of the scientists there saying, you know, well, we can get so much work done here than we could in the United States because the safety concerns are not onerous from their point of view. They don't have to be in a BSL four lab and be in a you know, spacesuit kind of thing, So from their point of view, it's so much easier to do this kind of dangerous
not not cost free. Yet Jonathan, to that second point, how would you have a two month outbreak in in Sierra Leone, that that doesn't get picked up and what did what did ms What was MSF's response to that. Well, the the similar answer to the first part is that, uh, you know, the beginning of an outbreak, there are not very many cases typically, so an abola doesn't transmit that easily,
so so it would be possible to miss it. In between that and the problems with diagnosing a bola, which especially in its early stages, looks like many other illnesses like we've seen, like we've heard about malaria of cholera, but they also this is an area of the of West Africa that that is uh in which less of fever is endemic, So that's another disease that can be
uh miss misattributed in this case. So so you have all these possible confusions and what ms F discovered when they went to the lab and also the World Health organizations, a series of organizations went to the lab after the outbreak started. This is the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium Lab in Canama in Sierra Leone, and they went there and
they discovered all kinds of biosecurity breaches. There were allegations of needles all over the floor, that they didn't have UV decontamination procedures in place, and that samples were being you know, reagents were being reused and so forth. And we know that there was confusions. There was a group, there's a company called Metabiota, and there's a viral hemorrhagic fever consortium that were basically operating the same premises but essentially ended up in conflict with each other. And this
conflict seems to have started in confusion. But there's also the possibility that, exactly like COVID, that there is a great benefit to anybody who leaks a lab to confuse the data around the origins, because then it becomes impossible to re establish what actually where it change up the contact chains and the dates of diagnoses and so far of the people who first get beyond it. And I want to move to the next the COVID origin discussion next, but real quickly, where should people go if they want
to learn more about this? Well, our main article is on Independent Science News, which Jonathan is the editor of. I've been doing a series of smaller follow ups on my substack whoseaynt substack dot com just to put a
fine point on what Jonathan said. When doctors out Orders finally got to Seria Leone, they talked about a quote unquote hidden epidemic that's in one of the reports they published correct time at the time because they were startled by the number of case there, and they attributed this to bungling by Metabiota, which is people might realize has been in the news in other contexts. But that's one
interpretation that it could have been bungling. It could also have been part of a concerted effort to draw attention away from Sara Leone and effectively frame Guinea undercount the cases in Sarah Leone away where the US labs are, so that you can say the outbreak started in Guinea and pinned all on this toddler in an African advantage. And so moving on to the latest news on the COVID origin as we can put up this I think
R six. This is the pre print that kicked off so much news coverage over the past week, beginning in the Atlantic, which are based on some interviews actually with Christian Anderson. Here we were just speaking of Robert Gary and others. Those are authors. Now this preprint The New York Times did two major pieces off of this publicist. But you know, that's the thing. I don't think they have publicists. I think they just have direct It's the
credibility is that you're totally right. I'm kidding. So just swallow it, you know. And so we're still joined by doctor Jonathan Latham, virologist and the publisher editor of Independent Science News, Sam Husseini, reporter who writes on the substack. Husseini does substack dot com. Thank you again, guys for joining us, And so I'll start with you, doctor Latham.
So now now that we've had this entire news cycle, as the cycle dies down, now we get the preprint, which, to be clear for non scientists including myself, is not a peer reviewed paper, but we but at least it is something that is written down on paper. And so as you've digested this preprint, how does it match up with the New York Times and Atlantic headlines that were so definitive in saying we can now link the origins of COVID to a raccoon dog in the Wuhan market.
So I mean, right now what we get to see is how weak the underlying data is, right, and the fundamental the fundamental issue is that they find raccoon dog DNA, but they also find many other kinds of DNA. None of these, none of the raccoon dog DNA demonstrates that the raccoon dog was infected with a virus. This is an animal market where raccoon dogs are for sale, so
finding raccoon dog DNA is a little bit unsurprising. But that the you know, what the data shows is that stars CoV two RNA nuclear tide sequences were basically all over the market. But the fundamental point for me is that the dating of this is all wrong. Right. We know that the that the outbreak almost certainly started in September or October, and maybe even earlier than that. That
is approximately the consensus. We know that there were people sick in Italy, for example, there are samples from Italy and November, so we know that the outbreak started months before these samples were taken. Therefore, these samples are irrelevant to the beginning of the outbreak. And I would say that the huan Im market, there's no evidence even that the huen Im market was a super spreader event. It may simply have been representative of Wuhan city at that time.
When there were thousands of cases of COVID in the city. And it's really obviously hard for a journalist in January, February, March of twenty twenty to know what questions to ask, to know to ask that questions about the samples and the timing and all of that. That doesn't excuse them not asking those questions. And Sam, I'll toss this question
to you. You may both have thoughts on it, whether we're talking about ebola or cold The publicis thing is kind of funny because it's funny, but it's sad because it's so true that when people come with a preprint, put it in the media and give it their spin, reporters are susceptible to just swallowing that spin and running
with it. So when you look at this preprint, now, when you look at how the media reports on difficult subjects like these, what disconnect do you see between the inability then of the press without medical expertise to translate that into information the public needs. I don't think that the public and the press should be have this deferential you know, this appeal to authority. You know, science, like journalism, is about observing the world and using reason to draw conclusions.
It's a fairly simple proposition to say there's a lab that nearby, could that have something to do with it? And then when their response is oh, people thought the same thing when this other outbreak happened, when they're a lab nearby, the logical conclusion would be okay, so you're telling you there's another case, So maybe that's like that. That would be the reasonable way to look at it.
But this establishment scientific community, and you know, the sort of John Stewart line that somehow science is the problem, that curiosity will kill us all. That's that's wrong too, because as I've looked at, for example, Peter Dazac, who funded the Institute of Virology dangerous lab work, the funding base for this is largely from the Pentagon and from USAI t This militarized view, you know, way of looking at things has perverted science. And you had scientists speaking
up about this. I mentioned the anthrax attacks earlier. In two thousand and five, there was a letter of five of seven hundred scientists saying you're perverting our field to the NIH saying you're putting so much money, you know, studying these dangerous pathogens, you're messing up with our field. It's no longer becoming a scientific inquiry. And it was Fauci who told them to put up or shut up. The government has told us that they want this work done.
This is what we're going to this is what we're going to do. So science isn't the problem. The problem is a militarized view of science. And in terms of the recent report there this this isn't the first. There have been a series of these highly publicized reports saying oh, yeah, you know, it didn't come out of a lab. Yeah, yeah, a year ago. There was one in August of last year, right before Jeffrey Sachs flipped on this, and and the I think the net effect of that is just to
confuse the public. That is, people insiders are like, these guys are really burning their credibility, right, But it's to the net of effect of it is to confuse the public mind so that the public doesn't demand answers. That the public thinks that this is you know there, you know, maybe it's nothing after all. Muddy the water, totally muddy the waters. And it really reminds me of after twentieth and ards, after the Iraq War, after the Iraq invasion.
People might recall there was a series of stories where they claim to have found the WMDs that all ended up falling apart. Why did they do that? They did that to muddy the waters so that there was never a moment of reckoning. And I think that that's what a lot of these scientists are really hoping, that there's never a moment of reckoning. And doctor Latham, all of all of these reports that we're talking about tend to be driven by, roughly, it seems like half a dozen
kind of key virologists. And I saw somebody, a biologist saying on social media the other day that he felt like he was able to engage in this converse in a more open and dispassionate way because he's not in the field of virology, and so his career would not be negatively impacted by his scientifically coming to a conclusion
that is in politic within his field. So I'm curious for you, as a virologist, what has been the reaction over the last three years to you raising questions about what these half doesen virologists have tried to say is kind of settled science. You know, my challenge is a little bit different because I'm not in an academic department.
So I have a PhD in virology, but now I run a nonprofit and so I don't have to face my colleagues every day and explain to them why I am contradicting, you know, what appears to them to be in their best interest. But do you see, you know, I can speak to some of the emails that we've seen.
For example, there's a classic one in which some of Ralph Barrack's colleague, So, Ralph Barrick is at the University of North Carolina and collaborated with or proposed to collaborate at least or did, if I shouldn't say proposed, he actually did collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And they email each other and they say, our jobs is to keep our heads down at this point, right, And they because they they know how weak these stories are, but at the same time they cannot stand up and
contradict them for fear of their careers. And and the problem is that, you know, classically scientists have tenure exactly so that they can speak freely, but scientists in many institutions don't actually have tenure these days, or feel that they don't have tenure or feel that they will essentially
lose everything if they if they speak out. And it's clear that that the you know, the Lancet letter accusing people who discuss the lably of being conspiracy theorists and having this published in a premiere journal and have a whole constellation a very prestigious scientist sign this letter. It constitutes a threat to the scientific you know, anybody in the scientific community who might consider speaking out on these subjects. So it's been clear that that to me that there's
been a campaign of an intimidation. But I don't have to worry about it because I'm independent of that ecosystem, if you like. You know, there's been so much conversation about how are accusations that people who are suppressing the
lablque debate are protecting China. To the point you just made, Sam, it actually seems to me the real problem is that people like Anthony Fauci, who weaponized these charges of racism, which is really an interesting juxtaposition with what happened with the Obola outbreak, you know, may have been a situation that was the other way around, and gets to how cynical all of this is, but when you look at it, it actually seems as though what they were really protecting
was the United States, because the source of this funding time and again goes down to the Pentagon, goes down to groups like Ecohalth Alliance that are primarily funded or largely funded in many cases by the United States government. So it's been strange to see that narrative play out that this is all about protecting China, when in fact, if anything, it seems to be protecting the US. That's absolutely correct. There are sort of two strands of the
US establishment. One wants to target China and the other one wants to make sure that the United States government continues with this dangerous lab A terrible development to your point recently is that a large part of the public now thinks that Congress unanimously passed and Biden just signed legislation that would declassify all information regarding COVID origins. This claim was made on Fox, this claim was made on US the Washington in the Washington Post. It's been made
by the sponsors of the legislation. It's not true. If you read the legislation, what it says is that we direct the director of notional intelligence to declassify all information pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Arology. So that would mean that they wouldn't have to declassify the information pointing to other institutions or potentially even information exonerating in some way, as unlikely as that might seem, the Wuhan Institute of Urology.
And meanwhile the public is being told we're declassifying everything pertaining to this. So that is a setup for a very dangerous situation. The public thinks that what's being declassified as everything, when that's not the case at all. As a matter of fact, there's massive even unclassified information isn't being Foya the Intercept did a fair amount of this, A US Right to Know did a fair amount of this.
I was just at the State Department asking them why they still have not responded to Foye's from almost three years ago by US Right to Know, a transparency group which had to start litigation. So there's massive, you know, withholding of information while the public is being led to believe or you know, we're opening up the books here. And I saw a video of Sam yelling at net Price to release that information. Sam. If you recognize Sam
it's because you've seen some of his viral videos. He's often in the State Department briefings tangling with the State Department spokespeople. Yeah, it's very it's enjoyable stuff. I've told Sam, I'm going to start going to State Department briefings. Those look more fun than the White House. You know, the more cantankerous the hearing room, the more peaceful the outside world.
Philosophy and doctor Latham, one last question. It was wanted to put to you kind of the best case that the market origin types make and see what your response to it coming out of this this preprint that we just put They put up a heat map in there, uh, you know, in their article that shows kind of an intense amount of kind of COVID r N a sampling coming from the exact same portion of the market where where they can show that now that these raccoon dogs
were being sold, and they say that that's very strong circumstantial evidence that why would you have more COVID here than you would have in the rest of uh of the market. So what what's what's your reaction to there that that claim that that the circumstantially that this is strong evidence. Well, I mean, there's two issues. One is that we you know, we don't know if we have
access to all the data at this point. And the second issue is that I believe there's also a toilet at that part of the market, so people are coming and going and using that toilet and and basically potentially hanging out there maybe ALIGNE. We don't know. There's so much that we don't know, and and I think that, you know, the the basic issue comes back to the timing, right, I don't think we can ever get away from that.
The timing of this uh of this of this stuf playing is so late in the pandemic that it really can make no sense to identify raccoon dog DNA. I mean, even if you take the best case scenario that that was a raccoon dog infected with with STARS two in that market, the likelihood is that that raccoon dog called it from a person and not the other way around. And so the evidence, the evidence that they're putting forward
all told, is ridiculous to me. Right, it doesn't explain how a February infection could spark a September, October, or even November or December. And in fact, I'm a time travel expert. It couldn't even spark an outbreak in January. The breadth of Brian's knowledge. I'm surprise. I'm going to call the Atlantic with that and see if I get an article printed. Jonathan Sam, thank you so much for joining us. Really really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Thank you. All right, that's it. That'll that'll do it for this Wednesday edition of Counterpoints. Thanks everybody for joining us. Any any final words, any final thoughts. Just always appreciate people tuning in. And Ryan, I'm so glad you checked the lead on these segments because it's important information that nobody's talking about. Good stuff. Thanks and thank you guys for the great work that you've done. Thank you so much trying. We'll see you soon.