As violent crime continues to spike in New York City, competing visions for the city battle it out, President Biden gets concerned about the economy, and the COVID lab leak theory is exploding into public view. Ben Shapiro's take on the latest headlines surrounding Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bill de Blasio, and why the media should be paying attention to the people of New York, not the ideas of left-wing politicians like Bill De Blasio and Jamaal Bowman, and how they have run headlong into the brick wall of reality in their own city. The reality suggests that when it comes to actual policy, New Yorkers are beginning to turn more toward the Rudy Giuliani-style social policy and right-leaning crime policy that characterized the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations. Why? Well, because it worked in NYC. You know what doesn t work in NYC? Anything that the Democrats have been doing there for the last decade has wrecked the city, particularly in the last five years, and everybody knows this. The media continue to trot around the inspirational, wild left figures of the New York establishment, and focus on them as if they are the only hope of saving the city. But the reality says something different. In fact, they are part of the problem, and it s time to go back to the old days, when the city was run by right-wingers, like Mayor Rudy Giuliani. . The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by Express VPN. Visit ExpressVPN.co/TheBenShapiro to get 20% off your first purchase of a VPN today! Subscribe to the show and receive 20% OFF your first month with discount code: BONUS at checkout, and get 10% off for the rest of the month, plus free shipping and free shipping when you sign up for the next month, and a FREE 2-day shipping on all future orders, plus I'll be giving you an ad-free version of my new book, "How to Destroy America in 3 Easy Steps, How To Destroy America: How to Destroy It All by Ben Shapiro: Destroy America In Three Easy Steps for FREE while Supplies Last Week, How to Destroys America In 3 Easy Takes, I'll Make It All Come Together, I'm Calling It All That's a Billionaire's Guide to Destroying It All! FREE Mentioned in the show! Subscribe To My FB Page! You'll Get 5-Star Reviews,
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00:01:44.000A couple of nights ago, there was a big debate in New York City between all the mayoral candidates, and there are a few aspects of this that are amusing.
00:01:51.000Aspect number one, seven of the eight candidates said they actively did not want Bill de Blasio's endorsement for the mayoral seat, which is a hell of a referendum on the guy who is the sitting mayor of New York City.
00:02:02.000That's how unpopular Bill de Blasio is inside his own city.
00:02:04.000He has aspirations to run for governor or senator.
00:02:07.000Dude couldn't win an election for dog catcher today in New York City because nobody likes him.
00:02:12.000And the reason is because the ideas of leftism have run headlong into the brick wall of reality in New York City.
00:02:20.000And so while the media continue to focus in on the inspirational wild left figures of New York, the people like Jamaal Bowman and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and Bill de Blasio, the reality says something different.
00:02:31.000What the reality suggests is that when it comes to actual policy, New Yorkers are beginning to turn more toward the Rudy Giuliani sort of left-leaning social policy and right-leaning crime policy that characterized New York City throughout the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.
00:03:06.000So there are a couple of things that are worth noting about the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez left mentality.
00:03:11.000Number one, they truly believe that your money is their money and that they have no obligation to do moral things with their money.
00:03:19.000This was an undercover story in the major media, but Alexander Ocasio-Cortez She recently posted photographs of her grandmother's squalid living conditions in Puerto Rico and blamed President Trump for the situation.
00:03:31.000She put on Twitter, just over a week ago, my grandmother fell ill.
00:03:35.000I went to Puerto Rico to see her, my first time in a year because of COVID.
00:04:06.000She doesn't have tremendously high expenses, except for the Tesla that she recently leased.
00:04:11.000And so everybody online was like, you know, Alexandria, before you blame Trump for your grandmother's squalid living conditions, your words, You might want to, like, check your wallet.
00:04:29.000When it comes to people who are in your immediate family and people who you are close to, you have chief responsibility in taking care of them.
00:04:36.000And if that doesn't work, you go to your local community.
00:04:39.000And then if that doesn't work, you go to the larger community, to maybe an actual local government.
00:04:59.000The fact that Alexandra, that it never even occurred to her.
00:05:02.000My grandmother's roof is falling apart.
00:05:04.000Maybe I should do something about that instead of leasing that Tesla.
00:05:08.000Maybe I should instead lease, you know, an electric Honda or something for like one third of the cost and send the extra over to grandma.
00:05:13.000The fact that apparently never occurred to her.
00:05:16.000is just indicative of a particular mindset, which is, it is never my responsibility to do anything, it is everybody else's responsibility to do everything.
00:05:23.000It's the government's responsibility to do everything.
00:05:25.000I mean, it's kind of an incredible indicator of exactly where this mentality lies.
00:05:31.000And it's true for national politics too.
00:05:33.000If there's a problem in my immediate community, the problem must lie with a broader societal issue, as opposed to, what can I do about it today?
00:05:46.000Point number two is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's view of crime.
00:05:50.000So yesterday, she did this presser, and it was kind of amazing.
00:05:53.000She was standing directly next to Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, and she was calling for more funding for mental health, which Fine.
00:06:04.000I think one of the great tragedies of public policy in the last 60 years is the attempt to federalize all mental health and institutionalization issues.
00:06:12.000It started under the JFK administration, then moved forward with states shirking their duties, and this has led to a tremendous rise in the homeless problem over the course of the last few decades.
00:06:19.000Okay, but, Alejandro Ocasio-Cortez is talking about crime.
00:06:24.000And here she is explaining that the real problem, the real reason why we have too much crime is because we are building too many jails.
00:06:35.000If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.
00:06:42.000The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care, and overall health care, employment, et cetera.
00:06:51.000It's to support communities, not throw them away.
00:06:53.000Okay, look at the body language on Chuck Schumer there.
00:06:55.000Chuck Schumer is like, I want to crawl in a hole and die.
00:06:58.000He's standing right next to her, she says this.
00:07:00.000Because here's the thing, she's in a city where crime is skyrocketing, and her solution is build fewer jails.
00:07:05.000As someone on Twitter pointed out, this is akin to saying, if you want fewer sick people, build fewer hospitals.
00:07:11.000You build the jails to hold the criminals.
00:07:13.000You don't build the jails and then there's an upsurge in demand for criminality.
00:07:18.000Okay, but this sort of perverse thinking that my problems are everybody else's problems and my immediate family's problems don't fall on me, they fall on the government more broadly.
00:07:26.000And when it comes to criminality, that is a broader societal problem where the government is not supposed to step in and solve it.
00:07:32.000Instead, it's a broader societal problem that we just blame on everything else.
00:07:35.000That sort of mentality has crippled New York and continues to cripple New York.
00:07:39.000And you can see it play out in the New York mayoral race.
00:07:41.000Or if you look at the polls right now, the two people at the top of the heap, in terms of the candidates, are the two most conservative Democrats in the race.
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00:09:08.000According to Joel Siegel, who's the managing editor of Spectrum News DC, NYPD now says the number of shootings in May of 2021 jumped 73% compared to May 2020.
00:09:16.000173 shootings in May versus 100 last May.
00:09:17.000And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.
00:09:20.000There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.
00:09:23.000And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.
00:09:28.000There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.
00:09:32.000Today, May 2021, 173 shootings in New York.
00:09:37.000That is the result of an administration that has decided they are not going to police crime.
00:09:41.000They're going to release criminals back onto the street.
00:09:44.000It's an administration that has decided not to enforce the law that is going to allow Black Lives Matter rioters to run roughshod through the center of New York City.
00:09:50.000This has downstream effect in terms of criminals believing they can get away with anything.
00:09:53.000I'm fully convinced, by the way, that the uptick In hate crimes that you have seen against Jews is fully connected with law enforcement's inability or unwillingness in areas around the country to actually police.
00:10:06.000And that is true with regard to all types of crime, including hate crimes.
00:10:10.000That is a reversal of a trend, by the way.
00:10:12.000It is incredible how there has been this secular trend, meaning a widespread trend, for the last two decades in terms of lowering crime rates.
00:10:21.000Basically, from 1994 all the way until 2014, crime rates dropped precipitously like a stone.
00:10:26.000The reason for that is because people in major cities started taking policing seriously.
00:10:30.000Rudy Giuliani was elected in New York.
00:10:31.000Richard Reardon was elected in Los Angeles.
00:10:33.000You started to see All sorts of conservative policies attempted with regard to crime.
00:10:39.000This was the days when Joe Biden used to talk about super predators and he used to back crime bills.
00:10:44.000And then, thanks to Barack Obama's administration and the rise of wild left crazy people like Bill de Blasio and Eric Garcetti in major cities around the country, Crime rates started to rise again because policy is indeed connected with human behavior.
00:10:58.000And you know who's starting to realize this?
00:11:00.000Because as it turns out, what the polling data shows in New York right now, is that the people at the top of the heap, in polling, in New York, are the most conservative candidates.
00:11:09.000There is no progressive near the top of the heap.
00:11:12.000According to USA Today, in what could be the most consequential mayoral elections in the city's recent history, a host of Democratic candidates in a tightly contested race are vying to become the Big Apple's next mayor.
00:11:21.000Eight major Democrats are making their final bids to New York City voters in a campaign that has touched on a variety of challenges facing the city, led to a diverse list of candidates, and featured plenty of Zoom calls.
00:11:31.000The leading contenders are Andrew Yang, who is still seizing on the energy around his 2020 Democratic presidential run.
00:11:36.000I know Andrew Yang because he was Generous enough to do an interview with the show.
00:12:04.000And then trailing the pack is Catherine Garcia, who's received a bunch of big name endorsements from the New York Daily News, but continues to trail in the polling because she is just not far right enough.
00:12:14.000The Republicans in the race are not competitive because one, they're Republican, and two, because they're not the sort of Rudy Giuliani, quote-unquote, moderate Republican that did well in New York for so long.
00:12:22.000But Yang and Adams look a lot more like Ed Koch, who is the sort of gruff and avuncular mayor of New York starting in the late 1970s, who converted from being a radical left Bella Abzug progressive into being the sort of conservative-style Democrat who governed New York City for a while.
00:12:50.000The other night they had this big debate and the people who came off the worst by far were the people who were the most wildly to the left.
00:12:57.000And the people who came off the best were people like Adams and people like Andrew Yang.
00:13:01.000Now the reason this makes a difference is because what happens in New York can happen nationally.
00:13:05.000People like to say that the Democrats want to take California national.
00:13:09.000They also want to take New York national.
00:13:10.000But they don't want to take the style of Democratic governance of Michael Bloomberg national.
00:13:15.000Bloomberg ran for the presidency on the Democratic side of the aisle and received basically no support.
00:13:21.000Joe Biden seemed to want to govern that way at times during his campaign, but then he's run to the radical left.
00:13:26.000He looks a lot more like AOC or like Jamal Bowman or like Bernie Sanders than he does like the Joe Biden that people thought they were going to get when they elected him.
00:13:36.000So what happens in New York is a good indicator as to what is going to happen nationally, meaning there will be a backlash.
00:13:41.000There will be a conservative backlash.
00:13:43.000If it's happening in New York, it can happen anywhere.
00:13:45.000So Andrew Yang has been facing a lot of this stuff down.
00:13:47.000So yesterday, for example, he was walking around at a Park Slope event, and he was shouted down by people screaming to defund the cops.
00:14:04.000And you can see people trailing him, saying, hedge fund mayor.
00:14:07.000Okay, this is why Yang is going to do well in New York.
00:14:11.000And again, he has no history in elected politics, and if he doesn't win the mayoral race, he's gonna come in a close second.
00:14:16.000They have ranked-choice voting in New York, which means that... I'm kind of a fan of ranked-choice voting, to be honest with you.
00:14:21.000The way ranked-choice voting works is that if you vote for one of the lower-down candidates, number one on your ballot, and then you vote for Yang, too, if the lower-down candidate doesn't finish in the top couple of candidates, that person's votes are eliminated, and then your second choice becomes your first choice.
00:14:35.000And they just keep doing this until somebody wins.
00:14:36.000Okay, so, Yang, right now, is running in the top two with Eric Adams.
00:14:41.000Eric Adams, of course, is a former cop.
00:14:44.000So Yang and Adams went at each other, but the more telling attacks were the ones that were put out against Adams and Yang for being too conservative, which is why they're winning.
00:14:54.000It's why they're doing well in New York.
00:14:57.000New Yorkers are seeing the results of the policies they chose, and they are not liking the results of the policies they chose, and they are reacting to the policies they chose by moving in a different direction.
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00:16:01.000It's one of the reasons we found Kelly.
00:16:03.000Not only does she do amazing work keeping everything around the office running and humming, but also she shoots alligators in her spare time.
00:16:59.000As your consultants have told you time and time again, they admit you're an empty vessel.
00:17:04.000And I actually don't think you're an empty vessel.
00:17:05.000I think you're a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.
00:17:12.000In fact, what you're focusing on, things like casinos in Governor's Island, you're focusing on TikTok houses in the midst of a housing crisis.
00:17:19.000And what I'm saying to you today is there is a budget crisis, but it's a budget crisis that with $6 billion in federal stimulus money, more money for the foundation aid coming from Albany, Okay, well, this is going nowhere for Stringer, because he attacks Yang as a TikTok influencer guy.
00:17:40.000Okay, first of all, in New York, everybody's a TikTok influencer.
00:17:42.000But second of all, attacking Yang as a Republican, it ain't gonna do much.
00:17:46.000Okay, meanwhile, Maya Wiley, who is the most wild-eyed of the left candidates on the board, right?
00:17:55.000She worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as well as the ACLU and served as counsel to Bill de Blasio, which again, that's a resume that is not going to resonate in a time when Bill de Blasio is like the most hated person in New York.
00:18:09.000Well, the way that she went after Eric Adams is quite amusing.
00:18:11.000So Eric Adams is a former police officer and Eric Adams has talked about the fact that he wants to carry a gun and he also wants to make sure that off-duty police officers can carry a gun in order to crack down on crime.
00:18:23.000Mr. Adams has said he's carried a gun to church.
00:18:26.000He's asked off-duty officers to carry guns to church.
00:18:29.000He said he will carry a gun as mayor and maybe even ditch his detail.
00:18:33.000Eric, isn't this the wrong message to send our kids?
00:18:37.000We're telling not to pick up the guns.
00:18:39.000Okay, and the way he responded was, I've used my gun in order to stop crime off-duty.
00:18:44.000And he mentioned people who had been victimized by crime in the city, which is the reason why he's in really good shape, Eric Adams.
00:18:50.000Again, he's a retired former captain in NYPD.
00:18:53.000And he is running on a platform that includes stepped-up policing, not stepped-down policing.
00:18:58.000The whole defund the police movement, the BLM, the police are the bad guys, all cops are bastards routine, that is not playing in New York City.
00:19:05.000You guys, you're reaping the whirlwind.
00:19:07.000And you're not feeling it because these people are registered Democrats.
00:19:10.000When you elect Ed Koch Democrats, as opposed to Bill de Blasio Democrats, that indicates that EC change is happening in places like New York City.
00:19:18.000Meanwhile, Yang himself slammed Eric Adams.
00:19:22.000The battle in New York is also sort of internal.
00:20:29.000There are a huge number of people who are snowbirds who are now taking their part-time residency in New York and they're just moving it right down to Florida.
00:20:36.000You're seeing an influx of people from the Northeast.
00:20:38.000And that is because of the governing style in New York.
00:20:40.000If they hope to keep people, they're going to have to stop raising taxes.
00:20:43.000They're going to have to start backing cops.
00:20:45.000They're going to have to start backing private property rights again.
00:20:47.000They're going to have to start appealing to the business sensibilities of hedge funds that are in the city but can easily move.
00:20:53.000I know several people who are working at hedge funds who have moved their entire businesses down to Florida.
00:20:57.000I was meeting with the mayor of Miami yesterday.
00:20:59.000He was talking about the huge number of businesses that have been moving from New York to Miami specifically because Miami is a friendly business climate and because they're not going to shun business down here in Florida.
00:21:11.000Even New Yorkers are beginning to recognize this, and this bodes really, really poorly for Democrats going forward.
00:21:37.000How bad is the corporate tax rate proposal being put forward by the Biden administration?
00:21:41.000It's so bad, they're trying to cudgel literally every Western country into imitating their tax proposals just so they can avoid the consequences of their own tax proposals.
00:21:49.000Because if you force people into a choice between organizing in the United States and organizing abroad, And if they can save money organizing abroad, they'll organize abroad.
00:21:58.000And so Joe Biden is trying to force all of these other countries into setting a baseline tax rate so that businesses don't move out of the United States.
00:22:06.000If you have to do that, your economic policy sucks.
00:22:08.000But here was Jen Psaki pushing that economic policy yesterday anyway.
00:22:12.000He believes that we should continue to look at raising the corporate rate.
00:22:16.000That is a way to pay for a range of ideas.
00:22:18.000He's got a lot of ideas out there, a lot of bold proposals, including that aren't a part of this infrastructure negotiation.
00:22:24.000And he continues to believe that corporations can pay more.
00:22:27.000Unless you think corporations shouldn't pay any tax at all, and we'll leave that to others to speak to, then there should be a way to find a path to agreement.
00:22:37.000Okay, well, I don't believe the corporations should pay any tax at all.
00:22:39.000All that money gets passed on to employees or in prices.
00:22:45.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to more of the economic proposals of the Biden administration, which continue to quash economic growth.
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00:24:02.000All right, so the Biden economic plans, they suck, and Joe Biden is beginning to realize they suck, and that the suckage of the economic plans has actual consequences for his political future right here.
00:24:12.000So there's data that came out yesterday, and it showed that hourly compensation is soaring.
00:24:16.000And the reason that it's soaring is because no one is going back to work.
00:24:19.000It is almost impossible to get people to go back to their jobs.
00:24:21.000Okay, when hourly compensation soars, you know what happens to prices?
00:24:26.000And when prices go up, your savings are worth less.
00:24:29.000And when your savings are worth less, this makes you poorer.
00:24:32.000Okay, so for the people who get those higher compensation jobs, not terrible.
00:24:37.000For everybody who has savings, not great.
00:24:39.000And for people who are not getting a raise, also not great.
00:24:44.000All of this is because in the short term, the Biden administration is blowing money into the economy.
00:24:48.000In the long term, what's going to happen is economic stagnation, as I talked about yesterday.
00:24:52.000It's not just that you're going to get inflation, which is an ill, but even if the inflation levels off, you're going to get economic stagnation.
00:25:05.000And the reason for that is because when you suck money out of the system with a vacuum, and then you blow it back into the system via a bunch of redistributionist programs that get eaten up by the bureaucracy, you're removing the productivity from the economy.
00:25:19.000It is the reason you have not seen job growth recover at the pace that you would like to see.
00:25:23.000There's also a reason why Joe Biden is calling Lawrence Summers the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.
00:25:28.000According to the Washington Post, President Biden recently called former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Democrat who's been openly critical of his economic agenda, to acknowledge Summers' concerns and ask him to explain his objections, according to three people with knowledge of the private exchange.
00:25:41.000Biden made the call as the White House is weighing critical decisions on the economy, including how much and whether to trim a far-reaching infrastructure plan in response to Republican demands.
00:25:49.000My conversation also unfolded against a backdrop of warnings from Summers and others that Biden's spending plans present a risk of inflation and an overheating economy.
00:25:57.000The White House has downplayed the extent of the threat posed by inflation, arguing it will be transitory and manageable.
00:26:02.000But in recent months, Summers has engaged in increasingly bitter disagreements with White House aides.
00:26:07.000Summers has been warning that Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package is way too big and will overheat the economy, spurring inflation that could prove hard for the Federal Reserve to control.
00:26:15.000White House officials keep dismissing this.
00:26:17.000They're frustrated that he keeps talking about it in the first place.
00:26:20.000Apparently, the call occurred late last month, but that doesn't mean that Biden is taking his foot off the gas.
00:26:29.000Okay, so Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, she came out yesterday.
00:26:33.000She said, we're not going to negotiate forever on infrastructure.
00:26:34.000We're just going to ram forward our program right here.
00:26:38.000The president really does believe very strongly that the current tax structure is skewed, and he wants to rebalance it in favor of the middle class, the working class, and to close loopholes that allow corporations to offshore and to Get away in many cases with not paying any income taxes, and that's not fair either.
00:26:59.000So there are other ways of skinning the cat, and that's part of this negotiation.
00:27:04.000But ultimately, we cannot just sit and negotiate forever.
00:27:37.000These are not the numbers that Joe Biden needs.
00:27:39.000And they're not the numbers America needs coming out of an artificially induced economic coma.
00:27:45.000The fact that they are trying to blow money into the economy and that it is not working is demonstrative of the reality, which is that when you threaten business, when you tell them you're gonna raise the corporate tax rates, when you talk about making that retroactive, which frankly, I don't even know how that's constitutional, retroactive taxation, they're talking about making the corporate tax increase retroactive so that you can't escape it.
00:28:05.000Because they know that if they make it proactive, there'll be a stock market hit immediately.
00:28:09.000But if you make it proactive that you're about to raise the corporate tax rate, And that it doesn't have retroactive effects, then people are gonna start shifting their money out of corporate stocks, for example, because they know the corporations are gonna get hit.
00:28:19.000If you make it retroactive, then you say, okay, well, it's already priced in.
00:28:22.000But the fact that the Biden administration keeps on missing is fairly incredible, because it's so hard.
00:28:30.000I mean, it's the broad side of the barn here, guys.
00:28:32.000All you have to do is get out of the damned way, but you can't get out of the damned way, because your policy prescriptions are not in line with reality, just like AOC's policy prescriptions in New York are not in line with reality.
00:28:43.000And so New Yorkers are beginning to turn towards something that doesn't look like AOC.
00:28:47.000They're moving away from Bill de Blasio.
00:28:48.000Americans are going to look at the Biden economic agenda, the Biden crime agenda, the Biden racial agenda, the Biden foreign policy agenda.
00:28:55.000They're going to start moving away from it.
00:28:59.000If Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, given what is on their side, honestly, every member of the Republican House should lose their job if the Republicans cannot win back the House in 2022.
00:29:32.000Because people aren't re-entering the workforce.
00:29:34.000There's high demand for labor and low supply of labor, so the prices are rising.
00:29:38.000This could lead to increased price inflation at a time of economic stagnation.
00:29:42.000Or it could just be economic stagnation for a long time.
00:29:44.000Either way, ain't nothing good happening because of the Biden economic agenda.
00:29:48.000Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get into all of the new information that is emerging regarding the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.
00:29:56.000That should have been the main theory going forward since early last year.
00:30:24.000After I've stolen the title, barred against it, or sold the property, or done whatever I've done with it, it's 60 to 90 days to even figure out that they're the victim of this crime.
00:30:34.000By that point, you start getting foreclosure notices, and you realize you've got four mortgages on your house.
00:30:39.000Not only that, you don't even own your home anymore.
00:30:43.000I mean, that sounds like a pretty good case for getting Home Title Lock today.
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00:31:11.000Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the continuing implosion of the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.
00:31:19.000Vanity Fair, believe it or not, has a great piece on this today.
00:31:21.000First, there is no threat like that of a corrupt authoritarian government and a corrupt authoritarian institutional structure.
00:31:28.000When your own society begins exhibiting the power-hungry, controlling, cult-like signs of authoritarianism, it's time to stand up.
00:31:46.000You're feeling it from your corporate bosses.
00:31:47.000You feel it in the educational sphere.
00:31:49.000You're hearing it every time you turn on the media.
00:31:51.000Your values are going to be rejected and you're going to be extirpated from American society for those values by the institutions that you patronize, the institutions you trust, and the ones that you work with.
00:33:30.000No matter how many times their economic theories prove fraudulent and complete failures, no matter how many times they suck money out of the American economy and then blow it back in in the wrong places, we're still gonna pretend like they know what they're doing.
00:33:41.000It's fairly incredible that the geniuses who sit at the top of government, the people who can't tie their own shoelaces or properly eat soup, these people are going to run the economy better than you know how to run your own business.
00:33:51.000All right, meanwhile, Fascinating new article by Catherine Eban in Vanity Fair titled, The Lab Leak Theory, Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins.
00:34:01.000Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off limits.
00:34:04.000Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
00:34:43.000Here's Anthony Fauci saying things that make no sense as per his usual arrangement.
00:34:48.000Obviously you want openness and cooperation.
00:34:52.000One of the ways you can get it is don't be accusatory.
00:34:56.000Try to get both a forensic, a scientific, and an investigational approach.
00:35:03.000I think the accusatory part about it is only going to get them to pull back even more.
00:35:09.000We've got to do it in a combination of diplomacy, scientific forensic investigation, and do it in a way that the people of good faith, not who want to do blame.
00:35:19.000I love how he's like, we don't want people who want to do blame around here.
00:35:25.000We can't have people who wanted to blame.
00:35:36.000And then, watch, Fauci's like, trust people like me.
00:35:39.000But then, he's asked about the lab leak theory, and he's like, what if I just completely mischaracterize the lab leak theory entirely so I can dismiss it?
00:35:47.000He's just, this guy needed to be fired months ago.
00:35:51.000I don't remember what's in that redacted, but there, I mean, the idea I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people.
00:36:26.000Meanwhile, the NIH director was doing the same thing yesterday.
00:36:29.000Downplaying the investigate- It's not important.
00:36:30.000Why do we even need to know how this thing originated?
00:36:33.000We have to have a full-scale congressional investigation into why 300 droogs invaded the Capitol building and then were immediately removed, 400 people were arrested, and the process of government went on.
00:36:44.000We need to have a full-scale investigation.
00:36:46.000But the release of a virus that's killed 3 million people worldwide, including 600,000 Americans, why do we need to know where that came from, says the head of the NIH.
00:36:55.000I agree we need to get to the bottom of this but gosh you and I just spent a whole bunch of minutes here talking about some issue that we need to get an answer to and meanwhile people are still dying from COVID-19 and we didn't even talk about the ways to get to an end to this with vaccines.
00:37:09.000So please could we have a bit more of the focus on how we're going to save lives while we're talking about how this all started.
00:37:17.000Okay, so what actually happened here in terms of silencing the COVID lab leak theory?
00:37:21.000According to this Vanity Fair piece, Gilles Demeneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland.
00:37:27.000He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome 10 years ago and believes it gives him a professional advantage.
00:37:31.000I'm very good at finding patterns in data when other people see nothing, he says.
00:37:34.000Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demeneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.
00:37:43.000The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019.
00:37:52.000The Huanan Wholesale Market in the city of Wuhan is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables.
00:37:58.000A handful of vendors sold live wild animals a possible source of the virus.
00:38:03.000Wuhan is also home to China's foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world's largest collections of bat samples and bat virus strains.
00:38:10.000The Wuhan Institute of Virology's lead coronavirus researcher, Shaixing Li, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally.
00:38:23.000After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and she became known in China as Batwoman for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples.
00:38:32.000More recently, she and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious.
00:38:37.000Such research, known as gain-of-function, has generated heated controversy among virologists.
00:38:42.000To some people, it seems natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV's labs, a possibility she has strenuously denied.
00:38:51.000On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism.
00:39:04.000Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed, quote, solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China and asserted, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
00:39:16.000The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19's origins before it began.
00:39:20.000To Gilles Dimunov, following along from the sidelines, it was as if everything had been nailed to the church, as if it had been nailed to the church doors, establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy.
00:39:46.000But Dovonov soon discovered there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occurring at a top lab in Beijing.
00:39:54.000Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor.
00:40:00.000A grad student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
00:40:04.000Dumb Enough published his findings in a Medium post, titled The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, a review of SARS Lab Escapes.
00:40:10.000By then, he'd begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre.
00:40:14.000A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busily debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a laboratory at all.
00:40:23.000In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses.
00:40:27.000Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol, BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen.
00:40:35.000Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist's office.
00:40:40.000Having connected online, Semenov and Demystra began assembling a comprehensive list of research labs in China.
00:40:46.000As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world.
00:40:50.000Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes, others were science enthusiasts.
00:40:55.000At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China.
00:41:03.000President Trump's former political advisor Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Gao Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and unleashed it on the world.
00:41:14.000With disreputable right-wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness working on the world's most urgent mystery.
00:41:46.000According to Vanity Fair, it's all about Trump.
00:41:48.000In the wake of the Lancet statement, under the cloud of Donald Trump's toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.
00:42:01.000Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in a high-stakes battle over what could and couldn't be investigated and made public, according to Vanity Fair.
00:42:13.000A month's long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, a review of hundreds of pages of U.S.
00:42:18.000government documents including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S.
00:42:29.000investigation into COVID-19's origin at every step.
00:42:32.000In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology's gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S.
00:42:48.000I mean, this is bombshell kind of stuff, right?
00:42:50.000The State Department was actively telling people, do not investigate where this came from, because it might expose the fact that the U.S.
00:42:55.000State Department has been providing support via channels to WIV's gain-of-function research, and WIV may have released this thing accidentally.
00:43:04.000So instead, it was important to cover up China's involvement, and also, you can always just blame it on Trump's toxic racism, absolutely.
00:43:10.000In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNano, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, warned leaders within his bureau not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would open a can of worms if it continued.
00:43:34.000Apparently, according to Vanity Fair, in late March, former CDC Director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
00:43:43.000I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis, Redfield told Vanity Fair.
00:43:55.000Dr. Richard Ebright, Board of Governors, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took them a nanosecond, or a picosecond, to consider a link to the WIV.
00:44:07.000Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research.
00:44:14.000Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak.
00:44:20.000You may remember Peter Daszak from our episode a couple of days ago about Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails.
00:44:24.000Daszak sent Fauci an email thanking him for killing the rumors of gain-of-function research being responsible for this.
00:44:31.000So apparently that Lancet statement, rejecting the COVID lab leak theory as racist, was organized by Daszak, who has repackaged U.S.
00:44:39.000government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research, among them the WIV itself.
00:44:45.000David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department's day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry.
00:44:51.000He said it soon became clear there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy inside the federal government.
00:44:58.000On May 26th, the steady crescendo of questions led President Biden to release a statement acknowledging the intelligence community had coalesced around two likely scenarios and announced he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days.
00:45:10.000In the words of David Feith, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the East Asia Bureau, the story of why parts of the U.S.
00:45:14.000government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.
00:45:20.000So again, there was consistent pressure inside the U.S.
00:45:23.000government not to investigate this stuff.
00:45:27.000According to Vanity Fair, on December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the WHO.
00:45:39.000The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation.
00:45:43.000The conversation then turned to a more sensitive question.
00:45:47.000government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
00:45:50.000A small group within the State Department's Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance Bureau had been studying the WIV for months.
00:45:56.000They had acquired a classified intelligence suggesting three WIV researchers conducted gain-of-function experiments and then fell ill in autumn 2019.
00:46:04.000As officials at the meeting discussed what they should share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, Director of the State Department's Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S.
00:46:16.000government's own role in gain-of-function research.
00:46:19.000Some of the attendees were absolutely floored, said an official familiar with the proceedings, that someone in the U.S.
00:46:23.000government could make an argument that was so nakedly against transparency in light of the unfolding catastrophe was shocking and disturbing.
00:46:31.000Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S.
00:46:33.000government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places.
00:46:41.000As the group probed the lab leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a Pandora's box, said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair.
00:46:50.000The admonitions smelled like a cover-up, said Tenano, and I wasn't going to be a part of it.
00:46:54.000Park said, I'm skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.
00:46:59.000He added that he was simply arguing it's making an enormous and unjustifiable leap to suggest that research of that kind meant something untoward is going on.
00:47:07.000Again, this looks very much like a cover-up.
00:47:10.000And it looks like a cover-up that was politically motivated by bureaucrats inside the government and media outside the government.
00:47:15.000Bureaucrats inside protecting their own asses because they were involved in funding of gain-of-function research in China that could have led to the creation and then leaking of COVID-19.
00:47:23.000And a media willing to not investigate, not cover this stuff, Because the reality is, all of this information was available at the earliest date, and the media were complicit in covering it up.
00:47:34.000The media were too busy asking Joe Biden about his cat.
00:47:38.000By the way, they continue to be too busy, generally, asking Joe.
00:47:41.000You know the Biden administration still has not been asked serious questions by anyone other than Peter Doocy about the Wuhan lab leak theory and the cover-up?
00:47:49.000I mean, it's fairly impressive, I will admit, the media's performance on all of this.
00:47:53.000Instead, they're like, the right wing is focused on the COVID, why aren't they focused on their own performance?
00:47:57.000Well, because if you cover up the greatest biological scandal in modern history, and you do so for political purposes, and you have no curiosity about it, that's kind of damning of you as an institution in the media, and certainly damning of our public health bureaucracy, the experts who are too busy covering their own asses to be truthful about where COVID-19 came from, even though it killed 600,000 Americans.
00:48:20.000Pretty incredible stuff, and good for the folks at Vanity Fair for Late, but late is better than never.