The Tucker Carlson Show - Bret Weinstein

00:00:00.000 If you've been following any of the stories over the past several years about the movement

00:00:16.320 of hundreds of thousands, millions of people illegally into the United States, you may

00:00:21.320 have come across the phrase Darien Gap, and it's never really explained what it is.

00:00:25.640 It's a physical place.

00:00:26.540 It's between Panama and Colombia, and it is a gap in the Pan-American Highway.

00:00:30.620 In other words, if you want to get from South America to North America overland, you have

00:00:34.440 to go through the Darien Gap, but it's very difficult.

00:00:36.980 And yet, last year, at least 520,000 migrants crossed it to come here.

00:00:43.980 How did that happen?

00:00:45.500 What is it?

00:00:46.100 What is going on in the Darien Gap?

00:00:48.380 It's the key, in some ways, to this story, this immigration story.

00:00:53.980 Well, almost no one has taken the time to go to the Darien Gap and find out what's happening

00:00:58.320 there.

00:00:59.280 Leave it to a world-round biologist to do that.

00:01:01.760 Not a journalist, a biologist.

00:01:03.980 That would be Dr. Brett Weinstein, who is the host, along with his wife, Heather, of the

00:01:09.020 Dark Horse podcast.

00:01:10.260 And he was just there last week because he wanted to see it for himself.

00:01:13.360 We're honored to have him join us now to tell us what he found.

00:01:17.120 Dr. Weinstein, thank you so much.

00:01:18.380 Very good to be back with you, Tucker.

00:01:19.740 That was my feeble attempt to ad-lib an explanation of the Darien Gap, but can you a little more

00:01:25.120 precisely tell us what it is?

00:01:26.420 Sure.

00:01:26.880 You did a pretty good job.

00:01:28.400 The Pan-American Highway is a road that literally goes from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to the southern

00:01:32.820 tip of South America.

00:01:34.520 It is unbroken, but for a 60-mile stretch between Panama and Colombia.

00:01:41.180 It is not a canyon, as many people imagine the gap must be.

00:01:44.920 It's an impenetrable piece of jungle, and the road has never been completed there, not

00:01:49.800 because it's technically impossible to do, but because the combination of the difficulty

00:01:54.940 of putting a road through that jungle and the danger of doing so has meant that North

00:02:01.660 and South America have been separated in this way for the entire history of that road.

00:02:06.860 So you often hear people say it's a perilous journey to get across that 60 miles of the

00:02:11.080 Darien Gap.

00:02:12.300 Is that a fair assessment?

00:02:13.920 It's beyond fair.

00:02:16.260 Let's just say I did my graduate work not far from Darien.

00:02:21.100 I did it in central Panama, and the jungle in the Darien Gap is some place that one does 1.00

00:02:29.960 not go without careful preparation.

00:02:32.880 It is quite dangerous.

00:02:35.740 It involves a number of conditions that make it perilous.

00:02:39.860 For one thing, the Cordillera, which is the mountain range that is effectively the continental

00:02:44.700 divide, the same continental divide that we see in Colorado, for example, continues down

00:02:49.720 through Central America, and it passes through Darien.

00:02:52.620 So imagine a very difficult jungle without proper trails through it in which migrants have 1.00

00:03:00.600 to come up that mountain range, and they're almost all unprepared.

00:03:05.520 They don't have the kinds of materials you would want with you, so they're soaking wet from rain.

00:03:10.560 They're sleeping on the ground, and so they get hypothermia.

00:03:14.240 It's extremely slippery, so people are constantly sliding down hills, breaking limbs.

00:03:20.700 They sleep in their shoes and get trench foot.

00:03:23.420 It's a very treacherous journey, and the difficulty of it should not be underrated.

00:03:30.060 So how did—I mean, you wonder why there's not a permanent team of New York Times reporters

00:03:33.900 there trying to tell the rest of us what exactly is happening.

00:03:37.680 Half a million people move through there in one year.

00:03:40.280 How did you wind up there?

00:03:42.020 Well, I wound up there because Michael Yan had been sending me materials thinking that I

00:03:49.140 would be interested in what was taking place in Panama, and of course, I was utterly fascinated

00:03:53.780 by what I was seeing.

00:03:56.360 Now, some of your viewers may not know Michael.

00:03:58.820 Michael is a former Green Beret who has refashioned himself—well, the last time I was on your program,

00:04:06.800 I talked about Goliath.

00:04:08.320 Yes.

00:04:08.500 And if there's a Goliath, there's a David, and I would argue that Michael Yan is like David's eyes.

00:04:16.080 He's been traversing the world trying to understand a story that as yet has no name, and that story

00:04:23.460 is partially in the Darien of Panama, and it's all sorts of other places, including in various

00:04:31.860 UN installations.

00:04:33.680 There's some story that is difficult to piece together, and he's been physically traveling

00:04:40.180 to all of its various epicenters and showing people.

00:04:43.260 And that is the story of mass migration?

00:04:44.920 Mass migration, I now think, is a piece of it.

00:04:48.920 Now, when I went to Panama, I had a hard time explaining to myself why I was going because—

00:04:56.620 Those are the best trips, aren't they?

00:04:57.980 They—yes.

00:04:59.060 They are.

00:04:59.820 The serendipity of it is important.

00:05:02.100 But it was hard for me to justify in my head going to such a place when it wasn't going to

00:05:08.760 change, you know, the videos he had sent me were quite clear.

00:05:14.280 So what was it I was going to learn by standing there that I couldn't also learn by looking

00:05:18.860 at these things?

00:05:19.520 Well, I'm very glad I went because it did actually radically change my understanding of what I was

00:05:24.300 looking at for reasons I better understand now.

00:05:27.900 Now, one needs to see the physical relationship between the various sites that he showed us in order to really piece together what this story is.

00:05:41.460 So you went, if I can summarize what I think you're saying, because you're a researcher and you

00:05:46.360 wanted to know what's actually happening.

00:05:49.020 The thing that gets de-emphasized when we talk about high-quality science is the degree to which

00:05:56.900 it is informed by well-tutored intuition.

00:06:00.780 So I had a sense that I needed to see it for reasons that my conscious mind wasn't certain of at the time.

00:06:07.660 And I followed that.

00:06:08.800 And I'm very glad I did.

00:06:10.980 Follow your instincts.

00:06:12.020 Boy, that is the lesson of so many moments in life.

00:06:15.620 So what did you find?

00:06:16.560 And what did you conclude?

00:06:17.640 Well, I concluded a number of things.

00:06:19.940 And the whole thing was so mentally disruptive that I'm still in the process of unpacking what it was and debating with myself about what it means.

00:06:31.280 But I'll give you some basics.

00:06:34.520 But I do have to ask something of your audience.

00:06:38.060 There's part of this that is just me reporting what I saw and what I learned from Michael and others on our trip.

00:06:44.200 And there's part of it that's me speculating.

00:06:47.480 And I'm trying to do it as responsibly as possible because a great deal hinges on what the actual explanation for what we looked at is.

00:06:56.200 So when I'm speculating, I'm going to be careful to tell you that that's what I'm doing.

00:07:00.120 And people should, you know, treat hypotheses as hypotheses and nothing more.

00:07:05.500 But the first place that this trip really changed my understanding was I went down thinking that I was going to see a migration.

00:07:16.580 And other people have called it an invasion.

00:07:19.780 And there is something troubling to me about the tension between these two things.

00:07:24.860 I mean, which is it?

00:07:26.540 And I came away with the sense that it's probably literally both.

00:07:32.320 And the way that manifests is you have a massive movement of people through the Darien from Colombia.

00:07:44.240 Now, I did not know when I went down.

00:07:46.500 I now know that most of those people actually start in Ecuador.

00:07:49.900 And the reason they start in Ecuador is that Ecuador has a policy where they don't require a visa.

00:07:54.720 So people coming from all over the world can land in Quito, Ecuador, find their way through Colombia, move through the Darien.

00:08:01.500 And if they survive it, which not all of them do, they can then get relatively directly all the way through Central America into the U.S.

00:08:10.360 But that's not all that's going on.

00:08:13.100 So we went to several of the, I guess you would call them transit camps.

00:08:20.160 These are places where people who have come by whatever route to Darien, where they recover if they're injured and they have to accumulate money.

00:08:34.480 Because even if they settle out on their journey with enough money to buy a bus ticket to get them through Central America, by the time they've come through Darien, almost all of them have been robbed.

00:08:45.080 And much worse, actually.

00:08:46.580 People are being robbed. 0.99

00:08:48.700 Women are being raped. 0.70

00:08:50.020 And lots of people are dying. 0.99

00:08:54.220 The migrants talk about stepping over bodies in Darien. 1.00

00:08:57.760 And for somebody with experience in these kinds of jungles, it's not hard to see how, without a support network, the kinds of stuff that can happen in a jungle can become deadly very quickly.

00:09:10.640 Things can spiral out of control.

00:09:12.140 So you have all of these migrants from all over the world.

00:09:16.960 Many of them are South American, but that is by no means the whole story.

00:09:20.240 People are coming from the Middle East.

00:09:21.900 We met Afghans.

00:09:23.520 We met people from the Caribbean, Haitians.

00:09:25.680 There are people from Yemen, Iran.

00:09:28.040 It's shocking, really.

00:09:29.520 This looks superficially like the migration of Central Americans that you and I remember from when we were kids.

00:09:36.240 And there is some of that.

00:09:38.240 But that's not the whole story.

00:09:39.800 Now, there's a camp we went to called Canaan Membrio.

00:09:46.120 It's on the Canaan River at the town of Membrio.

00:09:49.100 And Canaan Membrio, we were allowed to walk around at will.

00:09:54.660 And we could interact with the migrants at will.

00:09:58.080 We were allowed to take pictures.

00:09:59.240 There was no concern about this.

00:10:00.500 We just had to check in with the Senna Front.

00:10:02.780 The Senna Front is the Panamanian Border Authority.

00:10:05.860 But once we had checked in, we were on our own.

00:10:08.560 And people were interested in talking, including migrants.

00:10:11.980 So we had many conversations with migrants.

00:10:15.520 And these migrants, I have to tell you, when they come to the southern border of the U.S., they get through on the basis that they are political refugees.

00:10:27.460 They aren't.

00:10:29.800 When we talk to them in the transit camp, everybody tells the same story.

00:10:34.860 They are fleeing economic collapse.

00:10:39.140 And they are fleeing in the direction of what they perceive to be economic opportunity.

00:10:43.540 And, of course, in American law, these two things are very different.

00:10:46.500 We protect people who are seeking political asylum.

00:10:49.960 But we do not offer automatic economic asylum.

00:10:53.140 And the reason for that is fairly clear, which is that in order to protect people economically, we end up robbing Americans of their economic well-being.

00:11:05.480 And that's just not something that people are entitled to.

00:11:09.180 No matter how much compassion you may have for people fleeing Venezuela, it is not our responsibility, especially not without some sort of a plan, an agreement about how many people are going to come through and in what way we're going to take care of them and how that's going to get paid for.

00:11:24.620 We don't do that.

00:11:28.280 But in any case, you get the same story from everybody.

00:11:30.780 They're fleeing an economic crisis.

00:11:34.180 And they're moving north.

00:11:37.160 And many of them have terrible stories about what happened to them in the Darien Gap.

00:11:41.820 So that's one thing.

00:11:43.900 And you see, when you go into this camp, Kananmenbrio, you see the hallmark of the international community.

00:11:51.020 You see NGO emblems all over the place.

00:11:54.620 Proudly, American flags.

00:11:56.540 They've paid for the water system, the toilets that are there.

00:12:00.740 The United States government is facilitating this economic migration.

00:12:05.100 And it's unmistakable, as is an organization called the IOM, which is the International Organization for Migration.

00:12:13.520 It's a branch of the UN.

00:12:14.700 And if you read their charter, you will discover that this organization believes that migration is an inherently good thing.

00:12:23.600 That it's always good.

00:12:25.260 And so they see it as their job to bring it about, to facilitate it.

00:12:29.400 And in this case, that's particularly tragic because their desire to induce people to migrate is causing people who are woefully unprepared for the Darien Gap to try to make that journey.

00:12:44.380 And the humanitarian tragedy is immense.

00:12:49.940 So the UN, which the United States is, I think, the largest donor by far, is paying for this with the U.S. government.

00:13:00.300 Yep.

00:13:00.840 Apparently, they are.

00:13:01.900 Now, Panamanians are largely unaware.

00:13:03.800 Some are aware that there's a migration.

00:13:05.860 But in large measure, this migration, once it gets through the Darien Gap, boards, buses, and effectively, what I now understand is that all of the countries in Central America are effectively waving the migrants through because those migrants are not going to stop in these countries.

00:13:26.640 As long as they keep going to the U.S., these countries are willing to remain silent about it. 0.75

00:13:31.980 Now, in 1991, Heather and I actually traveled the other direction through Central America, through all of the countries south to Costa Rica.

00:13:42.900 And all of those borders are tightly controlled.

00:13:45.280 Oh, I've been, yeah.

00:13:46.660 And so it is very surprising to find those controls are effectively lifted here.

00:13:52.500 That's clearly the result of a massive coordination.

00:13:57.280 And, of course, it's resulting in a large migration.

00:14:01.980 But what I was going to tell you about the fact that this migration doesn't appear to me to be just one thing is that we went to another camp called San Vicente.

00:14:12.840 And everything in San Vicente is different than it was at Canaan Mambria. 0.71

00:14:18.220 San Vicente, first of all, it's not a town.

00:14:21.640 This is a camp that is built as a transit camp.

00:14:24.780 It's built of containers and various objects to house people.

00:14:30.240 And it is almost entirely Chinese.

00:14:34.180 Now, there were Chinese folks.

00:14:35.480 Chinese?

00:14:36.120 Chinese.

00:14:36.740 That's a long way from China.

00:14:39.180 It sure is.

00:14:39.880 And what's more, in this camp, the rule that you're able to go in and walk around and talk to people is not in evidence.

00:14:53.000 The Senate front, the Panamanian border control, actually forbid us to go into the camp.

00:14:59.800 So we had to stay on the outside of it.

00:15:01.700 We were also forbidden to photograph it.

00:15:03.820 So what photographs we have were taken covertly.

00:15:10.700 But the most striking thing...

00:15:12.420 Wait, may I ask, so is it the government of China, do you believe, that's funding this?

00:15:19.320 Well, let me tell you the other thing I found, and then I think the answer to that will become clearer.

00:15:24.000 However, outside of the San Vicente camp, the Chinese migrants are, you can interact with them.

00:15:35.100 There are a couple of shops where they go to buy water or snacks or whatever.

00:15:40.180 And so you can interact with them at those places.

00:15:44.040 They are the opposite of forthcoming.

00:15:47.540 They have no interest in talking to outsiders.

00:15:51.900 And I've been to dangerous places before.

00:15:55.060 I've been to places where people fear their government and can't talk to you because they feel it's not safe.

00:16:02.000 This didn't feel like that at all.

00:16:04.360 This felt like people who did not want to share information because it would be a mistake to do so.

00:16:10.880 And what's more, there was an incident where Michael, who has lived in China, he's been all over the world,

00:16:20.140 and he started up or tried to start up a conversation with a guy who claimed to be from Korea.

00:16:29.960 And Michael tripped him up and got him to speak Chinese.

00:16:33.980 And then there was uproarious laughter at the fact that he had tried to pull this caper on Michael.

00:16:39.900 So it is not a friendly migration.

00:16:44.860 These Chinese folks who are overwhelmingly male, military age, there are women present.

00:16:54.160 I realized only this morning that in thinking back, I saw few, if any, children in the Chinese migration.

00:17:03.300 They were everywhere in the other places we visited, but they were not present as far as I remember in the San Vicente camp.

00:17:12.480 So what I have pieced together, and this is a place where I'm going to speculate, this is a hypothesis, this is not a conclusion.

00:17:24.860 But what I began to suspect was that the Chinese migration is actually being cloaked by the economic migration coming from South America.

00:17:40.000 And that that is consistent with the observation that it has some different motivation.

00:17:49.220 I learned from Michael that the Chinese migrants in the San Vicente camp largely bypassed the Darien.

00:17:55.420 Because they have money, they can go by boat and they can skip most of the peril of the Darien Gap.

00:18:03.320 And in any case, it's a very different phenomenon.

00:18:06.620 And to see it housed so separately is quite conspicuous.

00:18:12.420 I do not know what the rationale for this would be.

00:18:14.840 Can you estimate, do you have any sense of how many Chinese, these are Chinese nationals?

00:18:18.740 They seem to be.

00:18:20.280 How many did you see-ish?

00:18:22.980 Talking 60 or 600 or?

00:18:25.540 It's very hard to say because we were held at one edge of the camp.

00:18:29.280 So I probably saw 150 faces, but the camp is deeper.

00:18:38.280 Now, Michael does some drone reconnaissance, and he's also been to this camp many times.

00:18:43.360 He would definitely be the person to ask in terms of a good estimate for how many of these folks there are.

00:18:49.340 But the degree to which this is not consistent with a—well, let me back up a second.

00:19:02.060 I regard the Chinese people as victims of an oppressive government that I fear for my own reasons.

00:19:11.820 For sure.

00:19:12.200 So there's nothing about the fact that these folks are Chinese that throws me. 0.99

00:19:17.360 And if they were fleeing that government, I'm not sure what we should do about it, but I'm certainly supportive of their desire.

00:19:24.540 I would feel a great deal of sympathy.

00:19:26.180 And in fact, I felt a great deal of sympathy for all of the other migrants that I met.

00:19:31.020 But the sense of—it's really hard not to use the term hostility that I felt from the Chinese was particularly unsettling given that I know where they're headed. 1.00

00:19:40.340 Right, they're headed to the U.S.

00:19:43.280 And just to be totally clear on that point, this was not a work camp for a Chinese infrastructure project.

00:19:51.680 No, it was not.

00:19:53.860 And what I know is taking place at the southern border of the U.S. makes this even more disturbing.

00:20:04.220 Because although the controls at the southern border are still there for those of us who are crossing legally, the lack of any control for those who are crossing illegally is stunning.

00:20:16.860 So if I may just compare, when I came back from Panama, I approached a kiosk with my passport ready to scan it.

00:20:25.720 I didn't have to.

00:20:26.760 A camera took my picture.

00:20:29.000 And although I didn't know that my picture was about to be taken, I hadn't taken my hat off, I was wearing my glasses,

00:20:35.500 the kiosk told me I didn't need to put my passport there.

00:20:40.060 And then a customs officer behind me called my name, Brett.

00:20:43.760 He said, do you have anything to declare?

00:20:44.880 I said, no, he said, you're good to go.

00:20:46.940 So we have technology that is capable of identifying a person with that level of ease to the point that they knew exactly who was coming through the border.

00:20:59.440 But we are not apparently taking that information when people cross our southern border.

00:21:04.420 What we're doing at most is asking them their name and their birth date and taking them at their word.

00:21:11.100 But no biometric collection?

00:21:12.380 Apparently not, which means that, you know, even if this were simply a matter of our system being overwhelmed by migrants, 0.99

00:21:21.000 you would at least want to collect that information so that if a troublemaker did come through, which is inevitable that they will,

00:21:26.900 you could begin to figure out who it might be, right?

00:21:29.880 So that, you know, they had an identity.

00:21:32.040 Even if it was just connected to biometric data, that would be useful.

00:21:35.040 But we're not doing it.

00:21:36.600 So what I think I saw, my hypothesis for what I think I saw is that there is an invasion taking place.

00:21:49.580 You know, it's not a sleeper cell because it's on the move, but I started to think of them as sleepwalkers.

00:21:55.060 And there's also a massive migration.

00:21:59.220 And the migration is causing it, is causing us to have difficulty discussing the invasion, which is a distinct phenomenon.

00:22:08.280 And different simply from desperate peasants from poor countries coming here for work. 0.55

00:22:13.060 There was no desperation in evidence, and Michael also gave us a video, which I can't establish the origin of,

00:22:20.760 but it is a Chinese cartoon set to happy music of a migrant moving through Central America, changing modes of transportation.

00:22:33.820 And it basically indicates here's the route you will travel.

00:22:37.420 Now, was it produced by the CCP?

00:22:39.240 I can't be certain of that, but that certainly is suggested, that this is a message about how to make this journey for what purpose, I don't know.

00:22:50.020 But I do not believe that the people I encountered had left China without the knowledge of their government.

00:22:56.540 I believe their government has some reason to have facilitated.

00:23:01.900 But the administration must be aware of this.

00:23:05.460 Our administration?

00:23:06.260 Yes.

00:23:06.520 It is, but here's the problem I've been wrestling with.

00:23:13.900 It used to be that it was hard to convince people that our system was deeply corrupt.

00:23:19.840 Back in the days when those of us who were focused on this issue used to talk about campaign finance reform.

00:23:25.220 Right.

00:23:25.480 It was a problem, you know, that you could grapple with.

00:23:29.040 It was of that scale.

00:23:29.940 Now we have, it's like a whole different level of corruption, right?

00:23:36.340 And here's the question that I've never heard a good answer to.

00:23:40.720 What stops our enemies internationally from buying influence over our system in the same way that corporations do and did?

00:23:51.020 I can't think of anything, and I've never heard it.

00:23:55.180 Patriotism?

00:23:57.240 Right.

00:23:57.620 Sorry, just kidding.

00:23:58.360 I don't think there is any such safeguard.

00:24:02.320 And if there is such a safeguard, I would like to know how often it has been triggered.

00:24:06.780 Certainly our enemies will have noticed that we have a system that's pay for play.

00:24:10.220 And it's certainly, I mean, it's perfectly in keeping with Sun Tzu at the very least.

00:24:15.700 It would be far cheaper, easier, safer from their perspective to persuade us to harm ourselves than to go to war with us. 0.50

00:24:29.160 So, again, I don't know.

00:24:32.420 I'm a biologist.

00:24:33.580 I'm, you know, this is not my...

00:24:35.500 Well, you're an observer of things.

00:24:36.780 That's what the study of biology is, right?

00:24:38.900 It is, and unfortunately this is the most parsimonious explanation for what I've seen now,

00:24:43.980 is that somebody has persuaded us to endorse a policy that is decidedly not in our interest.

00:24:54.900 And I will also say that I've become aware in the process of doing this

00:25:01.020 that the Chinese have a rather famous plan for the world called the Belt and Road Initiative.

00:25:08.560 Yes.

00:25:09.540 In which they have scoped out where the resources are and how they're to get from one place to another.

00:25:16.640 What many people who know about the Belt and Road Initiative don't know is that they have also, you know,

00:25:22.620 the Belt and Road Initiative is largely about Africa and Asia.

00:25:26.020 But apparently there's been a considerable amount of thinking in China about how Belt and Road would work in the New World as well.

00:25:34.940 And it's in full operation.

00:25:36.560 I mean, St. Croix, which is an American protectorate, St. Croix next to, you know, it's American Virgin Islands.

00:25:43.820 Its road system is built by China.

00:25:45.660 There you go.

00:25:47.600 And there's an awful lot of investment in Panama.

00:25:50.800 And there is certainly talk in China about opening the Darien Gap.

00:25:55.920 Opening it, paving it.

00:25:57.400 Paving it.

00:25:58.080 Right.

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00:26:48.380 Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us.

00:26:55.840 Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.

00:27:03.400 This hurts consumers and every small business owner.

00:27:06.840 In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.

00:27:12.220 The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world.

00:27:17.260 Double candidates and eight times more than Europe's.

00:27:20.700 That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.

00:27:25.080 I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act.

00:27:32.080 Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.

00:27:33.760 Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

00:27:35.820 Another thing that Michael showed us, which is maybe the most surprising thing I saw, is a bridge building project at Javitsa, which is the town at the very end of the Pan American Highway in Darien.

00:27:59.980 So there is a massive bridge being built.

00:28:05.220 Not a bamboo and vine bridge.

00:28:06.740 Oh, no.

00:28:07.360 This is a massive concrete and steel highway bridge being built over the Chukunake River into the Darien.

00:28:18.220 What's on the other side is impenetrable jungle and a few villages.

00:28:23.720 This bridge does not make any sense.

00:28:26.340 So any idea who's paying for that?

00:28:28.160 That is much less clear.

00:28:31.040 There are no signs.

00:28:32.460 Most people in Panama are completely unaware that any such project exists.

00:28:36.820 There are no proud signs as there are in the transit camps.

00:28:41.640 I will say we spoke to the foreman of the project.

00:28:45.740 I mean, the project is actually pretty impressive.

00:28:48.000 You know, it's a construction site.

00:28:49.100 Nobody's standing around.

00:28:50.160 They are building a bridge and they are doing so impressively.

00:28:56.340 Do the workers seem to be local Panamanians?

00:28:58.420 They do.

00:28:59.420 The foreman was Panamanian and we asked him what the purpose of the bridge was and he didn't know, but he speculated that it was to bring yucca from Darien, from the villages on the other side, into Panama.

00:29:16.160 That's a low margin agricultural product for those who are watching.

00:29:20.080 It doesn't justify a steel reinforced bridge across the river.

00:29:22.720 There's nothing about this that makes any sense.

00:29:25.940 I mean, yucca, it's like a potato.

00:29:28.860 It grows all over Panama and all over the world's tropics.

00:29:33.760 There would be no reason to grow it in Darien.

00:29:35.780 In fact, there are very good reasons not to encourage more of it to be grown in Darien, given the priceless habitat that will be cleared to grow yucca there for no good reason.

00:29:44.680 There's lots of better places to do it.

00:29:46.260 So, what I was left with is the sense that there is a bridge going in and it has a purpose that has not been shared with the Panamanians.

00:29:59.680 That purpose really has to be, as far as I can tell, it's got to be one of two things.

00:30:04.700 Either this is about bringing lumber out of Darien National Park, which would be obscene.

00:30:14.380 Cutting hardwood.

00:30:15.280 Cutting hardwood.

00:30:16.100 This is priceless hardwood that is in part still standing because it is such a difficult jungle to access.

00:30:23.760 So, it's possible that somebody has targeted that wood and not told the Panamanians and they're building this bridge for that purpose.

00:30:31.960 But the other potential purpose is that they're intending to finish the Panamanian Highway through Darien, which is something that would certainly need to be discussed to be reasonable.

00:30:45.500 Now, in the aftermath of our trip, Anne Vander Steele put up a video sharing just a view of this construction site and her perspective on it.

00:30:58.780 And this caused a small scandal in Panama because the Panamanians weren't aware.

00:31:03.940 And suddenly, this was on the internet and they were talking about what is this bridge at the southern end of the Panamerican Highway in Panama.

00:31:12.820 And the Panamanians claimed that it was just to reach the villages on the other side.

00:31:21.880 So, I'm left with the very odd sense that their cover story is that this is a boondoggle.

00:31:29.540 Right?

00:31:30.160 If this was a boondoggle and they were just putting money into a project that meant nothing, then that would explain the bridge to nowhere.

00:31:36.320 But this didn't look like a boondoggle.

00:31:40.460 This looked like somebody wanted the bridge.

00:31:42.560 And given the Belt and Road Initiative and the sense that the Chinese have about what the future should look like and in which direction resources should move and for what purpose, it's hard for me not to connect the dots between these things. 0.94

00:31:58.160 You have a massive migration of people, labor, you have a likely invasion of military age, largely Chinese males, who are not forthcoming about why they have embarked on their journey and appear to be encouraged by something in China to do this.

00:32:19.760 So, you know, given what you're describing and what you saw with your own eyes, doubtless you have seen Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois' comments in the Senate where you said, hey, we should let people who came here illegally join the U.S. military. 0.87

00:32:37.440 What does that make you think?

00:33:07.440 That that likely had the purpose of getting rid of the kinds of people who refuse moral orders and that it created a much more compliant force.

00:33:19.220 Now, what happens if migrants are given citizenship in exchange for military service in the U.S. military?

00:33:29.380 That seems to create a major hazard because the perverse incentives for a migrant and the lack of allegiance to fundamental American values means that that would be just the kind of force that could be used to impose tyranny on other Americans because they would have, you know, no history with us that would cause them to think twice. 1.00

00:33:56.640 We've seen this. We've seen this before with the Roman legions.

00:34:00.360 That's exactly my conclusion. Does that sound like a crazy conclusion?

00:34:07.500 I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy.

00:34:14.440 The pattern of recent history.

00:34:16.740 I'm sorry, I want to repeat that.

00:34:18.100 I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seems crazy.

00:34:23.220 Yep.

00:34:23.420 Getting that tattooed.

00:34:24.420 Getting that tattooed.

00:34:25.540 Yeah. Well, I mean, this is where we are.

00:34:28.060 And it is, it's causing me to do something that I'm reluctant to do.

00:34:34.080 My training is as a scientist.

00:34:35.720 And scientists have to have a substantial degree of caution and skepticism to do the work.

00:34:47.120 But in order even to reach the possibilities that do fully explain what we're seeing, we have to be ready to consider the larger picture.

00:34:57.480 Now, I was talking to Chris Martinson while we were in Panama.

00:35:03.260 We were on our last day trying to just unpack what we had seen and what it meant to us.

00:35:09.340 Chris is also a scientist.

00:35:10.700 And people can check this out on the Dark Horse Locals community.

00:35:18.020 We've posted the entire conversation in which he and I reached some, I think we spooked ourselves trying to reason through what this might be.

00:35:26.520 And he reminded me of the massive number of surplus males that China now has as a result.

00:35:39.000 I was thinking the exact same thing as a result of the one child policy.

00:35:42.560 The one child policy.

00:35:43.400 Now, here's the part that I suddenly realized as soon as he reminded me of that.

00:35:49.580 I wrote an essay years ago about the one child policy and the paradox of a heavy bias in favor of males.

00:35:59.980 And the reason that this is a paradox is that there's a principle in evolution well understood.

00:36:05.640 It's the result of the work of a guy named Ronald Fisher.

00:36:08.260 And what Fisher realized was that although males and females can be very different in how many offspring they produce,

00:36:15.280 and because a male could produce thousands of offspring in a lifetime and a female, if we're talking about humans,

00:36:20.660 could, I think the maximum is something impressive like 60.

00:36:23.340 But nonetheless, because males can produce a lot more, it seems that it might be evolutionarily advantageous to be one.

00:36:30.860 But it's not because for every overperforming male, there's an underperforming male or at least one.

00:36:37.380 And the result is that sex ratios, no matter how different males and females are in their maximum reproductive capacity,

00:36:45.480 they tend to default to one-to-one.

00:36:47.620 If you have a society that has too many females, you should produce a male. 1.00

00:36:51.480 And if you have a society with too many males, you should produce a female, which tends to balance these things out. 0.99

00:36:56.660 That logic should have applied to China. 0.99

00:36:59.200 The fact is there were lots of excess males.

00:37:03.920 And if you put yourself in the mindset of a Chinese person having a child, if there are too many males, you should want to produce a female. 1.00

00:37:12.520 A male is very unlikely to find a mate.

00:37:14.540 A female is certain to find one. 1.00

00:37:16.340 And what's more, she has her pick of the litter.

00:37:18.860 Yes.

00:37:19.080 So that logic should have caused the sex ratio to return to 50-50, and yet it did not, which caused me all those years ago when I wrote this piece to wonder if there wasn't another evolutionary force in play.

00:37:33.540 If evolution did not have a mechanism for producing armies, that when a country was in a position to expand, that producing excess males does pay off at a lineage level.

00:37:47.100 That excess males who have no reproductive prospects at home become an effective weapon against neighboring populations. 0.81

00:37:55.580 So I can't believe that that did not occur to me as I was preparing for this trip, but it has occurred to me now.

00:38:05.720 I guess it didn't occur to me because when I wrote that all those years ago, I was expecting to see evidence that this was turning into a military force, and I didn't see it.

00:38:14.040 So I stopped thinking about it.

00:38:15.100 But now I wonder if that isn't exactly right, and if what happened is that a male-biased population in China was produced as a weapon, and if that weapon is now being deployed.

00:38:33.380 That's remarkable.

00:38:34.760 So that would—so far we have the U.S. government abetting this, a branch of the U.N., Chinese government.

00:38:45.260 Did you see any other funders or parent funders of this?

00:38:51.200 Well, I'm not expert in this area at all.

00:38:54.140 We did go to a place—so I guess I didn't say this.

00:38:59.400 25 years ago, I worked in Panama.

00:39:01.660 I lived on Barrow, Colorado Island, which is an island administered by the Smithsonian Institution in the Panama Canal.

00:39:08.300 It was a hilltop that got isolated when the canal filled, and the Smithsonian took it over because it was a marvelous opportunity to have an isolated piece of forest that they could watch over time and learn how tropical biology works.

00:39:21.900 So I had the privilege of living in the canal for 18 months, and I got very familiar with the canal zone.

00:39:26.300 You lived in the Panama Canal for 18 months.

00:39:28.400 Absolutely did.

00:39:28.960 We used to swim in the waters for whatever reason.

00:39:32.280 The crocodiles that inhabit those waters, if we would encounter them while swimming, they would turn and go the other way, which was lovely.

00:39:39.220 Apparently that's no longer true, and you can't swim there.

00:39:41.520 But, yeah, I lived there.

00:39:43.200 What were you studying?

00:39:44.820 Tent-making bats.

00:39:48.400 I know that sounds—

00:39:49.360 I'm only asking, really, for your benefit, because I want you to remember just how dramatically your life has changed.

00:39:54.480 Yeah.

00:39:55.340 Well, I still love tent-making bats.

00:39:58.180 It's a little miracle that exists in these forests.

00:40:01.500 But anyway, maybe we'll talk about that another time.

00:40:03.860 But I was well familiar with the canal zone because we used to—the canal zone, in fact, the military, this was before the handover to the Panamanians.

00:40:12.860 So we, you know, the military made it possible for the Smithsonian to work there, and we were constantly interacting.

00:40:20.180 We were going on their bases.

00:40:21.580 We'd go on their bases to watch a movie.

00:40:23.120 So we were using this military infrastructure, which has now all been handed over to Panama.

00:40:29.000 And what impressed me was when we went back, specifically to Fort Clayton, something that is now called the City of Knowledge.

00:40:39.960 The City of Knowledge is housed in—or its central building is the former Army South building from the U.S. Southern Command.

00:40:51.080 So this is both an important fact for the military, that U.S. Southern Command is a segment of the military dedicated to protecting American interests in the Caribbean and all of Latin America, south of Mexico.

00:41:10.440 And it has this impressive structure in Fort Clayton, immediately above the Las Flores locks.

00:41:23.540 So it was both physically there to protect the canal, and it was metaphorically this imposing presence looking out over—

00:41:32.500 To project power south.

00:41:33.720 Absolutely.

00:41:34.100 And after the handover, all of the military bases that were in the canal zone were handed over, and this one has been taken over by the U.N. and the international community, and all the NGOs have offices there.

00:41:46.240 And it reminded me of how many things in our society have been—had their purpose inverted, right?

00:41:55.120 Universities used to exist to make young people smarter and more analytically capable. 0.85

00:42:02.420 Universities now make people stupider and convince them of things that just simply aren't true.

00:42:08.080 Newspapers used to help us understand what the facts were about events that were taking place that involve us. 0.96

00:42:16.120 Now newspapers obscure the facts from us.

00:42:19.100 They're the last to report the news after we embarrass them into doing it.

00:42:22.260 So this structure that once was a testament to the achievement of the Panama Canal and the importance of protecting the Panama Canal is now involved in what looks like obvious subterfuge against American interests, right?

00:42:43.660 An organization that is dedicated to facilitating migration without asking Americans, without there being any plan at all for how the well-being of these people is going to be financed.

00:42:56.520 That their office, IOM, is sitting—if this building, U.S. Army South, the Las Flores locks, is—it's like a person.

00:43:11.500 And at that person's left knee is the IOM looking out at the Bridge of the Americas, which when I was there was the only way to cross the Panama Canal, right?

00:43:20.820 It's almost the exact inversion of what these structures were built for, and how many times do you have to see the inversion of something to begin to get the sense that that's—something has taken over our system and it's become sick?

00:43:35.580 Well, it's—and I'm sure there's a biological term to describe the process of maybe cancer, the body eating itself.

00:43:46.660 I mean, it seems like the structures set in place to protect the country are now at war with the country.

00:43:52.720 I do have the sense that the country, the structures—and it's not even just the country, it's the West.

00:44:01.920 And, you know, I view myself as very much a patriot of the country, but I'm also a patriot of the West, which I see the country as having—maybe it's slightly overstated to say invented the concept.

00:44:15.620 But in any case, yes, the West appears to be sick with an infection.

00:44:26.780 And again, I don't want to drag you into too much biology, but everybody knows what a parasite is.

00:44:34.600 There's also something called a parasitoid.

00:44:37.380 And a parasitoid is a parasite that kills its host in the process of doing its job.

00:44:43.340 And I'm concerned that we may have a parasitoid that is actually at least indifferent to the destruction of the United States and the West and is acting accordingly.

00:44:56.920 So I know it's become your life's work or part of your life's work to figure out what exactly that entity is.

00:45:04.560 Are you any closer?

00:45:05.640 I suppose I am.

00:45:11.240 I mean, maybe I'm partway, and that part involves—I now look at a map with much more skepticism that I understand what it means.

00:45:25.120 That we have become so accustomed to looking at something like a nation like China and thinking of it as an entity that behaves in some way.

00:45:35.660 And something about the ease with which various power structures interact suggests that we—I don't understand why my government is behaving in a way that seems to be sabotaging the interests of average Americans, but it is, undeniably.

00:46:00.680 It seems to be acting on behalf of our enemies.

00:46:07.720 I don't know whether that could conceivably because there's actually hostility.

00:46:15.540 I doubt it.

00:46:16.240 But my guess is what there is is just a rampant outbreak of amorality where people are willing to do whatever is expedient, and that has made the game rather easy for powers that be elsewhere.

00:46:34.460 And I don't know—I don't know where the analysis becomes absurd.

00:46:40.640 I have watched policy on the West Coast make the quality of life drop spectacularly so that people are fleeing, including wealthy people.

00:46:54.260 And I look at wealthy people fleeing California, for example, and I think, something about this story doesn't add up.

00:47:04.420 It's rather a lot like building up a population with too many males.

00:47:08.540 There's something else that explains this because at the end of the day, wealthy elites are going to end up with the best real estate.

00:47:15.420 So the fact that they're fleeing either means that which elites are going to end up with that real estate is about to switch.

00:47:22.260 Maybe this was a real estate scam.

00:47:26.300 Malibu will always be occupied by rich people.

00:47:28.580 It will, but which rich people?

00:47:30.520 Yes.

00:47:30.740 And I wonder, you know, having seen something that very much looks like an undeclared invasion moving through Central America,

00:47:43.620 knowing that the Chinese Communist Party thinks in terms of long-term planning over the movement of people and resources,

00:47:54.940 that our system, we've effectively opened the gates of the city to anybody who's willing to pay to corrupt our political structures.

00:48:06.760 There is a story you could tell in which the CCP has a different understanding of what the future of our country is than most Americans do.

00:48:16.920 And, well, let's just put it this way.

00:48:21.900 Maybe I'm imagining what I saw, but if I'm not, then all of those Chinese migrants who don't want to talk about what they're doing moving into the U.S., 1.00

00:48:32.140 they're going to do something.

00:48:35.560 I don't know what it's going to be, but I don't know when we became so naive about the fact that we have

00:48:44.220 there are parties abroad who do not wish us well and would not mind at all seeing us removed from our position of power.

00:48:56.860 And who knows, maybe, you know, some of us are displaced from the continent we live on.

00:49:02.060 I can't say.

00:49:03.620 I mean, China is literally the other side of the world. 0.93

00:49:07.860 It's also not Haiti.

00:49:09.160 I mean, there's economic opportunity in China, but there's also economic opportunity for unemployed Chinese in the Philippines or Vietnam, Malaysia.

00:49:20.440 It's not obvious that they would come to the Darien Gap to get here.

00:49:24.500 Well, the Darien Gap is a very strange place to have gone.

00:49:27.360 For one thing, as Chris Martinson points out, the absurdity, if we're going to invite people in, let's say we had decided that we didn't have enough people to do labor

00:49:42.220 and that it was actually good for the U.S. to bring in large numbers of people from elsewhere.

00:49:45.900 Having people go through the theater of marching through Darien is absurd and dangerous.

00:49:56.620 And it is creating a humanitarian crisis in addition to the environmental crisis, which is in Darien.

00:50:03.860 We're creating a humanitarian crisis that's absolutely needless.

00:50:07.480 Either these people should be welcomed because it's good for us to bring them in.

00:50:11.280 Exactly.

00:50:11.800 Or they shouldn't be there at all.

00:50:13.840 And the only purpose I can think, especially given that the Chinese, many of the Chinese, I don't want to say all, there are Chinese people in the other camps. 0.84

00:50:22.680 We saw that as well.

00:50:23.660 Also not forthcoming about anything.

00:50:25.860 But the only purpose I can think of for coming to America via Panama is that it allows them to blend with all of the people who are coming from South America.

00:50:43.800 It makes it hard to discuss, but I can't think of another reason to do it that way.

00:50:48.820 It's, at the very least, wildly inefficient.

00:50:55.860 Did you run into any journalists from big newspapers or TV channels when you were down there?

00:51:05.860 Absolutely not, which is also shocking.

00:51:10.420 I mean, this is emblematic of the era we are living in where the issues, which obviously have our well-being tied up in them, are hiding in plain sight.

00:51:23.520 But it's not hard to see this story.

00:51:27.000 All you need to know is where to go.

00:51:29.440 You can go look at it.

00:51:30.960 And the fact that that's not happening, that our major news organizations are disinterested in this story, again, suggests a system that has been corrupted across the board.

00:51:44.920 You would imagine that even if the New York Times didn't want to report this story, that some reporter with ambition would chase it down anyway.

00:51:54.460 But so universal is the complicity here that nobody reports it.

00:51:59.720 And if they do report it, they report it wrong.

00:52:02.320 They report it so that it leads you to have a confused sense or a sense that this is more minor than it is.

00:52:08.180 But we're talking literally about millions of people, and millions of people is not a minor issue in a country with 300 million.

00:52:17.840 This is a major demographic shift one way or the other.

00:52:21.100 Yeah, and a permanent one.

00:52:24.880 What did you hear about the cartels when you were down there?

00:52:27.540 We hear a lot about them in this country, but in pretty nonspecific terms.

00:52:30.920 We heard that they were present, and I don't think that's a new phenomenon.

00:52:39.560 We also heard, so there's a lot of what we would call coyotes at our southern border are called snakeheads.

00:52:49.740 There's a lot of this going on in Darien.

00:52:52.500 People are paying to have somebody shepherd them through, and that often does not go well.

00:53:02.660 So they're present.

00:53:04.800 The cartels appear to be making a great deal of money from this.

00:53:09.040 They're probably not happy to have it discussed.

00:53:11.560 I don't know what that implies.

00:53:14.060 But also, I would point out, the farther north, this migration obviously has a relationship with the cartels.

00:53:26.700 The cartels are largely about American demand for illicit substances.

00:53:32.000 And a massive uncontrolled wave of migrants is an obvious mechanism whereby fentanyl and other things are entering the U.S. in an unmonitored way.

00:53:46.280 I mean, and in fact, to the extent that they come in with migrants, we are apparently facilitating their transport into the interior.

00:53:54.960 We're spreading them around.

00:53:56.460 And so what I can say is the cartels are not directly visible to a visitor, but their influence is felt and discussed.

00:54:12.540 You're describing a lot of different crimes happening simultaneously.

00:54:15.980 Yep.

00:54:19.300 What's the solution?

00:54:20.440 Well, I mean, and strangely, it goes back to the idea of giving ourselves permission to entertain all kinds of possibilities, even things that are crazy and we have to ultimately reject.

00:54:32.660 But we have to not talk ourselves out of noticing what is taking place.

00:54:39.800 That's a scientific principle, is it not?

00:54:41.880 Well, you know, it's funny.

00:54:43.380 Scientists are losing their way as well.

00:54:46.100 And I think how science is actually done is being forgotten.

00:54:50.980 And, you know, I think we are actually literally in a cryptic dark age.

00:54:57.280 Now, every dark age has a small number of people, I call them keepers of the flame, who do remember how to do science and keep that knowledge alive in one way or another.

00:55:08.180 But it's time to dust it off and bring it out into the mainstream.

00:55:12.960 And, you know, the toolkit for figuring out what a story like this means is not different from the toolkit you use to figure out what's going on in a tropical forest.

00:55:24.620 It's hypothesis testing.

00:55:26.680 And what you don't want, you know, people have heard from me now, they've heard some things they may be shocked by them.

00:55:33.260 You don't know.

00:55:33.980 This is one person's view of what they saw.

00:55:35.980 What you really want is many people to have seen it, and then you want them to pool their understanding, to point out what doesn't make sense about one story, one explanation or another.

00:55:47.500 That's the process.

00:55:48.940 And the fewer of us who are on the case, the worse we're going to do.

00:55:54.040 And we should just expect that.

00:55:55.540 So the first answer is just wake up.

00:56:00.980 Something is afoot that none of us have seen before.

00:56:03.580 Even to the extent that there are echoes of historical processes here, much of this is quite new.

00:56:13.160 I mean, for one thing, a mass migration through a dense jungle where people have been informed about how to transit it, you know, by cell phone, where money can be wired by Western Union to buy yourself a bus ticket after you've been robbed by bandits in the forest.

00:56:33.180 All right.

00:56:33.460 This is some weird combination of very low tech and very high tech.

00:56:39.240 What percentage of the migrants have smartphones?

00:56:41.000 Well, I don't know, but my guess is a much larger percentage have them at the beginning of their trek than have them at the end.

00:56:49.660 In part, that's because of rampant theft.

00:56:54.120 Yeah.

00:56:54.300 I talked to a woman.

00:56:58.180 Her name was Jen.

00:56:59.740 She's Venezuelan.

00:57:00.960 She was a college student in Venezuela and is fleeing the collapse of her society.

00:57:05.620 She was robbed of everything she had. 0.93

00:57:07.940 In Darien, I'm almost certain she was raped.

00:57:12.600 I didn't ask her, but I told her that I thought her journey had been more perilous than she shared, and she confirmed that. 0.62

00:57:21.840 And I think we both knew what I was talking about.

00:57:24.540 But in any case, she lost her phone to bandits.

00:57:31.120 But the other thing that happens is the exhaustion that people who are unprepared for the Darien Gap experience in struggling up these just mud doesn't even describe it. 0.82

00:57:45.340 The clay and the clay in these soils is such that you just imagine incredibly slippery faces that are being drenched in rain on a daily basis.

00:57:56.040 People are so exhausted that they rid themselves of the possessions that they thought they would somehow bring through.

00:58:06.640 You know, they lose their shoes, they drop all of their possessions, and they walk out with nothing.

00:58:14.480 So in any case, I would say probably most of them have phones when they embark, and I have no idea what the percentage that actually...

00:58:24.420 What is it doing to the environment, to the landscape?

00:58:27.460 It's a catastrophe.

00:58:28.440 I mean, it's certainly going to be limited at this point to the...

00:58:32.940 I think there are three major routes through the Darien Gap at the moment.

00:58:36.600 They are absolutely littered with trash and bodies, and it's apparently quite hellish.

00:58:47.240 In fact, Jen told me that on her trek, she spoke pretty good English.

00:58:54.720 She said that she didn't see a single animal.

00:58:57.360 I'm sure she meant mammal, but the idea of walking across Darien and not seeing a single mammal suggests that this is just absolutely devastating.

00:59:11.220 Now, it's nothing compared to what will happen if a road gets put through.

00:59:16.380 Roads have a very well-understood impact on a forest like this.

00:59:20.540 Once you have roads, you're going to have hunters, and they're going to empty the forest.

00:59:24.520 You're going to have empty forest syndrome.

00:59:25.880 After that, you're going to have loggers.

00:59:28.040 They're going to be pulling out all of these priceless tropical hardwoods.

00:59:31.700 You're going to get miners who are going to illegally go in there and mine and leave big tailing piles and toxins.

00:59:39.300 It's a devastating impact.

00:59:42.040 At the moment, my guess would be that the forest is rescuable, but the process has to stop.

00:59:51.540 If it continues to go down this road, it will be unsavable.

00:59:55.420 Has the government of Panama said anything about this?

00:59:57.900 I mean, it's their territory.

01:00:01.740 Mostly, they don't say anything.

01:00:03.880 And what we were told was that this was kind of the deal, that if they ushered people through,

01:00:13.140 they facilitated their movement, then those people would keep going, and this is a temporary cost for Panama.

01:00:21.140 I think if the people of Panama thought that the migration was going to stop and they were going to have to absorb all of these migrants, 1.00

01:00:28.280 sometimes there would be riots in the streets.

01:00:32.760 That's my guess.

01:00:34.280 Panama is, for other reasons, in a rather perilous situation because after the handover, the Panamanians upgraded the canal.

01:00:46.940 And they did so according to plans that Americans had drawn up.

01:00:50.980 They put in a third lane for boat traffic.

01:00:54.740 So every time a boat transits the canal, a huge amount of water is lost in the process of lifting and lowering boats.

01:01:07.300 When the Americans drew up the plans for a third lane, which the Americans did not complete, the Panamanians now have,

01:01:14.960 it involved the damming of a second river to provide more water.

01:01:19.500 So that never happened.

01:01:22.480 Panama is now in a drought.

01:01:24.740 And the drought combined with the massive extra losses of water is resulting in the Panama Canal having greatly reduced traffic,

01:01:36.120 which is a huge hit to the Panamanian economy because each of the ships that transits the canal hands over a huge pile of cash to be allowed to do it.

01:01:46.840 And this is a major piece of the Panamanian economy.

01:01:49.320 Certainly, we're at the beginning of the dry season.

01:01:51.580 I don't know what's going to happen by the end of the dry season, but it may go from a greatly reduced number of transits per day to, I don't know, could it go to none?

01:02:01.120 Maybe.

01:02:01.940 Which would be a big hit to the world economy, actually.

01:02:04.800 This is why the Nicaraguans are considering completing that canal, right?

01:02:08.740 Nicaraguans, that has been long under discussion for-

01:02:11.260 Oh, 150 years.

01:02:12.420 Yeah, right.

01:02:13.100 So I don't know if the Nicaraguans are going to. 0.99

01:02:15.800 At the moment, the Panamanians are using the train that parallels the canal.

01:02:21.240 And basically, lots of ships are offloading their cargo onto a train, and it's going overland to a ship on the other side.

01:02:28.120 So in any case, Panama has a stability problem of its own, and that combined with the hazard posed by this migration, and if America closes the door on this migration, where do these people go? 0.85

01:02:49.760 Well, so last question, if you were to, I know that you will continue your journey of inquiry in this topic, but where else would you go to get answers to what exactly is happening?

01:03:04.360 Well, if I was initiating an effort to figure out that question, I would bring the people who have navigated the story this far together with whatever experts still exist on the various related topics.

01:03:26.540 I mean, frankly, I would talk to Michael Yon about all of the things that are connected to this story, all the things he's seen all over the world.

01:03:34.560 He has a very good sense for who the players are, and what he knows has to be brought together with an understanding of how these dynamics might play out.

01:03:51.540 But I have to say, I don't know if what I saw implies another shoe is going to drop.

01:04:06.420 How many of these Chinese sleepwalkers have to end up in the U.S. before some other phase kicks off? 1.00

01:04:15.540 What was the involvement of COVID?

01:04:20.420 Is it just happenstance, or is there something about the COVID crisis that is in some way connected to what we are now?

01:04:26.800 What do you mean?

01:04:30.060 This is a place we have to be extremely careful.

01:04:33.440 I'm just looking at the various puzzle pieces and trying to imagine what they could mean.

01:04:37.240 We know that SARS-CoV-2 was the product of dual-use research, which was bioweapons. 0.71

01:04:49.060 The spike protein in the so-called vaccines was taken from SARS-CoV-2.

01:04:57.020 So it is also the product of bioweapons research. 0.58

01:04:59.760 Now, again, I will say it again because I'm concerned that people will take it as a conclusion rather than a hypothesis.

01:05:07.240 This is only a hypothesis, and when I say it's a hypothesis, it doesn't mean that I believe it's true.

01:05:11.980 It means that I believe it's plausible.

01:05:15.940 The vaccines that people got, you may remember, I think we talked about it the last time I was here,

01:05:24.220 people who get more than three of these shots have an interesting effect that none of us saw coming,

01:05:34.920 which is the triggering of something called IgG-4.

01:05:38.540 Ig means immunoglobulin.

01:05:40.420 It's a synonym for antibody.

01:05:41.820 IgG is a class of immunoglobulin, and IgG-4 is a very interesting subclass.

01:05:48.020 IgG-4's purpose, its biological purpose, is to turn down an immune response.

01:05:56.120 So if your body is reacting to something it shouldn't react to,

01:06:01.460 nature has granted us a mechanism for turning down that reaction so that you don't die from an allergy effectively.

01:06:09.620 This is what allergens do is they try to trigger that attenuation signal

01:06:13.480 in order to get the body to stop reacting to something that it shouldn't be reacting to.

01:06:17.180 The fact that these shots seem to trigger the production of IgG-4 is fascinating. 0.64

01:06:26.900 It could just be an unexpected consequence that nobody saw coming.

01:06:33.240 But if you think about what it is that the folks who try to produce biological weapons want,

01:06:39.240 they want a weapon that separates populations.

01:06:47.640 In other words, a weapon is no good.

01:06:50.400 If it's not contagious, then you have to drop it on enough people to matter.

01:06:55.660 That's difficult.

01:06:56.780 If it is contagious, then your own population risks getting it.

01:07:00.780 So the problem is there's not a good design mechanism to deal with that.

01:07:06.120 But if the mRNA vaccines produced an attenuation signal in people who got more than three of these shots,

01:07:16.900 then conceivably that attenuation signal could cause that population of people to be induced not to react to a pathogen.

01:07:30.280 If you just added the spike protein to it, presumably it would trigger that signal.

01:07:34.540 So here's why I'm mentioning all of this arcane biology.

01:07:42.940 The Chinese did not vaccinate their population with mRNA technology or anything based on spike protein.

01:07:50.660 So those two populations are now different in this regard, which, again, might mean nothing.

01:08:04.640 But what we learned so painfully in the battle against the mainstream narrative over these so-called vaccines

01:08:14.260 is that the reason that I say so-called vaccines and I try to say it every time

01:08:23.860 is because what these things turned out to be is gene therapy.

01:08:27.780 But that doesn't even quite cover the problem with them.

01:08:31.560 They're gene therapy in the sense that they introduce a genetic message into your cells

01:08:35.360 and they get your cells to translate it.

01:08:37.700 But there's also a part of our bodies that absorbs messages in a whole different way.

01:08:45.920 It's our immune system.

01:08:47.000 Our immune system literally evolves on the scale of hours to days when you get an illness.

01:08:54.200 That's how we fend off illnesses that evolve so rapidly.

01:08:58.740 And so the message that was injected into so many people was like a firmware update.

01:09:06.700 It was a firmware update that caused the immune systems of those people to take up a new way of viewing the world.

01:09:16.000 And that new way of viewing the world seems to have produced this attenuation signal

01:09:20.400 in response to the antigen, the spike protein antigen.

01:09:27.260 So am I seeing a mirage?

01:09:31.720 Let's hope so.

01:09:32.740 So just to try to flesh out or put in non-specialist terms what you may be suggesting,

01:09:41.540 it's plausible that this was all an effort to make one population effectively immune

01:09:47.980 from some new bioweapon and another population susceptible to it?

01:09:51.840 Is that what you're saying?

01:09:52.740 That is what I'm saying.

01:09:54.880 And again, all it is is possible.

01:09:57.740 I have no evidence that this did happen except for the odd fact of this IgG4. 1.00

01:10:05.540 Well, why didn't the Chinese use mRNA vaccines? 0.98

01:10:08.540 I don't know.

01:10:11.140 It is, let's put it this way, nobody should have.

01:10:14.300 Of course.

01:10:14.820 It was a technology that was just simply not fit for human consumption.

01:10:18.160 But one does not know.

01:10:22.760 And further, we got a lot of nonsense out of China that caused people, including me, 1.00

01:10:28.660 to be more frightened of SARS-CoV-2 than was warranted.

01:10:35.020 Well, me too.

01:10:35.920 You remember the videos of people collapsing dead in the street?

01:10:40.120 Right?

01:10:40.420 That was nonsense.

01:10:41.160 So I don't know who's who on this playing field, and I don't know what they want.

01:10:47.520 But to the extent that there seemed to be an absolute obsession with injecting absolutely

01:10:54.480 everybody with these so-called vaccines, that was conspicuous.

01:11:00.520 That did not seem like just greed and a desire to sell more shots.

01:11:06.000 I agree completely.

01:11:06.720 It was bizarre.

01:11:08.000 And the fact that we specifically insisted on vaccinating the entire military and threw

01:11:15.900 people out who wouldn't take it, we vaccinated all of our frontline workers.

01:11:21.700 I mean, and at the time, I remember I said to Heather on our show, I said, even if these

01:11:29.900 are wonderful shots, it seems insane, given that we don't know what their long-term impacts

01:11:35.540 are, that we would vaccinate all of anybody with them.

01:11:38.220 How about half?

01:11:39.000 Especially the people we need.

01:11:40.780 The people we need most.

01:11:42.140 Right.

01:11:42.660 Exactly.

01:11:44.100 That's hopefully just a mirage, but it is a very frightening one.

01:11:48.760 And I certainly hope that that's not what's going on.

01:11:51.440 But if it is, there is no time to waste in us figuring out what we have been induced to

01:11:57.660 do and what the proper countermeasures are.

01:12:00.420 And so to the extent that people think that this is an abstraction, it is not.

01:12:05.540 If there is any possibility at all that that is the nature of what we went through, then

01:12:12.680 it is essential that we figure out how to neutralize the vulnerability.

01:12:20.020 So I've kept you too long.

01:12:21.700 But just this is my last question.

01:12:23.580 Do you think it's odd, given the price this country paid for something that China did, 0.95

01:12:29.920 that in the official storyline from the White House, for example, the Chinese are never the

01:12:34.480 villain.

01:12:34.800 It's always the Americans. 0.97

01:12:35.880 It's always some segment of our population.

01:12:37.360 People who didn't take the vacs are the villains.

01:12:39.300 I mean, the president just gave a speech saying that the other day.

01:12:43.060 Why has no one in authority in America said a bad word about China since we discovered that

01:12:47.820 they unleashed COVID on the world?

01:12:49.480 That's pretty weird, isn't it?

01:12:51.780 It is weird.

01:12:53.540 I have to say I'm stuck on this one because the more one knows about what role we did play,

01:13:01.820 the more that this is not a simple story of, you know, one country having screwed up and,

01:13:10.620 you know, unleashed hell on the world.

01:13:12.560 This was a collaborative effort.

01:13:14.120 Now, the question is, whose team are those collaborators on?

01:13:18.140 Great question.

01:13:19.040 I mean, I must say the whole thing I found shocking, but one of the most shocking things

01:13:22.620 I've never heard a single other person mention, which is since when does the United States

01:13:26.180 collaborate with China on bioweapons research?

01:13:29.160 You'd think they were adversaries, right?

01:13:30.700 It's like not just a uniparty, but a uni-world or something.

01:13:33.840 But yes, well, again, I think this is the place where we have to allow ourselves to think these

01:13:43.420 thoughts, and then somebody should talk us off the ledge, and we should find out it's

01:13:47.460 not nearly as bad as we fear.

01:13:49.480 But we have to consider these things and reject them rather than not think them.

01:13:54.400 I don't know.

01:13:55.560 I know some open-minded people, and I know some rigorously rational people.

01:14:00.740 I know very few who combine those qualities as well as you do, and I just have such a pleasure

01:14:05.200 to hear you talk.

01:14:06.880 So, but thank you.

01:14:08.020 Thank you so much, Tucker.

01:14:08.840 We'll be right back.

The Tucker Carlson Show - February 02, 2024

Bret Weinstein

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