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June 3, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
46:24
The Fauci Emails | Ep. 1267
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Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails emerge, and they are not particularly flattering.
And President Biden unleashes a tirade against America to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Okay, so the big news of the day is that BuzzFeed has somehow gotten access.
Well, not somehow.
They asked for a FOIA request for Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails over the course of the last year and a half or so.
And what emerges is a picture of Anthony Fauci that is not particularly flattering because he receives a lot of information that he then ignored.
He receives a lot of flattery from very high ranking people, which he apparently sort of took and stuffed in his back pocket.
Now, the way the media are treating these emails is that there is nothing to see here.
Like, nothing at all.
In fact, if you look at how the media are treating Fauci, they have to continue to burnish his image as the greatest of all doctors, despite the fact that he has been a public health failure in terms of the imaging and the messages he's trying to convey to the public.
He's flip-flopped on every available issue, from whether schools should be open, to what the proper methods of social distancing are, to whether masks are appropriate or not, to whether the vaccines require you to wear a mask post-vaccination or not.
He's been all over the place on every single one of these issues.
He has not been a good public health communicator, and he has indeed reveled in this.
The latest news on Fauci, by the way, is that he is set to release a book on truth and service in November.
So he's about to cash in.
In the new book, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases shares his views on truth and the experiences that have shaped his life philosophy.
It's only 80 pages, and it's filled with interviews that Fauci has conducted during his 34-year run as NIAID director.
The book, which will be released by National Geographic Books on November 2nd, will discuss how to lead during a time of crisis.
Sure to strike a chord with readers, the inspiring words of wisdom in this book are centered around life lessons compiled from hours of interviews offering a concrete path to a bright and hopeful future, says the publisher.
Meanwhile, there is a children's picture book about Fauci titled Dr. Fauci, How a Boy from Brooklyn Became America's Doctor.
That is due later this month.
Also, Fauci is going to be the subject of a new Disney-backed biopic documentary that will be released on National Geographic later this year.
Apparently, filmmakers were following Fauci around throughout 2020 as he worked on the coronavirus task force.
Unclear exactly how much he's going to make from the film or from the books.
Suffice it to say that Fauci has not been camera shy throughout all of this.
Now, the way that the media are treating these emails again is that there's nothing to see here.
The headline from the Washington Post, Anthony Fauci's pandemic emails, all is well despite some crazy people in this world.
Fauci's correspondence from March and April 2020, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, offers a peek into his world during the frantic early days of the coronavirus crisis.
As the coronavirus pandemic engulfed the world last spring, Science Magazine quoted a top Chinese health official saying the United States and other Western nations were making a big mistake by not telling people to mask up.
Science Magazine stands by its reporting, but the official, George Gao, worried that the comment might upset his longtime friend, Anthony Fauci.
So amid the deepening crisis, Gao reached out to clear the air.
I saw the Science interview.
How could I say such a big word, mistake, about others?
This was journalist wording.
Hope you understand, said Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Let's work together to get the virus out of the earth.
I understand completely.
No problem, Fauci wrote back.
We will get through this together.
About 866 pages of Fauci's emails were obtained by the Washington Post as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.
The correspondence, which is just March and April, so we don't have anything beyond that, is, um, yeah, according to the Washington Post, just demonstrates how wonderful he was at all of this.
He was reached out to by Bill Gates.
And he was reached out to by the medical director of the National Football League Players Association.
Fauci said in a recent interview, I was getting every single kind of question, mostly people who were a little bit confused about the mixed messages that were coming out of the White House and wanted to know what's the real scoop.
I have a reputation, I respond to people when they ask for help, even if it takes a long time, and it's very time consuming, but I do.
The released emails show Fauci indeed tried to answer many queries, sometimes hitting send well after midnight.
And even as Trump ratcheted up attacks on China for not containing the virus, Fauci sought to maintain ties with Gao, a well-regarded Chinese scientific leader, and Gao with him.
And the entire article is about what a wonderful, wonderful man Fauci is, and how tolerant he is, and how he shunned the limelight, which is pretty incredible for a guy who posts for InStyle Magazine.
Here's another headline from CNN.
Thousands of emails from and to Fauci during the pandemic's early days were published.
Here's what they show about him.
And the tweet from CNN is absolutely gushing.
The tweet from CNN is all about what a wonderful, these emails, they demonstrate just how wonderful he is.
Okay, so here are some problems with the Fauci emails.
He was warned about the Wuhan lab leak theory very, very, very early on.
In fact, it appears that he was warned in late January that there were elements of the virus that looked engineered.
There's a woman named Christian Anderson, I believe woman, or could be a gentleman, I'm not sure.
There's a person named Christian Anderson who emailed Fauci and said, Thanks for sharing.
I saw this earlier today and both Eddie and myself are actually quoted in it.
It's a great article, but the problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren't able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues except if they are completely off.
On a phylogenetic tree, the virus looks totally normal, and the close clustering with bats suggests that bats serve as the reservoir.
The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome, so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features potentially look engineered.
Okay, this would be an email from January 31st, 2020, in which a fellow scientist was telling Fauci that some of the elements of the virus look engineered.
On February 1st, there were emails in which Fauci apparently was discussing gain-of-function research.
One of his colleagues over at the NIH, a guy named Hugh Auchincloss, emailed him February 1st, 2020, saying, The paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain-of-function pause, but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH.
Not sure what that means.
And Fauci wrote back, Okay, stay tuned.
So it sounds as though people were talking about gain of function research in the Wuhan labs, apparently as early as like the beginning of February in these emails.
Okay, he was warned, was Fauci, that the Chinese were lying about their numbers by the founder of BioSignal Technologies as of mid-March.
This person warned Fauci, said, I'm confident that China stopped counting dead at COVID-19 infected bodies since about January 7th, 2020.
They've been adding fabricated data daily to show, say face, the world and their own people an impressive flattening of China's outbreak curve.
It's easy to prove this via data analysis because for example, improbable coincidences occurred in much of the data.
My suspicions were eventually confirmed by at least two of my sources in China.
The data posted by China is not only garbage, it has misled the world into a false sense of security with regard to death rate, age versus death, and other things.
Okay, so Fauci was warned again very early on that the Chinese were lying about their numbers.
He was warned again on February 22nd about the possibility of a lab leak.
There's a doctor named Michael Jacobs who's a Cornell Medical School graduate, associate professor of dermatology at Weill Cornell in private practice.
And he was working with a guy named Alexander Tarakovsky, who's a professor at Rockefeller University and a virologist.
He says, we have been following the coronavirus pandemic closely, and a few days ago became alarmed at the news that the Chinese government is sterilizing their paper money from Hubei province.
We think there is a possibility the virus was released from a lab in Wuhan, the biotech area of China.
We also think the virus might be complex with another organism, such as a yeast or fungus, to make it more sticky.
We would like to discuss this with you further.
He forwarded this on to his assistant, did Fauci, and said, please handle.
So, he was being warned about the possibility of gain-of-function research.
He was sending emails about it.
He was being warned about China lying.
And then, he was simultaneously downplaying the idea that this thing was made in the lab.
Remember that Fauci openly testified that there was no evidence that it was made in the lab at all.
Like, none.
He couldn't identify any.
If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now, it's very, very strongly leaning towards this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated, the way the mutations have naturally evolved.
Someone will say, well, maybe somebody took it from the wild, put it in the lab, and then it escaped from the lab.
But that means it was in the wild to begin with.
Nobody's arguing whether it was in the wild.
It's like a basic virus.
But this form of COVID-19 has never been found in a bat, like ever.
OK, so Fauci was being warned about that in February, and he was simultaneously downplaying all of this.
OK, later, of course, Fauci would testify with regard to COVID in China.
Rand Paul really went after him on this.
For years, Dr. Ralph Baric, a virologist in the U.S., has been collaborating with Dr. Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Virology Institute, sharing his discoveries about how to create superviruses.
This gain-of-function research has been funded by the NIH.
Dr. Fauci, do you still support funding of the NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?
Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute.
Okay, well, it turns out that actually we signed checks to a place called EcoHealth and they signed checks to the Wuhan Institute of Virology by best available data today.
Now, of course, Fauci admits that China could have used the money for gain-of-function research.
You gave them money, and you said, don't do gain-of-function research.
Correct.
And they said, we won't.
Correct.
And you have no way of knowing whether they did or not, except you trust them.
Is that right?
Well, we generally always trust the grantee to do what they say, and you look at the results.
Have you ever had a grantee lie to you?
I cannot guarantee that a grantee has not lied to us, because you never know.
Okay, again, there's an email sent February 1st, 2020.
We need to know what it means.
From Hugh Auchincloss, saying the paper you sent me says the experiments were performed before the gain-of-function pause, but have since been reviewed and approved by NIH.
So what exactly are we talking about here?
Not sure what this means.
Since Emily is sure that no coronavirus work has gone through the P3 framework, she'll try to determine if we have any distant ties to this work abroad, is what that email says.
Okay, so certainly there should be some sort of questions asked about all of this.
We'll get to more of Anthony Fauci and his emails in just one second.
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Okay, so Anthony Fauci, he downplayed the lab leak theory all throughout March, all throughout April, and he was thanked by heads of these various labs for doing so.
So for example, Anthony Fauci was thanked for downplaying the lab leak theory by a guy named Peter Daszak.
Peter Daszak said, as the P1 of an R1 grant publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the presidential press briefing last night, I wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat to human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
From my perspective, your comments are brave and coming from your trusted voice will help dispel the myths being spun about the virus's origins.
Once the pandemic is over, I look forward to thanking you in person and let you know how important your comments are to us all.
So that was the head of apparently one of these labs who's passing through funding.
Thanking Anthony Fauci for his approach on all of this.
Fauci was also thanked by Jin Wanzhou.
Thank you very much for your hard work on COVID-19.
Professor Wang Zhijun of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Science, who was very happy that he had downplayed all of the Chinese lab leak theories.
He emailed Fauci, Dear Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, Thank you very much for your hard work on COVID-19.
You are the hero of word.
Good times?
Alright, so that's what Fauci's emails show with regard to the lab leak stuff.
Okay, he was being warned very early on.
We have some emails that are internal that suggest that the lab leak stuff was being passed around.
Gain-of-function research speculation was being passed around internally.
And meanwhile, Fauci was strongly downplaying all of that information.
So further questions are necessary, to say the least.
Then, we get to Anthony Fauci on masks.
Now, as we know, Anthony Fauci's been all over the place on masks.
In fact, February 5th, he sends an email to Sylvia Burwell saying, quote, masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected, rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection. The typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material. And he's right.
It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keeping out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.
I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low-risk location.
Your instincts are correct.
Money is best spent on medical countermeasures such as diagnostics and vaccines.
Okay, so he was saying the same sort of stuff publicly, right?
He was saying that masks are unnecessary at this point in time.
This is in early February.
Okay, and later, of course, he would admit that in March, when he was saying don't wear a mask at the very beginning, that he was fibbing about the masking.
I mean, Fauci said that he didn't regret having fibbed about the masking.
In fact, he told Nora O'Donnell, quote, I don't regret anything I said then because in the context of the time in which I said it, it was correct.
We were told in our task force meetings they have a serious problem with the lack of PPEs and masks for the health providers who are putting themselves in harm's way every day to take care of sick people.
When it became clear the infection could be spread by asymptomatic carriers who don't know they're infected, that made it very clear we had to strongly recommend masks.
Also, it soon became clear we had enough protective equipment and that cloth masks and homemade masks were as good as masks that you would buy from a surgical supply store.
Okay, well, so he just admitted, again, that he lied.
But, you know, no biggie.
More egregiously, Fauci's emails show that he knew very, very early on that once you were infected, you were basically done.
Fauci himself explicitly says that when it comes to immunity post-infection, he said, yeah, I think it's there.
So Ezekiel Emanuel emailed him.
Ezekiel Emanuel, of course, is one of the advisors to Biden.
He was an advisor to Obama and one of the founders of Obamacare.
He wrote to him on March 4th, and he said, is a person likely to be immune once they caught COVID-1s?
Do we know anything about likely drift?
Fauci wrote back, this is March 4th, no evidence in this regard, but you would assume that there would be, he spelled there wrong, there would be substantial immunity post-infection.
It is an RNA virus, and so you can expect mutations, but not sure how much is going on.
Okay, but then he was out there wearing a mask, like when Rand Paul was not wearing a mask post-infection, I'm not passing this thing.
He had a tete-a-tete with Fauci on this particular issue.
And here is Fauci contradicting himself.
What studies do you have that people that have had the vaccine or have had the infection are spreading the infection?
If we're not spreading the infection, isn't it just theater?
You got the vaccine and you're wearing two masks.
Isn't that theater?
No, it's not.
Here we go again with the theater.
Let's get down to the facts.
In the South African study conducted by J&J, they found that people who were infected with wild type and were exposed to the variant in South Africa, the 351, it was as if they had never been infected before.
They had no protection.
Okay, so it turns out, of course, that Fran Paul was exactly correct.
The only question with regard to RNA viruses is whether the thing is mutated that fast that you won't have some sort of immunity to another strain.
But there was no evidence that this was the case, that people were routinely getting reinfected.
There's no evidence of that anywhere along the line, and yet we were still told that once you had had the virus, you should still be wearing a mask around.
Finally, Fauci, of course, admitted that he was wearing a mask for no reason.
I'm obviously careful because, I mean, I'm a physician and a health care provider.
I am now much more comfortable in people seeing me indoors without a mask.
I mean, before the CDC made the recommendation change, I didn't want to look like I was giving mixed signals.
But being a fully vaccinated person, the chances of my getting infected in an indoor setting is extremely low.
And that's the reason why in indoor settings now, I feel comfortable about not wearing the mask.
Because as we pointed out at the time when Fauci was saying all this was nonsense when he was saying it. And of course he was lying about it. But now we know that going all the way back to March of last year, he knew that once you were post infection, which also means post vaccination, you really don't need to wear a mask. And for months, we've been told that the responsible thing to do, Joe Biden said this, it was patriotic for you to mask up even after you'd had the And then, of course, he switched in time.
So the theme here, the constant theme from Fauci is that he had very early indicators of what was going on and he routinely took the position that best upheld what he thought was the viability of the National Institutes of Health.
In other words, he is a career bureaucrat and career bureaucrats do exactly what you would think they do.
They defend their institutions.
Sort of like John Roberts with the Supreme Court, right?
He'll make a bunch of bad decisions that are intended to uphold the veracity of the Supreme Court, as opposed to just looking at the text of a particular law and seeing whether it squares with the Constitution.
Well, Dr. Fauci did the exact same thing with the NIAID, right?
From the very beginning, he had people speculating that this was a Wuhan lab leak, and he downplayed that because it turns out that there may have been connections between gain-of-function research in China and funding from the NIH.
We knew at the very beginning that masks, he thought, were actually useful at the beginning.
He thought first they were not useful, then he thought they were useful, and then he lied about it.
And then he said, I don't regret having lied, because after all, I was doing the right thing.
We had Dr. Fauci, who's fibbing about the virus itself and post-virus immunity.
Right?
And all of this was designed to set him up as the expert.
And meanwhile, he's emailing everybody he knew about all of these wonderful profiles of him and saying, oh man, this is just, this is so tough to take, you know, this publicity.
And then he's going and posing for InStyle Magazine.
So does this say that he's an evil man?
Does this say that he's a conspiracist?
No.
What it does say is that like all career bureaucrats, he's a career bureaucrat and you shouldn't trust these public health officials to be anything but that.
Career bureaucrats.
They are not quote-unquote scientists in the sense they will follow the science wherever it leads.
They are bureaucrats who will do whatever they have to do to uphold their institutional prerogatives and their institutional power.
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Okay, so as I say, with Dr. Fauci, what does this really show?
It shows that he was not a forward-thinking, creative scientist who was just following the data.
Dr. Fauci was an institutionalist, and groupthink set in in these institutions, and an echo chamber set in in these institutions.
Lockdowns were the way to go, and it didn't matter whether the data didn't match the lockdowns.
Masks were the way to go, and it didn't matter whether the mask mandates were effective or ineffective.
Fauci just followed the crowd.
He was a follower, he was not a leader.
When you're a public health expert, theoretically, you're supposed to be a leader.
You're the person who's supposed to be speaking truth, no matter what.
And the media portrayed him this way, right?
Because Trump would say one thing, and then Fauci would say the opposite, because his statements were more in line with conventional thinking.
And then he was the hero, and Trump was the villain.
Okay, but Fauci never said anything that sort of bucked the conventional wisdom in the name of science.
In fact, very early on in the pandemic, he was sending out untrue information about mixing up case fatality rate and infection fatality rate.
He was saying there was a 2% case fatality rate, right?
And he was taking that as an IFR, right?
The difference between a case fatality rate and an infection fatality rate.
What percentage of people who are identified as having this thing die versus what percentage of people who are infected die?
Very, very different percentages.
Okay, but bottom line is this.
If you look at his emails, these are the emails of exactly what you would think.
A career bureaucrat who suddenly was thrust forward into the public limelight and took a series of conflicting positions based on whatever was the conventional wisdom of the day.
So do I think this makes Dr. Fauci the world's worst person?
No.
Do I think that there's always fog of war stuff going on in the middle of a novel coronavirus pandemic?
Sure.
I mean, just because he received emails in late January and February saying, you know, this could have happened in a Chinese lab, doesn't mean that he is forced to say, I think it happened in a Chinese lab.
But the sort of unequivocal statements he was making about it, that no, no, no, it almost certainly did not happen in a Chinese lab, that was unsupportable by the available evidence.
His statements about mass, which flip-flopped all the way around, And which it seems that he knew pretty early on that certain types of masks were effective and certain types were not.
That was unjustifiable.
He was a bureaucrat futzing around, in other words.
He's not the guy to whom you light votive candles.
And yet, the media treat him that way.
He's going to be receiving awards.
We're going to have documentaries about him.
We're going to have books about him.
About a career bureaucrat who kind of blew it.
That's my takeaway here.
Now, there's another takeaway here, which is an email that is at least partially redacted.
It's an email from Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, to Fauci, basically cold emailing him.
And Zuckerberg talks about how they're building a coronavirus information hub that they were going to put at the top of Facebook for everyone.
And he said he wanted to include a video from Fauci because people trust and want to hear from experts rather than just a bunch of agencies and political leaders.
Now, of course, the lie there is that Fauci is anything but an agency and political leader.
That's what he is.
And Zuckerberg offered to do a live Q&A.
And then there's a final paragraph that is redacted.
It's redacted under a trade secrets redaction.
Okay, and it's kind of unclear that the implication is possible.
That what this is, is Zuckerberg basically offering that Facebook will shut down information that Fauci doesn't want distributed.
Because this was a big problem throughout the pandemic.
If the WHO said something and you contradicted it, Facebook would ding you.
If you said something and Fauci contradicted it, Facebook would ding you.
The same thing was happening over at YouTube.
Two weeks before the CDC reversed its garbage, stupid chart showing that you couldn't, originally they said, even if you were vaccinated, you couldn't take off the mask indoors.
And I did a whole episode about this.
We removed it preemptively from YouTube because we knew that they would try to ding us for having contravened the wonderful and incredible CDC.
Two weeks later, the CDC flipped on it.
The notion that you're going to allow these public health bureaucrats to control the flow of information is pretty astonishing.
But again, what so much of this came down to was people didn't know who to trust, and the media decided who you should trust.
The media decided who you should trust.
The media decided you should trust Fauci, and you shouldn't trust anybody else.
Anybody who contravened Fauci was a bad guy, because the media has a simplistic black-and-white narrative where they didn't follow the science, they followed scientific quote-unquote institutions.
And Fauci, as an institutionalist, only mimicked what he thought would look best for the institution, namely take the most cautious possible line, yell at people about reopening schools, tell people it's bad to have open beaches, Tell people they can't go outdoors because they might get infected outdoor.
All this kind of stuff.
And now the media are sort of admitting this.
Right now the media are pretty much freely admitting this.
So for example, Ari Melber on MSNBC.
He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, for a year we ignored the lab leak theory, which again, I mean, Fauci was made aware of the lab leak theory in late January.
Like at the very beginning, late January, early February.
Here's Ari Melber fully admitting, the reason we ignored the lab leak was because of Trump.
The media had to set up the binary.
They needed a good guy and a bad guy.
By the way, I was noting this very early on, that the media were trying to split off Fauci from Trump, so that they could pose Fauci as the anti-Trump voice of science, and Trump as the bleep loony guy who's just saying crazy stuff.
It turns out, half the stuff Trump said was loony, and half of it was more accurate than the stuff that Fauci was saying.
And here's Ari Melber saying, yeah, we just regarded it lably because Trump said it.
On the one hand, if the chief and loudest advocate for something is a race-baiting liar, who lies all the time and has done things to contribute to, for example, the rise in hate crimes, you can understand why people don't want to get near that.
And yet, we all, I mean the whole world, has a vested interest in getting all the possible facts about where this came from, which informs what happened and what, maybe, if anything, to do about it.
Okay, but you all ignored it because Trump said it.
Maggie Haberman says the same thing over the New York Times.
She says, of course there was groupthink.
Early on when this happened, I think that there were a number of journalists who declined to ask questions who were covering specifically the origins of this virus.
And I think there was a there was a Twitter group think to try to push back on people who raised questions.
But at the end of the day, I come back to the fact that there can be enough enough issues here to go around.
And when you have a president and you have a secretary of state who say they have seen evidence Okay, you don't have to give them the benefit of the doubt.
You guys could have investigated.
But again, you had a narrative, and the narrative had to be preserved.
So what we see here is when institutions matter more than truth, things get really ugly.
This is true throughout life.
Throughout life.
When an institution matters more than the baseline truth, you end up with falsehood being promulgated.
For Fauci, the institution of the NIAID and the NIH, that mattered more than him following the science.
For the media, the institution of the media, which was dependent on the Democratic Party being successful, mattered more than following the actual science.
And this led them down some pretty deep rabbit holes.
We're going to get to more of this in just one second.
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Okay, by the way, just a quick note on the institution of science.
I've been ranting about this for a while.
I have a full chapter in my brand new book, The Authoritarian Moment, on the perversion of science and how science has basically become institutionalism.
Great sort of addendum here from the scientific community.
My wife at Ford forwarded me this story yesterday, of course, being a doctor and in the scientific community.
The editor of the medical journal JAMA has now been forced to step down from his job, according to Robbie Whelan at the Wall Street Journal.
Why?
Did he do something anti-scientific?
No, of course not.
He's being forced to step down from his job because he contravened politically correct notions, accidentally, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The editor-in-chief of the Journal of American Medical Association, one of the country's preeminent medical research journals, is stepping down after the publication produced a podcast episode and a tweet that questioned the existence of racism in medicine.
You're not even allowed to question it.
You're not even allowed to question whether your doctor is racist.
He is racist.
And if you'd say otherwise, you'd get fired from your job at the head of JAMA.
On February 24th, JAMA's official Twitter account posted a message that read in part, The message urged readers to listen to an episode of a JAMA podcast hosted by Edward Livingston, a top editor at the Journal, in which, according to several news reports, he said,
The JAMA tweet went viral, and it, along with the podcast discussion, provoked widespread indignation on social media and among research doctors, some of whom pledged to boycott JAMA by refusing to submit papers to the journal or provide peer review for its publications.
Howard Botchner, a pediatrician at BU who has edited the journal since 2011, was placed on leave in March, and now he has been fired.
The Institute for Anti-Racism in Medicine, a non-profit that promotes racial equity issues and professional useless people, circulated an online petition calling for a formal review of Dr. Boucher's handling of the incident.
The petition garnered more than 9,000 signatures.
They deleted the podcast episode completely.
The tweet was deleted as well.
Instead, Dr. Bauchner put up a recording, a forced malice struggle session, in which he said racism and structural racism exist in the United States and in healthcare.
And then he was forced to resign.
So, what exactly was the scientific evidence that was shown for him to remove an entire podcast episode discussing this crucial issue?
There was no scientific evidence that was provided.
He was just forced to step out.
Again, institutions exist in every area of American life, and if the institution outweighs the truth, then bad things happen.
You're seeing this happen inside the American Psychological Association where they are completely redefining terminology in order to meet with woke standards.
You've seen this inside the American Medical Association where there have been calls to get rid of concepts like biological sex for some radicals because they wish to redefine gender.
You've seen this happen inside, now, JAMA, the most prestigious journal of American medicine there is.
And, of course, it happened with regard to the coronavirus-19.
It happened with regard to COVID-19.
When the institutions of American life decided, for example, that it was perfectly acceptable for you to be out in the streets, en masse, protesting for George Floyd's death, you just couldn't be out there going to church, outdoors, right?
It was very important.
The science trumped Well, it was trumped by te-science, right?
Institutional science.
And there's a reason why you should pick up my book, The Authoritarian Moment.
I have a full-scale discussion of all of this kind of stuff.
And again, when you respect institutions as opposed to the truth, you're doing so because you believe in particular narratives.
You believe that certain narratives have to remain the truth even if the data don't support them.
The troublesome thing about science is that if science is truly about data, if data is what matters in science, then all data does is going around debunking things.
Data is basically the Socrates of modern life.
It goes around asking serious questions and then debunking everybody's narratives, debunking everybody's ideas.
But what happens when science gets hijacked?
Well, when science gets hijacked by the narrative, then science is no longer science.
More than that, there's now a push in American life to get rid of science as a whole.
So science has been thrown out the window in many of these cases, but not just that.
There's been an issue with data.
If you collect data, this is considered racist in certain circumstances, because the narrative matters more than anything else, because the narrative allows you to achieve power, and power is the goal.
We'll get to that in just one second, because that brings us to President Biden's speech in Tulsa.
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Meanwhile, Joe Biden was down in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He was paying homage to the 100-year commemoration of the Tulsa massacre, which we talked about yesterday.
And I think in order to understand Joe Biden when it comes to race, you have to understand that the entire Democratic Party right now has decided to centralize, they've decided to center all their attention around a new definition of racism.
Their definition of racism is anything they don't like.
Now, that's been their definition for a while, but their new theory is that all the institutions of American life are shot through with racism and they never have to define racism.
See, you and I could define racism pretty easily because we speak the language of English.
Racism means that you believe in the superiority or inferiority of people based specifically on their race.
That is the definition of racism.
But the left doesn't believe in that definition because if that's the definition, then racism has been alleviated largely over the course of American history.
Particularly over the last 60 years.
Most Americans understand that to believe such things is considered evil in our society.
To be an actual honest-to-God racist who believes in the inferiority of somebody based on race is something that is not even considered remotely within the bounds of the rational in modern society and in modern discourse.
So, what did the left have to do?
Instead, they had to say, well, the institutions of America are shot through with racism.
And we don't actually have to define that.
We're just going to say it.
And then if you don't understand what we're talking about, we're just going to say it again.
So the great sort of prevaricator about this sort of stuff and popularizer of this sort of nonsense is Ibram X. Kendi.
So Ibram X. Kendi is a professor at Boston University, which is insane and demonstrates the uselessness of higher education.
He's also the head of what is called the Center for Anti-Racism Research, which today has provided zero research, so far as I'm aware, but has taken in literally tens of millions of dollars from major institutions, including $10 million from Jack Dorsey of Twitter just last year for brilliance like this.
So here was Ibram X. Kendi.
This is, I believe, a couple of years ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
He was asked explicitly, how do you define racism?
And here is Ibram X. Kendi attempting to define racism.
This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard, but this is the basis for race ideology on the left today.
So racism, I would define it as a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.
And anti-racism Is it pretty simple using the same terms?
Anti-racism is a collection of anti-racist policies leading to racial...anybody want to take a guess?
Equity that are substantiated by anti-racist ideas.
Okay, this is the fact, my favorite part of this is where he kind of arches his eyebrows because he said something quite profound.
That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life.
The reason it's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life is if somebody asks you to define a term and then you use the term in the definition, you have not defined the term.
I'm holding a pen right here.
If you said define a pen and I said a pen is a pen.
You'd be like, that added no new information.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
If I said to you, define racism, and you said, racism is a thing that is racist, because it is motivated by racism.
You'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about, because that didn't add any new information.
Everyone else says this crap with a straight face.
And everybody just goes, oh, ooh, ah.
Okay, but this provides the basis for Democrats to say that any inequality of outcome is representative of racism in the system.
And this has been imbibed at the deepest level by the Democratic Party.
So that was the purpose of Joe Biden going to Tulsa.
It wasn't just to provide some sort of commemoration of an evil event in American life.
It was to say that that evil event is indicative of what America was and remains with regard to black Americans.
So Joe Biden goes down to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
First, he has a fight with his teleprompter.
I mean, this is just requisite.
Just as like an opening, as an opening move, as an opening gambit in every one of his rallies, he actually brings out the teleprompter and then he physically spars with it.
So here is Joe Biden versus the teleprompter, as always.
A belief enforced by law, by badge, by hood and by noose that speaks to that lit the fuse It lit it by the spark that it provided.
A fuse of fury was an innocent interaction that turned into a terrible, terrible headline allegation.
Yeah, man.
Teleprompter puts Joe down before the count, as always.
But the real purpose here is to conflate two ideas.
Idea number one is that we should come to grips with America's history of racism.
Obviously true.
We should pay attention to things like the Tulsa Massacre, because that is a part of American history that was neglected in education for a very long time.
My guess is that only in the last few years have most Americans even been made aware of the Tulsa Massacre, as opposed to, like, the Civil War, or as opposed to World War I or World War II.
But the reality is that that is a fairly, and that's good.
I'm glad more people are aware of the Tulsa massacre now.
That is a very good thing.
But the idea is that if you are opposed to the racialized agenda of the Biden administration, if you say things have kind of changed between 1921 and 2021, which they most indubitably have, then this means that you want to deny history.
So here was Joe Biden performing exactly this sort of conflation.
Here he was yesterday saying that America's great because we're coming to terms now with our dark side.
We should know the good, the bad, everything.
That's what great nations do.
They come to terms with their dark sides.
And we're a great nation.
Alrighty, so we're coming to terms with our dark side.
But what he means by that is that we are going to fundamentally shift the way that institutions are run in the United States in a racist fashion.
So Biden says, Americans think that if I hold you down, I lift myself up.
This is a pretty wild statement.
For too long, we've allowed a narrowed, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester.
The view that America is a zero-sum game, where there's only one winner.
If you succeed, I fail.
If you get ahead, I'm falling behind.
If you get a job, I lose mine.
And maybe worst of all, if I hold you down, I lift myself up.
Okay, how many Americans believe that right now?
Like truly, how many Americans believe that?
How many Americans are really...
Like he's saying that Americans today are malevolent, right?
Where too many Americans believe that I have to hold you down in order to lift myself up.
So Americans are really, really bad people.
Like today, not 1921.
Today, Americans are terrible.
Not only that, Joe Biden said that white supremacy is the greatest threat in America today.
It is the greatest threat in America today.
Now, here's the thing.
White supremacists, horrible people, believe horrible things.
No one has been more critical of white supremacists than I have.
I've been personally targeted by white supremacists.
The FBI arrested a white supremacist a couple of years ago trying to kill me and my family.
So, white supremacists and I, not friends.
Also, he conflates white supremacy with pretty much everything he doesn't like, and this is part of the danger.
How many headlines have you seen in the media recently saying things like, healthcare disparities are a result of white supremacy?
How many times have you seen members of this administration talk about how unequal outcomes in the justice system are the result of white supremacy as opposed to individual action by people of different races?
So here is Joe Biden laying it out there.
Here we go.
As I said in my address to the joint session of Congress, according to the intelligence community, terrorism from white supremacy is the most lethal threat to the homeland today.
Not ISIS, not Al Qaeda, white supremacists.
That's not me.
That's the intelligence community under both Trump and under my administration.
Okay, so first of all, if he just wants to say that that white supremacist terrorism happens and is threatening.
That's okay.
I have no problem with that.
But if the argument is that the most lethal threat to Americans today is white supremacists and terrorists, that is not true by any statistical measure of which I am aware.
The most lethal threat to Americans today, like overall, or the most lethal threat to America today, that's overall, All of this is driven by an agenda, right?
The agenda is that Joe Biden wants to radically remake America's institutions.
He doesn't have to provide data.
He doesn't have to provide an actual argument.
He just throws out Ibram X. Kendi-style circular reasoning, and then you're just expected to accept it.
That's the reason he was in Tulsa.
It was not just to commemorate.
It was obviously to provide the predicate for shifting America's institutions and our notions of individual rights versus the government.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
In the meantime, go check out the Michael Knowles show he discusses the U.S.
flying the pride flag at the Vatican.
It is an amazing thing.
I don't think they did this in Saudi Arabia, by the way.
You can hear more details about that story over on Michael's show that's available right now.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is produced by...
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Biden claims that white supremacy is the top threat against the United States.
Gender nullification surgery flattens people's genitals and turns them into real-life Ken dolls.
And the U.S.
flies a gay pride flag at the Vatican.
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