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June 4, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:30
Escape From New York | Ep. 1269
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As violent crime continues its spike in New York, competing visions for the city battle it out.
President Biden gets concerned about the economy, and the COVID lab leak theory cover-up is exploding into public view.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
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Alrighty, so.
A couple of nights ago, there was a big debate in New York City between all the mayoral candidates, and there are a few aspects of this that are amusing.
Aspect number one, seven of the eight candidates said they actively did not want Bill de Blasio's endorsement for the mayoral seat, which is a hell of a referendum on the guy who is the sitting mayor of New York City.
That's how unpopular Bill de Blasio is inside his own city.
He has aspirations to run for governor or senator.
Dude couldn't win an election for dog catcher today in New York City because nobody likes him.
And the reason is because the ideas of leftism have run headlong into the brick wall of reality in New York City.
And so while the media continue to focus in on the inspirational wild left figures of New York, the people like Jamaal Bowman and Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and Bill de Blasio, the reality says something different.
What the reality suggests is that when it comes to actual policy, New Yorkers are beginning to turn more toward the Rudy Giuliani sort of left-leaning social policy and right-leaning crime policy that characterized New York City throughout the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations.
Why?
Well, because it worked in New York.
You know what doesn't work in New York?
Anything that the Democrats have been doing there for the last 10 years.
What they've been doing there for the last decade has wrecked the city, particularly in the last five.
And everybody knows this.
So the media continued to trot around following around AOC.
I just want to point out the mentality of the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez left.
It is pretty astonishing.
So there are a couple of things that are worth noting about the Alexander Ocasio-Cortez left mentality.
Number one, they truly believe that your money is their money and that they have no obligation to do moral things with their money.
This was an undercover story in the major media, but Alexander Ocasio-Cortez She recently posted photographs of her grandmother's squalid living conditions in Puerto Rico and blamed President Trump for the situation.
She put on Twitter, just over a week ago, my grandmother fell ill.
I went to Puerto Rico to see her, my first time in a year because of COVID.
This is her home.
Hurricane Maria relief hasn't arrived.
Trump blocked relief dollars for Puerto Rico.
People are being forced to flee ancestral homes and developers are taking them.
And then she tweeted out a picture of her grandmother's roof, which appears to be collapsing in places.
Later, she amended the tone of her comments for 45 minutes later, her grandmother was doing okay.
Now, the reason that she said that is because everybody pointed out that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has an annual salary of $174,000.
She has no children.
She doesn't have tremendously high expenses, except for the Tesla that she recently leased.
And so everybody online was like, you know, Alexandria, before you blame Trump for your grandmother's squalid living conditions, your words, You might want to, like, check your wallet.
Like, check your pocketbook.
See, here's one of the things about conservatism.
Conservatism suggests that there are a series of overlapping circles in terms of responsibility.
Okay?
When it comes to people who are in your immediate family and people who you are close to, you have chief responsibility in taking care of them.
And if that doesn't work, you go to your local community.
And then if that doesn't work, you go to the larger community, to maybe an actual local government.
You go to your state community.
And then maybe at the very end, you get to the federal government.
But the first line of defense against difficulty in life is your immediate circle.
And so, if my grandmother is having financial trouble, Then I step in if I have the ability to do so.
And this is what most people do.
The fact that Alexandra, that it never even occurred to her.
My grandmother's roof is falling apart.
Maybe I should do something about that instead of leasing that Tesla.
Maybe I should instead lease, you know, an electric Honda or something for like one third of the cost and send the extra over to grandma.
The fact that apparently never occurred to her.
is just indicative of a particular mindset, which is, it is never my responsibility to do anything, it is everybody else's responsibility to do everything.
It's the government's responsibility to do everything.
I mean, it's kind of an incredible indicator of exactly where this mentality lies.
And it's true for national politics too.
If there's a problem in my immediate community, the problem must lie with a broader societal issue, as opposed to, what can I do about it today?
And what can people do?
What can people with agency do to fix their own problems?
Okay, so that is point number one.
Point number two is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez's view of crime.
So yesterday, she did this presser, and it was kind of amazing.
She was standing directly next to Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, and she was calling for more funding for mental health, which Fine.
I'm on board with that.
I think one of the great tragedies of public policy in the last 60 years is the attempt to federalize all mental health and institutionalization issues.
It started under the JFK administration, then moved forward with states shirking their duties, and this has led to a tremendous rise in the homeless problem over the course of the last few decades.
Okay, but, Alejandro Ocasio-Cortez is talking about crime.
And here she is explaining that the real problem, the real reason why we have too much crime is because we are building too many jails.
Let's check out how this works.
If we want to reduce violent crime, if we want to reduce the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them.
The answer is to make sure that we actually build more hospitals, we pay organizers, we get people mental health care, and overall health care, employment, et cetera.
It's to support communities, not throw them away.
Okay, look at the body language on Chuck Schumer there.
Chuck Schumer is like, I want to crawl in a hole and die.
He's standing right next to her, she says this.
Because here's the thing, she's in a city where crime is skyrocketing, and her solution is build fewer jails.
As someone on Twitter pointed out, this is akin to saying, if you want fewer sick people, build fewer hospitals.
You build the jails to hold the criminals.
You don't build the jails and then there's an upsurge in demand for criminality.
That's not how any of that works.
Okay, but this sort of perverse thinking that my problems are everybody else's problems and my immediate family's problems don't fall on me, they fall on the government more broadly.
And when it comes to criminality, that is a broader societal problem where the government is not supposed to step in and solve it.
Instead, it's a broader societal problem that we just blame on everything else.
That sort of mentality has crippled New York and continues to cripple New York.
And you can see it play out in the New York mayoral race.
Or if you look at the polls right now, the two people at the top of the heap, in terms of the candidates, are the two most conservative Democrats in the race.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, so.
All this sort of idiocy has had serious consequences for New York.
According to Joel Siegel, who's the managing editor of Spectrum News DC, NYPD now says the number of shootings in May of 2021 jumped 73% compared to May 2020.
173 shootings in May versus 100 last May.
And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.
There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.
versus 100 last May.
And that was on top of a 63% increase in May 2020 versus May of 2019.
There were 61 shootings in New York in May 2019.
Today, May 2021, 173 shootings in New York.
That is the result of an administration that has decided they are not going to police crime.
They're going to release criminals back onto the street.
It's an administration that has decided not to enforce the law that is going to allow Black Lives Matter rioters to run roughshod through the center of New York City.
This has downstream effect in terms of criminals believing they can get away with anything.
I'm fully convinced, by the way, that the uptick In hate crimes that you have seen against Jews is fully connected with law enforcement's inability or unwillingness in areas around the country to actually police.
When policing goes away, crime spikes.
And that is true with regard to all types of crime, including hate crimes.
That is a reversal of a trend, by the way.
It is incredible how there has been this secular trend, meaning a widespread trend, for the last two decades in terms of lowering crime rates.
Basically, from 1994 all the way until 2014, crime rates dropped precipitously like a stone.
The reason for that is because people in major cities started taking policing seriously.
Rudy Giuliani was elected in New York.
Richard Reardon was elected in Los Angeles.
You started to see All sorts of conservative policies attempted with regard to crime.
And shockingly, crime dropped.
This was the days when Joe Biden used to talk about super predators and he used to back crime bills.
And then, thanks to Barack Obama's administration and the rise of wild left crazy people like Bill de Blasio and Eric Garcetti in major cities around the country, Crime rates started to rise again because policy is indeed connected with human behavior.
And you know who's starting to realize this?
The people of New York.
Because as it turns out, what the polling data shows in New York right now, is that the people at the top of the heap, in polling, in New York, are the most conservative candidates.
There is no progressive near the top of the heap.
According to USA Today, in what could be the most consequential mayoral elections in the city's recent history, a host of Democratic candidates in a tightly contested race are vying to become the Big Apple's next mayor.
Eight major Democrats are making their final bids to New York City voters in a campaign that has touched on a variety of challenges facing the city, led to a diverse list of candidates, and featured plenty of Zoom calls.
The leading contenders are Andrew Yang, who is still seizing on the energy around his 2020 Democratic presidential run.
I know Andrew Yang because he was Generous enough to do an interview with the show.
I think he's a really good guy.
I disagree with him with regard to universal basic income, which has been part of his pitch.
But his main pitch has been, I am not an unreasonable, crazy person.
His main pitch has been, we need to get corporations back into the city.
We need to get jobs back into the city.
And we need to give the police the resources necessary in order to shut down crime.
Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer, zeroed in on public safety.
That's been his main pitch.
And then trailing the pack is Catherine Garcia, who's received a bunch of big name endorsements from the New York Daily News, but continues to trail in the polling because she is just not far right enough.
The Republicans in the race are not competitive because one, they're Republican, and two, because they're not the sort of Rudy Giuliani, quote-unquote, moderate Republican that did well in New York for so long.
But Yang and Adams look a lot more like Ed Koch, who is the sort of gruff and avuncular mayor of New York starting in the late 1970s, who converted from being a radical left Bella Abzug progressive into being the sort of conservative-style Democrat who governed New York City for a while.
These are those type of Democrats.
This is leftism being rejected in places like New York City because leftism has failed in places like New York City.
So it was fascinating.
The other night they had this big debate and the people who came off the worst by far were the people who were the most wildly to the left.
And the people who came off the best were people like Adams and people like Andrew Yang.
Now the reason this makes a difference is because what happens in New York can happen nationally.
People like to say that the Democrats want to take California national.
That's true.
They also want to take New York national.
But they don't want to take the style of Democratic governance of Michael Bloomberg national.
Bloomberg ran for the presidency on the Democratic side of the aisle and received basically no support.
Joe Biden seemed to want to govern that way at times during his campaign, but then he's run to the radical left.
He looks a lot more like AOC or like Jamal Bowman or like Bernie Sanders than he does like the Joe Biden that people thought they were going to get when they elected him.
So what happens in New York is a good indicator as to what is going to happen nationally, meaning there will be a backlash.
There will be a conservative backlash.
If it's happening in New York, it can happen anywhere.
So Andrew Yang has been facing a lot of this stuff down.
So yesterday, for example, he was walking around at a Park Slope event, and he was shouted down by people screaming to defund the cops.
No more tax!
And you can see people trailing him, saying, hedge fund mayor.
Okay, this is why Yang is going to do well in New York.
And again, he has no history in elected politics, and if he doesn't win the mayoral race, he's gonna come in a close second.
They have ranked-choice voting in New York, which means that... I'm kind of a fan of ranked-choice voting, to be honest with you.
The way ranked-choice voting works is that if you vote for one of the lower-down candidates, number one on your ballot, and then you vote for Yang, too, if the lower-down candidate doesn't finish in the top couple of candidates, that person's votes are eliminated, and then your second choice becomes your first choice.
And they just keep doing this until somebody wins.
Okay, so, Yang, right now, is running in the top two with Eric Adams.
Eric Adams, of course, is a former cop.
So Yang and Adams went at each other, but the more telling attacks were the ones that were put out against Adams and Yang for being too conservative, which is why they're winning.
It's why they're doing well in New York.
This can't be overstated.
New Yorkers are seeing the results of the policies they chose, and they are not liking the results of the policies they chose, and they are reacting to the policies they chose by moving in a different direction.
Democrats had better be wary.
They'd better be wary.
New York is a one-party city, and they're still moving to the right wing of the Democratic Party.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Alrighty, so some examples from the mayoral debate the other night.
So Scott Stringer, who is one of these also-ran candidates, he was expected to be more of a competitor in this particular race.
He was the New York City comptroller, but then he was hit with a sort of sexual harassment accusation by a former political ally.
He denies the allegations, but he's been trailing in the polls.
He went after Andrew Yang, and he said, you know, it seems to me like you're a Republican.
That is not going to work.
I mean, really, this is not a... And Yang just kind of was like, okay.
It's kind of amazing.
As your consultants have told you time and time again, they admit you're an empty vessel.
And I actually don't think you're an empty vessel.
I think you're a Republican who continues to focus on the issues that will not bring back the economy.
In fact, what you're focusing on, things like casinos in Governor's Island, you're focusing on TikTok houses in the midst of a housing crisis.
And what I'm saying to you today is there is a budget crisis, but it's a budget crisis that with $6 billion in federal stimulus money, more money for the foundation aid coming from Albany, Okay, well, this is going nowhere for Stringer, because he attacks Yang as a TikTok influencer guy.
Okay, first of all, in New York, everybody's a TikTok influencer.
But second of all, attacking Yang as a Republican, it ain't gonna do much.
Okay, meanwhile, Maya Wiley, who is the most wild-eyed of the left candidates on the board, right?
She's a long time MSNBC contributor.
She worked with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as well as the ACLU and served as counsel to Bill de Blasio, which again, that's a resume that is not going to resonate in a time when Bill de Blasio is like the most hated person in New York.
She went after Eric Adams, right?
Well, the way that she went after Eric Adams is quite amusing.
So Eric Adams is a former police officer and Eric Adams has talked about the fact that he wants to carry a gun and he also wants to make sure that off-duty police officers can carry a gun in order to crack down on crime.
This goes very poorly for Maya Wiley.
Mr. Adams has said he's carried a gun to church.
He's asked off-duty officers to carry guns to church.
He said he will carry a gun as mayor and maybe even ditch his detail.
Eric, isn't this the wrong message to send our kids?
We're telling not to pick up the guns.
Okay, and the way he responded was, I've used my gun in order to stop crime off-duty.
And he mentioned people who had been victimized by crime in the city, which is the reason why he's in really good shape, Eric Adams.
Again, he's a retired former captain in NYPD.
And he is running on a platform that includes stepped-up policing, not stepped-down policing.
The whole defund the police movement, the BLM, the police are the bad guys, all cops are bastards routine, that is not playing in New York City.
You guys, you're reaping the whirlwind.
And you're not feeling it because these people are registered Democrats.
When you elect Ed Koch Democrats, as opposed to Bill de Blasio Democrats, that indicates that EC change is happening in places like New York City.
Meanwhile, Yang himself slammed Eric Adams.
The battle in New York is also sort of internal.
So Yang is going after Eric Adams.
He says that Eric Adams has a corruption problem, which is kind of true.
He is under investigation.
I think three separate investigations actually for corruption issues.
Eric, we all know that you've been investigated for corruption everywhere you've gone.
City, state, even Barack Obama's Department of Justice investigated you.
You've achieved the rare trifecta of corruption investigations.
Is that really what we want in the next mayor?
You think you're going to enter City Hall and it's going to be different?
We all know it's going to be exactly the same.
That's why so many people on this stage don't want you to be mayor.
Okay, so here's the bottom line issue.
Putting aside all the sort of fireworks that happened on the stage the other night, Right now, Americans are going to have a choice.
Do they want the Bill de Blasio-ization of America?
Or do they want the Ron DeSantis-ization of America?
Do they want to make California more like New York?
Or make California more like Florida?
Or make America more like Florida?
The idea of making America more like New York is trying to be more like Florida now.
New York is picking up.
Why?
Because people are leaving New York for Florida.
The numbers are astonishing.
There are a huge number of people who are snowbirds who are now taking their part-time residency in New York and they're just moving it right down to Florida.
You're seeing an influx of people from the Northeast.
And that is because of the governing style in New York.
If they hope to keep people, they're going to have to stop raising taxes.
They're going to have to start backing cops.
They're going to have to start backing private property rights again.
They're going to have to start appealing to the business sensibilities of hedge funds that are in the city but can easily move.
I know several people who are working at hedge funds who have moved their entire businesses down to Florida.
I was meeting with the mayor of Miami yesterday.
He was talking about the huge number of businesses that have been moving from New York to Miami specifically because Miami is a friendly business climate and because they're not going to shun business down here in Florida.
Even New Yorkers are beginning to recognize this, and this bodes really, really poorly for Democrats going forward.
It's not going to bode well for them.
Especially because, again, Joe Biden is pursuing the New Yorkification of America, not the Floridization of America.
Speaking of which, look at the way that the Biden administration is approaching economics.
So yesterday, Jen Psaki, again, making the case we need to radically raise corporate tax rates.
New York has tried to do this kind of stuff.
You know what happens?
Businesses relocate.
How bad is the corporate tax rate proposal being put forward by the Biden administration?
It's so bad, they're trying to cudgel literally every Western country into imitating their tax proposals just so they can avoid the consequences of their own tax proposals.
Because if you force people into a choice between organizing in the United States and organizing abroad, And if they can save money organizing abroad, they'll organize abroad.
The United States knows this.
And so Joe Biden is trying to force all of these other countries into setting a baseline tax rate so that businesses don't move out of the United States.
If you have to do that, your economic policy sucks.
But here was Jen Psaki pushing that economic policy yesterday anyway.
He believes that we should continue to look at raising the corporate rate.
That is a way to pay for a range of ideas.
He's got a lot of ideas out there, a lot of bold proposals, including that aren't a part of this infrastructure negotiation.
And he continues to believe that corporations can pay more.
Unless you think corporations shouldn't pay any tax at all, and we'll leave that to others to speak to, then there should be a way to find a path to agreement.
Okay, well, I don't believe the corporations should pay any tax at all.
All that money gets passed on to employees or in prices.
That's all double tax money.
All of it.
Okay, in just one second, we'll get to more of the economic proposals of the Biden administration, which continue to quash economic growth.
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All right, so the Biden economic plans, they suck, and Joe Biden is beginning to realize they suck, and that the suckage of the economic plans has actual consequences for his political future right here.
So there's data that came out yesterday, and it showed that hourly compensation is soaring.
And the reason that it's soaring is because no one is going back to work.
It is almost impossible to get people to go back to their jobs.
Okay, when hourly compensation soars, you know what happens to prices?
Prices go up as well.
And when prices go up, your savings are worth less.
And when your savings are worth less, this makes you poorer.
Okay, so for the people who get those higher compensation jobs, not terrible.
For everybody who has savings, not great.
And for people who are not getting a raise, also not great.
All of this is because in the short term, the Biden administration is blowing money into the economy.
In the long term, what's going to happen is economic stagnation, as I talked about yesterday.
It's not just that you're going to get inflation, which is an ill, but even if the inflation levels off, you're going to get economic stagnation.
And Biden is admitting as much.
He's admitting that we're going to have like 1.8% growth for the next 10 years.
That sucks.
Those numbers are bad.
And the reason for that is because when you suck money out of the system with a vacuum, and then you blow it back into the system via a bunch of redistributionist programs that get eaten up by the bureaucracy, you're removing the productivity from the economy.
It is the reason you have not seen job growth recover at the pace that you would like to see.
There's also a reason why Joe Biden is calling Lawrence Summers the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.
According to the Washington Post, President Biden recently called former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Democrat who's been openly critical of his economic agenda, to acknowledge Summers' concerns and ask him to explain his objections, according to three people with knowledge of the private exchange.
Biden made the call as the White House is weighing critical decisions on the economy, including how much and whether to trim a far-reaching infrastructure plan in response to Republican demands.
My conversation also unfolded against a backdrop of warnings from Summers and others that Biden's spending plans present a risk of inflation and an overheating economy.
The White House has downplayed the extent of the threat posed by inflation, arguing it will be transitory and manageable.
But in recent months, Summers has engaged in increasingly bitter disagreements with White House aides.
Summers has been warning that Biden's $1.9 trillion stimulus package is way too big and will overheat the economy, spurring inflation that could prove hard for the Federal Reserve to control.
White House officials keep dismissing this.
They're frustrated that he keeps talking about it in the first place.
Apparently, the call occurred late last month, but that doesn't mean that Biden is taking his foot off the gas.
Of course not.
Keep on keeping on.
This is Popstar.
Never stop, never spending.
Okay, so Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, she came out yesterday.
She said, we're not going to negotiate forever on infrastructure.
We're just going to ram forward our program right here.
The president really does believe very strongly that the current tax structure is skewed, and he wants to rebalance it in favor of the middle class, the working class, and to close loopholes that allow corporations to offshore and to Get away in many cases with not paying any income taxes, and that's not fair either.
So there are other ways of skinning the cat, and that's part of this negotiation.
But ultimately, we cannot just sit and negotiate forever.
We have to get to an end.
Okay, what if your economic policies suck because the jobless numbers just came in?
Here are the jobless numbers in May.
The United States added 559,000 jobs in May.
Now, that would be good, except we missed by 750,000 jobs last month, and we missed by 100,000 jobs the month before.
The expectations going into this economic report, 671,000 jobs.
So they missed by, again, 100,000 jobs.
Again, 100,000 jobs.
These are not good economic numbers.
These are not the numbers that Joe Biden needs.
And they're not the numbers America needs coming out of an artificially induced economic coma.
The fact that they are trying to blow money into the economy and that it is not working is demonstrative of the reality, which is that when you threaten business, when you tell them you're gonna raise the corporate tax rates, when you talk about making that retroactive, which frankly, I don't even know how that's constitutional, retroactive taxation, they're talking about making the corporate tax increase retroactive so that you can't escape it.
Because they know that if they make it proactive, there'll be a stock market hit immediately.
But if you make it proactive that you're about to raise the corporate tax rate, And that it doesn't have retroactive effects, then people are gonna start shifting their money out of corporate stocks, for example, because they know the corporations are gonna get hit.
If you make it retroactive, then you say, okay, well, it's already priced in.
But the fact that the Biden administration keeps on missing is fairly incredible, because it's so hard.
I mean, it's the broad side of the barn here, guys.
All you have to do is get out of the damned way, but you can't get out of the damned way, because your policy prescriptions are not in line with reality, just like AOC's policy prescriptions in New York are not in line with reality.
And so New Yorkers are beginning to turn towards something that doesn't look like AOC.
They're moving away from Bill de Blasio.
Americans are going to look at the Biden economic agenda, the Biden crime agenda, the Biden racial agenda, the Biden foreign policy agenda.
They're going to start moving away from it.
I'm fairly confident.
I mean, I've said this before.
If Republicans don't win back the House in 2022, given what is on their side, honestly, every member of the Republican House should lose their job if the Republicans cannot win back the House in 2022.
This is, these are bad numbers, guys.
I'm sorry, but 559,000 jobs in May, with 650,000 jobs expected, those are bad, that's three straight months of missing on jobs.
Okay, again, what we are seeing also, average hourly earnings continue to surge 2%.
The reason for that?
Because people aren't re-entering the workforce.
There's high demand for labor and low supply of labor, so the prices are rising.
This could lead to increased price inflation at a time of economic stagnation.
Or it could just be economic stagnation for a long time.
Either way, ain't nothing good happening because of the Biden economic agenda.
Okay, in just a second, we're gonna get into all of the new information that is emerging regarding the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.
That should have been the main theory going forward since early last year.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Okay, in just one second, we'll get to the continuing implosion of the cover-up of the COVID lab leak theory.
Vanity Fair, believe it or not, has a great piece on this today.
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It's all about Joe Biden's COVID lies.
You've been told that Joe Biden was a truth teller on COVID?
Yeah, not so much.
So make sure you check out Debunked this weekend, the audio version of our beautiful video podcast.
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By the way, quick note on this economic report.
The labor force participation rate went down this month.
Down.
Okay, it should be precisely the opposite, right?
The economy is getting back into full swing.
You should be going back to work.
But when you pay people to stay home, they don't go back to work.
People have a bunch of money that the government stuffed in their pockets.
They ain't going back to war.
They're trying to spend the money, but there ain't the supply to keep up with the demand.
That's how you get inflation.
More dollars chasing fewer goods.
But in the long run, is that price inflation going to last?
Well, it depends.
Are people going to continue to take out debt and blow it into the economy?
Probably not when the demand ain't there.
You're just gonna end up with prolonged stagnation.
Well done, once again, for the Team Biden, for Team Biden.
Just amazing stuff.
No matter how many times their economic theories prove fraudulent and complete failures, no matter how many times they suck money out of the American economy and then blow it back in in the wrong places, we're still gonna pretend like they know what they're doing.
It's fairly incredible that the geniuses who sit at the top of government, the people who can't tie their own shoelaces or properly eat soup, these people are going to run the economy better than you know how to run your own business.
All right, meanwhile, Fascinating new article by Catherine Eban in Vanity Fair titled, The Lab Leak Theory, Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins.
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off limits.
Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
Yeah, no bleep.
Some of us have been saying this for quite a while.
I mean, Tom Cotton got beat around by the media.
I mean, they were just beaten, cuddling him around the ears.
How dare he point out that this thing probably leaked from a lab?
It was just terrible.
And it's amazing how they continue to downplay the lab leak theory, by the way.
I mean, Anthony Fauci is like the worst on this.
He's just terrible at this.
So Anthony Fauci yesterday, he was asked about how he even gets to the bottom of the lab leak theory.
And he was like, well, the key is, the key is, you gotta be really nice to China.
If you're really nice to China, that'll really, I think that'll really, don't be accusatory.
Be nice to them.
Here's Anthony Fauci saying things that make no sense as per his usual arrangement.
Obviously you want openness and cooperation.
One of the ways you can get it is don't be accusatory.
Try to get both a forensic, a scientific, and an investigational approach.
I think the accusatory part about it is only going to get them to pull back even more.
We've got to do it in a combination of diplomacy, scientific forensic investigation, and do it in a way that the people of good faith, not who want to do blame.
I love how he's like, we don't want people who want to do blame around here.
We can't have people who wanted to blame.
That would be terrible.
They might blame me.
You know where that's going, right?
I mean, the people who have been most accusatory are the ones who have been most accurate so far.
Dr. Fauci.
And then, watch, Fauci's like, trust people like me.
But then, he's asked about the lab leak theory, and he's like, what if I just completely mischaracterize the lab leak theory entirely so I can dismiss it?
Here he was on CNN yesterday.
He's just, this guy needed to be fired months ago.
I don't remember what's in that redacted, but there, I mean, the idea I think is quite far-fetched that the Chinese deliberately engineered something so that they could kill themselves as well as other people.
I think that's a bit far out, John.
Okay, no one was making the argument, as far as I'm aware, that China militarized the virus just to release it on an unsuspecting world.
It's called a leak.
Lab leak theory.
It leaked from a lab.
Yeah, but this is the one you should trust.
I mean, Captain Science over here.
Meanwhile, the NIH director was doing the same thing yesterday.
Downplaying the investigate- It's not important.
Why do we even need to know how this thing originated?
We have to have a full-scale congressional investigation into why 300 droogs invaded the Capitol building and then were immediately removed, 400 people were arrested, and the process of government went on.
We need to have a full-scale investigation.
But the release of a virus that's killed 3 million people worldwide, including 600,000 Americans, why do we need to know where that came from, says the head of the NIH.
I agree we need to get to the bottom of this but gosh you and I just spent a whole bunch of minutes here talking about some issue that we need to get an answer to and meanwhile people are still dying from COVID-19 and we didn't even talk about the ways to get to an end to this with vaccines.
So please could we have a bit more of the focus on how we're going to save lives while we're talking about how this all started.
Amazing, amazing.
Okay, so what actually happened here in terms of silencing the COVID lab leak theory?
According to this Vanity Fair piece, Gilles Demeneuf is a data scientist with the Bank of New Zealand in Auckland.
He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome 10 years ago and believes it gives him a professional advantage.
I'm very good at finding patterns in data when other people see nothing, he says.
Early last spring, as cities worldwide were shutting down to halt the spread of COVID-19, Demeneuf, 52, began reading up on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease.
The prevailing theory was that it had jumped from bats to some other species before making the leap to humans at a market in China, where some of the earliest cases appeared in late 2019.
The Huanan Wholesale Market in the city of Wuhan is a complex of markets selling seafood, meat, fruit, and vegetables.
A handful of vendors sold live wild animals a possible source of the virus.
That wasn't the only theory, though.
Wuhan is also home to China's foremost coronavirus research laboratory, housing one of the world's largest collections of bat samples and bat virus strains.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology's lead coronavirus researcher, Shaixing Li, was among the first to identify horseshoe bats as natural reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that sparked an outbreak in 2002, killing 774 people and sickening more than 8,000 globally.
After SARS, bats became a major subject of study for virologists around the world, and she became known in China as Batwoman for her fearless exploration of their caves to collect samples.
More recently, she and her colleagues at the WIV have performed high-profile experiments that made pathogens more infectious.
Such research, known as gain-of-function, has generated heated controversy among virologists.
To some people, it seems natural to ask whether the virus causing the global pandemic had somehow leaked from one of the WIV's labs, a possibility she has strenuously denied.
On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement that roundly rejected the lab leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism.
Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed, quote, solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China and asserted, we stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19's origins before it began.
To Gilles Dimunov, following along from the sidelines, it was as if everything had been nailed to the church, as if it had been nailed to the church doors, establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy.
Everyone had to follow it.
Everyone was intimidated.
That set the tone.
That statement struck Dovonov as totally non-scientific.
He began searching for patterns in the available data.
It wasn't long before he spotted one.
China's laboratories were said to be airtight, with safety practices equivalent to those in the U.S.
and other developed countries.
But Dovonov soon discovered there had been four incidents of SARS-related lab breaches since 2004, two occurring at a top lab in Beijing.
Due to overcrowding there, a live SARS virus that had been improperly deactivated had been moved to a refrigerator in a corridor.
A grad student then examined it in the electron microscope room and sparked an outbreak.
Dumb Enough published his findings in a Medium post, titled The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, a review of SARS Lab Escapes.
By then, he'd begun working with another armchair investigator, Rodolphe de Maistre.
A laboratory project director based in Paris who had previously studied and worked in China, de Maistre was busily debunking the notion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a laboratory at all.
In fact, the WIV housed numerous laboratories that worked on coronaviruses.
Only one of them has the highest biosafety protocol, BSL-4, in which researchers must wear full-body pressurized suits with independent oxygen.
Others are designated BSL-3 and even BSL-2, roughly as secure as an American dentist's office.
Having connected online, Semenov and Demystra began assembling a comprehensive list of research labs in China.
As they posted their findings on Twitter, they were soon joined by others around the world.
Some were cutting-edge scientists at prestigious research institutes, others were science enthusiasts.
At times, it seemed the only other people entertaining the lab-leak theory were crackpots or political hacks hoping to wield COVID-19 as a cudgel against China.
President Trump's former political advisor Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Gao Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and unleashed it on the world.
With disreputable right-wing nuts on one side of them and scornful experts on the other, the researchers often felt as if they were on their own in the wilderness working on the world's most urgent mystery.
They weren't alone.
That is the question.
The question isn't what Trump was saying.
The question is, what was the scientific community doing for a full year?
less challenging for those seeking the truth.
The researchers are doing better research than the U.S.
government, says David Asher, a former senior investigator under contract to the State Department.
The question is why.
That is the question.
The question isn't what Trump was saying.
The question is what was the scientific community doing for a full year?
For a full year.
According to Vanity Fair, it's all about Trump.
In the wake of the Lancet statement, under the cloud of Donald Trump's toxic racism, which contributed to an alarming wave of anti-Asian violence in the U.S., one possible answer to this all-important question remained largely off-limits until the spring of 2021.
Behind closed doors, however, national security and public health experts and officials across a range of departments in the executive branch were locked in a high-stakes battle over what could and couldn't be investigated and made public, according to Vanity Fair.
A month's long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, a review of hundreds of pages of U.S.
government documents including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S.
investigation into COVID-19's origin at every step.
In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology's gain-of-function research because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S.
government funding of it.
I mean, this is bombshell kind of stuff, right?
The State Department was actively telling people, do not investigate where this came from, because it might expose the fact that the U.S.
State Department has been providing support via channels to WIV's gain-of-function research, and WIV may have released this thing accidentally.
So instead, it was important to cover up China's involvement, and also, you can always just blame it on Trump's toxic racism, absolutely.
In an internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNano, former Acting Assistant Secretary of the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, warned leaders within his bureau not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19 because it would open a can of worms if it continued.
So don't investigate?
Apparently, according to Vanity Fair, in late March, former CDC Director Robert Redfield received death threats from fellow scientists after telling CNN he believed COVID-19 had originated in a lab.
I was threatened and ostracized because I proposed another hypothesis, Redfield told Vanity Fair.
I expected it from politicians.
I didn't expect it from science.
I mean, it's amazing.
Dr. Richard Ebright, Board of Governors, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took them a nanosecond, or a picosecond, to consider a link to the WIV.
Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research.
It's not a dozen cities.
He said it's three places.
Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak.
You may remember Peter Daszak from our episode a couple of days ago about Dr. Anthony Fauci's emails.
Daszak sent Fauci an email thanking him for killing the rumors of gain-of-function research being responsible for this.
So apparently that Lancet statement, rejecting the COVID lab leak theory as racist, was organized by Daszak, who has repackaged U.S.
government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research, among them the WIV itself.
David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department's day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry.
He said it soon became clear there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy inside the federal government.
On May 26th, the steady crescendo of questions led President Biden to release a statement acknowledging the intelligence community had coalesced around two likely scenarios and announced he had asked for a more definitive conclusion within 90 days.
In the words of David Feith, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the East Asia Bureau, the story of why parts of the U.S.
government were not as curious as many of us think they should have been is a hugely important one.
So again, there was consistent pressure inside the U.S.
government not to investigate this stuff.
According to Vanity Fair, on December 9, 2020, roughly a dozen State Department employees from four different bureaus gathered in a conference room in Foggy Bottom to discuss an upcoming fact-finding mission to Wuhan organized in part by the WHO.
The group agreed on the need to press China to allow a thorough, credible, and transparent investigation.
The conversation then turned to a more sensitive question.
What should the U.S.
government say publicly about the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
A small group within the State Department's Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance Bureau had been studying the WIV for months.
They had acquired a classified intelligence suggesting three WIV researchers conducted gain-of-function experiments and then fell ill in autumn 2019.
As officials at the meeting discussed what they should share with the public, they were advised by Christopher Park, Director of the State Department's Biological Policy Staff in the Bureau of International Security and Non-Proliferation, not to say anything that would point to the U.S.
government's own role in gain-of-function research.
Some of the attendees were absolutely floored, said an official familiar with the proceedings, that someone in the U.S.
government could make an argument that was so nakedly against transparency in light of the unfolding catastrophe was shocking and disturbing.
Park, who in 2017 had been involved in lifting a U.S.
government moratorium on funding for gain-of-function research, was not the only official to warn the State Department investigators against digging in sensitive places.
As the group probed the lab leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a Pandora's box, said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair.
The admonitions smelled like a cover-up, said Tenano, and I wasn't going to be a part of it.
Park said, I'm skeptical that people genuinely felt they were being discouraged from presenting facts.
He added that he was simply arguing it's making an enormous and unjustifiable leap to suggest that research of that kind meant something untoward is going on.
Again, this looks very much like a cover-up.
And it looks like a cover-up that was politically motivated by bureaucrats inside the government and media outside the government.
Bureaucrats inside protecting their own asses because they were involved in funding of gain-of-function research in China that could have led to the creation and then leaking of COVID-19.
And a media willing to not investigate, not cover this stuff, Because the reality is, all of this information was available at the earliest date, and the media were complicit in covering it up.
The media were too busy asking Joe Biden about his cat.
By the way, they continue to be too busy, generally, asking Joe.
You know the Biden administration still has not been asked serious questions by anyone other than Peter Doocy about the Wuhan lab leak theory and the cover-up?
I mean, it's fairly impressive, I will admit, the media's performance on all of this.
Instead, they're like, the right wing is focused on the COVID, why aren't they focused on their own performance?
Well, because if you cover up the greatest biological scandal in modern history, and you do so for political purposes, and you have no curiosity about it, that's kind of damning of you as an institution in the media, and certainly damning of our public health bureaucracy, the experts who are too busy covering their own asses to be truthful about where COVID-19 came from, even though it killed 600,000 Americans.
Pretty incredible stuff, and good for the folks at Vanity Fair for Late, but late is better than never.
It's an incredible story.
You should go check it out over at Vanity Fair because it really is telling what it means when bureaucrats run the systems.
Bureaucrats should not be running America's systems.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with an additional hour of content.
First, you cannot forget to end your week by checking out the Andrew Klavan Show.
Drew's show is every Friday.
He's got an exciting evening planned for you.
Head on over to dailywire.com this evening at 7 p.m.
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