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June 11, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:06:13
THE PLAGUE OF WHITENESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 109
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The left says that whiteness is a plague.
What could be the cure for that one?
Science writer Alex Berenson on the great COVID cover-up.
And how to write a sentence.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'm Dinesh D'Souza.
Now, what are they talking about?
I guess in the era of COVID, it is natural to think in terms of plagues and pandemics.
But of course, with COVID-19, we have vaccines, we have cures.
Well, What's the cure for whiteness?
Now, let me back up here for a minute, because recently, Barack Obama, in his usual mode, was talking to Anderson Cooper, and he goes, well, I'm not quoting him, he goes, there are certain right-wing media venues, for example, that monetize and capitalize on stoking the fear and resentment of a white population that is witnessing a changing America and seeing demographic changes.
So, according to Obama, the right people like me, I guess, are irresponsibly fear-mongering.
We're getting people worked up about a non-existent threat.
Well, let's try to see how non-existent this threat is.
And the way we do that is we look at the psychology of the people on the other side.
Now, here's a... New York City psychiatrist, psychologist, Dr.
Aruna Kilinani, obviously a fellow Asian Indian, she gave a talk at Yale recently, and she talked about how she fantasizes about shooting white people in the head.
Let's take a look.
So she starts off talking about anger, and she says, you know, we are...
We are calm.
We are giving. We're too giving.
And then when we get angry, they, meaning white people, use our responses as confirmation that we're crazy or have emotional problems.
And then she goes, nothing makes me angrier than a white person who tells me not to be angry because they have not seen real anger yet.
And then she says...
White people are out of their minds, and they have been for a long time.
And in describing whites as a group, she goes, And then talking about her own psychology, she says, I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I
walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.
Now let's think about this. This isn't sort of the casual statement where someone gets irritated they go you know I could have killed you.
This isn't that.
Because she's actually, and she's someone in the psychological profession talking about not only this kind of murder, but she thinks it through.
I'm going to bury the body and then I'm not going to feel bad about it.
I'm actually going to have a, I like the phrase, a bounce in my step.
Almost as if she has a little sense of Adolescent pride in what she's done.
Now, this is very violent rhetoric.
I mean, this is hate speech if there ever is hate speech.
And I'm referring here not just to the content of it, but also the person doing it.
Obviously not someone who is some Yahoo off the street.
This is a... A credentialed psychologist.
What's the venue for the statement?
It's given at the Yale School of Medicine.
Now, I noticed that there's been no public repudiation, no public apologies, none of this.
And that means that the hate speech is embedded in influential institutions.
So when the left talks about systematic racism, here it is.
They talk about hate speech that is systematized in our institutions of higher learning.
Here it is. And yet, this is the type of hate speech that is permitted, allowed, even to a degree encouraged.
Why? Because it's coming from a person of color and it is being directed against whites.
Now, let's talk about an article.
Association. This is an article that's called On Having Whiteness.
It's written by this guy Donald Moss. He's a white guy, faculty member at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. And what's interesting about this article is this is a kind of a confessional.
You've got a white guy describing the evils of whiteness, evils that he says are created almost in the womb and last until the grave.
I'm just going to read a few sentences and then interpret them.
What's going on here?
He goes, I'm now reading just from the abstract, which is the summary of the article.
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has.
A malignant, parasitic-like condition to which white people have a particular susceptibility.
White people, in other words, can't help being white.
Parasitic whiteness renders its host's appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.
Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.
And then he ends, there is not yet a permanent cure.
And there's a lot more in this vein.
I may not go into all of it, but before I proceed at all, I want to say, you know, just as a thought experiment, what if you were to take this, take all of this, and just make a little bit of a racial switch?
Let me try with the Aruna Killani first.
I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any gay person, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step.
Can you imagine the public reaction if someone did that?
Or let's take Donald Moss and take his abstract, take the word whiteness and just substitute blackness.
And now I read. Blackness is a condition that one first acquires and then one has.
A malignant, parasitic-like condition to which black people have a particular susceptibility.
Or let's say you take the same rhetoric and put in the word Jews.
Parasitic Jewishness renders its host's appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.
Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.
There is not yet a permanent cure.
This sounds like it's written by Hitler.
In other words, what you have here is the type of rhetoric so violent, so extreme, and not only extreme on the part of people who want to do violence, I'm not quoting him.
He goes, Only to reshape whiteness' infiltrated appetites to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward a work of reparation.
So, he goes, you can moderate whiteness, but you can't cure it.
And I think the true message of what he's saying is, wipe me off the face of the earth.
In other words, the real message here is, whiteness is an incurable plague, and And how far is it from that kind of message?
And from people who say, I'm violently disposed toward this.
I want to put bullets in the head of these kinds of people to say that all of this is nothing more than an invitation to genocide.
Yeah, I said it. An invitation to genocide.
I went back and actually took a look at Mein Kampf.
Even Hitler's rhetoric in Mein Kampf does not match the virulence of what I've been describing here today.
So we have reached a very interesting phase in our society in which whites, who are still the majority of our population, have somehow allowed or sanctioned or let happen, because there are obviously whites behind this movement.
This guy, Donald Moss, is white. Most of the people heading our institutions are white.
Most of the college presidents who approve of this kind of rhetoric are white.
So they are sanctioning what can only be described as a dangerous, violent, belligerent, and borderline genocidal type of rhetoric.
Hitler didn't start by killing the Jews.
He started by naming them, by insulting them.
He used words like parasites and leeches.
So the first idea was to dehumanize the Jews and Judaism.
I think we're reaching a dangerous turn in our society in which...
We are licensing the kind of behavior for which the 20th century, I think, will be infamous in the annals of history.
In other words, the licensing of very base hatreds and appetites.
What makes this particularly ironic is that this hatred is now being mobilized in the name of fighting hatred.
But it's not fighting hatred.
It is hatred.
And it's carrying hatred to new, unprecedented, and chilling lengths.
I want to talk about the American dream, the American dream of home ownership, of having and owning your own house, of building a modicum of security and perhaps even wealth.
Through this accumulation of equity in one's home, this has been a critical part of the American experience going really back to the early 19th century.
Think of all the pioneers who went west.
They put their stakes into the ground.
They built their homesteads.
That was their little piece of heaven.
And for many American families since, The idea that you can move into a house, you can get a mortgage, put a down payment, and slowly become the full and undisputed owner of that house, certainly by the time you retire and then have something to leave to your children.
This is an inextricable part of the American family aspiration.
It's part of upward mobility.
It's part of what Americans hope for and what immigrants come here for.
It's a very disturbing set of stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere about how huge hedge funds, pension funds, and so-called REITs, real estate investment trusts, are amassing giant sums of money, billions, tens of billions, in some cases, trillions of dollars.
Think of what a trillion is.
A billion is a thousand million.
A trillion is a thousand billion.
So these are people with the kind of resources that you and I can only dream of.
We can't hope to compete with or match.
And what these huge hedge funds are doing is they're moving into neighborhoods all around the country and buying up homes.
Not a home here, not a home over there.
They're buying up whole developments of homes.
Let me give a couple of examples.
This is actually right out of the Wall Street Journal in an article called, Meet Your New Landlord, Wall Street.
So, real estate agent Don Nugent lists a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house on Joanne Drive in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
And a young couple with a small child decides to make an offer.
And they're offering full price, $208,000 for this starter home.
But it turns out that there was a competing bid.
The competing bid was not from another family.
It came from a group called American Homes for Rent.
This is a public company which has a massive portfolio of cash.
And they offered exactly the same price, $208,000, all cash.
So in other words, no loan, no waiting period, no risk.
We'll write you a check.
And so who do you think got the home?
Yes, American Homes for Rent got it.
And literally 12 hours after the house went on the market, they signed a contract, they wrote a check.
A month later, the exact same house was back on the market, but this time for rent at $1,575 per month.
So what's going on here is that these giant...
Investment firms are buying properties.
And like I said, it's not one property.
And we're now going to talk about a small community in Texas, a neighborhood of 124 homes.
In swoops the big corporation and buys the entire SFR. What's an SFR? Single-family rentals.
So it's not single-family homes to own.
They buy the home and then they look for people to rent it.
So what's going on here is a trend, and this is happening, by the way, not just in one place, it's happening all over, it's happening in San Diego, it's happening in the South, it's basically happening in all desirable communities where you have nice homes, good schools, relatively safe neighborhoods, and the effect of it, that's what I really wanna talk about just briefly here, and I'm gonna talk more about this in subsequent podcasts,
is to turn the American family owner into an American family renter.
So remember that rent is something you pay out, you're not building equity, it doesn't go toward anything, and you can't build wealth that way, you're just paying out.
In equity, when you make a mortgage, and see, most Americans, I think this is actually a pity, don't save enough, they don't save a lot.
Now, you might say, well, man, Dinesh, I can't really save all that much.
I don't make all that much.
But nevertheless, the point being that for most Americans, their wealth is in their home.
This simple kind of required act of paying the mortgage over time, well, a lot of it at the beginning goes just to paying interest.
But over time, it starts piling up some equity.
And that's how you build some wealth in your home.
But if you don't have that available to you, If every time you try to buy a home, some big company comes in and bids, and some of these companies are bidding 20%, 30%, 40%, in some cases double of the asking price.
They're essentially outbidding the ordinary American trying to buy a home.
The social impact of this cannot be good.
It cannot be positive.
It's very bad for the American dream.
Now, there are people who are going to say, and some people have said, and here's a couple of tweets from Ben Shapiro, where he says, in effect, you know, this is capitalism. This is the way it is.
He goes, I'd like for you to explain how those who currently own their homes, why you're taking money out of their pocket.
What he means is that if some guy owned that home before and is now getting 30 or 40% more than his asking price, he's going to be happy.
So, you know, go explain to him why he shouldn't sell to the highest bidder, even if it happens to be ABC Corporation, instead of some nice family with two kids that's trying to...
Now, Ben, of course, is aware that what happens with these big companies is that they buy these homes.
Then the price falls.
Then they go bankrupt. Then they go running the government for help.
Oh, bail us out.
And so Ben says correctly, no bailouts ever.
He's saying if these guys want to take the risk, let them.
That's their problem.
That's their risk.
But I think that when we think about capitalism, and I think as conservatives we don't do this enough, we've got to realize that government policies, like the market itself, do have massive cultural and social effects.
They do affect the ability of the ordinary guy to get a job, get a home, and so on.
What I do agree with is that we should think about these trends without always thinking about a government solution.
Why? Because often the government solution is worse than the problem.
So you don't want to say, hey, look, you've got these big corporations, they're doing something, the social impact of it is bad, therefore...
Let's turn over all this responsibility to the government.
Why? Because the government's not likely to do any better.
In fact, they have even less stake in the matter.
They're ultimately going to manipulate the market to their benefits.
You have all kinds of government incentives to create dependency, to make people leeches on the government for political reasons.
And so the danger of government intervention might be equal to or greater than the danger of massive corruption.
Corporate control. But in either case, we need a conservatism and a republicanism that is attentive to the ordinary American family.
That's attentive to the little guy who's starting at the bottom of the ladder and trying to make his way up.
That pays attention at the end of the day not to government control and not even to corporate profits.
But to the idea that a guy can come to this country or start in this country and make a better life for himself and his family and move up the ladder and accumulate wealth and in that sense achieve this notion of becoming better than you are and leaving something, leaving a better life or the possibility of a better life to your children than the one that you enjoyed.
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He takes the hit.
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Dinesh. I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Alex Berenson.
I've been following his work really through social media now for a while.
Alex is a former New York Times writer.
He's also a novelist.
He's been publishing a series of short books.
The latest one is called Unreported Truths About COVID-19 and Lockdowns, Part 4, Vaccines.
Alex, welcome to the program.
Thanks for coming on.
This is, well...
Not just the biggest story in the country, it's probably the biggest story in the world.
And maybe we can begin with what we're finding out about how this all got started.
Now, for more than a year, we heard a sort of unified voice.
Through social media, enforced by digital media, apparently ratified by experts, that COVID-19 came out of a wet market in Wuhan.
Can you talk a little bit about, A, how we got this, what now seems to be a little bit of a bogus consensus, and two, how did that begin to crack?
Sure, Dinesh. Thanks so much for having me on.
It's a pleasure. There are two stories here, and they're related.
And the first is, you know, where the virus came from.
We still don't know the answer to that.
Although, you know, I think a lot of us, or some of us last year who were looking at the evidence thought there was pretty good evidence that it probably had leaked from a Chinese lab.
Possibly as the Chinese were trying to create potentially a broad vaccine against coronaviruses, possibly they were just doing what's called gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, which is essentially an effort to make coronaviruses or any virus more dangerous, any pathogen more dangerous artificially in a lab, which is research that's been debated quite a bit in the last 10 years.
You know, as being risky for precisely this reason that these viruses could leak.
So that's one issue.
The second issue is, and this has really just come out in the last, I would say, week to two weeks just in June, this issue of how, as you say, we were steered away from even being allowed to consider this.
And in some ways, to me, that's the more interesting and scandalous part of this because it involves a lot of Americans, apparently including Dr.
Anthony Fauci. Yeah, so let's talk about that for a little bit because we learn partly from the Nicholas Wade article, but mostly from the Vanity Fair article, that there was a kind of orchestrated effort on the part of virologists who were actively involved in this so-called gain-of-function research to create an impression of consensus.
And in some ways, Vanity Fair suggests that these are people who also were leveraging U.S. taxpayer dollars by handing them out.
You do research on this, you do research on that.
So they had a lot of virologists, I won't say in their back pocket, but sort of under their control.
And then some of the lead guys decided, you know, maybe we should keep our names off the letter so it doesn't suggest a conflict of interest whatsoever.
And then the digital media guys get behind that and start banning people who say the opposite.
I mean, this all would seem to show not only the perils of censorship, but I would also say something that undermines confidence in the health profession, which is to say the ability when an institution can be manipulated in such a way that people who are dissenters are very reluctant to speak out.
Yeah, I mean, I'd absolutely agree with that.
I'd say there's a third piece of this puzzle beyond those two articles that you mentioned, and to me it's actually in some ways the most important, which is the emails that were FOIA'd and released now about two weeks ago, I guess a little less than two weeks ago, involving Dr.
I keep calling him Dr. Anthony Fauci, but Fauci's correspondence with other top virologists, he's not a virologist, but with virologists.
And so here's what we know.
In January 2020, this virus emerges in Wuhan, and it looks very bad.
It looks much worse than it turned out to be.
There was a talk that the infection fatality rate might be 3 or 4%.
In other words, that one person in 25 who got this might die.
There were these, you know, body bags piling up in hospitals.
There was all kinds of very scary stuff coming out of China.
And virologists very quickly wanted to figure out, where is this coming?
What do we know about this virus?
And the Chinese published the genome of the virus very early on, and then actually the lab that published the genome got in trouble and was forced offline for a while, but the genome was out there.
So a virologist named Dr.
Christian Anderson emails Fauci on January 31st and says, there's a lot of stuff here that looks very strange.
There are potentially engineered features of this virus.
And Fauci says, let's talk about this on a conference call.
What had happened was he and some other scientists, very senior people, had set a secret conference call for February 1st.
We don't know what was discussed on that call specifically, although we think ... I mean, there's evidence because there's a lot of stuff that's been redacted in the emails, but the emails do show that they were talking about the genome of the virus.
In other words, what the virus actually consisted of.
So after that call, February 1st, all of these very respected virologists pushed very hard on the theory that this must have come from a wet market or some natural origin that somehow jumped from a bat to a human.
that it jumped from a bat to another animal to a human, but that it was natural and there was no lab leak and anyone who says that is a conspiracy theorist and hates Chinese people and that becomes the consensus within weeks.
When we come back, I'm going to probe this further with Alex Berenson.
How is it the case that a legitimate debate over the origins of the virus somehow got publicly suppressed?
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We're talking about the origins of COVID-19.
Alex, you were saying that this guy, Christian Anderson of the Scripps Institute in San Diego, this is a guy who had, in his emails, essentially said to Fauci, if you study this virus from a kind of Darwinian or evolutionary point of view, you find things that don't match, which would appear to suggest that this might be a man-made virus or a humanly enhanced virus. Fauci, you said, calls a kind of meeting, a kind of a
conversation about it, and then everybody, including Anderson, puts out the public message directly opposite to what his email would seem to say, we are confident that this was a wet market virus.
Now, I want to explore why they would say that.
Is it possible that these guys who kind of all have their hands in the kitchen of gain-of-function research suddenly realize, oh my gosh, here's a virus that got out, and if people come to think that we collaborated in making it, I mean, this would be worse than Chernobyl, right?
I mean, think about what Chernobyl did to the nuclear industry.
It shut the whole thing down for a generation.
So that could it be that out of self-interest, these virologists go, listen, we got to throw the trail off of us.
Let's just blame a wet market.
And what do you think actually is happening here?
Because it appears like Fauci was aware that there was a debate about this.
And yet, From his public statements, you would never get any idea that there was such a debate.
Oh yeah, I mean, he was absolutely aware there was a debate about it.
I think, so again, let's distinguish between man-made and engineered, right?
So the virus is not man-made from the ground up.
The question is whether or not it was enhanced in a lab.
And we know that virologists do this work.
It's, you know, there have been public debates about it.
Fauci has been on the side saying this work should be done.
Fauci, you know, I would say it's not that Fauci, you know, We're good to go.
And all these guys knew there was a risk.
It is impossible to get away from that fact.
They knew there was a risk. The risk had been publicly debated.
They'd been on the side of saying, we should do this research despite the risk.
Okay, now all of a sudden it looks really bad.
There's a really dangerous virus that's come out of a place...
That Peter Daszak, you know, is in bed with, that Fauci is helping fund, even if it's only in a small way, they know how terrible this looks, okay?
I'm not saying that they knew exactly what happened.
What I am saying is it is very clear that Christian Andersen and Daszak and a number of – Daszak's not a virologist either.
He doesn't actually do any of this research.
He just pays for it. But a number of other top people in this world wanted nothing to do with the idea that this could be gain of function.
And the most interesting thing to me, you know, as an American, as a taxpayer, as somebody who's watched Anthony Fauci for the last 18 months, essentially lead our coronavirus response, Fauci wanted nothing to do with it either.
And at the same time, he didn't want his fingerprints anywhere near it.
So he is on this call.
He sees a paper that Christian Anderson has written that becomes a sort of urtext for the people who are saying it had to have been natural, it couldn't have been a lab leak.
And all of that is secret.
And he is, you know, and Daszak knows him too, and that's kept pretty, you know, pretty close to the vest.
And so that's the backstory.
And as a result, last year when we could have been investigating this, when we could have put pressure on the Chinese, now maybe it wouldn't have worked, maybe it would have, but when we could have been investigating this, we did nothing.
Now we're 18 months in, the trail is completely cold, it is quite possible we will never know What happened in that lab?
Let me ask you, Alex, you mentioned the World Health Organization, and they sent a team, I believe Daszak was the only American on that team, to look at the origins of COVID-19.
But as I understand it, their kind of marching orders were to identify the sort of natural origin of the virus.
In other words, that this was You may almost say oriented to one side of the debate.
Hey, go find the natural cause of this as opposed to go and see if this came out of a wet market or if it came out of the Wuhan lab.
And Daszak, of course, seems to have been completely on board with the wet market theory from the beginning.
So can you talk a little bit about the WHO inquiry and why?
Well, I suppose it isn't a surprise to me that it seems to have produced absolutely nothing.
Yeah, I mean, the WHO inquiry was a joke.
Daszak had, you know, from the first said that he didn't think it could possibly be anything, you know, any kind of lab leak.
And he was on the commission.
So, you know, as I said last year in a tweet, it's like asking the Saudis to investigate, you know, 9-11.
It was ridiculous.
And I will say this, actually.
You know, the people who wanted to orchestrate this cover-up made a mistake.
When the report came out, I think it was February, it was so absurd, I think it caused a backlash.
Because it said, oh, you know, we think it's definitely natural origin, even though we can't find the species that the virus jumped from.
Don't worry about that minor little detail.
It can't possibly have been a lab leak.
Here are some other possibilities.
Maybe it was a frozen...
Maybe somehow the virus got into China on frozen food, which is this bizarre theory that the Chinese have been promoting basically as a way to say, oh, maybe we didn't even...
If it did lab leak, it wasn't one of our labs.
I mean, this is nonsense.
It's scientifically impossible.
It doesn't pass the first smell test.
And yet the WHO... I think it was one of these cases where the cover-up was so obvious, it was offensive to some scientists.
And so they, you know, that actually, to me, was the beginning of the pushback.
But it shouldn't have taken more than a year.
You know, Senator Tom Cotton was talking about this in January of 2020.
It was obvious to anybody who...
You didn't have to be an expert virologist.
You just had to know that that lab was in the city where the outbreak started and that there were pieces of the virus that didn't seem natural.
Even though they, look, they could have been, there's still a possibility, I'd say an outside possibility that the natural origin hypothesis is true, but there's a lot about the virus that doesn't look right and you don't have to have spent 15 years in a virology lab to see that.
You just sort of have to have some basic understanding of science.
When we come back, I want to ask Alex about two important figures in this whole debate.
One is Fauci and the other is Trump.
In times of economic uncertainty, the simple rule of investing is diversify and hedge your bets.
Now, in May, U.S. inflation rate hit 5%.
That's the highest in 13 years.
So we're seeing, you're seeing higher fuel prices, higher food prices, higher new and used car prices, construction costs, housing prices, the list goes on.
So inflation isn't just coming, it's huge.
Have you protected your savings, your investments?
If you haven't yet diversified a portion into precious metals, the answer is, unfortunately, no.
Now, for decades, I never really wanted to invest in gold, only the stock market.
But now I'm seriously worried about the regime we have in Washington.
Absolutely no sense of fiscal responsibility.
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I'm back with writer Alex Berenson.
Alex has a series of just terrific monographs and books, unreported truths about COVID-19 and lockdowns.
The latest part is part four, vaccines.
Alex, we've been talking a little bit about about Fauci.
Very kind of interesting figure because, as you know from recently, he has been posing as kind of an apostle of science.
And one of the slogans we've heard throughout COVID is kind of listen to the science as if the science itself kind of jumps out of the box and tells you what to do.
And what I want you to do is talk a little bit about this kind of appeal to science as an authority, when it seems to me that you're dealing with issues like lockdowns, which have political effects, they have economic effects, they have psychological effects on children, the effects on education.
So the idea that sort of being a virologist or knowing the science can sort of tell you what to do as a statesman or in terms of a political response seems to me on the face a bit absurd.
I think that's true.
Fauci is a scientist.
He's a physician.
He's a scientist. He's a bureaucrat, which you don't hear as much, but he certainly is a very successful bureaucrat too.
I think you're absolutely correct.
We didn't ask Oppenheimer whether or not...
We didn't put him in charge of dropping the bomb.
His job was to make the bomb.
And our political leaders, for better or worse, made the decision that we were going to use it to end World War II. And so Fauci's job was, or should have been, to offer the president and our elected leaders options.
And to say, here's how we think this might go.
Here are various choices you can make in terms of lockdowns or not lockdowns or mask wearing or not mask wearing.
And here's the certainty we have that this will do any good.
Here's the biggest problems I foresee.
You know, in terms of hospital capacity, in terms of, you know, how the virus might morph.
Here are the treatments that we have.
Here's what I think we should work on.
We have, you know, X billion dollars to spend.
You know, that's his role, right?
His role is not, you know, just like, and again, it's like Oppenheimer and the bomb.
It's like Eisenhower when he was a general.
You know, the general fights the war.
When you become MacArthur, when you think you're in charge, it's dangerous.
You are not in charge.
You are a technician. And Fauci never really seems to have understood that.
And his lack of understanding has gotten worse as the epidemic has progressed.
I would say last year I thought of Fauci more as a...
I guess a guy who just was overly concerned about controlling the virus and didn't see the societal effects.
Now I see him as a more sinister figure.
Wasn't he also ideological from the beginning?
And I say that because, you know, my wife's a bit of a germaphobe.
She's always kind of liked Fauci, and it was partly because she thought Fauci was sort of telling it like it is.
But then she noticed that while he was decrying the Trump rallies, oh, this is terrible, super spreader events, he kind of went dead silent when there were huge rallies organized for George Floyd, Black Lives Matter.
He was also very quiet about the border, even though lots of people coming across the border reports of COVID coming from Mexico to the United States, not a word from Fauci. So you got the sense that this was a guy who was kind of cunningly recognizing sort of in which political canoe he wanted to be steering. And that made you a little suspicious that he was merely, quote, speaking the science. I think that's true. It's interesting. You know, I have a fairly big audience on Twitter.
These days I have a couple hundred thousand followers.
Not like you, but a couple hundred thousand.
And when I asked people a few months ago, when did the scales drop from your eyes on the seriousness or relative lack of seriousness of the epidemic, a lot of them pointed to the public health response to the Black Lives Matter rallies.
Where, you know, the same scientists and epidemiologists who weeks before had said, hey, you can't protest this.
You know, you protesters in Michigan are killing people.
You need to go home in the face of much, much larger rallies about George Floyd and People said nothing or sometimes said, hey, I'm okay with this.
Police violence is a public health emergency too, so get out there and protest.
By the way, my position on this was that all the protests were fine.
You know, that protest is an essential American right, and that whether you're protesting George Floyd's death or whether you're protesting the lockdowns, you should be allowed to do that as long as you don't get violent.
But you did see, you know, not just Fauci, but other epidemiologists taking this approach.
This contradictory stance.
Back to Fauci for a second.
The reason I've come to the conclusion he's more sinister than I thought is if you look at his public statements, I'm talking about his public statements, you see a man who has extraordinary self-regard.
And who, you know, has positioned himself as the hero of the AIDS crisis and, you know, very successfully, very successfully nurtured journalists for the last, really for the last 30 years, and who...
And who realizes, I mean, it was clear to him once the HIV protesters stormed the NIH, which they did do in 1990, and had very sympathetic press coverage, it was clear to him that epidemics were political.
And he didn't want to be on the side that the press didn't like.
And he has really run his whole career ever since like that.
Listen, the AIDS and HIV are great success stories for the American scientific establishment.
The research that Fauci, I'll say led, even though it's really a matter of his directing money, but the research that he led helped make this virus manageable for people.
And he does deserve credit for that.
But he has been very, very good at managing his public persona, and sometimes it seems like that is the thing he cares about the most.
I mean, it seems interesting, back to his emails for a minute, the communications with Bill Gates, with Zuckerberg.
Apparently, he was regularly going back and forth with Chris Cuomo about his case of COVID. So this suggests a certain kind of journalistic savvy.
Oh. And he also seems to have been orchestrating indirectly digital censorship because, of course, these people who own these platforms are able to—I mean, think of all the millions of people who are deplatformed, censored, had posts taken down for what, in retrospect, we now know was holding legitimate positions.
Yep, that's absolutely correct.
And, you know, somebody pointed something at me that I hadn't noticed that I thought was really interesting, which was when you look at, for example, the conference call that was set up, I don't believe there are any other NIH scientists on there.
Maybe one, but I'm not even sure about that.
When Fauci, you know, Fauci spent a lot of time talking to people.
Outside the NIH. And Fauci, by the way, also, you know, if you were Steph Curry and you called, he was going to go on your podcast.
He went on with Kim Kardashian.
But, you know, if you raised a scientific question that he didn't like or didn't want to go near, he was going to fob that off to, you know, to an underling with a, you know, please respond.
So, yeah, he definitely viewed himself as an important figure in all of this.
And yeah, he cultivated people like Gates and Zuckerberg.
When we come back, I want to ask Alex about Trump, the Trump effect.
But I also want to ask him about something that hasn't really been part of the debate.
Is it possible that COVID-19 was used as a bioweapon?
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I'm back with writer Alex Berenson.
We're talking about COVID-19 and the origins of COVID-19 and Dr.
Fauci. Let me turn, Alex, for a moment to Trump, because it seems to me that part of what we've been seeing throughout this COVID epidemic is the Trump effect. And the Trump effect is that if Trump says, go forward, everyone goes back. If Trump says up, the media says down. And on position after position, I think of hydroxychloroquine, I think of lockdowns, I think of the origins of COVID. It appears like there was a sort of a public
position taken particularly by the media and the left in direct opposition or in direct contradiction to Trump.
Now, was that reflexive posture damaging in retrospect in that it forced people into all kinds of positions that now appear in retrospect hasty, dogmatic, indefensible?
Say a word about the Trump effect.
I mean, you're absolutely correct.
Look, let's be clear about one thing.
Trump didn't do himself any favors.
When he talked about injecting bleach, you know, when he said the virus would magically disappear, when he said he was happy that some of the people were being kept on a ship because it made the numbers look better in the U.S., that was back in February, he said some things that did not help his cause.
But what I think gets missed is he also said some things that were basically correct.
He said very early on in March that a lot of people who get this don't wind up going to hospitals.
And so the infection fatality rate, the risk of it, is lower than it seems because a lot of people recover on their own.
And he was really derided for saying that, and that turned out to be absolutely correct.
He was right, and he was right for the right reason about that.
You know, HCQ, I don't think to this day we know whether HCQ works or doesn't work.
What we know is that once Trump supported it, the scientific establishment wanted to very badly to discredit it to the extent that the Lancet, back to the Lancet, published research that they had to acknowledge was faked.
And so there was a Trump effect.
Oh, by the way, another crucial point about this is Trump called it the Wuhan virus or the China virus, and that clearly steered the media away from the lab leak theory in response.
It was if Trump's going to call it the Wuhan virus, we can't even acknowledge that there's this giant lab in Wuhan that maybe it's not just coincidental was doing all this research on coronaviruses.
So, yes, you are right.
Donald Trump...
You know, look, Donald Trump, I think, damaged the media in ways that we are only beginning to see because I understand that, you know, look, I was a reporter for the Times.
I understand that covering somebody who exaggerates and doesn't always tell the truth is difficult.
But the Times and other top media outlets essentially openly opposed him.
And that forced them into making mistakes, in my opinion.
Yeah. Well, couldn't you go further and say that, listen, even though they were supposedly correcting his lies and deceptions, we now see from Russia collusion to COVID to the origins of the virus, there's been a lot of deception on the other side.
Because in some of these cases, it's not like there wasn't evidence available that these guys were on the wrong track.
So it's a little hard to say that these were just honest mistakes.
It appears that they were so dug in that they didn't really want to cover something that would embarrass the narrative.
You know, I think, unfortunately, that looks more and more true.
And, you know, you especially see it with the origin stuff where the Times, as you know, unless they've done it in the last few hours, has simply ignored the Fauci emails.
You know, it's as if they can't acknowledge these exist because it might mean that Tom Cotton was right, you know, or worse, Trump was right.
And so, yeah, I mean, this is why you...
This is why journalistic outlets should be, in my opinion, nonpartisan to the extent they can be.
Or if they're going to be partisan, that's okay, but they should be openly partisan.
The problem that the Times especially has is it has a hundred-year history of being relatively nonpartisan and centrist.
I know it leaned a little bit left, but it was pretty centrist.
And pretty much the voice of the establishment.
And it has given that up.
And I think, you know, a lot of people don't realize just how much it's given that up.
Let me turn to something that I know you're a little skeptical about, and that is when we talk about this gain-of-function research, making deadly viruses, and you mentioned earlier Robert Oppenheimer.
I remember a striking statement that Oppenheimer made.
He made this later when he actually came to regret his role in the atomic project, but someone had asked him, in effect, why do you do it?
I mean, why do you do it in the first place?
And his answer wasn't, you know, we were trying to end the war.
It was the surprising answer where he said something like, The technological possibilities were exhilarating.
The very idea that you could make the Earth go a thousand feet into the air, you could incinerate a hole.
The fact, if you can do it, you should do it.
So what I want to get at is, is it possible that this gain-of-function research, although they say, oh, it's aimed at curing viruses, it could also be, A, pushing the envelope technologically, or, and we know the involvement, there is involvement now, In America, too, of the military in some of this research, obviously on the Chinese side as well.
Is it possible that from the Chinese point of view, this kind of research serves military purposes?
Well, I mean, it's different to say the research serves military purposes, which is clearly correct.
And this was an engineered weapon that was released.
By the way, the coronavirus is a particularly stupid engineered weapon to release because it does nothing to military age men and women.
Or, you know, almost nothing to, you know, obviously there's always exceptions, but basically if you're a healthy young person, you're going to shake this thing off in a day or two.
So, you know, from that point of view, it's simply a terrible weapon.
And I think generally viruses are not a good idea to release as a weapon because you don't know where they're going to go once you put them out.
I mean, you know, with something like anthrax or chemical, you know, anthrax, Is a powder that, you know, is not transmissible human to human.
So you can kill a bunch of people and not have it blow back on you.
And obviously chemical weapons are the same way.
You know, you can use them and kill the enemy and move on.
Viruses, you know, propagate.
So I think there's a lot of reason to think that this was not, you know, intentionally engineered as a weapon.
I think the other point you're making is more interesting to me.
And it's actually something I've been thinking about in the last week or so as a novelist, which is this.
These guys, look, if you're a virologist, you probably weren't the coolest kid in high school, okay?
And you're probably not the most fun guy to talk to at parties.
But if you can go into your lab And play with these viruses and make them deadlier.
You're a Superman all of a sudden.
Even if nobody else knows about it, you have superpowers.
You can kill the human race.
And that must be very exciting on some primal level to these guys.
Whether or not they will ever admit it.
And maybe it's like Oppenheimer.
Maybe they have to... I think that must be exciting.
Hey Alex, this has been great.
Thank you so much for joining me.
Dinesh, it's a pleasure.
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I want to talk in this segment about how to write a sentence.
Yes, there's actually a book of that title.
It's not a new book, but it's right here, How to Write a Sentence.
And it's written by Stanley Fish.
Stanley Fish is one of the great Milton scholars in the world.
And someone that I've debated maybe five times on campuses around the country.
This was in the early 1990s when I published my book, Illiberal Education.
But Stanley is a literary scholar of great significance, and he's also a really good writer himself.
And he says in his book that he's kind of a connoisseur of sentences, which I am too.
I'm quoting Fish. I belong to the tribe of sentence watchers.
He goes, some people appreciate art, other people like wine.
He goes, I appreciate fine sentences.
I'm always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, that make you go, isn't that something?
Or, what a sentence!
So, and then he goes, hey, this is kind of like being in sports.
You know how you go, what a play, what a dunk, what a hit.
And what you're saying when you say that is, you know, I wish I could do that.
I got two arms and two legs, but I couldn't hit the ball that way.
So how do you write a good sentence?
Now, obviously, when you go to school, you learn certain basics and there are certain sentencing.
Sentence writing is a kind of craft.
It's got some obvious rules.
Write in the active voice, not in the passive voice.
A good sentence sometimes contains an element of surprise, a certain twist.
It can be alliteration.
Which is sentences that have a certain pattern to them.
It can be metaphor. It can be irony.
But all of this, even if you do it, is going to teach you to write an okay sentence, a decent sentence, but really not a great sentence.
And that's what really Stanley Fish is after.
And a sort of perhaps disappointing conclusion of this book is he goes, I'm now quoting him, You can't produce a good sentence by consulting a recipe.
Shoot. Well, what this means is that he can't teach it to you in a certain way, in a certain three-step form.
But what he does do is he leads you through some really interesting and good sentences.
And by reflecting on those, you might get a little insight into how to write better yourself, how to compose a good sentence.
And some of his sentences aren't written.
They're spoken. He actually starts off with an example from Joan Crawford, the actress.
Who apparently never left the house without getting impeccably dressed.
Jewels and everything. Even if she were going to the grocery store, she dressed like she was going to a dinner at Sardi's.
And a reporter asked her why.
And here is the sentence.
She replies... If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
And Stanley Fish loves this because he says it's one thing for an actress to realize that people are buying into a dream, into an image, and therefore it's important to look good pretty much everywhere.
Now these days, sometimes you'll see actresses and they're like picking their nose or they're like sitting at the hairdresser.
But this was the glamour days of Hollywood.
So Joan Crawford instinctively realized if you want to be seen as a star, act like a star.
But what impresses Stanley Fish is that Joan Crawford is not exactly an architect of words puts it so well, which is to say, if you want to see the girl next door, go next door.
Here's his other sentence.
This is from the movie The Professionals.
In which Ralph Bellamy's character accosts Lee Marvin's character and calls him a bastard.
You bastard. To which Lee Marvin replies, and this is the closing sentence of the whole movie.
In my case, an accident of birth.
But you, sir, are a self-made man.
Now, the point of this is kind of a crushing line is that you're the real bastard, but you know what?
In my case, I inherited it.
In your case, you achieved it.
My favorite part of this sentence is the word, sir, because it contains such a, it's cynical masquerading as respectful.
Here's the first sentence of Agatha Christie's, one of her mystery novels involving Jane Marple.
Jane Marple is her heroine, a detective.
In the afternoons, it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.
This is a very intriguing sentence because in one sentence it tells you an amazing amount of information about Jane Marple.
Let's think about it. First of all, she has a routine.
Second of all, it's not just a routine, it's a custom.
She reads the newspaper.
This is a sort of tradition.
And her customs are sort of ritualistically observed.
She doesn't just sort of open the newspaper.
No, she unfolds the newspaper, suggesting that she has a certain type of a pattern.
She wants to read certain things first, and then other things, and things that may seem unimportant to other people, like obituaries, are of interest to a detective.
Now... The interesting thing about it is she's unfolding her second newspaper, which means that she's not content with one source of information.
I'd write it over here. But let's see what these guys have to say about it.
And that's another way of saying that Miss Jane Marple misses nothing.
She compares facts.
She's not somebody you really want to lie to.
She's not somebody you can really kind of put a fast one over.
And then we turn finally to Stanley Fish's favorite sentence of all time.
One of my favorite sentences of all time.
It's kind of funny. You've got sometimes people on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum debating on politics, but agreeing in literature.
We agree about Milton.
We agree about aesthetics. And we kind of agree on what's a good sentence.
And Stanley Fish is closing out his book with a sentence from Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, in which...
Christian, the hero of the novel, is told by a guy named Evangelist that he needs to flee from the wrath to come.
And now comes the sentence.
Because in order to flee, Christian begins to run.
And here's the sentence.
Now, he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children perceiving it began crying after him to return.
But the man put his fingers in his ears and...
And ran on crying, life, life, eternal life.
First of all, you notice that the word crying is repeated.
His wife and children are crying.
Stop! Stop! And the man is crying.
Life, life, eternal life.
And so, right there in one sentence, you have two types of crying.
And crying over what?
Well, the wife and children are essentially crying for attention, for the man to exercise his paternal duties, his social responsibilities.
Hey, you've got duties at home.
You're a husband. You're a father.
And the man hears it.
In fact, if he didn't hear it, there'd be no reason to stick his fingers in his ears.
The The reason he sticks his fingers in his ears is he knows not only that he does have those responsibilities, but he feels the power of it.
But there's a stronger power on the other side, which is life, life, eternal life.
In other words, this life is one second in the vast expanse of eternity.
The eternal destiny is more important than the earthly destiny.
He has to make a choice, at least in this instance.
Later, by the way, Christian will be reconciled to his family.
But here at the beginning of the novel, he has to choose family or his soul.
And he chooses his soul.
He flies away from the family, not listening to what they have to say.
In a sense, in one single sentence, you get sort of the Christian demand that...
Not that you shouldn't love your family.
Not that you shouldn't take care of your responsibilities.
But that at the end of the day, it is God that matters most of all.
At the end of the day, it is your spiritual destiny.
That's what you should run toward most of all.
And here's Stanley Fish. He's Jewish.
He's secular. He doesn't really care about the theological message of a pilgrim's progress.
But he can recognize, as we all can, a great sentence.
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