#62: Tyranny Comes at you Fast (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 62nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. In this episode, we discuss the value of gratitude, always but especially now. We pivot to the lab leak hypothesis, and what its discussion in the mainstream media means for the ability of society at large to consider what might be true regarding the origins of SARS-CoV2. We discuss what happened in the Capitol on January 6...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number is it 62?
It is 62.
Wow, I'm amazed I got that right in light of where we are.
Things are moving at quite a pace in the world.
And I must say, in some ways this could be exactly the thing that the Dark Horse Podcast leans well into.
You and I are two adults with a certain amount of expertise in the world and a certain amount of experience.
We can talk things through and people seem to find that rewarding.
On the other hand, it's very hard to know how to even process what's going on.
So I must admit I personally am feeling a bit discombobulated and off kilter, even though at some level Everything that is taking place, not in its detail, but in its general valence, has been predicted by us and others in numerous places.
I don't know exactly know why I'm so surprised.
I think it has to do once again with the incredible speed, right?
That is to say, even when you predict that some process is going to happen, you can be caught completely off guard by how quickly it unfolds.
And there's something, something important in that.
Indeed.
I'd like to start though with some gratitude.
Great.
And actually, and just point out where we're going today.
Although much of what we're going to be talking about today is exactly responsive to some of the main events that have happened this week, which puts, you know, I think it's much more within your both wheelhouse and interest space.
And I was hoping to talk about sea stars this week.
I don't think there will be time, but perhaps in a later week… Give me a second, wait.
I got the connection.
Okay, then you will give me… I mean, you know my enthusiasm, my renewed enthusiasm for sea stars as of this week, so… And the shocking revelation which you brought to me.
This one I didn't see coming.
Right.
So maybe we'll get there, maybe we won't.
But I want us to start with some words of gratitude and end actually by talking, by providing some words from the great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh on fear and what its impacts in the world are from his book of the by providing some words from the great Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh on fear and what its impacts in the world are
In the middle, we're going to talk a whole lot about the lab leak hypothesis and its entry into the mainstream conversation and, of course, the events at the Capitol on January 6th and their resulting events with regard to censorship in social media the events at the Capitol on January 6th and their resulting events with regard to censorship Apple, Google, the whole bit.
But first, it is now January 9th.
It is now actually all parts of Christmas are now over.
We have been informed, we've been educated as to the epiphany ending.
Oh boy, I've already forgotten.
Is it actually the 6th?
It might be.
Epiphany, the Christmas, the 12 days of Christmas.
Oh, I didn't know this term.
Epiphany.
So, it is over, but because of delays in shipping due to COVID and overburdened shipping and such, we ended up receiving a number of things from Dark Horse fans.
To our post office box that we just received this week, and we wanted to say in response to your gratitude, thank you as well.
So we received many, many cards, including people's Christmas cards that they were sending to their friends and family, and they thought, you know, why not send them to us?
And they're really wonderfully appreciated, including Not least, the one that on the back is printed, Epstein didn't kill himself.
We received that one today, actually.
I would say festively printed.
Festively printed.
Yeah, I laughed out loud.
That was good.
I appreciated that.
We got cookies, and even though due to delays they arrived rather a lot later than they were shipped, they were delicious.
We received some wine.
And we have no idea who the wine is from.
Exactly, I would love to know.
Yeah, so if that is in fact one of y'all, we'd love to know who that is because there's no indication.
Right, and I would say the wine was excellent.
Not a great match with the cookies.
You need a little break there.
Although, as we were drinking, we have only drunk one bottle of the wine.
It was a French wine, and upon putting it down for a while, I picked back up my glass and I said, I detect a little sugar cookie in the flavor profile of the wine.
That's true.
You should not be drinking the cookies with the wine, but sometimes you can find Yeah, exactly.
Even if no one has surreptitiously dipped their cookie in your wine when they weren't looking.
So yeah, that seems perhaps trivial.
Cookies, wine, etc.
But no.
Especially now, when we see ourselves, our entire society, the world, And even within families fracturing and splintering and decohering in so many ways, it is ever more important to recognize the acts, both large and small, of others that reveal our shared humanity and our appreciation for one another.
So we really appreciate that what we're doing here is being responded to with enthusiasm and gratitude.
And in turn, we are grateful for you.
Yes, so I'm going to just wing a little addendum to that.
You know, we are working once again without Annette, because once again, she didn't show up for work.
Never.
Never.
She is not a hard worker, actually.
But in any case, I would say there is something delightful About people revealing their gratitude.
I don't want to say this is just about gifts or anything, but it is so nice when people alert us that what we're doing is meaningful to them, right?
I mean, even just to know that a small number of people find it a significant fact in their week that it makes them feel better about the world, more grounded, all of these things.
It is incredibly rewarding and it is also fascinating and marvelous to see when people, you know, put their creative energies in motion and generate art pieces which go onto our walls and other things.
Sorry, I should have mentioned this.
Those things didn't happen to come in the last week or two, but we have received some amazing art from people.
And maybe at some point we should perhaps, you know, photograph and share some of it.
But really, truly wonderful wood carvings and some sculptural pieces.
Really remarkable.
Beautiful stuff.
And I would say there's something in it, you know, I think this should be obvious, and probably the conscious part of it is, but there's something that's easily lost, where human beings, because of the way the modern world works, don't get an opportunity to be important to each other very easily, right?
It's just not an opportunity that exists in people's lives.
So people tend to become... Frankly, COVID's made that even harder.
It has made it even harder, although I've seen lots of people, you know, pioneer new ways of reaching out, too.
So, you know, it cuts both ways.
But I think the thing is, you know, were we hunter-gatherers or were we, you know, pastoralists, you know?
Carving a living out of the earth or whatever the various recent or more deeply ancestral ways of being that one could have found themselves in.
The, you know, I think the common experience would have been to be important to a small number of people in your town or in your Absolutely.
And that there's something just so alienating about a style of life that in fact just doesn't offer that possibility because, you know, most of your time you're preoccupied with earning a living by, you know, doing things that aren't important to you because somebody else will pay you to do them. doing things that aren't important to you because somebody else
And may in fact, you know, often are not important to the world or even bad for the world, but serve, you know, some small number of people's bottom line, a profit motive of a few people as opposed to serving any greater good.
Yes, I'm reminded actually, I find David Graeber a mixed figure.
He died this year.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah, he did.
So say a few words about who he is.
So he actually was very particular about how he was described.
I think what he said was something like, anarchism is not something you are, it's something you do.
And so he didn't like being called an anarchist, though he clearly had those leanings.
And I must say, I don't share those leanings with him, though, you know, as anarchists go, he's a pretty sophisticated thinker.
He was, I would say, you know, geez, this is, you know, people do not like it when you're honest about the dead.
He was atrocious when it came to evolutionary analysis.
He just got it really, really wrong.
On the other hand, his article, Bullshit Jobs, was really quite spectacular and it made the point that what most people do cannot really be explained in even classical economic terms, right?
That basically we have a society that preoccupies people on nonsense that's so ephemeral it's hard to imagine why it's even being done.
So, if I were listening to this and had never heard of him before, some of the words I'd like to hear to inform me of who he is before you say more about him is that he was, I believe, a professor of anthropology and that the work by which I came to know about him was this massive book called Debt.
In fact, I looked it up.
It's Debt.
The subtitle is The First 5,000 Years from 10 years ago.
Yep.
And so he's doing sort of an economic anthropology of the history of what it is to exchange for humans.
So he was a professor and he was also a founder of the Occupy movement.
So anyway, all of these things paint a kind of a picture.
But something about the Bullshit Jobs article, which was quite a short, to the point piece.
I'm sure it's easily findable.
You know, speaks to the fact that there's just something about the way this amazing machine-like thing that we call civilization sidelines our humanity and sets us about other things.
And, you know, at some level you may not have a lot of choice about whether or not you're employed as a cog, but it certainly makes sense to notice that that's happening to you and maybe to take up arms against it.
Yeah, and the legitimate feelings of frustration and futility which can manifest in illegitimate ways.
We've been seeing from the so-called left all summer and fall, and on Wednesday in the Capitol we saw from, you know, maybe it's the actual right, maybe the so-called right, and it's emerging from a similar human place, and by saying that I'm not in any way justifying the behavior of the rioters on either side.
But there's legitimate sense of futility and lack of connection because we are living such disconnected, anonymous lives.
Which raises a couple of things that I should probably mention somewhere in here.
I was on Triggerpod Trigonometry this week talking about the events at the Capitol.
Yeah, they livestreamed with you on Thursday, the day after the events, right?
Yep, it has been pretty widely circulated.
And anyway, we talked a bit about the fact, you know, in some sense, one place that one should stand to understand what's going on, is that there is Massive frustration around some vague sense that something is way off, that the system is not functional, and many of us, including me, certainly believe that the system is rigged.
I believe that it is rigged in many ways that are legal, and that that's not a defense of those things.
It is certainly sometimes rigged in ways that are illegal that we get hints of, which of course means that there is no end of false conspiracy allegations and it's very difficult to sort between which ones are valid and which ones aren't valid, which of course
Requires a skill set that at some point we should talk about and we have talked about you know we've talked about the fact that you know the word theory and the more I think about it the abuse of the word theory is at the heart of so many of our dysfunctions that really as annoying as it is.
To have, you know, these semantic concerns brought to the fore in the midst of a crisis.
In this particular case, if we were careful about it, if we just simply agreed across the board, hey, theory has a definition, hypothesis has a definition, and we are all obligated to just sort of stick to them and not blur that distinction because it's a really important one, we would be way ahead in so many different places from I mean, I agree with your point about the abuse of the word, but I don't think that would help right now.
I don't think that's fundamental enough to the problem.
I don't think solving the language problem would address any serious issues at the moment.
Well, I think it would in the sense that to the extent that one wants to convince you of something and cause you to act, and they invoke the term theory because it carries power, right?
To the extent that somebody making an analogous argument uses the term hypothesis.
They've already told you what rules they've signed up for.
When somebody says they're involved in critical theory, I don't know what rules they've signed up for.
I don't think this is where we want to spend time today, really, but I will say that pretty much anyone hearing the word hypothesis does have the sense of what it means, but that theory has been so abused that, you know, you hear people saying, oh, well, that's just my theory.
That's, you know, and so, you know, it means everything.
And without the counterpoint hypothesis, I don't think it actually carries the kind of weight that you think it does.
And I'm not saying that that hasn't hindered the conversation when, you know, conspiracy theory is the word of the day as opposed to conspiracy hypothesis.
But I don't think resolving that actually helps us much.
But I think we should move forward.
I just want to make the point that.
We are dealing, you know, in so many different realms with the downstream consequences of this, right?
Where we have, you know, string theory effectively owns modern physics.
And the question is, it is jumping, it is not even a hypothesis in the sense that we don't have any predictions from.
And so to the extent that it has effectively taken over a field, and the point is it has taken over a field from a very weak position.
I mean, you're not telling me anything I don't agree with.
We disagree about whether or not this is the important conversation to be having right now.
I just don't think it is.
All right.
I will continue to fight this quixotic battle.
You can beat the drum.
I just don't think that drum is going to rise to the top of the importance ladder.
All right.
That's not a thing.
That didn't make any sense.
That didn't work.
It worked well enough, I mean, for, you know, for live internet discourse, I suppose.
You were going to say something about David Graeber, I think.
Well, I was going to say that this was really a riff on your bit about gratitude, which is that Many people have arrived at the conclusion that there's something wrong with human interaction.
And one thing that seems to be wrong is that our ability to find ways to be important to each other is just severely curtailed.
And, you know, you and I are lucky in the sense that the modern Era has delivered us tools to be important to a lot more people than we would ever meet under normal circumstances That's pretty cool, right?
But the point is it's also just a weird and very arbitrary concentration of a kind of value where you know We can tap into reaching a lot of people whereas most people have a hard time reaching anyone just because of the economic realities of Of modernity.
So anyway, thank you for alerting us to the fact that we are doing something positive in your lives.
And the gifts are very, very meaningful.
And we do spend time thinking about each of them.
Yeah.
Sharing them with our children.
One of our children is obviously hard at work in the other room, clicking away, making this podcast happen.
That's right.
All right, so there's a question about where we should go first, and I think the first place to go is, or second place to go, is to talk about the progress with the lab leak hypothesis that occurred in the last week.
Yeah, my notes suggest, in which a conspiracy hypothesis is accepted by the mainstream with no acknowledgement that that is what has happened.
And yes, this was published in the New York, in New York Magazine on, why is there no date?
Fascinating.
Oh, January 4th, 2021.
So yeah, within the last week.
So January 4th, so roughly a lifetime ago.
Yes, and it's quite good.
I mean, maybe Zach should put it up.
Yeah, I think he should.
I sent him a link to it.
Zach, do you want to?
It's also on my screen if you want to show it there.
Okay.
So this article is very, very well written, and it covers a lot of the people that I hold in high esteem who have been both courageous in discussing the lab leak hypothesis, including Yuri Dagan, who was on the Dark Horse podcast, and some others who I've become aware of who have bucked the academic trend and talked about This.
And what it does is it takes the lab leak hypothesis and it legitimizes it so that now anybody can discuss it.
And the reason that this is so important is that We have this period between which it was obvious that there was something to discuss, and the mainstream has effectively been forced to admit that.
And that period is going to be lost to history, I have a feeling, but its significance is hard to overstate.
I am flabbergasted that this is a point that needs to be made, but when you say there's a period between which it was obvious that there was something to be discussed and now it's entered the mainstream and so we're sort of allowed to discuss it, and this is a period that lasted well more than half a year.
Because we began talking about it on this podcast in April of 2020.
What you said is exactly right, but this nuance, which is not really nuanced, will be missed by some people.
It is obvious that there was something to be discussed.
What you have said is not.
It is obvious that it is true.
This is in fact your distinction between theory and hypothesis, right?
That the idea that it is a possibility that we should be considering on the table as opposed to we've got an idea that is true.
It's that this is a, you know, there was an animal in the market in Wuhan and that's the origin of this virus.
That is the only thing we're allowed to consider.
At the point back in April, May, June, etc.
of last year that you had scientists no less credentialed scientists working as scientists earning their pay as scientists who said there was one and only one possible explanation for where this virus came from and for you to think anything else is irresponsible.
That right there is anti-scientific because what scientists do is they observe something and they say what are all the possible explanations for this thing?
And lab leak was obviously a possibility from the very beginning.
And by saying it was obviously a possibility is not saying it was obviously true, saying it was obviously a possibility.
So it was obviously a possibility.
And interestingly, you can see it was captured in my Twitter feed exactly how early it was obvious that it was a possibility.
And so the percentage likelihood that it was the explanation for the pandemic has changed for me and presumably for everybody checking in with that idea.
But Zach, do you want to show the screenshot of my Twitter feed from February 4th?
The screenshot of my Twitter feed from February 4th seems really specific.
So there are two screenshots here.
Boy, can you put that on a bigger screen, Zach?
Okay, so I'm going to...
I will just start telling you what's here and okay.
So let us set the stage here for a second, Heather.
You and I were in the Amazon.
So this is February 4th, 2020.
February 4th.
This is like less than a week after we got back from Ecuador.
I was hoping you'd know the exact date offhand, maybe you don't.
Which date?
Date of what?
That we left the Amazon, the date at which we went from being completely without communication in Yasuni, in Ecuador, to returning.
I mean, cell phone reception again becomes possible at the military checkpoint when you are transitioning back to the town affectionately known as Coca.
That's going to have been January 24th.
January 24th.
Okay.
And then we came back to the U.S.
on January 28th.
So the fact of the coronavirus, what was then called novel coronavirus, was unknown to us while we were in the Amazon.
We emerged while we were in Otavalo.
In the Andes.
In the Andes, decompressing and getting ready to return home.
Literally decompressing given the low air pressure up there.
Wow.
So true.
Yes, we were decompressing in the Andes looking at hummingbirds and all sorts of other stuff.
But in any case, we emerged from the Amazon.
The world had begun to grapple with the idea of a novel coronavirus.
And you know, If you think back to where you as a listener were to the novel coronavirus at that point, you know, there have been a number of these emergent viruses, you know, SARS and MERS and bird flu and things like this.
And You know, so there's always this question about, oh no, there's this virus that's been spotted.
What's going to happen?
Is it going to take over the world?
Is it going to burn itself out?
And so it's very hard to tell at the point that we caught wind of the novel coronavirus how bad it was going to be.
There was a Nature paper.
Is that what you're referencing here and what's on screen here?
Yes, it was a Nature paper that outlined the wet market hypothesis and the fact that the virus had come from bats.
And I thought, as a bat researcher, I thought it made sense for me to look at this paper.
I'm always a little bit troubled When diseases are associated with bats because people don't know how to calibrate it.
There's so many species of bats.
And yes, bats do vector a lot of diseases because they fly and therefore they're good vectors.
But, you know, people don't understand.
It's not, you know.
The little brown bat in your backyard, if you're listening to this in the United States, is not vectoring these diseases.
Right.
It's not likely to, and it's not likely to carry rabies either, though that's a possibility.
It's a possibility, but unlikely.
Unlikely.
But in any case, the...
The fact is, the viruses are the enemy of the bats too, so in some sense we're on the same side and I don't like to see bats demonized.
But anyway, I thought I would look at the paper, I would read it, it said, you know, bat-borne coronavirus, Wuhan seafood market, and I just thought I would weigh in and say, I've looked at it, it makes sense to me, and I did.
And that was at 10.30 in the morning of February 4th.
I immediately got pushback from followers who said, oh, so it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety level four laboratory studying bad coronaviruses in Wuhan where the virus emerged, right?
A fact about which you were previously unaware.
Completely.
Sure.
And I thought, that's a hell of a coincidence.
There's probably something about the story I don't know.
At least I need to understand why that coincidence is not stunning, right?
That piece of information puts this hypothesis on the table as something that obviously needs to be considered.
Obviously needs to be considered!
And, as Yuri Dagan pointed out when I talked to him, and as I thought, One of the things you need to know, you know, I wasn't really deeply thinking about what a biosafety level 4 laboratory was and I had no idea how many of them there were.
You know, if there were a thousand such laboratories and the fact that there's one in Wuhan may not be significant.
It's just a coincidence.
You know, if there's one and it happens to be in Wuhan, it's a spectacular coincidence and it happens there are a handful.
But that one of the two primary ones studying Coronavirus, bat-borne coronaviruses in Wuhan is certainly a stunning fact.
And many, many of us who are on the heterodox side of this question have had this exact same experience, which is, as soon as you realize that Wuhan is the location of such a lab, that it was studying exactly these viruses, and it is the first place that humanity becomes aware of this virus, you know that there, if you're an honest broker, you know that there's something that has to be considered.
Yeah, so this article, this magazine article that's out this week in the New York Magazine, cites a piece from 2012 that's published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which I would love to read just the first two paragraphs from because it's directly relevant.
Sure.
Sure, if you want to, it's on my screen.
It's called The Unacceptable Risks of a Man-Made Pandemic by Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester.
For those of you looking, I don't know why the first paragraph is partially replicated, so I'm reading the first two paragraphs even though it looks like I just skipped one.
Now that world attention finally has been focused on the potentially human contagious H5N1 Asian bird flu virus, remember this is written in 2012, the international research community should take steps to deal with three other potential pandemic pathogens.
Two are among history's nightmares.
Smallpox, which killed or maimed millions of people over centuries as it ravaged the world, and the resurrected 1918 pandemic flu virus, which may have killed 50 million people worldwide over just two years.
The third is Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, a newcomer that proved how lethal it could be in one natural outbreak during 2002 and 2003, when it killed 9.6% of those it infected, a fatality rate almost four times higher than the 1918 flus.
These potential pandemic pathogens, or PPPs, pose a danger that goes well beyond the potential of other hazardous microbes that have made the news.
The PPPs are all extremely deadly, highly contagious, or potentially highly contagious in humans, and not currently present in human populations, meaning it would be a disaster to reintroduce them into the population.
Of the three, smallpox, researched at only two facilities in the world by international agreement, poses the smallest threat of laboratory escape.
At Russia's Vector and the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control, lab workers have been vaccinated to prevent infections to themselves that might spread to others outside the lab.
In stark contrast to the strict controls on smallpox research, however, SARS, the 1918 flu virus, and potentially human-contagious H5N1 bird flu are studied in laboratories throughout the world using less than the highest biocontainment, known as Biosafety Level 4, or BSL4, and there is no approved and stockpiled vaccine for any of them.
So yes, there is awareness of the hazard which in fact resulted in an intense effort to study bat corona viruses and there has also been a competing awareness of the danger of studying them and in particular of studying using techniques called gain-of-function research where viruses are enhanced to see what they will be like when they become truly infectious
Which, and the hypothesis, the lab leak hypothesis, I think for all of us who have tracked it carefully, is not.
There is a version of it in which the virus simply ends up in a laboratory and unmodified escapes from the laboratory into the world.
That's very unlikely to be true because the virus that would have ended up in that laboratory Would not have been highly transmissible between people.
And if there's one thing you can say about SARS-CoV-2, it's that it is highly transmissible between humans, right?
It's a trick it's very, very good at.
And so the question is, where did that happen?
And while possible, the idea of this virus happened to be in a lab, it was unmodified, is less parsimonious than this virus was out in the wild and transmitted without having an intermediate step in a lab.
Right.
Well, one would expect an evolutionary period in which the virus either picked up a skill through recombination with some other virus.
So time to evolve without human artificial selection.
Right.
So there's a number of things you would expect, and we have evidence for exactly none of them, right?
It doesn't have a long period of time in which it learned to go from person to person.
It doesn't have, you know, many people have hypothesized things like pangolins and other intermediaries.
But there's no evidence that this actually occurred So anyway, there's a there's a whole lot of mystery but what I wanted to point out about these screenshots is that they actually happen to document a thought process and Give it a time stamp.
So February 4th 1030 I Tweet I have looked at the nature paper cited here and the evidence is That the novel coronavirus came from bats, possibly Rhinolophus affinis, or another species, sorry it's at a distance, it's hard for me to read, or another species that shares roost with it, is fairly compelling.
How it jumped to humans is less clear, but wet markets are likely.
Okay, that was 1030.
My next tweet, which was 1129, I said, several followers have pointed to a competing hypothesis, and the Nature paper does not allow us to distinguish between the two.
The virus likely comes from bats.
That much is true.
The bushmeat trade is dangerous.
Also true.
Those things may well be unrelated in this case.
Now, my reference to the bushmeat trade is obliquely about HIV, which the best explanation for how HIV ended up in humans is basically chimp butchery that resulted in the virus transmitting to a human.
So, in any case, That's less than an hour by one minute, right?
Between your two... Between my two tweets.
The fact of the BSL-4 lab in Wuhan is sufficient to raise the skepticism of an honest broker thinking in a scientific mode.
It didn't mean that it was the probable answer there.
Now, the irony is, as the lab leak hypothesis has Uh, been defended by courageous people willing to take the risk of being dismissed as conspiracy theorists or Trump loyalists or whatever it is that the accusations have been.
Um, as that hypothesis has, you know, clawed its way into, uh, grudging acknowledgement by the mainstream that it is something that reasonable people might consider, the explanations that were offered as official have fallen, right?
Everybody, including China, acknowledges the wet market had nothing to do with it, there weren't bats for sale there.
So the point is, the other hypotheses have crumbled, even as this one has gained steam, right?
Now, a person could have a wild conspiracy theorist, that is to say, somebody who is not exerting any sort of analytical discipline could have landed on the right answer here, and they would turn out to have been, I won't say right, because we still don't know that the lab leak is what happened, but would turn out because we still don't know that the lab leak is what happened, but would turn out to be in this A person who was methodical and careful and just simply following the logic and the evidence where it led would have ended up here too.
So you can't really distinguish those two things.
But, over time, one of these hypotheses has gained ground because it is impossible to refute so far, and the circumstantial evidence is very strong.
There's no direct evidence, but the circumstantial evidence is incredibly strong.
As we iteratively fail to falsify a hypothesis, it looks ever more likely to be an accurate representation of underlying reality.
Right.
And what's more, if it turns out lab leak is not the explanation, all of the things that we will have learned in the attempt to falsify that hypothesis are now basically a description of what a better hypothesis would have to explain in order to take the lead.
And so people will remember back in Would have been June or July.
I said that one of the ways to deal with this stuff responsibly is to rank, to give a percentage chance that you think some possibility, if you have competing hypotheses, what you think the percentage chance is, and I made a little flow chart and I
Went through all of the things that I could think of that could possibly explain Where this virus had come from and I ranked lab leak as very high something like I think this was far earlier I think this was May frankly may have been anyway may have been May but in any case there's a way to do this and there's a way to do it responsibly and the amazing thing is when you do it responsibly even when you have you know a credential that is Means that somebody has agreed that you have the toolkit with which to do such a thing.
Even then, you face these amazing, appalling accusations of being a conspiracy theorist, right?
Being irresponsible, spreading false information.
You know, I mean, even Peter Daszak, who it turns out was central to the funding pipeline that resulted in the money that allowed this coronavirus to be or these coronaviruses to be studied in the Wuhan lab, this guy with this incredible conflict of interest, right?
He was leveling accusations of conspiracy theorists against anybody, including us, for talking about this stuff.
The point here is two things.
And as usual, you know, follow the actual conflict.
It's easy to accuse people of having, you know, having secret financial connections, and some people presumably do, or being grifters or whatever.
But when there's a known conflict of interest by someone who is accusing other people of spreading information for which there was no support, but you can actually point to the support or the failure to falsify, well then, the conflict of interest speaks really loudly.
Yes, the conflict of interest is deafening at some level.
And in Peter Daszak's case, it's just amazing how far he has gone to ridicule and erode the credibility of anybody who even raised this possibility in public.
But, so this comes up here for two reasons.
One, this is the week in which this hypothesis has become mainstream and suddenly you should expect a very different level of conversation about it because effectively people have been signaled that it is now safe to acknowledge the obvious, right?
Safe to acknowledge the obvious.
Now how many topics Do we face this kind of situation?
Why is it ever unsafe to acknowledge the obvious?
Ever?
Gosh, I just have this image of someone like peering out from a storm cellar door.
Is it safe to acknowledge the obvious?
Right.
Is it safe to acknowledge the obvious?
Is it safe, you know, to acknowledge that men and women are different phenomena?
You know, well, we'll get back to you, right?
Not all that safe at the moment.
Maybe we'll get there.
But, the question really, and the interesting thing, this is just happenstance that this arises in the same week as the insurrection at the Capitol, and if need be I will defend that word in a moment here, but the insurrection at the Capitol, and what may be much more important, which is the downstream
At least narrative consequences, so things have been moving incredibly fast in the last day and Ostensibly that is the result of the the invasion of the Capitol building Some of it can't possibly be.
I frankly didn't have enough time in becoming aware of the fact of a new anti-terrorism bill that is ostensibly the result of or responsive to the events at the Capitol.
You know, I wasn't able to look at it, but This can't possibly be responsive.
It has to have been ready to go in large measure and then, you know... Some giant many, many, many page bill that someone is arguing was created in response to what happened on Wednesday?
Yes.
That is my understanding.
I don't know anything about this story.
Well, the number I've seen was something like 20,000 pages.
Now, that could just be rumor.
I'd like somebody to validate that.
I went looking for it and time ran out on me before the live stream.
But nonetheless, yes, There does appear to have been a lot of stuff ready to go and then the events of the Capitol seem to have created pretext for it to be unleashed.
And what I want our listeners to do is to keep what has happened with the lab leak hypothesis and then what has, you know, the latest chapter is it has gone mainstream.
I want them to keep that in mind As they try to grapple with what is taking place ostensibly as a result of an egregious breach at the Capitol building.
All right, so how to put this in context.
So what has happened?
Just for the sake of catching people up, there was a rally encouraged by the president at the Capitol.
Now, this rally was apparently much larger than most people understand.
The number of people who entered the Capitol building was relatively small.
The number of people who were present in this rally was quite huge.
And we are in the awkward position.
We have been working, in fact, overnight trying to get processed and ready for release.
An interview I did Yesterday, with Jeremy Lee Quinn, who people will remember I interviewed before, Jeremy Lee Quinn happened to have been in Washington at that rally as a journalist and actually went into the Capitol and witnessed what took place firsthand.
And what he has to say is quite shocking and quite a good corrective to the narrative that that is circulating.
So that very long conversation that you had with an eyewitness journalist to the scene should be up both on YouTube and as a podcast momentarily, frankly.
So YouTube is telling us that video processing is taking longer than expected.
I don't know what to make of it.
Probably video processing is just taking longer than expected.
But in any case, please do take a look at that interview.
I think you'll find it fascinating and I think you'll find it very hard to dismiss as resident in some part of the political spectrum.
The fact is Jeremy Lee Quinn is a progressive lefty self-described pacifist anarchist.
I'm a person of the what I would call the intellectual left and here we are you know discussing people who were decidedly on the right who breached the Capitol for many different reasons.
You know it was not one of the things we talk about is that it was not a coherent There were people there who were engaged in what they thought was a coup, and there were people there trying to prevent what they thought was a coup, right?
And they were somehow in the same protest.
So it's an event that really requires people to think very carefully about what its nature was.
And indecipherable from one another in photographs, presumably.
Right.
And in fact, you know, I do think there's, I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly how to think about it or phrase it, but there is some interesting yin yang, you know, the anarchists, the Antifa, Black Bloc anarchists that we have seen rioting, All summer, make an effort to de-individuate and they, you know, they become the black block, right?
And this is about not displaying their identity.
Now, if you pay close attention, it's clear that to them, they do have identities and that, you know, so they still can earn cred with each other.
But from the point of view of the outsiders, it's just a bunch of people wearing so much black that you can't deduce who they are.
Whereas in the insurrection at the Capitol, you know, you have a dude in a A Viking helmet?
I mean, yeah, it's it's so there was a whole lot of it's basically a much more libertarian perspective.
And the fact that everybody you know, I was I didn't I'm not aware that in the insurrection there were, you know, grandmothers, Trump-supporting grandmothers who entered the Capitol.
I didn't know that.
So, you know, you've got dudes in Viking helmets, you've got grandmothers, you've got people carrying the Confederate flag.
You know, it's not a clear message.
It's a bunch of different frustration, but at some level... Well, it's not coherent.
And, you know, in this way, I think there is something.
In many ways there is something analogous to the protests which reliably became riots that were taking place in Portland almost every night for well over half a year and in other cities as well with some less regularity in that there are, you know, and you know the treatment obviously from the media of these these two sets of events is wildly wildly different but in both cases it is not a single uniform group and so just as
People on the right decrying every single person who went out into the streets to support Black Lives Matter were wrong to do so, because this was not a single uniform force, and not by far the vast majority of people who were protesting on the streets in Portland, for instance, and elsewhere did not become rioters, but a reliable portion of people almost every night did.
And it sounds like, I don't know what the ratios are, we may never know, but you know, just as there was some rally that included a wide variety of people, most of whom had no intention of and would not have gotten wrapped up into what You're calling an insurrection, a siege on the Capitol.
But that doesn't mean that some small proportion of people didn't do that.
And in both cases, the rioting, whether or not it's on a federal building in downtown Portland, or the actual Capitol building in Washington, DC, is totally unacceptable.
Oh, completely unacceptable.
Now, one does have to deal with and I talked about this on the trigonometry podcast.
One does have to deal with the fact that the United States was born in an insurrection.
And so there is an acknowledgment in our, you know, our foundational principles that there are there are events that call for something well beyond civil disobedience.
In fact, can we just show very quickly here, Zach, my screen, a Wall Street Journal op-ed from three days ago, actually from a former Princeton fellow as well, Aaron Zubia, called The Founder's Guide to Knockdown Dragout Fighting.
The subtitle, the sub-headline here being the ratification debates of 1787-88 were colored by, quote, patriotic enthusiasms verging on violent chaos.
Again, not a justification, just an historical correction of sorts that our rosy image of history, as if the U.S.
was born, you know, sort of Aphrodite-like on the half-shell and everyone was thrilled with it, is certainly not true.
Yeah, certainly, certainly not true.
But, you know, so I will say this whole conversation takes place with a certain amount of, you know, I'm tempted to say trepidation, but let's just call it fear.
There's a certain amount of fear that what is taking place on the major platforms is coming for us, and that the important points that we are trying to make will not only be lost, but that our attempting to make them may hasten what will likely come for us.
Not for the first time, so we will come back to this.
But in any case, I want to somehow make this point, and to the extent that Dark Horse might disappear from this platform, I want you to remember that I made it.
And the point is, You have a lot of people responding to a garbagey understanding of what is taking place, right?
You have the QAnon right, right?
Which has a misunderstanding about where we are.
Not that there, I don't know almost anything about the detail of the content of QAnon, but it's an overly packaged view of what has gone wrong.
It has filled a vacuum of information about what really runs society.
This is, again, the counterpart of the confused understanding over on the BLM Antifa black block left, right?
Which has the sense that Our civilization is so evil and so far above others with respect to how much harm it has done that the only response to it is to tear down its structures, right?
That that cannot possibly make things worse and will inevitably make things better.
That is an equally confused understanding of where we are.
And so you cannot have a society In which every individual gets to decide for themself when you have reached a moment that you are obligated to rebel against the structures and tear them down, right?
You can't have everybody waking up each morning and deciding whether they're in a Unabomber mood or not, right?
So, to the extent that the founders of the country rebelled against a tyrannical governance structure, they were very clear-headed on why they were doing it, and they were united, and it was clearly justified.
And what we have here is a small insurrection into the Capitol that is Somehow the fringe, I mean it's almost physically the fringe of this much larger protest that was at the Capitol, which is itself the fringe of the conservative movement, right?
So anyway, you've got these things, it's like a physical gradient, and you've got people who are, you know, wearing the Viking helmets and carrying the Confederate flags, breaching the Capitol.
That's obviously completely unacceptable, and it is an insurrection, even according To many of them, right?
You'll see this in what they say into cameras.
However, I think it is also incumbent on us to recognize there are some very, I know nothing about the improvised explosive devices that were We are told were found at the Capitol.
I did see an image of somebody who appeared to be a protester who had zip ties of the kind you would use to bind somebody's hands.
These are very troubling facts, as are the Confederate flag, the Camp Auschwitz t-shirt.
You know, these are hallmarks of something Completely out of control.
Completely unhinged.
Completely unhinged.
On the other hand, what I didn't see, these are right wingers.
Were any of them armed?
I assume they must have been.
But one did not see a lot of firearms in this circumstance.
So what you have is an insurrection, an egregious violation of the law, one that is not justified by our circumstances.
But, done in a way that is clearly intended to be, in some sense, symbolic.
Right?
So, I'm not justifying it, but what I'm saying is that an honest broker would have to parse all of this nuance, and that unfortunately,
What we are getting, this idea that we can decide who's right enough to listen to, that we can take anybody who is engaging any idea that has been formally dismissed and toss them off platforms and things, is going to result in the worsening of the problem that caused the rioting this summer, And the worsening of the problem that caused the breach of the capital, which is people don't have good information to go on.
Why don't they have good information to go on?
Lots of different reasons, including mundane algorithm stuff.
But the point is, this is what happens in the vacuum of analysis, is you get this kind of confusion.
You get QAnon confusion on the one side and Antifa confusion on the other side.
And if you want this not to characterize the way we are going forward, The thing to do is not to try to police speech online.
That's a perfectly insane response to this.
It's going to make it worse.
The right thing to do is to let those of us who know how to engage these difficult questions responsibly do it.
Will we make errors?
Of course, but that's the nature of civilization.
So may I speak a little bit to someone else who we know online, who I think is engaging these things responsibly, and I don't always agree with her, but I just want to share some of one of Caitlin Johnstone's most recent pieces here.
Zach, just briefly share.
So this is an independent journalist who publishes on Medium and she's done several pieces in the last several days.
This one called The Boot is Coming Down Hard and Fast.
So excuse me if I may have my screen back, Zachary.
Thank you.
The very final paragraph of what she's written here is the correct response to a huge section of the citizenry doubting an electoral system that we've known for years is garbage would have been more transparency, not shoving the process through and silencing people who voice doubts and making that entire faction more paranoid and crazy.
This is, um, in a piece which she begins by pointing out that Biden was in fact the original framer of what would become the Patriot Act.
And, uh, in, alongside that fact, she provides, as Caitlin Johnstone, the journalist who's written this piece, provides us a clip from an appearance on Morning Joe with the CIA analyst and former Times Now House representative, Alyssa Slotkin, who is informing us that the real battle against terrorism is now inside America's border.
She says, quote, The post-911 era is over.
The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division, the threat of domestic terrorism, the polarization that threatens our democracy.
If we don't reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside.
And one I find totally appropriate response to this is from a woman named Whitney Webb, I don't know her, who quote tweets Slotkin, again the current House representative who was a CIA analyst.
Webb says, Before Congress, Elissa worked for the CIA and the Pentagon and helped destabilize the Middle East during the Bush and Obama administrations.
What she says here is essentially an open announcement that the U.S.
has moved from the war on foreign terror to the war on domestic terror.
This is terrifying.
And, um, we, you know, we should be considering that, you know, as you, I don't, I have not seen this, this bill that you have referenced.
I don't know anything about it.
Uh, that has apparently been produced in record time.
Right.
Um, but it is likely to be something like back in the mid nineties, Biden produced something apparently right before actually the Oklahoma bombing, um, produced something that was, you know, Put up there, taken down, sort of disappeared, and then repurposed effectively as the Patriot Act after 9-11.
You know, where did the bill that is being trotted out right now start, and by whom, and to what purpose?
Hopefully we come to know the answer to that.
One more thing about this though, and I'm sure you have a lot to say.
Returning to Representative Slotkin's claim of two Americas.
I think this is actually a further divisive and dangerous formulation, and it's old, right?
We have this two-party system, there's red and blue, there's Republicans and Democrats, but I at least see no evidence of there being two Americas.
I see a much, much, much more fractured state.
And at the very least, we have three, you know, at the very least.
Because when Trump ascended, there were many in the Republican Party who said, no way, no how, I'm a never-Trumper, I'm not going there.
And similarly, as the Democrats have become woke and intersectionalist and embraced, frankly, the riots on the streets of America.
Um, and, uh, you know, other nonsense.
Uh, there are many of us on the left who have said, that's not my left.
Uh, I still consider myself, uh, of the left, but not that way.
And so, you know, we have talked often about finding much common cause and many common values, but disagreeing about the current state of where we're at.
with regard to reasonable people on the right.
There are a lot of reasonable people on the left who disavow the sort of Antifa black bloc stuff, and there are many reasonable people on the right who disavow, you know, Beowulf, you know, in the Capitol.
And that makes at least three Americas.
And formulating this as two Americas Effectively, 100% says that if I start to critique Antifa, anyone else gets to say, well, then you're in the America that embraces Trump.
And if someone on the right says, I am criticizing Trump, then they are therefore in the Antifa camp.
No, it's not.
America is not Antifa versus Trump.
No way, no how.
That's not the America we live in.
And if it is, we're doomed.
But that's not what we see.
There are, I still believe, a majority, and I hope it's a strong majority of people, who are actually in the vast middle, identified as left or right, different views on how to solve the problems we have, fine.
But not Antifa, not insurrectionists at the Capitol.
Something far more interested in actually collaborating and coming together as a country.
All right, the two important points that we have to cover.
In reference to what you're describing.
Great.
So there are two Americas and there aren't.
And how to describe this?
So we know and we have frequently talked about the Hidden Tribes Report that says there's 67% of us that are in broad agreement about essentially nuanced, non-extreme versions of the answers to all of the problems that are supposed to divide us irreconcilably.
That is clearly true.
And for you and me, we have had the gift of our, you know, the story that brought us to public attention has put us in contact with so many people on the center right that we know for sure because we have met them.
Hundreds and hundreds of people, right?
who we are supposed to be on the other side of an unbridgeable gap.
And it turns out actually we are in broad agreement and we have to search for things that we actually have substantial disagreement over.
So that thing is real.
What is also real is that narratively speaking, it's almost like I'm imagining there's some substance that you can drop into a room full of people who are in that vast, exhausted middle described by the hidden tribes and you drop that thing in exhausted middle described by the hidden tribes and you drop that thing in and they simply polarize to other sides because narratively speaking, we are two Yeah.
They're not the same place.
And so the fact of having an exemption from, you know, we can cross no man's land and not get shot at.
In fact, we're more frequently shot at from our home side.
Then from the other side, which often embraces us with, you know, curiosity, if, you know, not a little bit of perplexity, but whatever, right?
Being able to transition across this boundary tells you, oh yeah, that agreement is real, but the other thing... And there are humans on the other side.
There are humans everywhere.
Yes, in fact, most of the people on the other side are every bit as recognizable and yes, they're confused, but where is the quadrant where people aren't confused?
And the extremists on both sides are the ones that are difficult to grok and reckon with.
Right.
They are driving the system and they are causing the narrative to be un-reconcilable or irreconcilable.
Okay, the other point that I want to make, so there are two Americas and there aren't is one.
The other point I want to make is that Every time I hear the word terrorism invoked, it sends shivers down my spine.
And the reason is because I know it is a legally special word.
It has been made into a legally special word.
And what it causes to happen is the suspension of all of the protections that would normally be afforded to people.
And so here, Zach, you want to put up that screenshot?
Here's the Washington Post, and I would remind you that the Washington Post is a Jeff Bezos property, which connects it to Amazon, which is connected to the CIA.
I have no idea what that has to do with what they do and don't believe and what they do and don't publish, but nonetheless... That was one of the most terrifying sentences yet today.
Well yeah it's a rough one and the thing is I want you to pay close attention.
I didn't say that I have an understanding of what goes on inside the Washington Post and why.
All I can say is that it's not hard to connect the superficial dots and that just like the fact of a biosafety level 4 Coronavirus lab in Wuhan forces you to ask the question.
The connection of the Washington Post to, you know, intelligence is one that it raises questions.
Maybe there's some perfectly satisfying answer, but I don't know it.
In any case, invoking the term terrorism causes all sorts of special... So have you read, for people who are just listening, what this headline says?
So the headline says, what happened at the Capitol was domestic terrorism, lawmakers and experts say.
Now, again, Under normal circumstances, what we would make of what happened at the Capitol, I don't think it's terrorism.
Now, I did call it an insurrection, right?
An insurrection is the most serious of crimes.
But, you know, I actually made this point in an article that I think was so long ago, I don't even remember.
I think it was published in Common Dreams after Was it the Charlie Hebdo attack?
In Paris, yeah.
And my point was, look, terror is a tactic.
It's sine qua non is that an entity that doesn't have the military strength to hurt you does have potentially the ability to make you hurt yourself if it can spook you enough.
So, the reason that terror is at the center of that word is that terror causes you to behave in a way that is self-destructive.
Much like a bee does not have the power to kill you, but it might have the power to induce you into an immune reaction that might kill you.
A bee, you said?
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, the bee doesn't have an interest in doing that, but the point is if, you know, it's not the bee sting that kills you, it's your immune reaction to it that kills you if you die from a bee sting.
Terrorism It's a psyop, right?
And so the point is, you know, people can be induced to doing self-harm through fear.
Now the question is, is what happened at the Capitol, was that designed to induce fear in Americans?
I don't think so.
It was an insurrection, but it was not Uh, you know, it was not designed to be terrifying.
And that thing means, I believe, that those who would say, it's obviously terrorism, and what they're really saying is, you agree it's very, very bad, and therefore it's terrorism.
And I do not agree that that which is very, very bad is inherently terrorism.
Right.
To the point, this representative Slotkin, who seems to be suggesting that we need to move away from considering outside forces as the biggest threat to the US to considering inside forces, add to that the observation that Researchers say, in quotes, that most domestic terrorism is from the right.
And, you know, in what way is that established?
I have no idea, but I can guarantee you I don't have much faith in those methods.
That if, you know, these researchers are the same ones who helped turn the SPLC into an organization that has no credibility anymore, then, you know, on what basis are a bunch of organizations being called domestic terrorist organizations Um, on the right but not on the left.
There's probably, there's almost certainly political bias there.
Therefore, if we are being told by representatives that the biggest threat is coming from the inside, and it has already been established, in quotes, um, through pseudoscientific means, but trust the authorities, uh, that most of that, uh, domestic threat from the inside is from the right, well then it's not hard to get to, therefore we need to be concerned about the threats from the right, uh, and, and that's it.
Perfect.
Now, for those of you looking for balance, I can't remember when it would have been, but somebody may find it.
They will recall that I also blanched when Antifa was accused of being a terrorist organization.
Now, I blanched at it for the very same reason and I would point out what I said at the time was I remember when Occupy was taking place and I will speak only for myself.
I participated in Occupy.
I should have bailed on it earlier because it got taken over by anarchists with whom I had no agreement.
But nonetheless, as a person protesting the TARP program and Too Big to Fail and the financial crisis and all that led to it, To have the government Say oh, these are domestic terror.
This is a terror threat right and therefore avail itself of all of these extraordinary Exemptions and tools was truly frightening and I don't like seeing that weapon pointed at anybody who isn't an actual terrorist now the argument with respect to antifa and black bloc is Stronger I believe because in fact It's not terror in the sense of a big explosion that causes people to misunderstand the danger that they themselves are going to be blown up.
But there is... They're marching through neighborhoods with lights and yelling at people and breaking windows.
Right.
Inventing people in the middle of the night and harassing them does induce fear.
So at least, you know, there's some sort of connection.
But again, I think the thing is, hey, that's a magic word.
Terrorism is a magic word.
And when you hear people invoking it because it then justifies the next thing that they do against somebody that maybe you don't like, boy, this is the moment that you need to stand up and say, actually, what are you doing?
So is there, I mean, is there sort of a Russell conjugation analog for terrorism that we could slot in here?
I'm not sure there is.
I'm not sure there's a simple word that we can use instead here.
Well, I mean, unfortunately what there is... Which is going to require a little bit more language.
Yes.
I think the thing is there are a lot of terms for things that don't rise to the level of terrorism.
Right.
But no big category that can be slotted in at the same level of inclusiveness.
Yeah, I don't think so.
And so I think the answer is it's actually, it's a category that either applies narrowly to those who would avail themselves of a tactic that causes people to miscalibrate a hazard to themselves and overreact.
So for example, you know, the 9-11 attacks killed 3,000 Americans and we lost more than 6,000 people fighting on foreign battlefields and spent You know, many more dollars in fighting off those terrorists than the harm the terrorists were able to inflict.
But watching buildings collapse was distorting, right?
It's very hard to calibrate how serious a threat the people who were able to make that happen were to the U.S.
And so in some sense, we reacted in a way that did, you know, I'm not We reacted in a way that did more measurable harm to us than the terrorists were able to marshal, right?
We can talk about whether or not the harm we did to ourselves was worthwhile.
Obviously what happened in Iraq was an abomination as a result of the fact that it was under false pretenses, etc., etc.
The whole thing.
That was just a lie.
Yep.
But in any case, so terrorism is a special word.
Every time you hear somebody invoke it, you really need to ask the question whether or not they're invoking it because the thing that they're pointing it at is clearly terrorism or they're invoking it because of all of the things it allows them to do next.
And that's the thing that worries me most.
Yeah.
Are you communicating or are you creating a tool, giving yourself power with use of a tool that you will then use in ways that we can probably foresee but we will not be able to stop once you've invoked the tool?
Right.
Now, this brings us to the final piece, which is the breathtaking purge of people from social media that has been taking place.
Jeez, I don't know exactly how many hours it would be, but since sometime yesterday, there has been a breathtaking purge.
That purge has included The President.
It has included the President not only in his private account, but his official presidential account and every other account he would attempt to use to communicate.
And this has been, of course, cheered by all sorts of people who, you know, see only, if this is bad for Trump, then I like it.
Who are, of course, just... Somehow forgetting that censorship that you like is always followed by censorship that you don't.
Right.
Either they never learned about the Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance, or they've forgotten the lesson.
But my goodness, is this going to be used in ways that you don't like down the road.
And there's a question about why it's happening in the way it is.
Of course, many of the people who are being tossed off the major platforms are conservatives.
And the problem is that lulls a lot of people who are not conservatives into imagining That whatever is going on is an academic concern because it won't come for them.
Right.
Let me point out a couple things about it.
One, hey Zach, could you put up the screenshot of the Articles of Unity account?
So this is a screenshot from today of the Articles of Unity Twitter account.
The Articles of Unity Twitter account was the official account of the unity movement that at the time was advancing a plan to fend off both the Republicans and the Democrats and put the presidency in the hands of a left-right partnership team that would be above politics and non-ideological.
And actually patriotic.
Actually patriotic.
The three characteristics were capable, courageous patriots.
That was the qualifications for the job.
I feel like a few of those people still remain.
A few of those people still remain.
They do.
But here's the point.
If you think that this censorious instinct of Twitter and Facebook and Google is about people whose beliefs we all understand to be anathema, wrong, dangerous, etc., then you need to grapple with the fact that it is only months ago
That these very same entities took up arms against a decidedly non-partisan, non-ideological effort, which you may have liked, you may have disliked it, but the point is they availed themselves of the right to close down this account.
Why did they do it?
Well, they said we violated the rules.
We went through an intense investigation to find evidence of what they had said we had done.
It wasn't there.
It didn't result in them unsuspending the account.
It remains suspended.
So this account was suspended without a justifiable explanation and remains so to this day.
Right?
That tells you something.
Now, I wish we had more examples.
There are a few, but I wish we had more examples of a high profile so that people could understand that while it's going to tell you what it's doing is getting rid of dangerous conservatives who are espousing views that will cause people, you know, will cause harm, what it is really doing is getting rid of people that are inconvenient for it.
And yes, many of those people are conservatives, but it is not In any way, the thing that is at the center of these purges.
And the Overton window of what is inconvenient will of course shift.
The Overton, well, it will be shifted to whatever is convenient.
And I would point out, hey Zach, can you put up the Facebook, the tweet about Facebook?
Okay, so here is another case.
This is not about Articles of Unity officially, but viewers will remember that my Facebook account, which I barely used.
At one point I was a user of Facebook, but walked away from it largely after the Evergreen debacle.
Facebook tossed me off, said that they had already done an internal review, that there was no going back, that I was permanently having my account suspended.
I raised a ruckus publicly, which brought down a lot of heat on them, and then they gave a preposterous explanation and said I had triggered algorithms that were looking for inauthentic behavior.
Um, and they were sorry.
Now, where did I, you know, I learned this on Twitter.
I never got any official communication or anything.
Now, okay, that's... And without your audience, you would have had no recourse.
Right.
Okay, so I have, you know, 400 plus thousand Twitter followers.
That allows me to generate a fair amount of heat.
But the point is, the very same weapons are directed at people who just don't happen to be lucky enough to have that many followers, and so they remain suspended.
Our good friend Jordan Greenhall has been suspended from Facebook without explanation.
I believe he remains suspended.
The Dr. Rollergator satire account was suspended for saying things... It was CAPS, wasn't it?
Suspended for using CAPS?
Suspended for not using his indoor voice, I mean...
Crocodiles never use their voice.
I don't know what the pretense was.
I'm not sure that he, the guy who runs the account, ever found out either.
Well, there were some tweets they wanted him to remove, but tellingly, the very things in those tweets that they claimed violated their rules were quotes of other accounts that were still up and had not been suspended for saying them.
So, anyway, a completely preposterous and inconsistent explanation.
But, Owen, Zach, do you want to... So this also is not just about tech platforms.
Do you want to show the Harper's screenshot?
Um, so this, I have not had time to delve deeply here.
I learned about this just before the live stream.
This person was fired shortly after writing this article for Harper's.
I started reading it.
Wait, this is from 2018?
Am I missing something?
Well, it says 2018, Archive 2018.
I hope I'm not making an error here.
She's talking about in the URL.
I just, so Walter Kern is an excellent writer and he used to do a lot of the opening essays.
I don't know anything about this story at all.
But anyway, you may... I don't know what you're going to say about this.
I don't know about this story.
You're raising a question.
I don't want to make a mistake if I'm getting wind of something now that is actually not relevant to our current situation.
But even if this story is not what I thought it was, we have at least one case of a musician being cancelled by Their record company, their record label, for apparently the crime of holding conservative viewpoints.
So, anyway, what are we to make of all this?
Well, a couple things.
One, I would point out, we are living in a completely novel circumstance that is not anticipated by our Constitution.
And we are forever caught in the following bind.
We hold freedom of speech as a high value, but we are arbitrarily held to the protections that were delivered to us by the founders who could not possibly have imagined a world of tech platforms that would control the equivalent of paper and ink.
Right.
They only knew to name the press in the First Amendment, for instance.
Well, they knew to protect us from government incursion, which they saw as the most dangerous threat to the freedom of exchange.
And the problem is, and this is the place where conservatives inevitably trip up, which is, okay, free speech is important.
Why?
It's important because it is the mechanism through which we hash out what is true, what we must consider.
It is basically the realm in which nuance is dealt with.
There's a ton of garbage in speech.
Probably most things that are spoken are garbage, but the point is you cannot separate out the fact of Heterodox speech from nonsense speech.
There is no rule you can apply.
There's nobody with expertise good enough to surgically separate the two so that what you're left with is the high-quality heterodoxy and You are freed from the noise, right?
It can't be done It's not a job that can be done in light of the fact that it can't be done We have to be free to talk about anything and everything and then in retrospect we can say what the important heterodoxy was so just simply the Idea of free speech is important, okay?
Once you have the idea that free speech is necessary to the functioning of a society like ours, especially one in which consent of the governed is the basis of legitimate government, then the question is how do you protect it?
And the fact that the founders protected us from government incursion and didn't protect us from private incursion is just an accident of history.
The fact is the heterodox speech needs to be protected in the environment in which it takes place.
And conservatives will very frequently say, "Well, these are private platforms.
They're entitled to bar people as they will." And the answer is actually this analysis doesn't hold.
For one thing, they're private platforms in a sense, but they are traveling on an internet that we publicly financed the construction of, right?
What's more, they function as a public square.
Especially in the era of COVID.
I mean, even more so.
And we will go back to a moment in which we can actually convene in a public square, but they are, for many of us, the only thing we've got.
Well, even at the point that the public square is again the public square, the public square doesn't have the scale in order to allow us to have a conversation at the scale at which we need to be governed.
And so the idea of these private concerns having absolutely arbitrary rights to interfere with anybody's speech, including the president's, and yes, the president can hold a press conference, but where will that press conference be seen?
How many people will get wind of it?
In effect, yes, there's a technical ability To just be you know to you can shout out your window, and if people really want to hear you Maybe they'll you know come stand outside your building, but that is not a meaningful a meaningful challenge to the control that the tech platforms now have and I would point out that in effect what conservatives are very likely to leap on which is the
Essentially, private property rights that are the basis of the argument that if you own a platform, you don't have to let just anybody speak on it, you know, and obviously, that's true at one level, if you and I started a, you know, a small, you know, mom and pop publishing house, we don't have to publish anybody who, you know, wants to throw a manifesto our way.
But these things are functioning in a different way there.
Twitter and Facebook and Google are not monopolies individually, because each one has the other in its sphere.
Together they effectively function as a monopoly, and they are acting in concert here to limit the access of certain voices to the audience.
Right.
I mean, one piece of evidence to that point in the last 72 hours is that the conservative-leaning alternative to Twitter, Parler, has had its app removed by Google from whatever the equivalent of the Apple Store over on Google is, and apparently Apple is likely to do the same thing from the Apple Store.
At the point that there is a competitor to Twitter, but it has an ideological bent that may be the mirror image of what Twitter's ideological bent is, at least in terms of what the CEO is willing to do and say.
The fact that other big tech is willing to step in and say, no, we won't distribute, we won't facilitate this thing being out there in the world, that looks like collusion.
Yep.
And it looks, you know, it's not actually the legal meaning of the term monopoly.
It's not monopolistic, but it's a kind of de facto monopoly.
It's a de facto monopoly.
And the fact that you don't have any diversity about political leanings of these gigantic platforms and, you know, tech companies, you know, the idea that You know, Apple and Twitter, because they are traveling in the same political circles, can act in concert.
Oh, Twitter's going to shove you off Twitter.
Maybe you go to parlor and then Apple's going to shut down parlor, right?
So the point is, yeah, it's functioning as a monopoly, right?
And if the law isn't caught up to it, then we need to fix the law.
But that's not what's happening.
What's happening is you've got the blue team.
Which is now in control of two of the three official branches of government, right?
It's in control of, or will be in control of, the Executive and both Houses of Congress.
The courts are still potentially independent, but this reduces checks and balances.
Well, and that's an interesting use of the term, independent.
What you mean is, you know, sort of red team.
I don't really mean red team, I just mean not inherent.
So you're not talking about the Supreme Court particularly, you're talking about the courts across the land.
There's a diversity of political leanings of the judges, precisely because the judges, you know, as in SCOTUS, but specifically across the land, have been...
Are appointees or have been voted in by electorates across many, many years.
So actually have diversity of politics.
They potentially have independence.
I'm curious, I'm not sure why you're using the word independent when you say there's Democrats here and then there's independents.
It just seems like a strange bifurcation that you're making.
Because what I'm seeing is an unnatural Alignment on the blue team.
It's not there's no natural diversity of opinion.
It's not like Google is Sympathetic with Democrats but holds a strongly free speech position and you know, Twitter is much more interested in censorship
So, I mean, we need checks and balances in the system, and you are arguing that it seems like the courts writ large still have enough diversity that they effectively can act as checks and balances, perhaps if need be, as you go up towards the Supreme Court, but that there is very little evidence for checks and balances at this point, as of the end of January,
Executive branch, legislative branch, big tech, academia, etc.
Well, so this is what I'm getting.
I think the courts are an unknown.
How effective the courts can be in holding back the blue team's power grab, which I think is what we are watching unfold in real time, remains to be seen.
But what I would point out is that this view that there are three branches of government and that's where checks and balances come from has only one of the branches potentially independent enough to exert a check and what we have is effectively de facto new branches of government.
Now that's a very imprecise way of saying it but we have Things that exert power as if they were branches of government that are unanticipated in our founding documents.
And so, you know, it's a little bit naive to think that, you know, the three branches of government and one of those branches remain retaining enough independence to exert a check is sufficient in a world where in effect what you have is executive, legislative, judicial, but then you also have The so-called fourth estate, the press, which is on the blue team.
You have academia, which is on the blue team.
You have the deep state, dare I say it, which appears to be on the blue team.
And you have big tech, which appears to be on the blue team.
Now, So just, you know, you're going to get clipped, but you've been talking about deep state for well over a decade.
Yep.
And it was challenging and irritating at the point that Trump showed up on the scene and started using that language.
Often imprecisely, as a sort of a political cudgel, rather than as a patriot.
And, you know, we're well over an hour and a half at this point, I think, so we should really be wrapping it up.
But do you, I feel like if you're going to use that phrase in the current environment, you should spend a minute or two saying what you mean by it.
What I'm saying is that there is some entity which is not accountable by virtue of the fact that it doesn't, it's not transparent, so we can't see it, and it's not accountable.
And it is, you know, it is the reason that we fight over, you know, things like Snowden and Assange and the things that they have alerted us to.
But anyway, there's something which doesn't transition with the shifts in belief structure.
There's something that maintains a presence, administration after administration.
And so anyway, you know, we can argue about the details of it, but I think it's hard to argue about the fact of it.
And in any case, It is a powerful force and it's one that is not anticipated in the Constitution.
The Constitution could not have understood the high-tech world of espionage and what would happen when you empower these, you know, these organizations to start, you know, breaching and bending laws, you know, in the interests of the nation, what they ultimately end up doing.
And, you know, we've seen all kinds of shenanigans like The, you know, the five eyes mechanism for escaping the protections that US citizens are supposed to have from government surveillance, right?
This was just a simple shell game, which was if the US government is forbidden to spy on its own citizens, but it is allowed to spy on British citizens, and the British are not allowed to spy on their own citizens, but they can spy on American citizens, then there's an obvious trade, right?
That evades the protection that was supposed to be there, and it exists.
So anyway, I don't want to belabor the point.
All I would say is the founding documents are not in a position to protect the values that they correctly highlighted.
And the reason that they're not in a position to do it is because the world has changed radically.
And so the fact of the judiciary may be having the power to check You know, the other two branches of government, which are now going to be in the hands of the same party, is reason for hope.
But it has to be placed in the context of, yes, but there are these other forces that appear to be in the hands of the same party, and they exert a tremendous force in the other direction.
And we're seeing that unfold online over the last 24 hours.
Right, obviously the most you can ever hope for with regard to the division in a two-party system between three branches of government is two to one.
But your point is that so many of the other forces that are aligned in the world that are extra-governmental are in fact living in the same ideology, which is one that is claiming to be liberal, but that we recognize as an extremist branch that is It's also authoritarian.
It's an authoritarian branch of the Democratic Party that is ascending rapidly.
It is ascending rapidly.
And so I want to make a last point.
Um, one of the things that is so troubling about the way the tech platforms work and the way it is interfacing with this, um, this power grab and this, uh, shoving large numbers of people out the door is that the way they shove you out the door,
Obliterates what you did when you were there and so it makes a the history Impossible or nearly impossible to recover that is to say, you know Initially Facebook when you decided that it was too toxic and you left it Disappeared you from all the conversations that you had been in and untagged you in every photograph that you had once been tagged in and this was a Disincentive for people to leave but now this is turning into a mechanism for
Allowing one side to shape the narrative falsely, right?
So it is difficult.
I don't know what the president's sympathies are.
I don't trust him.
And I think he did encourage The protest at the Capitol.
In fact, it's clear that he encouraged it and what he thought of those who broke in, I can't say.
But there is a question about whether or not he actually encouraged the breaking of the law.
That is much harder to establish because he was clearly abiding by at least a technical standard with respect to what he said.
But having disappeared him from Twitter, What you get is the absence of the evidence that one would ordinarily want to go through in order to figure out if what Nancy Pelosi is saying that he said actually came out of his mouth at some point.
So my point is that the very fact of the tech platforms not only having the ability to prevent you from speaking going forward, but to effectively erase what you have said, and therefore allows your detractors to imply that you have said things that you may or may not have actually said,
And it's one with which we should be well familiar from 20th century history, from Orwell's dystopian vision of 20th century history, and more.
Yeah, yes.
The airbrushing people out of photographs is not a legitimate process under any circumstances.
Right.
Can we finish by talking a little bit about fear and how to overcome it?
And I feel like you have spent a lot of time there, but Thich Nhat Hanh, who's a Buddhist monk and has written several books, including this 2012 book called Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm.
He's really an extraordinary man, and I was lucky enough to spend a couple of weeks with him back in high school, actually.
I had a creative writing teacher, Peter Levitt, who was a poet and also a Buddhist, who invited me to this retreat at the school where we met, actually, where we were friends at the time.
And it was otherwise filled.
I was by far the youngest person there.
It was filled with beat poets and an occasional ceramicist and painter and me, this high school kid, aspiring writer at the time, and Thich Nhat Hanh, who I had never heard of before, and he led us.
This was at a retreat center in Ojai, California.
He led us in three sitting and one walking meditations every day for two weeks.
We slept in tents and did our art, our writing, and cooked together.
I think it actually helped me form my idea for field trips later on when both of us came to teach as professors at Evergreen.
Just a very brief two-page excerpt from this book.
Um, in a chapter called The Opposite of Fear, two little sections.
Deep listening and loving speech.
When communication is cut off, we all suffer.
When no one listens to us or understands us, we are like bombs ready to explode.
Compassionate listening brings about healing.
Sometimes only ten minutes of listening deeply can transform us and bring a smile back to our lips.
Many of us have lost our capacity for listening and using loving speech in our families.
It may be that no one is capable of listening to anyone else, so we feel very lonely even within our own families.
We go to a therapist hoping that she will be able to listen to us, but many therapists also have deep suffering within.
Sometimes they cannot listen as deeply as they would like.
So if we really love someone, we need to train ourselves to be deep listeners.
We also need to train ourselves to use loving speech.
We have lost our capacity to say things calmly.
We get irritated too easily.
Every time we open our mouths our speech is sour or bitter.
We have lost our capacity for speaking with kindness.
Without this ability we cannot succeed in restoring harmony, love and happiness.
In Buddhism we speak of Bodhisattvas, wise and compassionate beings who stay on earth to alleviate the suffering of others.
The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, also called Kuan Yin, has a great capacity for listening with compassion and true presence.
Kuan Yin is the Bodhisattva who can listen and understand the sounds of the world, the cries of suffering.
You have to practice breathing mindfully in and out so that compassion always stays with you.
You listen without giving advice or passing judgment.
You can say to yourself about the other person, I am listening to him just because I want to relieve his suffering.
This is called compassionate listening.
You have to listen in such a way that compassion remains with you the whole time you are listening.
That is the art.
If halfway through listening, irritation or anger comes up, then you cannot listen deeply anymore.
You have to practice in such a way that every time the energy of irritation and anger comes up, you can breathe in and out mindfully and continue to hold compassion within you.
No matter what the other person says, even if there's a lot of injustice in his way of seeing things, even if he condemns or blames you, you continue to sit very quietly, breathing in and out.
If you are not in good shape, if you don't feel that you can go on listening in this way, let the other person know.
Ask your friend.
Dear one, can we continue in a few days?
I need to renew myself.
I need to practice so that I can listen to you in the best way I can.
Practice more walking meditation, more mindful breathing, and more sitting meditation to restore your capacity for compassionate listening.
Walking with the Sangha.
One wonderful thing to do with your community is walking meditation.
When we are physically active together, moving, it is easy to feel supported by the collective energy.
It is good to begin your practice of walking meditation with a group to get the support.
You can ask a friend to go with you, or you can even take the hand of a child and walk with him or her.
To practice mindful walking on your own you can begin by making a contract with a staircase.
You vow that you will always go up or down that staircase mindfully with very solid steps.
If it happens that halfway up you realize that one of your steps didn't have your true presence in it, you go down and begin again.
You can end up on that staircase a very long time.
If you can do it successfully without staircase, then wherever you go, you'll be able to dwell in the present moment.
You also can make a contract with a particular distance, perhaps from your work area to the restroom, and vow that when you walk that distance, every step will be solid and mindful.
Otherwise, you will go back and do it again.
It's a wonderful way to learn how to live every moment of your daily life deeply, resisting being carried away by your habit energy.
Walk with your feet, not with your head.
Bring your attention to your feet and walk.
Walk in such a way that joy and real life are possible right here and now.
When we do walking meditation as a group, we produce a collective energy of mindfulness and peace that nourishes us and helps heal us.
So that's obviously in a language that we don't tend to use between us or here on Dark Horse, but I think he is approaching through Buddhism what I in particular have approached, you know, having learned from him when I was very young, through animal behavior.
The act of going outside, of being present in your body, of understanding that you are a physical being with instantiation in the real world, And observing without interpretation as much as possible.
Be in your body first, and this isn't something that you will be doing all the time, and it will get in the way of analysis and interpretation and creativity to some degree, but especially when you're hot, when you're emotionally hot, as I think almost all of us are at least sometimes now, given what is going on, being able to return back to self and physical reality and breathing.
And trying to just observe or hear or be in a place without interpretation is a way to reduce fear.
Yes, I think it's excellent and tuning in, you know, tuning into your environment and tuning into others who are tuned into their environment is, in some sense, the antidote.
And, you know, as is so often the case with Buddhism, you know, it takes a while to figure out why the approach is what it is and what the deeper point is.
But once you see it, it's universal.
And I guess we're not getting to sea stars.
We're going to have to do that next time.
We're going to have to save sea stars for next time.
We're going to save sea stars.
Okay, so I guess I, in light of your reading, I would like to say something to our audience that I said to my class the last time I met with them.
Ever.
Ever.
Before we were forced to leave Evergreen.
We were in a public park, actually.
And what I said to them was, pay very close attention to what is happening.
I don't think we will pass this way again.
And I think that's where we are.
Something utterly dramatic is afoot and how it comes out we do not know, but it certainly makes sense to note everything because this is history happening.
That's right.
That's right.
So, I think we will forego most of the announcements we would normally make, but we'll say that good conversations happen on the Discord server, which you can find at either of our Patreons, and that after a 15-minute break, for those who are watching rather than just listening, we will be back to answer your questions in the second hour.
