#143 What Did They Know & When Did They Know It? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 143rd 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.This week, we discuss how some stories diagnose a system: What does it mean when a college declares its (non-racist) professors racist? What does it mean when journalists only recognize election fraud if it works against their team? What does it mean when “science” is invoked only to support foregone conclusions? Discussing...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 143?
143.
143 it is.
That's right.
Product of two primes.
The product of two primes.
There you go, there you go.
Does that have a name?
Probably.
Oh yeah, alright, I'll go with that.
Probably?
Yeah, that it probably has a name.
I'm confident that it probably has a name.
All right, so I think we need a disclaimer or two here.
Let's go with three.
Alright, you're going to have to do the third disclaimer.
I've got a couple of disclaimers.
So, we are still engaged in moving, and that's going to be a process that continues for some time.
Pardon our dust.
Actually, some of our dust is just literal dust at this point.
We've got a lot of that circulating.
We also have both picked up a cold through Toby, who brought it home from school.
Thank you, Toby, for that.
It's just a cold.
It's just a cold, but here's the thing.
Some of you tune in to Dark Horse for the biology, and you're in for a treat, because there's going to be more biology involved in today's Dark Horse than is ordinarily.
Please no.
I shouldn't have said that.
No.
Those of you for whom that was a targeted comment... Or triggering, perhaps.
Biologically triggering.
It'll be triggering for most, but for some that comment was for you and you know who you are.
As such, we are just going to do the main show today.
We're going to not do the Q&A because we might not still be Upright insofar as we are currently upright by the end of a Q&A.
Apologies for that, but hopefully we'll be back next week with both a live stream and a Q&A.
With A's to your Q's!
Yes.
Right.
Also, I believe, impacted by our current level of drippiness and coldness, is I will be doing two of the ads today.
Two of the ads, which while that is not exactly like reading War and Peace, it's kind of for me like reading War.
But, you know, we'll see how it goes.
Okay, I've got the third disclaimer.
Awesome.
Yeah, I knew you'd be thrilled.
The third disclaimer is, big apologies for those of you who can hear the birds in the background.
What are you going to do?
We've got the door open and there's birds.
Yes, these birds are spectacular, though not real.
In any case.
I mean, just in keeping with the whole birds thing.
Right.
Like all birds.
Exactly.
Yeah, they probably can't hear him.
Really?
Okay.
Well, then the disclaimer was unnecessary, but it's, you know, safety first.
Thank you.
You are welcome for protecting you from the sounds of Bird's House, that.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
So, let's see.
We are going to appreciate and read about our sponsors, but first let's just see.
We're not going to do the Q&A today.
Oh, one announcement that I wanted to make is that because we have moved, as we have announced, Up here to the gorgeous, farthest northwest corner of the lower 48 United States in the San Juan Islands, which is part of an archipelago which includes the Canadian Gulf Islands, none of which is relevant to what the announcement is, but that may be sort of what happens today.
It's sort of a run-up to the announcement.
Yes, so we sometimes receive wonderful mail, letters and packages and such, and on our websites and our book website there's been an address in Portland, a P.O.
Box that you can send letters and packages to, and while our mail has begun to be forwarded, it's not clear to me the packages have been forwarded, and so we may have lost some things in this In this transition, but we have a new PO box, which I'm not going to announce here in part because I didn't write it down, but it's on our websites now.
So if you, for instance, did get something returned to you and actually still want to send it on to us, we really appreciate almost everything that we get.
Yep, yep.
Increasingly we could use lumber, diesel fuel, all sorts of things that are in short supply.
You should check whether or not these things are... Fairy workers.
Fairy workers, yes.
Don't send those through the mail though, I'm sure there's laws against it.
Fairy workers, fairy godmothers, really, you know, Spelled differently, she says, as if that matters.
As if spelling isn't an afterthought to language, which it quite clearly is by many thousands of years, probably hundreds of thousands of years.
It's a beforethought to fairies.
And no, beforethought isn't a thing.
No.
I like it though, beforethought.
Yeah, a beforethought.
All right.
Yeah, we've got a store, darkhorsestore.org, slash home.
We're on YouTube and Odyssey both.
Not slash home.
Yeah, I don't know why my link here says that.
DarkHorseStore.org.
We've got Natural Selections, where I actually posted an excerpt, a couple of excerpts this week, from Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century in honor of the year anniversary of that book coming out, which is now also published in several other languages.
And we appreciate you.
We're supported by you, our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing to the channels, liking, sharing both our full episodes.
And our clips at Dark Horse Podcast Clips, which is a channel on both Odyssey and YouTube.
And having been demonetized by YouTube just on the basis that our content was not conducive to them finding ad sponsors for us, and then of course adding ads just not paying us for the fact that they've done so, we are doing other things, like telling you that we have been demonetized.
And that we appreciate any support that you can offer us.
You can join either of our Patreons tomorrow.
We have our monthly private Q&A at 11 a.m.
Pacific for two hours that you get access to through my Patreon.
First Saturday and Sunday, usually of every month, Brett has more intimate conversations associated with his, and on both of them you can access the Discord server, which right now several members of the Discord server are actually in a real-time camping trip and enjoying themselves rather a lot, I hear.
So that is the sort of thing that can happen as a result of access to the Discord community.
And, of course, we do have sponsors.
And so, as we've said before, we only accept sponsors who make products or offer services that we actually truly stand behind for a number of reasons.
And without further ado, we're going to start.
You are going first, but somehow that's in the wrong order.
They have gotten in the reverse order.
Yes.
But seamlessly, without the people at home being at all aware that it has happened, we've switched the order back to the correct one.
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We haven't unpacked the Tolstoy yet, but you doing okay?
Well, there was some roughness in there.
They're reading through me a little bit, but I think we got through it.
You're halfway there.
I'm halfway there.
Alright.
You can do this.
We don't know that yet, but it's looking... the chances of my failing to do it are now down by 50%.
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a condition it causes dis-ease okay so I believe it is a disease in any case I've had it and it sucks - Yes.
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No.
I told you there was going to be more biology in today's Dark Horse.
Yes, he's barking at Toby who has shown up.
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For fuck's sake.
There's all the domesticated biology showing up and making noise today.
Yep.
That was our epic tabby Fairfax, who's just come in to yell at us.
That's it for the ads.
That's it for the ads.
All right.
Well, let's let's launch into it.
Let's launch into it.
Yeah.
So I wanted to do a kind of view from 30,000 feet of where we are.
And I think the title of this section is, Some Stories Diagnose a System, which is something longtime viewers of Dark Horse will have heard me say before.
But I want to give a kind of refresher of what that means before we get to the specific example.
Diagnosed the failure systems?
No, they diagnosed the system.
What is the state of the system?
Right, so the first example of this is the Evergreen story.
Evergreen, what happened to us at Evergreen diagnosed, certainly diagnosed the college of which we were a part for 15 years, but it also diagnosed the university system, right?
Something happened to us at Evergreen Which revealed a pattern that was common across the academy, but it wouldn't be obvious how common it was for a couple of years, right?
And so the story was really what happens when professors who have an excellent track record on issues of race, sex, and gender Stand in the way of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives because those initiatives would be bad for the college that they're part of.
Right?
And in fact bad for the people that they were ostensibly designed to help.
Right?
We saw in the Evergreen story exactly what happens, which is that a phony story of racism ...is generated, and it is used to support riots to force the hand of the administration.
And the administration, of course, uses this as a bit of leverage to remake the college for their own purposes, right?
Bloating administration, etc.
So the Evergreen story diagnosed the system by showing you, it's like Luminol in some sense.
Luminol being the substance that is sprayed on a crime scene that then allows UV light to reveal where there might be blood or bodily fluids, right?
So some stories function like that.
Election fraud.
Some stories function like Luminol.
They function like luminol.
Election fraud is another such story, right?
We can see by the way the press has dealt with the question of election fraud in the U.S.
that effectively what we have is no longer a press interested in finding the truth.
What we have is a press that is interested in the team sport of politics that basically highlights the possibility of election fraud when it works against the team that they're affiliated with and obscures it when it works for the team that they are affiliated with.
So we can see where once upon a time the idea that there could have been a distortion in the American election would have been a tremendously important story that would have been of interest to anybody who was patriotic and interested in the health of the nation.
Now we know that the press has taken sides and they will only look at the story or frankly invent the story in service to one team and not the other.
And so both of your first two examples Evergreen as diagnostic of the larger system of higher ed and coverage of election fraud as diagnostic of journalism at large.
speaks to two systems that are explicitly supposed to be, that in fact do not function if they fail to be nonpartisan.
Nonpartisan is the shallow end of the pool.
Journalism and higher ed broadly explicitly needs to investigate, needs to encourage the investigation of stories such that the truth is discovered.
And it feels like you're going to go a third place, which I'm betting is going to be science, which is the biggest one of these.
If science doesn't, if what we are calling science has a pre-drawn conclusion,
And there's only one thing that you're allowed to conclude, regardless of whether or not research was done or not, regardless of what the data say or don't, then you're not doing science any more than you're doing journalism, if you only cover one side any more than you're actually engaged in an act of higher education, if you allow ideologically motivated people to draw attention away from you doing something which is actually antithetical to higher ed, which
You know, it is in part, as you said, about bloating administration.
Well, you're close.
What you're suggesting is certainly included in what I'm going after here.
Your third example?
My third example diagnoses a much larger system and in fact I don't think it's a system that has a name.
You know, we can talk about our global system and that has a kind of a vague But I would say we are all embedded in a nested hierarchy of systems, right?
And what COVID did was diagnose the entire thing.
And I'm afraid that what it has to say is terrifying, frankly.
Okay, so then let me say then, not knowing exactly where you're going with that, that you can put the third thing in there that's at the same kind of level that is science.
I would not want to be the person to rank the importance of science versus journalism in a functioning society, higher ed also being necessary, but you're then going to talk about some umbrella thing that doesn't even have a name, it's so big and amorphous, but certainly there are aspects of what happened in the last two and a half years that reveal that what we call science and many of the people we call scientists are actually no such thing.
Oh yes, I'm absolutely going to suggest that one of the subsystems that is diagnosed by COVID is science, and it is beyond unhealthy at this moment.
It's just embedded in a larger network.
I don't know whether science is more important or less important than journalism in a functioning system.
I would say having a functional scientific system and journalistic apparatus are both prerequisites.
So the point is, there isn't a more important.
You need both those things.
In order for your car to function, is the engine more important than the transmission?
No, you need them both to work.
So, in any case, what I'm going to argue is that among the things that COVID has revealed is that journalism is completely dead.
Right?
The fact is there are stories inside of the COVID story that are just waiting for a journalist to take them seriously, to investigate them without partisan commitments and follow them where they lead.
Huge stories, stories that in the world that you and I were born into were not only the kind of thing that would make a journalist career, but they were the kind of thing that altered history, where journalists revealed something and the powerful were in no position to stop it.
And these were the things around which history pivoted.
And the fact that we've got these stories and can see them, we can name them, and yet There does not appear to be a journalist who regards themselves as capable of pursuing it, or that they are ready to confront the kind of power that they would have to confront in order to pursue it, is very shocking.
So we'll return to that.
But journalism is one of the things that is clearly diagnosed by the COVID story.
The failure of certain stories to be systematically explored by You know, not even just a journalist, but some newspaper or journalistic magazine that wished to ascend to the top of that hierarchy, right?
Could do so simply by pursuing these stories if something else weren't taking priority, taking precedence.
The second thing is exactly what you mentioned.
It's science.
We are, I think, Living in a dark age.
I think that has been arriving for some time.
I strongly encourage members of our audience who have not listened to my conversation with Steve Patterson to do so.
He and I discussed the question extensively.
He has a different approach to the question of whether we are in a dark age, but nonetheless I think The idea that we might be, and that the evidence is actually persuasive, is something that is profoundly important.
Is it more important than journalism?
Who knows?
But is it vitally important that you have A functional truth-seeking apparatus able to figure out what the basic facts imply, right?
Of course it is.
Especially, you know, the more technological and complex our lives become, the more important it is that we're able to sort signal from noise and figure out what we're doing that is inflicting harm on us and what we might do that would make us healthier and safer.
Another system that is clearly diagnosed by this is universities.
And it turns out that whatever universities were previously, they have become effectively churches that exist in service of a particular team's articles of faith.
That is to say, they rationalize belief in certain things that may or may not be supported by any evidence, right?
A team declares that something is true, and then the university provides what appears to be science that suggests that it's true, irrespective of whether or not there is an equally compelling or more compelling body of evidence that suggests that it's false, right?
That is not the function of a university as it has been defined, but it is the way that these things are behaving.
Yeah, and you can't claim that a university acting that way isn't a university.
I mean, you might, but because university is defined as a much larger and more amorphous thing, that's not the kind of claim that I think you or I would make.
Can and will and have said.
Actually, when you do it like that, when you have a foregone conclusion, and you look for evidence to fit that, or to analyze in such a way, data to analyze in such a way that it can be made to look like it fits, it's not science.
It's not science.
Right.
It's not science.
And, you know, it'd be one thing if it was just simply not science.
But when it's dressed as science, and it's specific, so it's basically sucking up all the oxygen in the room for doing science, and not doing it, that's lethal.
I've heard my science for the week.
Done the science.
Oh, man.
I so followed the science.
I followed so much science, I was exhausted.
I was like, I'm running around.
Yeah, I'm going out for pizza now, because I'm scienced up.
It actually suggests something I've said in a very different context.
I've argued that the American founders made an error for which we can't hold them responsible because of when in history they existed.
They built an evolutionary system.
They built a system that had all of the necessary components for it to evolve.
Without building in a structure that recognized that and counteracted it, right?
So the point is they built something with the intention to create X, but because it evolved, basically it found a niche and became Y, which is something, being pre-Darwinian, they could not have properly anticipated.
They did a hell of a job, though.
Oh, they far exceeded expectations, given what they knew, but given what we now know, the answer is, look, any time you build something with all of the characteristics necessary to make it evolve, A, you'd be a fool to think it won't, and B, you have to do something to deal with what it's going to evolve into, and the right thing to do Is to make sure that it can't find a niche that does things that you don't want done, right?
So our system has evolved into something without a name and it masquerades as a democratic republic and it serves some other function.
And the universities are like this too.
The universities, because of the reward structure in them, have evolved to become this church-like entity with sacred beliefs that cannot be challenged with evidence.
That thing was inevitable that this would happen, but it results in this other thing that we've talked about extensively, which is The mismatch between the contents of the box and the label on the box.
That's right.
Oh, it says university on it.
Oh, this must be a place of truth-seeking.
No.
Yeah, it was at one time, but it has inverted its purpose, right?
It's now a truth-obscuring entity.
Yeah, well, a lab coat is a kind of label.
I said last week I think lab coats are cheap.
Labels are cheap.
It's a lot cheaper to change what you call a thing, or what you slap on the outside of a thing, than it is to change the actual thing itself.
Right, and it is also, you know, a lab coat is a cloak.
And the point is, a cloak is an obscuring entity.
It obscures something.
And so the point is, if you were to invent something that does what modern universities do, Nobody, we would spot it, we would recognize it as a hazard.
It is only because it is dressed in sheep's clothing that we don't notice what role it is taking on.
Well, I think that can be the case, but I think I disagree with you a bit here.
I don't see a lab coat primarily as a cloak or a wolf dress in sheep's clothing.
I think, unfortunately, what it is, it is the insignia of, I am a scientist, and of course there's lots of us who do science who don't do lab science and so have a relatively rare reason to be wearing a lab coat, but I think for me, You know, I used to, in the beginning of my evergreen programs, in my, like, what is science lecture, say, you know, what do you need to do science?
You need glassware.
You need a lab coat.
You need a PhD.
And of course, you need none of those things.
And this was the point.
But the lab coat is this imprimatur.
It's this, it's the symbol.
That suggests that what's inside is going to be a real scientist, but actually anyone can put on a lab coat Yeah, well alright, but then this metaphorically this is particularly good because if you think about what the lab coat is right where it came from Science is messy You don't want to get it on you, right?
That's what a lab coat is for, right?
You are going to be doing science, and whether that is caustic chemicals or... So you're not talking metaphorically here?
No, I'm talking quite literally.
That science is messy, you don't want to get it on you because it could be pathogenic, it could be poisonous, it could be caustic, it could be a lot of things.
It could just be gross.
It could just be gross, but the idea that this thing is supposed to protect What is inside, and it has now become its inverse.
It now hides what is inside.
What is inside is now the dangerous thing, right?
And it is very much like the metaphor of sheep's clothing, from the point of view of an unsuspecting public that doesn't really get That what makes something science is this particular adherence to a method and the philosophy that underlies it, and it is not the walks like a scientist, talks like a scientist thing, which is now very misleading.
Yeah, I guess we could argue this point, and it's going to feel very semantic to a lot of our audience for a long time.
I think for me, the main problem with the lab code is not that it can obscure, but that it appears the same, that the institutions of higher ed themselves have become so corrupted that the granting of the PhD that enables you to have the lab, that enables you to have the lab code, or maybe it's just you're a lab tech
In a lab, and you're mostly washing glassware, but you still have the lab coat, many people will view the lab coat as, oh, OK, well then, I'm going to ask that guy.
Right.
Because you're wearing the thing that tells me that you have some kind of authority.
And so it's the use of the lab coat as an indicator of authority that I find to be the giant risk.
He's too easy a target at this point.
And it's just remarkable to me how politicized this has become.
The idea that those who criticize Fauci are inherently on the right is insane.
It really makes the left look like a bunch of baboons, frankly.
And, you know, we're not.
Not all of us.
But, you know, Fauci claimed to be science on more than one occasion.
And he ain't.
And he wasn't doing it, either.
He was a political animal the entire time.
And maybe he was a political baboon.
I don't know.
Yeah, well I'm not disagreeing with you.
I would point out that the Milgram experiment more or less exactly tested this question, that somebody who was dressed as a scientist carried a kind of authority that would cause people to harm other people.
But I would also point out, what we're really, you know, go one layer down from what we're discussing, And there is an underlying truth, which is, to the extent that something carries special authority, it is going to be targeted and captured, and it's going to be worn as a cloak.
So, what is the New York Times?
It is the paper of record, except what it is now is some propaganda rag that is owned by we-don't-exactly-know-what, and speaks their sacred truths as if they were actually true.
And so, you know, that should not be surprising.
The fact that there was a paper of record makes it an irresistible target for capture, and unless it had an incredibly good immunity, of course it was going to be captured.
And, you know, likewise universities.
Of course they're going to be captured.
Likewise, Wikipedia.
Oh my god, there's a free encyclopedia that serves nobody's interests because it's non-profit?
Wow, what a tantalizing thing to capture and get it to speak your particular propaganda, because people take it as impartial.
So basically the point is, as soon as you establish the thing that we all need, which is the voice that does not pay any heed to people's financial interests or power, Once you've got that thing, you've also put a bullseye on it, right?
It's going to be targeted for capture, and if you don't protect it, then the point is it's going to become your enemy.
Well, and capture can look a lot of different ways.
And mostly you're not talking about what I'm about to mention, but I think, for instance, with newspapers, with once journalistic or aspiring to be journalistic outfits, it can start this way.
And I mentioned this when I was in college.
I did a bunch of research into publications that are aimed at women.
But this would have been in the early 90s.
This is in a different era, back when everyone understood what a woman was, for instance.
And Gloria Steinem, who at that point I had nothing but respect for, who founded... Ms.
Well, no, she didn't found... I think I want to say, I think this is true, that she oversaw The founding of AdFreeMs.
I don't know that she was one of the founders of the original Ms.
I'm not totally sure now.
I haven't looked this... I didn't re-look into this today.
But she wrote some stuff after the initiation of AdFreeMs, which started up in the early 90s after Ms.
had been around for a while, about the ways that advertisers, you know, the reason they had gone ad-free.
And as she described it, and no one has argued that she's wrong here, in fact there's lots of corroborating evidence, basically the advertisers in Mins, as a publication aimed at women, demanded certain kinds of editorial content to go on flip sides of pages with ads and things like that.
And in fact began to make even bigger demands about, you know, having difficult stories in an issue at all with any kinds of ads.
And this is obviously exactly antithetical to journalism.
And it's part of why we avoided doing ads ourselves for a while.
You know, we thought, you know, we need to retain a firewall.
We need to be very, very clear about never taking any sponsors simply because, oh, wow, yeah, we could use the money.
That's good money.
Like, no, we're only going to do it for products that we actually can vouch for.
But when you are an organization that is growing, that has lots of people involved, that the revenue stream is depending on a lot of things, and would-be ad sponsors start coming in and saying, well, we could promise you six months or a year of regular ads, but we're definitely not going to want our ads in the same section as any discussion of, I don't know what it's going to be, war, abortion.
You know, pedophilia.
There are a lot of true and ugly things in the world that need to be discussed, need to be capable of being discussed, in any outlet that claims to be doing journalism, where if they're being told at the outset, in order to have a business relationship with us, so that we can help you pay your bills and keep your lights on, you're going to have to make sure that you don't say anything about that topic, which you might otherwise have said something about.
That's the beginning of the end.
Yeah, I mean, and let's, I think we can't be complete about the taxonomy, but an advertiser might not want you especially conscious, right?
Because most products function, the desire for them is not rational, and it's subliminal, and so anything that causes you to be in your critical, in your critical mindset They might be counterproductive.
They might not want things that are a buzzkill because, you know, you might be feeling positive towards a product and then the discussion of war, as you say, or something might cause you to be feeling not so good.
And that could be counterproductive or inconvenient truths.
Right?
Inconvenient truths.
There are a lot of those.
Right.
And so, you know, we can get off this topic immediately.
We have turned down many sponsors, more than we have taken, and the reason is to make very sure that nothing compromises us.
You know, we are in a position where we have to take sponsors in order to survive because, you know, YouTube, for example, has taken up arms against us and really obviously would prefer we not be on the air.
But, nonetheless, taking things that we have thought through carefully, whether or not they do compromise us, and that our advertisers have thought through carefully, that they are willing to deal with our complete independence to say whatever needs to be said, irrespective of what mindset it puts people in.
Or very often encouraging of that.
Right.
And that's part of what makes an excellent relationship, right?
Actually, we know what you are.
Yeah.
We know that you are explicitly independent thinkers who will say what you say, and that's part of why we want to support you.
That's amazing, and that's what any relationship with an outfit that calls itself journalism.
We don't actually, we've never used that word about ourselves.
Right, we're not journalists.
I'm talking about, you know, New York Times, anything like New York Times to HuffPo.
Both of which I think aspire to journalism, I think, but are clearly engaged, at least to some degree, both of them, and to an ever larger degree, I haven't looked at HuffPone forever, but to an ever larger degree, in producing stories that tell one side of every story.
And that's it.
And if you can rely on that, then you have to know that you're not getting The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Right.
WAPO is Democracy Dies in Darkness.
The New York Times is all the news that's fit to print.
These are just the taglines of these papers that I can come up with off the top of my head.
They all sound something like that.
Similarly, the universities, which is where you started here, right?
Many of the universities have...
You know, some version of truth, truth above all, truth and light, you know, often in Latin as their as their mottos.
And boy does it not seem like that's what most universities, at least in the West, are standing for anymore.
Veritas TM.
Right.
All right.
Well, so now in special reality filter.
Yeah.
Trues you'll love.
Okay, so we have so far said that COVID has diagnosed the journalistic system, that apparently there is no journalistic system, because we have giant stories that in a past era would have been an obsession of journalists.
That are almost untouched.
We have said that the scientific system is broken.
We are apparently living in a dark age and even the basic fundamentals of how science is done are not being followed.
The universities, which were once these truth-seeking establishments that were independent and they were supposed to follow the truth wherever it led, have become Protectors of particular articles of faith of one team and not the other.
And then the next level, which we haven't talked about yet, is that the U.S.
government is apparently completely captured and it is captured at best by private interests that are at best indifferent to the suffering and death of average citizens.
And I say at best because there are far worse possibilities about what they're up to, but the indifference that they display to the harm done to the public and the murkiness of who's interested is that they are serving is mind-boggling, right?
And COVID made it so clear.
We watched the entire system fail and not Once, not twenty times, we saw a hundred different failures that all looked alike, right?
Each of them in real time and yet seeming to be in slow motion.
All you had to do was be mentally independent in order to watch the system predictably follow a particular narrative irrespective of what evidence loomed up in front of it, right?
That was an amazing fact, right?
And it took over everything.
So, alright, you had a government which I'm certain was never free of corruption, but at one time it functioned To a large extent, in the interests of the American people.
And we watched COVID reveal that it's not in that business anymore.
No percentage of it, no percentage of it is interested in the well-being of the American people, right?
That is an inconvenient obstacle that has to be addressed only in as much as elections require it to be addressed.
Right?
And to the extent that it can be done entirely at a narrative level, so no actual bending of policy to the citizenry has to occur, all the better from the point of view of whatever it is that's captured our governmental structure and whatever purpose it's on about.
I really don't think we know, but we can see it isn't about us, right?
That's just simply where we are.
And then the last one of these that I think COVID has diagnosed, and you know, maybe our Our listeners and our watchers will find others that I haven't spotted, is that COVID revealed that national sovereignty barely exists anymore, right?
The degree of coordination of the corruption over national borders.
Yes, there were differences, but the basic point is something is in power across the West and it It got almost every nation to march in lockstep in complete indifference to the countervailing evidence that says that at least if it were true that the system were in fact confused Right?
If this had been some massive error where people who thought they understood things better than they did had screwed up, right, there would have been a wide diversity of approaches across the West.
And we didn't see that, right?
We saw the occasional departure to an extent, right?
But we did not see A wide diversity of approaches.
We saw people doubling down on the same things that turned out to be, that started out clearly wrong, and became wronger over time, and yet the policy remained consistent as if that evidence had never arrived.
Sorry.
You should keep talking.
Yeah, well I should keep talking, except that that was more or less the end of the idea.
But anyway, so okay, you've got You're back.
- You're back.
- You're back.
- Okay, apologies guys.
I did wanna point out the exceptions that I know.
- Sure.
- Which you made a point of saying that they were minor, and I think in the West that is true.
I think, you know, Sweden actually in early-mid 2020 was shocking to most of the rest of the West because, you know, Sweden being in Scandinavia is just the darling of liberals, at least in terms of policy, and somehow what that has come to mean is surely they will lead the charge in lockstep or something, right?
And yet from the beginning they did not, you know, they took precautions, but they did not close down schools in the same degree or impose masking or, and I don't think ever went to mandates, vaccine mandates.
So Sweden was a bit of an exception in the West, and in the West largely there were not many, but the rest of the world The version that we hear is Oh, what needs to happen is this is about inequity in vaccine access, right?
And what we need to do is make sure that all of the poor people who, I can't believe we did this, but they didn't get vaccinated when the rest of the, when the West got vaccinated.
So what we really need to do is basically cover Africa with COVID vaccines.
So Africa, most Africa, most Sub-Saharan African countries, with I imagine the exception of South Africa and maybe a couple of others.
is far less COVID vaccinated than other than countries in the West.
And they were doing better, right?
Yeah.
And similarly, Latin America, several countries in Latin America struck out to some degree on their own and, for instance, started started actually engaging in allowing people to partake of early treatment of non, you know, off off Off-label drugs, which we've talked about here before, and did not suggest that for the first time in all of human history there was one and only one way to treat this disease.
Oh, and by the way, the fact that it is neither effective nor particularly safe should not stop you.
So, it does feel like this is a disease of the West, unfortunately, and there were some deviations, but they weren't gigantic, whereas the deviations to the degree that they exist were largely chalked up in the West to more DEI crap.
Right.
Like, this is more about diversity, equity, and inclusion, and aren't we all really racist, and that's why we haven't given them all their shots.
Which is, you know, it's just layer upon layer of garbage thinking.
Right.
That's the thing.
It's the garbage thinking.
Now that we can stand back and say, two and a half years down, what have we learned about our system?
Not, what have we learned about COVID?
What have we learned about our system because of COVID?
Yeah.
One of the things that we have learned, and this is really the point of this particular exploration, is we have learned It is impossible for something like COVID to happen and for you not to learn painfully what you didn't understand as a result of what is revealed, right?
You discover your arrogance, right?
You thought this thing was going to work very well.
You deploy this thing and you discover, ah, it didn't do what I thought.
And what's more, it did this other thing I didn't anticipate.
It is impossible for that not to happen in a system that is actually interested in doing better.
And the fact that our system is not obsessed with discovering what has now been revealed by our attempts to solve this problem is the real thing that we need to be alarmed by.
That's what I'm getting at.
That's what I'm getting at is now in September of 2022, it is becoming apparent that the thing doesn't care that it was wrong.
And what's the evidence for that?
Well, for example, you have a extremely unambiguous excess death rate that appears to track our remedy And our prophylaxis rather than the disease itself.
There's some excess death that is the result of COVID, but there is a signal.
What do you mean by the remedy and the prophylaxis?
Well, the way we have dealt with people who are sick with COVID and the way we have attempted to prevent people from coming down with COVID, right?
That's some sort of medical policy.
The excess death signal Appears to track that and in particular it appears to track the so-called vaccines really transfection agents, but the so-called vaccines Rather than the disease itself.
There's certainly an excess death signal from COVID, but the distinction between the pre-inoculation phase of the pandemic and the mid-inoculation phase is substantial.
Now, a normal system.
Let's say that all of the people who orchestrated policy Had just been arrogant boobs, right?
And they did the thing that we've seen a thousand times where they thought they understood the biology better and they deployed a policy that seemed right to them.
And you can imagine them talking themselves into that belief.
Into certainty.
Into certainty.
And then deploying the thing and having nature reveal their folly.
Well, the natural thing that would follow that, I'm not saying this is good, but the natural thing that would follow that is there would be a rush to shunt blame to others.
There would be a, and this is key, there would be a rapid campaign to reduce the future harm, right?
And that is not necessarily about anything noble.
It is just simply about trying not to be responsible for more suffering and death.
But you would not, for instance, continue to see mass PR campaigns to vaccinate and boost your children?
Right.
This is the most obvious of these things.
If you were confused about this, then your confusion would persist longest when it comes to the people most jeopardized by COVID.
And your confusion would be alleviated most rapidly with people who were least jeopardized by COVID.
And as it turns out, most jeopardized by the supposed treatment.
Exactly.
So we would expect the system to be embarrassed into functioning.
And it is not being embarrassed into functioning.
It is doubling down on the same insanity.
And it is basically going to take that excess death signal.
And instead of causing it to be finite in time, it is going to make it into the new normal of the rate of death.
Now, the problem, the many problems that are downstream of this recognition, is if it is indifferent to Human suffering and death now, after these patterns have been revealed, was it at first?
Right?
Is this a new indifference?
It thought it was right and then it decided it didn't care?
That's unlikely.
I mean, even Occam's Razors wise, that's two steps.
The rational thing The most rational thing, the most parsimonious thing, is to imagine actually it never gave a shit in the first place.
Maybe it wasn't trying to be right.
Right?
And that's disturbing.
I don't like saying that out loud.
I would love to believe that we live in a system in which people who are truly indifferent to the suffering and death of others are relatively rare.
Right?
That most people care somewhat.
Some people care a lot.
But I would imagine, in general, that indifference is rare, that it shouldn't be common even in the halls of power.
It should be a rare thing, and the fact that it seems to be dominant in the particular places in the system that governed policy over the last two and a half years ought to alarm us, and it ought to force us to engage certain kinds of questions.
But then this goes back to where I started, which is engage these questions with what exactly?
We don't have... With the tools of science, and journalism, and other things you would learn in college.
Right.
You would expect the university system to go into high gear figuring out how these errors were made, what should have been done, what we ought to do now.
Right?
You would expect journalism To be obsessed with diagramming the failure, figuring out who actually was responsible, right?
None of this is happening.
And really, I don't, you know, dark age I think is a good metaphor because The hazard of living in a dark age isn't about being in the scientific dark.
It's about all the things downstream of not being able to figure out which way is up.
Right?
We are stuck in a predicament where we have a lot of things.
Well, maybe government should fix this.
Cool.
Except that the thing that is dressed as government isn't functioning like a government.
Right?
Maybe universities should figure out what's happened.
Yes, except that that thing is now a church that is hell-bent on not figuring out what happened.
Maybe some journalist ought to look into it.
Yeah, except who do they work for?
They can't work for any major publication, so they've got to be an independent journalist, and if they do go after it, maybe that's the end of their career.
Right?
Well, many of the institutions, and I think you use the word church to describe the university system, but I think most of these systems have become de facto replacements for religion.
Many, you know, science is acting like, you know, people who don't understand science, which includes a lot of people with fancy letters after their names and who call themselves scientists, don't know what it is and are treating it like a religion.
Many people are, I don't know, journalism is a little different, but you know, if you can only speak the conclusions that have been handed down to you by who knows what, that sounds kind of religious.
The universities are acting like, you know, the woke stuff is acting like a religion, as we've talked about before, as John McWhorter has written about extensively.
The government is effectively acting like a new kind of church.
So, you know, we do have And, you know, maybe by no coincidence at all, exactly as the waning of explicit and formal religion happens, people groping about blindly, not having actually understood what science offers, what actual science offers, what an actual secular understanding of the world can grant you, and have
have glommed onto and created these heinous new religious-like structures that are at least as dangerous, if not more so, than many of the actual religions that came before.
Yeah, in fact I will retool that a little bit.
Religions, true religions, are things that have stood the test of time and have been shaped by selection to at least benefit the people who adhere to them, the lineages that have passed them along.
I have argued that the problem with such things, what I've just given as a defense of such things, The problem is, they may be very good at addressing hazards that look like the hazards of the past, but there's no reason at all to think that the wisdom that is contained in them is any good for a completely novel set of hazards.
The example that we give in the book in Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century is, were the commandments being written today, you might imagine that God would include, thou shalt not enrich uranium.
Right.
Thou shalt not enrich Uranium.
In fact, God doesn't mention Uranium because God didn't know about Uranium at the time, despite ostensibly having created it.
So, you know, religions are compendiums of wisdom.
They are not inherently moral.
That wisdom can involve, you know, enslaving others.
But the point is, at least whatever is in there was, in some sense, metaphorically true for a past set of realities.
But there's no reason to expect in a world of novel hazards that you can go to those ancient traditions and find wisdom.
You probably won't, and you'll probably hurt yourself if you think you can.
But the problem is the religion shaped whole, right?
To the extent that the world has gone secular, it has a niche for things that function like religions.
And these modern things that function, you know, it's in some sense wrong of me to call the university some new kind of church.
Or at least it needs the following caveat.
You know, a church for an ancient religion is one thing.
It dispenses a kind of wisdom of the past.
We are talking about cults.
We are talking about religions that have not yet passed any test of time and in this case we are talking about cults that just so happen to have a business model that calls into question anything that they dispense that might be like wisdom.
Right?
It's probably not good for you because it's paying somebody else handsomely.
Right?
So anyway we've got that situation and really I don't know what could be More frightening than a world that is being made rapidly more dangerous by the way power, that is to say political and economic power, is interfacing with modern technology.
Right?
You're in no position to defend yourself against the novel compounds that are in your food or your air or the inoculation that you're being told you should get for your health that, you know, You know, is it a vaccine made in a factory?
No.
It turns you into a vaccine factory.
Is that safe?
Yeah.
Really?
How do you know that that's safe?
It's never been done before.
Right?
So, you're in no position to defend yourself from these things, and all of the things that should be at least figuring out painfully, oh, we thought that was safe, it turned out not to be, here's what you need to know.
All of the things that should be filling in the here's what you need to know have been captured and are broken.
Yes, how often do you hear...
Any figures in the media or science coming and saying, we were wrong.
We got that one wrong.
The advice we gave you was wrong.
We're sorry.
Here's what we suggest you do from here on out.
Here's how we got it wrong.
Here's what we should have understood.
Here's what we now get.
And here's how it changes what we told you six months ago.
Right?
You should be hearing that.
And the fact that you're not hearing it ought to be setting off every alarm bell that you have.
Right?
And really, I don't know what the solution is here.
There are some independent journalists who I'm hoping are going to spot the size of this problem.
Right?
Sagar and Jetty did a piece, I think last week, that was quite good.
continued to follow the story of the lab leak hypothesis in spite of the all-out effort to reverse history and reverse the recognition that so many of us have come to that this in fact is almost certainly from the Wuhan lab.
Yep.
Right?
Obviously the scientific establishment decided that that would be an awfully inconvenient truth and it attempted to reverse it by claiming that it had new evidence that the virus had emerged from the from the wet market.
That evidence wasn't in fact evidence and didn't in fact mean anything.
And anyway, Sager and Jetty on Breaking Point, went after it and he's continued to be quite dogged on this.
On the other hand, I think he hasn't noticed that the lab leak story and the repurposed drug story and the so-called vaccine story are actually the same story, right?
That they are basically one team had, you know, decided to portray the virus falsely.
It had decided to obscure the hazard and it decided to obscure the useful treatments that turned out to be at our disposal and it decided to promote one treatment that made no sense and it decided to promote it in a way that was bizarrely indifferent to whether or not you were particularly at risk from the disease or particularly at risk from the treatment it was offering.
So, in any case, maybe Sager, maybe Glenn Greenwald, maybe Matt Taibbi, maybe one of these journalists who has shown so much courage is going to come to see the pattern, and they are going to figure out how to pursue the larger story.
And, you know, the larger story...
involves, first of all, a return to some basic principles that every journalist wants to know, right?
Skepticism is essential.
The idea that there are certain truths that are so important that we all accept them right away, that this is no place for skepticism, right?
I can see arguments for that in some quadrants, never in journalism, right?
Journalists need to remember that the conflicts of interest of their sources is paramount.
A person may or may not be responsive to those conflicts of interest, but those conflicts of interest exist and they ought to create a skepticism of sources whose conflicts are either not obvious or whose conflicts suggest that that person might not be truthful.
It seems to me that there's a kill switch for skepticism that is being used, that a lot more people were willing to discuss LabLeak than are willing to discuss actual treatment for COVID that isn't one of these so-called vaccines, or the safety and efficacy of the so-called vaccines.
Those second two things are touched by almost no one who is still invited to fancy cocktail parties, right?
And the kill switch on skepticism seems to me to be, oh, but you're going to kill people.
Don't go there.
You're going to kill people.
And as we have argued, but as very, very few people, other people have argued, actually, where did the virus come from?
Is it a naturally occurring zoonotic virus that leapt from one species to another?
Or is it a frankenvirus that was put together in a lab?
...does have medical and health consequences, absolutely, because this is where evolutionary biology is paramount, as so many places.
But that will change how it is likely to behave, how it is likely to evolve, and therefore what we can expect of it.
But I've never heard anyone else argue that actually viral origins, SARS-CoV-2 viral origins, has importance with regard to health, to human health.
And so, if you believe that, and given that no one seems to be stopping, no one seems to be arguing that from the other side, then you can go there, even when it was considered crazy to talk about lab leak, without being told you're killing people now.
Whereas early treatment, repurposed drugs, vaccine safety, efficacy, etc.
Those came already packaged with the touch this and we'll call you a murderer label.
Yeah, and it has this very nasty implication, right?
So let's take the repurposed drugs thing.
The question is, do they work or don't they work?
That would seem to be the question, wouldn't it?
There are lives at stake either way.
The people who say, don't talk about repurposed drugs, you'll kill people, are not protecting people.
What they are doing is they are immunizing themselves from the accusation that something that they said will result in death.
Now if you argued against talking about repurposed drugs and people died because they didn't get repurposed drugs that work, Obviously that kills people.
But the point is, their fingerprints aren't on it.
So there's a way in which people are motivated to stay away from certain stories because they don't want responsibility for the fact that lives are at stake.
They hang in the balance one way or the other.
They're not really protecting people.
They're not even behaving in a way that logically might protect people.
Blocking the question so that their fingerprints are not on the deaths of people who die, right?
And, you know, I actually I have it right here just as you said, the question of what is COVID is so fundamental, right?
You want to talk about a question in which lives hang in the balance?
I mean, you've got more than six million people dead of COVID.
That's a huge number of lives.
The question of whether... What's that number?
That's an of or with number?
I don't know.
Let's put it this way.
It's their number, right?
So, the fact that you have... There was certainly a lot of with that got lumped into... Yeah, but I don't even think it's a good question because there is never...
Look, it's one thing if you had COVID and you get hit by a bus and you get counted as a COVID death, as we know happened, right?
Anybody who tested positive was counted this way, right?
That's obviously a case in which you're in the wrong category, but in general the complexity of biology means that you may really be very close to the grave because, hold on, hold on, because you're 89 years old and your death certificate will say flu.
And the point is did you die of the flu or did you die with the flu?
And the answer is it's complicated.
Right?
I mean just like actually we shouldn't have, I mean talking about this new, this prospective study out of Thailand on cardiovascular effects of the second Pfizer shot on 13 to 18 year olds, okay?
There's not, you know, the idea that we should have a single treatment that is the only treatment that is recommended for a 15 year old male and an 85 year old woman is insane.
Yeah.
So when you've got a person who's 90 whose death certificate says COVID, Uh, then we can talk about exactly, okay, okay, I don't know, you know, maybe this was, this was the final straw and COVID was a factor and that's the thing to push them over.
And some, you know, some people definitely died of COVID, but a lot of people who were not ready to die, who were not anywhere close, um, had something happen to them.
And then it turns out that they, you know, they got into the hospital and they were tested with these crap tests.
And, you know, who even knows if, you know, some of those deaths of COVID may not even have been with COVID because they may not even have been positive.
Like, you know, everything about the testing and diagnostic and treating structure of this entire disease and virus is Beyond bad, and this is your central point that you keep returning to here, which is that it is so bad, and there have been so few corrections, that we can no longer plausibly say, oh boy, they really got it wrong, didn't they?
I'm sure they must feel bad.
Right.
We can't say that, and I don't know how to alert people to that problem exactly.
I mean, we're taking a crack at it here, but my point is, look, six million deaths.
Of COVID, with COVID, undoubtedly a mixture.
The fact that we know that people who had comorbidities We're vastly more likely to end up in that category.
Yes.
Suggests that this is a complex system phenomenon, that it did damage to the body, it did damage to the bodies of people like us who are healthy, who got it, right?
But the point is, the more things you have pushing you towards the grave, the more likely this one is to push you over.
Sure.
The fact that their number says something like six million people have already died with COVID as a factor suggests that this is not a tiny phenomenon and it suggests that something like six million people Already and it's not like we've got any control over this thing at all right six million people already are downstream of the question of
Is it a food practice that resulted in this pandemic or is it a laboratory practice, right?
No Nothing could be more consequential than this.
Not only are all of the deaths and all of the illness and all of the disruption of the global system that flowed from COVID downstream of that question.
But the entire question of the so-called vaccines and their implication for human health is also downstream of that question.
So there's never been a more important question to get the answer to than, what is COVID?
Where did it come from?
And from the point of view of going forward with respect to COVID, as I have said from the beginning, if it came from a lab, Knowing what it was that the people who were working in that lab were attempting to do.
Were they trying to make a vaccine?
Were they simply testing, were they trying to make a human infectious virus in order to study it?
Whichever of those it was, we are entitled to know what protocols they used.
And that is like a Rosetta Stone for what this virus is likely to do.
Because they were selection.
They were acting as selection.
That was exactly what they were doing.
This point has been made before, but it's just so obvious, especially when you say, was it food practice?
Was it a cultural food practice or a lab practice that produced this thing, which produced this crazy set of policies?
and two and a half years later, here we are, very much the worst for wear as a planet and as a species.
Was it a cultural food practice or was it a lab practice?
Well, it's the people saying it was a lab practice who were accused of being the racists.
I can't even say it with a straight face.
Like, literally, the zoonotic origin people are claiming that it's the way those crazy Chinese people eat and do their marketing, their food market stuff, that is what caused this.
And those of us over here who are saying, no, actually we think it was the bad science that was a collaboration between Chinese and American researchers, we're the ones being accused of being racist.
Again, this is just DEI, this is part of what we're experiencing, part of what you're talking about here, with all these systems interplaying with one another.
Maybe could not even have happened.
Absent the woke.
Absent the DEI.
Absent the diversity, equity, inclusion stuff.
Like, covering the entire outside.
Because it is the go-to argument.
Whenever anyone disagrees with your standard accepted thing, which in this case is, well, it has to have been the food, you know, the cultural things of the Chinese and how they eat.
It's like, oh, I don't think so.
Ah, you're a racist.
Wait, what?
That was backwards.
You people are making the opposite arguments and somehow no one in the media is calling them out.
Well, I think it goes to your earlier point about the skepticism kill switch.
I don't think anybody actually believes that argument.
That talking about LabLink is racist.
I think the question in, I mean, and look, we saw a certain amount of this in the Fauci emails with Christian Anderson.
Christian Anderson at the time, you know, before he became such a strident proponent of the natural origins hypothesis, privately he's saying to Fauci, actually this virus is inconsistent with predictions from evolutionary theory.
Right?
So then the question is, oh, jeez, that's bad because, jeez, who is liable to be responsible for this if this isn't a natural virus?
Uh, Anthony Fauci and Peter Daszak and, right?
So the point is, well, that will be bad.
How are we going to do away with that argument?
Well, we're going to have to stop people in their tracks.
Let's blame the Chinese.
Well, let's... One thing.
Let's claim, look, I want to nail it exactly.
Your point is there is a skepticism kill switch.
Right?
Ordinarily, when things go weird, people become skeptical.
Right?
Because it's the right thing to do.
If you need to nip that in the bud, how do you do it?
Well, there are certain arguments that people have been traumatized over that they won't touch.
One of them is racism.
Yep.
Right.
So if the idea is, hey, if you're going to say laboratory, we're going to say racist.
The point is, oh, damn, didn't see that coming.
Don't want to be accused of racism.
I know it's really, really bad for your prospects going forward.
Racist.
Murderer.
Well, anti-vaxxer.
Racist?
Murderer.
It's exactly the same thing.
Oh, you can't go there.
You can't say you don't approve of the thing because this disease kills, doesn't it?
Well, yes.
And we've got the cure!
I don't think it is the cure.
Ah!
If you say it's not, then you're a murderer.
So, you've got racism, you've got...
superstitious, unscientific, backwards religious person, right?
That argument was used all over the place here, right?
It is those who are following the science that are saying X, Y, Z, and if you are somewhere else, then you are one of those, you know... Deplorables.
Deplorable hill folk, whatever it is that's being leveled, you know?
Likewise, conspiracy theory.
Right?
Oh, you're trafficking in conspiracy theories.
Am I?
And if we decide that we can't talk about conspiracies, then were anyone ever to conspire, I mean, I know it's never happened yet on planet Earth, but were someone to invent the idea of conspiring, and we've been forbidden in advance to talk about it, aren't you effectively handing them the game?
I watched our cats conspire this morning.
Cats are solitary, like, you know?
This is an insane argument.
Yeah, it's nutty and it never held any water, but I think, you know, your point about the skepticism kill switch is it's not about it holding water.
It's about it spooking you away from following evidence.
Yep.
Right?
That's right.
And that's where we've ended up, which then brings us back to the journalists, right?
There are no journalistic institutions that function, but there are some journalists who still function, right?
Sager, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Cy Hirsch, right?
These are all people who could potentially see the big picture and start following it.
And because they're supported by comparatively independent, I don't know in Cy Hersh's case, but in the other cases I mentioned, they're supported by their audiences, they could potentially stare down what will come back at them.
Right, but they're going to have to remember their skepticism, they're going to have to remember the conflicts of interest that sources have, and they're going to have to, you know, ignore bad evidence, no matter, or bad information, no matter how authoritatively it's dressed.
Because journalism functions as, you know, one of very few checks on political and economic power.
And it is obvious that whatever it is that has taken over our system is sort of loosely in the neighborhood of political and economic power, right?
We don't know what it is, but we can see what it does.
And, you know, certainly, I would say certainly the place to start and the place As you point out, the source of the virus is somehow more explorable than the other questions surrounding COVID, right?
We did surprisingly well on that topic because people, I think, probably misunderstand how much still rests on the question.
But at the point that some journalist or some set of journalists starts pursuing this, they're going to have to recognize that, you know, if we can go back to the entire diagnosis of the system, right?
We are living in something that is functioning like a dark age.
We have to figure out, because much rests on it, I mean look, let's talk about the question of the origin of the virus more directly.
If the virus came from nature, without human meddling, right?
If it came through the wet market because somebody brought a wild animal there that had the virus and it jumped to people and created the pandemic.
Then that suggests, as we've discussed before on Dark Horse, That those who were rapidly working their way towards understanding these potentially pandemic viruses weren't fast enough, right?
We didn't fund them enough.
We didn't do enough gain-of-function research, right?
Whereas, if this escaped from the lab, then the exact opposite is true, right?
If this is the result of our gain-of-function research program to study these viruses that were argued to be potentially pandemic starting, an argument that I think was way overdrawn because Jumping from nature across species barriers is far harder than they represented it.
But if it turns out to have come from the lab, then the point is this is entirely a self-inflicted wound.
The whole pandemic, right?
And so everything hangs on that question, and it has to be nailed down.
It cannot be I mean, I feel like we're looking at the tobacco industry's playbook, right?
Of trying to muddle the evidence, right?
Trying to make it impossible to figure out what's true.
So most people will simply move on.
And the point is, how much damage has this done?
I mean, even if COVID were to disappear tomorrow.
The disruption of our global system, right?
The inability of supply chains to function.
The fact that we have, you know, labor shortages that make certain essential processes completely unreliable, right?
That is all downstream of this one question.
So, it has to be studied.
And likewise, the issue of, let's take for example, The health consequence of the one remedy that was pushed on everyone.
This is not a difficult question.
Right?
It is a noisy question.
Right?
There's plenty of statistical noise in the impact of a particular remedy that was administered to billions of people.
But it is a question that science is well positioned to answer relatively easily.
We can't say what the consequence of those inoculations will be for people decades in.
But we should have a rapidly accumulating body of evidence that says, what is the effect one year out?
What is the effect three years out?
Right?
That body of evidence should be accumulating and we should be getting smarter as a result of it.
Right?
This is something our university, this is the shallow end of the pool from the point of view of logic and study.
This isn't technically difficult.
This isn't statistically difficult.
This is something What you need is to compare groups, and you need to have large enough samples that you address the question of noise, and you figure out what the signal is.
It should be easily done.
And again, we're looking at something that is apparently not interested in the answer to that question.
Which, I think then, it leaves us at the following
Uncomfortable endpoint, which is if our system is not interested in figuring out now what the consequences of its behavior were, that means that it is indifferent to the suffering and death of millions of people.
If it is indifferent to the suffering and death of millions of people now, It is at least strongly possible that it was indifferent from the beginning.
That it wasn't ever especially interested in protecting people.
It was interested in doing something else that has never been shared with us.
And so I think we have to ask In light of the obvious evidence of cover-up that we've seen, the cover-up of the connection to the Wuhan lab, the cover-up in Fauci's emails, the cover-up of the harm to healthy young people who never should have been advised to get these inoculations in the first place, we have to ask the question, what did the architects of this policy know?
And when did they know it?
Right?
It's a traditional journalistic question.
We have to follow the money and we have to know what did they know and when did they know it.
And I will point out that there are certain things which would be decisive if we understood them.
For example, did these people, when they got COVID, Have access to repurposed drugs that they claimed didn't work?
Or didn't they?
Not did they have access, but did they use?
Did they use?
Did they avail themselves of drugs that they advised others not to use?
Did they get the vaccinations?
Did they get the same ones that other people got?
Did they get particular ones?
Right?
Or didn't they?
Right?
What did they know and when did they know it?
And I'm not claiming that we can access that information, that we can discover it, and I'm not claiming to know, but I think the point is we've seen enough evidence that the trials revealed hazards of these inoculations that it's not obvious that the people who pushed them hardest got the same shots as other people got.
And a journalist should pursue that that information because if they didn't then that would tell us that actually this was not a massive error that has been followed up by the indifference of these people.
That it was in fact indifference to the suffering and death of strangers that existed from the beginning.
Indeed.
Alright.
Let's do one more very, very short thing.
Sure.
That actually does tie together, although it ties not exactly with where you just ended, but where I thought you were going to end a little while ago.
There's another skepticism kill switch.
There's many of them, I think.
But a newer one than murderer or racist is TERF.
Right?
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.
Which, you know, some people have started to take on as a as a label that they are proud of because it is so clearly an absurd epithet.
But I wanted to say with the preamble that I have made a point of basically not looking into what we think we know, but I want to say a tiny bit about the The shop teacher with the giant prosthetic breasts outside of Toronto, who went to school, went to high school, wearing these crazy things.
And Zach, do you have a screenshot to show?
So can they see it now?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, um, this is batshit crazy, right?
This is, this is, this is a dude, uh, wearing a mask below his nose.
That's the silly part of it.
Um, and you know, I don't even know what these are.
Porn breasts, something, sex toy breasts, uh, with giant nipples showing, uh, that he, he declared himself a woman recently and, uh, and is apparently teaching shop.
I'm using this saw on the right here for those just listening.
As far as I know, the mainstream media, which has the well-known liberal bias, has not touched this at all, except maybe to denounce the right-wing media, including Fox, of course, and things like the Daily Wire and other places, for being basically TERF-y and transphobic-y, for saying that this is a problem.
There are a lot of true things that you can say about why this is inappropriate.
That is not a woman.
That appears to be a man living out a sexual kink in front of children and forcing public school, young adults, high schoolers, to engage in sexual, to respond to sexual display because He's their teacher.
But the thing that actually maybe most interests me about this, because, you know, that's just more of the same.
You know, so much, so much of the trans activism is not about the tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of people who are really truly trans, but about women and womanhood being appropriated and disappeared.
And pretending that what a woman is is a costume that you can wear, as opposed to actually being a hell of a lot deeper than that.
But the piece of this story that I think that is interesting to me is this is a shop teacher.
And again, I have not gone into the biography.
I don't know.
I barely know more than what I've said here.
And I did that sort of intentionally because I'm sure there's a ton out there.
But a shop teacher.
Shop like a lab.
The very first moments of the very first day in shop or lab have got to be the safety lecture with things like closed-toed shoes only and if you've got long hair you pull it back and you know maybe you even have to you know secure it under something.
And not only is this guy wearing these crazy, ridiculous boobs, but he's also got this wig, I assume.
Long, flowing blonde trusses that are also not tied back, as he's operating this chop saw, maybe?
Miter saw.
Miter saw.
And, you know, that's not what chop teachers do.
And this makes me think.
This makes me hope that this is a big troll.
That this is someone who is so done.
with the nonsense, with the DEI nonsense, with having your words policed and starting to have your thoughts policed and being told that all you have to do is decide that you are the sex that you're not born to and suddenly you can get away with everything.
Well, this person is going to put a just a grotesquerie, a clownish caricature of womanhood on Make it hyper-sexualized with the erect nipples and come to class and do this in front of students.
If it was an English teacher, unfortunately, I'd be like, okay.
I know that there are English teachers that's confused, but if this is a shop teacher who actually still has all of his digits, or even is just missing a little bit of one or something, but learned the lesson of whatever happened, there's no way that this is for real.
Well, wait a second.
I need to ask you a question, because It seems to me that this is clearly a troll, but it could be one of two different kinds.
Okay.
Right?
It could be a conscious troll who's trying to reveal how confused civilization has become, because it can't even prevent somebody with grotesquely technologically augmented breasts from teaching... Well, they're not real.
They're not augmented breasts.
They're prosthetics.
Okay.
I mean, I must say I have not been paying attention to the story.
It's still technology.
Yes, but it's not augmented.
That makes it sound like this person is walking around like that all the time.
He gets home, he takes that shit off.
Okay.
Makes a great deal more sense.
But the point is, it could be one of two different... Look, you've got a Zuby-style troll.
Right, now Zuby is a person, I find him to be quite a wonderful, thoughtful person.
And what he did, as somebody who is very serious about weightlifting, is he declared himself female and smashed the female deadlifting record and then went back to being a guy.
And his basic point is, look, The rules you have set up make this a completely legitimate phenomenon.
I have now just become the weightliftingest female on earth, right?
Because you've set up a system that is completely open to being gamed by any man who wishes to do so, right?
Okay, so that's a conscious It could also be one of these other kind of trolls who have decided, oh, you're going to declare transness sacred?
I can do anything I want as long as I'm trans?
Well, why not?
And so you have these guys taking advantage of it, basically daring civilization to call them out.
Right, but if you have successfully been using power tools for your professional life, and now you've Donned gigantic balloons in front of you, and you've got a wig on, and presumably they're both attached to you.
So, you know, he slices the tip of one of those prostheses off.
It's probably not going to hurt.
He gets his hair caught in a saw that catches him and pulls him down.
You know, that could be very dire indeed.
These aren't reasonable shop practices.
Of course not.
I'm not disagreeing with you that it's a troll.
I'm trying to figure out whether you imagine That it is a well-intentioned troll designed to reveal that we have all become very stupid around this issue, or it is an ill-intentioned troll designed to take advantage?
I think I just answered that question.
If this person has been a successful shop teacher, has been using these kinds of tools in his professional life for some number of years, He would not throw that level of understanding and safety out the window in order to pull a malicious prank.
Well, I don't know, right?
But I will say, okay, now I get your hypothesis, and it makes a prediction, which is that he will reveal it.
Right.
Right.
If it's well-intentioned, it has to be revealed.
Revealed when?
It could be a lot of things.
I saw a letter, supposedly from the school, I don't know if it's legit, that says actually it would be illegal to not let her express her gender identity.
Bull, but okay.
So, you know, maybe the hope is that he gets fired, and then he could take it to court, and then, you know, you don't reveal it until, you know, it goes through the justice system, right?
So, I don't know.
I've just said, like, this, those, those pictures, and they came out, what, a week and a half ago or something, are so preposterous.
It seems like it has to be a fake.
It's not a fake.
I mean, the boobs are fake, but, you know, it's, This person really did show up in class and some of the students really did take covert photographs and video and there is apparently a protest by parents and some students outside the school now to make him stop, right?
You know, the more of that, the more people who are pushed into, oh my god, I don't want to be going out and protesting, but I have to because this is insane.
Because that person is not a woman, and my kid should not be forced to pretend that that is a woman, and to see that, and to have their entire downstream The entire rest of their lives be affected by having had to be in class with that.
Yeah.
It's barbaric.
We've gone barbaric.
Well, it's barbaric, but I would also... There is a legal question here, right?
Presumably, if a person... That's Canada.
So I don't know.
They still have laws.
I know, I'm just saying.
I don't know what you're going to evoke here, but just remember it's not the U.S.
we're talking about.
Okay, it's Canada.
It's a cold matter of law.
Presumably, if a shop teacher...
became so fat that they could not operate the saw.
Yep.
Right?
Then they couldn't be a shop teacher because it's not about their fatness, it's about the fact that actually you are physically incapable of operating the device that you're supposed to be teaching people, right?
This person is, your point is, close to this.
It's not fat, but what it is is something so compromising of their ability to safely operate these kinds of tools That the point is, look, it's not about what's under your shirt.
It's about the fact that there's so much of it there that you can't do the job for which we hired you.
And obviously, we cannot have a civilization in which you are entitled to hold a job that you cannot conduct because of Kink or whatever it is.
Right.
Right?
We have to be able to say, look, one of the prerequisites for this job is that you can do this job.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, this story also just feels to me like it gets at this point that we were making last week, that we make in the book, that we make all the time about physical reality versus social reality, right?
I'm sorry.
You woke up feeling like a woman today.
Doesn't make you a woman.
But that saw could chop those things off.
And that's true.
And the physical reality of that saw, you've got it plugged into the wall, those electrons are moving, and so is the blade, and I don't care how you feel.
And neither does the saw.
The physical reality is the physical reality.
Yeah.
The saw is turf.
Yeah, physical reality is a terror for sure.
All of it.
Sorry guys, but it is.
Yeah, you're right and it's interesting that this exists.
If it is a conscious troll, I don't think it gets revealed after a court case.
I don't think it should go to court.
But if it is a conscious troll, then, you know, it does successfully reveal that we've become so dumb that when somebody is actually going to put students in danger because they can't demonstrate the basic safety protocols for the equipment in question, right, that we still can't bar them from the classroom, of course we have to be able to do that.
Right, but I guess even if it's not a conscious troll, it reveals that.
It should.
Intention of the shop teacher doesn't change what the fact that the mainstream media's silence on this, and therefore complicity, reveals that we are just that dumb at this point.
Regardless of what the intention of this insane behavior is.
And I'm just hopeful.
I've been thinking about this on and off since I first saw those insane pictures and went like, God, I just really hope this guy is in on his own thing.
Yeah, it's presumably better if he is, but I would point out that we have a dumb system in which, you know, the race to get attention has certain exploitable loopholes, and the point is if you want to take
You know, a costume like that to the next level and create a social confusion as one team pretends not to notice and the other team becomes obsessed, right?
That's a way to, you know, get to the... But if he was gesticulating in front of those enormous breasts while talking about Chaucer, it would be more muddled.
Like how... okay, you're still doing sexual display in front of children and that's unacceptable.
But you're not... you know, Chaucer's at no risk here, right?
Yeah, I mean, Chaucer would be hard to follow either way.
Yes, I don't know if Chaucer is taught in high school.
Oh, Chaucer is taught in high school, I just don't think it's learned by me.
It's difficult to know what it's about.
It's tough.
Yeah, it is tough.
Maybe Tolstoy.
Okay, we're back to Tolstoy.
We've come full circle to Tolstoy.
War, peace, war again.
Yeah, nah, war.
That was going to be the sequel.
Nah, it was war all along.
It was war all along.
Well, I think we've done it.
We've gotten there.
Apologies for the schnuffling and the schnarfling, but we got through it.
We will be doing our private Q&A tomorrow.
If you're listening on September 24th, on September 25th at 11 a.m.
Pacific, you can find our private Q&A at my Patreon.
And questions have already been asked, but it's a wonderful group and we can interact with the chat and all of that.
So if you want the Q&A that you've missed today, consider joining us there.
Anything else to say before we sign off?
I don't think so.
I guess check out the Steve Patterson episode of Dark Horse and the Ramsey Rammerman episode in which we discuss free speech, Section 230, publishers, and platforms, and all of those issues on which everything seems to hang.
Awesome.
All right.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
