#190: Burden of Truth (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 190th 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 Biden and the job he hopes to finish, Covid in the White House and the U.S. Open, what the socialists think we should do about Covid, how Martina Navratilova sees the future of women’s sports, Title IX, sense-making when the experts aren’t making sense, how to tell good heterodoxy from bad, ...
You are Dr. Heather Hying, and we are raring to go here on a cloudy, drizzly Wednesday in the beginning of September.
Indeed.
Yep.
Still summer, but it doesn't totally feel like it right now.
Yeah.
I'll grant you that.
Yeah.
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Indeed.
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And, um, there are a number of things to talk about today.
Do you want to start?
Why don't you start?
Really?
Yeah.
I thought, okay.
I thought Zach had asked you to start.
Nope.
I think we have reversed the order for technical reasons that are above my pay grade.
Oh, are they?
Yes.
That's fascinating.
Um, Well, I wanted to mention that Jill Biden has tested positive for COVID.
And there's a remarkable article, I'm sure there are many more remarkable articles about this fact, including in The Telegraph, which is, of course, a British paper.
So, I find it maybe more interesting to read news about the U.S.
from non-American sources.
They sometimes have a better view on things, a more nuanced and at least less, you know, embedded in the problem view on things.
But I guess before we go there, I also wanted to say that my natural selections this week, I wrote about Joe Biden, Joe Biden's husband.
I remember him, yes.
Joe Biden's campaign slogan, which I only came to be aware of this week, which is, together we can finish the job.
Now, that's extraordinary, isn't it?
I encourage you guys to go check out my Natural Selections piece on this.
I compare it to Reagan, who I was never any fan of back in the day's slogan, which was, it's morning in America.
That was one of his ad campaigns, it's morning in America.
And it seemed ridiculous at the time.
What the hell is he talking about?
He hasn't done anything good for the country.
Of course, you look at some of the numbers now and you think, oh, yeah, OK, I've had some of that wrong.
You know, he did.
He did turn some stuff around.
Of course, some of the stuff that he turned around might have been the result of skullduggery in order to get him elected in the first place.
You know, this is true.
But.
Regardless of whether or not you think that Reagan's America was, in fact, mourning in America, it was helpful.
It was forward thinking.
It was saying, we are born again.
Here we are.
Let's go forward.
Let's do something amazing, and together we can.
And let's finish the job?
So, as I write about in Natural Relations this week, I'm like, what job is that, Joe?
Just, you know, fully selling out the Americans to Big Pharma.
Reducing, with apologies to Grover Norquist, reducing the size and influence of science so that you can drown it in a bathtub.
That's a fair point.
Right?
I mean, what?
Really?
We're going to finish the job?
And then what?
Well, if you think about the comparison between the two men, it's actually pretty dramatic, right?
Now both, I would argue, and don't leap out of your seats, but I would argue that both men were actually, or actually in the case of Biden, figureheads.
These people are obviously not in charge of policy.
And in Reagan's case, his purpose was to provide a commanding presence that made policy changes that might otherwise not have been possible possible.
And whatever you think of those policy changes, the idea that a figurehead has a purpose and that purpose is the, you know, the image that the nation casts into the world, for example.
I remember my grandmother swooning over him.
She remembered him as a Hollywood star, as, you know, B-list actor, whatever.
He was never huge, but he was handsome and dashing.
She's like, oh, I get to vote for him.
So that, you know, that was part of what the appeal was.
Right.
You could read lines.
And in Biden's case, he's about as commanding as Bonzo, the chimp in the movie for which Reagan is so famously derided.
Bedtime for Bonzo?
Is that it?
Bedtime for Bonzo.
Yes, this is so far before our time that I am certain neither you nor I have seen that film.
But in any case, actually, you didn't happen to see a Dave Smith comedy routine in which he argues that he loves Joe Biden because Biden is almost a perfect description of the state of the nation, this tissue paper thin individual.
Which anyway, it's a pretty funny routine.
But The, you know, Biden, uh, you know, he can barely command his own shoes, right?
He just, he's not in a good state.
And the idea that for some reason, even as ridiculous as it was to elect him the first time, we're staring down the barrel of having him in an election a second time.
And that the slogan, which actually, um, it's a great contrast to Reagan's slogan, but it reminds me an awful lot of George Bush Senior's slogan.
Do you remember that?
Did you run across it?
I mean, it turns out that there are often many slogans.
And so, like, It's Morning in America, I don't think, was Reagan's official slogan.
That was just that one ad campaign.
Right.
So, I don't know.
The one I remember.
I mean, and, you know, George Bush, Sr.
was a lot of things, but memorable he wasn't.
Actually, before you tell us, as I say in the beginning of this piece that I wrote this week, The It's Morning in America ad campaign was, you know, much derided in liberal circles in 1984.
And of course, we were too young to vote in that election.
But in 1988, which was the first election that both you and I could could vote in, at the point that Bush got elected, I wore a It's Morning M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G in America pin around campus, just feeling very dark.
It felt like such dark times and, oh boy, was it not by comparison to where we've gone to.
Yeah, my spelling at the time was not good enough for that pin, but, you know, yeah, it's a good one.
So his campaign?
Well, I don't know.
I don't actually remember if it was his slogan, but he was famously associated with the idea, stay the course.
Oh, yes.
He said that.
I think maybe he said that in a debate and then it got picked up in some ads or something.
Stay the course, which is like the minimum possible argument in favor of something is that changing course is bad.
Well, I mean, it's similarly not exciting for sure.
But I mean, I think it's some If you really are in a time of plenty.
If the country really has been turned around, especially if it's under your president's watch and you were his VP.
Yeah.
And you know, I don't, I don't think in retrospect, almost any historian would argue that 1988 was that moment, but you know, there were certainly a lot of good things going on in the country right then.
But if that was really the moment that you were in, um, you, you might compellingly argue, you know what?
I, I was here for the last eight years.
I, you know, helped, I helped this happen and I can therefore continue to, to do more in the same direction because boy, are we on the right, on the right course.
Yeah, I agree.
It was so... I mean, look, I don't like politics at all.
Politics is the malignant portion of policymaking, and so I don't have patience for any of this stuff.
But the idea that there's some version of slogans that we remember that is optimistic and And then there's some set of slogans that is so bureaucratic and empty that it's just hard to imagine what they were thinking.
Even if this is the argument, we should stay the course because the course is pretty good and, you know, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or whatever it is.
Uh, it is pretty classic conservative, right?
Right.
What we're doing is working.
Why would we change?
So I don't, I guess I don't see, you know, I'm not inspired by it, but I don't see that it's an error inherently in the same way that I feel like let's finish the job And I didn't, you know, I didn't spend 20 hours at the task, but I went looking, like, what do they perceive the job is?
And, you know, what does he think he's done in his first term?
Oh, well, obviously nothing about this has anything to do with him.
This is some... It doesn't matter.
Him, the Democrats, Blue Team, all of it.
But, you know, the arguments about what it is that they have actually done mostly are actually the opposite of what has happened.
Well, we're going to get into a thing here, but the fact is they have done something.
And it's the same thing that they've been doing for 30 years.
They stave off the French Revolution moment by creating distractions and creating false villains and... Right, but staving off the French Revolution moment isn't a job.
To finish the job, how do you finish staving off?
That's exactly the point.
This is not about us.
So the idea is, what are we going to say to the people who are in danger of revolting in order that we can explain why we have no vision, why we don't accomplish things that matter, why we don't make the obvious plays that would make the public happier, because that's no longer what this party is about.
So I really do think this is about, you know, just as when a political party decides to attack education because they aren't downstream of public education.
I'm not saying this is what's happening presently, but when a party decides, hey, actually, I don't really want the children of my competitors well-educated because that will make them more effective at competing with my children, so I'm going to sabotage public education.
I'm going to subsidize my kids' education privately.
I'm going to argue for vouchers to recover as much of my investment in publication as I and public education as I can.
When you do that, you can't say, let's sabotage our competitors.
So you have to say something in as an explanation for why you're not doing the obvious thing, which is figuring out how education should work and investing in it.
And I think this is just one of these cases.
These people are, and you know, I don't mean the Democratic Party, but the people who run it are enemies of the citizenry, and therefore it's difficult for them to explain what they're doing.
And so, of course, an empty slogan is like, well, you're gonna need a slogan, and no slogan matches what they're up to.
I don't, I guess I don't, I don't find that to be an answer, but Zach has something to say.
What you find if you go to the White House social media accounts is that for the last, you know, two years, three years, they have been constantly posting statistical things that are, if not outright lies, extremely misleading and misrepresentative.
Yeah, so they would have us believe.
That the economy is in better shape than it ever has been.
I believe that they would have us believe that the economy is doing staggeringly well.
Yeah.
And the prime rate is nearly, or depending on exactly, basically double what it was when Biden took office, the prime rate.
No one can get a mortgage.
Working class and most middle class people can't afford a mortgage when mortgage rates are over 8%.
Eggs are up, electricity is up, everything is more expensive, and yet we are being told exactly the opposite by these people.
So to finish the job is like, oh, we're going to keep on helping the middle class be able to afford great things.
No, you're doing the opposite.
But, you know, look, I knew this was going to tangle us, but the fact is they have one argument for reelecting this guy.
What's the one argument?
Trump.
Right.
You can't say, elect us because Trump sucks worse, right?
That is not a slogan.
You need something that explains why you didn't have a slogan.
And the main reason you didn't have a slogan is because the only thing that you could plausibly be accomplishing is keeping the boogeyman out of the office.
No, and actually the campaign video on Biden's site, on the presidential re-election campaign site, which includes the tagline, which includes, let's finish this job.
He slurs, so he slurs as this rather than the, because he slurs because he's ancient.
But it literally begins with footage and doom music from January 6th.
Right.
So, I mean, that is clearly the only reason that they actually want you to know.
That's the job.
But again, that's not a job you can finish.
You can't finish not electing Trump.
Oh, no, no, no.
First of all, whatever the hell is going on with the weaponizing of the courts against Trump, this is a job that they could plausibly finish.
I think they are absolutely insane to be doing this.
Maybe that is a wink.
Maybe it is a wink.
Let's face facts.
This is I'm not a good enough historian to say the weakest candidate who has ever been run by a major party, but as weak as he was the last time, he's even weaker, right?
Even weaker and more despicable.
And we know more about his family and his corruption.
Which was completely evident, but he is still He's still the most likable guy in the party.
This guy who isn't likable at all is still the most likable guy in the party, and that tells you something.
They've gotten rid of all the decent people.
That's not true.
Who?
Newsom?
No!
I mean, for one thing, Bobby Kennedy is still a Democrat.
He is, but as I keep pointing out, they are more afraid of Bobby Kennedy than they are of Donald Trump.
I understand that, but you just made the claim that Biden is the most likable Democrat on offer.
Well, let's put it this way.
He is the most likable Democrat that the people who refuse to give up their stranglehold over this once important party could possibly run.
No, I think it's like the union of likable and controllable.
He's completely controllable.
He's in no position to do anything of his own.
But anyway, I did want to point out the really direct parallel between stay the course and finish the job.
Almost the same formulation, as Mourning in America and Make America Great Again are very reminiscent of the same concept, right?
And, you know, as you point out, it's interesting that this nominally liberal president, and he's only nominally liberal, what he really is is just corrupt and using the echo of liberalism as a disguise, but that this is now a very conservative statement with no vision whatsoever It is, yeah.
It's harkening back to yesterday, which was perhaps actually nominally better than today, and whose fault is that?
Yes.
And it's also terribly ironic, because The most important thing that we could say about the Democratic Party and its value between when it was a defender of slavery and its current instantiation as a wickedly corrupt shadow of its former self
But in its heyday, this party actually advanced policies that were in the interest of working people, and those policies actually completed a liberal vision of the way the West should run, and the way the West should run
Is that it should be interested in color blindness, equal protection under the law, everybody having a fair access to the market, all of those liberal principles, which the Democratic Party is now savaging, right?
And this is actually a little back and forth we had in the comments on my natural selections piece.
Someone pointed out exactly this, like the parties have effectively reversed what they stand for.
And, you know, this is exactly what you're saying and what we've said before, but most voters haven't caught on yet, or at least most blue voters haven't caught on yet, that the Republicans are actually the ones standing up for the gains of yesterday, which were mostly put into motion by radicals and liberals and hippies and such and Democrats, right?
And the Democrats are busy working really hard to dismantle all of those gains.
Yes, in fact.
Working really, really hard.
To make us hyper aware of things like race that we were, you know, we weren't done with it, but we were definitely headed in the right direction.
Hyper aware of race, dismantling women's rights by pretending that men are women.
And it's remarkable.
And I don't...
How much brand loyalty could you possibly have to maintain blinders that make you think that today's Democratic Party is the same one as that of the 60s?
Right.
Put aside the question of corruption.
Perhaps both parties have been corrupt the whole time.
Certainly there's been some corruption in both parties the whole time.
But in terms of what they were actually really working towards and standing for, what the Democrats stand for and were working towards in the 60s has no relationship to what is happening now.
It has.
Yeah, it's an ironic sabotage of all of the good stuff that was accomplished and frankly that's why some of us are so freaking pissed off about it.
But I would also point out there's an obvious tactic here.
The creating of a narrative around January 6th and around Donald Trump is about getting your amygdala to do the voting.
Right?
That's what they have to do because if it was your conscious mind rationally considering who these people are and what they're doing and what it means to your future, there's no conceivable way that anybody would support it.
And the reason that people do support it is because they have been whipped into a frenzy of fear over Trump and over the idea that something like a coup almost unfolded on January 6th.
And whatever is true, A, the obvious involvement of the FBI in January 6th means that anybody who thinks they know what happened really has to take a step back and rethink it.
Yeah, and I mean, this is a point we've made over and over and over again, but meanwhile, what happened to the people holding cities like Portland hostage for Months at a time.
Nightly.
Riots.
Every single night.
Have any of these people seen justice?
Right, and you will no doubt recall that I wanted to see both groups pardoned.
That's right.
Because the necessity for us to get out of letting our amygdala be the deciding factor in elections is so great that it would, I mean, it would have been a slam dunk and, you know, that was the patriotic thing to do was to say, all right, we've seen stuff on both sides.
It's unacceptable.
But we are not going to tear ourselves apart sorting it out, sending people to jail, and especially, you know, the comparison is so clear.
I mean, frankly, that would be a gift to the left.
And instead, the left has been like, nah, we're just going to pretend that none of that crap happened at all on our side.
And it went on for a tremendously long time.
Some of the cities are still under its sway.
I mean, Portland is.
And there's just, you know, it's mostly peaceful.
They're mostly sane.
They're mostly dressed.
They're mostly not on fentanyl.
They're mostly like, what?
Yeah, no, it's nonsense.
And it went on.
It was, you know, if it wasn't premeditated on the first night, it was premeditated for the, you know, 99 nights after that.
And that's very different than a one-off event where, you know, actually the story we were sold is in conflict with the video, which they didn't show us.
In which, you know, people who've been locked away in a jail cell were being... About which one are you talking about?
January 6th.
Um, where, you know, you had, you had this, uh, uh, the QAnon shaman guy, and I probably shouldn't be using that term because I think it was part of the, the PSYOP, but where he's being, you know, led around by the Capitol Police inside the building.
I mean, this, none of this makes any sense, but, um, Anyway, I do think we, the public, would be really wise to stop letting them trigger our reflexes, because our reflexes are not good at thinking, and this amygdala stuff is getting a lot of people who would ordinarily look at Joe Biden and say, you've got to be crazy, that's the candidate?
But of course, you know, with, you know, the boogeyman as the alternative, it's like, well, you know, No, and that's the only way that he can win again is if Trump is his competitor.
Yeah, and I don't know.
He certainly can't win against Bobby.
No.
Well, not in a fair fight.
Not in a fair fight.
If the thing takes place in the Democratic Party, then I don't see how Bobby could get the nomination.
The thing is too rich.
But in a general election.
The only possible chance that Biden has of winning in a fair fight is against Trump.
Yep.
And, of course, that presumes that a fair fight is possible.
Yep.
All right.
So, oh, hold on.
Jill Biden has tested positive for COVID-19.
Jill, you said?
Yes.
Yep.
And here we have the Telegraph with a, you know, remarkably youthful-ish, you can show please, um like totally competent looking president there, and uh happy looking Jill, and um what we're, oh is that all I get now?
Oh they shortened this since I sat last.
Um we have uh They're considered in a high-risk group because of their age, but both have been vaccinated.
As if that's helpful, which it's not.
And then two paragraphs up from there in this very short piece, Mrs. Biden, 72, last tested positive for the virus in August last year after Mr. Biden himself recovered from the same illness.
Last tested positive.
This is just what we do, because we all understand that vaccines provide no protection at all against disease, but they just make you kind of roll with the punches.
This is both old news and even the Telegraph, which is not a particularly left-leaning paper at all, it's just becoming background bullshit.
Well, at least they're vaccinated.
The last time she got COVID, it was just a little more than a year ago, Well, I have to tell you, this is one of these stories that I, for reasons of keeping my analytical sanity, do not process.
Because I'm not confident that it means that any of the things about the story are true.
If they thought it was in their interest to portray Jill Biden as sick with COVID and recovering, I have no doubt they would do it.
Sure.
I do not trust that Jill Biden or Joe Biden got the same vaccinations as citizens.
Right.
So you, you're, keep going, but you are responding to a very different level of the story than I am.
I'm responding to the media reporting on it and what it leads people to believe about Um, the normalization of, well, of course she got COVID.
Everyone gets COVID.
What were the shots for then?
And, well, of course she's not going to get sick because of course she's vaccinated.
So both of those things exist within a couple lines of one another in this mainstream outlet.
Right, and I do process that part of the story, that the utility of the story is in reporting it just so, right?
She got it, she's not very sick, of course she was vaccinated, and I can see why that narrative would be useful because of course we know lots of people who are getting sick with it, mostly vaccinated,
And the obvious ghost in this machine is whatever Anthony Fauci was doing that created the problem in the first place, denied us remedies that worked, and then sold us a one-size-fits-all remedy that didn't work.
And so what we should be doing is saying, okay, if this is the new normal and people are now just simply getting this disease on the regular, And whatever you think of it, you may think it's not a big deal.
You and I think it's a bigger deal than people think it is because of some of the long-lasting effects of it, the broad range of tissues that it infects and things like that, that the costs of the errors That were set in motion by Fauci and his friends is gigantic with no end in sight.
This is something we are going to indefinitely pay costs over.
And so we should be very focused on how this happened and what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again.
And we appear to be very lightly focused there, if at all.
Yes.
Yes, we are.
So, COVID also seems to have hit the U.S.
Open, one of the Grand Slam, one of the big four tournaments in tennis.
And the New York Times asks, and you may show my screen, why are so many players getting sick at the U.S.
Open?
Just a few bits from this.
So many people sick, but largely it's not being attributed to COVID.
And the New York Times is kind of going like, oh, we don't know.
Well, you're not required to get vaccinated anymore.
So maybe, as if that would have prevented it from being there, but you're also not required to be tested.
So how would we know?
Well, not that the tests are any good anyway, but it seems odd.
That they are almost like pretending that you wouldn't be able to tell.
Um, when for so long, for a couple of years, it was all about for sure, anytime anyone is sick, it's definitely COVID, even though, yeah, you kind of actually can't tell.
So here we have, um, you know, just a number of people sick.
It's not just players.
The ESPN commentator John McEnroe said on Tuesday that he had, he, see, he's the one person in the story who actually tested positive for the coronavirus after feeling unwell.
But again, the tests are unreliable in both directions.
It is unclear whether all of the players have the same illness or whether their cases are connected, but something has been going around the U.S.
Open.
Well, that sentence alone is incoherent, because if something is going around the U.S.
Open, it's connected.
And if it's some things, if, you know, it's also extraordinarily unlikely that, unlike any past year, a whole lot of players are getting very sick, sick enough to have to stop matches, that it's completely unrelated.
They're all independent cases.
Like, you know, that doesn't seem It just seems like a contagious disease.
It seems to be behaving like a contagious disease.
Exactly.
I would point out...
And I would love to have the retrospective data on this, the pre-COVID data.
But one of the things that seems to be true is that there's a lot of out-of-season illness.
Now, of course, summer colds were always a thing.
Right.
But this is worse than a cold here.
Yeah.
And so anyway, there is a question about, you know, what What was in Pandora's box that they released?
What is the effect of this?
And how much of it is them trying to spook us by, as they obviously did, utilizing lots of phenomena that weren't COVID and lumping them in with COVID deaths and all of this?
So what game are they playing now?
That's what I'm wondering.
Okay, so the game has changed.
What game is it now, guys?
What are you up to?
What's the point now?
What is the job that you are trying to finish?
New York Times.
So here's just a couple more things from this article in the New York Times.
Illnesses are possible at any tournament where players are often in close quarters and share facilities.
But with players no longer required to test for COVID-19, it is difficult to determine the cause of the illnesses among them.
Again, like, testing for COVID-19, if we actually had good tests, even if they did that, unless it was positive, you still wouldn't have any more information about what else they might have.
But they're also not good tests.
And by the way, why not?
Like, why do we still not have good tests?
That's a question.
Health protocols at the U.S.
Open have become less stringent since 2020, when spectators were not allowed to attend the tournament and when players took to the empty courts in face masks.
Stringent is one word for it.
Insane is another, right?
Like, you had elite athletes playing in face masks across a frickin' tennis court from one another with no one in the stands?
Well, it did mean they could grumble at each other without violating any rules of etiquette.
Good lord.
When fans were allowed to return in 2021, they were required to show proof of vaccination against the coronavirus.
Yes, they were.
That requirement has since been dropped, and those attending the U.S.
Open this year do not need to show proof of vaccination, provide a negative coronavirus test, or wear masks.
And then this young woman, Jabour, I'm not totally sure, Anz Jabour, uh who was seated like five or something um got really really sick she says i'm taking a lot of medicine she said adding that she basically took every medication the u.s open doctors have great good for her why isn't she getting well when she's taking all the medicine the doctors recommend yeah jeez i wonder what it is how does she get to be an elite athlete doing that i'm a zombie because i have a flu
So this whole thing just feels like yet another, well, PSYOP.
Honestly, like, you know, that sounds, we got one person, you know, one of the most famous people at the tournament, who's now a commentator, John McEnroe, having actually tested positive and having all the symptoms that we are told are currently associated with the current brand of COVID that we have been sold.
And yet these other people are assured that they have the flu.
We're walking like, I just, How is anyone continuing to believe any of the stories from these people?
Well, I want to go back to the conspicuous fact of us not having reliable tests.
Right.
The fact that the tests have not gotten substantially better over time is conspicuous.
Yeah.
And the degree to which the people playing this game have been interested in Creating narratives that were not supported by evidence but were very difficult to fight because it wasn't like you could say here's the evidence and it doesn't match your story because the evidence was confused by all this noise.
So in other words, is it possible That really noisy COVID tests are a feature and not a bug because it allows you to claim anything at any moment.
I do think, I have a sense of foreboding around the upcoming 14 months that the U.S.
presidential election is going to create a fertile landscape for psychological operations of many kinds.
We're going to have many claims of misdisc and malinformation over presumably true things will be dismissed, false things will be portrayed, all of the usual stuff, and The ability to have a viral boogeyman that you can call forth at any moment by declaring that some set of illness is this thing may be the reason that the tests aren't any good.
Because if we, you know, if you could just simply go to CVS and buy a test that was reliable enough that, you know, it really gave you a confidence that you either did or didn't have the thing, then we'd be in a very different place because we would actually be able to generate information about what is or isn't circulating.
That's right.
So, in unrelated news, Novak Djokovic is playing.
He's seeded two, interestingly, not one.
He's wiping the floor with his opponents.
There's lots of people who aren't sick at the U.S.
Open.
He's not the only one.
But he, of course, is famously unvaccinated, was not allowed to play in earlier U.S.
Open.
And Australians, I think, captured him and had him in one of their little They quarantined him.
Despite being well.
Despite being well.
So well, in fact, that he refused to take an experimental treatment for a disease which, if he got, he would be very likely to fend off because of his youth and vigor.
Yes, and the treatment would be very likely, or too likely, to rob him of his elite athletic status by virtue of a mechanism that we will talk about a little later in the podcast.
Not surprising that he's continuing to wipe the floor with his opponents, but, uh, yes?
It is a little surprising to me, because we have known since early in the pandemic that wiping the floor doesn't help since this is not transmitted by fomite.
Okay.
I thought that was a pretty good joke.
No, I don't, I don't think so.
Oh.
Um.
Alright, well.
So the world— An attempt was made, as the kids say.
The World Socialist website has an opinion about what's happening at the U.S.
Open as well.
U.S.
Open tennis players fall by the wayside as COVID surges.
This is The first paragraph is amazing, and I'm just going to read the first paragraph and then the final paragraph of this piece from the World Socialist website.
This year's U.S.
Open Tennis Tournament in New York City has been plagued by what is being euphemistically referred to as a mysterious illness and what, in fact, is all the hallmarks of a COVID-19 super spreader event.
A number of top players have had to pull out of the tournament or have struggled to play due to COVID-like symptoms including respiratory and gastrointestinal ailments.
Actually, one more paragraph here.
The spate of tennis players getting sick takes place under conditions where the United States Tennis Association and the U.S.
Open organizers have dismantled all anti-COVID safety measures in the midst of a new global surge of the pandemic.
This is the first hidden surge of the pandemic since the World Health Organization and the Biden administration Ended their COVID-19 public health emergency declarations in early May, which cleared the path for the scrapping of all pandemic surveillance and public health measures globally.
Just check out the language there, right?
The scrapping of all pandemic surveillance.
The scrapping of surveillance!
How dare they scrap the surveillance!
How dare they scrap the scrappy surveillance that didn't work worth a scrap in the first place.
Amazing, right?
And so, like, this piece is long and remarkable and I'll link to it in the show notes and all, but here, here is the final paragraph.
More fundamentally, the criminal cover-up of the pandemic and the unchecked spread of COVID-19 must be opposed with a socialist public health program, in diametric opposition to the monstrosity unfolding at the U.S.
Open, What is required is a powerful mass movement of the international working class in unity with public health workers and scientists to force the implementation of a global elimination strategy to stop all human to human transmission of COVID-19 throughout the world.
Oh, man.
This was written now.
Yeah.
This week, this is the US Open happening right now.
This is the World Socialist saying, what is required is to force the implementation of a global elimination strategy.
It is almost a perfect description of how a Marxist would think about this.
Like, independent of the biology, the implausibility of what it is they're proposing, force must be used to get us to unite around doing away with this virus that we're going to be stuck with for the rest of eternity, right?
I mean, it's, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need, and if we have to lock you in your houses and get your neighbors to rat on you in order to make it happen, then so be it.
I mean, right?
Totally!
Communism in a nutshell.
It's amazing!
They're not even communists, they're socialists!
I'm just shocked that anyone puts this in writing.
Throughout the world, the vast majority of the population can no longer receive free or affordable COVID-19 testing.
Treatments like Pax Lovid and even vaccines will soon only be available at marked-up prices.
Who are these people?
They're like commies in bed with pharma?
Yeah, pharma commies!
They're pharma commies, what the hell?
It's nuts.
It's totally nuts.
And I don't know, I guess just that.
It's totally nuts that they would put that up and apparently have no sense of irony or embarrassment.
Yeah.
Workers of the world unite around not getting taken for a ride by this shit anymore.
I mean, you know, we wake up... Workers of the world unite!
Yeah, I mean, this is just obvious, right?
They're on the wrong side of history and they can't figure it out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One more thing before we go into what you wanted to talk about.
The connection is just tennis, but it's not about COVID.
It's that Martina Navratilova has who, you know, another contemporary of John McEnroe, although of course they didn't play against one another because neither of them pretended to be the sex that they were not.
And that wasn't really that allowed then anyway, although there was One such case in the 70s or 80s when both of them were playing.
She has been speaking out against men playing in women's sports and she has written a piece now published at Genspect, which is a fantastic organization that is having a conference in November that I will be at.
Uh, in, in Denver.
Uh, and this was published last, uh, end of August, five years later, what I've learned about women and men in sports.
And there's a, there's a lot of good here, right?
She is standing up for, um, for, for women to be able to play against women in sports.
And she says among, in, in part of her argument, um, Serena Williams made the same basic point when Grand Slam champion Andy Murray challenged her to an exhibition match in 2013.
She refused, explaining to David Letterman, Andy Murray has been joking about me and him playing a match.
I'm like, Andy, seriously, are you kidding me?
If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose 6-0, 6-0.
The men are a lot faster and they serve harder, they hit harder.
It's just a different game.
I'm going to skip that one for a moment and then Navratilova writes, the female category was created to provide opportunities for women to compete fairly.
It was always intended to exclude males.
We need to keep excluding them.
And this is, like, she just says it so clearly and simply and, you know, it's one thing to put aside whether or not I or you think that this has gotten out of control and may not be what we were sold at all.
But it's quite one thing to say, I feel I'm a man but I feel more like a woman and I'm going to dress that way and I'd love it if you were to address me that way.
Put aside what that might mean for that person and society.
Anyone pretending that putting on the costume of makes you the thing is just doing that pretending, and this is being used to erode Women's sports is the piece that matters the least, right?
It just does.
I care about women's sports.
A lot of people do, but it matters the least, but it's the most obvious place because everyone can see.
Everyone who is physically active at all and has ever engaged in any kind of athletic competition understands that men and women are different and are going to be differently capable over in the athletic realm.
So there's one thing in here that Navratilova wrote that I sort of threw an error at, and I wanted to point this out because it goes into the giant rabbit hole of what is actually Title IX and what does it promise.
So she writes, The promise of Title IX has not been realized 51 years after its inception.
According to a report by the Women's Sports Foundation, high school girls enjoy 1.1 million fewer sports opportunities than boys do, and college women enjoy 80,000 fewer opportunities than men.
Champion Women Incorporated has found that women lose out on $1.1 billion in college scholarship dollars alone, not to mention inequities in sponsorships and media coverage.
I want to focus on the statistics that she's pulling from the Women's Sports Foundation report, which I've got here too, and I've skimmed.
But the particular statistics that Navratilova is pointing out here, as evidence that the promise of Title IX has not been realized, is that, quote, high school girls enjoy 1.1 million fewer sports opportunities than boys do, and college women enjoy 80,000 fewer opportunities than men.
This is not evidence that Title IX has failed.
This is not evidence that women are being treated unfairly.
This is not evidence that there is bias against women in sport.
It can be true, and it can also be true, and I'm not saying that we've gotten there, but this is not evidence of bias because it is quite possible, and I would argue incredibly likely, that men are far more likely to be interested in engaging in competitive athletic sports than are women.
And unless what you are arguing is that men and women have to be exactly the same, with exactly the same interests and the same outcomes, and only then shall we have achieved equality – and of course that's not equality, that's equity – That's a ridiculous desire.
And I went looking to see, is that actually what Title IX is shooting for?
Because I thought that Title IX, I've seen Title IX be weaponized for a long time now, right?
But I never thought that what it was trying to do was get equal numbers of male and female athletes.
Yeah.
Because that's a stupid goal, right?
So what I find is, and sorry I have to pull it up, it's going to take me a moment here, what I find is in this report that Navratilova is citing, this little graphic, Title IX's three-part test of gender equity and athletic participation opportunities.
And this, I find, is an actually accurate portrayal of what Title IX Offers.
This is a three-part test in which institutions that meet any of these are found to be in compliance with Title IX.
Part 1.
Substantial proportionality.
Athletic participation opportunities for girls or women and boy or men athletes are offered at rates proportional to their enrollment.
Okay, that's the one.
That's the one that we just heard Navratilova trot out those statistics.
Well, You don't have, you know, at this point we've got like 60-40 women to men on many college campuses, right?
So we need to have 60% of the athletes be women.
That's a stupid goal, and that is one of the ways that institutions could be found to be in compliance with Title IX, but it's only one.
Or, number two, history and continuing practice of program expansion.
Offerings in the athletic program have kept pace with increasing numbers of girls and women athletes.
Cool.
Less operational, like it's less easy to see exactly what the metric is, but that sounds right.
That sounds like, yeah, okay, if there are women who are trying to play sports, there should be the offerings for them.
To me, that's what Title IX was about.
Or, full and effective accommodation.
The existing menu of teams offered satisfies the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex.
So, two interesting things here.
First of all, that seems like the broadest, most doable, and most actually honorable goal of Title IX.
If there are, you know, if in the early 70s there were a bunch of girls in high school who really wanted to play soccer and the response was girls don't play soccer, Title IX came to be in part to help that to not be the response.
Actually, we want to play soccer and if we want to play soccer and you've got a boys soccer team, you've got to put some resources towards girls being able to play soccer too at the high school level or at the college level as well.
But the other thing that's interesting here is that it doesn't say the existing menu of teams offered satisfies the interests and abilities of girls and women.
It says of the underrepresented sex.
So there may be some sports that are historically female-dominated, and Title IX actually requires that if boys and men start becoming interested in some such sports, that there be a movement to accommodate their interests as well.
And, you know, this is also, you know, people who don't understand populations or teams might get confused by the fact that, like, oh, well, we can just find one person at some school, one girl who wants to play basketball, and the fact that there's no women's basketball team means that they're not in compliance with Title IX.
Like, you know what?
One person does not make a basketball team.
I don't know how many you need.
Eight, maybe?
I mean, I know five people are on the court at a time, but to make a team you probably need seven or eight, something like that.
It's probably usually on a deeper bench than that.
But one person saying, oh god, Title IX has failed because I don't get to do what I want to do.
It's like, well, if what you want to do is a team sport and no one else wants to play with you, that's not about Title IX and the government should have no say in forcing a bunch of other girls or women to play with you because you have a desire.
And frankly, this feels like, in microcosm, the entire insanity going on on the left with regard to, like, if I want to do this thing, I'm going to throw a fit until I get someone from the government to come make sure that I get what I want.
And not only that, but the reason that there aren't others like me who want to do this thing is obviously evidence of the patriarchy.
Bias, discrimination, racism, sexism, everything.
Where, you know, it is not unlikely that, for example, girls are less interested in playing football.
Right?
And I don't, like, I wanted to and I didn't have time to like, okay, are there any women's football teams?
Or do women just not play football?
Right?
Um, yeah, I mean, I don't know.
And it's obviously a self-reinforcing pattern because to the extent that it isn't on television and that there aren't lots of programs means that girls who might be interested in exploring it don't end up doing it.
But I think it is pretty clear that at least if you took a static snapshot that the interest by girls and women in playing football is going to be lower.
Well, I mean, I mean, football is a good example, right?
I mean, these are war games.
Yeah.
This is the Olympics.
This is for show that we have a ready force that can engage in competition for play, such that at some moment that we are called upon to do so, we will have ready warriors.
And there are a few... And women don't engage in war games!
Right.
And they don't engage in war in virtually any culture at virtually any time.
One because of the other.
Right.
And, you know, this particular game is one that actually, not for every single player, but at least across a team, does reward the very things that distinguish men and women So differently, right?
The weight and strength advantage is a primary player in football, whereas, you know, agility can compensate for it to an extent on a basketball court, and I don't know, I assume women's basketball has a different basket height, so you can just simply neutralize the distinction between... I don't know.
Zach knows.
Don't know the answer to that, but I know that professional women's basketball is famously boring to watch, so I think it may not be lowered to make it...
Famously boring, isn't it?
I think it may be the same game that is not very well suited to women's bodies.
Not an informed comment.
I'm going to bet from an uninformed position that the basket is lowered to a different standard, but in any case.
One more thing.
I didn't want to put you on the spot.
I am having trouble remembering, and I'm embarrassed, which player I can't remember, but the famous match between Bobby Riggs and Billie Jean King.
That's who it was.
Yeah.
Why does that never come up in the arguments over the difference between males and females in sport?
Yeah, I mean, I think it does some, and I think the old guard mostly is just rolling their eyes and hoping it will go away, right?
I think no one who's not paying close attention to the trans ideology madness actually can believe that it is, has gotten as far as it has.
Yeah.
And, and some people, and I think, I think Navratilova started out here, frankly, sees one thing and goes like, Oh, well, that can't, that can't be the case.
And then finds herself dragged.
I think she got dragged by that, that trans bicyclist.
I don't remember which one.
There's so many of them now.
And she went looking and she got told to educate herself.
She's like, okay, I'll go educate myself.
I am only one of the best female tennis players of all time, but okay, I'll go educate myself.
And also, out early as a lesbian, before that was easy at all or common at all.
So she's been through all of these ringers that should be relevant here, and she went and educated herself and went like, yeah, no, men shouldn't be playing in women's sports.
I am pretty sure that's obvious to everyone.
And I think she, like anyone who goes deep I was like, whoa!
I can't believe we're here!
But most people are just like, oh, not my thing.
Not my story.
I don't know.
I'm sure there's truth on both sides.
I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Well, no.
The truth is not always somewhere in the middle.
Not when you've got an antagonist that is so powerful and so insane that they move their position completely off the playing field.
Yeah, and you can always tell who it is because the point is they destroy the possibility of having a nuanced perspective.
They destroy the middle specifically so that we have an argument that can't be resolved.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, I think I'm done.
All right.
Well, I wanted to talk about something, and I'll present sort of the general version of it.
But far too often in the modern sense-making landscape, I think that there is just a missing layer.
And I'll start by quoting my friend Steve Patterson, who has been on the Dark Horse podcast.
Who once said that philosophy is where it's at, philosophers aren't.
Which I think is really insightful, and I will say it echoes my own annoyance at the fact that we train people in philosophy, presumably lots of them.
We as a society invest in this.
And yet, they are nowhere adjudicating debates over evidence.
We have claims and counterclaims about global climate change, about COVID, about treatments, about origins, all these things.
That is the right place for philosophers who are actually good at figuring out how to take irreconcilable bodies of evidence and reconcile them so that we can at least Proceed in a rational way relative to the signal that we can extract from the noise.
You're looking for applied philosophers.
Right!
I think we should be drafting them.
It should not be up to... I'm sure they're underemployed.
Well, I think what they have... Or do they not exist anymore because they have not been trained to actually do philosophy?
I think there is a grand error, just sort of a standard academic error, where philosophers who, most of the time, when there's nothing to talk about, end up finding what to talk to each other about.
And then they come to think that that's their job, is talking to other philosophers, rather than adjudicating the really important stuff of the day, which would be a perfect place for them to say, here's how you deal with this claim and this counterclaim, right?
And that would be a fascinating thing.
How many of us would not benefit from seeing somebody who was not a climate scientist Come in and say, okay, let me ask you some questions about that claim you are making, and let's see whether it stands up based on, you know, frankly, a lot of ancient wisdom about the nature of facts.
So, philosophy is where it's at.
Philosophers are not, because the philosophers are too busy talking to each other to help the rest of us out, which is what they should be doing, which is presumably the reason we initially subsidized the existence of these fields in the first place.
That said, what I think is missing are some basic pieces of the puzzle about assumptions, about presumption, about burdens of proof, about thresholds of proof, and that these are things that, you know, in a court of law, these things are all thoroughly well understood because they have to be, right?
Who has the burden of proof?
Well, if you've been accused of a crime, the state has the burden of proof.
Right?
You could, in theory, say nothing.
And if the state cannot make a compelling case that you committed the crime, you walk free.
You know, what constitutes evidence?
The idea that, for example, if the state has violated your right to privacy and it has discovered that you, you know, let's say it discovers a letter that you have written acknowledging that you committed a crime and describing some of the details, That it is not only not allowed to enter that letter into evidence against you because it cheated to get it, it cheated and violated an important right of yours, but it is not allowed to proceed from fruit of the poisonous tree.
That is to say, it cannot go back to the letter and say, well, okay, we can't use the letter, but what did we learn from the letter that we could use?
Actually, everything downstream of it is poisoned.
So, these kinds of things are dealt with in a formal context.
In court, but we out here in public trying to figure out what to think about what we're being told are not benefiting from the fact that these things are actually well worked out.
So just to repeat, I said slightly flippantly you were looking for there to be applied philosophers, and you're now arguing that actually law is applied philosophy at a very formal level, but that we need effectively informal applied philosophy in our
in our daily lives, and I would point out too that actually the, you know, all of the degrees that people get, which then allows them to be teaching undergraduates at university, almost all of them, are in fact doctors of philosophy.
And while you might have a PhD in biology, for instance, as we do, or a PhD in art history, or a PhD in chemistry, or any number of other things, All of those are supposed to be doctors of philosophy and whereas our program, our mentors, actually took that very very seriously and we were we were effectively trained in the philosophy of science throughout our graduate work.
When I have said that to other people with PhDs, when I have said, well, you know, we are supposed to be engaging in philosophical inquiry, I have received everything from quizzical looks to outright laughter.
Yeah.
They really cannot imagine what the philosophy part of the Doctor of Philosophy is doing there.
Yeah, and because they have seen only bastardizations of it, or abstractions that are so remote they couldn't possibly be useful, they do not understand what role it plays when life and limb are on the line.
And I would say that actually one group, a group I'm pretty angry at at the moment, but one group has actually distinguished itself in this regard in recent history.
And that's the rationalists the rationalists because of their relationship with Bayesian analysis.
have actually formalized a branch of this.
And if properly applied, it is very, very useful.
I'm angry at them in large measure because they didn't understand that there was a line that if they crossed it, it was going to ruin their Bayesian analysis.
And I think the effective altruism movement did not understand that it was saying something painfully naive and trying to take rationalism into an operationalizable position.
In other words, I want the philosophers to tell us how to think about stuff.
I don't want an army of philosophers remaking society.
Once we know how things should be understood, then others are probably better at figuring out what to do about it.
But in any case, And frankly, the absurdity of the way the rationalists screwed up COVID despite a tremendous amount of evidence that they should have processed properly is a stunning failure.
Yep.
You know, hopefully they will, instead of doubling down, they will wise up and recover from that.
But in any case, so I wanted to point to the question of when should Something like silence actually alter what you think is likely going on.
And I was spurred to think about this because of a happy accident, a confluence of a couple things that happened close together in time that I know to have been unrelated because I was involved in one of them.
So many of the viewers of this live stream will have seen the episode that I did with Jeremy Riss and Michael Shermer, and that is an episode that's very good because we all agree on the objective of analytic work being discovering what is true, and we have arrived at different conclusions about what might be true, and
Anyway, it's an interesting discussion.
I strongly recommend people watch it.
Zach, do you have a clip?
I want to show a clip from a particular segment in which, for longtime viewers of the podcast, you will have heard me describe a mechanism that I claim makes any mRNA platform vaccine dangerous because it ...will induce cells to produce a foreign antigen which cannot help but trigger the immune system to react to those cells as if they are infected by a virus, which they are not.
and destroy them, which will then do damage to whatever organ was doing the translating of that protein.
Okay, so here is my exchange after having explained that.
If the vaccine, the so-called vaccine, stayed in your deltoid when they injected it, then the answer is, well, the cells that will be attacked by your immune system are in your arm and you can afford to lose them.
Once we knew that the vaccine circulated around the body, it should be clear to anyone who understands how immunity develops that this is going to cause an autoimmune disorder in any tissue that transcribes it.
And if that tissue happens to be your heart, it's going to be a devastating problem.
So, how Paul Offit doesn't know that?
I think Paul Offit has to know that.
How did the other people who signed off on this not know it?
I don't know.
He's not here.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
It's like, you know, you float this hypothesis, Jeremy and I, this is not what we do, so I don't even know how to, you know, how is it possible?
Not just Paul Offit, you know, it's like thousands of scientists would have to be either just delusional or bought off or... Perfect.
Perfect.
So here's what we've got.
You can't evaluate what I said, nor should you be able to.
You're not a biologist.
Here's what you can know, though.
I have just staked my reputation on a claim about how the immune system works and how the vaccine, as described by those who designed it, should work.
If I'm wrong, you, Michael Shermer, are sitting here, and there should be a flood of biologists ready to explain what I've got wrong.
And when that flood of biologists doesn't show up, you should ask yourself the question, why is that?
If Paul Offit is right and Brett Weinstein is wrong, why is nobody pointing out the reason?
Well, did you invite them on your show to talk about it?
It doesn't matter.
You can invite them.
I'll invite them.
Show me who knows the answer to the question.
And I'll be happy to talk to him.
Maybe I'll host an episode of the Michael Shermer Show with you and whoever.
I would love that.
If you want to bring Paul Offit on.
Who's the guy that Rogan wanted to have back on?
Peter Hotez.
Alright, so philosophically I think this is an interesting predicament because Michael is having the correct reaction.
What you, Brett, are saying can't possibly be right.
That there is an obvious reason based on simple immunobiology that invalidates the mRNA platform because it will trigger an autoimmune disorder.
If that were true, Surely other people would know about it.
We wouldn't be deploying these things, much less continuing to re-up boosters and planning to put other vaccines that weren't mRNA-based onto the mRNA platform.
That seems shocking to him, that such a thing could possibly be true, therefore the most likely— There's a level at which a fringe belief doesn't warrant being taken seriously, because it's too fringe, it's too far outside, there's too few people saying it, I don't have time to deal with all the fringe stuff that comes my way, not this one, not this time, no thank you, Brett.
Right.
So as a non-expert, his conclusion is, that just doesn't sound like that could be right, because if that were true, what else would that imply?
And my point is, well, Strange as it may sound, Michael, that is exactly what's going on here.
It's not the first time that I've described this mechanism.
He asked me, he says, what do people say in response?
And I said, I've never heard a credible response.
Now that may sound even more incredible to him.
What are the chances that there's not, even if it's wrong, that there isn't something that people say?
But that question is exactly the right one.
What do people say in response?
And when the answer that comes back, and this is not your first rodeo on this one, when the answer that comes back is, I can't get a response.
Now again, there will be some cases where people are Talking such craziness that they just don't warrant a response, right?
And it can be hard for a non-expert who doesn't feel like they can assess the evidence to tell the difference.
But When you have, it's not just you and me making these arguments.
You are specifically making a very precise argument here.
But writ large, there are a lot of people who are arguing that the mRNA platform is actually the opposite of safe and effective, right?
Or the opposite of safe.
And you're not just one guy.
Even if you were just one guy, You have a track record that is proven and therefore should be given a little bit more credibility going into the question.
Even more than that, I would say.
You and I were constantly berated during COVID for the fact that with the platform that we had, that our speaking about the dangers of the vaccines was irresponsible because people might believe us and if they did it might put them in harm's way.
So whatever else might be true, the fact that we have a platform that you're willing to tell us that we have an obligation to shut up because people might listen, If I'm saying nonsense about the nature of the immunobiology here, then somebody should come and say, politely perhaps, this is not true and here is why.
And the fact that that message never comes tells you something.
And in fact, I'm reminded No, and it's such a precise scientific argument.
It wouldn't take much for anyone to dismantle if it was dismantleable.
Right, right.
And so I was reminded that many years ago Ralph Nader came to Evergreen and I had not been able to reach him.
I wanted to talk to him about the telomere work and the implications for the mice because I thought it was right up his alley.
And I tracked him down backstage.
Of course you did.
Of course I did.
I tracked him down backstage and I said, Mr. Nader, I have a story I want to tell you.
I've wanted to tell it to you for a long time.
And he said, okay.
And I did my best 12-minute version of the story.
And he asked me one question.
He said, "Was the response that you got back dismissal or silence?" I said it was mostly science.
And he says, "Okay, that's how I know your story's probably right." Because that's how they do it.
So anyway, interesting anecdote that he would have seen that.
But here's my point.
It's important.
Yeah, it's an important situation.
But here's what I did not realize.
I think I recorded that podcast on the 28th.
With Michael and Jeremy.
With Michael and Jeremy Riss.
And what I only found out yesterday is that John Campbell had done another in his series of podcasts one day prior.
Okay.
And in that he describes the exact mechanism that I have been describing.
He describes it, I think it's almost Identical except that he uses the term lymphocyte, whereas he says cytotoxic, and I say killer T cell and natural killer cell, but the mechanism he describes is unmistakably the same mechanism.
Am I right we cannot show it, Zach?
Okay, but interestingly, not only does he go through the same line of logic for what must be true if the mRNA vaccines do not stay in the deltoid, as we know that they do not, where he says, look, they, you know, the lipids on the surface of the cells will have a chemical affinity for lipid nanoparticles, which means that any cell that these things encounter You can take them up and can translate them into protein, at which point the immune system will attack the cell and destroy it.
If that happens in your heart, that would be myocarditis.
Exactly the argument I've laid out.
And he says he reaches the same conclusion.
He says not only is this a devastating danger for these vaccines, but it will be a devastating danger for any mRNA platform vaccine, which is what I have also been saying.
So What I'm thinking is now, you know, I didn't know that John Campbell was going to do an episode on this, but now Michael Shermer has another data point where not only am I saying things that he can't check, but if they're true, suggest a campaign of silence over an obvious design flaw of the mRNA vaccines, but now he's got John Campbell independently saying the identical thing.
So now Michael should start to think what would have to be true that nobody is telling these two guys that they've got it wrong?
Okay, now, you know, let's add Peter McCullough to the list, because Peter McCullough has made a similar argument.
What would have to be true for nobody to be telling Peter McCullough that he's got it wrong?
Okay, we can add Marc Girardot to that list.
Why is nobody telling him that he's got it wrong?
Andrew Wakefield.
Why is nobody... So, at some point, you've got enough people coming from enough different places spotting the same design flaw that, frankly, Clearly implies no vaccine could be put on this platform until a targeting mechanism is designed and that could be decades away.
Yeah, something that is capable of targeting a tissue that you can afford to lose.
Well, and I would love to talk to John Campbell about this, because he says a couple of things in his description where he and I might slightly differ about the implications.
And anyway, it would be great to talk that out.
A live virus vaccine has this defect, but it does have targeting.
Because you're using a live virus, it's not going to go into every patient.
The virus comes pre-targeted.
Right, the virus is pre-targeted, and so the point is you could get a cost-benefit analysis that makes that a viable platform, whereas there is no rescuing this platform until you have a targeting mechanism, and I have not heard thing one about how you would target it.
What's more, they just vaccinated billions of people with one that wasn't targeted, and lo and behold, myocarditis showed up, and nobody can figure it out.
I mean, in fact, John Campbell's video was in response to Pfizer having been asked if they knew why it caused myocarditis by the Australian Congress and they failed in real time to say anything coherent.
They just spouted boilerplate nonsense and at the end of their boilerplate nonsense they promised to look into the matter and get back to them with an answer to the question And John Campbell goes through the answer and there's no answer in it, shockingly enough.
So the question is, does Pfizer know what the rest of us know?
And it's deploying these things anyway, or does it somehow not know?
In which case, how did it miss something so basic?
This I don't know.
Yeah.
So what we need is philosophers to grab some people by the lapels and get them to respond to the evidence the way they should.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, to bring it full circle to where you started, there needs to be like a system of keeping track of actually, I made this claim.
And if it is wrong, you should want me to know that.
I want to know it.
This is of importance in this particular case, the entire world.
And it would be easy to dismantle if it's not true.
So, the next time this comes up, the response can't once again be, but that can't be the case.
Lots of credentialed people don't think that's the case.
Every time it comes up and you want to respond with, but look at how many people think you're wrong, People have to start keeping track, and this is I think where you're arguing the philosophy comes in, like you have to start keeping track.
But if there are so many people who believe I'm wrong and actually believe that from first principles as opposed to they've been told to believe that by God Pfizer or whatever, then tell me how I'm wrong.
And, you know, it feels like the failure to respond is almost like this extraordinarily juvenile woke move of like, it's not my job to educate you.
I'm so exhausted.
Like, I can't do it.
You know what?
It's science.
And it's your obligation to actually come up with an explanation for why your damn product is causing these grievous problems in people.
And there is a plausible hypothesis on the table that no one is attempting to falsify.
That is what science does.
It attempts to falsify hypotheses.
Here it is.
All of those people who think that Pfizer knows what it's doing and the platform is great, Respond to this.
It's your obligation to respond to this.
It's your obligation to respond, and when you don't, the natural conclusion, you've got an empirical observation of a kind of damage that is dire, you've got young healthy people having damage to their hearts, damage to their hearts that in many of their cases compromises them in the short term, in many of the other cases we should expect it to compromise them in the long term.
If this was an honest system in any regard, if Pfizer, for example, was a company that was actually interested in improving human health, then its discovery that there might be something wrong with its product that was causing young people who had a long life ahead of them not to have a long life ahead of them, that would cause it to be very interested in this question.
And when you discover that it is not at all interested, that not only can it not be asked in real time by Australians to explain how myocarditis is being produced, but even when it submits a written response later, it's completely empty.
A total disinterest in answering that question says, at the very least, that this company is indifferent to the deaths that it is causing.
It may be that it thinks there's a cost-benefit analysis in which it thinks it's saving more people than it's hurting.
But if you were saving more people than you were hurting, you wouldn't be indifferent to the ones you were hurting.
And especially when there's an age stratification to be done that would save most of those young people.
So the fact that it doesn't respond in the way that a normal person would at discovering something surprising suggests that maybe it's not surprised at all.
Maybe it knew this and it's just fine with it.
I think that's right.
All right.
I think we've arrived.
I think we are there.
We're going to take a break and then we'll be back with a Q&A on Rumble only, right?
And the chat will be, the watch party will be on Locals only.
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And, of course, you can find us all sorts of other places as well, but we would really love to direct you to Rumble and to Locals, where, again, we've got watch parties for our livestreams, we're releasing guest episodes a day early on Locals, we've got our monthly private Q&A on Locals now, and Discord is coming soon, so please, please join us there.
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