All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 10, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:37
The Truth About the Coronavirus - COLLAPSE?!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This is Stefan Molyneux from FreeDomain.com.
I'm going to put forward some hypotheses in this presentation that may be shocking to you, but I will give the sources below and I will tell you why I am making these connections.
This is the truth about the coronavirus.
Collapse, worst case scenario, often in the short run, ends up being not the worst case scenario in the long run.
Let's start with the facts.
This is as of February the 10th, 2020 coronavirus cases confirmed 40,655, and I will tell you shortly why we can't really trust these numbers.
As far as the deaths go, 910 recovered 3,669.
And if we look at total cases on the bottom left here, we can see there's been a slight flattening of the increase, although the increase is still considerably high.
The total deaths on the right here, well, Potential, exponential, we could still be at the beginning of a steepening curve and probably are.
Okay, let's talk about the Canadian connection.
I touched on this in previous presentations.
This is from the National Post, a national newspaper, of course, in Canada.
And this is from August 2019.
Biowarfare experts question why Canada was sending lethal viruses to China.
An expert said, I think the Chinese activities are highly suspicious.
After it was revealed, a Winnipeg lab sent samples of Ebola and Hennepa virus to China.
This is the article.
In a tabletop pandemic exercise at Johns Hopkins University last year, a pathogen based on the emerging Nipah virus was released by fictional extremists killing 150 million people.
A less apocalyptic scenario mapped out by a blue ribbon US panel envisioned Nipah being dispersed by terrorists and claiming over 6,000 American lives.
Scientists from Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory have also said the highly lethal bug is a potential bioweapon.
But this March, that same lab shipped samples of the Hennepa virus family and of Ebola to China, which has long been suspected of running a secretive biological warfare program.
Huh. China strongly denies it makes germ weapons, and Canadian officials say the shipment was part of its efforts to support public health research worldwide.
Sharing of such samples internationally is a relatively standard practice.
But some experts are raising questions about the March transfer, which appears to be at the center of a shadowy RCMP investigation and dismissal, of a top scientist at the Winnipeg-based NML. I would say this Canadian, quote, contribution might likely be counterproductive, says Danny Shoman, a biological and chemical warfare expert at Israel's Bar-Elan University.
I think the Chinese activities are highly suspicious in terms of exploring at least those viruses as biological weapon agents.
James Giordano, a neurology professor at Georgetown University and senior fellow in biowarfare at the U.S. Special Operations Command said it's worrisome on a few fronts.
China's growing investment in bioscience, looser ethics around gene editing and other cutting-edge technology, and integration between government and academia raised a specter of such pathogens being weaponized, he said.
That could mean an offensive agent or a modified germ let loose by proxies for which only China has the treatment or vaccine, said Giordano, co-head of Georgetown's Brain Science and Global Law and Policy Program.
Asked if the possibility of the Canadian germs being diverted into a Chinese weapons program is connected to other upheavals at the Microbiology Lab, Public Health Agency of Canada spokeswoman Anna Madison said this week the agency, quote, continues to look into the administrative matter.
That's not a denial. That's not a, what, are you crazy?
Of course not! That would be mad!
How horrifying! How horrible!
No way! No how!
So, that seems important.
And this, of course, I talked about this before, an acclaimed NML scientist was reportedly escorted out of the lab along with her husband and other biologists and members of her research team.
The agency said it was investigating an administrative issue and had referred a possible policy breach to the RCMP. Little more has been said about the affair.
So that is...
That's not good.
So you've got a Chinese woman and her husband working in this...
Lab. And she's ghosted.
She's vanished. And people in the lab are told not to contact her.
Her computer was seized.
Escorted out of the lab with her husband.
And, you know, it's a great way to clear all this up.
Just release all of the files the RCMP had about what they were investigating and why.
This is not an administrative issue, for heaven's sakes.
An administrative issue is you're dating the wrong person in the lab.
They don't involve the RCMP in that.
So just tell people what's going on.
You know, it's kind of tough, got to be honest with you.
It's kind of tough to hire people whose family is embedded in a totalitarian regime like China, because even if they are wonderful people and good-hearted people and they love the West, their family is still vulnerable to pressure from said totalitarian government, i.e. China. So it's a little tricky to figure out where practical loyalties lie, even if they have, as I said, the best of intentions and love the West.
They can receive a lot of pressure from the Chinese government regarding their family.
So, that is a big challenge.
This is from the article. China's extensive and controversial use of CRISPR gene editing and related technology makes it conceivable the country could bioengineer germs like NYPA to make them even more dangerous.
Well, that seems relevant.
So, The guy who was in charge of this lab just a couple days ago died.
This is from CBC. Renowned Canadian scientist Frank Plummer dies in Kenya where he led HIV breakthroughs.
World-renowned scientist Dr.
Frank Plummer of Winnipeg Has died.
Plummer, 67, was in Kenya, where he was keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the University of Nairobi's Collaborative Center for Research and Training in HIV, AIDS, and STIs.
Huh. Dr.
Larry Gelman, who helped set up that meeting, said Plummer collapsed and was taken to a hospital in Nairobi where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
No confirmed cause of death has yet been released.
Plummer was born and raised in Winnipeg, where he headed up Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory for several years.
Isn't that rather terrifying?
The lab has an administrative issue, could be a security breach.
A Chinese woman and her husband are escorted out.
People are told not to contact them.
And now the head of that lab is dead.
No cause of death.
So, we shall see.
We shall see. Well, who am I kidding?
We probably won't see it all. So, are people tidying up loose ends?
Is it an accident? All right.
Let's get on to further updates about what's going on.
So, this is from some of my contacts.
In the national anthem of China, there is a phrase about the people unwilling to be slaves.
It is now being censored in China, so Chinese social media, on the grounds of endangering national security and posts with this will be removed.
More conflict.
Shenzhen and Jinggao people are coming to Hong Kong and buying supplies.
If China does not start up again very soon, prices of goods will become expensive and more expensive and we can see that inflation is beginning to occur because demand is high for goods, particularly food, while of course supply is low because people are paralyzed, the economy is paralyzed. Now the Chinese Communist Party is under a lot of pressure to start up their economy again.
So, under pressure to start up again, the CCP is taking a risk.
Factories can start production once again after approval from the state.
And a friend of mine from Hong Kong said, very small quantity of paper products when I went to the market this morning.
It was quickly snatched up.
Rationing is now enforced in Singapore for Hong Kong.
Supermarkets are restricting sales of key daily necessities, which are very low in stock too.
In the midst of the epidemic, many restaurants are seeing far fewer people.
However, people are actively providing business to yellow economic circles to keep them afloat while others close down.
Ostracism works faster in a crisis situation.
In Beijing, a hospital only three kilometers from the Chinese Communist Party headquarters has significant numbers of infected people.
The UK has evacuated its citizens...
Chongqing, Wuhan are burning dead people to the degree where sulfur air pollutants have gone up.
Sulfur is key in many proteins of the human body, so you're breathing people.
The air is people.
The hyperstagflation vicious cycle has officially started.
5.4% inflation, 20.6% inflation in the price of food, 1.6% on daily necessities, 1.4% inflation increase.
So it's increased to 5.4.
So this is typical for these kinds of disasters, and it's also typical for governments to react in this manner.
So when there is a lack of supply and an increase in demand, it bids up the price of the goods.
Everybody gets angry, and they start blaming the shopkeepers and the black marketeers for price gouging.
You've of course heard about all of this.
When there were the terrible floods in New Orleans and people came with crates of water and were selling them vastly more than they cost.
But that's the only way to get the water there.
If you can't charge more, nobody's going to bother to bring the water.
So your choice is either a $5 bottle of water or no water at all.
There's no other choice. So, of course, when the government sees prices go up and people get angry, then naturally what happens is the government says, well, there are these price gougers.
We're going to put on price controls.
And price controls produce shortages.
It's one of these basic axioms of any reasonable economics.
So businesses don't produce enough.
There's a lack of incentive relative to risk.
So the government tries to boost the production and it doesn't really work.
Inflation, hoarding, repeat.
And you can see this all over the place.
Venezuela, Argentina, etc.
So... When people have things that are valuable, but there's a price control, they simply won't sell them.
If you're sitting on a whole bunch of water and you're not allowed to charge more than you paid for it, then you simply won't sit on the water.
You won't distribute it. You won't go out there and sell it.
And so then the government, of course, accuses you of hoarding, and then you get punished for that as well, and it just becomes this inevitable totalitarian spiral.
In Hong Kong, a family reunion of 19 people caused nine to become infected.
And let's talk about escalation.
There are rumors, of course, that some are actively attempting to infect others.
University dormitories have become quarantined, and the World Health Organization warned that novel coronavirus can survive both humid and hot climates, as well as cold and dry.
World Health Organization Philippines reminded the public to wash your hands frequently and cover coughs and sneezes with a tissue or a bent elbow, and throw the tissue in the bin and wash your hands immediately afterwards.
Aside from this, the World Health Organization Philippines also debunked claims that the drinking of water and alcoholic beverages protect people from the 2019 NCARV virus.
So, from BBC News, Wuhan pneumonia, China confirms new coronavirus transmission via aerosol through air.
China's official health department confirmed on Saturday, this February the 8th, that the new coronavirus can be transmitted through the air.
Now, whether people say airborne is the same as aerosol, is it floating on its own or is it piggybacking on drops of water?
Here are the facts, at least what's affirmed now.
Confirmed roots of the novel coronavirus now include aerosol transmission.
Quote, Aerosol transmission refers to the mixing of the virus with droplets in the air to form aerosols, which causes infection after inhalation.
I talked about this some days ago.
Hong Kong.
The government continues to try and build medical facilities next to neighborhoods causing greater protests that now cross political lines, creating common ground between previously pro-government and anti-government residents.
The police have reacted violently.
Unmarked cars have been driven into crowds.
More people have been struck in the head, shot with less than lethal rounds.
Journalists have been arrested and the response from residents has escalated to throwing objects from above.
The firebombing of police stations continues as police look to acquire new gear.
Mass arrests of nearby residents opposing medical facilities and in memory of a protester who died after falling under uncertain circumstances is This is all occurring.
I'm just taking this directly from the text.
According to the Hong Kong Department of Health, current strategies cannot effectively prevent a citywide outbreak.
Now, again, from a contact in Hong Kong, what I believe could have the most profound consequences is that China's first quarter and likely second quarter are facing losses.
is.
Factories have been forced to stop working and workers cannot get to where they work.
Supply chains are being broken, contracts cannot be fulfilled.
I mean, the whole modern economy.
I mean, the economy that you see, like as a consumer, I mean, I know this from my experience in the business world, in the software field.
There's a B2B economy that dwarfs the business-to-consumer economy.
I mean, you go to the store, you go to the grocery store, and you see these lines of foods with sugar added that'll mostly kill you, but you don't see all of the supply chains and contracts and complexity that has a pineapple.
from South America end up in a grocery store in Nikina.
I mean, it's just really complex, and this is all taking massive blows from this lack of production.
And if a contract cannot be fulfilled, then there can be legal consequences, there can be punitive clauses, and how is that going to be negotiated or remediated?
The People's Bank of China is, as usual, printing money to prop up this economy, and then you get hyper- Stagflation.
So stagflation is when inflation is going up, but the economy is stagnant, and that usually is the result of the overprinting of money.
Now, this is very, very important.
For 99% of small-medium enterprises, 33% have less than one-month cash reserves.
One-month cash reserves.
In entrepreneurship, in small businesses, cash flow is king.
It doesn't matter if you have a contract coming in next month if you've got to make payroll this month.
There's this relentless metronome of bills.
You've got to pay for your internet, you've got to pay for your phones, you've got to pay your rent, you've got to pay your employees.
That's just boom, boom, boom.
And if you don't have a lot of money in reserve, and when you're a small business, the way that you grow, I mean, I was competing out there with IBM and other big companies.
And the way that you do it is you live lean and you take your excess profits and you plow them back into growing the company, particularly into research and development.
Because when you're a small company, you can't compete with a big company on stability or reputation.
You can only compete with a big company on charisma, on innovation, on nimbleness, on having just way better features than the big company.
There's an old saying in business, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. But if you buy from a smaller business, if that smaller business goes out of business and you're stuck with a big complex, say, computer system with nobody to support it, that's really bad.
You can get fired for that.
That's not going to happen with IBM. So businesses plow a lot of money back into research, development, innovation, and growth, and so they don't sit on a lot of cash.
Some companies, bigger companies, do often.
So 33% of the small to medium enterprises...
Businesses have less than one-month cash reserves.
34% have less than two-month cash reserves.
18% have three-month cash reserves.
Now, about half of China's GDP is contributed by small to medium enterprises.
So if they stop working for over three months, 85% of them could close, potentially wiping out nearly half of China's gross domestic product.
Do you understand why I've been talking about this?
So in depth, this has been the largest series of presentations I've done in quite some time.
I want you to understand this.
I need you to understand this.
Because we're all intertwined in the modern world economy.
It is a global economic structure.
Let's just take the situation where a third of the small to medium enterprises run out of money, go out of business.
Because a third of them have less than one month cash reserves.
So let's say that only a third of these small to medium enterprises go out of business.
But about half of China's GDP is contributed by them.
So if a third of them go out of business, we're talking about a third of half of China's GDP. So, I mean, that 16-17% of China's GDP could simply collapse within a month or two.
That is a world-changing event.
This is why I'm talking about this so much.
So this is why the Chinese Communist Party is rushing to make firms in key cities resume work.
The risks are likely high, and even China's own health ministry says it is difficult to assess the risks.
Saving rates in China are also low.
Many people do not have enough savings to last more than three months.
People in China do not save as much as they did before.
And savings, of course, are important.
Once you run out of savings and you're still quarantine-bound or the prices of things have still gone up, you face...
I mean, people won't just sit at home and starve to death.
They'll get out and riot and steal and grab and just go into the country and take food.
They will do anything to survive. It's not always the virus itself that is the most challenging for society as a whole.
It's the ripple effects of these kinds of things.
Now, this is important regarding transmission rates.
Remember, I'm no doctor.
I'm no expert in this area.
I'm just a critical thinker looking at data.
So today, 60 more aboard the Diamond Princess, this is a cruise, ship infected from Hong Kong passenger.
More than 60 additional people quarantined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship operated by Carnival Corporation's Princess Cruises, now in Yokohama, have tested positive for the new coronavirus.
That emerged from Wuhan, China, a government official said today.
So this means there are now more than 150 confirmed cases in Japan, including about 130 on the Diamond Princess in the city south of Tokyo.
The ship has been kept in quarantine after a passenger who disembarked in Hong Kong was found to be infected with the pneumonia-causing virus.
Okay, so this is really, really important to understand.
This is one person on a cruise ship.
Now... Cruise ships were hit in the past with the norovirus and they've had of course other issues where they've had viruses on the ship.
So cruise ships are very very strict about hygiene and cleanliness and so on.
And so if you want to really get a sense of how infectious this horrifying disease is then look at these people.
If there's one person Who was able to infect 130 people on a ship, which means, of course, a ship again with significant hygiene and cleanliness standards.
That is really quite alarming.
Again, sources to all of this will be below.
All right, so this is from Bloomberg.
From February the 8th, Hong Kong is showing symptoms of a failed state.
With empty supermarket shelves and rising public distrust, the coronavirus hit city is ticking most of the boxes.
And there's a picture here, of course, that is pretty horrifying.
Imagine you go to the grocery store, your children are hungry, you're hungry, and you see empty shelves.
Grocery runs in Asia's financial powerhouse have begun to remind me of shopping in Russia in the chaotic summer of 1998.
You grab what you can find, and if there's a queue, you consider joining it.
Surgical masks and sanitizer gel are bartered for.
Detergent shelves are bare.
I run on toilet paper.
Last week, after an online rumor was reminiscent of Venezuela.
Crowds are irrational everywhere and social media hardly helps, yet the palpable anxiety and coronavirus hit Hong Kong these days suggests worrying levels of distrust in a city where citizens have always expected private enterprise, at least if not the state, to keep things ticking over.
Both have failed miserably, preparing inadequately even after the SARS outbreak that killed almost 300 people in the city in 2003.
A fragile state is usually defined by its inability to protect citizens, to provide basic services, and by questions over the legitimacy of its government.
After an epidemic and months of poorly handled pro-democracy demonstrations, Hong Kong is ticking most of those boxes.
And add in a strained judicial system and the prognosis for its future as a financial hub looks poor.
So, you can read this in more detail.
I want to make sure I get to...
The most essential conclusions here.
At the end of January 2020, the report is Starbucks and hot pot chain Haidilio closed mainland China stores in response to Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
Starbucks to close more than half of its outlets in mainland China expects outbreak to materially affect results.
Haidilio is closing all its mainland hot pot restaurants through Friday while keeping its business as usual in Hong Kong.
And these companies do not do this out of nowhere.
This is a big effect on stock prices.
This is where their money...
If the government fails, the government bureaucrats, the Mandarins, the chieftains, they're all fine, relatively, right?
I mean, they don't usually get fired for this kind of stuff.
I mean, maybe they'll quit under certain amounts of pressure, but this is where people actually have their money on the line and they're willing to close these kinds of Stores.
The Department of Commerce states that most food staples in Hubei province, of which Wuhan is the capital, are still stable for about 10 to 15 days.
So that could have fewer than two weeks of food staples.
And again, supply chain.
And if you're in the country and you are growing food, you don't want to drive it into the city.
You want to hang on to it.
I mean, and certainly as cities are so reliant upon the delivery of food, I mean, it's ridiculous.
I mean, you understand if you sort of think about it for a bit.
But as inflation goes up, currency becomes less valuable, food becomes more valuable.
Now, do you want to trade something that is going up in value for something that is going down in value?
Well, of course not. I mean, during a run on Bitcoin going up, do you want to trade it for a notebook whose value is going down?
Well, of course not. So if you're sitting on food and the value of your currency is decreasing, the prices are going up, then you want to hang on to your food and not trade it for money.
Well, of course, the basic trade between the city and the country is money for food.
So the incentive for farmers to bring their food into the city is going down.
That's not good for the people in the city.
Taiwan's military is helping ramp up mask production to meet demand.
So, from February the 8th, this is why I'm talking about big picture stuff here, the coronavirus threat to China's grand plans.
China's plan to dominate the 21st century hangs in the balance as the deadly coronavirus outbreak spreads.
Coronavirus is stress-testing President Xi's industrial and economic vision for the future as factory supply chains and companies navigate the crisis.
The outbreak is soaking up all of China's resources and attention.
It reinforces an inward-looking China, says Sam Sachs, a fellow at the New America Foundation.
Times' Charlie Campbell writes, every organ of the Chinese state has been harnessed to enforce an unprecedented quarantine on 50 million people across 15 cities.
China's government has unleashed a 1 billion yuan, $142 million, war chest to fight the outbreak amid a frenzy of construction work that, among other feats, erected a thousand-bed hospital in just 10 days.
The outbreak is upending China's industrial sectors.
This will put a damper on China's access to foreign technology and slow the transition to high-value-added high-technology manufacturing.
Wuhan, the epicenter of the crisis, accounts for 4% of China's entire economy.
It's a region key to the country's automotive industry and made in China 2025 plan to dominate the technologies of the future.
Even factories that are starting to reopen are dealing with labor shortages as travel continues to be restricted across China.
Thousands of smaller Chinese factories may permanently shut down as a result of the outbreak.
So you understand all of this, right?
You've got workers who are being fired or laid off.
Food supply is precarious.
And inflation is increasing.
This is a very, very bad situation.
The panic around the coronavirus could push the Chinese Communist Party to exert even greater control over all parts of the country, including the high-tech private sector.
And again, you can read more about this, but this is a very, very big deal.
And it's not just about the virus.
There is a great fight between states and regional governments within China for masks.
Masks are being transported from one region to the other with APCs and armed police escorts and the armed police exports.
And these shipments are being robbed midway by other armed local police.
This is what I'm talking about.
Social collapse. The fragmentation of the largest and most powerful totalitarian government the world has ever seen.
Now, on the ridiculous front, the fight for what to name the virus and disease continues.
The World Health Organization do not call the disease Wuhan pneumonia or China virus.
But of course, they did have something called the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.
I'm pretty sure Kung Flu is off the table.
And as I mentioned before, the former scientific director general has died.
PLA soldiers, Chinese soldiers are supposedly becoming infected too, for every sick person up to five people are necessary.
Barracks are ideal places for spreading diseases.
No data will come out of it, but it is sufficiently well rumored, I believe, it is now worth announcing.
Shenzhen is now in lockdown.
Hong Kong prisons are essentially forcing prisoners to do more overtime for mask production.
And my contact says, and again, this is what I'm hearing and what you can reason out, this could well destroy China.
The CCP, Chinese Communist Party 2, is clearly afraid to have the big meetings they like.
This is a societal collapse scenario about to come.
Whether this is true or not, we shall see, but it is very, very important to be alert and aware to what is happening.
So, as people across China mourned the death of a whistleblower doctor in an almost unprecedented outpouring of grief and anger on Thursday, little did they know that another truth-teller of the coronavirus outbreak was being silenced, according to friends and family.
Chen Quixi, a citizen journalist who had been doing critical reporting from Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak, went missing on Thursday evening, just as hundreds of thousands of people in China began demanding freedom of speech online.
This is an important thing to understand.
Let me just have a brief aside here.
People are willing to accept restrictions on their liberties as long as their security of existence is maintained.
People will trade freedoms for money.
They will trade liberties for stability.
When the stability is threatened, then they demand their liberties to report on the destabilization and the events and occurrence of destabilization.
And if further repression occurs, you hit a breaking point.
So, Lai Wenliang, a 34-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, died of the same virus he tried to warn others about early on in the outbreak.
Rather than being listened to, he was punished by the police for spreading rumors and later contracted the virus from a patient.
And there were some questions about how well he was treated, what kind of treatment he got near the end.
And I'll let you read all of this.
But Chen's friends posted a video message of Chen's mother on his Twitter page saying her son had disappeared.
His close friends say Chen had left them his login details to the platform in case he was taken by the authorities.
I'm here to beg everyone online, especially friends in Wuhan, to help find Quixi to find out what's going on with him.
So... This...
Struck me as powerful and interesting.
This is the mainstream media reporting on the Spanish flu, one of the greatest disease tragedies in human history.
One case of Spanish influenza has been reported in Kamuki, Honolulu, while there are 13 cases in Honolulu hospitals, these latter being patients taken from two vessels arriving recently from the Orient and from the mainland.
The health authorities claim there is no danger of a serious epidemic.
The Spanish flu killed tens of millions of people.
One of the reasons I responded to these stories, although with Ebola and other outbreaks, I was very skeptical of danger.
The moment that the mainstream media tells you there's nothing to worry about, that's when you start stocking up on the food, my friends.
Let's look at some of the videos that are going on here.
The Chinese authorities are welding shut whole apartment buildings with residents inside.
What if there's a fire?
This is a tweet. It says, videos of people being welded in.
Not a single video of them being cut back out or delivering food or water or meds afterwards.
So here, you can see people.
They are welding. See the spot welding there going on?
They are welding apartment buildings shut with residents inside.
And this is, again, back to the Black Death in Europe where they would simply nail up people's houses when people were heard to be coughing inside.
This is... It's pretty terrifying stuff, as you can see.
These are bars across, weldings.
They're just keeping people stuck inside.
This is not an ordinary flu, you know?
This ain't no ordinary flu.
Oh, no, now I've got that Sade song stuck in my head.
This is bolts, of course, people inside their apartments showing.
And the fact that we can see all of this is truly incredible.
I mean, astounding and horrifying.
Imagine you bolted in. That's it.
All right. People inside this apartment building says the suite have been quarantined due to coronavirus.
The worker well's exit door's shut so they don't escape from the buildings.
And that's not good.
Now, let's talk about this particular situation.
So this is on Face the Nation.
This Chinese ambassador is being questioned.
Because it also gets at, there's a lot of unknown and a lot of suspicion because of that.
And in fact, this week, Senator Tom Cotton, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services Committee, suggested that the virus may have come from China's biological warfare program.
That's an extraordinary charge.
How do you respond to that?
I think it's true that...
Well, boy, you know, if there's, if when you're accused of When your government is accused of potentially loosening a virus that is killing hundreds of people, infecting tens of thousands, and has the capacity or the potential to be at the epicenter of a worldwide pandemic that could kill countless people, listen to this. How do you respond to that?
I think it's true that...
Now, of course, you can just take the snippet out.
I think that it's true that. But that's not how you want to start answering the question at all, because that's priming people to have you think that maybe you're unconsciously confessing something.
A lot is still unknown.
A lot is still unknown.
So this is very interesting, right?
I'm sorry, I just can't pause from here.
That's an extraordinary...
How do you respond to that?
I think it's true that a lot is still unknown.
And our scientists, Chinese scientists, American scientists, scientists of other countries are doing their best to learn more about the virus.
But it's very harmful.
It's very dangerous. Okay, so when they say this came from a, could have come from a bioweapons lab, this could be a bioweapon.
Well, is it impossible to figure out that it's not?
In other words, if you didn't have any weapons laboratories that were working on anything like this, any kind of coronavirus or anything like this, then you could find out pretty quickly that you did not release this from a bioweapons lab.
Because, you know, nobody's working on this stuff.
Nobody's got any connection with this kind of stuff.
So for sure it didn't come from... But they're not saying that.
Now the question is, why wouldn't they just issue a blanket denial?
Why wouldn't they just issue a blanket denial?
Say, absolutely, we've investigated, we've confirmed, it's thoroughly true, there's no possibility, because they're facing social media.
Because they're facing social media.
Now, if the government puts out a blanket denial that this came from a bioweapons lab, hey, I'm not saying it did or it didn't, I don't know, right?
I don't know, but this is sort of puzzling this out, right?
If the Chinese government says, no way it came from bioweapons lab, then what they're doing is they're kind of taunting people who might have different information to start releasing their data.
And, of course, as we've seen, this is a hat tip to Scott Adams, but as we've seen from the recent Iranian debacle where the airliner was shot down and the Iranian government denied completely that it was responsible at all, and then they were quickly found out and revealed, that's a big blow to the credibility of the government.
So if you issue... A staunch denial, and then it turns, and you're taunting people into releasing evidence to the contrary, then nobody believes anything that you say anymore, and government is, you know, government is outnumbered by the people.
It relies on specific targeted force and general credibility.
And again, people are willing to surrender their freedoms in return for stability when the government can't provide either.
You get changed.
So let's hear more what this guy has to say.
To stir up suspicion, rumors, and spread them among the people.
For one thing, this will create...
Oh boy, where do you even start with this kind of stuff?
Where do you even start? So this guy is concerned, you see, about the spread of rumors.
The spread of rumors.
Which he's not denying, right?
This is really, really important.
The Chinese government sat on this outbreak for weeks.
So they're more concerned about the spread of rumors than they are about the spread of a potentially fatal virus.
But, you know, that's government.
It's what they do. Panic.
Another thing is that it will fend up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things.
Oh, he knows the keywords, man.
and you start talking about xenophobia and racism and prejudice and bigotry, you're just hitting those vending buttons of the dispensation of apologies and the lack of self-protection of other populations.
That will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus.
Of course, there are all kinds of speculation and rumors.
There are people who are saying that these viruses are coming from some military lab, not of China, maybe in the United States.
How can we?
What are you talking about?
I mean, I've been reading quite a bit on this.
Maybe I missed something completely.
But I've not heard anyone say that this could be coming from a lab In the United States?
Come on. Okay, so he's saying that they don't know where the virus came from.
But they know for sure it's crazy to think it came from a bioweapons lab.
Those two statements...
Cannot be reconciled.
Like if you're a teenager and you bring your dad's car home with a ding in it, and your dad says, where did this ding come from?
And you say, I have absolutely no idea where this ding came from, but I know for absolutely certain that I had nothing to do with it.
It's like, well, those two statements can't be reconciled.
If you know absolutely nothing about something, you can't say anything about it.
If they have absolutely no idea where this virus came from, then it could have come from a bioweapons lab.
It's certainly technically possible.
It's feasible. And, of course, the reporter, this is why I'm not in the mainstream media, the reporter would say, well, wait a minute, you can't say that you don't know where the virus came from, but it's crazy to say it came from a bioweapons lab.
So which is it, right? I mean, they must have eliminated the bioweapons lab to call it crazy, in which case they should release all of the information to put people's minds at ease.
According to some initial outcome of the research.
Yeah, yeah, he goes on to say that it's about animals and so on, right?
Okay, so that's an important thing to look at.
So why do I say that this has the potential to be a world-changing event?
Because... I know my history.
I took an entire lengthy course in graduate school on medieval history and I actually ended up...
Thompson is a famous art collector in Canada and I ended up being able to view his private collection of art of which there were significant art and sculptures from the Black Death.
So talking about the Black Death, which is the greatest disaster demographically that Europe had ever and has ever experienced, is a way of understanding just how these changes can come about through something as simple as a virus theorized to be transmitted on fleas on the backs of rats that were in shipments is a way of understanding just how these changes can come about through something as simple as a virus Now, the Black Death, of course, was a worldwide event.
We're going to focus here on Europe and understanding that the Black Death was not a single event.
It was a series of events.
If you look at national and local epidemics, England, just England, had 30 years of plague between 1351 and 1485.
And understanding the depopulation scenario, and I'm not talking about this with regards to novel coronavirus.
I'm talking about this historically.
Europe's population by 1430 may have been 50-75% lower than 1290 AD. That is an astonishing drop, 50-75% lower.
Now, the effects of this, there are massive psychological and sociological effects, political effects of something like disease.
If you look at the credibility of the church in Europe, the church is always taught, of course, that the wages of sin is death and that disease is a punishment from God and so on.
And when you think, of course, of the Catholic priests going from deathbed to deathbed to deathbed to administer the last rites, the Catholic priests were actually spreading the disease and, of course, the priesthood, which had often taught that the wages of sin is death.
The priesthood were cut down, perhaps the most of all, because of their exposure to disease.
And, of course, people became frightened of priests coming to their house because of the association with disease.
There was no germ theory, you understand.
There was no germ theory, which is why we know that smallpox blankets weren't used as a weapon of war against the natives.
Plus, there's no evidence that they ever were.
But there was no germ theory until the late 19th century.
But there were associations.
There were associations.
So when you had priests dropping like flies, the credibility of the church itself, can the If... If the church teaches that plagues are a punishment from God, then what have I been doing wrong?
What has the church been doing wrong that we're being punished in this manner?
Now, the aristocrats had country estates and would often, of course, retreat from the city, which were centers of this Albert Camus plague-style outbreaks and spreads of the Black Death.
They would go into the country, and the aristocrats often had a higher IQ than the general population.
People who lived in the country were able to survive and be...
We had self-sustaining situations, and the people in the cities died a lot more, which was a huge problem.
Because there was a massive reduction in the peasantry, the plague hit the young in particular.
It was actually known as the children's plague.
It hit the young so hard.
it hit men more than women for a variety of reasons.
And so what happened was, of course, you have a lack of supply of labor.
So whereas before the population had been increasing as a result of the immense improvements in agriculture that occurred after the dark ages, or as they're really should be properly known, the ages wherein England was destroyed largely by Muslim slave capturers.
But you had massive improvements in crops.
You had crop rotation. You had winter crops like turnips and so on.
And what happened was you had this excess of food which produced an excess of population or an increase.
You shouldn't say an excess. An increase in population and paved the way for cities to grow.
If you don't have an excess of food production, you can't really have cities.
And so when the Black Death hit, what happened was the laborers, the workers available to To the aristocrats, that number plummeted.
And that meant that those who had survived from the aristocrats, they don't farm their own food, they don't tend to their own livestock, they don't mend their own fences, good heavens.
What's the point of being an aristocrat if you have to nail up a fence?
So the working class, so to speak, had a much stronger position to bargain from because there were so few of them left.
And because the price of labor was going up, like whenever the price of labor goes up, the powers that be always want to try and keep it down.
And so they do this now with mass immigration, mass migration into Western countries.
And in the past they did it.
There was a decree, the Ordinance of Labor is in June 1349.
And what that was was a law that limited the peasants' ability to bargain for more than the same wages they normally would have been able to get, you know, five or six years before the increase in the price of labor.
And if you were a worker and you demanded higher wages based upon the fact that there could be five aristocrats in the neighborhood all bidding for your wages and you can put them in a bidding war against each other, If you demanded higher wages, you could be arrested and put in prison.
And this was a big, big problem.
It's one thing to have sort of serfdom where you're kind of tied to the land and don't really have much negotiating ability.
It's one thing if you inherit that historically, you're just kind of used to it.
You know, it's like that old saying about a fish and you say, hey, what's the water temperature?
And the fish says, what water? They don't even know.
They're just swimming in it. It's just their environment.
You don't notice air until the temperature changes radically or you run out of it, right?
So... When you have a rather than a slow historical you've been raised with it kind of enslavement when you have a sudden enslavement like a law being passed that doesn't allow you to bargain for wages and has you radically underpaid relative to the market value you have at the time people get really really angry and they suddenly notice this sort of velvet fist of the state shaking over their futures and their families and this again makes people pretty pretty angry.
There was, of course, mass hysteria.
People didn't know why all of this death was occurring.
And there were physical attacks against government officials.
Why aren't you protecting us?
Why aren't you saving us? There were physical attacks against the church because, of course, people would get together and pray for salvation.
But of course, by getting together in a church, they would all be breathing in each other's viruses or disease, and this would actually cause it to get worse.
So none of the old solutions, running to the government, running to the church, none of the old solutions were working.
In fact, they were often making it worse.
And the Catholic Church was, according to some reports, sworn to protect lepers and Jews Now, of course, lepers with their highly visible physical dysfunctions and deformities and so on, they're believed to spread the plague, so they were attacked.
And in all of these kinds of hysteria, the Jews were attacked.
They were believed to have poisoned the water and poisoned the air and they were attacked.
And that, of course, was catastrophic.
And the Jews did have certain higher hygiene practices at the time, which did limit the disease spread to a small degree among the Jews.
A lot of government officials, right?
What do you do when you're a government official and the people are panicking?
You go out, you make a speech, you go and talk to the people, you try and calm things down.
And what happened? Well, a lot of government officials and political figures got infected.
And what did they do? They went home and they died.
And so the government vanished from the local environment.
And doctors fled to escape the disease.
And that was a huge issue.
And so what happened was the moral legitimacy of the papacy and of the church as it stood, I mean, the pope could, like, bend rulers like Henry IV and John I from England, who could bend them to their will.
But after the Black Death, the popes and the church found their credibility so reduced that the interdict, the ostracism capacity of the church was significantly diminished.
And that was...
So, you can't really get the Protestant Reformation without the Black Death destroying the credibility of significant portions of the Church and the Protestant Reformation, which led to massive multi-hundred-year wars throughout Europe,
which killed off the people most dedicated to the most fundamentalist and primitive interpretations of Scripture— It is a low IQ thing to imagine that, well, you've read this thing, you're absolutely certain what it is and what's true, and you're willing to kill and die for it.
That is, like, not an intelligent response to the complexities of theology.
And so the people who are willing to fight and die often killed each other off.
Those who survived were of a more sort of Hitchens-style, ironical, distant, interpretive, not the literal meaning, but the symbolic meaning of the text.
And those people tended to do fairly, fairly well.
And they're the ones who founded the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and gave birth in many ways to the modern world.
Again, it would be really nice if people had listened more to reason and evidence and didn't have to go through these kinds of horrible situations.
But as a philosopher, you just recognize that a lot of what you're doing is you're just yelling, you know, when you're a teenager and you go and see, you rent a movie with your friends, and it's a horror movie, and the teenagers are all doing stupid things.
You know, you go for help.
I'll follow the bloody footprints.
And you're screaming at the screen.
Like, stop doing these stupid things.
Like, just get out, go for help, get out.
And why don't we take off and nuke it from orbit?
As Bill Paxton famously said in Aliens 2, right?
And, you know, screaming at people on a screen doing ridiculously self-destructive things.
Things, you recognize that you're not going to change what they do because it's a movie.
And this is, tragically, the role of smart people these days is just to yell at people to stop doing stupid things.
Those people will continue to do those stupid things and disaster will occur.
So the fact that it killed off People in cities, it killed off peasants, it killed off more men than women, it killed off more poor over rich people, and we know that income is somewhat correlated to IQ,
and the fact that it killed the young over the mature shaped the demographics of Europe almost permanently and in many ways gave birth to the modern world.
These are the kinds of good things, so to speak, that can come out of horrifying things.
So what is the future?
When you believe that the government, while authoritarian and bossy and bullying and dictatorial, is providing and promoting the stability that allows you to provide for your family, then you are willing to self-censor.
You are willing to surrender your liberties for the sake of security and prosperity.
When... Because somehow you believe that the government is doing these things, suppressing people and ordering people around and telling you what you can do with your free speech and so on, and you don't have free speech.
People are willing to sort of accept that because they say, well, you know, they're harsh, but their hearts and minds are in the right place.
You know, it's mean, it's tough, but, you know, I'm doing well, I'm providing my family, I have a job and all that.
Now, when... The true nature of the state gets revealed.
The state is the opposite of the people.
And this is what's so frustrating.
I went to go and see the movie 1917 and talked about it on social media last night.
It's not a great film. It's technically good.
And the acting is very good.
But it is way too many war cliches.
And this bottomless hatred for Germans continues in Hollywood.
But the people were saying, oh, but the Germans did this and the Germans did that.
It's like, no, no, no. The German youth were forced to fight in World War II. And Christmas 1914, I've got a whole video on this called The Truth About World War I. I will link to it below.
The British and the German soldiers got together in no man's land on Christmas Day and played soccer and drank with each other and sang songs together and tried to learn each other's language and realized of course that they had more in common with each other than the rulers and the bankers driving the war.
So the German state waged war.
The German people suffered. That's such an important distinction, to not mistake the government for the people.
So you were willing to submit to a state if you have in the back of your mind that it somehow has good motives, benevolent outcomes, and so on.
But when you see the state lying about an outbreak, when you see the state protecting itself, when you see the state falsifying and under-reporting, there is a report now that is particularly chilling that the Chinese...
Government is now no longer counting people as infected if they have tested positive but they have no symptoms.
This is going to lead to a massive under-reporting.
So when you see that the government is really after only its own benefit and its own power and is not there to protect you but is there to exploit you, that's when governments and the world itself can really change.
Please, please help out with the costs of this show and these productions.
I really, really do need your help.
I don't put out any ads.
I don't have any sponsors.
This is all driven by your support and donation.
▲
Export Selection