I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, y'all, introducing independent journalist Sam Husseini.
He has been writing about the possible lab origins of the coronavirus since at least February of 2020, and he's got many great articles about it, including Averting Our Gaze from Biowarfare, and Contrary to Claims, the Pandemic May Have Come from a Lab.
That one ran originally at Salon.com and is a very in-depth study of the thing.
And well, and he certainly brings a unique take to this, something that I haven't heard anywhere else, and that is the Pentagon's involvement in subsidizing the gain-of-function research, which apparently may have had something to do with the origin of this virus.
So welcome to the show, Sam.
How are you doing?
Great to be with you, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you here.
So I take it from reading these articles, you already knew a little bit about this and had real concerns about germs escaping from laboratories and affecting the broader public, you know, for quite a while before COVID broke out.
So you had a lot of educated questions that needed to be answered, where a lot of other people were just groping in the dark.
Is that right?
That is right.
And it's for two reasons.
One, I remember the anthrax attacks in 2001.
People might remember after the 9-11 attacks, a week later, there started to be anthrax attacks.
Somebody was putting anthrax in the mail to journalists and other individuals, including lawmakers.
And it was depicted as coming from evil Arabs and Muslims.
It was used to, you know, ramp up the perpetual wars we're still in, and the so-called Patriot Act and civil liberties restrictions and so on.
It ended up coming out of a U.S. or a U.S. allied lab.
The person that the FBI alleged eventually tried to pin it on committed, allegedly committed suicide.
So there was never a trial.
In addition, there were concerns around the U.S. labs in West Africa in 2014 that many Africans alleged were behind the Ebola outbreak in 2014.
So those and a general concern about so-called gain-of-function research.
Gain-of-function is an insidious euphemism.
It means gain of threat.
It means the creation of potentially pandemic pathogens.
It means that you have scientists that the NIH and other U.S. government agencies have funded that try to make a virus that is perhaps deadly, but not very transmissible, more transmissible.
So there becomes a greater threat, potentially unleashing a pandemic for the alleged purpose of combating it if it were to arise in nature or if the evil terrorists were to unleash it upon us.
Francis Boyle, who wrote the U.S. implementing legislation for the Bioweapons Convention, has said that this work violates that convention, and he has condemned the scientists participating in it in the most vociferous manner possible.
And now in your writing, you make a lot of the word games and semantics that are played and exploited by those in denial here.
And they will always say, this was something that was even blatant, say, right around a year ago.
I remember Tucker Carlson on his TV show talking about how, you know, the debunkings were saying, this is definitely not an engineered bioweapon.
And Tucker Carlson is saying, yeah, but nobody ever said, or that's not part of the argument.
Maybe at some very fringe website somewhere, someone brought that up.
But the accusation wasn't that it was an engineered bioweapon.
It was that maybe it had escaped from a lab where people were doing the kind of research you're talking about, where they're making it more deadly in the name of being able to research how to destroy it and deter it and protect people from it.
And so it's kind of an obvious red herring argument evading the point.
And you're much more specific.
You talk about the difference between engineering a virus versus going through the generational process of, you know, these kinds of things.
And now when the scientists are debunking, quote unquote, debunking the theory that this might have come from the lab, they hide behind these semantics, not just on bioweapons, but even on saying, well, it wasn't engineered.
But that would mean, you know, gene splicing or whatever, whereas just doing generations of ferret infections doesn't count as engineering.
That kind of thing.
Am I right about that?
Largely.
Yeah.
I mean, they are using engineered when it's convenient to them in a very specific way that constricts it, you know, when they if it's proven and I don't think it's been definitively proven that there's no bioengineering involved in this.
But if it's proven that it's not bioengineered, that doesn't mean that it didn't come out of a lab.
It doesn't mean that it didn't come out of a lab through other processes, including, as you indicate, serial passage where you take a virus and then pass it through a series of animals.
Ferrets have a respiratory system that's similar to humans.
And this was actually what was done in 2011 by a couple of scientists with the avian flu.
And it caused, you know, some concern.
I mean, the New York Times actually had an editorial at the time saying an engineer doomsday using this serial passage thing.
But I also think the term bioweapon is sort of a buzzword.
I mean, look, you know, I remember an episode in The Sopranos where Tony Soprano sees a nemesis of his and he grabs there's some construction going on or something, and he grabs a nail gun and he attacks the guy with a nail gun.
Well, the nail gun wasn't designed to be a weapon, but it is a weapon.
So, you know, it's a largely semantic game.
If you say that, oh, I'm not creating a weapon here, I'm just simply making a virus more deadly so that I can protect against it.
Well, that to me starts sounding like you're saying, oh, I want to invade Iraq because I want to bring democracy there.
Well, you know, your stated goals and your actual goals might be quite different.
You might need to say that something is a motivation for you when your actual motivation is something altogether more nefarious.
Now, we can't get inside these people's heads, but there are laws in place, the Bioweapons Convention and U.S. law implementing it, which the author of it says this type of work violates.
In other words, it's all dual use.
And so here's the giant loophole.
We can make whatever germ weapons we want in the name of one day if we were faced with something like this, we have to know how to protect from it.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it's all largely Pentagon and USAID funded.
The notion that the pandemic came, that it's a conspiracy theory that came out of a lab was largely driven by Peter Daszak, who's head of EcoHealth Alliance, which sounds like a nice, earthy, crunchy group, except what they do is go around the world trying to collect deadly viruses and juice them up for these purposes or we don't know what for purposes.
And they, as you know, it has been reported, especially in right wing media, he funded the lab in Wuhan for this work.
And now he gets a ton of U.S. government money.
Most of it is not from the NIH.
Most of it is from the Pentagon and USAID and USAID isn't so much an aid agency as you know, it's sort of a soft power, you know, a sort of more suave version of the, you know, you know, I mean, they do spook stuff, they run out of the State Department, but they do stuff to undermine so-called U.S. enemies around the world.
So the sources of this funding, you know, at least since 2013, he's gotten at least $80 million from the Pentagon and from USAID for this work.
And can you clarify for us, Sam, how you know that?
I had, well, I approached them, they wouldn't give me their numbers.
I got the USAID number by approaching their academic partners at the University of California.
And unlike EcoHealth Alliance, they got back to me with the USAID numbers.
And the other numbers, I had to intern slave over government databases for several months.
And I wrote this all up for Independent Science News in December of 2020.
And you show your work in the articles, I want to mention to people when they read them, they can see the evidence for your assertions and the tables and the totals there.
So go ahead.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So what's and, you know, a large part of this has been driven by the revered Anthony Fauci.
There was a surge of funding for this kind of dangerous lab work after 9-11, ironically, because the actual anthrax attacks were out of a U.S. lab.
So they took that as a pretext to actually increase the funding of what caused the problem.
And in 2015, there was a petition by some 700 scientists pleading with the NIH to stop funding this kind of dangerous lab work so much while they are ignoring other problems of pressing human and health needs.
And Anthony Fauci responded to them.
And he basically said, the American people through their elected representatives is referring to the Bush-Cheney administration there, have made it known that they want this work done.
Now, this work can either be done through, you know, the Pentagon or other secretive agencies or it can be done through the NIH and we can have a seat at the table.
I'm paraphrasing there.
So he was basically telling these scientists to put on their big boy pants and get with the program and that if they wanted to get some real cash, they had to go along with this.
And this has completely perverted, as that letter feared it would.
They say you're deforming the scientific field because it no longer becomes a field of scientific inquiry.
It becomes a field of how can you talk about what you do in terms of biodefense so that you can get more cash from the NIH or the Pentagon or USAID or whoever.
So it's totally deformed the field.
So it's not really science anymore in significant part.
It is how to write a grant.
And less and less scientists have been willing to speak out against this.
I mean, you had the case of Mark Lipsitch, who's now finally speaking out.
He's been warning for years about the, you know, the dangers of what he calls in his academic writing, he's at Harvard, potential pandemic pathogens.
When the outbreak happened, he was completely silent.
He wouldn't say a damn word.
You know, I was, you know, tweeting at him, like, you know, what the hell, man.
And so finally, he's started saying something in the most tepid terms.
And I think at least part of it is a reflection of the funding dictates and the fact that, you know, Fauci and others have been such staunch proponents of this kind of dangerous lab work.
And you further, you know, another pillar was the Nature Medicine article.
And people like Meryl Nass, who runs the Anthrax Vaccine blog.
Yeah, I've interviewed her before about the Anthrax case.
Oh, wonderful.
I'm pretty sure.
I mean, have you interviewed her since the pandemic broke out?
I don't think so, no.
I'd recommend you do so because she was the first person to call bullshit on the, on that, on the Nature Medicine article.
And, you know, now you're having emails come out between Anderson, one of the authors of it, and Fauci, where Anderson actually initially, you know, seemed to be saying that he wasn't so sure about all of this.
In any case, so she was the first person to say this Nature Medicine article, which said that it couldn't have come out of a lab, basically, was at least incredibly disingenuous.
And I quote her in my first salon piece of a year ago.
And for her efforts, she's gotten silenced and shadow banned and so on.
She has done cutting edge work on biowarfare.
She was, I believe, the first person to show an instance of biowarfare in the post World War Two world of an attack in Rhodesia against African farmers of anthrax.
So, you know, there's a clique of very well funded scientists who have in concert with, you know, Facebook and other big tech attempted to silence people.
The big media totally went along with it.
Now, some of the right wing have gotten some decent information out, but it's been largely in the framework of, you know, going after China and, you know, in effect, either explicitly or implicitly arguing that the Chinese labs are uniquely dangerous.
That's not accurate.
This type of lab work is dangerous no matter where it happens, by whatever country.
And it's really been the United States that has driven what I argue is effectively a bioweapons arms race.
You know, people think that the genie of bioweapons was put back in the bottle, but by getting around the restrictions on bioweapons through these series of pretexts, they in effect have let it out of the bottle and the U.S. has hindered efforts at the United Nations, including the Obama administration, to stop this.
So it's quite possible that the Chinese were sort of trying to catch up with the United States in this regard, and they might have slipped on a banana peel.
I do not exclude the possibility that this could have been intentionally released either to frame the Chinese labs in some manner.
I'm not saying that that's what happened.
I just think that we need to approach this methodically and rigorously because there has clearly been attempts by Peter Daszak and others in order to effectively enact a cover up as to the possibilities of lab origin of the current pandemic to hide a wider problem in terms of this dangerous biolab work.
Well, and that's putting it politely.
Daszak was the guy that organized the letter in The Lancet a year ago that said that this is nonsense and no one should believe it and therefore Facebook should censor it, etc.
Exactly.
And, you know, most of the media bought that hook, line and sinker.
I mean, right around the time that that Lancet letter appeared, I asked the CDC about this at a press conference at the press club and they gave an incredibly disingenuous answer.
And then remarkably, Peter Daszak was put on both The Lancet and W.H.O. committees to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
And he was put on The Lancet committee by Jeffrey Sachs, who I just heard on Democracy Now!
, which is remarkable.
The day after Trump talked about, you know, indicated that he thought maybe it came out of a lab, Democracy Now!
had Peter Daszak on to dismiss that possibility that, you know, Democracy Now!
and so much of the other media spent last year talking about Peter Daszak as if he was a source and not a suspect because, you know, he had, quote unquote, knowledge of the situation.
While that knowledge included funding the lab and the fact that he wasn't viewed incredibly critically by a whole plethora of media is just a remarkable instance of, you know, the highest order of completely derelict journalism, in my view.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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So I don't know if you saw this, Sam, but the Washington Post reporter slash opinion have heard Josh Rogan has put out a new book about this and he was interviewed on the Joe Rogan show, no relation, different spelling, but there you go.
And one of the things that he talked about was when Redfield, the head of the CDC said, and I'm not sure the timeline on this, you could help me out with the date, but at some point Redfield said, geez, I don't know, it looks like it might have come out of a lab to me.
And Josh Rogan's take on that was, listen, he was flashing a bright red siren light at us there.
You know, he was saying he knows he wasn't just being general, like Jesus could have come out of a lab somewhere.
He knew everything about this process.
And essentially the truth of it all would be highly classified.
He would not be allowed to say, I know that this is what happened at this lab.
It must have been in such a specific way, but that for him to say, geez, kind of looks like it must've been something like that to me is the same thing.
That's him saying as much as he can, but essentially confirming to the degree possible that this is also what he thinks it must be the answer.
Is that right?
Do you think?
That could be right.
You know, I, in my reporting, I have not depended on the statements of U.S. government officials.
You know, I tend to view their statements as potentially self-serving, but I think they are worth paying attention to.
What I don't quite understand or I'm not sure about is, you know, if the Trump administration had that kind of evidence, why didn't they release it before the election?
Did you see the new Vanity Fair piece that's all about the government, the internal government reaction to all of this?
And the one that starts profiling the drastic group, the Twitter group.
Yeah.
I haven't gone through the whole thing yet.
So it's basically, you know, government is a government program, right?
So you've got the state department, you've got the NSC, you have the CIA and the FBI and whoever, and they're all doing their own different independent takes and they're all contradicting each other and stepping all over each other.
And then Donald Trump goes out and says, China, China.
And then as she puts it in the article, this generated an antibody response inside the government that if Trump is saying China, China, then that means that they all need to find out a reason why it's not their fault, just as reaction to him, because that was their job as the fourth branch of government was to undermine the elected president at every opportunity, no matter what.
Possibly.
But, I mean, there was that tendency even before Trump said anything in a lot of quarters.
Right.
Although he did say it pretty early on.
So that was enough, apparently, to really disrupt any honesty.
And just like you're saying with the scientists themselves, there's so many conflicts of interest everywhere.
Right.
The State Department and USAID are putting a bunch of money into this.
Even if the Pentagon is putting 40 million dollars or I think he said double that or something earlier, 80 million over a certain time period into this.
It's just just two EcoHealth Alliance that they're putting 40 million.
But that, you know, EcoHealth Alliance is just a small chunk of the overall picture.
I got you.
I'm sure I'm sure it's in the billions of dollars.
Right.
But so and that's really essentially that's the story in the in the Vanity Fair piece is that the government was just dragging ass all year long and didn't want to come to the conclusion that would serve the president.
They had to hang this around his neck no matter what.
And that's not a defense of him by me.
That's just an accusation against them by me and by her, I guess.
I trust Trump and Fauci and the CIA about the same amount.
Sure.
So, I mean, I mean, right now you're seeing similar dynamics.
I think that different arms of the establishment want different things.
One thing is to protect the edifice of doing this dangerous lab work.
And the other thing is to use this story to some extent, at least as leverage over China.
And I think that they're sort of, you know, cutting a series of deals as to how much and when they do each of those things.
And what I think is clear is that virtually none of these government operatives or agencies have any interest in, you know, actually, you know, getting the truth of the situation out and in protecting the people of the world.
Right.
From this thing.
I mean, if the avian flu got out, the estimate is not the devastation that we've seen and whatever it is, three million people dead from covid.
If it's the avian flu that gets out, the estimate is one point six billion with a B.
That's what we're talking about here in terms of the dangers of this type of lab work.
When I say the avian flu, I mean the juiced up version of the avian flu that NIH funding helped create by scientists in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin.
This is where we started with the ferrets.
Right.
And you wrote quite a bit about that.
And in fact, I don't know, maybe a quarter of all you're writing here is block quotes of other extremely important scientists saying this is so dangerous.
This is we should not be doing this even for all the alleged possible benefits.
We're really playing with worse than H-bomb fire here.
Correct.
Yeah.
I think that this is an existential threat that probably exceeds nuclear at this point.
It's like the Terminator.
Right.
Like, geez, if we can create Skynet, let's do it without without ever saying, but yeah, but this could be the end of us all.
Right.
Or Jurassic Park or something like that.
You know, it's like, you know, they figured they could do something and they never sat down to think about if they should do it.
And they're doing it driven by funding, driven by geopolitical gain, driven by doing dangerous lab work in third world countries that don't know how to protect themselves or too weak to protect themselves.
And you know, for that, for their for their own egos and to, you know, profits of, you know, companies that scientists start up, start up in the hopes of getting massive government contracts.
Yeah.
That's a large part of what's fueling this.
Yeah.
All right.
So can you tell us about David Franz or Franz, who's he?
He's one of several individuals involved in this.
He used to be at the at Fort Detrick, the largest so-called biodefense facility in Maryland.
And he's an advisor to Eco Health Alliance.
He recently wrote a piece at some point last year, wrote a piece with the infamous Judy Miller, who, of course, you know, got a lot of lies about Iraq WMDs into The New York Times before the invasion of Iraq.
And they co-wrote a piece basically saying that you needed to fund biowarfare slash biodefense stuff more.
Now, what was particularly interesting to him about to me about him was that he with Judy Miller, even after the invasion of Iraq, kept going on about the there being mobile weapons labs in Iraq.
That's why we couldn't find the WMDs, because they were in these mobile weapons labs and we had to track them down.
And they were still floating this possibility after the invasion of Iraq, because, you know, if they could have sold that story, then they would have, you know, effectively tried to justify the invasion, say, you know, you know, everybody was saying, where are the weapons of mass destruction that you have talking about?
That story was effectively debunked by David Kelly, a scientist, a scientist in Britain.
He apparently exposed information to the BBC that exposed that story as false and therefore put sort of the last kibosh on the justifications for the Iraq war in terms of weapons of mass destruction.
And then he ended up being found dead of an alleged suicide shortly thereafter.
You've had other cases of alleged suicides pertaining to U.S. bioweapons work.
You had the case of Frank Olson, who it now appears in the 1950s was a was considering blowing the whistle on apparent U.S. government use of bioweapons in Korea.
He ended up dying by falling from a New York City skyscraper.
The story that they put out, that the government put out upon Frank Olson's death was that it was an LSD experiment that had gone wrong, that he and some other scientists to try to experiment with the effects of LSD took it.
He freaked out and he threw himself outside the window.
That incredibly elaborate story all seems to be a ruse.
There was actually a fascinating Netflix multi-part documentary on this featuring his son and featuring Cy Hirsch.
It's called Wormwood.
If anybody wants to look at that, it's really great.
It's both entertaining and educational.
And what apparently was the case was that Frank Olson was going to blow the whistle on U.S. use in some capacity.
And I'm sorry, just a side note here, but it's got to be mentioned, Sam, that that story, aside from being a limited hangout and preventing the truth about the bioweapons program coming out, that also became the basis for this old wives' tale that LSD causes people to jump off of roofs and out of windows and die.
And then that translates directly to entire lifetimes wasted, languishing in filthy, rotten cages simply for possessing LSD or for selling LSD.
There's essentially no limit to the number of dead heads that got entrapped into something like life sentences for selling acid over this.
This basic limited hangout lie became the scare story that made people who had no idea about it and no experience with it themselves at all believe that acid makes people crazy and suicidal.
And what if your son jumped off a roof?
And so we have to, this has to be a felony to have just a little bit.
And I'm sorry, it's just a parentheses, but it's just an atrocity.
I mean, we're talking about decades upon decades upon decades of people punished for this.
And now they go, oh, actually, you know what?
Taking mushrooms and LSD is a really good way to stop being depressed and suicidal and to get over abuse, trauma and all of these things.
It turns out the hippies were right all along how beneficial this stuff can be under the right circumstances.
But anyway.
That's fascinating.
I mean, I feel like so much of this stuff has that mentality of, in effect, making either other people or nature the enemy rather than in a scrutinizing these militarized institutions.
They end up being the threat and they point to all of these other threats, whether it's foreigners or ethnic minorities or nature itself is going to come after you or something like LSD.
I know I hadn't thought about what you were saying, but it kind of fits into a general framework, a general pattern that I've seen in terms of how the scaremongering that goes on through here and through that scaremongering, the establishment, you know, effectively coerces people into going along with their militarized agenda.
And, you know, there are really good guys on our side who are really worried about this narrative taking hold because the yellow peril is in fashion again.
If it ain't Russia, it's China.
And if it ain't one or the other, it's both the new enemy.
And sometimes Iran, but, hey, those scary Easterners and you can't get more East than the Chinese boy.
So and people are terrified of it and people like being terrified of it.
I was a guest on the Tim Pool show and I basically just, you know, China ain't so bad.
I ain't afraid of them kind of thing.
It's all right.
We can get along.
And the audience reaction was just, you know, they're right leaning people in the comments section and their heads just exploded.
It was like if in 2002 I was saying Saddam Hussein was harmless and they're just having a heart attack about it.
They just can't believe it.
How could you be so pro Chinese communist and and and favor their victory over our own civilization so badly because they're all they're just begging the question.
They just know it's true that China is going to take over the world.
And that means us, too.
And so then this plays into that, oh, my God, they unleashed this germ, which, you know, there seems to be something to the idea that they held open the airports and encouraged people to come home for the Chinese New Year and then kept the airports open and sent everybody out hither and yon all over the world after the holiday was over, which is I kind of thought that that sort of stood for, well, if this is going to happen to us, it's going to happen to everybody else, too, kind of an attitude when they could have prevented that.
Not that I'm trying to play into the Cold War, but it does seem like part of the problem, you know.
Yeah, I haven't really, to be honest, parched through Chinese government actions.
I do think that I would, again, caution against, you know, pinning it on the Chinese in two respects.
One respect, this dangerous lab work, it was funded by the United States or at least a substantial portion of it, and that it's being done and driven by the United States and there should be global restrictions on this kind of dangerous lab work if we want to prevent or re the continuation of of this existential threat to humanity.
And you know, again, you know, given what happened with the anthrax attacks, they were a false flag, given what happened with the Frank Olson cover story, complete charade to cover that up.
I don't think that we should exclude the possibility that the Chinese labs in some fashion were being framed.
It would serve a lot of agendas for that to have been the case.
That doesn't prove that it happened.
But I think that, you know, it is one of the three options, objectively speaking, the three options are A, it had nothing to do with the lab, B, it was an accident that leaked out of one of the labs in Wuhan or the third one being that it was it possibly was some kind of intentional release, possibly to frame those those labs for strategic purposes.
So I think that if there's going to be a genuine, independent, rigorous inquiry, it would have to consider all three of those possibilities.
Yeah, well, that's not going to happen.
Well, it'll be just a contest of narratives, right, Sam?
And then?
Well, no, I think that there are things such as evidence and logic.
And it's been remarkable to me, as I mentioned to you what what Meryl Nass did, for example, small example, but, you know, I mean, she she called out that Nature Medicine article of a year ago.
Yeah.
And now it's become completely apparent that that Nature Medicine article, which was regurgitated through tons of media, which Frank Collins, the head of the NIH, basically said closes the case a year ago in a blog post that he wrote that it did come from nature.
You know, she she's an independent physician working in Maine and she figured it out.
So I think that there is the possibility here of networks of individuals, at least if we're not going to get any any meaningful official inquiry, and I certainly don't trust the Biden administration or the spook agencies that will presumably continue to put out information on this.
I think that it is possible for networks of individuals to try to arrive at some some some meaningful levels of truth, if not definitive answers.
And I don't think that that should be dismissed.
I don't think we should be, you know, you know, completely you know, we can be cynical about the institutions involved, but I don't think that we should dismiss the possibilities of parsing out the truth.
I'm sure you're you'd agree.
I mean, that's what you do.
Of course.
Yeah, I'm a big believer in journalism.
You know, I never read the 9-11 Commission report, but I read a hell of a lot of different reporters all about all different aspects of that thing, came my own, made my own little report in my own head.
That's very, very sensible.
So and in fact, in this case, we have a very specific example here, and it should have been you, Sam, a year ago or more.
But in this case, what happened was a former science reporter from The New York Times wrote a million word piece for Medium.com.
And by a million, I mean, it was about, what, 20,000 words or something.
So this giant piece for Medium.com that said, hey, listen, this really does look like a real possibility here.
And for whatever social psychological reasons, that seemed to make the difference.
So that was what kicked open the door.
And then other reporters started asking officials about it, and they started denying it less and being more open to the possibility.
And now here we are, what, three weeks later, and we're in a full scale debate about whether this is really a thing or not, right?
That's a large chunk of what happens.
I mean, I'm, again, I'm a very skeptical person.
I mean, the latest round of interest in this, which started about a little over a week ago, I think, was the Wall Street Journal published a piece.
By Michael Gordon.
Yeah, the infamous Michael Gordon, along with one of the former Knight Ritter reporters, it should be added.
Yeah, Stroebel, right?
Yeah.
Michael Gordon, who did a lot of highly dubious reporting with Judy Miller, put out a piece, you know, citing spooks, saying that workers at Wuhan got, got sick, you know, the lab workers indicating that COVID might have come out of the lab.
Well, you know, I mean, they're obviously, you know, it would seem like they are pursuing an agenda to, you know, target the labs in Wuhan.
I mean, you know, I mean, the Trump administration has, the Biden administration has, wants leverage over China the same way that Trump did, just in a less crass manner.
So, you know, and I don't, I mean, all of these report like Nick Wade and others who were silent for a year, I mean, it's hard to know how to assess that.
Was it just simply knee jerk anti-Trumpism or was it that, you know, you know, are they getting their cues from, you know, government entities?
I don't know what's inside these people's heads.
I'm, you know, I spent a good deal of last year being dismayed at the silence of so many people who should have known better.
And you have to question what the, what the agendas at play were.
But I, you know, I think you're right that Nick Wade piece sort of started opening the door on the discussion, but it really has taken off since the, you know, explicit information coming from, clearly coming from spook agencies.
Right.
Yeah, that's right.
And again, I mean, the real question is, why wouldn't they discuss this last year?
And that was because they had to make as much of the germ Trump's fault as they possibly could for electoral politics reasons.
And essentially the entire establishment, including the Republicans, you know, not necessarily Fox News, but everybody else on the right, we're all trying to get rid of Donald Trump.
And so I think they just didn't want to run with anything that would diffuse the responsibility from him.
I think, I think that's part of it.
But I also think that, I mean, imagine if the public were aware, you know, in February of last year that this could have come out of a lab, you know, and there was objective reporting around that, I think that there would have been a nationwide and global mass demand to end this dangerous lab work, you know, and I mean, that agenda goes far beyond Trump.
So I think that there are very deep seated interests who wanted to keep that off the public agenda.
Yeah.
No, that's a very good point.
And they have succeeded.
Right.
We have not been discussing.
Well, what is going to happen with the Pentagon money and IH money and the State Department money going towards these things?
Right.
Right.
I mean, these I mean, the genius of Trump was to seem to play against the establishment while effectively backing it up, which is kind of similar to what Obama did.
Right.
And they accepted all of his favors while still opposing him anyway and doing everything they could to undermine him anyway.
Sort of.
But in a limited way.
I mean, you know, they didn't undermine him for, you know, you know, for the Jerusalem move or.
Well, you got that right.
You know, I mean, they only undermined him for, you know, they spent three years on Russiagate, which was a complete farce.
So it's I'm reminded of your book Fool's Errand.
Yeah.
Somehow giving away Golan, which wasn't his to give away, was just totally kosher over at The Post and The Times.
That's fine.
And if he talks about getting out of Afghanistan, you oppose him on that.
You know, so and then he never delivers on that.
He doesn't get out of Afghanistan.
Right.
So, you know, he plays against NATO and then so all the liberals got to back up NATO.
It was a sort of, you know, it was kind of a stroke of genius on the part of the establishment to use Trump as a foil to sort of further entrench it.
And I think that that happened in spades in in this case, by him talking about, you know, the possibility of a lot of origin that sort of sealed the deal.
It was already there, as I said, but that sort of sealed the deal, as you indicate.
Yeah.
That that was an insane, unthinkable thought.
Yeah.
And I think that that was completely tragic.
It certainly shut down, you know, a lot of so-called progressives and a lot of so-called anti-war people, even people who, you know, were critical of the whole Russiagate narrative.
You know, Max Blumenthal and others all, you know, jumped on the bandwagon that lab origin was a conspiracy theory.
And, you know, it just shows to what degree so much so-called journalism is just reflexively anti it's sectarian.
It's you know, it's just playing against what faction you don't like.
It's not assessing evidence.
It's not looking at history.
And I think so.
I think that we've seen a complete failure of the scientific community, of the global legal framework around bioweapons, around journalism.
And we've seen how big tech, euphemistically sometimes called social media, is used to mold public opinion rather than be a tool for empowering individuals.
Yeah.
And listen, I mean, that really is one of the most important buried headlines in this whole story is the level of censorship by Google and Facebook.
And I'm not sure if Twitter was banning people for saying this or not.
I mean, a lot of people are being censored by Google.
I mean, YouTube, the all important YouTube for a year, this thing that's now perfectly debatable by The Post and The Times for a year would get you or your mom kicked off a Facebook for talking about it.
It's crazy that they would do that.
What is this, China?
This is supposed to be the United States of America, for God's sake.
Right.
And they set up this structure where, you know, free speech rights don't exist on these privatized networks.
But they, in effect, coordinate with government entities.
So it's sort of the worst of both worlds.
So that you don't have First Amendment rights.
They get to utilize this for their personal profit.
They know everything about you.
You know nothing about them.
And it really is genuinely dystopian.
So I think that, you know, there are so many threads that are, you know, screaming for major reforms and that's very near the top of the list.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
You guys check out Sam Husseini.
He's at husseini.posthaven.com questioning the CDC origin of the pandemic and biowarfare.
He's got a whole list of articles there and also including, contrary to claims, the pandemic may have come from a lab and averting our gaze from biowarfare, pandemics and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Thanks so much for coming on the show, Sam.
Great to talk to you.
You people can just go to plain old husseini.org.
That'll take them to that page.
Thanks so much for having me on, Scott.
Great.husseini.org.
I appreciate it.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
