Tucker Carlson: We were labeled as conspiracy theorists for asking questions about the origins of COVID
Fox News host Tucker Carlson reacts to reports that the Energy Department has concluded COVID-19 most likely came from a Chinese lab on 'Tucker Carlson Tonight.'
So how would you define the Biden administration? Well, really, the hallmark has been an almost otherworldly disconnection from the actual affairs of the United States. If it's really happening in this country, the Biden administration will pretend it's not. In fact, White House officials seem to have no idea what's going on in our country, no interest in learning about it.
The week a train derailment poisoned an entire town in Ohio, the transportation secretary, the man in charge of preventing train derailments, held a press conference attacking White construction workers because they're the problem. It's 1952.
Our 80-year old president, meanwhile – 80 years old – he seems convinced it's 1915 and we're all living in rural Alabama, burning crosses in the front yards of terrified sharecroppers to amuse ourselves. We don't have TV. Biden gave a speech the other day, in 2023, to denounce lynching as if lynching is still happening in the United States. It all seems a little delusional.
So it was with genuine relief that we saw today one of Biden's top cabinet officials, Janet Yellen, who runs the Treasury Department, sign off her Twitter account, finally leave Washington and meet with actual flesh and blood human beings who are suffering. And not only did she meet with them? To prove her sincerity, Janet Yellen brought with her a check for $1,000,000,000. And we'll admit, partisanship aside, we were happy to see that. Finally, someone in the Biden administration who actually cares was getting on an airplane to show concern. That's the good news. The bad news is Janet Yellen was not in East Palestine. She was in Ukraine. Watch.
TUCKER CARLSON: RUSSIA'S INVASION OF UKRAINE WAS THE ENDPOINT OF A MUCH LONGER STORY
JANET YELLEN: And today, I'm proud to announce the transfer of an additional balance of over $1.2 billion. That's the first tranche of about $10 billion in direct budget support that the United States will provide in the coming months.
We love you so much that we will give you whatever you want. Anything. A new bicycle, a puppy, a pony? It's yours. We love you. Billions more for Ukraine, your tax dollars. But that money's not going to be going to the newly poisoned communities of eastern Ohio. Who cares about them? It's not going to be earmarked for the hundreds of thousands of American families who have lost loved ones to the opioid epidemic, an epidemic that was created by Democratic donors at Purdue Pharma.
No, that money is going to Zelenskyy and his wife in Kiev, and that money will complement the more than 100 billion in tax dollars they've already received from the U.S. Treasury. And you've got to think, as they watch this tonight, assuming there's still TV reception in East Palestine, the people who are stuck there are kicking themselves. If only they had paid Joe Biden's crackhead son $80 grand a month for a no show job, Janet Yellen might be visiting them today.
It seemed like a lot of money at the time, but that turned out to be the best investment those Ukrainian oligarchs ever made. It was like buying Google stock 20 years ago. Talk about a jackpot.
And by the way, nobody understands the principles of political venture capitalism better than, ironically, the communist Chinese government does. They paid Hunter Biden, too. And this weekend, we learned a little bit about what they got in return.
The Wall Street Journal reported the Biden administration has finally concluded that, yes, COVID was not naturally occurring. It didn't emerge organically from a pangolin, whatever that is, at the wet market, whatever that is. No, the virus came from a Chinese military lab where it was created. That's the determination of the Department of Energy based on new intelligence that of course, everyone already had. Now, we learned this, interestingly from a newspaper. We did not learn it directly from the Biden administration because Joe Biden hasn't said a word about it. And that's a little odd.
A million Americans, they tell us, died of COVID. Close to 7 million died globally. So it's inherently a big story. Now, it is true that the origin of COVID is not directly related to anti-trans racism. So it's not a natural for Joe Biden, he doesn't have his talking points already written. But it might still make for a good topic for, say, a primetime address to the nation. He might mention it to us. He might answer a few other questions while he's at it. For example, is Joe Biden still sending money to China for biotech research? The administration was actually doing that, sending cash to that same Wuhan lab, as recently as last year. Are they still doing that?
Coronavirus. Courtesy of the CDC
And bigger picture, have their views on China changed now that they know that China is responsible for the deaths of almost 7 million people? We know China unleashed COVID on the world, intentionally or not, and then lied about it for sure and then hid lifesaving genetic information about the virus from the scientists who were trying to respond to COVID. Now we know all of that. Does Joe Biden still consider Vladimir Putin, he's so bad, the greatest threat to world peace and stability? It does seem like this story could overturn some of our previous assumptions.
Well, Joe Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, went on CNN yesterday to answer precisely none of these questions. Instead, he told us, "We're still not sure where it came from." Watch this.
DANA BASH: Did the coronavirus pandemic start in a lab? Is that what you believe now?
JAKE SULLIVAN: Well, Dana, there is a variety of views in the intelligence community. Some elements in the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don't have enough information to be sure. And if we gain any further insider information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people. But right now, there is not a definitive answer that has emerged from the intelligence community on this question.
We just can't say for sure where COVID came from. There's no consensus. We're still debating it.
Well, there's never a consensus in Washington about anything, particularly not with the intel agencies. They're lying. We know perfectly well COVID came from, we've known this for years. In fact, one of the very first things we knew about COVID was that it was an engineered virus that escaped somehow, intentionally or not, from a Chinese military biolab in Wuhan. It was in early March of 2020, three full years ago, at the very beginning, that we did a long open on this show about the Chinese research paper whose authors later disappeared. Now, these Chinese scientific researchers scolded the Chinese government for the lax safety standards that they said allowed COVID to escape and infect the world. This was three years ago. Watch this.
TUCKER CARLSON: In fact, the outbreak may have begun not in a public meat market, but in a poorly run Chinese laboratory. Now, that's not our theory. Anyone who raises that theory on American television is attacked as a conspiracy monger. But this is a theory from a now censored Chinese paper, a draft paper posted in mid-February. Scientists at the South China University of Technology suggested the virus outbr,eak, coronavirus outbreak, began at the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, where an animal may have infected a researcher who then spread the disease outside the facility. The paper is explicit about this. We're going to quote it. "The killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan."
So it's not like we did a lot of hard hitting reporting with our Chinese speaking staff. That paper was in English on the internet and anyone who was interested could have found it. We were just interested. That's why we found it. And then we found someone who was there. We found a Chinese physician, a scientific researcher who worked for the Chinese government, who was in and around Wuhan when COVID emerged from that lab. Her name is Li Meng Yan, and we did a bunch of interviews with her. Here's one.
LI MENG YAN: From my first report, I can present the solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 virus, actually is not from nature. I work with the top coronavirologists in the world. So together, with my experience, I can tell you this is created in the lab. This is a from that template owned by China military. And also it is spread to the world to make such damage.
TUCKER CARLSON: "To make such damage." Do you believe the Chinese government released this intentionally, on purpose? Did they do this?
LI MENG YAN: Yes, of course, it's intentionally.
Wow. Now, we thought that was a story. So there was a physician who worked on coronaviruses for the Chinese military, who was in Wuhan, telling us in September of 2020 that the Chinese government did this intentionally to wreck the West, to kill people and destroy the economies of its rivals here in the West.
Now, if you're a middle class Christian American, it's hard to imagine that level of malice existing anywhere in the world. You just would never consider doing something like that. But with the Chinese, are they serious enough? Probably. But instead of following up on that, people attacked the woman you just saw, really attacked her and then attacked us for giving her airtime. "Pants on fire. You're lying," said the "fact-checkers."
But she wasn't lying. And Tony Fauci and many others in the US government knew that she wasn't lying. In fact, they knew the truth about where COVID came from long before the rest of us had even heard the term "COVID." In mid-November of 2019, a friendly Asian government, we have learned, sent a cable to American officials warning that there was evidence of something strange going on in Wuhan, and it looked like a dangerous leak from a biolab. They knew that. The origins of COVID were never a secret.
The real story, the great outrage of this story, is that the people who knew or should have known the truth, lied about the truth. Why? To hide the Chinese government's role in mass murder, the killing of almost 7 million people and the destruction of the American economy. That's the interesting part looking back three years later.
A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)
From the beginning of the outbreak, the American media, as one, took the side of the Chinese government in this new propaganda war over COVID. And Trump once again, to his credit, knew. He knew exactly where this came from. He didn't say so directly. He should have, but instead he alluded to it. He called COVID the "China virus." And when he did that, he was over the target, so the Chinese government attacked him. They've learned a thing or two from watching American politics as a, "racist." One Chinese news outlet tweeted this: "Racism is not the right tool to cover your own incompetence." Shut up, racist. They saw it working in America. We're going to try that. And it worked.
And then the entire American press corps covered for the Chinese government. People like David Frum at The Atlantic. Oh, he's so smart. David Frum immediately parroted that slur from the Chinese government. You have to ask yourself, was David Frum taking money from Beijing to repeat their lies? We can't confirm that. But he might as well have been taking money from Beijing.
And it wasn't just David Frum. NBC News called the phrase "Chinese virus' "both inaccurate and harmful in tying racist associations between the virus and those from China." Of course, the virus was from China. It was from a Chinese military biolab, and it may have been released on purpose to kill people.
It didn't matter. No one asked a single question. Joe Biden and his lackeys in the media all repeated the talking point. Watch this.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: And neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia. Labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability.
JIM ACOSTA: The president referred to the coronavirus as a, quote, "foreign virus." I think it's going to smack, it's going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia.
ALI VELSHI: The administration's labeling of this virus as foreign is undoubtedly playing into these rising xenophobia about it. Trump isn't cautioning us to check our racism, but is rather stoking xenophobic sentiment.
CHRIS CUOMO: The president says it's a foreign virus as if this was launched on us like an attack. We know what that's about. That's about him playing xenophobia, works with his base.
REPORTER: Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus? Why do you keep using this?
DONALD TRUMP: Because it comes from China. It's not racist at all. No, not at all. It comes from China.
Every one of the people you just saw should resign in disgrace and should spend the next decade in ashes and sackcloth pondering what they've done, which is cover for a crime. By the way, if the US media had swung behind the evidence in this story and pressed where did this virus come from, then it's at least potentially conceivable that scientists in the United States would have forced the government of China to release the information they had about the genetic makeup of COVID. Maybe we would've had a vaccine that worked, for example. Or a medical response that saved Americans' lives, but they didn't. None of them did.
JESSE WATTERS: WHY WAS THE WUHAN LAB LEAK THEORY SCANDALIZED?
The New York Times' top global health and COVID reporter, a person called Apoorva Mandavilli,wrote quote, "Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not today." Where is the Oberlin Sociology Department-New York Times pipeline? Like, when did that start? Why are they hiring the dumbest and most reflexive people who take their opinions wholesale from the hive of Twitter?
There were a few people who were not deterred by "Racist, shut up." They said what was clearly true, and for their trouble, they were denounced as crazed science-deniers. Science-deniers.
Sen. Tom Cotton was attacked because he relied on a map and common sense to ask a very simple question. Here's what he said.
SEN. TOM COTTON: Here's what we do know. This virus did not originate in the Wuhan animal market. Just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level four superlaboratory that researches human infectious diseases. Now, we don't have evidence that this disease originated there. Because of China's duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.
Well, yeah. And by the way, that wasn't a guess. A wet market is a seafood market. A pangolin is a mammal. So, they weren't selling pangolins in a seafood market, for one thing. For another, a group of Chinese researchers went and interviewed everybody in the wet market and asked, "Have you ever seen a pangolin for sale here? Or bats? Another mammal?" No, not one had. That was on the Internet. We read it, we reported it. That was February 2020. So what we knew at that point was the Chinese government is lying. Tom Cotton was absolutely right. And for his trouble, he was called insane, a conspiracy theorist.
Residents wearing face masks purchase seafood at a wet market on Jan. 28 in Macau, China. (Getty Images)
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Tom Cotton, a couple of days ago, spouting a conspiracy theory that the Chinese made this virus. Don't try to spool up some of whoever was wearing tinfoil hats, in your audience.
DON CALLOWAY: Let's apply Occam's razor and just call crazy crazy. This is crazy. It's an insane thing to do because it's just wildly irresponsible and was totally unnecessary. I don't know what Tom Cotton gets out of this.
FAREED ZAKARIA: In the 1980s, I remember when the far left trafficked in rumors about HIV having been invented in CIA labs. The far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory.
Oh, yes. Let's have the plagiarist, Fareed Zakaria, on to tell us about science. By the way, it wasn't just Tom Cotton who was attacked. It's almost too unpleasant to bring you the story because the wall of dishonesty was impenetrable at that point three years ago. The one thing we needed to know, where did this come from, was the one thing they wouldn't let you even consider.
In fact, if you did, you would be un-personed. Facebook banned any user who suggested the virus was man-made because – and we're quoting – "the science was settled." It was not settled at all. There was no science. We didn't know anything. As NPR reported, quote, "Scientists debunk Lab Accident Theory of Pandemic Emergence." Really? On what basis? They had no evidence to "debunk" it. But that didn't stop Vox from reporting and we're quoting now. "No, coronavirus did not start in a Chinese lab." They had no idea. They were just flat out shilling for the Chinese government and hiding its complicity in mass murder. What?
And then a woman called Laura Helmuth, the diversity hire now running the once but no longer respected publication, Scientific American said, "It's a conspiracy theory to believe a lab leak had occurred." But it did. That's the thing. Facts still matter. Every facet, every element, every link in the chain that connects every part of elite America to itself pushed the same lies. Even the comedians, they were on propaganda duty, too. Watch this.
JIMMY KIMMEL: He's also pushing U.S. intelligence to find evidence for this theory that the virus was accidentally released from a lab in Wuhan. That's his new angle to feed the wingnuts, to treat this virus like it was a conspiracy of some kind.
DONALD TRUMP: It should have never happened. This plague should never have happened. It could have been stopped, but people chose not to stop it.
JIMMY KIMMEL: What people? Tomorrow he'll blame the Spanish flu on Antonio Banderas.
Imagine if you're a comedian and all of a sudden your cue card has all kinds of talking points from politicians and foreign governments on it. Don't read it. You degrade yourself, and you become complicit in the greatest crime in history.
So you have to ask what role did the US intelligence agencies play in all of this? Of course, they knew. Well at one point, MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, the single most dishonest person on television now or ever, claimed that and we're quoting "Donald Trump is turning his intelligence community to now investigate a conspiracy theory about COVID coming from a lab in Wuhan."
By the way, we're not watching this woman's show, but is she in tears tonight begging the forgiveness of her audience? No, but let's parse this for a second. Obviously, she was wrong about the origins of the virus. It did come from that lab, intentionally or not. But what's interesting is that she was also wrong about what Donald Trump's government, under the leadership in part of Mike Pompeo, was doing.
On March 17, 2020, a group of scientists wrote a paper in Nature magazine. That paper concluded that "We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." Now, that's the final word. That's the science. Well, internal NIH emails show that Tony Fauci helped edit that paper. He did not disclose this publicly. It was all behind the scenes. Now, that's significant because Fauci was funding bat coronavirus experiments in Wuhan, the ones that apparently caused the pandemic. So he was editing the report on the origin of the virus. Okay. That's not peer-reviewed, as we say. It's the opposite.
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As Paul Thacker reports on his Substack, just a few days after that paper was published in Nature, the State Department's Office of Outreach, part of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, began promoting these false findings, these lies. The State Department covertly recruited scientists to go around Washington, D.C., in off-the-record high level meetings, telling everyone who would listen that COVID "emerged naturally in an animal before crossing to humans and was not engineered in a lab." Now, the scientists who made this false briefing, who told these lies, cited one source, the Nature article that was secretly edited by Tony Fauci.
In other words – and we could give you a thousand other examples – America's, not China's, America's entire leadership class, from the government to the intel agencies to elected officials to, of course, the media in unison, spent years trying to hide Chinese culpability for the greatest crime in human history. They cooked up fake papers and bogus data. They attacked anyone who asked the obvious questions. Even people who were in Wuhan at the time who knew.
And you have to ask, "Why did they do this?" Could it be that they were implicated in this, too? They were implicated in creating the worst pandemic in modern history? We're not sure. But it's an amazing story.
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