Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so
much for your support. So we have another chapter in
the growing saga of now it can be told. I
should write a book. I should put together a book
of all of the now it can be told stories,
I mean post Biden presidency right now it can be told.
Now we're learning all of the things that we already
knew but we're never really reported on. But now it
can be told that we were right. But they're not
going to tell us we were right. They're just gonna say, oh,
my gosh, did you know that this was happening at
the time, because we sure didn't, even though it's our
job to be perceptive and then to find out these things,
chase down rumors and leads, find out if they're true
or not, and then report to you on what is true. Right,
that's our job. But we didn't do it for a while,
and so now we're doing it, and now we're finally
able to tell the story. The latest chapter is about COVID. So,
all you racists who thought that the that the COVID
virus may have originated in a high tech lab in
the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the whiz right, all of
you racists that thought the Chinese working on some really
top secret, you know, high tech stuff, you may have
been more than the other non racisty people who thought
it was from the Chinese people eating bats. Okay, so right, Okay,
So now we find out confirmation that seven Americans maybe
but totally did have contracted COVID nineteen. They may have
got the bug while they were participating in the World
Military Games. Okay. This is where service members from all
the you know, different branches of our military and different
militaries from around the world, they gather for sort of
an Olympics kind of event and they compete in physical
activity and such. And I'm not sure how they are
able to trace this to the COVID nineteen outbreak, except
for the fact that the Military Games were held in Wuhan,
right down the street from the lab and the wet market.
I'm not sure if these military people were eating all
of the bat soup at the time, but they came
down with COVID symptoms in October of twenty nineteen. October
twenty nineteen, which, if my math is correct, was about
two months before the outbreak all around the globe, right,
So they would be sort of the patient zero through seven,
where I guess, if your patient zero, you're zero. But
if there were seven Americans that got COVID, allegedly seven
of them, so I guess the seventh would be patient six.
Why do they call it patient zero? Wouldn't it be
patient one? Anyway? This occurred obviously several months before the
reported start of the pandemic, according to a bombshell military
terry report that has been obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
And you may be wondering, Pete, why did it take
so long for them to connect these dots? Ah, good question,
glad you asked. They actually connected these dots a while ago.
But the report, which was done in December of twenty
twenty two, has been concealed, it's been buried, it's been
blocked from our view. It was blocked by the Biden administration.
But then you may say, but Pete, I thought that
the Biden administration was required by law to release to
the public all of this information. Good question as well,
very informed follow up question. Yes they were, but they didn't.
The report from twenty twenty two reveals for the first
time that seven US military service members contracted COVID nineteen
like symptoms during or after their participation in the World
Military Games in Wuhan in October of twenty nineteen, which
kind of contradicts the Biden administration's public claims in twenty
twenty one that there was no evidence that any American
participants contracted the virus at those games. The revelation adds
to a mounting body of evidence that the virus was
circulating in Wuhan for months before China disclosed it to
the world in December of twenty nineteen, which kind of
makes sense because Kami's lie rule number one. Communists lie,
and so when they said, oh, we got this thing
going on, yeah, this virus, we're disclosing it. See look
at how good we are. Yeah, yeah, no, you already
knew about this. You already knew about it for several months,
so it also bolsters the growing consensus that it could
have leaked into the human population from a Chinese lab.
Another piece of evidence. I just throw this in. The
Washington Freebeacon article did not specifically address this part of it,
but I would just throw in an extra piece of
information that may or may not lend some more credibility
to this theory that the nature of the research was
making the virus transmissible among humans. Okay, so there is
that part of it too that I feel is I
feel is kind of important. I feel it's a piece
of relevant information to toss it. The twenty twenty two
National Defense Authorization Act required the Biden administration to make
its report on the twenty nineteen WU Hand World Military
Games publicly available on an Internet website in a searchable
format by summer of twenty twenty two. Though the Biden
administration transmitted copies of the two page report to the
House and Senate Armed Services Committee in December of twenty
twenty two, the report did not see the light of
day until sometime in late March, when the Trump administration
quietly uploaded it to a Defense Department website Now, you
may recall China has floated a couple of accusations, some
allegations about how the virus started. One of those accusations
was that the American military could have unleashed it during
the World Military Games. Right, So China was saying that
China was using this event in order to promulgate the
story that America created it and America released it into Wuhan, which,
to me, I would think that if you are trying
to combat a Chinese created narrative to blame America, that
you would have, I don't know, released this information to
show no, we didn't, you did. It was in Wuhan.
And by the way, not just our participants, our military
members caught it, others did. Why would we release it
and infect our own people? Right? But for some reason,
the Biden administration chose not to combat this false narrative
by releasing the information about our own military members who
got it. I'm not sure why. Is there some sort
of reason why the Bidens might not want to hurt
the Chinese government now, don't I'm just thinking through like,
is there any kind of connection? Somebody should take a
look into whether or not the Bidens ever did business
or something with the chiicoms that might be of value.
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video dot com guys, did you know that Wait, did
you know that Hunter Biden had some dealings with a
Chinese company?
Speaker 2: Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that might actually be relevant to this whole story
about why we didn't press on the Chinese regarding the
World Military Games and the reported outbreak of COVID like
symptoms in October of twenty nineteen. Maybe, but now the
story can be told. Russ writes in and says, as
with so many of the blockbuster revelations stories about COVID
and a lot of other stuff, I feel like it's
all information a lot of us have known for four
or five years now. I remember hearing about the military
game's infections a few weeks after the lockdown started, right, Well,
that's because you're racist, you see, and you thought that
it originated before the Chinese told us it did in
the wet markets obviously. Washington Freebeacon has the story. The
American military athletes traveled to and from Wuhan via Seattle
Tacoma International Airport, And did you know that one of
the earliest hot spot outbreaks was in wait for it,
that's right, Washington State. The seven soldiers all recovered from
their symptoms within six days. The Pentagon did not disclose
when it discovered the potential illnesses, and the Pentagon declined
to comment. Military athletes from Germany, France, Italy Luxembourg as
well who competed in the game teams also reported coming
down with COVID nineteen like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan,
which the participants also described as a quote ghost town, which,
to be fair, China does have a bit of a
history of building a bunch of cities where nobody lives
in them. Okay, so like that is that is kind
of a thing that they do. They build these massive buildings,
they build malls, They build a lot of stuff just
because they're trying to keep people employed, so they just
build stuff and then nobody lives in them. Have you
ever seen the ghost malls? Go look up Chinese ghost mall.
I mean not right now because you're listening. Oh, I
mean you can listen to the show and then also
pull it up on YouTube or something. But yeah, they
have these ghost malls and ghost towns and stuff, and
it's not city. These aren't places like our ghost malls
where you had a mall and then you know, the
businesses left and they all moved like into the revitalized
downtown district or something. No, no, no, these are shopping
centers that are built and nobody ever moves in because
they're communists, so they don't. Right, they're not looking at
the market signals and they're just building stuff to build them.
Very eerie. And yes, they're ghost malls much like ours.
All they have are sneaker shops. The Congressional Republicans have
long since concluded that the twenty nineteen Muhan World Military
Games served as one of the earliest super spreader events
of the pandemic, with House Foreign Affairs Republicans issuing its
findings on the matter back in August of twenty twenty one. Right,
That's why, to Russ's point, this is probably not news
to most people who consume conservative media because we would
have been made aware by the Congressional Republicans about this story. So, yes,
we were told that this stuff, this report did exist,
but it was supposed to be published as part of
the twenty twenty two Defense Reauthorization Act, and it wasn't.
They just kept sitting on it. Now, maybe it was
an oversight. That's possible. It could have just been an oversight.
The Defense Department, though uploaded the report sometime late last month,
so late in March, to a section of the website
dedicated to quote quality of life issues for military service
members and their families. The wuhand World Military Games report
is actually sandwiched between two different reports, but both of
them are on military spouses obtaining occupational licenses. That's where.
So if you're looking for the report, it's going to
be in between those two articles. Okay, several federal agencies
now including the CIA, the FBI, the Energy Department to
all say that the COVID nineteen pandemic most likely originated
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Now the story can
be told. So along these lines, I came across a
couple of interesting tidbits out of a podcast that was
hosted by is hosted by Barry Weiss. It's called Honestly and.
Speaker 2: It is.
Speaker 1: Barry Weiss's project is called The Free Press. Barry Weiss,
you may recall, was a I think she was the
New York Times columnist, and she was basically forced out
of the New York Times over woke stuff and anti
semitism and all of that, and she started the Free
Press and over the last. I don't know, it's been
probably four years or so. She has built this platform
into a refuge of sorts for a lot of you know,
former mainstream journalists tending towards the left, that saw a
problem with the woke hive mind, as Elon Musk would
call it, and spoke out about it, got fired for it,
got canceled for it, and then they end up over
at the Free Press. And so she does this podcast
called Honestly, and I think this is the most recent episode.
She brings on the founders of Axios. I know, I know,
I know. She brings on both of the founders of Axios,
guy by the name of Jim van de Hie and
another guy named Mike Allen. I want to say they
both worked for Politico prior. I think they both worked
for Politico. But these guys are as mainstream journalists as
you can be. They went off and started Axios, and
you know, say what you want about Axios, like I
don't think that they veered too far off of the
path that they were on. Okay, but now the truth
can be told, right, So now there is this sort
of repositioning, if you will, crafting of different narratives that, oh,
we saw what was happening, but it wasn't our fault
that we didn't tell you this stuff was happening. And
there's this what did Mike Allen called it? Reporter brain?
Reporter brain. As a former reporter, I can tell you
I've never heard of this before. Okay, I don't know
what he's talking about. Reporter brain. It just sounds like
partisan ideology, That's what it sounds like. All right. If
you're listening to this show, you know I try to
keep up with all sorts of current events, and I
know you do too, And you've probably heard me say
get your news from multiple sources. Why Well, because it's
how you detect media bias, which is why I've been
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make the media landscape more transparent. So two founders of
xios dot com, Jim Van de High and Mike Allen,
they were on the Honestly podcast with Barry Weiss, and
first up is vand High and he points out that
trust in American media collapsed, according to him, in three phases,
three phases.
Speaker 3: I feel like the trust really started to shatter over
the last decade, and I look at it as in
three phases. The first was the creation of Twitter. What
happened with Twitter is people forget like now. It's a
lot of conservative voices, a lot of independent voices. It
was a hot bed of liberal group think for a
long time. And it was the first time since I've
been in this business that I would get on a
feed and I would see reporters who I had trusted,
who I had admired, making it crystal clear what their
views were.
Speaker 1: Journal journal List. Twitter wasn't the first there was a
thing called journal list. And for people who may not recall,
this was back in the wild West days of the
beginning of blogs and the interweb and distribution lists email
distribution lists, and if I recall correctly, it was The
Daily Caller that blew the lid off of the existence
of the journal list. And I think at the time
this was when Tucker Carlson was still running The Daily Caller.
So what it was was just an email chain, basically
a group email with all of these DC area and
you know, high profile reporters who were all in on
the same email list, and they would talk about stuff,
and The Daily Caller then published what they were saying
because somehow or other, somebody that they knew, either you know,
got handed the email list or got added to the
distribution list or something and they got access to all
of it. So this idea that these reporters are on
Twitter talking about what they really think about stuff is
not new. Twitter just let all of us see it
happen in real time. So I mean I saw, okay,
maybe I am quibbling with Jim VandeHei on this, but
I don't believe this is the first time that he
had ever been exposed to these leftist ideologies held by
his colleagues. I find that difficult to believe. I will
tell you that when I was a reporter for a
decade here in Charlotte, and I worked with reporters from
different outlets, and we would go and cover stories. And
when you cover a certain beat or you're covering, you're
on a certain shift, like if you're doing you know,
afternoons and evenings, you tend to end up at the
same stories as the same people from the other outlets.
And while you're, you know, hanging outside the burned down
apartment building waiting on fire Captain Rob Brisley to come
to the mic and tell us what happened. And you're
standing out there and you're just chit chatting, and you
get an idea of the other reporters politics by the
stories they talk about, the comments they make, whatever. So
I find this difficult to believe that but for Twitter,
Jim Vandehi would have no idea that he is surrounded
in his profession by lefties. That's I don't believe this.
But to his point about Twitter. Yes, I think it
did make a lot more people outside of the reporting
world aware of the biases that these reporters are harboring.
Speaker 3: What side they were on. You could tell in what
they were tweeting, and you could tell in who they
were following and who was following them. So I thought
that was stage one, because at least before any bias
people had they hid from the public. Now it was
in a somewhat full view. Then came along kind of
the COVID defund, the police word policing, where I think
a lot of Americans were looking around and being like,
it doesn't sit right with me, and it doesn't in
a way it's being covered didn't sit right with them.
And then I think the final straw really was the
coverage of Joe Biden, when people were saying, hey, I
could see with my own two eyes that the guy
seems pretty old, probably doesn't seem capable of being the
president in the next term, and yet there's not a
whole hell of a lot of coverage of it. We
you know, Alex Thompson, our White House reporter, just won
the White House Reporting Award because he was one of
the few reporters to write about the decline of Joe Biden,
and he got the help kick exactly. Some of the
very reporters who may have you know who will applaud
him when he wins the award in a couple of weeks.
If you go back and look at their Twitter feeds,
there's a lot of people dunking on him and saying, oh,
that's not actually true. And we're on the other ends
of the calls from the White House saying that you
guys are out on a limb, you're wrong, you're crazy,
blah blah blah. And so I think those three things
in totality really cemented the distrust that a lot of
people have in media, and it breaks my heart. I
hate that. I love journalism. I am a fierce, fierce,
depend defender of journalism. I believe that most reporters, at
most institutions actually do try to get to the closest
approximation of the truth and achieve it most of the time.
I think it's a couple of bad apples who make
it look bad for everyone.
Speaker 1: It's just a couple of bad apples, that's all. But
that would that would contradict his point number one about
Twitter exposing the political bias of so many journalists, not
just in what they tweet and what they think and
write about and you know, throw it out there for
everybody to see, but also what did he say the
people that these reporters follow and the people that follow them, right,
And once you could start mapping this stuff, you saw
that they are living in an echo chamber. They're in
a bubble. And the more they relied on Twitter to
you know, generate story ideas and leads, the more pronounced
it became, and the more obvious it was. So no,
it's not a few bad apples, the shattering of the
old model. It wasn't from a few bad apples, because
if you just toss the few bad apples, then you
can protect the rest of the barrel. Right, But that's
not what happened. It was way too late. There were
way too many rotten apples, and its spoiled the whole bunch.
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Here's a message from Sharpie Joe who says it's not
a few bad apples, better described by Martha Raditch as
just a handful fun to watch the liberals deny everything
that they did Happy Friday. Yeah, well, and this is
how they think they're going to reclaim some modicum of
credibility with large audiences. And this is look, Axios is
going to make these arguments because they're positioning themselves as
better than the legacy outlets. They are competitors, right, so
they are going to offer up a unique value position
versus the other outlets that people have lost confidence in.
So look at us, you can trust us. And I
will take a moment here and say what I've said
in the past about the very nature of the news operations,
all of them. They are aggregators. Okay, every news organization,
from the oldest newspaper to the modern cable stations, everything
is we are aggregators. We look at all of the
stories that are out there in the world and we
pick and choose, you might say, selectively edit. We bring
in the stories that we think the audience needs to
know about, the most interesting, the most compelling stuff they
need to know about their local governance and such, and
you know, yes, apartment fires, car crashes, all of that
stuff because it makes really good video. So these are
all part of the decision making process, but they're all aggregators.
And so the whole point of the news organization and
the people who put their trust in the news organizations
is that you have to be trustworthy and your audience
has to believe that you are picking these topics for
no other reason than you think these are the most
important things they need to know about. But when you
start coloring the selection of the stories, and then you
color the way the stories are reported, people then lose
confidence in your ability as an aggregator. And with the
technology being what it is now, people can aggregate their
own feeds. For good and bad, there are trade offs here, right,
because if you're aggregating your own stuff, or you're just
relying on the you know, the TikTok algorithm, then you're
just you're outsourcing that to some you know, to some
other AI tool that is not going to be able
to make those types of decisions for you, because it's
it's just a tool, you know, And if you're doing
it yourself, confirmation bias usually kicks in and you start
looking for stories and topics that you're interested in and
that's it, or opinions that agree with yours already, and
so you end up in an insulated bubble, which is
exactly what the news organizations ended up in because they
did not hire a diversity of thought. That wasn't what
they were looking for. Okay, So here is the other
founder of Axios, Mike Allen, also formerly I Believe of Politico,
and he said the media's failure to cover Joe Biden's
mental decline was all the worst parts of what he
calls reporter brain. All right, we'll take a listen, reporter brain.
Speaker 2: What explains the failure? Is it a lack of curiosity?
Was it the White House successfully spinning people? How do
you explain what happened? Mike?
Speaker 4: Yep, Barry, this was all the worst parts of reporter
brain coming together. And there is the group think, the
monothink that you were talking about. You add to it
another piece of what you were just talking about is cluelessness, right,
and this is where the American people see something sent
something and they're not seeing it reflected in news outlets
that they used to trust. And so specifically with the
Biden health people, discounted what they saw with their own eyes,
ignored it. And this is the reporter group think part
of it. That there is an insecurity, a herd mentality
you don't want to be separate is like the typical
reporter instinct. And like you know, like the three of
us like have made great live and a great innovation
by saying we did want to be the one that's different.
But it's the hardest thing to teach your kid. It's
hard to teach a reporter. We tell our reporters, if
you go somewhere and there's two other reporters, you can
leave there's no story. If there is, we'll see it
on TV.
Speaker 2: But Mike, what did the herd? I Schris you that
herd mentality group think is incredibly powerful. It's something we
all learned in COVID. But what did the herd want
in this case?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: They wanted to herd?
Speaker 4: Yeah, the herd wanted the approval of the White House
connectivity of the White House. They didn't want to look
like they were being ideological on Twitter or another social
media when in fact they were being clinical fail.
Speaker 1: That was a fail. They didn't want to look like
they were being ideological by confronting the White House by
asking the White House, Yo, what's up with Joan is
inability to like formulate coherent thoughts? Why is he? You know,
why is he like walking towards closed doors and not
knowing how to open them and asking that question would
make you look ideological? No, it wouldn't. They knew, they
knew what they were seeing. So on the one hand,
he says, oh, it's cluelessness. But on the other hand,
he says, they didn't want to appear ideological. They wanted
to be seen as more clinical. I'm a professional, I'm
a professional journalist. Yeah, a professional journalist would have noticed
the thing that everybody else was noticing, and then would
have asked about the thing that everybody is noticing. That's
what a clinical approach would look like. An ideological approach
would be to not ask about it. So it's completely
the opposite of what Alan is describing. He also then says,
into this reporter brain and insecurity, that I think is true. Okay,
that part is true. Like a lot of reporters are
insecure because they are going and talking about these other
things that are occurring. They're not doing those things that
are occurring. They're just there to watch it happen and
then tell other people that this thing happened.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I think that there is always this level of insecurity,
and yes, there's also the insecurity of being outside of
the herd, no matter what, whether you're a reporter or not.
So I think that part he is correct about. I
think he's also correct that they were worried about losing
their connectivity, as he called it, to the White House.
They wanted to be cozied up to the administration so
they could get the scoops because that's what they want
to get, and so if you are an adversary, then
you may not get the scoops. They don't seem to
care about that in a Republican administration, but they really
care about it in a Democrat one. Why because they
are of like mind as is their audience, and so
those scoops matter more. Group think. What's another word for
that one? Peer pressure based on what ideology and getting
invited to the cocktail parties. Right. Limbaugh talked about this
for years, the cocktail circuit. They want to be in
the club, they want to be in the power elite.
As for this advice that they give their reporters, if
you show up and there are two other reporters there,
you can leave. No, that's crazy advice. I've never heard that. No,
you go and you maybe ask the questions that the
other two group thinking herd mentality insecure reporters don't think of.
That's why you go. It's a newsworthy thing and you
can then report on it from your own perspective. Right,
all right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you
so much for listening. I could not do the show
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