Social trends: Political violence watch

The possibility of political violence by extremists on the right and the left is increasing. From what I can tell, probably most of the radical right rank and file sincerely believe that American democracy and liberties are on the verge of falling to some form of a corrupt, Godless, radical left tyranny. According to radical right propaganda, the socialist tyranny is hell-bent on doing immoral, illegal and oppressive things like (i) confiscating guns, (ii) oppressing and replacing White people with non-White and non-heterosexual people, (iii) forcing Christians into re-education camps and brainwashing them into atheists, and (iv) etc. Many of them are willing to consider violence to defend themselves from the fake threats they have been convinced are real. Anger over the indictment of Trump has inflamed emotions on the right.

Increasing numbers of Democrats are expressing openness to violence, apparently out of anger over things like loss of abortion rights and control of the USSC by Republicans. 

Poll data from August 2022 indicated that a large majority of people said they thought violence was unacceptable for normal politics. Ipsos summarized its poll data:

Eighty-three percent also disagree that violent acts are acceptable in order to achieve their idea of a better society. Additionally, 85% of Americans do not believe it is acceptable for someone in their political party to commit violence to achieve a political goal. The poll also shows believing that political violence is unacceptable is a bipartisan notion.

Two-thirds of Americans are concerned about acts of violence committed against people in their community because of their political (66%) or religious beliefs (64%). Both a majority of Democrats (73% and 71%) and Republicans (60% and 58%) are concerned about acts of violence for political and religious beliefs, but Democrats are more likely to say they are concerned than Republicans. Eighty-two percent of Americans say that domestic terrorism is a threat to American society, with Democrats (90%) more likely to say this than Republicans (76%).

But more recent poll data indicates an uptick in acceptance of violence to achieve political goals. The Chicago Project on Security and Threats commented about its recent poll data:

From April 6, 2023 to June 26, 2023, Americans agreeing that “the use of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency” increased from 4.5% to 7%, or the equivalent of an estimated shift from 12 million to 18 million American adults. 

Trump is viewed as a far greater threat to democracy than Biden, by a difference of 52% vs 33%. Although lower, the level for Biden is still notably high. .... Far more Republicans than Democrats now believe that the 2024 election is already rigged against their party, by a difference of 27% to 11%.

Public support for the use of force to coerce members of the US Congress grew from 9 percent in January 2023 to 17 percent as of June 26, 2023, effectively doubling. While increasing across the political spectrum, the rise was sharpest among Democrats where it grew by about 2.5 times. This growing anger parallels the Republican rise to power and proceedings in the House of Representatives.

Radical, expressly violent support to restore the federal right to abortion grew from 8 percent in January 2023 to 12 percent as of June 26, 2023, a modest but significant rise beyond the margin of survey error. The increase was sharpest among Democrats, doubling over the past 6 months from 8 to 16 percent. This likely indicates growing anger over the Republican controlled supreme court.   

As of June 26, 2023, 7 percent of the American public – which equates to an estimated 18 million adults – supports violence to restore Trump to the presidency, while another 15% or 30 million adults are ambivalent.

Deep distrust of democracy is associated with statistically significant 

increase with support for political violence by about a factor of two

Deep distrust includes belief in Satan

worshipping pedophiles running the US government

 

An article in The Hill exemplifies the normalization and acceptance of violence by radical right extremists:

Grand jurors who voted to indict former President Trump in Georgia earlier this week are facing threats and a profusion of racist comments online. The jurors’ names were listed publicly within the indictment, as required under Georgia law.

“Everyone on that jury should be hung,” one user wrote on a right-wing online forum. On a different far-right site, the purported addresses of all 23 grand jurors tapped to serve in Trump’s case were posted in full. “MAGAs posting the grand jurors addresses online,” a Truth Social user wrote. “I see a swift bullet to the head if, and when, somebody shows up at their homes.”

The threats were not only made on far-right platforms but also surfaced on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “Awful nice car you have there…hate to see something happen to it,” one user wrote on X early Wednesday morning, referencing the grand jury foreperson by name.

Considering the odds of civil war

At this point one should ask if the left and radical right are about equal in their probability of actually engaging in widespread violence. There's just no way to know that with good certainty. In my opinion, the radical right is about 10 times more likely to engage than the left. Why? Because for years most radical right leaders and influencers have been knowingly using apocalyptic, terror and rage-inciting dark free speech to normalize and morally justify the idea of political violence. By contrast, most leaders and influencers on the left continue to reject violence and rely on far softer rhetoric and propaganda. In my firm opinion, that is a major, core difference between the two sides.

Odds of an actual shooting war? There's no way to know with reasonable certainty either. Presently my estimate is that there is maybe about a 5% chance the radical right will try to start a civil war if DJT loses the election in 2024. IMO, the left is at about a 0.5% chance if DJT is re-elected. One factor is how well DJT and the radical right propaganda Leviathan can foment willingness of the deceived and betrayed radical rank and file to go to a shooting war against fellow Americans. They support a corrupt, fornicating traitor-dictator. They simply cannot see or accept that hyper-inconvenient truth. Many of them sincerely believe DJT is God-sent to save America from Satan worshipping pedophiles. Insane crackpottery like that is what can foment a civil war.

News bits: Radical right violence watch; A flawed GOP analysis?

The NYT reports about a threat of violence related to we all know who and what:

A Texas woman has been charged with threatening to kill Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge in Washington who is overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election.

The woman, Abigail Jo Shry, of Alvin, Texas, called Judge Chutkan’s chambers on Aug. 5, two days after Mr. Trump was arraigned on the election interference charges, and left a voice mail message attacking the judge, who is Black, with a racial slur, according to a criminal complaint unsealed on Friday.

In the message, Ms. Shry told Judge Chutkan, “If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly, bitch,” according to the complaint. She added, “You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.”

NBC News reports:

The purported names and addresses of members of the grand jury that indicted Donald Trump and 18 of his co-defendants on state racketeering charges this week have been posted on a fringe website that often features violent rhetoric, NBC News has learned.

NBC News is choosing not to name the website featuring the addresses to avoid further spreading the information.

The grand jurors' purported addresses were spotted by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan research group founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator and staffer for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It’s becoming all too commonplace to see everyday citizens performing necessary functions for our democracy being targeted with violent threats by Trump-supporting extremists," Jones said. "The lack of political leadership on the right to denounce these threats — which serve to inspire real-world political violence — is shameful.” [IMFO, Jones frames this wrong -- lack of radical right political leadership in defense of democracy is intentional; GOP elites support violence by silent complicity or otherwise, but they do not condemn it] 

Tuesday — after Trump posted on his social media website that authorities were going "after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!" — Advance Democracy said Trump supporters were "using the term ‘rigger’ in lieu of a racial slur" in posts.

Notice the overt racism the poisoned ones are expressing? 

Qs: A peanut gallery denizen asks: How the fuck does this racist dude still have bail? He's openly encouraging supporters to threaten and attack witnesses, jurors and judges. What the actual fuck? 

Darn good questions. Our two-tiered system of justice, one for elites, the other for the rest of us, keeps the violent dictator beast out on bail. 

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An NYT article used recent poll data to analyze the groups that make up the authoritarian radical right Republican Party (ARRRP). Much of the analysis makes little sense to me in terns of the big picture, i.e., actual voting behavior. The NYT writes:

The last New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 37 percent of Republicans count as part of Mr. Trump’s loyal base.

The Moderate Establishment (14%). Highly educated, affluent, socially moderate or even liberal and often outright Never Trump.

The Traditional Conservatives (26%). Old-fashioned economic and social conservatives who oppose abortion and prefer corporate tax cuts to new tariffs. They don’t love Mr. Trump, but they do support him.

The Right Wing (26%). They watch Fox News and Newsmax. They’re “very conservative.” They’re disproportionately evangelical. They believe America is on the brink of catastrophe. And they love Mr. Trump more than any other group.

The Blue Collar Populists (12%). They’re mostly Northern, socially moderate, economic populists who hold deeply conservative views on race and immigration. Not only do they back Mr. Trump, but he himself probably counted as one a decade ago.

The Libertarian Conservatives (14%). These disproportionately Western and Midwestern conservatives value freedom and small government. They’re relatively socially moderate and isolationist. Other than the establishment, it’s Mr. Trump’s worst group.

The Newcomers (8%). They don’t look like Republicans. They’re young, diverse and moderate. But these disaffected voters like Democrats and the “woke” left even less.

Mr. Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party is founded on an alliance between the Right Wing and Blue Collar Populists, two groups that combine to represent nearly 40 percent of Republicans — and about two-thirds of Mr. Trump’s MAGA base of seemingly unshakable support.  

The Blue Collar Populists and the Right Wing don’t always agree. In particular, they split on the issues of the religious right, like same-sex marriage and abortion. But these two groups are big Trump supporters. They mostly agree with him on his defining issues and they share his deeply pessimistic, even cataclysmic view of the direction of the country, including fear of the declining white share of the population.

Susan Collins is an establishment moderate?

Really!!??

Rick Perry is a traditional conservative?

Really!!??

What makes little sense is that despite various group differences, ARRRP voters vote for ARRRP candidates, not Democrats. Decades of divisive, mendacious, slandering ARRRP dark free speech has poisoned the minds of the party's voters. So despite their alleged dislike of DJT, they nonetheless vote for him. Also missing, is the usual MSM failure to understand how radicalized the entire GOP has become. Susan Collins is no moderate. She voted to confirm all three of DJT's radical right Christian nationalist, brass knuckles capitalist, pro-dictatorship USSC nominees. That is not moderate. That is radical right, even if she did vote to impeach DJT in his 2nd impeachment trial (she voted to acquit him in the 1st trial, which is radical right extremism). 

Take Rick Perry allegedly being a traditional conservative. That is nonsense. Traditional conservatives are pro-democracy and pro-civil liberties. Perry does not stand against the pro-tyranny, anti-civil liberties GOP. He is a GOP elite and the GOP stands for corruption and tyranny. As usual, the MSM either fails to understand what it is dealing with mostly because it is incompetent, or it has been subverted and corrupted by corporate ownership, or more likely some combination of both. The 4th estate continues to fail the American people.

Most, maybe ~85%, of the so-called moderate establishment and the allegedly traditional conservatives probably didn't vote for Biden or voted for DJT. If it were otherwise, the 2016 and 2020 elections probably could not have been as close as they were. Something about the NYT analysis feels seriously wrong. I think the main problems are that the NYT misunderstands voting behavior and indefensible definitions of groups. 

Q: What counts more in a democracy, party loyalty and actual voting behavior, or complaints about the party candidates by a group within the party?

EGADS.......... Are Americans stupid?

 Catchy thread title, wouldn't you agree?

I admit, I am stealing this question from another forum (no, not saying which one) where the simple question was asked: Are Americans stupid?

The reference was to those who still support Trump. So it was a biased question. I rather ask it in the GENERAL.

I find it difficult to say "a country" is stupid. Is Russia stupid because of Putin? Canada because of Trudeau? 

BUT that is the general text we so often read when a country votes a corrupt leader or has elements within that supports a corrupt leader?

Does that make the country stupid? Some actually would say yes. In response to the above question on that other forum, 65.2% said the country is stupid if they continue to support Trump. THE COUNTRY is stupid? Imagine how that must feel to those Americans who don't support him being called stupid because there are stupid people that do support him.

BUT, there is more than the Trump phenomenon. How many Americans (vs people from other countries) refused to take a Covid vaccine? Or claimed they were harmful? How many Americans still believe in angels? The answer is 69%. Yup, 69%.

Are Americans stupid? Or is this just a disingenuous characterization because so many Americans act stupid? 

What say you?

News bits: Collapsing church-state separation; An advance in mind reading; Drug price gouging

Vox writes about the collapse of church-state separation:

The Supreme Court is taking a wrecking ball to the wall between church and state

The Court’s Republican majority has ground the Constitution’s establishment clause down to a nub

Last June, a previously obscure Oklahoma state board voted to allow two Roman Catholic dioceses to operate a charter school in that state. Lawyers from several civil rights organizations, including the ACLU, responded just over a month later with a lawsuit alleging that this state-funded religious school violates the state constitution.

This challenge to the religious charter school, known as St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, should be a slam-dunk — at least assuming that the allegations in the lawsuit are correct.

Charter schools are public entities funded by state tax revenue. Among other things, the complaint points to a provision of the Oklahoma Constitution which provides that public education funds may not be “used for any other purpose than the support and maintenance of common schools for the equal benefit of all the people of the State.” And several school policies described in the complaint indicate that St. Isidore does not intend to operate for the equal benefit of all students.

According to the lawsuit, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, one of the two dioceses that plans to operate this school, has a policy of expelling students who “intentionally or knowingly” express “disagreement with Catholic faith and morals.” This includes a rule that “‘advocating for, or expressing same-sex attractions ... is not permitted’ for students,” and also a rule providing that a student who “reject[s] his or her own body” by beginning a gender transition “will be ‘choosing not to remain enrolled.’”

Yet the most striking thing about this legal complaint is what it does not say. The lawsuit states explicitly that “the plaintiffs’ claims for relief are brought solely under the state constitution, state statutes, and state regulations.” It does not even mention the federal Constitution’s First Amendment, with its prohibition on laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Before a series of recent Supreme Court decisions carved up this establishment clause, a lawyer challenging government funding of religion almost certainly would have raised some claim under this clause.  

This establishment clause was long understood to require strict separation of church and state — and specifically to forbid using public funds to pay for religious instruction. As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.”  

But those days are long past. Indeed, under the current Court’s decision in Carson v. Makin (2022), it’s not even clear that Oklahoma may refuse to fund charter schools that are operated by a church, that seek to train students in that church’s values, and that actively discriminate against individuals the church deems sinful.

Like with some other parts of the US Constitution that the radical right Christian nationalist (CN) extremists on the USSC hate, they now have simply gutted the legal vitality of the Establishment Clause. With that part of the Constitution now obliterated by radical Christian fundamentalists (they hate secularism and secular public education), the wall protecting the state from the church has been demolished. 

And by the state, I particularly mean taxpayer dollars and civil liberties. The most important CN goal is to establish a Christian Sharia theocracy to allow the elites to own and control as much wealth and power as the American people will tolerate. A prime tactic to get wealth and power is to sink CN claws into tax revenue streams. The CN movement want us to force us pay for their efforts to gain control over us and to cut back our civil liberties, with power flowing from the people to Christian Taliban elites. That is just like the CN political movement's success in imposing forced birth laws on millions of women in CN-dominated red states. That is an undeniable, direct attack on a core civil liberty. 

Now that the USSC has obliterated the Establishment Clause, we can expect radical right state legislatures to repeal existing state laws that protect tax dollars from profoundly greedy, corrupt CN elites. The CN wealth and power movement is winning its war against secularism. Its claws are sinking deep into tax revenue streams. 

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An incremental advance in machines reading minds: Berkeley News reports on the first time that recordings of electrical activity in the auditory cortex of the brain have been fed into an artificial intelligence program and that was used to recreate the music that people listened to. BN writes:

Brain recordings capture musicality of speech — with help from Pink Floyd

Neuroscientists decode song from brain recordings, revealing areas dealing with rhythm and vocals

Neuroscientists recorded electrical activity from areas of the brain (yellow and red dots) as patients listened to the Pink Floyd song, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1.” Using artificial intelligence software, they were able to reconstruct the song from the brain recordings. This is the first time a song has been reconstructed from intracranial electroencephalography recordings.

As the chords of Pink Floyd's “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1,” filled the hospital suite, neuroscientists at Albany Medical Center diligently recorded the activity of electrodes placed on the brains of patients being prepared for epilepsy surgery.

The goal? To capture the electrical activity of brain regions tuned to attributes of the music — tone, rhythm, harmony and words — to see if they could reconstruct what the patient was hearing.

More than a decade later, after detailed analysis of data from 29 such patients by neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is clearly yes.

The phrase "All in all it was just a brick in the wall" comes through recognizably in the reconstructed song, its rhythms intact, and the words muddy, but decipherable. This is the first time researchers have reconstructed a recognizable song from brain recordings.  

Because these intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings can be made only from the surface of the brain — as close as you can get to the auditory centers — no one will be eavesdropping on the songs in your head anytime soon.

But for people who have trouble communicating, whether because of stroke or paralysis, such recordings from electrodes on the brain surface could help reproduce the musicality of speech that's missing from today's robot-like reconstructions.

The article includes two 16 second audio clips, one of the original sone, the second is what the AI reconstruction sounds like. It's so strange. The published research paper is here.

A head X-ray of one participant in the experiment shows the placement of electrodes over the frontal (top) and temporal (bottom) regions of the brain. These electrodes were placed on the surface of the brain to locate the origin points of epileptic seizures. While waiting for days in their hospital rooms, patients volunteered for other brain studies, including one attempting to pinpoint the brain regions that respond to music.

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From the Brass Knuckles Capitalism (BNC) Files: An ars technica article discusses drug price gouging:

Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs

The top 25 costliest drugs for Medicare Part D plans earned their lofty rankings largely through exorbitant price hikes—increases that, on average, more than tripled their list prices since they entered the market, according to a new analysis by AARP.

For nearly all the drugs, the price hikes far outstripped the rate of inflation, with increases ranging from 20 percent to 739 percent during the drugs' lifetimes on the market.

Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest.

The drug in the analysis with the largest lifetime price increase was Lantus, a Sanofi-made, long-acting insulin for diabetes. Since its introduction in 2000, Sanofi has hiked the list price 739 percent, the analysis found. The general inflation rate during that period was 71 percent. 

In a blog post on Friday, PhRMA called the AARP's analysis on drug price increases a "flawed report to spin a misleading narrative." The group pointed to insurers and pharmacy benefit managers for their role in increasing costs for seniors.

There is nothing misleading about drug price gouging by the drug industry.  It is no surprise that the drug industry immediately attacked the analysis. 

When faced with inconvenient fact and truth, attacking it is what nearly all companies do when their revenue streams and/or profit margins are brought into question. That's exactly what lying cigarette makers did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of smoking cigarettes and second hand cigarette smoke. That's what the lying oil and coal industries did for decades and still do today to deceive the public about the reality and dangers of global warming and greenhouse gas pollution. 

With BNC, those with pricing power charge whatever the market will bear and their power can enforce. This has nothing to do with making the world or democracy better or people happy or healthy. Most of the time for big companies, the only moral value there is for BNC is maximum profit. Everything else, including patients who cannot afford medicine die or global warming kills people, is secondary. 

He's been indicted again, good and hard this time

The NYT reports about the latest indictment against DJT and 18 other miscreants:

Former President Donald J. Trump and 18 others have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case, accusing Mr. Trump and some of his former top aides of orchestrating a “criminal enterprise” to reverse the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

The 41-count indictment, an unprecedented challenge of presidential misconduct by a local prosecutor, brings charges against some of Mr. Trump’s most prominent advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election.

Donald J. Trump’s legal team includes a former prosecutor with experience in white collar cases and a career defense lawyer who started as a public defender and is best known for defending hip-hop artists.

The defense lawyer, Drew Findling, is known in rap circles in Atlanta as a “magician” because of his effective defense of clients like Cardi B, Migos and Gucci Mane.

It is very good to see Meadows, a rabid, morally rotted Christian nationalist, finally nailed for his role in the coup attempt. Where the hell is the US DoJ?

The WaPo reports that DJT faces 13 counts if illegal acts, presumably felonies. All the defendants have been indicted for racketeering, which carries a mandatory minimum jail sentence for a conviction. The perjury count contradicts DJT's defense in the federal lawsuit. Another WaPo article reports: 

A core Trump defense in the federal Jan. 6 case is the idea that he was merely exercising free speech.

But that defense won’t work as easily in Georgia, which has a broad prohibition against making “a false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation … in any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of state government.”  

That law figures heavily in the indictment, with the phrase “false statement” appearing more than 100 times, including as individual counts and as part of the alleged racketeering. (The indictment lists 161 overt acts as part of the latter.) Defendants like Trump and Giuliani are accused of making false statements about voter fraud publicly, in legal filings, in hearings in Georgia and elsewhere.  

One of the more striking details comes in the 38th and 39th counts — the last charges against Trump — which date to Sept. 17, 2021, nearly eight months after Trump left office.

The charge has to do with a letter Trump sent to Raffensperger in which he enclosed a report alleging that 43,000 ballots in Atlanta-based DeKalb County were not properly handled using chain-of-custody rules. Trump suggested that Raffensperger “start the process of decertifying the election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner.”

The indictment accuses Trump and others of having “corruptly solicited Georgia officials, including the Secretary of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, to violate their oaths to the Georgia Constitution and to the United States Constitution by unlawfully changing the outcome of the November 3, 2020, presidential election in Georgia in favor of Donald Trump.”

One can only hope that the coup attempting dictator wannabe lying liars face non-trivial consequences for their filthy lying lies, and their power-lust driven coup attempt.

Part of the 1st page

of the indictment

Page 3

State Dept. Investigator Alleges that US Gov't is Hiding Critical Info about Wuhan Lab Leak

What follows is an article by David Zweig (investigative reporter Atlantic, New York Mag,NY Times, Wired et al.) based on interviews with a bioweapons and East Asia specialist who led the US State Department's Covid-19 origins investigation . Note, this potentially explosive article was not,  of course,  published in the Atlantic, New York Magazine, Wired or the NYT, but on his Substack page where most of the high level leaks and big scoops on this topic have surfaced through various journalists -- some well known, others relatively obscure. If the allegations are true,  it supports the view I've long taken that the claim "we will never know the origins of Sars-CoV-2 because China won't give us the info" is not necessarily the case. As I noted in previous posts on this subject, the experiments in China were collaborative, and the idea that the NIH and EcoHealth Alliance (who wrote the proposals for the GoF research carried out in Wuhan) would not keep very good records of the results never seemed credible to me. According to the official who led the State Dept's investigation earlier this year, the government is deliberately hiding damning evidence of a research-related lab leak. Here is Zweig's August, 14 article from his Substack, Silent Lunch..

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“It’s a massive coverup spanning from China to DC.” This stunning claim, made in reference to our government’s wishy washy official stance on the origin of Covid-19, is not from a cable TV pundit or an internet rando. It is by David Asher, a bioweapons and East Asia specialist who led the US State Department’s Covid-19 origins investigation. 

According to Asher, the notion that after three-and-a-half years there still is not a clear assessment of how the pandemic began, “is the biggest intelligence failure in American history.” Asher has plenty of points of comparison. A veteran investigator, he held senior roles in the US Government’s campaigns to disrupt North Korea’s WMD program, and counterterrorism efforts related to Iran and the Islamic State. 

Through a series of interviews conducted over several weeks, Asher, who is now a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank, shared a torrent of knowledge and views—about his experience infiltrating international terror networks, the inner workings of various intelligence agencies, and, most pressingly, his exasperation at the investigations into the origin of SARS-CoV-2. 

***

THE DNI REPORT

“A large amount of information, classified, unclassified, and pertinent to the origin of Covid-19, remains inside in the United States government, undisseminated and unanalyzed,” Asher said in frustration. He was referring to the shortcomings of what was supposed to be an all-encompassing report on the pandemic’s origin, released in June, by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The DNI is the head of all United States intelligence operations, and the report was derived from assessments by at least nine of the agencies that the DNI oversees. Mandated by a law issued from Congress and signed by President Biden in March, the much-anticipated report was seen as a chance to bring some clarity to the lab leak debate—one of the most divisive issues of the pandemic.

Yet perhaps nothing exemplifies the problem that Asher speaks of more than the DNI report.

Given the arcane science and extensive resources devoted to myriad investigations, many people had expected a comprehensive analysis. Instead, the DNI report was a dud. Clocking in at a shockingly meager 10 pages, five of which were taken up by a glossary and introductory pages, the document brought little new information. Citizens and politicians alike who had been following the origins debate closely were left angered and wondering whether, surely, there is more the intelligence community must know. 

According to Asher, these people are right to be suspicious. His charge about Covid origins information remaining inside the government is an explosive allegation, given that the law required the DNI to “declassify any and all information relating to potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the origin of COVID-19.” 

More striking, still, of the limited information that was included in the DNI report, Asher said, some of it was “deliberately distorted or downplayed in a manner that reeks of coverup.” 

“WE MAY NEVER KNOW”

In Asher’s view, there are a few main issues with the “we may never know” official line about the pandemic’s origin—a sort of bureaucratic shrug—that many intelligence agencies and the executive branch seem to have settled on. 

First, an insufficient effort has been made to find out what still is unknown. 

“We broke into North Korea,” Asher said. “We penetrated an underground facility. Do you know how difficult that is? It’s crazy.” Asher said the Wuhan Institute as an investigative target is “a cake walk” compared to North Korean and Iranian WMD programs. “If someone gave a small team of us access to $50 million to pay sources and encourage defections and to run operations against the Chinese we could penetrate any lab in China,” he said. “I have done so much harder things than this.” Asher said we could have solved this mystery, but “those in charge obviously don’t want to know.”

Second, there has been a purposeful burying of much of what is already known, and a refusal for those at the top to connect the dots between this copious evidence.

For example, some politicians share Asher’s view about the DNI report, among them Indiana Senator, Republican Mike Braun, who released a critical statement on June 26 that said, in part, “the COVID-19 Origin Act calls for a full declassification, not CliffsNotes.” And when I asked Asher directly about the report, he was very clear. “The DNI is deliberately noncompliant with the law,” he said. Yet most of the government has been mute on this point. And to make matters worse, similarly, much of the legacy media in its coverage of the DNI report did not question why it was so flagrantly deficient, and how its paucity of information was at odds with the law. 

More broadly, earlier this week I published an exposé in The Free Press on Anthony Fauci’s obfuscations and evasions regarding the funding of dangerous virology research, and its connection to a potential lab leak in Wuhan and the triggering of the pandemic. As I reported, Fauci’s actions have not been unique. His former boss, Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, along with a Fauci deputy named David Morens, among others, have partaken in an extensive campaign to confuse and conceal the NIH’s funding of gain-of-function research of concern on coronaviruses, including said research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Third, the differing intelligence reports that have been made public about potential links between the WIV and the origin of the pandemic have been framed in a manner of false equivalency. 

The coverage of the DNI report in much of the media has been that its findings are inconclusive, and that the intelligence community was divided, with only two agencies—the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Energy—determining that a lab leak was the most likely cause of the pandemic. Yet what the media has failed to elucidate, said Justin Kinney, a quantitative biologist at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a critic of gain-of-function research of concern, is that the FBI and DOE are the two agencies most equipped to make a determination. 

In fact, the DNI report itself notes that the differing views of the agencies that were part of the DNI report largely stem from the differences in how they conduct their investigations. The CIA, for instance, likely prioritizes human intelligence gained from foreign assets. The Department of Treasury’s core competency obviously is related to financial matters, not the intricacies of virology. The DOE, by contrast, Kinney said, has a deep scientific expertise, and the FBI, of course, has an investigation focus, which is very different from simply intelligence gathering. David Asher agreed with Kinney’s observations. 

***

Despite the lack of effort into a more effective investigation, Asher emphasized that much is already known. But a purposeful effort has been made to pretend that some form of perfect evidence, which will never exist, is necessary to draw as close to a firm conclusion as one reasonably can at this time. “With these types of investigations,” he said, “you often don’t find a smoking gun. But when the room is on fire—as it is now—there is smoke everywhere.”

The reason we don’t have a clearer answer on the pandemic’s origin—beyond the fact that there is much evidence already gathered that is not being analyzed or made public—Asher said, is because those in power want it that way. There are too many officials in too many government agencies who would be implicated in a lab leak, not to mention how it would complicate our relationship with China. “Our own state department told us ‘don’t get near this thing, it’ll blow up in your face,’” he told me. 

“We may never know” is a policy preference of many people, Asher said. “It protects everyone. It’s a convenient obscurity.”

China’s internal coverup of COVID’s emergence—whether is was from a lab or nature—and the country’s unwillingness to share an early warning is beyond reproach, Asher said. Assuming the virus leaked out of a lab, there are massive geopolitical and global health implications. If we simply let this go, he said, Beijing can get away with millions dead, sending much of the world economy into a tailspin, and costing us trillions to recover. Asher warned about the repercussions of our inaction. “What message does that send President Xi?”