Monday on FNC’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson reacted to a Wall Street Journal report that the Biden administration now acknowledges China’s role in the spread of the COVID-19 virus.
Carlson asked given this acknowledgment, does the Biden administration still consider Russian President Vladimir Putin the biggest threat to U.S. national security.
Transcript as follows:
CARLSON: So how would you define the Biden administration? Well, really the hallmark has been an almost other worldly 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 is 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. This 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 a billion dollars and will 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JANET YELLEN, US TREASURY SECRETARY: And today, I’m proud to announce the transfer of an additional amount 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.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: 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 is not going to be going to the newly poisoned communities of Eastern Ohio, who cares about them? Is 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 Kyiv. And that money will complement the more than $100 billion in tax dollars they’ve already received from the US Treasury.
And you’ve got to think as they watch this tonight, assuming there is 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 seven million died globally, so it is inherently a big story.
Now, this shows that the origin of COVID is not directly related to anti- trans racism, so it is 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 is at it, for example, is Joe Biden is 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. They are still doing that?
And bigger picture, have their views on China change? Now that they know that China is responsible for the deaths of almost seven million people. Now that we know China unleashed COVID on the world, intentionally or not; and then lied about it for sure and then hid life-saving genetic information about the virus from the scientists who are trying to respond to COVID. Now we know all of that, does Joe Biden still consider Vladimir Putin, he is 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR AND POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Did the coronavirus pandemic start in a lab? Is that what you believe now?
JAKE SULLIVAN, WHITE HOUSE NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Well, Dana, there is a variety of views in the Intelligence Community. Some elements of 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 insight or 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.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: We just can’t say for sure where COVID came from. There is 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 where 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 bio lab 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
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 that the virus outbreak, 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.”
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DR. LI MENG YAN, CHINESE VIROLOGIST: From my first report, I can present a solid scientific evidence to our audience that this virus COVID-19, SARS- CoV-2 virus actually is not from nature.
I worked with the top corona virologist in the world. So together with my experience, I can tell you, this is created in the lab. This is from that template owned by China military, and also, it spread to the word to make such damage.
CARLSON: To make such damage. Do you believe that Chinese government released this intentionally on purpose? Did they do this?
YAN: Yes, of course, it is intentionally.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: 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 is 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 even heard under 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 bio lab.
They knew that. The origins of COVID were never a secret. The real story, the great outrage of the 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 seven million people and the destruction of the American economy. That’s the interesting part looking back three years later.
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 bio lab, 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN, THEN CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: And neither should we panic or fall back on xenophobia labeling COVID-19 a foreign virus does not displace accountability.
JIM ACOSTA, CNN ANCHOR AND CORRESPONDENT: The President referred to the coronavirus as a “foreign virus.” I think it’s going to smack — it is going to come across to a lot of Americans as smacking of xenophobia.
ALI VELSHI, MSNBC: 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, THEN CNN ANCHOR: 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, it works with his base.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why do you keep calling this the Chinese virus? Why do you keep using this? A lot of people say it is racist.
DONALD TRUMP, THEN PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Because it comes from China. It is not racist at all, no. Not at all. It comes from China.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: 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.
And 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 the United States would have forced the government of China to release the information they had about the genetic makeup of COVID, maybe we’ve had a vaccine that worked, for example, or a medical response that saved Americans lives, but they didn’t. None of them did.
“The New York Times'” top global health and COVID reporter, person called Apoorva Mandavilli wrote: “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’s the Oberlin Sociology Department in “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 are 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. Okay.
Senator Tom Cotton was attacked because he relied on a map and common sense to ask a very simple question. Here’s what he said.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): 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 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.
Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Well, yes, 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 have. 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.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE SCARBOROUGH, MSNBC: Tom Cotton a couple of days ago, spouting conspiracy theory that the Chinese made this virus up.
Don’t try to spool up some of — whoever was wearing tinfoil hats in your audience.
DON CALLOWAY, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST: Let’s apply Occam’s razor and just call it crazy, crazy. This is crazy. This is an insane thing to do. This is just wildly irresponsible and was totally unnecessary.
I don’t know what Tom Cotton gets out of this.
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST: In the 1980s, I remember when the far left trafficked in rumors about HIV had been invented in CIA labs. The far right has now found its own virus conspiracy theory.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Oh, yes. Let’s have the plagiarist, Fareed Zakaria on to tell us about science.
But 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 unpersoned. Facebook banned any user who suggested the virus was manmade because — and we are quoting: “The science was settled.” It was not settled at all. There was no science. We didn’t know anything.
As NPR reported: “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 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 though the “comedians,” they were on propaganda duty, too. Watch this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JIMMY KIMMEL, “JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE” HOST: He is also pushing US 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 wing nuts to treat this virus like it was a conspiracy of some kind.
TRUMP: It should have never happened. This plague should never have happened. It could have been stopped, but people chose not to stop it.
KIMMEL: What people? Tomorrow, he will blame the Spanish flu on Antonio Banderas.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CARLSON: Yes. 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 and 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 e-mails 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.
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 around Washington, DC 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 can 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.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor