Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 04/20/26:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 08/14/26:

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I leave for a week’s vacation with my wife and children today, the first real one we’ve all taken together for some time. It’s a slow time on the calendar and I’ll be back next Tuesday, assuming I’m not eaten by a reef shark. Thanks to Racket readers for being understanding, and I hope everyone enjoys what’s left of summer.

From the BBC:

Public figures and friends of Jason Arday have called for a public inquiry into media coverage surrounding the former Cambridge professor before his death. Labor MP Diane Abbott and actress Jameela Jamil are among 30,000 signatories of a letter to the prime minister, which claims Arday’s death followed “two weeks of relentless harassment.”

The letter issued by group Good Law Project — which had been representing Arday after he stood down from his Cambridge role amid a plagiarism row — said many of its signatories had warned media outlets about the intensity of their reporting. Lord Woolley, principal of Homerton College at Cambridge, said Arday had been subjected to a “vicious witch hunt.”

Metropolitan Police admitted in early August it was a mistake to investigate reporter Jack Grove for four months just for reviewing then-Cambridge professor Jason Arday’s record. After Arday was found dead by suicide Friday, that mistake will likely be compounded by an inquiry into what London mayor Sadiq Khan called “pernicious public shaming” by media. Cambridge Chancellor Lord Chris Smith likewise said it was important to tend to questions of “academic integrity,” but also to refuse to give in to a “racist feeding frenzy.”

Al Jazeera already called Arday’s suicide “institutional murder,” and Ibram Kendi has already produced a headline in the Emancipator saying the media “lynched” him. Across the world, politicians, pundits, and activists have sounded the same note, denouncing the press for driving Arday to kill himself.

Bollocks. I’m all for beating up media, but in this case? The Arday story will be debated as a race matter, but the story is really about a deeper problem, the institutional rejection of reality itself, which at Cambridge was once celebrated in the form of Isaac Newton’s apple tree.

Once he was caught in the jaws of media scandal, Arday did become a symbol, only not of race. A strategic decision was made by politicians, pundits, and institutions like Cambridge to try to massacre fact through innuendo and sheer obstinacy. This was the dystopian beyond-arrogance of a political school whose exploding popularity around the world is rooted in a religious belief in transcendence — of science, economics, foreign policy, history, art, and a hundred other things. After centuries of agreement, we’re now being told apples can freeze in mid-air, if so ordered:

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U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden has ruled against the Defense Intelligence Agency in an ongoing Freedom of Information case, filed by the U.S. Right to Know:

For these reasons, it is hereby ORDERED that DIA shall either produce to Plaintiff or withhold all documents by September 7, 2026…

It’s not always significant when a court orders an intelligence or defense agency to produce records, as those agencies often ignore FOIA orders anyway. In this case, however, there’s a slim chance the Pentagon can be pressured to disclose something significant. Earlier releases to this same plaintiff offered the most graphic evidence to date that U.S. government analysts considered an engineered origin for Covid-19 possible, almost from the start. Raise your hand if you saw this DoD flow chart covered anywhere:

“When I saw the slides for the first time, I just about fell out of my chair,” says Gary Raskin of the U.S. Right to Know.

Raskin’s group, which has grown into a large team over the years, has been a major driver of Covid disclosures, thanks to a tireless program of FOIA filings aimed at gain of function research, communications of key U.S. researchers, and Covid-19 origins. With regard to the Defense Intelligence Agency, Raskin credits reporter Lewis Kamb and staff scientist Karolina Corin for plugging away in a years-long FOIA battle that produced multiple major stories, including two big ones in the last two years.

One concerned a DIA “genome analysis” that outlined the hypothetical scenario shown above,. The second, from February of this year, revealed an “authoritative assessment” that showed the Pentagon was looking at a lab leak scenario as early as March 27, 2020. That was ten days after Nature Medicine published “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the paper “prompted” by health officials like NIAID chief Anthony Fauci and NIH head Francis Collins, and authored by a quintet of scientists who initially believed a lab leak was “so friggin’ likely,” but publicly declared the opposite. “This study leaves little room to refute a natural origin for COVID-19,” roared Collins, under headlines like ABC’s “Sorry, conspiracy theorists: Study Concludes Covid-19 is ‘not a laboratory construct.’”

The DIA disclosures not only prove that military intelligence was entertaining a lab theory at the exact time officials were hammering an opposite narrative, they also show that intelligence analysts didn’t need secret data to go against the approved story. In fact, the classified write-ups are remarkably similar (to use a generous term) to the research of DRASTIC analyst and biotech entrepreneur Yuri Deigin. “I was surprised they didn’t cite me because they could have put just my Medium article in the citations,” Deigin laughs now. Both analyses center on the same unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome that were undisguised from the start and should have been at the center of public inquiries, in government, academia, and media.

The DIA analysis not only shows that lab origin is possible, but also explains why consensus arguments against lab origin were laughable. Raskin has no idea what might come back on September 7th. “We don’t have the faintest idea of what they might turn over,” he said, adding: “After doing this project for six years, the only thing we know is to expect surprises.” The Pentagon theory of lab origin to date:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 08/11/26:

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Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 08/10/26:

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Had a chuckle reading the New York Times story this morning about Nebraska Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn, whose interesting take on the two traditional parties is, “I think they both kind of suck.” The Times is stroking Osborn for the same reason the Democratic Party is promoting him — he’s running against Republican Pete Ricketts. Which is fine, and logical, but this was funny:

Off the stump, Mr. Osborn passes the political test of a guy you’d like to have a beer with. He is loose, chatty, goofy and prone to saying stuff that would give the average campaign consultant a heart attack.

What a blast from the past! The New York Times hasn’t pulled out the infamous “beer test” for a political candidate since May 22, 2015, when it ran this story:

The “beer test” was once a massively overused campaign reporting cliché. It grew out of a Sam Adams ad campaign in the 2000 race, and from Bush-Gore through the 2016 cycle it was nearly impossible to escape “beer test” coverage. Then Donald Trump won the 2016 beer test by default — it was hard to imagine Hillary Clinton having a beer at all — leading even Slate to pronounce “there has never been and perhaps never will be a candidate you’d be more eager to have a beer with than Donald Trump.”

When Trump won, it led pundits to rush out pieces explaining the beer test is no bueno, especially in races involving female candidates, and therefore “it doesn’t matter which candidate you’d rather have a beer with,” as ABC proclaimed during the 2024 cycle. Writers like Yascha Mounk of the Atlantic by then had already tried introducing a replacement called the “Inverted Likeability Test.” It never caught on.

To trace the history of this goofball campaign reporting crutch is to take a short cut through the last 25 years of irrational political pathologies. Originally — I saw this with my own eyes— the beer test was a way for campaign reporters to flex during campaign seasons, since they were usually the chief arbiters of which candidate was beer-i-er than the next.

CBS even used beer as a reverse indicator for “weirdness,” which the network said was disqualifying, as Pat Robertson, Ross Perot, Dennis Kucinich, Bob Kerrey, and Mark Sanford — all, they said, were at least a little flaky, and “none have passed the have-a-beer-with test.”

Beer started as a battering ram campaign pundits used against liberal candidates, then in the post-Bush era reporters used it to argue for Barack Obama. Post-Trump, blue-leaning campaign writers abandoned the beer test as a standard story element but revived it periodically to argue for certain candidates, even trying to shove beers in the hands of Kamala Harris. This was ironic on several levels, beginning with the fact that she usually looked in the bag whether holding a beer or not. The Stephen Colbert episode of October 2024 was a heavily-publicized dose of awkward:

The beer test has mainly vanishedsince 2016 because beer itself has become a stand-in for unredeeming deplorable values. Democratic male candidates stopped bothering with beer and instead tried tactics like livestreaming a haircut (Beto O’Rourke) or going on the “most extreme” state fair ride with a daughter (that was Tim Walz, who also tried blowing his balls off in a hunting video). After Elizabeth Warren torpedoed her campaign by trying to livestream a home scene that ended with her husband turning down an offer to “have a beer with” her, the Washington Post angrily decried America’s “preoccupation” with beer as a “barometer” for likeability. Why not, they suggested, quote a voter who’d commend Warren for having “fun aunt energy”? (We did not subsequently have “fun aunt” polling.) DSA candidates haven’t called for abolishing beer, but it’s absent from their messaging — though one Times profile described a “Building Working Class Solidarity” meeting they held over “$7 beers.”

Now, thanks to an odd edge case in which Democrats can root for an Independent without endorsing heteronormative leisure tendencies, the beer test today made a return in the New York Times after an 11-year absence. In the scheme of things, unimportant, but man is this country weird sometimes.

Having finished Dostoyevsky’s “The Demons,” Brad Pearce and I will be starting a new book today, a Stephen Crane collection that begins with the story, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. The tale is sometimes described as a pioneering work of American naturalism, sometimes called a satire, sometimes grumbled about as social commentary minus the solutions part. What do we think? Join us at 4:30 PM ET at:

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You can also find us on X, @mtaibbi or @waywardrabbler. See you soon!

“George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, commencing an all-out blitz by NGOs, whole ranges of things.”

The actual line is:

“George Floyd was killed on May 25, 2020, commencing an all-out blitz by NGOs, politicians like AOC, and media to force America to change the way it talked about whole ranges of things.”

Apologies, not sure how that one happened. It’s been updated.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave an interview to ABC’s Jon Karl over the weekend:

Karl: So you have Wisconsin coming up next, Francesca Hong, who is the Democratic Socialist of America-supported candidate for governor… You haven’t endorsed her. Are you going to?

Ocasio-Cortez: No, I haven’t endorsed in that race. My focus has been in winning back the Congress, winning back the House, and positioning ourselves to have the best chance possible to win the Senate. So I’ve been focused on those legislative races.

Karl: What do you make of those controversial statements? I’m sure you’ve seen. I mean, the Thanksgiving dust up. She says she doesn’t still believe that, but… the abolished prisons, abolished police… also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who have won… How do you get around that..?

Ocasio-Cortez: These races ultimately are local, and all politics are local. My understanding is that is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate.

Karl: Yeah, she’s moved away from a lot of that.

Ocasio-Cortez: Right. She’s moved away from it. And I have a local city councilman that - Yeah. Has this, uh, uh, saying — “Woke one was crazy.” (laughs)

Karl: Woke one was crazy. That’s so true!

Ocasio-Cortez: I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what—

Karl: Was it? I mean, did the movement go too far with some of those positions? I mean, you, you briefly supported the idea of defunding the police.

Ocasio-Cortez: You know, I think that, I think that during this time, and during, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. Yeah. And I think that the, the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.

Discussions! Fruitful! Quite a way to describe “Woke 1,” the first pass at saturation-bombing America with race paranoia, scarlet-lettering, and threats in an effort to produce grotesque public displays of ideological obedience.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to say, “Of course, during lockdown, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” What she means is, “We tried to shove it down your throats through the sheer power of our freakout before. This time, we’re going to get elected first.” AOC has to refer to “Woke 1” because “Woke 2” is now ascendant, and its primary characteristic is its effort to remarket itself as a viable electoral movement, less insane than that initial run from a screeching mob of torch-bearing half-literate buffoons who tried to burn the American project to the ground. Since Woke 2 is, like AOC, dusting itself off to run for office, it wants you to forget this earlier incarnation, even though none of its adherents have apologized or changed their minds:

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Yesterday, the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee voted along party lines to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress, after the former NIAID head invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than answer questions. Predictably, the press response was to dismiss the vote as a vengeful partisan “stunt” and “ruthless persecution,” with no point other than to “punish” a figure once celebrated for leading America’s Covid-19 response.

The investigation of Fauci is no stunt, though. It’s an effort to use Congressional oversight power to punch through a six-year omerta binding duplicitious health officials, mostly located in the United States and in China. The effort to describe the investigation as partisan persecution is part of the same ongoing Covid coverup. Thousands of pages of Fauci’s diaries and other “investigative documents” released last week make clear that figures like Fauci are still hiding what they know. “The infections spread among people weeks before the Chinese reported that they were dealing with a new infection,” Fauci wrote in a diary entry on January 26th, 2020, adding: “Early on, the Chinese were saying that there is no human to human transmission and all the original 27 cases were from the market. Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”

Fauci knew the wet market story was a lie and yet was still promoting the theory months later in story after story after story, while simultaneously denouncing any questions about a possible lab accident as conspiracy theory.

Why do it? The motive almost certainly had to be deflecting attention from the Wuhan Institute for Virology, where multiple branches of the U.S. government and even Fauci’s own NIAID had funded questionable research. If Fauci’s diaries were damning, the emails released last week involving the Wuhan Institute were worse, and spoke much more to possible causes of the pandemic.

On September 9th, 2021, The Intercept published an exposé about a $3.1 million NIH-funded grant from 2014 titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” along with a report on the grant’s progress and other materials. The grant went to the since-debarred EcoHealth alliance and its former president, Peter Daszak, while China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology was a sub-awardee. The relevant documentation, only released after The Intercept sued the NIH, showed that researchers infected genetically engineered mice with chimeric bat viruses, in some cases producing increased pathogenicity in the process — gain of function, seemingly.

Earlier that year, on May 11th, Fauci testified that the NIH “has not ever, and does not now” fund gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute. Senator Rand Paul confronted Fauci about the claim months later, on July 20th, 2021, in an exchange that was derided — even by The Intercept — as a “chilling” “attack,” replete with “false” and “conspiratorial” claims. The documents released by the Intercept appeared to change some minds in the science community. When computational virologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center read the text of the 2014 grant, he sent Daszak a letter asking for data about “coronavirus sequences that were collected in China,” to “better understand the evolution of SARS-COV-2.”

Bloom by then already demonstrated a willingness to pose uncomfortable questions about Covid’s origins. In June of that year, he reported uncovering a “set of SARS-COV-2 sequences” from 34 samples that apparently had been deleted from the NIH database. He posted his findings online, saying they suggested “SARSCoV2 was circulating in Wuhan before the December outbreak at the Huanan Seafood Market,” and also wrote a much-discussed paper on the subject.

The day after receiving Bloom’s email, on September 8th, Daszak wrote to Wuhan Institute virologist Dr. Shi Zhengli, popularly known as the “Bat Lady,” and complained about an “annoying request from Jesse Bloom,” a “geneticist/phylogeny person” who “recently caused trouble” by highlighting “partial genomes of SARS-CoV-2 that were deleted.” He went on to say that although he’d been “fighting this,” there were journalists who “took the NIH to court and a judge forced them to release our grant proposals.” Bloom was therefore able to read the original proposal and see Daszak had promised to release his data “no later than six months after the receipt of final sequencing data.” Now, he had the temerity to ask for it.

Daszak told Shi he believed Bloom was the “kind of person” who would write to her directly and ask for the data. He then asked Shi to do something extraordinary. “Please do NOT share agree to this request!” Daszak wrote. “If [Bloom] asks for this data from the NIH grant work, tell him that I am the Principal Investigator and he needs to ask permission from me.” He added, incredibly:

I will respond to him sometime in the next few days and explain to him that all of the bat SARSr-CoV sequences are now uploaded onto Genbank. He will probably write back and ask for the raw data. I will then ignore his requests.

“I’ll do what you suggest if I receive the email from Jesse Bloom,” Shi answered. Then, in the middle of an email in which she is planning to be non-transparent with a scientific partner, she wrote that “[Bloom] is obsessive of the conspiracy that China is not transparent regarding the origin of COVID-19. I believe he is a brilliant scientist but don’t understand why he stands with the conspiracy makers”:

This exchange was highlighted last week by an India-based researcher who goes by the name The Seeker, one of a handful of independent analysts who did a lot of the work journalists like me should have done after the outbreak. He’s known for uncovering key background like a 2013 Chinese medical paper called “The Analysis of 6 Patients with Severe Pneumonia Caused by Unknown Viruses,” which described Chinese patients infected with an unknown disease in a mine in the Mojiang province. Time and again, the Seeker and scattered researchers from a group called DRASTIC uncovered documents, contradictions, and anomalies that forced officials to release data or issue P.R. statements that increased public awareness about the virus and its origins.

“Six years on,” the Seeker said this week, “if you set aside the FOIA and the Senate/Congressional releases, almost every other load-bearing step in this story traces back to DRASTIC and the people working alongside or adjacent to it.” He concedes “we certainly got some things wrong,” but the persistent questioning from people like himself and Viral authors Alina Chan and Matt Ridley kept the doors to inquiry open whenever health officials and their press cheerleaders tried to shut it.

Ridley agrees on this point, noting, “the running was made by citizen-scientists, mostly amateur, mostly self-funded. People like Seeker, Gilles [Demaneuf], Yuri [Deigin], Francisco de Asis, [Charles] Rixey, Billy Bostickson. And the scientists who did contribute were maverick, junior or freelancing mostly: Alina [Chan], Monali Rohalkar, Rossana [Segreto], Dr. Richard Ebright, [Bryce] Nickels.” He added, “Where the fuck were the professional journalists, scientists, spies, politicians? I mean, for an ambitious journalist or scientist this was the chance of the lifetime, surely?”

Apparently not. The pattern last week was typical. While Western media focused on Fauci’s decision to plead the Fifth and covered it as a partisan “witch hunt,” the Seeker and other independents focused on new email exchanges. As he put it, the one above showed “Daszak, on record, coordinating with WIV to block independent scientific review” and “subvert the data-sharing requirements of the grant.” Not one U.S. or European news outlet has covered the exchange.

After six years, there’s now an entire alternative history of Covid to look back on, mostly pointing in one direction. Chinese scientists collected thousands of samples from bats in years prior to 2020 and specifically looked for viruses that bind well to human receptors. As Ridley put it, they also engaged in precisely the right kind of experiment, on precisely the right strain of virus, at precisely the right time, in precisely the right city, and in precisely the wrong biosafety conditions. It’s a damning circumstantial case, but to prove it, someone would have to establish that one of the samples they collected was the progenitor virus to SARS-CoV-2.

Without the data, it will probably never be settled. However, we can certainly answer the question of whether or not the Wuhan Institute and their American partners would cover up important data about viruses. A long list of under-reported incidents already showed they would do it and have done it, while the rest of the documents released last week leave no doubt:

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Matt Bivens and I will be doing a livestream today at 3:00 PM ET on a variety of issues related to Covid origins, the recent hearings with Dr. Anthony Fauci, recently released documents about the Wuhan Institute, and other recent developments in the world of medicine, including AI-generated viruses. Please check this space in about an hour for an article about the Wuhan documents, and join us for the stream at 3:00 PM ET at:

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As well as @mtaibbi. See you then.

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From CBS News:

The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted Thursday to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress over his refusal to answer questions during testimony before the committee last week, arguing that he inappropriately invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

“Holding a witness in contempt is a serious thing, and it should be rare,” Sen. Rand Paul, the committee chairman, said as the panel gathered Thursday. “But the contempt power exists for precisely this circumstance.”

The contempt resolution described how Fauci would be “proceeded against in the manner and form provided by law,” pursuant to two statutes (2 U.S.C. 192 and 2 U.S.C. 194), for refusal to “answer questions pertinent to the subject under inquiry.”

Paul indicated that if the committee voted as it did, he’d immediately refer the matter to the Department of Justice, which is not obligated to prosecute. The DOJ told the Washington Post it “seriously reviews all congressional referrals.” Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal broke another story last night:

A Senate panel investigating Dr. Anthony Fauci has obtained a copy of the doctor’s iPhone, potentially securing even more records related to the doctor’s actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The copy of the phone was transferred by the Department of Health and Human Services to the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is chaired by Sen. Ron Johnson (R., Wis.).

This revelation comes just days after copies of Fauci’s journals were publicly released following their transfer from HHS to Congress. Two Republican senators, Johnson and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have increased pressure on Fauci in recent days to answer questions related to pandemic health measures and the origins of Covid-19.

Data from Fauci’s phone is a good bet add to public understanding both of Covid’s origins and the official response to the pandemic. As noted above, Paul already released Fauci’s diaries, in addition to a less-covered batch of “investigation records” posted last Tuesday. Racket has two stories in the works about the new materials, and I’m also going to do a livestream with Dr. Matt Bivens tomorrow summarizing the evidence for and against a lab leak, as the ongoing mystery as to Covid’s origins remains the most important story. Bivens and I will go through individual “investigation records” and also look at previously released records and video that were largely overlooked in coverage.

Check this space tomorrow morning for information about the time of the livestream. We’ll likely do it mid-afternoon, around 3 p.m. Standby also for a piece on the “investigation records.” More to come.

Narrated by Jared Moore

Art by Daniel Medina

Text published 07/30/26:

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