The latest chapter in "Now It Can Be Told!" (04-11-2025--Hour1)

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[00:00:29] 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 were never really reported on.

[00:00:57] But now it can be told that we were right. But they're not going to tell us we were right. They're just going to 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.

[00:01:19] 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.

[00:01:33] So all you racists who thought that the COVID virus may have originated in a high-tech lab in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the WIV, all of you racists that thought the Chinese working on some really top secret, high-tech stuff,

[00:01:57] you may have been more right than the other non-racist-y 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-19. They may have got the bug while they were participating in the world military games.

[00:02:28] Okay? This is where service members from all the 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-19 outbreak,

[00:02:51] except for the fact that the military games were held in Wuhan, like 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 2019. October 2019.

[00:03:19] 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. Or I guess, if your patient's 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?

[00:03:48] 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 report that has been obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Now, 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.

[00:04:18] But the report, which was done in December of 2022, 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.

[00:04:47] Very informed follow-up question. Yes, they were. But they didn't. The report from 2022 reveals for the first time that seven U.S. military service members contracted COVID-19-like symptoms during or after their participation in the World Military Games

[00:05:09] in Wuhan in October of 2019, which kind of contradicts the Biden administration's public claims in 2021 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

[00:05:36] before China disclosed it to the world in December of 2019, which kind of makes sense because commies 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.

[00:06:05] 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 Free Beacon 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.

[00:06:34] 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 in. The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act required the Biden administration to make its report on the 2019 Wuhan World Military Games publicly available on an internet website in a searchable format by summer of 2022.

[00:07:02] Though the Biden administration transmitted copies of the two-page report to the House and Senate Armed Services Committee in December of 2022, 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.

[00:07:25] 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.

[00:07:52] 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.

[00:08:23] 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.

[00:08:49] Is there some sort of reason why the Bidens might not want to hurt the Chinese government? Hmm. I don't know. 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 Tricoms. That might be of value. All right. So spring is here, a time of renewal and celebrations. You got graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and the special days for mom and dad.

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[00:10:12] Guys, did you know that, wait, did you know that Hunter Biden had some dealings with a Chinese company? Oh, 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 2019. Maybe. But now the story can be told.

[00:10:42] Russ writes in and says, 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.

[00:11:13] Washington Free Beacon 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 hotspot outbreaks was in? Wait for it. That's right. Washington State. The seven soldiers all recovered from their symptoms within six days.

[00:11:43] 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 games, also reported coming down with COVID-19 like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan, which the participants also described as a, quote, ghost town.

[00:12:10] 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 that 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. You ever seen the ghost malls? Go go look up Chinese ghost mall. I mean, not right now because you're listening.

[00:12:39] 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, people, 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.

[00:13:08] 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.

[00:13:29] Congressional Republicans have long since concluded that the 2019 Wuhan 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 2021. 2021. Right.

[00:13:50] 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 2022 Defense Reauthorization Act.

[00:14:20] 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.

[00:14:42] The Wuhan 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. OK.

[00:15:02] Several federal agencies now, including the CIA, the FBI, the Energy Department, all say that the COVID-19 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.

[00:15:34] And it is, 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.

[00:15:57] 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.

[00:16:26] 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, a guy by the name of Jim Vandeheye and another guy named Mike Allen.

[00:16:54] 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.

[00:17:20] 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.

[00:17:50] 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 so impressed with Ground News. It's an app and it's a website and it combines news from around the world in one place. So you can compare coverage and verify information.

[00:18:17] You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:18:44] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. All righty. So. Two founders of Axios dot com, Jim Vande Hei and Mike Allen. They were on the Honestly podcast with Barry Weiss.

[00:19:13] And first up is Vande Hei and he points out that trust in American media collapsed, according to him, in three phases. Three phases. I feel like the trust really started to shatter over the last decade. And I look at it 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.

[00:19:42] It was a hot bed of liberal groupthink for a long time. What? 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'd admired, making it crystal clear what their views were. Journalist. Journalist. Journalist. Twitter wasn't the first. There was a thing called Journalist.

[00:20:09] And for people who may not recall, this was back in the wild, 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 Journalist. And I think at the time this was when Tucker Carlson was still running the Daily Caller.

[00:20:39] So what it was, it was just an email chain, basically. It was 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.

[00:21:02] Because somehow or another, 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.

[00:21:24] So, I mean, so, 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.

[00:22:12] 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 VandeHei would have no idea that he is surrounded in his profession by lefties.

[00:22:41] 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. 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.

[00:23:09] Now it was in 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 be like, I don't just sit right with me. And it doesn't in the 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 can see with my own two eyes that the guy seems pretty old.

[00:23:37] 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 hell kicking. 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.

[00:24:05] 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 defender of journalism.

[00:24:34] 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. 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.

[00:25:02] Not just in what they tweet and what they think and write about and, you know, throw it out there for everybody to 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.

[00:25:27] 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 the shattering of the 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.

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[00:27:10] Or check out all there is to offer at cabinsofashville.com and make memories that'll last a lifetime. Here's a message from Sharpie Joe who says, It's not a few bad apples. Better described by Martha Radditch as just a handful. Fun to watch the liberals deny everything that they did. Happy Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and this is how they think they're going to reclaim some modicum of credibility with large audiences.

[00:27:40] 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.

[00:28:02] 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, you know, 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.

[00:28:32] 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.

[00:28:56] 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.

[00:29:14] 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. But there are tradeoffs here, right?

[00:29:39] 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 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.

[00:30:07] And that's it or opinions that agree with yours already. And so you end up in a 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. OK, so here is the the other founder of Axios, Mike Allen, also formerly, I believe, of Politico.

[00:30:32] 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. 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?

[00:30:59] Yeah, Barry, this was all the worst parts of reporter brain coming together. And there is the the group think the the mono think that you were talking about. You add to it another piece of what you were just talking about is cluelessness. Right. Like and this is where the American people see something, sense something, and they're not seeing it reflected in news outlets that they used to trust.

[00:31:26] 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.

[00:31:53] And like, you know, like the three of us like have made great lives 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. But Mike, what did the herd? That's crazy.

[00:32:21] 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? Right. They wanted the herd. 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. That was a fail.

[00:32:51] 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 Joe and his 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.

[00:33:21] They knew what they were seeing. So on the one hand, he says, oh, it was 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.

[00:33:49] 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 an insecurity. That, I think, is true. Okay. That part is true. I think 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.

[00:34:18] And then tell other people that this thing happened. Right. I think. That there is always this level of insecurity. And, yes, there is 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.

[00:34:48] 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. Groupthink. What's another word for that one? Peer pressure. Based on what? Ideology.

[00:35:17] 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.

[00:35:46] 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 without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepeetcalendarshow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening.

[00:36:15] And don't break anything while I'm gone.