February 27th, 2023

On Monday’s Mark Levin Show, more and more government agencies are now saying that the origin of COVID was from a Wuhan lab leak, and there is nothing but propaganda and twisted information to argue otherwise. Donald Trump and Tom Cotton were attacked for claiming it was a lab leak in 2020, and no scientific evidence was used to refute them – only attacks and claims of xenophobia. This was another coverup by the incompetent ruling class, who refuses to hold China to account in any way. China is a communist paradise where if you speak out against Xi or protest, you are blackballed through a social credit score, and in some cases arrested and imprisoned. Also, President Biden has no intention of visiting East Palestine, Ohio and the official response from the Democrat media is that it is Trump’s fault. Joe Scarborough is the latest to blame Trump for deregulations when an overheated ball bearing was the culprit. No Trump-era deregulations can be pointed at that would have prevented this disaster. The priority of the corrupt partisan media is no to inform us with facts, but to regurgitate the Democrat party line. Later, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ new book is the new conservative roadmap. DeSantis is staying on offense before the media can make him play defense and fighting back against the liberal culture war taking over our schools and communities.

Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP

The podcast for this show can be streamed or downloaded from the Audio Rewind page.

Rough transcript of Hour 1

Hour 1 Segment 1

Back in May 2021, I read an article as I was digging and digging and digging research about this COVID virus and so forth. I came across a gentleman by the name of Nicholas Wade. I figured he was a huge leftist. I just assumed so because he had spent a lot of his career at the New York Times. And he wrote this piece, COVID 19, about misinformation and so forth, and he was widely attacked for it. He. Was born in Britain. An author, a journalist, written many books, wrote for Nature and Science. The science section of The New York Times, where he was, I think, effectively the editor there. Then he published an article in support of the COVID 19 lab lab leak hypothesis. And as Wikipedia, of course, puts it, fueling the controversy around the origins of the virus. Weight claim about the origin of COVID 19 are at odds with the prevailing view among scientists. At that time, Nobody. Nobody. Was directly linking the lab. To the virus except Tom Cotton and Donald Trump. Now, they’re not scientists, but they surmise that’s what had to happen. And, of course, they both came under vicious attack. Well, I want you to hear what Nicholas Wade said literally days after his piece was published. I brought him on Life, Liberty and Lovin. By the way, wasn’t that a fantastic interview with Governor DeSantis? Last night was fantastic, I thought. And it’s a great book. I’ll talk about that a little later and other interviews that are coming up. Anyway, back to Nicholas Wade on Life, Liberty and Levin, May 23, 2021, literally a few days after his piece was published. And nobody got that. Nobody was pressing this case. And I was not ideological about it. I just thought what the man wrote made a hell of a lot of sense. Here is a little bit cut where you go and what is the theory behind research like this, making viruses more lethal, particularly lethal for human beings? Well, that’s right. It sounds crazy at first sight, but the rationale is that many of these viruses are going eventually to jump over animals to humans anyway once they acquire sort of a couple of mutations that allows them to make that jump. And so if we could define those mutations in advance, we will get a jump on virus sort of jumping or he was going to do naturally, and that would give us a leg up in trying to predict and prevent future epidemics. That’s the rationale for for conferring gain of function on these viruses. So basically create in a lab more lethal viruses from the original virus. So you can try and figure out what to do with it should it become more lethal and jump into human beings. Is that about right? Yes, that’s right. With the one exception is you’re not you’re not always working with the original virus. You are often swapping into it bits and pieces from related viruses that may be able to do something based on spread the range of hosts the virus can attack. Mm hmm. Now. Looks like a cut over here. I talked about this expert, this Chinese expert, scientists at the Wuhan lab. You say she set out to create coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity on human cells. Is this what she’s known to do? He said she’s not known just for that. She just she’s known as a sort of general expert on the coronavirus. But she was working at the lab and so there were questions raised. Cut 13, go. So we have these scientific journals, we have these scientists. We have sort of these groups of scientists. In the case of a dancer. He had 20, 25, actually 35 signatures. We have the second one from Anderson, five signatures. The media basically use these letters as an argument that it it had to be from animal. It jumped to human beings. Why do you think the media was so incurious? I mean, people are getting ill. This is a pandemic, wouldn’t you? I mean, if you were back at The New York Times and so forth, wouldn’t you say to your editor, I want to know how the hell this happened? Well, I agree. It’s very puzzling to me why the media headed by the science journalists are on the staff of most mainstream newspapers and networks didn’t run after this story, which by any standards was one of the biggest Sun stories of of the decade. And so I am perplexed to know why they didn’t see through the rather large holes in the Anderson and Daszak letters that so much shaped public opinion. But with the science journalists going along with the natural emergence theory, there is a zoo, I guess will depend on their advice, went along to it. And in addition, the the whole issue became horribly politicized, essentially by President Trump saying the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab and not providing any evidence. Now, I’m pretty sure my guess is that what his intelligence service said to him was exactly the same as they’ve been saying under the Biden administration, namely, that we cannot rule out the possibility of lab escape. And Mr. Trump, I fear, dropped all those caveats and announced it as if it were an outright fact. So therefore, everyone who was with President Trump sort of favored lab escape when everyone who was against President Trump refused to consider it. It seems to me to be a reflection of politicized. Our whole public discussion has become that that that means political attitudes prevailed over what should have been scientific curiosity. Right. And they should have looked at it anyway. And he kind of backs into this, which is because Trump said it was leaked the entire Washington so-called scientific, bureaucratic media. Community colluded to oppose anything, Trump said. And earlier, anything Tom Cotton, it said. That’s my view of what’s taken place here. Let’s play another clip. Cut 14. Go. Don’t you think? Even though there’s not a direct connection, as you point out, don’t you think the National Institute with these infectious diseases or the National Institutes of Health, these entities that the American people have had a lot of faith in? They’ve put a lot of reliance on and I have over the decades that they have a responsibility to try and figure out how this happened. I hear nothing from those institutions about where they think this virus came from. And other than they dismiss people who have thoughts and comments and so forth, it just seems to me if you’re going to be in the business of grant giving, I don’t care if it’s three levels below or whatever it is at this point, you know, something horrific happened. Shouldn’t they have some responsibility to try and get to the bottom of it, including saying, look, we’re trying to get the data, but the communist regime in China won’t give it to us? Mark, I think that’s an excellent point. The National Institutes of Health, even more so than all the media, surely had a duty to investigate the origin of the virus as carefully as it could to lay out its role in it, to explain why it continued funding this research even during a US government moratorium on funding it. And there are lots of questions that I wish the NIH had addressed a year ago and been upfront about and invited public comment and scrutiny and just laid out everything they knew and tried to see what had happened and explain it to us. And they haven’t done that. And I share your perplexity at why not? And they propaganda talking points are out not just from the podium in the press room at the White House, but at the various host desks throughout cable and network news, MSNBC, LSD, and Constipated News Network and all the rest. Jake Sullivan put it out yesterday. We can’t confirm or deny recovered originated. Jen Psaki on the morning show show Energy Department cover report. Not insignificant. We still don’t actually know. It’s amazing. Just amazing how they cover for the communist Chinese. Jean Pierre at the White House today. Political attacks on Fouchier counterproductive. Fauci was the biggest propagandist of them all. Now we have reports out I didn’t make them up. This is in anybody’s opinion by experts, experts that natural immunity was as effective or more effective than the vaccines. I had experts on this show and on television long before anybody else. I dug them up at Stanford University, Yale. Rockefeller College, You might recall they were all on the program. And they said natural immunity is the answer. It’s the quickest way to get this over with. Yes, Vaccines for the elderly. Yes, vaccines for those who have immune issues and so forth. Just in case, No question. And then they say masks. Originally, Fauci said, forget about the mess and he was into the masks. And his answer was he didn’t want everybody buying up mass. Never made any sense. And now there’s another scientific study not done in some boiler room, not funded by some partisan group that says masks are ineffective. There were people saying it at the time, and so there was censorship online because the government and the left didn’t even want these discussions to take place. Everybody was a kook, a conspiracy theorist. And in the end, who benefited from this? 7 million people worldwide died. 7 million, as best as we can tell. Some of the numbers are really kind of weird, but you understand, 7 million. Maybe it’s five, maybe it’s ten. Whatever it is. A lot. Even that number was manipulated. So it’s difficult to know. But let’s assume millions. At the hands of the Communist Chinese in the Wuhan lab. In the American media. The American bureaucracy. The elected officials, the Democrats. They didn’t want us to go there. And when Donald Trump called it the China virus, he was called a racist and all that. Mr. Peterson. He must be a racist. All about racism, racism, collusion, the morons out there. And yet, look at this. Our government. The bureaucracy. The Democrat Party. Our media still today. Not all, but too many covering up for the Communist Party of China. The Communist Party of China. You couldn’t even mention the lab leak. Here we are. Wall Street Journal. From the weekend, Michael Gordon and Warren Strobel. The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the COVID pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress. If this itself wasn’t leaked to the media, you wouldn’t even know this. The American people wouldn’t know what the hell is going on with this government. Why is this top secret? This ship by the Energy Department. Which conducts a lot of these tests, which previously was undecided on how the virus emerged. As noted in an update to a 2021 document by Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, his office. The new report highlights how different parts of the entire community had arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the FBI in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese lab. For other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of natural transmission. Two are undecided because our government is incompetent. If you reread Mr. Wade’s piece, I’m sure you will be convinced that he came out of that lab. And there’s literally nothing, nothing but propaganda and twisted information, particularly by nonprofits, to argue otherwise. I’ll be right back.

Hour 1 Segment 2

And now, of course, all the agencies agree that regardless of any differences they might have, the Chinese are not working on bio chemical weapons, of course, like viruses. Another massive cover up by the incompetent ruling class, if you ask me. And the communist Chinese are not held to account in any way. And how can we hold them to account? Economically. We could break the back of that economy. But for the fact that so many of our unpatriotic corporatists in this country who put policies in place to harm American workers with their damn woke agenda, their ESG agenda, well, they bend over backwards for a genocidal regime that’s in a Cold War against us and maybe a hot war in the near future. Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and all the rest. And they know who they are. We’ve never seen unpatriotic corporatists like this. Remember World War Two? They didn’t exist. I’ll be right back.

Hour 1 Segment 3

All right. It’s just amazing that this could happen to the world. And, you know, the communist Chinese regime has not allowed the world to really look into this. Now, if they were innocent, wouldn’t they say, come look at everything? But they haven’t. Not even their friends at the World Health Organization have been able to do that. They have drawn very strict, bold, dark lines around what they can look at. So the communist Chinese did this. They did it in the lab. Mark, you don’t have proof that it was for military purposes. I don’t need proof. It’s the enemy. They’re the enemy. And they have no compunction whatsoever. There is no separation of powers, no oversight. The public rises up. I’ll give you an example. This from our friends at Breitbart, John Hayward. Listen to this. This is this regime we’re talking about. China’s white hair or silver protesters, that is, seniors who participated in massive demonstrations over the last few weeks against cuts to medical benefits of retirees. Are being scooped up by police in the latest regime crackdown. So, in other words, things have quieted down. And what the regime does is they go back in because they have cameras everywhere. And they collect up these people and they disappear. That’s what happened a few months back when people rose up on the strict lockdowns on COVID. Settle down. Then the police state acted. They went back in and started grabbing people and they disappear. In other words, they go to concentration camps or they’re killed. Demonstrators filled the streets in the cities of Wuhan and Dalian in early February after the city governments announced so-called reforms that would effectively cut the value of their health insurance benefits in half. Oh, yes, communist regimes in their socialist economies. Their Bernie Sanders model, along with increased reimbursement thresholds for doctor visits, the Chinese government seemed surprised by the intensity of the protests. Authoritarians do not like surprises. Radio Free Asia reported that at least five of the leading activists involved in the white hair protests have been arrested, including one who had been activist Zhang Hanke, who drew the Chinese Communist Party’s baleful attention by complaining about the death of his father during one a dictator, Xi Jinping’s deranged citywide lockdowns. Zhang found himself on the wrong end of China’s dystopian social credit system after filing suit against Wuhan, officials with his bank card shut down and online accounts frozen. This is American 20 years. I’m telling you the truth. We learned about. What the Biden administration, the FBI, DHS, DOJ were doing with the social media platforms. What’s happening to pro-lifers, what’s happening to the almost at a thousand people that they have rounded up and arrested? And we’re throwing in jail from January six, a thousand people. And his bank cards were shut down. Online accounts froze, and he was reportedly arrested in Genson for joining the war in protest against health insurance cuts and posting videos of an online. Zhang was arrested, along with a younger protester whose crime was singing the global communist anthem. The international in a manner that suggested the current Chinese government was betraying socialist ideals. RFA source listed three other detainees and added There are probably many, many more than that who have been who have been counted. Some of the detainees were handed quick and dirty ten day administrative jail sentences, which Chinese police can impose its will on anyone they see as a troublemaker. Longer sentences sometimes imposed during the ten day administrative hold. They won’t, one resident told RFA. The crackdown appears to have begun with long time activists like Zhang Hay and people who drew attention to themselves by speaking with reporters. If they’re picking off these obvious targets, Chinese authorities have developed a, quote, stability maintenance system, unquote, that helps them quickly swoop in and grab known troublemakers when mass protests are brewing, including people who were flagged for participating in previous demonstrations. As the old saying goes, they round up the usual suspects at the first hint of unrest. The New York Times pointed out that the white hair protests have thus far been a city by city phenomenon, unlike the huge nationwide protests that finally brought an end to China’s coronavirus lockdowns in December. Deflating municipal funds are prompting benefit cuts so each city devises its own cost cutting measure that some cities in much worse shape than others. Besides Wuhan and Dalian, the other city that has seen demonstrations so far is gung ho, and its protesters were not quite as angry as those in the other two cities. Three quarters of China’s population, 1.4 billion farmers, migrant workers, others in low wage occupations. Well as children don’t have personal health accounts and they have to rely on barebones coverage known as residence insurance. Presaging further unrest if humanist rallies implement cuts like all hands. And so. There is the Communist paradise. And if you speak out of turn, if you dare to protest. They have their own form of FBI that will round you up. Except in our country, we only round up American citizens. If you’re an illegal alien, you get all kinds of. Well. All kinds of passes. And deferments. But that’s China, which of course, it’s even worse than that. But I wanted to point that out. Well, I hope you had an opportunity to watch Life, Liberty and Levin this Sunday. We had Governor DeSantis on for the full hour. It’s actually 40 minutes with commercials, but the full program. And I do interviews a little differently than most Sunday shows. Most Sunday shows Meet the Depressed, You Face the Nation and all the other reprobates. They’re there to play gotcha. They’re there to really promote themselves. They’re there to promote ratings and all the rest of it. That’s not why I do this. I believe when I invite a guest on, it’s not up to me to rip the guests to pieces. Unless, of course, they’re a leftist, but they won’t. Come on. It’s up to me to allow the guest to speak. And you can draw your own conclusions. And I’ll ask a question that I think is relevant. And Governor DeSantis has a brand new book out. And it’s a very, very good book, by the way. I literally read 90% of it the night before the interview. It’s the courage to be free. Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. And it’s not a snarky book. It’s not a gossipy book. It’s not an attacking book. He doesn’t attack any any of the other Republicans or anything like that. He talks about his life. He talks about what he’s done. He talks about what he considers leadership and how he applies that in the state of Florida. And he talks about his priorities, his conservatism. He’s very, very knowledgeable about the Constitution. There’s a there’s a chapter in the book and a chapter 14 where he talks about post constitutional America. It’s a phrase I’ve used, and he really spells it out very, very well. And I think his. Approached leadership is something that governors, mayors, executives of across America to pay attention to, he said. Stay on offense. I’m just summarizing it. Stay on offense, because if you’re not on offense, you’re on defense. Make the media chase you and your issues rather than playing, you know, defense with the media. And he said, you know, I got 50% of the vote, but I had 100% of the executive power use it. He figured out what his constitutional authorities were, where his administrative authorities were. And he said in every case, you know, he wants to follow the law, he applies it, he uses it and he advances. The cause of liberty. And his explanation was much more coherent than I’ve heard from other governors. I can tell you that, quite frankly. And the book is also filled with suggestions on things that can be done to rein in the administrative state and that representatives in government have done a very poor job of representing the people. They create these bureau. Ocracy using that they can have all this power on them. So you have no say in anything. And he acknowledges that. And that’s one of the things he wants to deal with. And his tussles with the media. He said, I can’t I can’t worry about what the media are going to say in these culture wars. He didn’t invite the culture wars. He explains that, too. You know, you got Chris Sununu and even Mike Pence. I was surprised. And others, Larry Hogan, most most of these like Sununu and Hogan, these are bit players, but nonetheless, they’re out there trying to redefine conservatism in a way that gives them cover for their, quite frankly, liberal Republicanism. And so someone is talking about meeting the left halfway and bipartisanship. Hogan was really a plaything of the Democrat legislature. The Senate has changed the entire state. From a marginally Democrat state to a strong red state. In five years, really four years, and created the economic conditions for that, created the living conditions for that law and order, keeping the schools open, that sort of thing. And it’s very, very refreshing for people. It’s the way the country used to be. So I wanted him to have an opportunity to explain these things because where else is he going to get it? I’m quite honest about it. I said some pay commercial and it’s not going to be the long time. As I say, I’m not. Andrea Mitchell Thank God in many respects or Jim Acosta, I’m not interested in yelling and fighting with the guest. Unless, of course, it’s a Bernie Sanders or something like that. He would be yelling and then I’d respond in kind, but I’d rather have a one on one intelligent discussion with a guy like that, but they won’t even come on. But I thought I would expose you to DeSantis. I didn’t discuss President Trump and I didn’t discuss polls and I didn’t ask you if he’s running because he’s a dumb question. You’re going to run? No, I can’t tell you right now. That’s the answer to that. I already answered it. Donald Trump. He’s not going to attack Trump. He’s just not going to get into that stuff and polling. He doesn’t do polls. So I think he came across very well, very intelligent, very classy. And his book now is flying off the shelf if you want to get a copy. It’s called The Courage to Be Free. Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival. When a book comes out of the gate so hard as this one, it’s number one on Amazon. Now, Amazon slashes it in terms of the price, so they’re already at a 33% discount. The book comes out Tuesday. That’s tomorrow. So at midnight, midnight tonight or tomorrow morning, depending on where the the second hand is, they start shipping it. Now, if the discount, whether it’s his book or anybody else’s book goes even deeper, you’ll get the benefit of the deeper discount on day one. So if they say, okay, on day one, it’s 40% off, The way Amazon works is you get that. How do I know that? Because. They’ve written enough books. Donald Trump is working on a project that I’m not free to talk about because I haven’t been given permission. But I will be interviewing him, I believe, in April. Some may still still agree to it, but they do, as far as I know. So we’ll be doing that, too. But I just wanted you to have a chance to hear Governor DeSantis in his own words for a long form interview. And I thought he was great. I’ll be right back.

Hour 1 Segment 4

They very much want to defeat Rachel MADDOW. She’s a sanctimonious left wing buffoon. May I say that? I think I will. Who trashes the system as she gets rich from the system? Have you noticed all this? How all these people get rich off the system that they claim to detest? Yes. Typical Marxist hypocrite. I’ll be right back.