On the menu today: As we approach the one-year anniversary of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, the New York Times unhelpfully contends that “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day” and “the Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.” (Take a moment to try envisioning a bloodless, legalized riot.) Meanwhile, the Chinese government pulls out all the stops to make sure that no one looks around the abandoned copper mine that once housed a virus that is genetically similar to the one that causes Covid-19. Finally, as 2022 begins, consider this offer that you won’t want to miss.
How Not to View January 6
The political-journalism world has decided that this week will be focused upon the one-year anniversary of the January 6 Capitol Hill riot, led by the New York Times editorial board declaring, “Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.”
Because I’m going to swim against the current here, go back and read what I wrote on January 7.
I called for Trump’s immediate impeachment and removal from office for his slow response to the violence against the legislative branch. I declared that “Despite their self-identification as patriots and proud Americans, [the rioters] pledged allegiance to nothing beyond chaos. Every single person who climbed those steps and went through those doors made their choice to beat on the chamber doors, to break those windows, to criminally trespass and disrupt the legitimate work of the duly elected legislative branch of the U.S. government.” Everyone who violated the law that day ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
But I also think that declaring every day to be January 6, as the New York Times editorial board did, is stirring fear, suspicion, and paranoia in a country that already has more than enough of all three. The NYT’s editorial board contends that “The Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.” There is no such thing as a bloodless, legalized riot.
You can hate the laws that these elected officials are trying to pass, but those lawmakers are attempting to pass them under the legal constitutional order, and they’ll be subject to judicial review to ensure they don’t violate the Constitution, just like every other law. That’s not a riot. Calling it a riot is a metaphor that obscures more than it illuminates. If we want there to be a universal condemnation of political violence, we cannot argue that attempting to pass laws we oppose is just as bad as violence.
Declaring every day to be January 6 is a bit like the familiar refrain that some particular problem, spurred by the actions of a few people, is “everyone’s fault.” It’s a cop-out, a blurring of the lines, an attempt to spread the emotional horror stirred by specific actions, sights, and outrages in a place and time and spread it across a much broader area.
In fact, it dishonors what happened on that day to say that every day some nutjob says Trump really won the election or tries to justify assaulting U.S. Capitol police is the same as January 6. If every day that a hateful attitude associated with an infamous date in our history exists made it that day again, then every day is September 11, too. I suppose if you looked hard enough, you could find someone expressing sentiments that would make every day December 7 or November 22.
Yes, you can find nutty and even frightening people saying nutty and frightening things all the time. But holding an odious view is not the same as taking an odious action. This weekend, CBS News reported on the results of a new poll:
There is 12 percent of the country, and a fifth of Trump’s 2020 voters, that want Trump to fight to retake the presidency right now, before the next election.
When we follow up with them on that idea, they mostly say they would like to see that done through legal channels. But then a third of the people within that 12 percent say he should use force if necessary. While that only amounts to 4 percent of the population, it still translates into millions of Americans effectively willing to see a forceful change in the executive branch.
I hate to tell you this, but four percent of your fellow citizens are nutjobs. Or more specifically, four percent of respondents are nutjobs who are willing to tell a pollster from CBS News that they support a violent, anti-constitutional illegal effort to overthrow the government and install an unelected leader. That’s bad, and that’s one of the reasons we have law enforcement.
(We should also pause to note that the CBS News poll found that a willingness to accept violence for a political cause was not exclusively a right-wing phenomenon: “Among liberals and Democrats, about four in 10 say civil rights and equality issues are important enough that violence might be justified over them, and a quarter name labor issues and abortion policies. For the right — that is, conservatives and Republicans — it’s more likely to be gun policies and election results, with about four in ten saying force might be justified on these issues.”)
But people tell pollsters all kinds of things; that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re willing to act on what they say they believe.
Generally, people are more reluctant to admit controversial views — “research has shown that respondents understate alcohol and drug use, tax evasion and racial bias; they may also overstate church attendance, charitable contributions, and the likelihood that they will vote in an election.” But I wonder if in the era of social media, where the clearest way to gain attention is to say something provocative, controversial, and incendiary, some people are more likely to make their beliefs sound more radical than they really are, instead of more mainstream and milquetoast than they really are. If you said to that four percent of Americans, “Here’s your gun, there’s a military base, go start the insurrection,” how many would actually volunteer to get started? And how many people would suddenly remember they had other plans?
(Our society is full of messages such as, “Don’t follow the crowd. Ignore what anyone else thinks of you. Be true to yourself. Speak your own truth.” When you tell people that the highest value is to be true to themselves, some people will follow their hearts into some really dark places.)
Let the January 6 Commission finish its investigation and offer a detailed and thorough report. Prosecute and try the perpetrators. (So far 725 men and women have been arrested for their roles in the Capitol Hill riot, and “about 165 individuals, the office said, have pleaded guilty to a variety of federal charges, from misdemeanors to felony obstruction. So far, 70 defendants have received some kind of sentence from a judge. Of those, 31 people were ordered jailed, and 18 were sentenced to home detention. The remaining 21 defendants were placed on probation.” Whatever you think of the verdicts, every defendant had the right to counsel and a fair trial.
By declaring that Trump deserved to be impeached, that January 6 is unjustifiable, that the menace of violent Trump supporters is being overhyped, that the New York Times’ editorial board is obscuring instead of illuminating, and that the justice system is working, I’ve likely irked and outraged every corner of the spectrum now.
Why Is Chinese State Security and Military Guarding an Abandoned Copper Mine?
RaTG-13 was, for a long time, the virus found in nature that is closest to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. A not-yet-peer-reviewed study contends that three newly discovered viruses found in bats in Laos — labeled BANAL-52, BANAL-103, and BANAL-236 — are actually genetically closer to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG-13 is. Some argued that this pointed toward a natural-origin theory and away from a potential leak or accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
EcoHealth Alliance issued a statement in November that “No work was ever conducted in Laos as a part of this collaborative research project” but Matt Ridley pointed to records indicating that EcoHealth Alliance submitted at least one sample of bat coronaviruses, with country of origin labeled “Laos,” to the “key laboratory of special pathogens and biosafety, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
Whether or not RaTG-13 was the precursor of the virus that causes Covid-19, the Chinese government has done everything possible to ensure that no one else can learn anything about where RaTG-13 came from.
The RaTG-13 virus was first discovered in an abandoned copper mine after six miners fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering the mine to clear bat guano in 2012; three of them died. Scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology investigated, collected samples, and identified several new coronaviruses, including RaTG-13. We know that a virus genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2 was in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they were conducting gain-of-function research, just a few miles from where the first outbreak of Covid-19 cases.
Back in May, the BBC’s John Sudworth revealed all of the gritty details of his effort to visit the mine in October 2020. The extensive efforts of the Chinese government to keep Sudworth and his team away from the mine — with no explanation — is jaw-dropping:
With the path blocked by a car, we set off again on foot, but were intercepted by some very angry men, in a 4×4, clearly communicating with someone in higher authority. Groups of other men hung around and, we were told, they would soon turn violent if we didn’t leave.
We backtracked and attempted to turn south again. This time finding our way blocked by a small van. Further along the road, a car with plain clothes police sat in wait. One man told us his job was to keep us out. We would not reach Danaoshan again.
Defeated, we tried to head to the Shitou cave, where WIV researchers found the bat virus that led to their insights into Sars1. That discovery set in train the effort to collect, sequence and experiment on coronaviruses across Yunnan, including of course at the Tongguan mine.
We had no plans to enter the cave but thought it might provide a location for a reporter standup, and we hoped to speak to locals about what they knew about the huge scientific field study that had been going on around them.
We were blocked again. First, by another lorry:
. . . then by men in military uniforms . . .
. . . and finally by a “broken down” car. We were held in this field for over an hour.
By now you get the idea. It’s impossible to overstate just how large and coordinated the effort was – state-security, plain-clothes police, uniformed police, officials, and local residents. When we tried to talk to anyone, they’d turn their backs.
The threats and pressure I faced over my reporting in China — which eventually forced me to leave — weren’t only because of my work on Xinjiang. Officials also told me that red lines were being crossed for my reporting on the virus, like this piece:
There is no proof the virus leaked from a lab. But, of course, that’s the point. Without transparency we can’t rule it out either. I’m proud to have been part of one of the first MSM news teams to ask these crucial questions.
Crucial questions . . . that have never been answered.
In the pictures in Sudworth’s thread, notice no one is wearing masks or any other personal protective equipment. So the claim — never actually made to Sudworth — that Chinese authorities are blocking off these mines or caves because of the risk of someone catching an upper-respiratory virus doesn’t hold water. These mines or caves aren’t being blocked off for safety reasons. They’re being blocked off for security reasons.
Why are there military soldiers and state security blocking off access to an abandoned copper mine and caves if this mine and caves are of no particular significance?
We know the Chinese government lies, and lies, and lies some more. So why do some people investigating this keep bending over backward to give the Chinese government the benefit of the doubt? If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then why do we keep encountering people who insist it cannot possibly be a duck?
ADDENDUM: It’s a new year, and it’s a good time to take care of all of those little tasks to prepare for the year ahead. If you’re reading this on the website, you may have noticed that the Morning Jolt newsletter is not an NRPlus article, meaning that you won’t run up against the paywall. I love reaching the widest audience possible — and this newsletter reaches a wide audience. But I link to a lot of my colleagues’ work, and sometimes those are NRPlus articles, so if you’ve ever hit the paywall and gotten annoyed, it’s probably worth spending a couple of dollars — no, really, the rates are now that low — and relieving yourself of that annoyance for the entirety of 2022.
Right now, the suits are offering twelve weeks of NRPlus for six dollars, which looks to me like a misprint. (After those twelve weeks, it auto-renews at the regular $69 per year rate. Nice.) At this moment, a year’s subscription to the print magazine is just $30 — that’s $1.25 per issue! — and if you want NRPlus and the print magazine for a whole year, it’s just $75.
Grab the deal, and rest easy, knowing you’ll never have to deal with a paywall for the rest of the year.