Why Should We Care if Now Everyone Thinks COVID-19 Escaped from a Lab (and China Covered it Up)? | with Jim Geraghty
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And welcome once again to Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific, brought to you by IEJ Media and our sponsor, Bauer Group Asia. We'll know more about them in due course. I am Ray Powell. I am the former military officer. I live in California. My co-host is Jim Caruso. He is now in New York, and it is raining. How are you, Jim? Building the arc. It's coming along. Thank you.

Well, I'm surrounded by Jims today because I've got our guest is Jim Garrity. Jim Garrity is in Northern Virginia where he lives in the neighborhood he likes to refer to as Authenticity Woods. We'll ask you something about that later probably. He is a senior political correspondent for National Review and I believe also a columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of the popular Morning Jolt newsletter and a frequent commentator on U.S. national and global politics.

One of the topics that Jim Garrity is best known for has been his relentless reporting on the Chinese government's cover-up of COVID-19's origins, which he began writing and speaking critically about in its earliest months. Well, two months ago, the German press reported that German intelligence concluded as early as 2020 that COVID-19 was, quote, 80 to 95% likely to have escaped from a lab, but that, quote, the assessment was kept from the public at the time.

All right, Jim Garrity, this is COVID-19, not COVID-25, and most of the world has moved on. So why should we care if now intelligence services are saying it actually escaped from the lab, as you were reporting back in 2020?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me on the program. Yeah, I went back and I checked. It was March 4th, 2020. That's when I wrote my first piece. My colleague, Michael Brennan-Doherty, had just sent me on the company Slack, hey, there's this guy on YouTube who says this is all because of a leak or something. And, you know, as everyone remembers, we didn't have a lot to do back then because you couldn't leave the house. You couldn't go out and enjoy yourself. So I had a lot of time on my hands. So I think the first step was

going through each step, each claim in that video. This guy was an expat, but I guess he just had spent time in Wuhan, just knew, hey, there's a lab there that's working on that. He'd go into the website. And I do not speak Chinese. So I took everything that he was talking about, double-checked to see, is this on the website? And I take it and then I run it through Google Translate. Okay, it all seems to make sense. And verified everything I could. And really within a month of

the world shutting down was the recognition of the fact that, yes, there was not just one lab, but there was also the local branch of the CDC. And both of them were doing research on coronaviruses found in bats. Now, that's almost overdetermined. One would be suspicious enough. Two of them is there. One was very close to the infamous wet market that everybody believed was the, or that many people had theorized was the origin point.

And that there had been, obviously, this lab operated with a great deal of secrecy. And then, you know, subsequently, they've been fined. Anyway, why should we care? If people don't care the way they did back in 2020, 2021, 2022, I'm not surprised.

We've all kind of gone on with our lives and we're at a very different place in our life right now at this moment. But I'm trying to think of anything any government has done that is more harmful than the ultimate effect of the COVID pandemic. Officially, 7 million killed around the world. The economists did some good studies and noticed that a whole bunch of countries, China among them, but also Russia, Iran, basically all the bad guys, died.

insisted they did not have a lot of COVID deaths. They did a terrific job. There was really, you know, just entirely coincidentally in early 2020, they had a giant spike in pneumonia deaths, but they were totally unrelated to COVID. There's no connection there whatsoever. And I think remember, you know, one of the grim amusements during the, you know, the year that COVID really shut down our life

were the charts put out by the government of China that had, you know, a really unplausibly low number. And eventually they got enough grief about it that they adjusted it up 50%. And after that point, they basically said nobody had died of COVID. And it just was a flat line over the cross. Nevermind, they're shutting down cities. They're, you know, you know, satellite photos are showing tons of cars around the hospitals, all kinds of stuff that didn't really add up.

So I think what the Chinese government, look, I don't think it was deliberate. I think this was some idiot at the Wuhan Institute of Virology not using the protective equipment the way he was supposed to someday. Lab leaks, unfortunately. Lab accidents happen all the time. Thankfully, the consequences of them generally aren't that bad. But they went home, kissed his wife, and the virus was off and running.

The Wall Street Journal had reported there were three Wuhan Institute of Virology employees who were hospitalized in the fall of 2019. They'd never, as far as I know, they were never able to nail down, was it COVID-19 or was it some other ailment?

ailment that prompted this. And they said that, look, it's not completely unheard of for lab employees to be sick with something and need to go to that. But the timeline kind of lines up and fits that. So I think what the Chinese government did, they all cost us a year of our lives. And that's the best case scenario. Nevermind the consequences of the education of American students.

never mind the economic damage, never mind the fact the number of people who lost loved ones, the number of people who never got to say goodbye to their loved ones because they didn't have a funeral. Like COVID was one of the biggest things that happened to our lives. And it's kind of amazing

That for a long stretch, a whole bunch of people in positions of responsibility were like, nah, we don't know. It could have, might have been a pig. One of my favorite moments was Jon Stewart going on Colbert's show and freaking out the host by saying, maybe a pangolin kissed a, you know, and he kept, you know, and he's like, or maybe it's the Virus Research Institute right down the street. So I realize that's a very long answer. But to me, this is the most consequential mistake in human history. And...

The Chinese government's got all kinds of other reasons for us to be irked with them. I don't think we've ever really had accountability. They've done a terrific job of escaping accountability. I think that's because a lot of Americans in powerful positions didn't want us to look too hard at the origins of this. And guys, I'm used to stubbornly trying to fight for causes that have no chance. I'm a New York Jets fan. Oh, that is...

Can we end the podcast now? I was going to say, you're suffering? You think you're going to hurt me? You can't hurt me. There's nothing you can do to me I haven't already been through. You've seen hell. Yeah. All right. So we sort of expect the Chinese government to lie and cover up. Nothing new there. What concerns, I think, me and Ray is...

How is it our intelligence agencies kept going back and forth, back and forth? Were they covering up? Were they getting different information? What was their motivation for changing their minds? Yeah. Well, almost. So it's worth remembering that this occurred while Donald Trump was president. There were various statements made by Trump in those first couple of months saying what a great job Xi Jinping was doing. I'm not a huge fan of that.

Trump thought he was going to get this great soybean deal with the Chinese government and was not eager to be all that antagonistic. And apparently at some point he told Pompeo to knock it off with making critical statements about how the Chinese government had been handling it. So that's on the Republican side. Biden comes into office, orders a review of the information that's there.

The intelligence community comes back with a, nah, boss, sorry, it's inconclusive. We just can't tell. And although apparently there were various indications that there were, the FBI was saying, yeah, we think it's a lab leak. Later on, Livermore Labs came out and basically said, yeah, we're pretty sure it's a lab leak. People might be thinking, well, Livermore Labs, well, apparently part of the U.S. government, for all of its copious flaws, I'm a conservative, I'm a small government guy,

But they employ a lot of smart people. And they have a section over at Livermore Labs that tracks biological weapons. As a result of that, they know a lot about biology. They know a lot about viruses. They know. And by the way, before I go any further, you have an intelligent audience. I assume they know this distinction. But I should point out, to the best of my knowledge, to the best of my research, everything we've seen, there's nothing that indicates that SARS-CoV-2, which is the virus that causes COVID-19, there's no indication that it is a deliberate bioweapon or it's a deliberate attack on anyone.

Now, with that said, a lot of research in viruses is what they call dual use, where basically the more you know about viruses and how they multiply and how they spread and how they're contagious and all that stuff, well, the more you know about that, the more you could apply it to a biological weapon.

So I, you know, while I don't think there's any indication that COVID-19 was a biological weapon, did a lot of damage to the Chinese, did a lot of, you know, like there's no reason to point to that. It did, it's conceivable that it was part of a biological weapons research program and or some other part of the Wuhan Institute of Biology is involved in biological weapons research. This is the sort of thing that's very hard for our intelligence community to figure out. But as with that, there was always this dispute

And as long as there was that dispute, the U.S. intelligence community could say, well, it's inconclusive. Oh, it's divided. I believe the last time President Biden ever spoke about the origins of COVID-19 was in that summer of, I want to say, 2021, maybe a little bit later in the year, that once they got that answer, there was next to no interest in discussion. It was not mentioned in the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump last year, barely mentioned on the campaign trail. You know,

The gentleman who wrote The Great Influenza, John...

I'm still going to go read the fascinating, but he makes the point that after the influenza of 1918, 1919, the world just wanted to forget about it. You think about we see a lot of memorials to World War One. We've seen books, documentaries. It's a fascinating show. Great influenza had a huge impact on America. But when it ended, people just wanted to forget about it. They did not want to study it. They did not want to discuss it. And when you read that, I'm like, well, it's not going to be like that for covid.

And I think you can make an argument, by and large, it was that once normal life returned, people wanted to get back to as close as they could as, you know, to normal life and to believe it was all like a bad dream. As I said, Biden, I think Biden was not interested in further antagonizing the government of China. They had a bunch of other disputes going on. By February 2022, Russia invades Ukraine, one of the other great passions of my work. And that occupied a great, to the extent that there was a

uh foreign policy bandwidth of the biden administration and when your president is an octogenarian he only has a certain number of good hours a day he can only give a certain number of speeches in a week you know relationship with china shifted to the back burner and i think there was no appetite in the administration to push hard trump comes in and like within 20 minutes of um

coming into the office of the CIA. It's like, yep, oh, by the way, we're pretty sure it was a lab leak. And last I heard, it sounds like Tulsi Gabbard very much wants to come out with some sort of definitive report saying, yeah, it was a lab leak. Now, Tulsi Gabbard is not my favorite human being on this planet, but if she goes and does this, if she actually manages to pull that off, Tulsi Gabbard, this bud will be for you. Oh, this administration doesn't like bud. This other beer, something else will be for you.

Okay. So a lot of our audience is concerned about international institutions like the World Health Organization, which has been through a very bizarre number of years around this question of COVID-19. The gentleman who runs it, Dr. Tedros, has run it since 2017. When this whole thing started, he was seen as being very soft on Beijing, very sort of

complementary of their management of things. Of course, the Trump administration sort of pulled us out. Then we were put back in and now we're

Leaving again, what should we make of China's relationship to the WHO? And what does this tell us more broadly about China's involvement with these international institutions? Yeah. The right side of the aisle, you can find a lot of these international institutions, WHO, probably throw in World Trade Organization, United Nations.

And there's one chunk that says, we hate them. They're never on our side. They're always an impediment. They're always a pain in the neck. You know, let's withdraw, stop funding them and just get rid of them. And there are other ones like, no, no, you know, as Bill Clinton once said of affirmative action, mend it, don't end it. The idea that these institutions have some, can still do some good. They just need new leadership and they just need some reforms.

I think if you're the World Health Organization and you fumble it as badly as they did on COVID-19, it's really hard to ever come back. And I don't know if we will ever see, let's just say, well-informed Americans who follow these sorts of things having the same faith in the World Health Organization that they did before the pandemic. And it's worth noting, at one point, I believe, pardon me, it's been a while since I've looked at the timeline, but the gist is, like, January, these numbers of cases in China keep going up. And I believe people at the World Health Organization are just like, wow, we got to declare a global pandemic.

And the Chinese government said, no, no, no, you don't need to do that. In fact, I think it was January 21st or somewhere around that time is when the Chinese government up until then was insisting they saw no evidence of human to human transmission. Never mind the fact that, you know, doctors were catching it from their patients. Never mind the fact that you're seeing it. This couldn't all be from everybody eating bat soup in the market that day. It was always, you know, the evidence was always pointing in that direction, but it was a great embarrassment to the Chinese.

And so they kept insisting, we have it under control, we have it under control. So they delayed declaration of a global pandemic by about a week. Now, we could argue whether that would have made a very big difference in the long history of the pandemic, but it was a good demonstration of the fact that China's government effectively had a veto

Over the sorts of questions that are like it's the mission of the World Health Organization is to declare things like global pandemic when there's evidence of that. I find myself feeling like that the gift from office space. Just what is it would you guys say you do here if you're not going to come out and declare a global pandemic? That World Health Organization, I think you'd be about organizing world health. I think it'd be right there in the name.

Now, the interesting thing about Dr. Tedros is that, so yeah, so people like me are very upset. And, you know, your listeners may remember, at one point, a World Health Organization team did go to Wuhan. And apparently they went into the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

and had a very odd meeting where they asked, there was nothing accusatory, there was nothing where anybody was pointing the finger and saying, you know, you guys did this or anything like that. But they just said, hey, can we get your data on the very first cases? And the Wuhan Institute of Biology is like, no. And they're like, what?

Again, look at our name, World Health Organization. We kind of need the data, guys. We kind of need the info. And they've gotten to a shouting match. And people pointed out, you don't usually think of virologists as being hot-tempered, table-pounding, Sam Kinison-type screaming at you or something like that. And it was assigned. That, to me, says, OK, these guys are definitely hiding something. Further evidence for the suspicions.

But anyway, they do that study. They spent like an hour, a couple hours in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, come out and very quickly say, yeah, but totally it wasn't a lab leak. There's no evidence of it. Those darn pangolins, those darn bats and all that stuff. And apparently like even Dr. Tedros was like, you know, I think that's a little premature to make that declaration. So you had the head of the organization looking at the investigation to say,

Fellas, come on. Not even I can sell this. This is, you know, you look like you just went in and did a very cursory study, tried to get China off the hook for this. And everybody is just supposed to live in fear of somebody else eating at a wet market. Now, I point out that the wet markets opened up for business a couple of months after the pandemic started again. So if you're like if here's if this had set off something that required whole cities to be shut down for months at a time,

and you're the Chinese government and you think it came from a wet market, do you think he'd be eager to open them back up again? To me, the evidence, the behavior of the Chinese government says to me, they know why this happened. They know, they're not particularly worried about this happening again because they feel like whatever problem it was, they fixed it.

And as much as they, because like if it had been a wet market, you figure we would have found, oh, here's a bunch of animal smugglers and they all died mysteriously, you know, or some other scenario pointing to that. And we never did. In fact, as far as I know, we've never found that precise virus in a bat.

Now, doesn't that seem kind of weird that you've got this thing that's a bat coronavirus and it spreads like wildfire amongst human beings. This thing spread all around the world within a couple of weeks, but it doesn't spread quickly from one bat to another. Now, I don't know about you guys. That to me says it's somewhere along the line. It gained a function.

kind of like it had gone through some sort of process designed to make it more virulent and more contagious amongst human beings. And in the process, it became different from all the viruses you found in bats and different from, so that you'd never find it in a bat, that it was always being, it start, you know, being spread through human beings, not through bats. So what concerns me is, all right, so the WHO is discredited and dysfunctional. Our national health system is now, I would say, under attack.

global cooperation on health is uncertain, but we still have the same problems of the possibility of new pandemics arising. So in your opinion, where do we go from here? When you say under attack, is it because the Secretary of Health and Human Services is recommending leeches or... Well, Ray is very pro-leech. Okay, all right, yeah, yeah.

Jim is my friend, so I don't want to cast any aspersions.

I was going to say that there are areas of the Trump administration where I think they're doing a good job, border, some of the stuff with the Houthis, stuff like that. And there are other parts of the Trump administration I think they're doing a terrible job. I was not a fan of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. becoming Health and Human Services Secretary. Just for starters, I would really love to have an HHS secretary who knew which one was Medicaid and which one was Medicare, because when he was testifying, he kept mixing them up. But that's kind of the job, fellas. You really need to know which one is which.

Medicare is for old people. That's why they scare, Medicare, you know, they're trying to scare the old people. Medicaid is for poor people. And if we renamed it poor people care and, and old people care, I think we'd all be doing a lot better. The, but anyway, so like,

Yeah, there are times where I will tell my audience, hey, this institution you once trusted or thought was at least full of competent people doing their jobs. Here's some evidence that it's really bad. And, you know, sorry. And there is unfortunately not a replacement institution. Government does not have it's not like we can say, you know, we can change administrations. But in the end, the institutions are largely full of the same people, although the Trump administration is trying to get rid of as many people as it can.

I think public health has did itself enormous damage during the pandemic. And it's going to be a long time and a very long, slow process. In fact, I might say, I don't know if RFK Jr. becomes the big deal that he did if you don't have the vaccine skepticism. And I think vaccine skepticism came obviously out of the experience with COVID. For anyone listening, I hope you went out and got your shots.

Every vaccine I've ever had has been fine. Every vaccine my kids have ever had has been fine. But if you have any questions, talk to your doctor. I'm not a doctor. Jim, as a guy who spent 35 years in the military and I think got nine anthrax shots. There you go. You must have felt like a pincushion.

But yeah, like one of those things were like, you know, being very pro go out and get your COVID vaccine. I was never a big fan of the mandatory or attempting to strong arm it. And I always thought that the efforts to fire people because they didn't want to get, uh, it was, it was, there was, there was something, uh,

authoritarian in it. There was something all of a sudden at the time when our government really needed the public to trust it, it really needed to behave in a manner that would encourage communication, that would encourage a sense of, oh, these people really do care about me. For some reason, the entire federal government decided to be like Eric Hartman on South Park and this guy, respect my authority, you know, this, this vibe of I will make you get these shots whether you want them or not. And,

And of course, many of the same office holders would then insist that they're pro-choice and they believe in bodily autonomy. But not when it comes to what we're going to jab you with. And so I believe that was handled very badly by people who I think just have instincts of how dare you defy me. How dare you? At one point, I started the pandemic thinking Anthony Fauci was this swell guy.

I still think he's a very knowledgeable guy, but I think month by month, let's see, month by month, year by year, being a celebrity, I think it's not good for you. I think being a widely revered, celebrated celebrity is probably not good for you. I wouldn't know. Okay. Ironically, being a, we have a new Pope, I'm Catholic. I'm not particularly religious or devout, but I would just point out when I go into a store and I see those prayer candles,

that have Illuminaries like Stacey Abrams or Dr. Fauci, that is one of the few things in this world that I will look at and say, that is frigging sacrilegious. That is wrong. And to me, the fact that... I also think the reverence for somebody like Fauci does speak to the quasi-religious yearning that was in everybody, including maybe people who think of themselves as atheists or secular, that they wanted some messiah figure who was going to come along and make things okay.

And I think Fauci started buying into his own hype. And at one point, one of those, he, at minimum, his testimony about gain-of-function research over in China and whether the NIH was funding it was highly misleading, if not all outlying to Congress. And I think he, you know, evolved into

the figure that his foes always wanted to believe he was, of arrogant and dismissive and, you know, I am the science. How dare you question me? Which I think did a lot of damage. And I don't think... That's not the sort of thing you get over in a year or two years or even five years. Check back in a decade and maybe Americans will trust the public health authorities a bit. So speaking of things that, you know, mend it, don't end it, one thing that seems to be ending is the U.S. agency for global media. And I...

Full disclosure, I have done a lot of work with Sea Light, with very, very good journalists from The Voice of America and Radio Free Asia who are now out of work. I think that as of today, this is May 9th as we're recording this, 90% of Radio Free Asia's staff is being laid off, including their Uyghur and Tibetan language programs, which are already done. Yeah.

You recently wrote that you thought that the U.S. Agency for Global Media should be fixed and not eliminated. But that doesn't seem to be where things are going. What do you hope happens from here? I was going to say, Ray, the best hope we can have is that because it feels like because of the dueling court cases about whether the administration has the authority to do this,

We're recording this May 9th. By the time people hear it, it may have changed. There may be some other injunction that goes back the other way or something like that. It feels like that's what it's been for the last few weeks. But yeah, the outlook for Voice of America and all these other programs is not great. And I look at what it stems from is a broad conservative sense that, quote unquote, the media is bad.

And look, I write for National Review. If I wrote, you know, if you put all of my articles about criticizing the media and bad coverage and unfair coverage, skewed coverage, coverage that gets things wrong, you put it from end to end, you could probably go back to, go to you, Ray, and then up to you, up to New York, Jim, and then back down to me, you know. I've been writing, like a lot of the criticism of the media is deserved. But as you just laid out, these government-funded institutions, right?

who generally work overseas and they cover news overseas. And by and large, they're not covering the sorts of things that drive conservatives crazy about the media, i.e., Donald Trump is Hitler, Republicans are fascists or stuff like that. Now, having said that, if I were running these sorts, they do cover U.S. domestic news.

I'm sure if you went looking, I could find articles there, but I didn't like it or I wouldn't have gone with that headline choice or something like that. There's valid criticism. And Voice of America should be trying to bend over backwards to avoid being perceived as partisan. If for no other reason than the fact that they're funded by the government. So at some point, that other power, that other party is going to get in power and they're going to want to, you know, take it out in your budget. But basically, you know, they, you know, there were cases where I think their coverage, you could argue, was skewed.

But to me, that wasn't what Voice of America and all these other institutions were all about. They were all about

putting coverage that was honest, that was countering foreign propaganda and bringing it primarily to foreign audiences, not to American audiences and saying, Hey, I know Russia is telling you this, that, and the other thing, but you know what, but, but here's the actual truth. I know China is saying the Uyghurs are, you know, whistling while they work while they work and everybody's happy and singing and dancing and everything's swell, but it's not. And, and,

I think that's an invaluable service. The other thing I kind of marvel at, and this is one of those real beefs I have with the Trump administration. So you look at what Russia spends on foreign propaganda. Sputnik, RT, all of the Internet Research Agency, all the little trolls they have in St. Petersburg. I mean, it's got to add up to billions and billions of dollars. And you'd be like, well, Russia is not a washing money. The Ukraine war is costly. Well, because to them it's worth it.

They think this is a worthwhile investment to get their message out there and to, you know, divide Western societies and get people to believe, boy, Vladimir Putin is swelled. You see how good he looks without his shirt? And I totally believe he scored nine goals against the Russian all-star team all by himself. There's no way they let him score those goals and all this other stuff. So like, and the China and all the state-run Chinese media institutions, like,

Our enemies think spending a lot of money to get their communications out, to get their vision of the world spread out around the globe as much as possible, they think it's a worthwhile investment. Why don't we? Why do we look at that and say, ah, that's a waste? I think a lot of Americans don't like to think that we are in a global conflict, not a hot shooting war, something probably more akin to the Cold War, against...

It was a Ukrainian member of parliament, Marian Zablotsky, who used the term on this podcast. Can I use bad words? We try to minimize them. Okay. That's okay. Go ahead. He described what he called the axis of a-holes.

And I think your listeners know what A means. And it basically was Russia, China. You could throw in Iran, North Korea. At that point, the government of Syria. Syria is under new management these days. I hope things are getting better. Venezuela. And you could probably throw in a couple others. And are they a formal axis, an axis of evil, axis of the demons? Not necessarily. It's more of a partnership of opportunity.

And there are a lot of vivid examples of that, but one that probably is relevant to anyone who's paying attention to the Pacific, global shipping, trade, stuff like that. The Houthis do not attack Russian or Chinese flagged vessels. And there was a Chinese shipping company that was boasting, or there was some professor who was looking at this and saying, isn't it terrific that Chinese companies are the only ones that can sail through the Red Sea and guarantee that they will not be shot down or set on fire by Houthis?

And I'm sitting there thinking like, well, I guess we know who's helping out. Like they're scratching each other's back. They're all very happy to work with each other. I have been beating the drums on this for years. And there are a lot of days I feel like some days, guys, I feel like Sisyphus trying to roll that boulder up the hill. And then there are a lot of days I feel like Indiana Jones just running away from the boulder. But in any case, there's a boulder. There's a boulder. It's all. Yeah. Yeah. What I find so confusing is Trump's superpower is his ability to communicate directly

to the world. But the world doesn't get truth social, and the world doesn't all speak English. So the idea of using global media, the government arm, to help amplify and should be in his wheelhouse, it makes zero sense to me. And I know you have an explanation that American people don't see the value. How many American people are even aware of VOA? It's Washington people. And I think Washington people get it. So why

It worries me that almost conspiracy theory minded might say we're just disarming for some reason, another Putin gift. Well, we are also apparently trying to cut 8% from the defense budget each year for the next five years. Yeah, that up. That's like close to a 40% cut. I would note I wrote about that. And then a couple of people said, well, actually, they want to take that money and they want to put it into other more productive directions.

So if it really is eliminating wasteful spending and taking that money and putting it towards actual, you know, needed programs, I'll be fine with it. But if it's not, we are letting people go to Central Intelligence Agency. We are letting people go to civilian DOD. Chinese defense budget, it's going up. Russia defense budget, it's going up. You think our enemies are making cuts right now? All the available evidence says no, which to me says, you know, we are getting weaker and they're getting stronger. That's not a good scenario there.

As for Trump, why does he not see it this way? Guys, Witkoff went to Moscow and used the Russian's translator. Now,

First of all, if we really don't have a translator in Moscow, then Elon called the heck down. That's way too many cuts over it. No, but actually, we know the US. But the other thing I periodically think about is that if you are the president's special envoy, remember, Woodcuff is supposed to be special envoy to the Middle East. All of a sudden, he's in charge of not just Israel and Hamas, not just our negotiations with Iran, not just back channel talks to the Houthis. He's also in charge of Russia and Ukraine.

He has as many jobs as Marco Rubio. Well, I was going to say, now we know how Michael Rubio manages to do all these other jobs because he doesn't get to do any Secretary of State stuff. He's like parking cars somewhere or something like that. So like Witkoff, as far as I can tell, look, I want my government to do a good job. I'm rooting for Witkoff, not as much as the Jets. I'd like him to do a good job.

But nothing he says is reassuring. He comes back and he is utterly echoing Russian propaganda to Tucker Carlson and all that stuff. And so the idea that he's going into meetings with Putin without his own translator and being reliant on the Russians, like...

absolute amateur hour and why yeah oh because the quests are all morons jim uh because i mean like i i don't want to like be that snarky i don't mind being that snarky um but like in the end i think both trump and probably what cob and maybe a couple of these other guys in this group look at the biggest most dangerous challenging geopolitical struggles and they say

You know, this is all just a real estate deal. This is all just, you get this land, I get that land. We're going to draw the lines here. I give you some money. You get, you know, that this is all, that this is all essentially negotiation. And I don't know about you guys, to echo one of my, our recurring obsessions from the Three Marketing Knowledge podcast, I just picture Ellis,

from Die Hard, walking in to negotiate with Hans Gruber and saying, Hans, boobie, I'm your white knight. And just the idea of somebody who comes from a business and financial world.

not understanding the geopolitical consequences, the stakes and the people he's dealing with, which is why Witkopf keeps coming on and saying, I had a great talk with Putin. Witkopf also at one point said when Hamas, I'm glad you guys are sitting. It's going to shock you. It turns out Hamas made a promise and then did not keep it.

Now, I'll give you a moment to take that in. But at one point he said, yeah, maybe Hamas, maybe that's me being naive with Hamas. You think? If you cracked a book, knew anything about Hamas, take a look at the charter, right? Drive the Jews into the sea. This is not obscure literature.

deep in the footnotes of the PDB sort of thing you need to look for. Hamas is a bunch of untrustworthy bastards. I think you need to go into negotiations knowing that instead of saying, I'm a great deal maker and I'm going to charm these guys and I can get them to see reason. All right. To drag this back into our theater of interest, um,

Jim, you have... I tend to meander and segue, so yes. And you have spent time personally reporting from Ukraine and Syria and Taiwan. I'm actually dragging it back. I'm going to start in Ukraine, though, because we recently did a post-election review on one of our recent podcasts for Australia. Yeah.

And I was pretty interested to find out that maybe the most, one of the most seminal events in the recent Australian, lead up to the recent Australian elections, was the Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. And essentially what I heard from the people who were reporting on that election was Australians were looking at that Oval Office meeting and saying, that could happen to us.

Of course, Australia is extremely reliant, an ally extremely reliant on the United States for extended deterrence. So I'm going to just for, you know, pulling us back to the Indo-Pacific, what should Indo-Pacific allies conclude about the Trump administration's approach to alliances? I think that's highly unpredictable and that...

It, you know, I don't want to say it depends on what side of the bed Trump got into or what he saw on Fox News cry on right before he went into the meeting or something like that. And we probably should point out that the upside of having Trump being as transactional as he is, is that he and Vance and Zelensky had this, you know, an Oval Office meltdown, the likes of which we've never seen. And two months later, they sign a mineral deal.

So either Zelensky is really good at figuring out how to pull back from the brink and how to, you know, there was a very famous picture of them at the Pope's funeral in the Vatican where, you know, like,

The Pope, I mean, Trump can get furious, but his anger is kind of like a summer thunderstorm. It comes out of nowhere. It's very intense. And then it passes and everything's quiet again. So, you know, the fact that at one point Steve Bannon in the first term was famously fired and then he got back into the inner circle. It's interesting. Trump, for all of his, you know, raging on true social, doesn't necessarily always, you know, hold grudges.

But with that said, yeah, watching Trump and Vance double team Zelensky and just, you know, shouted him in the Oval Office. Yeah, that could happen to Australia. I'm sure Pierre Polivare up in Canada, the conservative leader, thought he was in great shape. And then Trump started like it was cute the first time when he called Justin Trudeau governor. I, for one, find the jokes that Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro a much funnier joke. And that's where my humor would have been gone.

But that's, you know, the, that like Trump kept doing it. And how do you expect the Canadian people to respond when you keep joking that you're going to turn them into the 51st state? Of course they hate it. Of course they hate the idea that they're going to be annexed by somebody. And, you know, the Liberal Party of Canada was like,

in the dumpster and Trump effectively pulled it out, dusted it off, gave it a dry cleaning, and it came out and they just won the election. And Pierre Polivere was like, what happened? I was ahead. We're supposed to have 200 some seats. So Trump's effect on other countries' politics is unpredictable because he's unpredictable. And every

Every other American president would go into a meeting with Australia or with Great Britain or with Canada or with any normal, long-established ally and speak of them in friendly terms and in respectful terms and thank them for their assistance and all the stuff that are just pro forma almost in a head of state leader meeting. And Trump not only doesn't do any of that,

He complained to Zelensky, you never thank us. Zelensky thanks the U.S. practically every speech. And he just, you know, like, the other thing which I think is worth noting, Trump did not run saying, when I am president, we are finally going to put the Danish in their place. We're going to let them know that they've been lording it over Greenland. As you guys can tell, I like doing Trump impressions. I've been shooting my head for about eight years now. But like this, like, oh, what?

Like, is Greenland a strategic position? Yes. But we already have a Space Force base there. Whatever we need from Greenland, we probably could get through normal negotiations with this, with the Danish.

And yet instead, Trump is like, oh, we're going to take it. And so when he's meeting with the Canadian prime minister, and the Canadian prime minister comes out and says, but, you know, Canada is not for sale. And boy, like, you know, that's the sort of thing every leader wants to say, you know, standing up for your country. And Trump's like, never say never. Like someday Canada's going, oh, okay, you can sell us. All right. You know, we are, turns out we are for sale after all. Maybe that's how y'all belong, you know, never say never. Just one day.

I would just like the Internal Revenue Service to know that it was James Caruso who did that, not James Garrity. I just want to be clear. Yeah, that's uncertain. So let's go to tariffs, my bugbear. Because China was on the ropes economically, right?

We were in great shape economically, and we could have pressed Japan and Korea and other countries to really put the screws on if China is our main competitor, the strategic competition of the century. And instead, what are we doing? Again, help me understand what the plan is.

If China is the main game and we've just thrown away, you should have heard Rahm Emanuel. I urge you to go back and hear him talking to us. He's so irate because it was part of his idea to just really squeeze him. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And it's worth noting, you know, I am generally a free trader, but I saw the argument, like China is just a very different case. Although I think it's worth noting, as some of my colleagues like Dominic Pino and Ramesh Ponnuru have pointed out, the great irony about the tariffs on China is that it's not primarily an economic argument. It's much more of a national security argument. It's much more of an argument of democracy.

do we want China making so much of our pharmaceuticals? Do we want anything that the Department of Defense is going to need to be made in China? Do we want any of our electronic components? It's all in the realm of, do we want to be dependent upon them for anything that we need? And if we ever had a conflict, could we suddenly look and realize, oh no, we depend on them for X and we can't fight that war without X. And when I

And when I say X, I mean the unknown. I don't mean the social media platform. So, yeah, so I was, you know, open to the, you know, to paraphrase Gwyneth Paltrow, consciously uncoupling from China. I believe that, you know, I wrote about this long before COVID that, you know, let's say, you know, 1990s Clinton signs most favored nation status for China. And there was some controversy then. It's worth noting that like mostly it passed with Republican votes. Yeah.

And there was this argument of, well, we're going to trade more with them. We're going to engage more with them. And by engaging more with them, we will bring our values to China. And I'll just say, now that here we are 20 years later, I wish that had been true. The world would be a better place if that were true. It did not work. And in fact, I think when you look at how in the aftermath of the crackdown on Hong Kong, when the Houston Rockets general manager put out that really interesting

you know, small ball, you know, free Hong Kong or whatever, you know, the tweet he put out there.

And China acted as if we had nuked Beijing. I mean, they just came out with every conceivable hardcore response to it. And everybody in the NBA is like, oh, I don't know that guy. Every NBA who's like taking the knee and weighing in on every political, Steve Kerr, who was speaking at the Democratic Convention, all of a sudden is like, look, it's not our job to get into politics. Really? Now? You don't want to get involved in politics? But the example, and I think I mentioned this to Ray when I had a chance to see him,

there was somebody who held up an 8x11 piece of paper side. This is not a giant banner. He's at a Washington Wizards game in Washington, D.C., and he holds up the side and it says, Google Uyghurs. It's not China sucks. It's not the Washington Wizards sucks. It's not NBA commissioners. It's just an instruction, a request. Google Uyghurs, please. And the NBA security took it out and told him he had to leave.

And to me, you know, we said, no, we didn't bring our values to China. We're bringing their values here. Our institutions are behaving more Chinese, are behaving more authoritarian, are having more of a crackdown on speech that they don't like.

And I think that's a sign this has not worked at all. And one of the nice things about writing for a place like National Review is that we're not part of a multinational. We're not part of a big conglomerate that is trying to open up a theme park or sell Rich Lowry bobblehead dolls all over Shanghai and Beijing. We're a small operation, but it means we get to see what we say.

ABC being part of Disney and Disney wants to open up theme parks over there or CBS, which is part, all of these big corporations have very big financial investments in China and none of them want to rock the boat. And they know China is very touchy about any kind of conceivable criticism. And, you know, again, preceding COVID, but I realize I'm meandering all over, but I'm hoping this is all close enough to the topic of your, of your, the passions of your, your podcast audience.

Transformers, the brilliant cinematic masterwork, that one of the, I think it was the third movie, part of it takes place in Hong Kong. In addition to seeing the evil Decepticons smashing things in the city and the Autobots trying to, they kept carrying away to scenes of the Chinese military saying, we must protect the civilians, deploy the forces. And it was the most wildly heroic propagandistic portrayal of the Chinese military you're ever going to see. Now I should point out,

Every other scene in a Michael Bay movie usually portrays the U.S. military in the most heroic light you possibly could ever see. But it just was one of those things where it was like, wow, we're having what we think of as American movies. This message is getting stuck in there. And if you'd said, oh, how great the British forces are, hey, we've always loved 007. If you said the French military forces, okay, that would never work. But the...

Sorry, French listeners. But the idea that an American that are left was pausing the robots fighting to let us know how great the Chinese military was, was a sign that something had gone terribly wrong and that China had demonstrated this really frightening ability to influence what Americans saw, heard, and presumably thought about their country.

Well, speaking of messaging, I do know that you managed to get your boss, Rich Lowry's name into the podcast. So I assume that's contractually obligated, the Editor National Review. Now, one of the names that you have associated yourself with is your

home subdivision, Authenticity Woods. So as an exit question, I'm going to ask you about Authenticity Woods and where did that come from and why has that been sort of one of your staples? Okay. So from 2005 to 2007, I lived in Ankara, Turkey. I'd like to say this is because I was such an adventurous spirit and always interested in foreign affairs, but no, my wife had a job out there and she says, we can do this. And I'm like, okay, came back. And we

And we moved to a housing development in Alexandria, Virginia. Not Old Town. That's where the really rich people live.

like my colleague Ramesh Purnoor. Apparently some people are doing real well. And I'd say, oh, Ramesh Purnoor must be making all that money from the Washington Post, except I write for the Washington Post. So anyway, they're doing, God bless the Purnoors. So we were in the wrong side of the tracks of Alexandria, but it was a very nice neighborhood. And I, but I said, this was 2007. And I joke, it's the kind of neighborhood where the Obama yard signs came pre-installed.

It's very blue. It's very democratic. And the first time I went to vote there, it was a primary day. And I go in and I ask for a Republican primary ballot. And the guy behind the desk just looks at me and says, why? And implied in that is you seem like a normal, nice, upstanding human being. Why? Why? Why would you vote for the forces of hell? You know, so he gave it to me. And my neighbors were very nice, but it was a very democratic neighborhood.

A couple of years go by, kids start getting bigger. We were living in a townhouse then and we wanted a yard. We start saying, okay, we're back to Fairfax County. I guess I've revealed my home county now, but you know, there's a million people here. So I feel pretty good about, you're not going to know exactly where I am. Oh, so the, the old neighborhood, uh, you know, I nicknamed it yuppie acres, uh, because that was basically, you know, we were, there were yuppie. It was, you would have the same conversation. Oh, yeah. When you move here. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't kids. So we decided, oh yeah, it's got a great daycare center nearby. Uh,

So what do you do? Oh, I'm a lawyer for a trade association, which I should point out. That's what everybody in the neighborhood said. Probably 20 to 30 percent of them work in the intelligence community. And that was their cover story. But nonetheless, that's the you know, everybody worked for government or influencing government in some way.

uh, move out to Fairfax County where every once in a great while Republican will win. Like I think Bob McDonald won like 50% to 49% or something like that here. So it's like they're in a really good year. Fairfax County can be purple. Um,

the Trump years has not been good. It's been much closer to like a two to one, you know, Democrat to Republican split. The way you know who votes what in my neighborhood of authenticity woods is that if you're voting for the Democrat, you have a Biden or a Harris sign. Jerry Connolly is our congressman. And if you're voting for Republican, there's no yard sign at all because you don't want anybody to know it. But that's a sign, you know.

So, yeah, I like where I live. And I joke that because it wasn't full of those yuppies, I was outside the Beltway by two miles and that this was authentic. This was the real America out here. So also we have spiders the size of Buicks out here. So this is why authenticity woods just kind of captures the vibe of where I live.

All right. Well, we have had with you, Jim Garrity, references to Die Hard and Yuppies, which just shows that this is very much a Gen X, well, with the exception of my co-host, who may be a little more senior than that. Anyway, so where can people follow Jim Garrity if they want to keep up with your work?

Sure. I write for National Review. I write the Morning Show newsletter every day. I often contribute to The Corner, which is kind of our rolling blog throughout the day of news and commentary. I write for the magazine every now and then. In fact, in the next issue, I have a profile of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and his apparent interest in purchasing the presidency. I'm sorry, running for president, running for president. But yeah, you know, it's...

And I also write for the Washington Post. You can find those columns over there. I'm on Twitter at, sorry, on X, poor Elon, you're going to drive me crazy, at Jim Garrity. And every once in a while, you can find me on a cable news channel, usually as a sign some other guest is canceled. All right, Jim. Well, for me and Jim, we want to thank you and invite you to come back sometime. It was great fun, and I appreciate what you guys are doing to call attention to, I think, a very undercovered, under-discussed story. So best of luck to you guys. ♪

And once again, our sponsor is Bauer Group Asia, a strategic advisory firm that specializes in the Indo-Pacific. We're very grateful for their sponsorship, and I know that their clients are very grateful for their unmatched expertise and experience that helps clients navigate the world's most complex and dynamic markets. Jim, I think that our guest today covered almost every market on Earth. It was a very wide-ranging interview. Fortunately, Bauer Group Asia is all over the Indo-Pacific.

And Jim Caruso is a senior advisor with Power Group. You can visit them at PowerGroupAsia.com. Jim, a very wide-ranging interview. Well, I just hope our audience knows enough about American pop culture, especially in the 80s, that he can follow the various references. Because I have to admit, I've never seen Die Hard.

Oh, wow. So there's an ongoing discussion in the United States as to whether Die Hard is an authentic Christmas movie. And people come down very hard on either side. So if you have not seen Die Hard, that's your homework assignment. You have to go now watch Die Hard. Yes, mother. But if we go back to his initial points way back at the beginning, that he feels it's definitely a lab leak.

Yeah. We'll never know. I think we know. I'm sorry, Jon Stewart on this one. You know, this the quote that he didn't say from the Jon Stewart thing was, oh, my God, there's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness in Hershey, Pennsylvania. What could it possibly be? Oh, I don't know. Maybe a hangling kissed a penguin or something, you know.

So I feel pretty confident that it's a lab leak. I like the story. I don't know who told me that maybe it was they were experimenting on bats and pangolins and all these things, and then they were going to euthanize them. But then some clever worker at the Wuhan Biology Institute said, you don't want to waste a perfectly good pangolin and took them off to the wet market and sell. Yeah.

So expose things. Yeah. You know, I think, so to me, what the kind of the nub of this whole thing is, is look, everybody knows that every government agency

on Earth wants to tell its own story the best it can and wants to, you know, wants other stories to be, you know, have less airtime, right? The advantage we still do have in democracies is that we can't just shut down all the stories we don't want. And,

We can have people who try, but in the end, you have to let those opposing voices be heard, especially in a country like America where there's a freedom of speech in the Constitution. There is no freedom of speech in an authoritarian country, and China, when it wants to tell its story—

will be in many cases very very bald-faced in the way that it tells whatever story it wants I say this as a person who recently published an article on the sea light blog where the first three words are Beijing is lying that was actually a story about the condition of Scarborough Shoal but you know

I do think that there was, and I do remember this pretty well, in the early days, there were actually stories about how transparent Beijing was being and allowing people to come in and research this virus. And it feels like this completely other universe that we were in. And of course, since then, we had years of just this

complete fabrication. And whether or not you think there may have been a wet market involved, what is clear is that Beijing told lots and lots and lots of false stories about COVID from the very beginning with catastrophic results for the world. But as you said, we should suspect this always.

What bothers me more is if our intelligence agencies really were told not to speak the truth publicly. That is a bigger problem. And that gets to, I think, in part. So some of this is internal government problems, but some of it was also the hyper-politicization of everything publicly.

in our country, at least the United States these days, where everything, whatever one side thinks might be true, the other side has to take the opposite opinion. And so everything becomes a partisan issue. And I, you know, I think part of the, part of the, um, the overtones of early COVID was who in America was to blame. Was it Donald Trump? Was it Anthony Fauci? Was it, and, and,

In some ways, the turning to Beijing and asking questions about that turned into, well, you're just letting so-and-so off the hook, right? Instead of just sort of asking the honest question, what is the credibility of this argument that we hear coming out of Beijing, which is clearly where the virus started? Well, I just need our institutions to have credibility, be apolitical, whether it's our health organization, our intelligence agencies,

D.O.D. or state, just play it straight and let the politicians politic. I am 100% with you on that one, Jim. Well, since we're in violent agreement, that makes me uncomfortable. So tell me a story. Well, I honestly have a hard time remembering whether it was on or off the recording that Jim Garrity was telling us about big spiders in Northern Virginia. And I remember as soon as he said it, I thought,

I have been, I have spent three years in Australia and I don't think Northern Virginia knows anything about big spiders. Call that a spider? So I think that the name of the spider in Australia was the Huntsman, right? Wasn't that the spider we had there? Oh, that's wonderful. We were, I remember very distinctly being in a car, sitting in the backseat of a car on my way to the Russell building, which was like their Pentagon. The driver of the car was our Marine attache.

And as I'm sitting there, I all of a sudden see crawling along my window a spider the size of my hand. And the car is in motion. And I remember leaning up and sort of saying quietly in the marine attache, the driver's ear, say, look, I don't want you to look to your right, yes, please.

But very slowly, this is what's going on. It didn't matter. He still almost drove us off the road. Those are really, really big spiders. This is why you should always have your weapon available. Exactly. Well, not in Australia. There isn't a lot of that going on in Australia.

All right. Well, again, amazing wide-ranging interview. Our audience may have heard references to a couple of other episodes you can go back and listen to or watch on your YouTube channel, youtube.com at IP Podcast. That's

They included episode 49, which was with Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. Why should we care about the U.S.-Japan alliance? And of course, our very, very recent, why should we care about Australia's election results, which we did with Mick McNeil and Michael Rowland, which was our first ever live show. And that was where we talked about that inflection point with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office.

So we want to thank all of our team here, Jim and Ian. Ian is our producer. You can follow him at his media site, IEJ Media. You can follow him on X at Ian Ellis Jones for the latest in the military and geopolitical graphics department.

Of course, you can follow us on social media. We're on LinkedIn. We're on X. We're on Blue Sky. You can email us at IndoPacificPodcast at gmail.com. That's IndoPacificPodcast at gmail.com. And finally, we want to give one last shout out to our sponsors, Power Group Asia at PowerGroupAsia.com. For Jim and Ian, I'm Ray. Thanks for joining us this time and join us again next time on Why Should We Care About the Indo-Pacific?