Hello, I'm Amber Athe, the Spectator's Washington Editor, and I'm here to encourage you to subscribe to the Spectator's American Edition.

If you visit spectator. us forward slash subscribe, you can get our print and digital edition for just $7.99 a month.

This means you get unlimited access to our amazing website and will send you a beautiful 80-page

monthly magazine. You'll also have access to our mobile app. Subscribe now at spectator.us

forward slash subscribe. You won't regret it.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and now the Joe Biden presidency.

We will be looking at how a 78-year-old president will change America and we'll be asking if normalcy, which is what he promised to bring,

has returned to American politics.

The answer, of course, is no.

I'm delighted to be joined today by the great Thomas Frank,

who is a historian, a writer for The Guardian,

among other places, and the author of many great books, most recently The People Know a Brief History of Anti-Populism. And we're going to be asking, what does it mean, or what will happen if the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis turns out to be true?

Now, Tom, I'm talking to you about this because you've just written a very, very good piece for The Guardian.

And it's really about science and the idea of science and expertise.

Yes.

And how at the start of the pandemic,

sort of official think, for one of a better way of putting it, was that now is the time where

people have to realize that they have to trust science. Yeah. And they have to believe in science.

And in recent weeks, we've had sort of a growing number of people saying that the theory that the virus

COVID-19 came from a lab is more credible than previously thought. And this has suggested that

actually the scientists who dismissed this theory quite vigorously a year ago were wrong.

What are the implications of that politically, globally, and so on? Well, so I'm not going to

...