Today we're going to talk about COVID and the lab leak, and I want to frame this show

at the top as being not just about that, but also several different things at once.

The first is the simple facts about what we know about the potential of the pandemic

getting started in a lab in Wuhan.

The second is about the nature of our public discourse and what information is allowed

to be discussed freely and what isn't.

For a long time, any speculation about a potential lab leak was literally banned from major social

media platforms.

You'd have your posts taken down, you might even have your entire account deleted just

for discussing it.

Then it became a right-wing thing.

If you are open to thinking about it, you are categorized as a right-winger and were

accused of xenophobia and sparking hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Now that we know more about the potential lab leak, the social media restrictions have

been lifted, but the cultural restrictions, the soft censorship that's actually way more

effective than the hard censorship that's still around.

So I suspect for a lot of our listeners what they'll hear today is going to seem out

of left field.

But all three of these journalists that I'm going to be joined with in a moment are

quite serious and diligent and will link in the show notes to the documents to back all

of this up and where we're merely speculating will be clear that that's what we're doing.

Now, the third thing, and this is actually the most important I want to talk about, is

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