0:00

You're listening to an Airwave

0:02

Media Podcast. Are

0:05

you interested in the parts of history

0:08

that remain a mystery? Do you want

0:10

to learn more about the historical myths

0:12

and misconceptions used to prop up false

0:15

belief today? I'm Nathaniel

0:17

Lloyd. In my podcast, Historical

0:19

Blindness, I delve into all

0:21

of these topics, sharing puzzling

0:23

tales from the past and

0:26

examining hoaxes, conspiracy theories, and

0:28

misremembered events that provide insight

0:30

into modern politics and religion.

0:33

Find out what's real and what's not when

0:35

it comes to famous conspiracy

0:38

theories like those surrounding notorious

0:40

assassinations and secret societies. Discover

0:44

the weak and deceptive underpinnings

0:46

of modern political ideologies and

0:48

religious beliefs. Join me

0:51

as I attempt to shed some

0:53

light on our historical blind spots.

0:55

New episodes every two weeks. I'm

1:25

Mark Chrysler, but that's not important right now because today

1:28

we're going to be listening

1:47

to another podcast. It is called

1:49

Historical Blindness hosted by Nathaniel Lloyd.

1:51

And if you regularly listen to

1:54

and enjoy this show, it seems

1:56

kind of like a given that

1:58

you'll appreciate historical blindness. What

4:00

caused the Severe Acute Respiratory

4:02

Syndrome or SARS epidemic in

4:04

the early 2000s showed that

4:07

it had likely crossed the

4:09

species barrier much like its

4:11

predecessor. What their research was

4:14

showing was that what was most likely to

4:16

blame were the conditions of the wet markets

4:18

and the practices of the wildlife trade in

4:20

China. However, the existence of

4:23

the Wuhan Institute of Virology and

4:25

the fact that it had been

4:27

studying coronaviruses that cause respiratory infections

4:29

ever since the 2003 SARS outbreak

4:34

was viewed by many as a kind

4:36

of smoking gun. Rumors

4:38

about researchers at this institute

4:41

falling ill with flu-like symptoms

4:43

late in 2019

4:46

further encouraged the lab leak

4:48

hypothesis, though there is no

4:50

evidence that any researchers at the

4:52

institute had COVID-19. Since

4:55

that time, it has become a

4:57

mire of conspiracy speculation, with the

5:00

institute being depicted as a US-funded

5:02

bioweapons development site and with further

5:04

claims that Anthony Fauci, a public

5:06

health spokesman during the first year

5:09

of the pandemic and chief medical

5:11

adviser to the president during the

5:13

first two years of the Biden

5:15

administration, was himself

5:17

personally responsible for quote-unquote

5:20

gain-of-function research to develop

5:23

a more transmissible virus.

5:26

While the scholarly community and

5:28

the intelligence community worked slowly

5:31

but surely to assemble evidence

5:33

for a natural origin, the

5:36

conspiracist community latched onto any

5:38

gaps in their evidence as

5:41

if it proved the opposite. Most

5:43

recently, a declassified report by

5:46

the US Department of Energy

5:48

that claimed with quote-unquote low

5:50

confidence that the lab leak

5:52

theory was correct, along with

5:54

the FBI director's

5:56

comments indicating that his agency

5:59

agreed has resulted in

6:01

numerous major press reports that

6:03

act like it has been

6:05

proven. Even though this conclusion

6:07

runs counter to the findings

6:09

of most other federal agencies

6:11

and intelligence services and scientific

6:13

consensus, the fact is that

6:16

it is still too early to draw such

6:18

a conclusion, which is exactly why

6:20

they have been drawn with quote unquote

6:22

low confidence. Even as

6:24

I wrote this, President Biden

6:27

signed the COVID-19 origin act

6:29

to declassify intelligence on the

6:31

subject, which has been deemed

6:33

inconclusive. And this announcement

6:36

came on the heels of

6:38

a further revelation that samples

6:40

deposited by Chinese researchers in

6:42

a virology database show that

6:44

the novel coronavirus was present

6:46

in civits and raccoon dogs

6:48

sold at a Wuhan wet

6:50

market. That these developments

6:52

will not likely be trumpeted with

6:54

quite the same gusto by the

6:56

press, which often

6:59

amplifies conspiracy claims because

7:01

it gets them clicks

7:03

and views. When

7:05

the recent conclusions of the Department

7:08

of Energy were making headlines, a

7:10

disgruntled listener who insisted he was

7:12

quote not an idiot in quote

7:15

emailed me to say that since

7:17

quote COVID-19 is thought to have

7:19

escaped a lab in quote,

7:22

he hoped I would quote

7:25

reconsider the possibility of HIV

7:27

having been foisted upon us

7:29

in quote. But

7:31

of course, we know that the notion

7:34

of HIV having been created as a

7:36

bio weapon is a baseless

7:38

conspiracy claim widely spread by

7:40

the KGB. Obviously

7:42

the story of how this

7:44

myth appeared and was propagated

7:46

for political purposes serves as

7:48

the perfect example from history

7:50

of why we must reserve

7:52

judgment about the origin of

7:55

COVID until the evidence is

7:57

more conclusive. This

7:59

is historical blindness. I'm

8:01

Nathaniel Lloyd and today I'll

8:03

be joined by a special

8:06

guest far more informed than

8:08

I on this topic to

8:10

share the insightful story of

8:12

infection, Operation Denver

8:14

and the engineering of

8:16

AIDS conspiracy legends. Welcome

8:34

to historical blindness. Before

8:37

I continue with this story, since

8:39

I've heard that the best way

8:41

to combat misinformation is not to

8:43

tease the accurate information until later,

8:45

but to state the truth at

8:47

the outset of your discussion, let's

8:50

start by talking about the natural

8:52

origin of AIDS. Just

8:54

as medical scientists have been

8:56

studying the natural origin of

8:59

COVID since its emergence, ever

9:01

since the 1981 recognition of

9:03

acquired immune deficiency syndrome as

9:06

a new disease and the

9:08

subsequent identification of the causative

9:10

retrovirus, now called the human

9:13

immunodeficiency virus or HIV, scientists

9:16

studied it and hypothesized

9:18

about its natural origin.

9:20

Early on, even though it seemed

9:22

to have emerged in America, it

9:25

was believed to have come out

9:28

of Africa because of the

9:31

discovery of its similarity to a

9:33

simian virus known to affect primates

9:35

in sub-Saharan Africa. With

9:38

far more time spent studying

9:40

this pathogenesis than has been

9:42

spent studying COVID, it has

9:45

been borne out with consistent

9:47

evidence that HIV passed naturally

9:49

to humans through a cross-species

9:52

transmission that it actually first

9:54

appeared in west central Africa,

9:57

then came to Haiti before emerging.

10:00

charging in America, all

10:02

long before the years when it

10:04

would subsequently be claimed that the

10:06

CIA was developing it as a

10:08

bio weapon. And the

10:11

intelligence services that were responsible

10:13

for legitimizing and spreading these

10:15

baseless claims have since confessed.

10:18

Well, actually already in the 1980s,

10:20

there were experts in the United

10:23

States government and the so-called active

10:25

measures working group who

10:27

were attributing this thesis that HIV

10:29

was developed as a biological weapon.

10:31

They were already saying the 1980s

10:34

that was Soviet disinformation and

10:36

they generally attributed to the KGB. It

10:39

was only after the end of the Cold War that for example

10:41

in 1992, the head of the successor

10:44

to the KGB, the FSB,

10:46

Yevgeny Primakov, confessed that yes,

10:48

it had been disinformation,

10:50

that they had been spreading and that it

10:53

had been the KGB. And

10:55

shortly thereafter, there were a couple

10:57

of Stasi officers who published a

10:59

basically their memoirs, if you will,

11:01

and then their memoirs, they claimed

11:03

that the Stasi also played a

11:05

role in this disinformation campaign. So

11:08

that was basically when it became known that

11:10

the KGB was behind it. That

11:13

is Dr. Douglas Selvidge, historian at

11:15

the Humboldt University in Berlin. Dr.

11:18

Selvidge generously agreed to chat with

11:21

me recently on this topic. As

11:24

for hard evidence of the workings

11:26

of the KGB's program and the

11:28

Stasi's involvement in it, that

11:30

was lacking for a long time,

11:32

causing some to doubt. But

11:35

eventually it was discovered in

11:37

the archives of Bulgaria's secret

11:40

police. Dr. Stojanarian,

11:42

he was a doctoral student

11:45

working on his dissertation in Bulgaria

11:47

about cooperation between the

11:50

Bulgaria and state security, the

11:52

Stasi and the KGB. At

11:54

my agency, I was working at the Stasi

11:57

Records Agency, he worked for us as a

11:59

base He basically has a paid researcher there

12:01

and he found documents about

12:03

KGB and Stasi active measures

12:06

and he's the one who sort of

12:08

found the telegram with the KGB basically

12:12

telegraph their Bulgarian colleagues in 1985

12:15

and said, guess what? We're

12:17

starting this worldwide campaign to spread

12:20

the thesis that HIV or the

12:22

virus that cause AIDS was developed

12:24

as a biological weapon in the

12:26

United States by the Pentagon and

12:28

the CIA and asking them to

12:31

help out with the disinformation campaign. So I

12:33

guess that's sort of what you call a

12:35

smoking gun. Dr.

12:37

Selvidge published a German language

12:40

study irrefutably proving not only

12:42

the existence of the KGB

12:44

disinformation campaign, but also the

12:46

nature and details of the

12:48

significant involvement of East German

12:50

intelligence in spreading the myth.

12:53

He has further published major papers

12:55

on the topic in the Journal

12:57

of Cold War Studies, as well

13:00

as on Open Democracy and the

13:02

Wilson Center website, and you'll

13:04

be hearing from him throughout the episode.

13:14

It would be inaccurate to suggest

13:17

that Russian disinformation is entirely responsible

13:19

for the invention of the conspiracy

13:21

claim that HIV was developed by

13:24

the US government. Before

13:26

the first known insertion of the narrative

13:28

into the media by the KGB, some

13:31

form of the conspiracy theory

13:33

had already arisen among the

13:35

community most affected by AIDS

13:37

during the first years of

13:39

the epidemic. More than

13:42

a week before the first known

13:44

use of the conspiracy claim by

13:46

the KGB, Boston's Gay Community News

13:49

and New York's Native, another newspaper

13:51

focused on gay issues and the

13:53

gay community, printed and repeated the

13:55

erroneous claim that AIDS was a

13:58

variant of the African nation. swine

14:00

fever virus, and pieces in

14:02

these papers argued without evidence

14:05

it had been brought across

14:07

the Atlantic by the CIA

14:09

for biological warfare purposes in

14:11

Cuba. The fact

14:14

that the conspiracy theory originated

14:16

in a marginalized and oppressed

14:18

community is no surprise. You

14:20

know, when groups is sort of

14:23

marginalized in a given society and

14:25

they've been victims of conspiracies before

14:27

or repressive policies, oftentimes

14:29

they react by developing

14:32

conspiracy theories. And the

14:34

fact that the Reagan administration was so slow to

14:36

act to combat the AIDS epidemic, basically

14:38

claiming it was a homosexual disease.

14:40

Also, if you will, the right-wing

14:43

fundamentalist sort of preachers, also the

14:45

right-wing fundamentalist politicians

14:47

and the Republican Party at the time were

14:49

saying it's a curse by God and, you know,

14:51

why should anybody get in the way of

14:53

a curse from God? You know, God is punishing

14:56

people and therefore who are we to try

14:58

to intervene, etc., etc. So

15:00

of course there's some people in the gay community

15:02

saying, yeah, they actually want to kill us. Likewise,

15:06

as the black community came to be greatly

15:08

affected by AIDS later in the 80s, it

15:11

seemed pretty reasonable to many that they may

15:13

be the victims of some sort of, quote-unquote,

15:16

ethnic weapon, especially

15:18

since history showed the U.S.

15:20

government was entirely capable of

15:23

such atrocity. And especially

15:25

for African Americans, again, as

15:28

victims of repression, there was

15:30

a famous Tuskegee experiment where

15:32

for 30 years, African

15:35

American, I think mainly

15:37

sharecroppers in the American South who had

15:39

been infected with syphilis, the U.S. public

15:42

health services sort of tracked their health

15:44

and the health of their relatives and

15:46

descendants and their spouses without providing effective

15:48

treatment, even after penicillin was proven to

15:51

be an effective treatment against syphilis. They

15:53

basically let, you know, these people die

15:55

from syphilis or spread it without giving

15:57

them any treatment. So this sort of

16:00

experimentation, this sort of experience certainly

16:02

made African Americans very wary of

16:04

the US Public Health Service, the

16:06

CDC, and also what the US

16:08

government was saying about diseases in

16:10

general. Also fresh

16:12

in the minds of the

16:14

American public were the Church

16:17

Committee revelations about Operation MKUltra,

16:19

the CIA search for mind

16:21

control drugs, and MKNaomi, which

16:24

developed biological and chemical warfare

16:26

technology. These revelations led

16:28

to Richard Nixon's 1969 executive

16:31

order banning the military use

16:34

of biological weapons. And

16:36

then shortly thereafter, even after this

16:38

disinformation campaign, it started and there

16:40

were revelations about nuclear

16:42

experiments where people like the

16:45

downwinders in Washington State, where

16:47

they'd been exposed to

16:49

radiation without their knowledge to basically figure

16:51

out, oh, what effects does radiation have?

16:54

There's more and more things coming out.

16:56

And of course, this is all grist

16:58

for the propaganda mill in Moscow once

17:01

they pick up on this thesis. Certainly,

17:04

the Soviets had agents in

17:06

America observing the media for

17:08

any social and political conflicts

17:11

they could leverage in their

17:13

disinformation. And having recently been

17:15

accused of developing biological weapons

17:17

themselves, the opportunity to deflect

17:20

such allegations and simultaneously discredit

17:22

the Reagan administration by suggesting

17:24

it had been ignoring this

17:26

ban and engaging in biological

17:28

warfare against America's own citizens

17:31

was too great to pass

17:33

up. If

17:41

one looks up the Soviet AIDS

17:44

disinformation campaign today on the internet,

17:46

one finds that it is widely

17:48

called Operation Infection with a K

17:51

when in fact, as Dr.

17:53

Selvidge has shown in his

17:55

work, the campaign was actually

17:57

called Operation Denver. are

18:00

a few reasons for that. There

18:02

were a couple of Stasi officers

18:05

who published basically their memoirs, if

18:07

you will, and in

18:09

their memoirs they claimed that the Stasi

18:11

also played a role in this disinformation

18:14

campaign. And then based on

18:16

especially the revelations of this one

18:18

former Stasi officer, Gunther Bonsack, he

18:20

mentioned they were involved in the

18:23

AIDS disinformation campaign, but he didn't

18:25

use the term Operation Infection. But

18:27

then later the historian Thomas Bogart

18:30

was writing an article about the

18:32

AIDS information campaign. This was before

18:34

these archives in Bulgaria were open

18:36

and these new materials were available.

18:39

And he used Bonsack basically as

18:41

one of his main sources. He

18:43

corresponded with him. And that's when

18:45

Bonsack said it was called Operation

18:47

Infection. But then what we found

18:50

in the Bulgarian archives was they

18:52

called it Operation Denver. And then

18:54

at the Stasi records, although

18:57

most of the files there for an

19:00

intelligence files were destroyed, there's still the

19:02

card catalog. And then there was an

19:04

actual Denver. So it was

19:06

clearly called Operation Denver. We

19:08

actually don't know what the Soviets called

19:10

it. They didn't use a code name

19:12

when they're talking with the

19:14

Bulgarians. The Bulgarians called

19:16

it what they did for pandemic.

19:20

So they had different names. We actually

19:22

really don't know what the Soviets called

19:24

it. I doubt it was

19:26

called infection because there was a campaign

19:28

of active measures that were ongoing against

19:30

Radio Free Europe and they used infection

19:32

as the code name for that. So

19:35

sometimes they recycled code names and used

19:37

them for different things. But I would

19:39

find it unusual that they would reuse

19:41

the same code name at

19:44

the same time to campaigns of active

19:46

measures with the same code name seems

19:48

unlikely to me. The other

19:50

reason is that it's just a better name. It

19:53

is more evocative of the actual

19:55

nature of the program. And it

19:57

has led to a useful metaphor

19:59

describing the spread of conspiracy

20:01

theories and disinformation as a

20:03

kind of viral infection. Indeed,

20:06

the New York Times even produced

20:08

a nearly hour-long documentary on the

20:11

subject, complete with engaging animation that

20:13

calls the operation by this incorrect

20:16

name and makes much use of

20:18

that extended metaphor. It's

20:20

for that reason and for search engine

20:22

optimization that I've used it in the

20:24

title of this episode in order to

20:27

catch those keyword searches. While

20:29

he has argued against the incorrect

20:31

designation of the program, Dr. Selvidge

20:33

has himself made clever use of

20:35

the metaphor, acknowledging that

20:37

conspiracy claims spread like a viral

20:40

infection, especially on the internet, where

20:42

they spread as memes. He

20:45

makes the fantastic point, however,

20:48

that the KGB did not

20:50

invent this quote-unquote virus, but

20:52

rather since they modified conspiracy

20:54

claims that had already appeared

20:56

in order to make them

20:58

spread more virally, it can

21:01

be said that they engineered

21:03

this claim to make it

21:05

more infectious, a process Selvidge

21:07

cleverly calls quote, memetic engineering,

21:10

end quote. Dr. Selvidge Well, I mean

21:12

the term operation infection is infectious

21:14

and of course, I guess I did

21:16

that a little bit when I was

21:18

talking about memetic engineering because I found

21:20

these similarities. They're talking

21:22

about the KGB was kept mentioning

21:24

genetic engineering, but actually they were

21:27

the ones sort of engineering these

21:29

memes or units of thought. Narrator

21:31

In order to draw a

21:34

more modern parallel to the

21:36

spread of COVID misinformation, it

21:38

might be said that Soviet

21:40

and East German intelligence performed

21:43

gain of function research on

21:45

existing conspiracy claims and as

21:47

a result, turned a small

21:49

outbreak of conspiracy theory into

21:52

a disinformation pandemic. Dr. Selvidge

21:54

Absolutely. I mean,

21:56

in the case of the KGB, what they did

21:58

was okay, they're sort of the naturally spreading

22:00

if you will, biological

22:19

weapons research. Then in Africa, they

22:21

would say, well see these Americans are

22:23

saying it's a natural virus and it

22:25

comes naturally out of Africa.

22:27

Well see they're just trying to blame

22:30

Africa again for their problems and this

22:32

shows you know this is typical of US

22:34

racism. So they would you know develop the

22:36

conspiracy theory, they would add elements to a

22:38

different to make it basically

22:41

spread better in different parts of the

22:43

world. On

22:48

July 17th 1983, the very

22:51

same month that this conspiracy

22:53

claim appeared in newspapers serving

22:55

the gay community in America.

22:57

A newspaper in India called

22:59

The Patriot published an anonymous

23:01

letter purporting to be from

23:03

an eminent US scientist. The

23:06

letter claimed that the Pentagon had

23:08

not abandoned its biological weapons program

23:11

after Nixon's executive order to do

23:13

so and that the CIA and

23:15

the CDC had discovered and developed

23:18

HIV at the US Army Medical

23:20

Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at

23:23

Fort Dietrich in Maryland. A facility

23:26

known for its research into

23:28

biological warfare and defensive countermeasures

23:30

against it. This would

23:32

prove to be the principal Soviet

23:34

contribution to the conspiracy claim. The

23:37

fact that the anonymous author claimed

23:39

to be an anthropologist, not an

23:42

infectious disease expert, and cited sources

23:44

like the magazine Army Research Development

23:46

and Acquisition, not your typical reading

23:49

for an anthropologist but just the

23:51

sort of publication the KGB monitored,

23:53

went a long way toward demonstrating

23:56

that the letter was KGB propaganda.

24:00

did the poor English of the

24:02

supposed American academic who wrote the

24:04

letter. But beyond these

24:07

tells, the intelligence community was

24:09

aware that the KGB actually

24:11

helped establish the Patriot in

24:13

1967 and

24:15

regularly used it as their

24:18

mouthpiece to circulate propaganda. The

24:21

Patriot newspaper had been known since the

24:23

1960s, there have been accusations

24:25

and I think it's been pretty

24:27

much established that they were receiving

24:30

money under the table from the

24:32

KGB in India to publish certain

24:34

articles. I wouldn't say

24:36

that everything in the newspaper

24:39

was necessarily KGB disinformation, they

24:41

were certainly left anti-US or

24:43

whatever, but like sensationalist stories,

24:46

but certainly the KGB

24:48

was a sort of known

24:50

place where they published things. This

24:53

was a tried and true method for

24:55

the KGB, plant the seed of a

24:57

story in an Indian newspaper and watch

24:59

it get picked up and spread in

25:02

other papers. For example, in 1968, during

25:05

the Vietnam War, the KGB likewise

25:07

forged a letter claiming that the

25:10

US was using biological weapons in

25:12

Southeast Asia and they spread it

25:14

by placing it in a Bombay

25:17

newspaper. But interestingly, where

25:19

this campaign came from and this is

25:21

actually important for today's Russian

25:24

disinformation is originally there

25:26

was this disinformation campaign

25:28

called Operation Cockroaches and

25:31

there was a US researcher in Pakistan

25:33

in Lahore who was doing research on

25:35

mosquitoes who was trying to find different

25:37

ways to combat malaria, but they had

25:40

already used that in India for earlier

25:42

disinformation where they said, oh, there's this

25:44

US research in

25:46

Lahore, Pakistan and these weaponizing

25:48

mosquitoes to carry

25:50

deadly diseases over the border

25:53

basically for bioweapons research. In

25:55

the end, because of all the uproar

25:57

it caused in India and Pakistan. this

26:00

researcher had to pack and go home back to

26:02

the United States. And so then in 1983, the

26:05

Patriot in this article you mentioned,

26:08

AIDS may invade India, they

26:10

built and this is typical of the KGB

26:12

too or their disinformation, they build on their

26:14

earlier measures. So in this case, they said,

26:16

oh, remember how there was this US

26:19

research over there in Pakistan who was doing

26:22

bioweapons research and it threatened to cross the

26:24

border? Well, there's this new thing called AIDS

26:27

and they seem to be doing experiments with

26:29

that as well. And so AIDS may invade

26:31

India, it might start infecting people here. Oh,

26:34

and by the way, it was probably

26:36

it was developed at Fort Detrick. And

26:39

that is

26:41

a US bioweapon and it could invade

26:44

India. So this is sort of a

26:46

one off active measure as typical of

26:48

sort of Soviet disinformation to pit India

26:50

against Pakistan to reassure India, they should

26:52

maintain their alignment with the Soviet Union

26:54

against, you know, the United States because,

26:56

you know, the United States is clearly

26:58

evil. And here they are plotting yet

27:01

again to do these terrible things to

27:03

India. The Patriot story

27:05

did not spread far, but

27:07

in a couple years, as

27:09

AIDS became a global crisis,

27:12

and as accusations were made

27:14

of the USSR engaging in

27:16

biological weapons development themselves, the

27:18

KGB resumed their campaign with

27:21

a vengeance. In 1985, they

27:24

published a story in the

27:26

literary Gazette, their principal mouthpiece,

27:28

which cited the fake Patriot

27:30

letter as if it were

27:32

evidence. Somebody apparently in

27:34

the KGB said, you know, well,

27:37

guess what? There's this new disease,

27:39

you know, HIV AIDS, maybe

27:41

we should, you know, just build on this.

27:43

And then they used another place. And this

27:45

is where they often place disinformation in the

27:48

Soviet Union. But there's actually this newspaper called

27:50

literary Gazette, the Trettsv Soviet

28:00

writers could publish articles about literature

28:02

or whatever. Well, the KGB had

28:05

their page in a sense where they were

28:07

always contributing articles to it under

28:09

various names. For example, this Operation Cockroaches

28:12

had been the main article that Elizrat

28:14

Zwirnaya gazeta. And now there's this new

28:16

article in 1985 about the AIDS sensation,

28:19

right? And

28:23

it's basically repeated these accusations about

28:26

AIDS being a bioweapon developed at

28:28

the U.S. laboratory and it had

28:30

been developed at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and

28:34

they were hoping that this would get the

28:36

disinformation campaign off the ground, right? This

28:39

article argued that HIV's

28:41

spread in America was

28:43

the result of experiments

28:45

on unsuspecting citizens, suggested

28:48

AIDS victims should sue the

28:50

CIA, and warned the nations

28:52

of the world not

28:54

to host the U.S.

28:56

armed forces because American

28:58

soldiers were surely carriers

29:00

of the scourge. Now

29:09

three brief intermissions. Did

29:17

archaeologists discover Noah's Ark? Is the rapture

29:19

coming as soon as the Euphrates River

29:21

dries up? Does the Bible condemn abortion?

29:24

Don't you wish you had a trustworthy

29:26

academic resource to help make sense of

29:28

all of this? Well,

29:32

I'm Dan Beecher and he's award-winning

29:34

Bible scholar and TikTok sensation Dr.

29:36

Dan McClellan. And we want

29:38

to invite you to the Data Over

29:40

Dogma podcast, where our mission is to

29:42

increase public access to the academic study

29:44

of the Bible and religion and also

29:46

to combat the spread of misinformation about the

29:48

same. But you know,

29:50

in a fun way. field.

30:00

So whether you're a devout believer or

30:02

you're just interested in a clear-eyed deeply

30:04

informed look at one of the most

30:06

influential books of all time, we think

30:09

you're going to love the Data Over

30:11

Dogma podcast. Wherever you subscribe to awesome

30:13

shows. Now

30:18

back to the show. Even

30:27

though these news articles which

30:30

mixed fact with baseless conspiracy

30:32

fiction were illegitimate, they could

30:34

then be cited to seemingly

30:37

legitimize further articles. Some

30:39

likewise placed by the KGB

30:41

and others written by people

30:43

who were unwittingly helping them

30:45

spread their narrative. The

30:48

KGB was known for sometimes

30:50

just planting their own stories that they

30:53

had developed in newspapers, including Soviet newspapers

30:55

with the hope that they would be

30:57

picked up on overseas. And

31:00

in other cases, they had journalists

31:02

in other countries who were willing

31:04

to write something tailor-made to their

31:07

theses or they would just basically

31:09

put their name on something that

31:11

the KGB had put together. But

31:14

what the KGB campaign really needed

31:16

was an academic. To lend their

31:19

claims scholarly clout and their partner

31:21

agency, the Stasi or Ministry of

31:23

State Security of East Germany provided

31:26

it to them. His name

31:28

was Jakob Seggal, a committed communist

31:30

who had been born in Russia

31:33

and studied biology in Germany. As

31:36

a Jew, he had been forced

31:38

to flee Nazi Germany for France,

31:40

where he completed his doctorate. When

31:42

the Nazis invaded France, he

31:44

joined the resistance, where he

31:47

likely first came in contact

31:49

with Soviet intelligence. He

31:51

returned to Germany after the

31:53

war, becoming the head of

31:55

the Institute for Applied Bacteriology

31:57

in East Berlin and according

32:00

to former Stasi agents, acted

32:03

as an operative or informer

32:05

for the Stasi. You

32:07

know, the Soviets had basically told the

32:09

Stasi and the other, you know, state

32:11

security service in Eastern Europe that they

32:13

were looking for scientists. And the Soviet

32:16

Bloc put back up this claim that

32:18

they made, somebody who make it scientific.

32:20

And the Stasi claimed that they sort

32:22

of, you know, covertly encouraged Jacob Segal

32:24

to do this. They've been looking around

32:26

for scientists, well, who could do this?

32:28

And they said, oh, there's this, you

32:31

know, scientist, he says that he's retired,

32:33

but, you know, he's sort of worked

32:35

before with the KGB and Stasi, this

32:37

guy, Jacob Segal. Maybe we could put him

32:39

on this. Likely at

32:41

the behest of the Stasi

32:43

and KGB, or perhaps just

32:45

with their sly encouragement, Segal

32:48

began to produce scholarly

32:50

style literature that argued against

32:52

the African origin of

32:54

HIV, suggesting

32:57

that the virus was an artificial

32:59

synthesis of the human T-cell lymphotropic

33:01

virus and a retrovirus that

33:04

affects sheep, even though the technology required

33:06

to recombine parts of viruses did not

33:08

exist at the time. And

33:11

those two viruses are too

33:13

distinct to even be synthesized,

33:15

and asserting with no evidence

33:17

whatsoever the truth of a

33:19

very specific scenario. He

33:22

added a new element to it. He said, well,

33:24

it was, you know, it was an accident that

33:26

it was released the way it was, because they

33:28

thought it was going to be an effective bioweapon.

33:30

And what happened was they tested this bioweapon on

33:32

prisoners in Maryland, around Fort

33:34

Detrick, at various prisons. Basically,

33:37

he claimed that these prisoners had been offered

33:39

the possibility of getting out of prison early

33:41

if they were willing to take part in

33:43

this experiment, and they basically signed off on

33:46

it. And so they were

33:48

infected with this HIV or this AIDS

33:50

virus, and they

33:52

waited a couple months or, you know, six

33:54

months, and nothing happened. And they said, okay,

33:56

well, apparently this isn't a good bioweapon. And...

34:00

these prisoners were basically given early

34:02

release in prison, you know,

34:04

maybe a year later or more

34:06

that they first then began to show symptoms

34:08

or began to spread it. His

34:11

claims relied not only on

34:13

complete speculation, but also on

34:16

two dubious assumptions. First

34:19

he asserted that these ex-convict test

34:21

subjects must have made their way

34:23

from Fort Dietrich in Maryland to

34:26

New York City where the first

34:28

outbreak occurred because they

34:30

were criminals and there simply was

34:32

no criminal community to accommodate them

34:35

in nearby Washington, D.C. When

34:37

the truth is Washington's crime rate was extremely

34:39

high at the time. And

34:42

second, he claimed that because the

34:44

test subjects must have been convicts

34:46

who had spent a long time

34:48

in prison, they must also have

34:51

become homosexual, thus explaining

34:53

why they introduced the virus

34:55

specifically into the gay community.

34:57

Now of course there are a

34:59

number of problems with this thesis. First

35:01

of all, you know, this idea of,

35:03

you know, anybody who's in prison becomes

35:06

gay or whatever. I mean,

35:09

yeah, there's a lot of stereotypes

35:11

here. Typical of conspiracy

35:13

theories. Who's involved in the conspiracy?

35:15

And the number keeps getting larger and

35:18

larger. So for example, there were the

35:20

prisoners who were experimented upon. There

35:22

were the doctors who gave them the disease.

35:25

There were the bureaucrats of the Pentagon. There

35:27

were the people at Fort Dietrich. There were

35:29

the prison authorities who, you know, gave them

35:31

the early release or whatever from prison. And

35:34

you know, none of these people ever found

35:37

who said, oh yeah, I was the one

35:39

who was experimented upon or, you know, yeah,

35:41

I knew about this experiment. You

35:43

know, it's just totally conjecture that, you

35:45

know, he developed. And then the

35:47

question is, well, why isn't this coming out in the

35:49

press? Well, then there's like, you know, why isn't the

35:51

US press covering it? And then Segal said, well, this

35:54

is a big conspiracy too to cover it up. The

35:56

US government, you know, controls the press or puts pressure

35:58

on the press so they don't report it. So

36:00

the conspiracy keeps getting larger and

36:02

larger and this is typical of

36:04

conspiracy theories as you know this

36:06

cascade effect where the circle of

36:08

conspirators becomes larger and larger and

36:10

somehow they keep everything silent. NARRATOR

36:12

Considering the stereotypes relied on

36:14

and the lack of evidence

36:17

provided by Seagal, it

36:19

is unsurprising that the scientific

36:21

community largely ignored him or

36:23

scorned his claims, as

36:25

was the case with one AIDS

36:27

expert who called it, quote, nothing

36:29

but a hypothesis and not a

36:32

very original one at that end

36:34

quote, in popular German magazine Der

36:36

Spiegel. However, while the

36:38

academic world never took him seriously,

36:40

the press in the Third World

36:42

and the tabloid press in the

36:45

UK became unwitting stooges

36:47

for Soviet intelligence by

36:49

spreading Seagal's thesis far

36:52

and wide. NARRATOR

36:56

Meanwhile in the US, some

36:58

useful idiots did their part

37:00

to strengthen the resolve of

37:03

Soviet propagandists and promote aspects

37:05

of their disinformation by spreading

37:07

a variant conspiracy theory that

37:09

blamed the Soviets for engineering

37:11

HIV. NARRATOR Dr.

37:14

Selvidge cleverly calls this a

37:16

different quote unquote strain of

37:18

the same viral conspiracy claim

37:20

and it was promulgated by

37:23

Lyndon LaRouche. NARRATOR LaRouche

37:25

is a fascinating character that everyone

37:27

in America should know about, but

37:29

I suspect he is largely forgotten.

37:31

DR. SELVITITO Originally, actually

37:34

LaRouche started off on the radical left,

37:36

but then he had started combating other

37:38

left-wing groups. There's something called Operation Mop-Up

37:41

when he told his supporters to basically

37:43

beat up on other sort of Marxist-Leninist

37:45

out there protesting or whatever, but then

37:47

eventually he was moving more to the

37:50

right and he kept bringing up conspiracy

37:52

theories about I think it was Khazars

37:54

which was basically a stand-in for the

37:57

Jews. He's talking,

37:59

putting... You know, like the Queen

38:01

Elizabeth was a drug dealer and, you know,

38:03

there are all these sort of different conspiracies

38:05

going on around the world. And

38:08

of course, as many people who spread conspiracy

38:10

theories, he was the one who saw through

38:12

all of this. So he's sort of

38:14

the great leader that is needed at the moment

38:16

because he's the one who sees through, you know,

38:18

behind the curtain what's going on. And that's

38:21

why you need to, you know, support him

38:23

because he's always perpetually running for president of

38:25

the United States. Lyndon LaRouche

38:27

ran for president in every

38:30

election for about 30 years

38:32

from the mid-70s to the

38:34

mid-aughts. While he never

38:36

had the numbers to come close to a

38:38

nomination, he had a devoted

38:41

following, sometimes described as

38:43

a cult, who in the

38:45

mid-80s infiltrated the Democratic Party

38:47

by winning some primaries for

38:49

state office. Today,

38:51

no less influential a figure

38:54

than Roger Stone has expressed

38:56

admiration for LaRouche. And

38:58

I can't help but find parallels

39:00

between LaRouche and Trump, who

39:03

himself drifted from the left

39:05

to the right during the

39:07

course of his political career

39:09

and over the course of

39:11

his several failed presidential campaigns

39:13

and single successful campaign espoused

39:15

numerous conspiracy claims. As

39:17

for the LaRouche-ite cult infiltrating

39:20

the Democratic Party, I find

39:22

it very similar to QAnon

39:24

Wackos consuming the Republican Party

39:26

from within, though the latter

39:28

have proven far more successful

39:30

as they currently hold some

39:32

sway over the Republican majority

39:35

leader in the House of

39:37

Representatives. LaRouche's principal

39:39

mouthpiece was his magazine Executive

39:41

Intelligence Review, which in 1985

39:46

granted the claim that HIV

39:48

was engineered at Fort Detrick,

39:50

but with one crucial twist. After

39:53

the Soviets published this article in Litu Ratsunaya

39:55

Gazzetta, he was probably one of the few

39:58

people in the United States that sort of picked the right place. up on

40:00

it, he actually translated it and published

40:02

it in his executive intelligence review and

40:05

he put his own twist on it. He said, well, this

40:07

is the confession by the Soviets. Yeah, they're

40:10

accusing the United States of developing this

40:12

as a bioweapon at Fort Detrick, but

40:14

actually, the Soviets could have actually developed

40:16

themselves and the fact that they're accusing

40:18

the United States suggests that actually it's

40:20

the Soviets who are developing it as

40:22

a bioweapon. Of

40:26

course, this only launched a

40:28

disinformation war with the Soviets

40:30

citing parts of LaRouche's claims

40:32

as further support for their

40:34

own allegations. Yeah, it was

40:36

sort of funny because they sort of argued

40:38

back and forth accusing each other and the

40:40

Soviets would pick up on what LaRouche was

40:42

saying and they would sort of recycle it

40:45

and their disinformation, add elements from his conspiracy

40:47

theory and then LaRouche eyes would see, oh,

40:49

what did the Soviets say? Okay, we'll add

40:51

this other twist to it to show that

40:53

it's actually the Soviets who are behind

40:55

it and so they sort of

40:58

built this conspiracy theory together. But

41:01

LaRouche's conspiracy mongering went further,

41:03

much like COVID conspiracy claims

41:05

decades later, his

41:07

AIDS conspiracy claims

41:10

involved anti-vaccinationism. It

41:12

was actually, this was a time when,

41:15

especially on the American right, there's this

41:17

new development of the video cassette recorder,

41:19

the VCR and like a

41:22

lot of conservatives or

41:24

even religious figures would

41:26

sell their VCR cassettes.

41:28

There's this fellow named Robert Strecker and

41:31

he developed his, the Strecker memorandum, it

41:33

wasn't just a memorandum that he and

41:35

his brother Theodore Strecker had written,

41:38

but then he also developed

41:40

this video that became very popular explaining

41:42

the origins of AIDS, that it was

41:44

a bioweapon. That

41:46

was probably developed by the US government

41:48

of Fort Detrick, but what he said

41:50

and what LaRouche said was basically, well,

41:52

you know, at Fort Detrick, it was

41:54

through the National Institutes of Health was

41:56

responsible because actually they were in charge

41:59

of Fort Detrick time they stopped using

42:01

it for bio weapons research. And they basically

42:03

said that what happened was that through

42:05

the World Health Organization of the UN

42:07

was infiltrated by the communists, they infiltrated

42:09

the US government, they infiltrated the NIH,

42:12

and they developed it at Fort Daedric

42:14

for the Soviet Union. See, so the

42:16

research sort of saw behind all of

42:18

this and Strecker did too, that they

42:20

were the ones that developed it at

42:22

Fort Daedric for the Soviet Union. And

42:24

then what Strecker also said

42:26

though, well, how did this virus get into the

42:29

world then, you know, from Fort

42:31

Daedric? And then he basically said, well, they

42:33

used it through this, there was a hepatitis

42:36

B vaccine that was developed, it turned out

42:38

to be a very successful vaccine. But

42:41

they had tested it especially among homosexuals,

42:45

gays in New York City. And that was

42:47

the beginning of the spread in the United

42:49

States. And then in the

42:51

case of Africa, that they were

42:53

basically polio vaccinations, other vaccinations where

42:55

they put the virus in to

42:57

see it spread in Africa to

42:59

get rid of unwanted populations. Furthermore,

43:03

his publications endorsed the notion

43:05

that AIDS could be spread

43:08

through even casual

43:10

contact, like through insect

43:12

bites, through the exchange of saliva

43:14

and kissing, and the old myth

43:16

about toilet seats. On

43:18

the basis of these groundless fears, he organized

43:20

support for a 1986 ballot

43:23

initiative in California that if

43:25

it had passed, would have

43:27

enforced the HIV testing of

43:30

every Californian and resulted in

43:32

the removal and forced confinement

43:34

of those who tested positive.

43:36

We need to test everybody,

43:38

quarantine them. He didn't say

43:40

the term camps, but you know, you

43:42

sort of understood what he was sort of

43:45

pointing towards. But the time is basically saying,

43:47

you know, this means the destruction of Western

43:49

civilization, it sort of goes back to the

43:51

50s, you know, there was the Red Scare

43:53

alongside the Red Scare, and sort of this

43:56

lavender scare, you know, like there's these homosexuals

43:58

in the US government and they tend

44:00

to be communist and there are threats. And

44:02

so this is sort of a rehash of

44:04

this old sort of conspiracy theory under new

44:07

form, but now it's AIDS, right? Frighteningly

44:10

enough, almost a third

44:12

of Californians voted for

44:14

this. Eventually,

44:19

the AIDS disinformation campaign seems

44:21

to have been officially discontinued

44:24

when the disease began to spread more widely in

44:26

the Soviet Union in the late 80s and

44:29

suddenly the Kremlin was more interested

44:32

in trading medical research about it,

44:34

Mikhail Gorbachev found the U.S. Secretary

44:36

of State less than cooperative because

44:39

of the known KGB campaign to

44:41

blame the disease on America. Suddenly,

44:44

official organs of the state,

44:46

like the newspapers Izvestia and

44:49

Soviet Skyarosia, disavowed

44:51

the HIV as U.S.

44:53

bioweapon thesis. And of

44:55

course, within a few years after

44:57

the dissolution of the Soviet Union,

44:59

the active measure would be admitted

45:01

to, as I shared earlier. Nevertheless,

45:04

Yakov Seygal would continue to

45:06

promote his claims until his

45:08

death in 1995 and

45:12

media outlets continued to

45:14

amplify his misinformation through

45:16

interviews. He apparently believes in

45:18

his own thesis or he wants to believe

45:20

in it. And one of the things that

45:23

Seygal recommended was aspirin as a treatment saying,

45:25

in the early phases of HIV, the pharma

45:27

industry, now we're getting into the pharma industry

45:30

conspiracy theories, right, the next stage, the pharma

45:32

industry is trying to develop, you know, this

45:34

ACT thing, which supposedly combats AIDS,

45:37

but not really. And

45:39

here, you know, they don't want to admit it, but

45:41

there's this easy treatment, just take

45:43

aspirin in the early phases and it'll stop

45:45

it, you know, in its tracks. So,

45:48

you know, Seygal is promoting all these

45:50

alternative cures as well, up until he

45:52

dies. the

46:00

claims he made, such as that

46:02

aspirin was the cure for HIV

46:05

and the pharmaceutical industry was covering

46:07

up this simple remedy. But

46:09

there is a sense that many

46:12

of those involved in the KGB

46:14

campaign believed that while they may

46:16

have been spreading unproven claims, the

46:19

claims were likely true or at

46:21

least reflected a broader reality about

46:23

the corruption and immorality of the

46:26

US government. Yes, I think he

46:28

believed them. But

46:31

this gets back to a very difficult question,

46:33

what is truth? Right,

46:36

for somebody like Jacob Segal, for

46:39

example, he believed in communist

46:41

ideology, so-called scientific socialism. So

46:44

there are these laws of society from

46:46

Marxism-Leninism, and that's the truth just as

46:49

much as, let's say, you do a,

46:51

you know, scientific experimentation, you come up

46:53

with results, right? That's also another type

46:56

of truth and for Segal, maybe there

46:58

wasn't a difference between them, they

47:00

were part of the same larger truth that's out

47:02

there. Interestingly,

47:05

something I've seen with conspiracy

47:07

theorists or conspiracy theories is

47:10

what are the things people say, okay, how can

47:13

you tell if something's a conspiracy theory? It's

47:15

a question of falsifiability. Five

47:18

percent evidence that the conspiracy theory is

47:20

false instead of, you know, perhaps

47:23

changing their theory or basically saying, well, okay,

47:25

maybe I was wrong. Instead, they'll

47:27

make up some reason why it can't be

47:29

falsified. And oftentimes they'll say, okay, well, the

47:32

person who's presenting this evidence, first of all,

47:34

it's fake evidence, even if it's true. And

47:37

that means the person is somehow involved in

47:39

the conspiracy or covering things up, right? So

47:41

they're part of the conspiracy. But another thing

47:44

I've noticed that oftentimes happens with conspiracy theories,

47:46

and I think this is something that often

47:49

isn't mentioned, is sometimes people say,

47:51

okay, well, maybe you're right, maybe

47:53

the facts are right, that, you know, maybe it

47:55

wasn't exactly like, you know, this person said about

47:57

how a conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory.

48:00

HIV was developed at Fort Detrick as

48:02

a bioweapon. But you know, it's sort

48:04

of part of a higher truth. There's a higher truth

48:06

of, you know, the US government is out to get

48:08

us. And in that sense, then this

48:10

is true. Well, the disinformation

48:12

specialist had sort of the same thing,

48:14

like one of the HVA officers who

48:17

was, well, the one who was in

48:19

charge of disinformation, the Stasi, Wolf-Wagenbreath, he

48:21

liked to talk about the historical process,

48:23

and that, you know, eventually even this,

48:25

you know, AIDS disinformation would be proven

48:28

to be true in the sense that

48:30

this is what imperialism is like, right?

48:32

This is the sort of things they

48:34

do, they're evil. And so, it also

48:36

has to do with images of the

48:39

enemy, right? This shows how evil the

48:41

United States is and the United States

48:43

is so evil and therefore eventually it'll be

48:45

proven true or even if it's not true,

48:47

at least as an allegory, it's part of

48:49

a higher truth. True in spirit

48:51

if not in fact. Thus,

48:54

it is possible that though he

48:56

knew his thesis rested on assumptions,

48:59

he still believed it likely. And

49:02

looking at his later claims, we

49:04

get the sense that eventually he

49:06

came to truly believe his arguments

49:08

and simply sank further and further

49:11

into conspiracist delusions. For

49:13

example, he would eventually finger a

49:15

specific scientist, someone who had actually

49:18

done a great deal to fight

49:20

the AIDS epidemic as the central

49:23

villain of his narrative, responsible for

49:25

the creation of HIV. Dr. Robert

49:27

Gallo co-discovered HIV as the cause

49:30

of AIDS in 1984 and

49:33

during his long career, most of

49:35

which was devoted to ending the

49:37

epidemic, he developed the HIV blood

49:39

test. But in Jakob

49:41

Segal's fever imagination, Dr. Robert Gallo

49:43

was head of the National Cancer

49:45

Institute's laboratory of tumor cell biology

49:48

in the 70s and since in

49:50

1971, after his

49:52

ban of biological weapons, Nixon

49:54

converted Fort Detrick into a

49:56

cancer research center. So

50:00

proof that Gallo had synthesized

50:02

HIV at Fort Detrick. In

50:06

fact, the NCI was extremely transparent

50:08

about the cancer research conducted at

50:10

Fort Detrick. And the Soviet Union's

50:12

Minister of Health even toured their

50:14

lab in 1972. In

50:18

terms of Seigal, his fascination with Gallo,

50:21

early on he didn't basically blame Gallo

50:23

as the creator of AIDS, but then

50:26

later, as he was interviewed more and

50:28

more, he elaborated upon his thesis and

50:30

then he later said that Gallo was

50:33

basically the person who developed the AIDS

50:35

virus at Fort Detrick

50:37

for the US military. His

50:40

wife, Lily Seigal, was actually involved in

50:42

helping him and was involved in the

50:44

research. She said she always

50:46

thought Gallo had something to do with the mafia,

50:48

just because he had an Italian name, which is

50:50

sort of a slur against

50:52

Italian Americans, all Italian Americans, so somebody would

50:54

have something to do with the mafia. Interestingly,

50:58

Jakob Seigal's obsession with Robert

51:00

Gallo, his scapegoating of a

51:02

respected scientist who was fighting

51:04

the disease as being the

51:06

actual person responsible for the

51:08

creation of it, seems

51:11

to me to parallel the

51:13

bizarre and insupportable COVID conspiracy

51:15

claims that have surrounded Dr.

51:17

Anthony Fauci for the last

51:19

few years. Yeah, you

51:22

could say that there's certain similarities

51:24

here. Despite the

51:26

fact that the inner workings of

51:28

the Soviet disinformation campaign have been

51:31

exposed and its thesis proven false,

51:34

the conspiracy claim has gone on to

51:36

do serious harm, especially in

51:38

Africa, which was and is ravaged

51:40

by the disease and because of

51:42

that, has proven to be fertile

51:44

ground for the propagation of the

51:46

myth. The fact that

51:48

the consensus of the scientific

51:51

community remains that AIDS spread

51:53

to humans from monkeys in

51:55

Africa has made Africans and

51:57

even African scientists defensive. and

52:00

more open to alternative narratives that do

52:02

not seem to lay blame on them,

52:05

even though of course no blame is

52:07

actually being placed on African peoples, since

52:10

it was a matter of

52:12

natural cross-species transmission. As

52:14

AIDS has ravaged African nations, we

52:17

again have seen the tendency of

52:19

those most marginalized and most affected

52:22

by an epidemic, giving the most

52:24

credence to conspiracy claims that offer

52:26

some explanation of their suffering, and

52:29

lay blame on an oppressive villain.

52:32

For example, one newspaper in

52:34

Zimbabwe in 1991 added to

52:36

the myth complex the wild

52:38

allegation that the CIA had

52:41

spread the disease by distributing

52:43

quote, AIDS-oiled condoms,

52:45

end quote, to other

52:47

countries. Major African

52:49

political figures and social activists

52:52

even publicly promoted the notion

52:54

that AIDS was an ethnic

52:56

weapon created by white powers

52:58

that be to destroy Africa

53:01

long after this was refuted,

53:04

such as Zimbabwean President

53:06

Robert Mugabe and Kenyan

53:08

Nobel Laureate Wangari Matai.

53:12

Of course, the continued

53:14

spread of these conspiracy

53:16

claims has variously discouraged

53:18

safe sex practices and

53:20

contributed to AIDS denialist

53:22

claims that effective treatments

53:24

like antiretrovirals are ineffective

53:26

and alternative treatments like

53:28

Seagal's aspirin doses are

53:30

preferable. Later on, there's

53:32

other alternative therapies. We talked about other

53:34

ones that were being promoted like Kim

53:36

Ron in Kenya, which was actually promoted

53:39

by the Nation of Islam in the

53:41

United States. He was supposedly

53:43

doing research with one of his

53:45

co-authors, Ronald Daimlo. They had

53:47

a special research facility financed

53:49

by the East German Ministry

53:52

of Health to look at

53:54

treating HIV with ultraviolet radiation

53:56

of the blood. You just

53:58

let the sun in. you

54:00

recycle somebody's blood through this machine,

54:02

you let it into the sunlight,

54:05

it oxygenizes the blood, and then

54:07

this leads to the destruction of

54:09

HIV. That was their hypothesis. Of

54:12

course, it was ineffective. So this

54:14

was sort of the beginning of sort

54:16

of the alternative treatment. So you go

54:18

from the conspiracy theory and the disinformation

54:20

saying, you know, oh, you know what

54:22

the scientists are saying about the origins

54:24

of AIDS is just all lies. But

54:26

if they're lying about that, and they're

54:28

tricked about that, then maybe what they're

54:30

saying about treatment is wrong, right? Because

54:32

if they're so stupid to think that,

54:34

you know, HIV wasn't developed in a

54:36

laboratory, they think it's the natural origin,

54:38

and they don't seem to know anything

54:40

about really HIV and where it comes

54:42

from, or this AIDS virus, then when

54:44

they tell me I should engage only in

54:47

safe sex or abstain from sex, or I

54:49

should wear a condom, or I should engage

54:51

in certain behaviors, I should get myself tested.

54:53

Well, if they're, you know, idiots about where

54:55

it came from or what it is, then

54:58

they're probably idiots about what to do about

55:00

it. And so then people come along and

55:03

feel the void and say, well, you know,

55:05

there's an alternative treatment for this. After

55:08

COVID, I know a lot of this sounds

55:10

sort of funny, but I was writing about

55:12

this before COVID, but now it seems like,

55:14

you know, this is how things happen. The

55:17

fallout of these false

55:19

conspiracy claims has been

55:22

deadly. In the case

55:24

of South Africa, because they believed in

55:26

these conspiracy theories, right, about the

55:29

origins of HIV AIDS, and about, you know,

55:31

the treatments in the pharma industry, and saying,

55:33

oh, alternative therapies, whatever, the

55:35

government, under Sabo Mbeki,

55:38

at the end of the 1990s, or the beginning of the

55:41

2000s, even though it had

55:43

been proven by that point, you know,

55:45

these antiretrovirals work, they refused to adopt

55:47

them. And because of their late adoption,

55:49

like tens of thousands of South Africans

55:52

died needlessly from HIV AIDS,

55:54

or at least that's what a lot of

55:56

scientists have stated. Although

56:03

the Soviet AIDS disinformation program

56:05

was eventually ended and even

56:07

acknowledged after the dissolution of

56:09

the Soviet Union, Russian intelligence

56:12

has continued to make similar

56:14

claims about other diseases. Using

56:17

the same playbook, epidemics such

56:19

as SARS and Ebola were

56:22

routinely asserted to have been

56:24

engineered by US scientists at

56:26

Fort Detrick as bio-weapons. Right,

56:29

well, for example, with the Ebola epidemic,

56:32

you know, before you have the KGB,

56:34

now you have Russia today. Or

56:38

these other sort of spot-neck news,

56:40

all of these sort of, you

56:42

know, these official platforms that spread

56:44

disinformation. And for example, when there's

56:46

this Ebola outbreak, I think it was around 2014

56:48

or 2013 in Africa, they

56:53

basically recycled the same disinformation. They were

56:55

publishing on their platform these claims that,

56:58

oh, guess what? There's this new virus

57:00

in Africa, Ebola. Guess what? The

57:02

US government's doing bio-weapons experiments. Guess what? It

57:05

came from Fort Detrick. And they basically recycled

57:07

the same disinformation. They just used a different

57:10

virus, same location, same

57:12

sort of claims about its spread. And

57:15

of course, what they usually do is

57:17

there's some Western expert or some Western

57:19

scientist or somebody who basically believes some

57:22

sort of conspiracy theory and they cite

57:24

this person and say, oh, well, this

57:26

is proof he's an American himself who

57:28

says, you know, it came from a

57:30

lab. And yeah, so, yeah,

57:32

he was sort of the smoking gun. And

57:35

among the many justifications for his invasion

57:37

of the Ukraine that Putin threw at

57:39

the world to see what might stick,

57:42

one was the accusation that

57:44

US-sponsored biological weapons research was

57:47

being conducted at Ukrainian facilities.

57:50

Now in terms of Ukraine, that's interesting

57:52

because this actually goes back to this

57:54

way I was talking about this operation

57:56

cockroaches and AIDS may invade India, this

57:58

idea that a neighbor Pakistan,

58:00

you know, there's this laboratory of

58:02

the Americans doing research on these

58:04

deadly viruses and they could come

58:06

across the border to India. Well,

58:09

what happened was there's this cooperative

58:11

threat reduction program where the US

58:14

and actually Russia at the time

58:16

in the 90s, I think it

58:18

was the Nulongar program, they basically

58:20

made these agreements with former Soviet

58:23

Republics to basically get rid of

58:25

their nuclear and biological weapons capabilities

58:27

and close down these old bioweapons

58:29

labs because of this giant offensive

58:32

Soviet bioweapons program and the different

58:34

former Soviet Republics. And

58:36

so what they did was they established

58:38

this program so there would be research

58:41

facilities in some of these countries like

58:43

Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, where there are formerly

58:45

these biological weapons facilities basically to hire

58:47

the scientists to do research on viruses

58:50

to prevent their spread, right? Sort of

58:52

like what the Centers for Disease Control

58:54

does in the United States as a

58:56

way to keep these scientists hired, doing

58:59

useful research instead of them saying, Oh,

59:01

God, I've been fired. I don't have

59:03

a job anymore. Well, maybe I'll just

59:06

go to Iran or North Korea

59:08

since they're offering me all this money

59:10

to, you know, develop bioweapons there. Basically,

59:12

no, maybe we should, you know, keep

59:14

these people, maybe we should destroy this

59:16

whole program, but somehow keep these people

59:18

employed and, you know, doing constructive work

59:20

and that's sort of what they've been

59:22

doing. But what's in their

59:25

prudent what they've been doing for a

59:27

number of years now is, for example,

59:29

in Georgia or in other countries, they'll

59:31

say, Oh, now there's

59:33

this threat that you know, there's

59:35

this US bioweapons lab, right, as

59:37

opposed to this sort of new

59:39

facility to stop them doing bioweapons

59:41

research. There's this US lab there,

59:44

you know, Georgia or whatever, and they're

59:46

doing these experiments on viruses, and they

59:48

could spread, you know, across the border

59:50

to Russia, we're being threatened, right. So

59:53

there's sort of this whole sort of

59:55

disinformation being recycled again, new bioweapons,

59:57

same sort of thesis, you know,

1:00:00

know, stick different countries names in there,

1:00:02

different labs, but it all goes back

1:00:04

to Fort Detrick coming across the border.

1:00:06

This is threat across the border, which

1:00:09

of course brings us to the Ukraine

1:00:11

war and the bioweapons labs in the

1:00:13

Ukraine. Again, this is all just recycled

1:00:16

disinformation. It goes back to the Patriot

1:00:18

in 1983 and they just

1:00:20

basically recycled it to say, oh yeah,

1:00:22

this is evidence for the war in

1:00:24

Ukraine. Whoever they could pick up on

1:00:26

something, for example, some of

1:00:29

the tests for COVID or whatever and

1:00:31

blood samples of Ukrainians was done in

1:00:33

the United States. And then, of course,

1:00:35

the Russians pick up on this and

1:00:37

then they twist it and say, oh,

1:00:39

they're studying the genome of ethnic Russians

1:00:41

in Ukraine so they can use it

1:00:44

as a better COVID bioweapon against Russians,

1:00:46

blah, blah, blah. You have the killer

1:00:48

mosquitoes again, right? Just like in Lahore

1:00:51

in 1982 to three. Now the killer

1:00:53

mosquitoes are in Ukraine and they're going

1:00:55

to come across the border of Russia.

1:00:58

Mosquitoes are being weaponized and now birds,

1:01:00

I guess, is the latest thing, migratory

1:01:02

birds. I mean, it's so

1:01:04

ludicrous. In

1:01:12

fact, it has even been claimed

1:01:14

that COVID was developed by the

1:01:16

US at Fort Detrick in what

1:01:19

appears to be a Chinese disinformation

1:01:21

campaign intended to throw the lab

1:01:23

leak theory back in American faces.

1:01:26

And they've done that with the series

1:01:28

of diseases, whatever developed afterwards. Also, they've

1:01:30

done it with COVID claiming

1:01:33

that it came from Fort Detrick.

1:01:35

Actually, though, in the case of Fort

1:01:38

Detrick and COVID, actually the Chinese have

1:01:40

been spreading that even more than the

1:01:42

Russians for reasons that

1:01:44

they've been blamed. The

1:01:47

China virus, right? They've been blamed for

1:01:49

this virus or supposedly constructing or whatever.

1:01:51

And so they've fought back by just,

1:01:53

you know, making these hair brain claims

1:01:55

about, you know, Fort Detrick again. This

1:01:58

long history of disinformation. information campaigns

1:02:00

and false accusations lobbed back

1:02:02

and forth with nations accusing

1:02:04

and counter accusing each other

1:02:06

of engineering and releasing diseases

1:02:09

that actually spread naturally should

1:02:11

teach us if we aren't

1:02:13

affected by a bad case

1:02:15

of historical blindness that

1:02:17

we should be cautious and

1:02:19

disbelieve any such claims until

1:02:21

there is irrefutable evidence about

1:02:24

the actual origins of diseases.

1:02:26

Yeah, I do have some

1:02:29

doubts about it. Part of the problem

1:02:31

is this. I

1:02:33

wouldn't deny that there's perhaps a

1:02:35

small percentage chance based on the

1:02:38

evidence we have today that the

1:02:40

COVID virus might have leaked out

1:02:42

of this lab in China. I

1:02:45

think the consensus amongst most scientists

1:02:47

is actually that it's of natural

1:02:50

origin, that it came, okay,

1:02:52

this wet market, who knows if that was

1:02:54

it, but they seem to center around this wet

1:02:56

market and Wuhan originally

1:02:59

it probably came from somewhere else. So

1:03:01

I have very many doubts

1:03:03

that it came out of the lab. But the other thing

1:03:06

is there's this tendency to say, well,

1:03:08

if it was a lab leak, it's

1:03:10

also a Chinese bio weapon,

1:03:12

right? So saying that, you know,

1:03:14

a virus leaked out of the lab because somebody

1:03:16

was sloppy is different than saying

1:03:19

it's a bio weapon that leaked out of

1:03:21

the lab. And that's, I find

1:03:24

that's totally, there's no evidence for

1:03:26

that. I mean, the

1:03:28

Chinese themselves, you know, they would have to

1:03:30

deal with the bio weapon leak and I

1:03:32

don't think that they were necessarily doing that

1:03:34

here. I don't see any evidence for that.

1:03:37

As Dr. Selvidge expressed to me in

1:03:39

our interview, any notion that

1:03:42

the US developed COVID or that

1:03:44

it was created as a bio

1:03:46

weapon in China, or even that

1:03:49

it leaked accidentally from their lab,

1:03:51

really in a way exonerates the

1:03:53

Chinese government for what they did

1:03:55

do for their secrecy about the

1:03:58

initial spread of the disease. and

1:04:00

their lack of international cooperation

1:04:02

since. One of the

1:04:04

main problems I find with all of this

1:04:06

is the fact that, especially under the Trump

1:04:08

administration, they were really pushing, saying, oh, this

1:04:11

is a lab leak, and in

1:04:13

some cases saying it was a bioweapon, is

1:04:15

that that makes it easy for the Chinese. The

1:04:18

Chinese can say, oh, the Americans are lying.

1:04:20

It's from Fort Detrick, right? And so they sort

1:04:22

of go back to the old Fort Detrick thesis

1:04:24

about HIV, but now it's COVID, or actually, you

1:04:26

know, the US developed HIV at Fort Detrick,

1:04:28

and now they developed COVID at Fort Detrick, blah,

1:04:31

blah, blah. And it

1:04:33

basically lets the Chinese off the hook, because

1:04:36

they were so irresponsible, right?

1:04:38

They failed to see

1:04:40

the signals of the epidemic. You know,

1:04:42

they failed to warn the world about

1:04:45

the epidemic that was already happening in

1:04:47

China. They failed to curtail travel outside

1:04:49

of China. There's so many things that

1:04:52

the Chinese did that were wrong, and,

1:04:55

you know, basically brought this to the rest

1:04:57

of the world. And it's

1:05:00

actually very nice for them to be able

1:05:02

to, you know, sort of boil things down.

1:05:04

Oh, was it developed at Fort Detrick, or

1:05:06

as a bioweapon, was it developed at Wuhan

1:05:08

as a bioweapon, right? And it basically lets

1:05:10

them off the hook, you know, the fact

1:05:12

that they won't let people investigate properly in

1:05:14

China. Of course, that's one of the

1:05:16

reasons that the conspiracy theories have risen, but

1:05:18

only one reason. It's a cheap

1:05:20

way for them to get off the hook,

1:05:22

and the fact that this is being spread,

1:05:24

the people think, oh, this will show how

1:05:26

evil China is, well, yeah,

1:05:28

good. I don't particularly like the government

1:05:30

there either. I don't like their, you

1:05:32

know, genocidal policies with regards to the

1:05:35

Uyghurs, for example, or what they've done

1:05:37

in Hong Kong. I don't like their

1:05:39

dictatorship. But by boiling

1:05:41

it down to just, oh, was it

1:05:43

their lab or our lab? I mean,

1:05:45

it just lets them

1:05:48

off the hook, and the rest of the world's just like, when

1:05:50

the United States then says, well, you know, the

1:05:52

Chinese government was irresponsible. Oh, you're just saying it

1:05:54

came from a lab, right there, that it was

1:05:56

a lab leak, it was a bio weapon. That's

1:05:58

just crap, you know. And that

1:06:00

basically, in a sense, it gives them

1:06:02

an alibi. Thanks

1:06:17

for listening to historical blindness. To

1:06:19

hear my interview with Dr. Douglas

1:06:22

Selvidge in its entirety, pledge support

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1:06:26

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1:06:28

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1:07:02

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1:07:04

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1:07:07

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1:07:09

citations for further reading. Specifically,

1:07:11

check out the research of Dr. Selvidge,

1:07:13

which I'll cite on that blog post.

1:07:16

Huge thanks to Dr. Douglas Selvidge for

1:07:19

chatting with me about this. Thank you.

1:07:21

It's been great talking with you. This

1:07:24

podcast is part of the Airwave

1:07:26

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1:07:29

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1:07:47

on this episode is from

1:07:49

Kai Engel, licensed under a

1:07:51

Creative Commons attribution license. Additional

1:07:53

music on this episode is

1:07:55

licensed through Blue Dot Sessions. Check

1:07:58

out the show notes for a list.

1:08:00

of the tracks used. You can support

1:08:02

the show by pledging on Patreon or

1:08:04

on PayPal. Find those links

1:08:06

in the show notes or find

1:08:08

me on Venmo at historical blindness.

1:08:11

Until next time remember just

1:08:13

because a newspaper prints a

1:08:15

claim doesn't make it true

1:08:18

but that doesn't mean that

1:08:20

claims about the free American

1:08:22

press being controlled in a

1:08:24

massive conspiracy of silence and

1:08:26

official cover-up are the

1:08:28

least bit tenable.