If you've been following any of the stories over the past several years about the movement of hundreds of thousands, millions of people illegally into the United States, you may have come across the phrase Darien gap, and it's never really explained what it is. It's a physical place. It's between Panama and Colombia, and it is a gap in the pan american highway. In other words, if you want to get from South America to North America overland, you have to go through the Darian gap. But it's very difficult. And yet last year, at least 520,000 migrants crossed it to come here. How did that happen? What is it? What is going on in the Darien gap? It's the key in some ways to this story, this immigration story. Well, almost no one has taken the time to go to the Darien gap and find out what's happening there. Leave it to a world renowned biologist to do that, not a journalist, a biologist. That would be Dr. Brett Weinstein, who is the host, along with his wife, Heather, of the Dark Horse podcast. And he was just there last week because he wanted to see it for himself.

We're honored to have him join us now to tell us what he found. Dr. Weinstein, thank you so much.

Very good to be back with you, Tucker.

So can you, that was my feeble attempt to add a little bit of explanation of the daring gap. But can you a little more precisely tell us what it is?

Sure. You did a pretty good job. The pan american highway is a road that literally goes from Prudo Bay, Alaska, to the southern tip of South America. It is unbroken but for a 60 miles stretch between Panama and Colombia. It is not a canyon, as many people imagine the gap must be. It's an impenetrable piece of jungle, and the road has never been completed there, not because it's technically impossible to do, but because the combination of the difficulty of putting a road through that jungle and the danger of doing so has meant that north and South America have been separated in this way for the entire history of that road.

So you often hear people say it's a perilous journey to get across that 60 miles of the Darien gap. Is that a fair assessment?

It's beyond fair. Let's just say I did my graduate work not far from Darien. I did it in central Panama, and the jungle in the Darien gap is someplace that one does not go without careful preparation. It is quite dangerous. It involves a number of conditions that make it perilous. For one thing, the cordiera, which is the mountain range. That is effectively the continental divide. The same continental divide that we see in Colorado, for example, continues down through Central America, and it passes through Darien. So imagine a very difficult jungle without proper trails through it in which migrants have to come up that mountain range. And they're almost all unprepared. They don't have the kinds of materials you would want with you. So they're soaking wet from rain. They're sleeping on the ground, and so they get hypothermia. It's extremely slippery. So people are constantly sliding downhills, breaking limbs. They sleep in their shoes and get trench foot. It's a very treacherous journey, and the difficulty of it should not be mean.

You wonder why there's not a permanent team of New York Times reporters there trying to tell the rest of us what exactly is happening. Half a million people move through there in one year. How did you wind up there?

Well, I wound up there because Michael Jan had been sending me materials, thinking that I would be interested in what was taking place in Panama. And, of course, I was utterly fascinated by what I was seeing. Now, some of your viewers may not know Michael Michael is a former Green beret who has refashioned himself. Well, the last time I was on your program, I talked about Goliath.

Yes.

And if there's a Goliath, there's a David. And I would argue that Michael Jan is like David's eyes. He's been traversing the world trying to understand a story that as yet has no name. And that story is partially in the Darien of Panama. And it's all sorts of other places, including in various Un installations. There's some story that is difficult to piece together. And he's been physically traveling to all of its various epicenters and showing people.

And that is the story of mass migration.

Mass migration, I now think, is a piece of it. Now, when I went to Panama, I had a hard time explaining to myself why I was going, because those are.

The best trips, aren't they? Yes, they are.

The serendipity of it is important. But it was hard for me to justify in my head going to such a place when it wasn't going to change. The videos he had sent me were quite clear. So what was it I was going to learn by standing there that I couldn't also learn by looking at these things? Well, I'm very glad I went, because it did actually radically change my understanding of what I was looking at. For reasons I better understand now, one needs to see the physical relationship between the various sites that he showed us in order to really piece together what this story is.

So you went. If I can summarize what I think you're saying, because you're a researcher and you wanted to know what's actually happening.

The thing that gets deemphasized when we talk about high quality science is the degree to which it is informed by well tutored intuition. So I had a sense that I needed to see it for reasons that my conscious mind wasn't certain of at the time. And I followed that, and I'm very glad I did.

Follow your instincts. Boy, that is the lesson of so many moments in life. So what did you find and what did you conclude?

Well, I concluded a number of things, and the whole thing was so mentally disruptive that I'm still in the process of unpacking what it was and debating with myself about what it means. But I'll give you some basics. But I do have to ask something of your audience. There's part of this that is just me reporting what I saw and what I learned from Michael and others on our trip. And there's part of it that's me speculating. And I'm trying to do it as responsibly as possible, because a great deal hinges on what the actual explanation for what we looked at is. So when I'm speculating, I'm going to be careful to tell you that's what I'm doing. And people should treat hypotheses as hypotheses and nothing more. But the first place that this trip really changed my understanding was I went down thinking that I was going to see a migration, and other people have called it an invasion. And there is something troubling to me about the tension between these two things. I mean, which is it? And I came away with the sense that it's probably literally both. And the way that manifests is you have a massive movement of people through the Darien from Colombia.

Now, I did not know when I went down. I now know that most of those people actually start in Ecuador. And the reason they start in Ecuador is that Ecuador has a policy where they don't require a visa. So people coming from all over the world can land in Quito, Ecuador, find their way through Colombia, move through the Darien, and if they survive it, which not all of them do, they can then get relatively directly all the way through Central America into the US. But that's not all that's going on. So we went to several of the, I guess you would call them transit camps. These are places where people who have come by whatever route to Darien, where they recover if they're injured, and they have to accumulate money, because even if they settle out on their journey with enough money to buy a bus ticket to get them through Central America, by the time they've come through Darien, almost all of them have been robbed. And much worse, actually, people are being robbed, women are being raped, and lots of people are dying. The migrants talk about stepping over bodies in Darien, and for somebody with experience in these kinds of jungles, it's not hard to see how without a support network, the kinds of stuff that can happen in a jungle can become deadly.

Very quickly, things can spiral out of control. So you have all of these migrants from all over the world. Many of them are south American. But that is by no means the whole story. People are coming from the Middle east. We met Afghans, we met people from the Caribbean, Haitians. There are people from Yemen, Iran. It's shocking, really. This looks superficially like the migration of Central Americans that you and I remember from when we were kids. Yes, and there is some of that, but that's not the whole story. Now, there's a camp we went to called Canon Membrio. It's on the Canon river at the town of Membrio and Canon Membrio. We were allowed to walk around at will and we could interact with the migrants at will. We were allowed to take pictures. There was no concern about this. We just had to check in with the senafront. The senafront is the panamanian border Authority. But once we had checked in, we were on our own and people were interested in talking, including migrants. So we had many conversations with migrants. And these migrants, I have to tell you, when they come to the southern border of the US, they get through on the basis that they are political refugees.

They aren't. When we talk to them in the transit camp, everybody tells the same story. They are fleeing economic collapse and they are fleeing in the direction of what they perceive to be economic opportunity. And of course, in american law, these two things are very different. We protect people who are seeking political asylum, but we do not offer automatic economic asylum. And the reason for that is fairly clear, which is that in order to protect people economically, we end up robbing Americans of their economic well being. And that's just not something that people are entitled to. No matter how much compassion you may have. People fleeing Venezuela, it is not our responsibility, especially not without some sort of a plan, an agreement about how many people are going to come through and in what way we're going to take care of them and how that's going to get paid for. We don't do that. But in any case, you get the same story from everybody. They're fleeing an economic crisis and they're moving north. And many of them have terrible stories about what happened to them in the Darien gap. So that's one thing. And you see, when you go into this camp, Kanam Embrio, you see the hallmark of the international community.

You see NGO emblems all over the place, proudly american flags. They've paid for the water system, the toilets that are there. The United States government is facilitating this economic migration, and it's unmistakable, as is an organization called the IOM, which is the international organization for Migration. It's a branch of the UN. And if you read their charter, you will discover that this organization believes that migration is an inherently good thing, that it's always good. And so they see it as their job to bring it about, to facilitate it. And in this case, that's particularly tragic, because their desire to induce people to migrate is causing people who are woefully unprepared for the Darien gap to try to make that journey. And the humanitarian tragedy is immense.

So the UN, of which United States is, I think, the largest donor by far, is paying for this with the US government.

Yep, apparently they are. Now, Panamanians are largely unaware. Some are aware that there's a migration, but in large measure, this migration, once it gets through the darian gap, boards, busses, and effectively, what I now understand is that all of the countries in Central America are effectively waving the migrants through, because those migrants are not going to stop in these countries as long as they keep going to the US, these countries are willing to remain silent about it. Now, in 1991, Heather and I actually traveled the other direction, through Central America, through all of the countries, south to Costa Rica, and all of those borders are tightly controlled.

Oh, I've been. Yeah.

And so it is very surprising to find those controls are effectively lifted here. That's clearly the result of a massive coordination, and of course, it's resulting in a large migration. But what I was going to tell you about the fact that this migration doesn't appear to me to be just one thing, is that we went to another camp called San Vicente, and everything in San Vicente is different than it was at Canon Mambria, San Vicente. First of all, it's not a town. This is a camp that is built as a transit camp. It's built of containers and various objects to house people. And it is almost entirely chinese now. There were chinese folks. Chinese, Chinese.

That's a long way from China.

It sure is. And what's more, in this camp, the rule that you're able to go in and walk around and talk to people is not in evidence. The senafront, the panamanian border control, actually forbid us to go into the camp, so we had to stay on the outside of it. We were also forbidden to photograph it. So what? Photographs we have were taken covertly. But the most striking thing, may I.

Ask so is it the government of China, do you believe, that's funding this?

Well, let me tell you the other thing I found, and then I think the answer to that will become clearer. Outside of the San Vicente camp, the chinese migrants are. You can interact with them. There are a couple of shops where they go to buy water or snacks or whatever, and so you can interact with them at those places. They are the opposite of forthcoming. They have no interest in talking to outsiders. And I've been to dangerous places before. I've been to places where people fear their government and can't talk to you because they feel it's not safe. This didn't feel like that at all. This felt like people who did not want to share information because it would be a mistake to do so. And what's more, there was an incident where Michael, who has lived in China, he's been all over the world, and he started up, or tried to start up a conversation with a guy who claimed to be from Korea, and Michael tripped him up and got him to speak Chinese. And then there was uproarious laughter at the fact that he had tried to pull this caper on Michael.

So it is not a friendly migration. These chinese folks, who are overwhelmingly male, military age, there are women present. I realized only this morning that in thinking back, I saw few, if any, children in the chinese migration. They were everywhere in the other places we visited, but they were not present, as far as I remember, in the San Vicente camp. So what I have pieced together, and this is a place where I'm going to speculate, this is a hypothesis, this is not a conclusion. But what I began to suspect was that the chinese migration is actually being cloaked by the economic migration coming from South America, and that that is consistent with the observation that it has some different motivation. I learned from Michael that the chinese migrants in the San Vicente camp largely bypassed the Darian because they have money, they can go by boat, and they can skip most of the peril of the Darien gap. And in any case, it's a very different phenomenon, and to see it housed so separately is quite conspicuous. I do not know what the rationale for this.

Do you have any sense of how many Chinese. These are chinese nationals?

They seem to be.

How many did you see ish talking? 60 or 600?

It's very hard to say because we were held at one edge of the camp, so I probably saw 150 faces, but the camp is deeper. Now, Michael does some drone reconnaissance, and he's also been to this camp many times. He would definitely be the person to ask in terms of a good estimate for how many of these folks there are. But the degree to which this is not consistent with a. Well, let me back up a second. I regard the chinese people as victims of an oppressive government that I fear for my own reasons for sure. So there's nothing about the fact that these folks are chinese that throws me. And if they were fleeing that government, I'm not sure what we should do about it, but I'm certainly supportive of their desire. I would feel a great deal of sympathy, and, in fact, I felt a great deal of sympathy for all of the other migrants that I met. But the sense of. It's really hard not to use the term hostility that I felt from the Chinese was particularly unsettling given that I know where they're headed. Right, they're headed to the US.

And just to be totally clear on that point, this was not a work camp for a chinese infrastructure project.

No, it was not. And what I know is taking place at the southern border of the US makes this even more disturbing, because although the controls at the southern border are still there, for those of us who are crossing legally, the lack of any control for those who are crossing illegally is stunning. So if I may just compare, when I came back from Panama, I approached a kiosk with my passport, ready to scan it. I didn't have to. A camera took my picture. And although I didn't know that my picture was about to be taken, I hadn't taken my hat off. I was wearing my glasses. The kiosk told me I didn't need to put my passport there. And then a customs officer behind me called my name, Bret. He said, do you have anything to declare? I said, no. He said, you're good to go. So we have technology that is capable of identifying a person with that level of ease, to the point that they knew exactly who was coming through the border. But we are not, apparently, taking that information. When people cross our southern border, what we're doing at most is asking them their name and their birth date and taking them at their word.

But no biometric collection?

Apparently not. Which means that even if this were simply a matter of our system being overwhelmed by migrants, you would at least want to collect that information so that if a troublemaker did come through, which is inevitable, that they will. You could begin to figure out who it might be. Right. So that they had an identity, even if it was just connected to biometric data. That would be useful, but we're not doing it. So what I think I saw. My hypothesis for what I think I saw is that there is an invasion taking place. It's not a sleeper cell because it's on the move, but I started to think of them as sleepwalkers. And there's also a massive migration. And the migration is causing us to have difficulty discussing the invasion, which is a distinct phenomenon and different simply from.

Desperate peasants from poor countries coming here for work.

There was no desperation in evidence. And Michael also gave us a video, which I can't establish the origin of, but it is a chinese cartoon set to happy music of a migrant moving through Central America, changing modes of transportation. And it basically indicates, here's the route you will travel. Now, was it produced by the CCP? I can't be certain of that, but that certainly is suggested, that this is a message about how to make this journey. For what purpose, I don't know, but I do not believe that the people I encountered had left China without the knowledge of their government. I believe their government has some reason to have facilitated.

But the administration must be aware of this.

Our administration. Yes, it is. But here's the problem I've been wrestling with. It used to be that it was hard to convince people that our system was deeply corrupt. Back in the days when those of us who were focused on this issue used to talk about campaign finance reform, it was a problem that you could grapple with. It was of that scale. Now we have. It's like a whole different level of corruption. Right. And here's the question that I've never heard a good answer to. What stops our enemies internationally from buying influence over our system in the same way that corporations do and did? I can't think of anything. And I've never heard patriotism. Right.

Sorry.

Just kidding. I don't think there is any such safeguard. And if there is such a safeguard, I would like to know how often it has been triggered. Certainly our enemies will have noticed that we have a system that's pay for play, and it's certainly. I mean, it's perfectly in keeping with Sun Tzu. At the very least, it would be far cheaper, easier, safer from their perspective to persuade us to harm ourselves than to go to war with us. So again, I don't know. I'm a biologist. This is not my.

Well, you're an observer of things. That's what the study of biology is, right? It is.

And unfortunately, this is the most parsimonious explanation for what I've seen now, is that somebody has persuaded us to endorse a policy that is decidedly not in our interest. And I will also say that I've become aware in the process of doing this that the Chinese have a rather famous plan for the world called the Belt and Road Initiative, in which they have scoped out where the resources are and how they're to get from one place to another. What many people who know about the Belt and Road initiative don't know is that they have also, the Belt and Road Initiative is largely about Africa and Asia. But apparently there's been a considerable amount of thinking in China about how Belt and Road would work in the new world as well.

And it's in full operation. I mean, St. Croix, which is an american protectorate. St. Croix next know American Virgin Islands. Its road system is built by China.

There you go. And there's an awful lot of investment in Panama. And there is certainly talk in China about opening the Darian gap.

Opening it, paving it, paving it.

Right?

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Another thing that Michael showed us, which it's maybe the most surprising thing I saw, is a bridge building project at Yavitza, which is the town at the very end of the pan american highway in Darien. So there is a massive bridge being.

Built, not a bamboo and vine bridge.

Oh, no. This is a massive concrete and steel highway bridge being built over the Chukanake river into the Darien. What's on the other side is impenetrable jungle and a few villages. This bridge does not make any sense.

So any idea who's paying for that?

That is much less clear. There are no signs. Most people in Panama are completely unaware that any such project exists. There are no proud signs as there are in the transit camps. I will say we spoke to the foreman of the project. I mean, the project is actually pretty impressive. It's a construction site. Nobody's standing around. They are building a bridge, and they are doing so impressively.

Do the workers seem to be local Panamanians?

They do. The foreman was panamanian, and we asked him what the purpose of the bridge was, and he didn't know, but he speculated that it was to bring yuca from Darien, from the villages on the other side into Panama.

That's a low margin agricultural product for those who are watching, it doesn't justify a steel reinforced bridge across the river.

There's nothing about this that makes any sense. I mean, yuca, it's like potato. It grows all over Panama, indeed, all over the world's tropics. There would be no reason to grow it in Darien. In fact, there are very good reasons not to encourage more of it to be grown in Darien, given the priceless habitat that will be cleared to grow yuca there for no good reason, there's lots of better places to do it. So what I was left with is the sense that there is a bridge going in and it has a purpose that has not been shared with the Panamanians. That purpose really has to be, as far as I can tell, it's got to be one of two things. Either this is about bringing lumber out of Darien National park, which would be obscene.

Cutting hardwood, cutting hard.

This is priceless hardwood that is, in part, still standing because it is such a difficult jungle to access. So it's possible that somebody has targeted that wood and not told the Panamanians, and they're building this bridge for that purpose. But the other potential purpose is that they're intending to finish the pan american highway through Darien, which is something that would certainly need to be discussed to be reasonable. Now, in the aftermath of our trip, Anne Vandersteel put up a video sharing just a view of this construction site and her perspective on it. And this caused a small scandal in Panama because the Panamanians weren't aware, and suddenly this was on the Internet, and they were talking about, what is this bridge at the southern end of the pan american highway in Panama? And the Panamanians claimed that it was just to reach the villages on the other side. So I'm left with the very od sense that their cover story is that this is a boondoggle. Right? If this was a boondoggle and they were just putting money into a project that meant nothing. Then that would explain the bridge to nowhere. But this didn't look like a boondoggle.

This looked like somebody wanted the bridge. And given the Belt and Road initiative and the sense that the Chinese have about what the future should look like and in which direction resources should move and for what purpose, it's hard for me not to connect the dots between these things. Right. You have a massive migration of people, labor. You have a likely invasion of military age, largely chinese males who are not forthcoming about why they have embarked on their journey and appear to be encouraged by something in China to do. You know, I don't know. Is there?

Given what you're describing and what you saw with your own eyes, doubtless you have seen Senator Dick Durban of Illinois'comments in the senate where you said, hey, we should let people who came here illegally join the US military. What does that make you think?

Well, this makes me think back to the COVID crisis and some thoughts that I was developing then about the insanity of throwing highly trained people, in many cases out of the US military for refusing to take the so called vaccines. Now, my sense at the time was that that likely had the purpose of getting rid of the kinds of people who refuse moral orders and that it created a much more compliant force. Now, what happens if migrants are given citizenship in exchange for military service? In the US military, that seems to create a major hazard because the perverse incentives for a migrant and the lack of allegiance to fundamental american values means that that would be just the kind of force that could be used to impose tyranny on other Americans because they would have no history with us. That would cause them to think twice.

We've seen this before with the roman legions. That's exactly my conclusion. Does that sound like a crazy conclusion?

I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy. The pattern of recent history.

I'm sorry, I want to repeat that. I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seems crazy. Getting that tattoo.

Yeah, well, I mean, this is where we are, and it's causing me to do something that I'm reluctant to do. My training is as a scientist, and scientists have to have a substantial degree of caution and self skepticism to do the work. But in order even to reach the possibilities that do fully explain what we're seeing, we have to be ready to consider the larger picture. Now, I was talking to Chris Martensen while we were in Panama. We were on our last day, trying to just unpack what we had seen and what it meant to us. Chris is also a scientist, and people can check this out on the dark horse locals community. We've posted the entire conversation in which Ian I reached some. I think we spooked ourselves trying to reason through what this might be. And he reminded me of the massive number of surplus males that China now has as a result.

I was thinking the exact same thing as a result of the one child policy.

The one child policy. Now, here's the part that I suddenly realized as soon as he reminded me of, that I wrote an essay years ago about the one child policy and the paradox of a heavy bias in favor of males. And the reason that this is a paradox is that there's a principle in evolution well understood. It's the result of the work of a guy named Ronald Fisher. And what Fisher realized was that although males and females can be very different in how many offspring they produce, and because a male could produce thousands of offspring in a lifetime, and a female, if we're talking about humans, could, I think the maximum is something impressive, like 60, but nonetheless, because males can produce a lot more, it seems that it might be evolutionarily advantageous to be one. But it's not. Because for every overperforming male, there's an underperforming male, or at least one. And the result is that sex ratios, no matter how different males and females are in their maximum reproductive capacity, they tend to default to one to one. If you have a society that has too many females, you should produce a male.

And if you have a society with too many males, you should produce a female, which tends to balance these things out. That logic should have applied to China. The fact is, there were lots of excess males. And if you put yourself in the mindset of a chinese person having a child, if there are too many males, you should want to produce a female. A male is very unlikely to find a mate. A female is certain to find one. And what's more, she has her pick of the litter. Yes, so that logic should have caused the sex ratio to return to 50 50, and yet it did not. Which caused me all those years ago when I wrote this piece, to wonder if there wasn't another evolutionary force in play, if evolution did not have a mechanism for producing armies, that when a country was in a position to expand, that producing excess males does pay off at a lineage level, that excess males who have no reproductive prospects at home, become an effective weapon against neighboring populations. So I can't believe that. That did not occur to me as I was preparing for this trip.

But it has occurred to me now. I guess it didn't occur to me because when I wrote that all those years ago, I was expecting to see evidence that this was turning into a military force, and I didn't see it, so I stopped thinking about it. But now I wonder if that isn't exactly right and if what happened is that a male biased population in China was produced as a weapon, and if that weapon is now being.

Would. So far we have the US government abetting this branch of the UN chinese government. Did you see any other funders or apparent funders of this?

Well, I'm not expert in this area at all. We did go to a place, so I guess I didn't say this. 25 years ago, I worked in Panama. I lived on Barrow, Colorado island, which is an island administered by the Smithsonian institution in the Panama Canal. It was a hilltop that got isolated when the canal filled and the Smithsonian took it over because it was a marvelous opportunity to have an isolated piece of forest that they could watch over time and learn how tropical biology works. So I had the privilege of living in the canal for 18 months and I got very familiar with the canal.

You lived in the Panama Canal for 18 months?

Absolutely did. We used to swim in the waters. For whatever reason, the crocodiles that inhabit those waters, if we would encounter them while swimming, they would turn and go the other way, which was lovely. Apparently, that's no longer true and you can't swim there, but, yeah, I lived there.

What were you studying?

Tent making bats. I know that sounds.

I'm only asking because, really for your benefit, because I want you remember just how dramatically your life has changed.

Yeah, well, I still love tent making bats. It's a little miracle that exists in these forests. But anyway, maybe we'll talk about that another time. But I was well familiar with the canal zone because the canal zone, in fact, the military. This was before the handover to the Panamanians. So the military made it possible for the Smithsonian to work there. And we were constantly interacting. We were going on their bases. We'd go on their bases to watch a movie. So we were using this military infrastructure, which has now all been handed over to Panama. And what impressed me was when we went back specifically to Fort Clayton, something that is now called the city of Knowledge. The city of Knowledge is housed in, or its central building is the former army south building from the US Southern Command. So this is both an important fact for the military that the US Southern Command is a segment of the military dedicated to protecting american interests in the Caribbean and all of Latin America south of Mexico. And it has this impressive structure in Fort Clayton immediately above the Los Flores locks. So it was both physically there to protect the canal and it was metaphorically this imposing presence looking out over to project power south.

Absolutely. And after the handover, all of the military bases that were in the canal zone were handed over. And this one has been taken over by the UN and the international community, and all the ngos have offices there. And it reminded me of how many things in our society have been had their purpose inverted. Universities used to exist to make young people smarter and more analytically capable. Universities now make people stupider and convince them of things that just simply aren't true. Yes, newspapers used to help us understand what the facts were about events that were taking place that involved us. Now newspapers obscure the facts from us. They're the last to report the news after we embarrass them into doing it. So this structure that once was a testament to the achievement of the Panama Canal and the importance of protecting the Panama Canal is now involved in what looks like obvious subterfuge against american interests.

Right.

An organization that is dedicated to facilitating migration without asking Americans, without there being any plan at all for how the well being of these people is going to be that their office IOM is sitting, if this building, US army south at the Los Flores locks is like a person, and at that person's left knee is the IoM looking out at the bridge of the Americas, which, when I was there, was the only way to cross the Panama Canal. It's almost the exact inversion of what these structures were built for. And how many times do you have to see the inversion of something to begin to get the sense that something has taken over our system and it's become sick?

Well, and I'm sure there's a biological term to describe the process of maybe cancer, the body eating itself. I mean, it seems like the structures set in place to protect the country are now at war with the country.

I do have the sense that the structures, and it's not even just the country, it's the west. And I view myself as very much a patriot of the country, but I'm also a patriot of the west, which I see the country as having. Maybe it's slightly overstated to say, invented the concept, but in any case, yes, the west appears to be sick with an infection. And again, I don't want to drag you into too much biology, but everybody knows what a parasite is. There's also something called a parasitoid. And a parasitoid is a parasite that kills its host in the process of doing its job. And I'm concerned that we may have a parasitoid that is actually at least indifferent to the destruction of the United States and the west and is acting accordingly.

So I know it's become your life's work, or part of your life's work, to figure out what exactly that entity is. Are you any closer?

I suppose I am. I mean, maybe I'm part way, and that part involves. I now look at a map with much more skepticism that I understand what it means. We have become so accustomed to looking at something like a nation like China, and thinking of it as an entity that behaves in some way. And something about the ease with which various power structures interact suggests that we. I don't understand why my government is behaving in a way that seems to be sabotaging the interests of average Americans, but it is undeniably, it seems to be acting on behalf of our enemies. I don't know whether that could conceivably be because there's actually hostility. I doubt it. But my guess is what there is is just a rampant outbreak of amorality, where people are willing to do whatever is expedient. And that has made the game rather easy for powers that be elsewhere. And I don't know where the analysis becomes absurd. I have watched policy on the west coast make the quality of life drop spectacularly, so that people are fleeing, including wealthy people. And I look at wealthy people fleeing California, for example, and I think something about this story doesn't add up.

It's rather a lot like building up a population with too many males. There's something else that explains this. Because at the end of the day, wealthy elites are going to end up with the best real estate. So the fact that they're fleeing either means that which elites are going to end up with, that real estate is about to switch. Maybe this was a real estate scam.

Malibu will always be occupied by rich people.

It will, but which rich people?

Yes.

And I wonder, having seen something that very much looks like an undeclared invasion moving through Central America, knowing that the chinese communist party thinks in terms of long term planning over the movement of people and resources, that our system, we have effectively opened the gates of the city to anybody who's willing to pay to corrupt our political structures. There is a story you could tell in which the CCP has a different understanding of what the future of our country is than most Americans do. Well, let's just put it this way. Maybe I'm imagining what I saw, but if I'm not, then all of those chinese migrants who don't want to talk about what they're doing moving into the US, they're going to do something. I don't know what it's going to be, but I don't know when we became so naive about the fact that we have, there are parties abroad who do not wish us well and would not mind at all seeing us removed from our position of power. And who knows? Maybe some of us are displaced from the continent we live on. I can't say.

I mean, China is literally the other side of the world. It's also not Haiti. I mean, there's economic opportunity in China, but there's also economic opportunity for unemployed Chinese in the Philippines or Vietnam, Malaysia. It's not obvious that they would come to the Darien gap to get here.

Well, the Darien gap is a very strange place to have gone. For one thing, as Chris Martensen points out, the absurdity, if we're going to invite people in, let's say we had decided that we didn't have enough people to do labor and that it was actually good for the US to bring in large numbers of people from elsewhere. Having people go through the theater of marching through Darien is absurd and dangerous, and it is creating a humanitarian crisis. In addition to the environmental crisis which is in Darien, we're creating a humanitarian crisis. That's absolutely needless. Either these people should be welcomed because it's good for us to bring them in. Exactly, or they shouldn't be there at all. And the only purpose I can think, especially given that the Chinese, many of the Chinese, I don't want to say all there are chinese people in the other camps. We saw that as well, also not forthcoming about anything. But the only purpose I can think of for coming to America via Panama is that it allows them to blend with all of the people who are coming from South America. It makes it hard to discuss, but I can't think of another reason to do it that way.

It's, at the very least, wildly inefficient.

Did you run into any journalists from big newspapers or tv channels when you were down there?

Absolutely not. Which is also shocking. I mean, this is emblematic of the era we are living in, where the issues which obviously have our well being tied up in them are hiding in plain sight. It's not hard to see this story. All you need to know is where to go. You can go look at it. And the fact that that's not happening, that our major news organizations are disinterested in this story, again suggests a system that has been corrupted across the board. You would imagine that even if the New York Times didn't want to report this story, that some reporter with ambition would chase it down anyway. But so universal is the complicity here that nobody reports it. And if they do report it, they report it wrong. They report it so that it leads you to have a confused sense or a sense that this is more minor than it is. But we're talking literally about millions of people. And millions of people is not a minor issue in a country with 300 million. Right. This is a major demographic shift one way or the other.

Yeah, and a permanent one. What did you hear about the cartels when you were down? And we hear a lot about them in this country, but in pretty nonspecific terms.

We heard that they were present, and I don't think that's a new phenomenon. We also heard. So there's a lot of what we would call coyotes at our southern border are called snakeheads. There's a lot of this going on in Darien. People are paying to have somebody shepherd them through, and that often does not go well. So they're present. The cartels appear to be making a great deal of money from this. They're probably not happy to have it discussed. I don't know what that implies. But also I would point out the farther north, this migration obviously has a relationship with the cartels. The cartels are largely about american demand for illicit substances. And a massive uncontrolled wave of migrants is an obvious mechanism whereby fentanyl and other things are entering the US in an unmonitored mean. And in fact, to the extent that they come in with know, we are apparently facilitating their transport into the interior, we're spreading them around. What I can say is the cartels are not directly visible to a visitor, but their influence is felt and discussed.

You're describing a lot of different crimes happening simultaneously.

Yes.

What's the solution?

Well, strangely, it goes back to the idea of giving ourselves permission to entertain all kinds of possibilities, even things that are crazy, and we have to ultimately reject, but we have to not talk ourselves out of noticing what is taking.

That's a scientific principle, is it not?

Well, it's funny. Scientists are losing their way as well. And I think how science is actually done is being forgotten. And I think we are actually literally in a cryptic, dark age now, every dark age has a small number of people, I call them keepers of the flame, who do remember how to do science and keep that knowledge alive in one way or another. But it's time to dust it off and bring it out into the mainstream. And the toolkit for figuring out what a story like this means is not different from the toolkit you use to figure out what's going on in a tropical forest. It's hypothesis testing and what you don't want. People have heard from me now. They've heard some things. They may be shocked by them. You don't know. This is one person's view of what they saw. What you really want is many people to have seen it, and then you want them to pool their understanding, to point out what doesn't make sense about one story, one explanation or another. That's the process. And the fewer of us who are on the case, the worse we're going to do, and that we should just expect that.

So the first answer is just wake up. Something is afoot that none of us have seen before. Even to the extent that there are echoes of historical processes here, much of this is quite new. I mean, for one thing, a mass migration through a dense jungle where people have been informed about how to transit it by cell phone, where money can be wired by Western Union to buy yourself a bus ticket after you've been robbed by bandits in the forest. This is some weird combination of very low tech and very high tech.

What percentage of the migrants have smartphones?

Well, I don't know, but my guess is a much larger percentage have them at the beginning of their trek than have them at the end. In part, that's because of rampant theft. I talked to a woman. Her name was Jen. She's venezuelan. She was a college student in Venezuela and is fleeing the collapse of her society. She was robbed of everything she had in Darien. I'm almost certain she was raped. I didn't ask her, but I told her that I thought her journey had been more perilous than she shared, and she confirmed that. And I think we both knew what I was talking about. But in any case, she lost her phone to bandits. But the other thing that happens is the exhaustion that people who are unprepared for the darian gap experience in struggling up these just mud doesn't even describe it. The clay in these soils is such that you just imagine incredibly slippery faces that are being drenched in rain on a daily basis. People are so exhausted that they rid themselves of the possessions that they thought they would somehow bring through. They lose their shoes, they drop all of their possessions and they walk out with nothing.

So in any case, I would say probably most of them have phones when they embark. And I have no idea what the percentage that actually.

What is it doing to the environment, to the landscape?

It's a catastrophe. I mean, it's certainly going to be limited at this point to the. I think there are three major routes through the darian gap at the moment. They are absolutely littered with trash and bodies, and it's apparently quite hellish. In fact, Jen told me that on her trek, she spoke pretty good English. She said that she didn't see a single animal. I'm sure she meant mammal, but the idea of walking across Darien and not seeing a single mammal suggests that this is just absolutely devastating. Now, it's nothing compared to what will happen if a road gets put through. Roads have a very well understood impact on a forest like this. Once you have roads, you're going to have hunters and they're going to empty the forest. You're going to have empty forest syndrome after that. You're going to have loggers. They're going to be pulling out all of these priceless tropical hardwoods. You're going to get miners who are going to illegally go in there and mine and leave big tailing piles and toxins. It's a devastating impact. At the moment, my guess would be that the forest is rescuable, but the process has to stop.

If it continues to go down this road, it will be unsavable.

Has the government of Panama said anything about this? I mean, it's their territory.

Mostly. They don't say anything. And what we were told was that this was kind of the deal, that if they ushered people through, they facilitated their movement, then those people would keep going. And this is a temporary cost for Panama. I think if the people of Panama thought that the migration was going to stop and they were going to have to absorb all of these migrants, there would be riots in the streets. That's my guess. Panama is for other reasons, in rather perilous situation, because after the handover, the Panamanians upgraded the canal, and they did so according to plans that Americans had drawn up. They put In a third lane for boat traffic. So every time a boat transits the canal, a huge amount of water is lost in the process of lifting and lowering boats. When the Americans drew up the plans for a third lane, which the Americans did not complete, the Panamanians now have, it involved the damning of a second river to provide more water. So that never happened. Panama is now in a drought. And the drought, combined with the massive extra losses of water, is resulting in the Panama canal having greatly reduced traffic, which is a huge hit to the panamanian economy, because each of the ships that transits the canal hands over a huge pile of cash to be allowed to do it.

And this is a major piece of the panamanian economy. We're at the beginning of the dry season. I don't know what's going to HaPpen by the end of the dry season, but it may go from a greatly reduced number of transits per day to, I don't know, could it go to none, maybe, which would be a big hit to the world economy.

Actually, this is why the Nicaraguans are considering completing that canal. Right?

The Nicaraguans. That has been long under discussion for, oh, 150 years. Yeah. Right. So I don't know if the Nicaraguans are going to. At the moment, the Panamanians are using the train that parallels the canal, and basically lots of ships are offloading their cargo onto a train, and it's going overland to a ship on the other side. So in any case, Panama has a stability problem of its own. And that, combined with the hazard posed by this migration. And if America closes the door on this migration, where do these people go?

So, last question. I know that you will continue your journey of inquiry in this topic, but where else would you go to get answers to what exactly is happening?

Well, if I was initiating an effort to figure out that question, I would bring the people who have navigated the story this far together with whatever experts still exist on the various related topics. I mean, frankly, I would talk to Michael Jan about all of the things that are connected to this story, all the things he's seen all over the world. He has a very good sense for who the players are and what he knows has to be brought together with an understanding of how these dynamics might play out. But I have to say, I don't know how much time we have. Again, I don't know if what I saw implies another shoe is going to drop. How many of these chinese sleepwalkers have to end up in the US before some other phase kicks off? What was the involvement of COVID Is it just happenstance, or is there something about the COVID crisis that is in some way connected to what we are now?

What do you mean?

This is a place we have to be extremely careful. I'm just looking at the various puzzle pieces and trying to imagine what they could mean. We know that SARS CoV two was the product of dual use research, which was bioweapons. The spike protein in the so called vaccines was taken from SARS CoV two, so it is also the product of bioweapons research. Now, again, I will say it again, because I'm concerned that people will take it as a conclusion rather than a hypothesis. This is only a hypothesis. And when I say it's a hypothesis, it doesn't mean that I believe it's true. It means that I believe it's plausible. The vaccines that people got, you may remember, I think we talked about it the last time I was here. People who get more than three of these shots have an interesting effect that none of us saw coming, which is the triggering of something called IgG four. Ig means immunoglobulin so synonym for antibody. IgG is a class of immunoglobulin, and IgG four is a very interesting subclass. IgG four's purpose, its biological purpose, is to turn down an immune response. So if your body is reacting to something it shouldn't react to, the nature has granted us a mechanism for turning down that reaction so that you don't die from an allergy.

Effectively, this is what allergens do, is they try to trigger that attenuation signal in order to get the body to stop reacting to something that it shouldn't be reacting to. The fact that these shots seem to trigger the production of IgG four is fascinating. It could just be an unexpected consequence that nobody saw coming. But if you think about what it is that the folks who try to produce biological weapons want, they want a weapon that separates populations. In other words, a weapon is no good if it's not contagious, then you have to drop it on enough people to matter. That's difficult. If it is contagious, then your own population risks getting it. So the problem is, there's not a good design mechanism to deal with that. But if the mrna vaccines produced an attenuation signal in people who got more than three of these shots, then conceivably that attenuation signal could cause that population of people to be induced not to react to a pathogen. If you just added the spike protein to it, presumably it would trigger that signal. So here's why I'm mentioning all of this arcane biology. The Chinese did not vaccinate their population with mrna technology or anything based on spike protein.

So those two populations are now different in this regard. Which, again, might mean nothing but what we learned so painfully in the battle against the mainstream narrative over these so called vaccines, is that the reason that I say so called vaccines, and I try to say it every time, is because what these things turned out to be is gene therapy. But that doesn't even quite cover the problem with them. They're gene therapy in the sense that they introduce a genetic message into your cells and they get your cells to translate it. But there's also a part of our bodies that absorbs messages in a whole different way. It's our immune system. Our immune system literally evolves on the scale of hours to days when you get an illness. That's how we fend off illnesses that evolve so rapidly. And so the message that was injected into so many people was like a firmware update. It was a firmware update that caused the immune systems of those people to take up a new way of viewing the world. And that new way of viewing the world seems to have produced this attenuation signal in response to the antigen, the spike protein antigen.

So am I seeing a mirage? Let's hope so.

Just to try to flesh out or put in non specialist terms what you may be suggesting, it's plausible that this was all an effort to make one population effectively immune from some new bioweapon and another population susceptible to it. Is that what you're saying?

That is what I'm saying. And again, all it is is possible. Right? I have no evidence that this did happen, except for the odd fact of this Igg force.

Well, why didn't the Chinese use mrna vaccines?

I don't is, let's put it this way, nobody should have. Of course, it was a technology that was just simply not fit for human consumption. But one does not know. And further, we got a lot of nonsense out of China that caused people, including me, to be more frightened of SARS Cov two than was warranted.

No, me too.

You remember the videos of people collapsing dead in the street, right? That was nonsense. So I don't know who's who on this playing field, and I don't know what they want. But to the extent that there seemed to be an absolute obsession with injecting absolutely everybody with these so called vaccines, that was conspicuous. That did not seem like just greed and a desire to sell more shots.

I agree completely.

It was bizarre. And the fact that we specifically insisted on vaccinating the entire military and threw people out who wouldn't take it, we vaccinated all of our frontline workers. And at the time, I remember I said to Heather on our show, I said, even if these are wonderful shots, it seems insane, given that we don't know what their long term impacts are, that we would vaccinate all of anybody with them. How about half?

Especially people we need.

The people we need most, right? Exactly. That's hopefully just a mirage, but it is a very frightening one, and I certainly hope that that's not what's going on. But if it is, there is no time to waste in us figuring out what we have been induced to do and what the proper countermeasures are. And so to the extent that people think that this is an abstraction, it is not. If there is any possibility at all that that is the nature of what we went through, then it is essential that we figure out how to neutralize the vulnerability.

So I've kept you too long, but just this is my last question. Do you think it's odd, given the price this country paid for something that China did, that in the official storyline from the White House, for example, the Chinese are never the villain. It's always the Americans. It's always some segment of our population. The people who didn't take the vaccine are the villains. I mean, president just gave a speech saying that the other day. Why has no one in authority in America said a bad word about China since we discovered that they unleashed Covid on the world? That's pretty weird, isn't it?

It is weird. I have to say, I'm stuck on this one, because the more one knows about what role we did play, the more that this is not a simple story of one country having screwed up and unleashed hell on the world. This was a collaborative effort. Now, the question is, whose team are those collaborators on?

Great question. I mean, I must say, the whole thing I found shocking, but one of the most shocking things I'd never heard a single other person mention, which is, since when does the United States collaborate with China on bioweapons research? You'd think they were adversaries, right? It's like not just a uni party, but a uni world or something.

Yes. Well, again, I think this is the place where we have to allow ourselves to think these thoughts, and then somebody should talk us off the ledge, and we should find out. It's not nearly as bad as we fear, but we have to consider these things and reject them rather than not think them.

I know some open minded people, and I know some rigorously rational people. I know very few who combine those qualities as well as you do. And I just. Such a pleasure to hear you talk so. But thank you.

Thank you so much, Tucker.