"This whole discussion reminds me of Janathan Haidt's lecture about truth vs social justice in universities: <a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gatn5ameRr8</a><br><br>If you value social justice above all", then Metzl will come off as credible. If you value truth above all, then the more Jamie Metzl speaks, the less credible he becomes. His position on the truth behind the lab leak theory is an outlier in how he operates because even there, he embeds an implicit acceptance that it's okay for people in positions of authority to lie to their peers and it's especially okay to lie to the ignorant laymen so long as it's in service of a greater good (which is o be determined by the liar). He has almost zero regard for basic truth if it runs up against his ideological dispositions. Every time he talks about people or organizations that are demonstrably corrupt, he almost always falls in line with the person or organization that lies, obfuscates, and deceives. To paraphrase a few of his points, "I have great respect for the WHO leader (even though he parroted the Chinese totalitarian propaganda about COVID)." "I have great sympathy for Sanjay Gupta's position on Joe Rogan (even though he defended lies about Rogan taking horse medication)." "I have great respect for this Chinese scientist (even though she lied to the world and the whole scientific community)." He comes off as being more concerned with maintaining his relationship in good terms with people in power than promoting true, forthright interactions with the public. When the government lies to us, he's the first in line to explain to us how we can't understand the position that government officials are in and how we should be okay with being lied to.<br><br>It seems, to me at least, that his overriding value is ideology first, and then truth falls somewhere in the hierarchy below that. He values truth, but not at the expense of social justice. In the final analysis, he supports all of these dishonest organizations in this interview (WHO, CNN, CCP) because they have what he considers to be good and necessary goals. If someone's stated goals are collectivist and utopian in nature, then no action (no matter how dishonest or corrupt; up to and including Uyghur genocide) is enough for him to condemn them. Based on his weak sauce take on the Uyghur genocide, I bet if someone says something like "kidnapping and killing minorities to harvest their organs is enough to cut all ties with them" Jamie Metzl might think that person is bigoted and close minded to all the good collaborative work we can do with the Chinese and the international community. Good grief.<br><br>What's worse is that he even tries to trade on the fact that he's Jewish in this interview and tries to draw the listener's sympathy to his family connection to the Holocaust. I wonder if he has any knowledge of the fact that there was a prominent group of Jewish leaders who encouraged all German Jews to continue to commiserate with the Nazis as they rose to power and told the Jewish communities to listen to the Nazis and understand them and comply with them. They believed that the Jewish could prove to the Nazis that they were "good" Germans by following and complying with all of the new Nazi Nuremberg laws. Here's a good lecture presented by Rabbi Moshe Cohn, Head of the Jewish World Section," International School for Holocaust Studies for reference on the German Jewish Response to the Rise of Nazism 1933-39 (<a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpXjhUll1ag)"">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpXjhUll1ag)</a>. Because he has no spine when it comes to confronting people who deceive and lie", I think it's plausible that if Metzl was a mature adult in Germany in the 1930s his mode of operating would have led him to aid and abet the Nazis in the name of not "othering" the poor Nazi. He would claim that we have more in common with the Nazis than our differences. The sad thing is, he'd be right, because Nazis are people too. And it would be xenophobic of anyone to argue with him by saying anything like "sometimes a small difference is enough to legitimately call someone an enemy." His compassion and empathy is the type that sent millions of Jews to genocide.<br><br>If someone as intelligent as him can be so cognitively dissonant, anyone can.<br><br>Even after all of this, I say let the man speak.