Jack

Back in February, Kyle Royce, a 20-year-old in British Columbia, Canada, created a video that proved far more controversial and influential than he had imagined it would be when he uploaded it to TikTok. He had built up a small following poking gentle fun at “Karen” behavior. Occasionally, he would also do live-streams, during which some participants would ask about his background—he’s a straight, cisgender Christian of mixed Asian and white ancestry—and press him on controversial matters of the day. On multiple occasions, he was asked if he would date a trans woman. He was repeatedly told, upon responding no, that his answer was transphobic.

“I felt like I was getting unfairly labeled,” he told me recently. “I’m not transphobic, I see that as a negative term.” Then, he had an idea. “Lots of sexualities are being created,” he said, alluding to the proliferation of terms such as pansexual, demisexual, sapiosexual, and more. Recasting his own preferences as a sexual identity of its own, he reasoned, would be “like a kind of defense” against accusations of perpetrating harm.

In a video trying out his idea, he said:

Yo, guys, I made a new sexuality now, actually. It’s called “super-straight,” since straight people, or straight men as myself––I get called transphobic because I wouldn’t date a trans woman.

You know, they’re like, “Would you date a trans woman?”

No.

“Why? That’s a female.”

No, that’s not a real woman to me. I want a real woman. “No, you’re just transphobic.” So now, I’m “super-straight”! I only date the opposite gender, women, that are born women. So you can’t say I’m transphobic now, because that’s just my sexuality, you know.

When I asked what his intentions were on a spectrum from 100 percent earnest to 100 percent trolling, he had trouble answering. Nowhere seemed quite right. He was trying to accurately convey his dating preferences and truly felt frustrated by others’ criticism. But he was also trying to make a point by co-opting a norm of LGBTQ activists: that one’s professed sexual or gender identity is unassailable.

[Chase Strangio: The trans future I never dreamed of]

Had the video spread no more widely than Royce’s followers, a low-stress exchange of ideas might have ensued. Instead his video quickly garnered many thousands of likes and shares. Supporters deemed the term super-straight an ingenious gambit forcing dogmatic social-justice advocates to live by the same standards they enforce on others. Royce also drew a lot of critics. Haters argued that super-straight was a cruel parody of all LGBTQ people. The video quickly disappeared from TikTok, perhaps because many users flagged it as violating the app’s rules. It reappeared about a week later, presumably after human content moderators reviewed it. That’s when it went massively viral. My TikTok feed, usually a respite of surfing highlights, recipe ideas, and Generation X nostalgia, was overrun by super-straight. Fans and critics alike commented on and shared videos about the subject—or posted their own. “Let me break this down: trans women are women,” declared the TikTok creator @tblizzy, who currently has more than 425,000 followers. “So if you’re a heterosexual man and you said you wouldn’t date a trans woman because it’s a preference, that’s just transphobia, period.”

The super-straight meme was soon proliferating on Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. The more it spread, the more people encountered it not through the original video, but through derivative content. Someone made a super-straight flag. Encountering the black-and-orange banner and the hashtag #SuperStraight, many internet users presumed they were encountering a random attack on trans people. “Have you seen these colors on a TikTok video? Scroll [away] instantly,” a critic warned in one of many response clips. “These men are known as Super Straights. We have to keep them off the For You page.” (“For You” is where users see whatever TikTok serves up based on an algorithm that boosts videos that garner interactions.) “Our trans family is being targeted, and we have to keep them safe. Do not comment, like, or watch their content. Pause it and report it.” Many users joined this effort to report fellow creators and censor their accounts in the name of safety. This mobilization in turn deepened many super-straight fans’ conviction that they were the victims of discrimination.

For me, the fight over the term super-straight suggested something else: that social-media culture is disorienting to many people in ways that make hard conversations harder still, and that no faction in Gen Z will win an argument about matters of the heart by tarring the other side as problematic. Few decisions are more personal than the choice of a partner. Questions about an individual’s sexuality need not degenerate into public fights about who is bigoted; an individual heterosexual man’s hesitation to date trans women need not provoke trans-rights supporters or encourage anti-trans trolls. But whenever an asserted identity comes to double as a hashtag, drama is sure to follow.

If you started dating in the 1990s, as I did, odds are you’ve never been asked, “Would you date a trans person?” To their credit, Millennials and Gen Zers have far surpassed their elders in welcoming trans people into the American cultural mainstream. Because of that progress, younger people will grapple with sensitive questions many of their elders never contemplated in the era before widespread trans visibility, when a cisgender person might never knowingly encounter a trans person in daily life.

Late-20th-century film and television did occasionally feature trans characters. And the hostility of many Hollywood portrayals is one reason why some trans-rights supporters remain hypervigilant to perceived slights, particularly when they concern straight men encountering trans women. In the Netflix documentary Disclosure, a chronicle of Hollywood portrayals of trans people over the decades, the actress and writer Jen Richards, who is transgender, reflects on movie scenes where a character in a romantic entanglement with a straight man is revealed to be a trans woman with a penis. In both the 1992 drama The Crying Game and the 1994 comedy Ace Ventura: Pet Detective—which spoofs The Crying Game’s climactic scene—a straight man retches in disgust. In some other films, the men erupt in violence. Without film representations of trans people, Richards reflected, “I might not have ever internalized that sense of being monstrous, of having fears around disclosure, of seeing myself as something abhorrent, and as a punch line and as a joke. I might be able to go on a date with a man without having the image of men vomiting.”

She continued:

When you start watching trans clips back to back, you see how often all the people around the trans character feel betrayed or lied to. But frankly, I kind of hate the idea of disclosure. And the sense that it presupposes that there is something to disclose. It reinforces their assumption that there is a secret that is hidden and that I have a responsibility to tell others. And that presupposes that the other person might have some kind of issue or problem with what’s to be disclosed, and that their feelings matter more than mine.

Hollywood has seldom portrayed the issue of disclosure from a trans person’s perspective. But such a conversation did happen in 2016 on the show Horace and Pete. In one scene, Horace, a heterosexual man, meets Rhonda, a woman. They have mutually enjoyable sex. At breakfast the next morning, they get to know each other. Horace notes that he has two adult children who are the same age but not twins—an anomaly that prompts him to reluctantly admit that years earlier he had an affair with the sister of his then-pregnant wife. When it’s Rhonda’s turn to talk about herself, she makes a comment raising the possibility that she was “born a woman in a male body.” Horace cannot tell if she is kidding. That makes him uncomfortable as he questions her:

Horace: You would have to tell somebody a thing like that.

Rhonda: Well, but you didn’t ask me before we had sex. You just told me about your big, special penis and invited me upstairs.

Horace: But you don’t have to ask people which one are you before you get started. A person has the right to assume certain things.

Rhonda: Did I have a right to assume that you aren’t a sexual deviant who did the unthinkable with his special penis? In some cultures what you did in your family is considered a crime punishable by death. So did you have an obligation to tell me what kind of man I was getting intimate with instead of springing it on me like the morning paper over some eggs?

Until very recently, very few people would have shamed a man like Horace for wanting to know if a prospective sex partner was trans or for feeling that he wouldn’t want to have sex with a trans woman for inarticulable reasons. “A 2018 study showed that only 1.8 percent of straight women and 3.3 percent of straight men would date a transgender person,” The Advocate reported in 2019. “A small minority of cisgender lesbians (29 percent) and gays (11.5 percent) would be willing. Bisexual/queer/nonbinary participants (these were all combined into one group) were most open to having a trans partner, but even among them, just a slim majority (52 percent) were open to dating a transgender person.”

[Read: My parents still struggle to know me after I transitioned late]

Whenever people are mismatched in their desires, the outcome can be difficult for all involved. Trans people face particular challenges: Knowing that much of your preferred dating pool disqualifies you before meeting you must be deeply frustrating. For some trans people, the subject is additionally freighted with fear that by seeking sex, they might risk violence. I empathize with people on the other side of this divide, too. Most have dating preferences that don’t necessarily imply a negative view of people who fall outside them––I’d be averse to dating an 18-year-old or a 60-year-old, yet I neither hate nor fear either age cohort––and that they might not be able to change even if they wanted to. Claims that only bigots would decline to date a trans person strike some commentators as a form of coercion. “It’s obviously completely valid to exclude trans people from your dating pool if you’re not attracted to them, and anyone who says otherwise is honestly kind of rapey,” argues the YouTuber Blaire White, who is trans. Nevertheless, among young people on social media, the perspectives that Jen Richards and the Rhonda character expressed are now common enough that some cis and trans people harshly criticize trans-exclusionary daters.

The longer social-media shamers condemn preferences that the overwhelming majority of people share, the more inevitable the pushback. For many, Royce’s meme was defensible precisely because it was couched as a plea for inclusion. “The fact that people are upset about this new sexuality being created is a little hypocritical coming from the folks who created abrosexual, demisexual, gerontosexual, gynosexual, intrasexual, kalosexual, multisexual, pomosexual, sapiosexual, and literally hundreds more,” White said on YouTube. “Even though super-straight is a joke, the irony is that it’s a lot more valid than a lot of those I just listed. Actually, all of them. Y’all are releasing new sexualities more than I release new videos, like it’s your full-time job. But you freak out when someone else does it?”

As super-straight spread and mutated, Royce watched the debate with alarm. He was still associated with the meme he created, but it had acquired its own momentum. Digital bullies began going through his Instagram posts, harassing his friends, and targeting his mother’s business with negative reviews, causing her to fear for her safety and beg him to delete his social media. He also felt a responsibility to urge others to use his creation for good, not evil. “Don’t use super-straight to spread hate,” he said in a follow-up video. “The super-straight motto is: ‘You do you; love and respect everybody else.’”

[Read: What do the parents of trans kids have to say?]

Of course, matters were beyond his control. A TikTok user who saw the original video might come away with a radically different understanding of it than, say, folks on Reddit. “The super-straight video started to spread on social media, eventually hitting the /pol board of 4chan, known for being a home to far-right trolls, and growing from there,” Insider reported. “The board members discussed creating and sharing memes about being super straight to ‘drive a wedge’ within LGBTQ communities and ‘use the left’s tactics against themselves’ … The posts also directly linked the abbreviation for super straight to the Nazi SS.”

On TikTok many creators who associated themselves with the label were people of color. Some gay and lesbian people began declaring themselves “super-gay” and “super-lesbian”—meaning that they too felt attracted only to people who are cisgender. Visual memes soon emerged. In some, failing to recognize self-professed “super-gays” or “super-straights” was an intolerant act.

Learn the difference. pic.twitter.com/PnsS9TCyct

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 7, 2021

In a video aimed at a super-straight TikToker, the YouTuber Eden Estrada retorted, “Your entire sexuality is based off of trans women, and yet I bet not a single one has ever paid attention to you. Look, I can literally care less what any ugly random turd in the middle of America is attracted to. But I do think that it’s really sus when these insecure little shrimps resort to making up a whole sexuality to bring down an entire community who has literally done nothing to them.”

Another negative response was more brusque:

#superstraight i proudly say that i am a superphobic pic.twitter.com/xdXUcne5tt

— eevee is crying /pos — ※ (@bentokoii) March 6, 2021

Super-straight adherents celebrated antagonistic reactions like that because, in their telling, they exposed progressives as hypocritically threatening violence to others on the basis of their sexual orientation. At its most dysfunctional, the meme war descended into a kind of mutually assured destruction: Many people invoking super-straight sounded like assholes. Many people denouncing it sounded like hypocrites. And the incentives were perverse: In a culture war, assholery or hypocrisy against the other side can raise your status with allies.

Internet discourse does not have to be that way. A better approach begins by recognizing that the worst of what we see is not representative. Super-straight went viral in February, but it has since become the social-media equivalent of a multi-variant pandemic. No matter how far you go down the rabbit hole of YouTube compilations of super-straight TikTok videos and memes, you’ll remain unable to generalize about it accurately. If someone assures you that super-straight is “just” the expression of a new sexual orientation, or “just” transphobic bigots—and especially if they tell you it’s “just” Nazis, or that its critics are “just” hypocritical and intolerant social-justice warriors—don’t let them mislead you. All of this is too expansive, fragmented, and varied for anyone to fully grasp or neatly characterize.

When its layers overwhelmed me, I turned to the video essayist Natalie Wynn, whose YouTube channel, ContraPoints, excels at getting fans to grapple with the complexity of fraught subjects. Wynn is transgender. In a recent phone interview about the super-straight debate, I asked her how the public conversation about dating and trans people might proceed more constructively.

She expressed frustration both with people who aggressively volunteer that they don’t want to date trans people and with people who aggressively ask others if they would date a trans person––and cautioned that the latter group is not representative of trans people. “If my only impression of what trans people were came from Twitter,” she joked, “I would be a transphobe.” And what’s more, she said, cis allies are often the ones who are pushing the matter.

Wynn does believe that “being totally closed-minded to dating a trans person often comes from a place of ignorance about trans people.” In her telling, people who believe that they’d never want to date a trans person should consider the possibility that they could change their mind––especially if they grew up in an environment where negative stereotypes about trans people abounded and attractive portrayals of trans people or relationships with them were nonexistent.

“To come out as trans, which I didn’t do until I was in my mid-to-late 20s, I had to overcome an upbringing of misinformation, stereotyping, and self-loathing,” she said. Might such negativity mislead cis people, too? “Often, when a person finds themselves attracted for the first time to a trans person, that comes as a shock to them,” she argued, as their intellectual preconceptions turn out to be at odds with how they feel. They want what they didn’t think they’d ever want. “That’s how this happens. Often people are surprised. They think they are not attracted to trans people, but then there’s a trans person they’re attracted to. That’s how attraction works. It’s not this ideological thing.” She also noted that “who you date is a really personal thing. And no one is ever going to respond well to being told that it’s bigoted to date who they want to date or to not date who they don’t want to date.” Berating other people “is never going to elicit any reaction other than causing them to get more locked down in their view.”

Notice how her approach points away from drawing sweeping conclusions based on meme analysis and back toward questions about how best to understand how fellow humans think and feel. Others can challenge or contest her viewpoints and understanding by invoking their own experiences or insights. But everyone would benefit from forswearing tactical stigma and shaming, laying down their memes, calling truce in the culture wars, and talking out their differences like friends.

In a recent post on zoning, some commenters pointed out that new housing development can lower the property values of existing homeowners. That’s true, indeed the whole point of new development is to make housing more affordable for those who do not have a home in the area where they’d like to live.

If one argues that we should use regulation to maintain property values, that’s sort of like saying that we should use regulation to prevent millennials from living in cities where their parent live, or that we should use regulation to make it harder for homeless people to find housing.

Perhaps some people are mixing up pecuniary and technical externalities. A technical externality is something like air pollution, where one person’s activity physically damages another person. It may represent market failure.  A pecuniary (monetary) externality is like when a Chevron gas station opens up next to an existing Exxon station. It adds competition and thus reduces the monetary value of the Exxon station owner’s business.  It does not represent market failure.

Every property is like a small business. Owner-occupied businesses are producing housing services for the owner, whereas rental property sells the service to someone else. Having a regulation that restricts new development is no different from have a regulation that bans new restaurants or gas stations, in order to protect incumbent businesses.

It is theoretically possible that new housing construction could produce negative technical externalities, such as underpriced traffic congestion. But as a practical matter, dense infill development is good for the environment, which is why the smarter environmentalists favor the “YIMBY” position.

If you don’t allow high rise apartment buildings along transit lines in LA or Silicon Valley, the alternative is more suburbans sprawl in places like Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which is even worse for the environment. And if people move from California to Texas, that’s even worse (in terms of carbon emission.)

Zoning should not be used to prevent housing construction.  If zoning is to be used at all, it should only be for technical externalities, such as preventing a polluting steel mill from opening up next to a residential neighborhood.  Based on the experience of Houston, I’m not convinced that we need any zoning laws.

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Yesterday, President Biden said, "I will not impose any tax increase on people making less than $400,000. But it’s time for corporate America and the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans to just begin to pay their fair share....But I will not add a tax burden, additional tax burden on the middle class of this country. They’re already paying enough."

According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, the middle class (defined here as the middle quintile of the income distribution) now pays about 13 percent of its income in federal taxes. The top 1 percent pays about 30 percent of its income in federal taxes.

I wonder: What constitutes a "fair share" in President Biden's eyes? On what basis does he conclude that the current distribution of the tax burden is not fair?

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Last month, Seattle's city council voted to lift a host of restrictions on many home businesses, thanks to the efforts of one small local cidery and its supporters.

As I detailed in a February column, after one neighbor complained repeatedly to the city about Yonder Bar, the city forced the "bar"—a converted home garage walkup window where consumers may only purchase cider to drink at home, rather than a place where people drink alcohol beverages—to close temporarily.

As I also explained in the column, the city, which had approved and licensed Yonder Bar prior to its opening, claimed, in closing down the bar, that Yonder Bar was operating illegally in a residential area, didn't have adequate off-street parking, used signage to indicate to consumers that it's a business—and not, say, an unmarked garage full of old tires or broken croquet mallets—and could operate only by appointment.

That might have been the end of the story. But thousands of Yonder Bar's neighbors and at least a couple city councilors rallied behind the takeaway-only bar. Those city councilors introduced a bill that would not just allow Yonder to reopen—but also allow other, similar home-based businesses to operate without fear of being shuttered by the city.

City Council members Dan Strauss and Lorena Gonzalez introduced the bill, dubbed Bringing Business Home, in order to "provide additional support and a means towards economic recovery for small businesses adversely affected by current land use codes during the pandemic."

The bill was intended to lift some of the most onerous home-business requirements, including the appointment-only rule, signage ban, cap on employees, and traffic restrictions.

In my column on Yonder Bar, I cited one local Twitter account that predicted Yonder Bar's persistent nemesis could end "up getting a citywide zoning change that will legalize stuff like Yonder on every lot."

That's largely what happened. Yonder Bar reopened soon after the bill was introduced. And then, rather amazingly, the Bringing Business Home bill passed by an 8-1 vote.

"This bill removes one of the biggest hurdles for small businesses—commercial rent—and gives them the opportunity to follow their dreams," Yonder Bar owner Caitlin Bramm told me this week. "We started Yonder Bar in our garage, and it allowed us to safely and confidently grow while providing valuable cash flow for our business. We are thrilled to have it back open, and can't wait to see what opportunities this bill opens up for others."

"Our land use code cannot be the barrier to vibrant neighborhoods and a strong economy," Councilmember Strauss said after the bill's passage. "It's essential we meet our businesses where they're at: whether that's out of their homes or garages."

Strauss is right. But given that the legislation is only temporary—it's set to expire in a year—the city council still has work to do to ensure Seattle's government isn't a barrier to the success of small food entrepreneurs.

While many small food producers across Washington State face similar restrictions, there's also a movement currently underway to expand opportunities for home food entrepreneurs throughout the state. A bill to legalize microenterprise home kitchens, which passed in the legislature last month and is now before a key state Senate committee, could turn some home-based cooks "into a legitimate industry, fostering entrepreneurs and lowering the barrier to entry into the food industry."

The bill's sponsor, State Rep. Noel Frame, who also hails from Seattle, explained last month that small entrepreneurs "really want to get into the food business but may face pretty big barriers to do so, particularly cost. This is a pathway of opportunity for them that is slightly lower-barrier."

Frame's bill could help bring in from the cold underground food sellers such a "C.," an anonymous seller I contacted (while researching a 2018 column) through Facebook's Marketplace. I subsequently met C. in a Costco parking lot to buy a few of the delectable tamales her mom cooked to help supplement her income.

Unfortunately, even if Frame's bill passes, it's more likely to leave C. and her mom and thousands of other existing and potential home-food entrepreneurs out in the cold than it is to legalize their work.

That's because, as part of a pilot program detailed in the bill, Washington State's largest county—King County, which includes Seattle—may issue no more than 30 permits during the law's first year. Most other counties could offer only 10 such permits. Other restrictions include a cap on the number of meals a seller may offer each day or week. Also, the bill wouldn't take effect until summer 2022.

These limits have unfortunately become a feature of microenterprise home kitchen laws. California, the first state to adopt such a law, has seen its new policy vacillate between flailing and failing, largely because the state left it up to local governments to opt in to the law.

"While a handful of counties and cities have expressed interest in adopting the law in their own jurisdictions, no California city or county save Riverside County—not one—has adopted the law and drafted rules to implement it," I explained in a column last year on the California law's status, dubbing it "nothing more than a cruel illusion."

Seattle city council members deserve credit for recognizing that laws and regulations often act, as Councilor Strauss noted, as a "barrier to vibrant neighborhoods and a strong economy." Washington State lawmakers deserve credit, too, for recognizing that home-based culinary entrepreneurs want and deserve a path to legitimacy.

But until and unless Seattle's home-business law is made permanent, and Washington State's microenterprise home kitchen bill is strengthened, streamlined, and adopted, Washington State food entrepreneurs will likely remain tangled in red tape.

More progress on the crusade to legalize marijuana:

Yesterday, on the same day that New York became the 16th state to legalize recreational marijuana, legislators in Santa Fe approved a bill that will add New Mexico to that list. The Cannabis Regulation Act passed the state House by a vote of 22–15 and the state Senate by a vote of 38–32 during a special session convened by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who is expected to sign the bill soon.

Who wants to legalize pot?

Residents of states like California want to legalize pot
Residents of states like South Dakota want to legalize pot
Democrats want to legalize pot
Republicans want to legalize pot
Men want to legalize pot
Women want to legalize pot
Whites want to legalize pot
Blacks want to legalize pot
Hispanics want to legalize pot

Who wants to keep pot illegal?

Joe Biden, and his fellow “Silent Americans” (born before 1946).

David Frum has a new piece in The Atlantic, which discusses the GOP’s increasing opposition to free enterprise. These tweets summarize part of his argument:

Meanwhile, the GOP is also moving away from property rights for homeowners that wish to sell their house to developers of multifamily units:

Remember when Republicans used to point with pride to Houston’s lack of zoning, and contrast that with California’s restrictive housing policies?

The GOP has always been awful on the military, social issues, voting rights, etc. Their one saving grace was they were more supportive of free enterprise than the Dems. Now they are even abandoning that ideology. What’s left?

The conservative wing of the House GOP recently put out a report that in the future the party should follow the lead of Trump. Many of you claimed that Trump was discredited after January 6. I still expect him to be the GOP nominee in 2024. Who’s going to beat him?

BTW, John Boehner says the rot began before Trump, indeed with the GOP class of 2010.

HT: Matt Yglesias

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Want to visit Iceland without ever getting on an airplane?

If you’re within driving distance of Boston, a new cruise itinerary from Holland America will let you do it.

The Seattle-based cruise line has announced plans for a new, 24-day voyage to Iceland out of Boston that will include a complete circumnavigation of the island nation — a first for the line.

For more cruise news, reviews and tips, sign up for TPG’s new cruise newsletter

Scheduled to start on Aug. 3, 2022, the new sailing will take place on one of Holland America’s newest ships, the 2,650-passenger Nieuw Statendam.

The trip will include six calls in Iceland at the ports of Reykjavík, Djúpivogur, Seydisfjörur, Akureyri, Isafjörour and Grundarfjörour.

In addition, on the way to and from Iceland, the ship will make stops at Bar Harbor, Maine; Halifax and Sydney, Nova Scotia; Saint-Pierre, St. John’s, Red Bay, St. Anthony and Corner Brook, Newfoundland; and Qaqortoq (Julianehåb) and Nanortalik (Ilivileq), Greenland.

Circumnavigations of Iceland are a growing trend in the cruise industry, but most such trips begin and end in Iceland or another nearby country such as the U.K. or Norway. It’s unusual for Iceland circumnavigations to begin and end in the U.S.

Iceland circumnavigations are a relatively new phenomenon in the cruise world. While adventure company Zegrahm Expeditions operated a complete circumnavigation of the island by ship as far back as 1999, it wasn’t until 2013 that Iceland circumnavigations began to occur with some regularity.

Lindblad Expeditions and Norwegian cruise company Hurtigruten added Iceland circumnavigations in 2013, and Windstar Cruises began such trips in 2016. Ponant and Adventure Canada also have added Iceland circumnavigations since 2018.

In addition to sailing to Iceland out of Boston in 2022, Holland America has announced that Nieuw Statendam will operate a series of six- to eight-day “Canada & New England Discovery” voyages in 2022 between Boston and Québec City, with weekend departures. Port calls will include Bar Harbor, Charlottetown, Sydney and Halifax. The eight-day sailings add Saint John, New Brunswick.

Holland America also has said Nieuw Statendam would operate longer “Newfoundland & New England Discovery” cruises between Boston and Québec City. Ports on a 10-day itinerary include Baie-Comeau and Havre-Saint-Pierre, Québec; and Corner Brook, St. Anthony, St. John’s, Halifax and Bar Harbor. An even longer 11-day departure brings calls at Portland, Maine; Saguenay, Québec; and Saint John, Halifax, Corner Brook, Charlottetown and Baie-Comeau.

Planning a cruise? Start with these stories:

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Featured image of courtesy of Holland America.

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The New York Times reported last week that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer discouraged the Federal Emergency Management Administration from rolling out new policies that would ensure coastal landowners pay risk-related flood insurance premiums. This policy change would have been particularly worthwhile given the threat of climate change and would have helped address concerns that the federal government is subsidizing construction in harm's way. But apparently it would also have increased insurance rates for a small percentage of affected property owners with outsized political influence, so Senator Schumer swung into action.

From the NYT report:

Senator Schumer objected to the flood-insurance overhaul when it was first announced in 2019, citing its potential to raise costs for people on Long Island. The new system would mean steeper rates for some high-value homes, and the southern shore of Long Island includes the Hamptons, which have some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

Senator Schumer's office told FEMA that the new rates could have a "severe impact" on some communities in New York, according to a person familiar with the conversation. . . .

As detailed in the NYT story, the policy change would actually save money for some homeowners, but would also have a significant effect on a small percentage of "higher-cost homes" in places like the Hamptons. In other words, Senator Schumer seems to oppose those climate policies that might impose greater costs on the rich.

Under the new approach, 23 percent of households with flood insurance would see their rates fall right away, by an average of $86 a month, according to data provided by FEMA, because the updated formula shows they have been overpaying based on their risk. Another 73 percent would see either no change or an increase of no more than $20 a month.

But for some of the remaining households, costs would go up significantly, according to others briefed on the changes.

Congress prevents FEMA from increasing a household's flood insurance premiums by more than 18 percent a year. Under the new system, some households would face that maximum annual increase for 10 years or more. As a result, their rates could increase at least fivefold over that time.

Those big rate increases would mostly apply to higher-cost homes, which under the current formula tend to underpay for insurance. Many of the people that would see a decrease live in lower-cost homes.

Senatorial hypocrisy on flood insurance and climate change is nothing new. Back in 2014, most members of the Senate Climate Caucus voted to gut changes to the National Flood Insurance Program that would have reduced subsidies for coastal development.

Climate change is a serious problem, but it's hard to take politicians seriously on the issue when they behave like this.

[warning: boring inside baseball post]

From The Hypothesis: Here's Why Substack's Scam Worked So Well. It summarizes a common Twitter argument that Substack is doing something sinister by offering some writers big advances. The sinister thing differs depending on who's making the argument - in this case, it's making people think they could organically make lots of money on Substack (because they see other writers doing the same) when really the big money comes from Substack paying a pre-selected group money directly. Other people have said it's Substack exercising editorial policy to attract a certain type of person to their site, usually coupled with the theory that the people they choose are problematic.

I'm one of the writers Substack paid, which gives me some extra information on how this went down. Here's a stylized interpretation of the email conversation that got it started:

SUBSTACK: You should join our new blogging thing!

ME: No.

SUBSTACK: It's really good!

ME: No.

SUBSTACK: You can make lots of money!

ME: No.

SUBSTACK: Like, X amount of money (where X is very large, much larger than I would have thought possible).

ME: No I can't, you're lying.

SUBSTACK: No, we're serious, we've gotten good at making these kinds of predictions, and we really think you can make X.

ME: I wasn't born yesterday and I refuse to believe you.

SUBSTACK: Okay, we'll put our money where our mouth is. We're so sure you can make X that we'll sign a contract promising to give you an advance of Y% of X (where Y% of X is still a very very large number) your first year, in exchange for Y% of your subscription revenues (but not all, because then people who want to support you would have no incentive to subscribe). After the first year, you’ll go back to our normal payment scheme, and if it’s not as much as you want, you can quit.

ME: Give me a second to talk to some smart people to figure out how you could be scamming me...huh, none of them can think of a way this could be a scam. Fine, I'll join.

That's the shot. The chaser is - as I write this, my organic subscriber-generated revenue is very slightly more than X. I lost money by taking the deal! This is in no way a complaint - I'm making much more than I thought possible, much more than I conceivably deserve for writing online articles, it would be ridiculous to complain, and Substack deserves the extra money for the work they put in overcoming my skepticism.

Matt Yglesias, another writer who took the same deal, says the same thing. He says that if he hadn't taken Substack's advance, he’d be making $775,000, but as it is, he'll only keep $380,000 this year. Again, these are all huge numbers, Yglesias has no right to complain, and AFAIK he isn't complaining. But it suggests that I'm not a one-off. I can imagine Yglesias having the same conversation with Substack management. They say "You could make more than $250K!" Yglesias says "Haha no you're lying". They say "We're so sure of this that we'll offer you a fixed payment of that much plus a little extra your first year." Then Yglesias says yes and ends up making even more, and Substack goes on to offer the same terms to lots of other people including me.

[update: Yglesias confirms this is what happened, Taibbi says that “everyone he knows” would have made more money not taking the advance]

At least for Yglesias and me, I don't see any reason to attribute sinister motives to Substack. We didn't believe Substack's estimates of how much money we could make. They made their projections more credible and skin-in-the-game-y by offering an advance. We took it, and they increased their market share plus made a lot of money. Usually if a for-profit company uses a strategy, and it ends with them increasing their market share and making a lot of money, it's safe to assume that was what they were going for.

I don't know anyone's stories except Yglesias' and my own, so maybe they're doing something else with other people. But there's no particular evidence to make me think that; the two of us seem like pretty typical cases, and you can see why Substack would stick with the strategy.

[edit: some people suggest I mention I had a blog with tens of thousands of readers, built up over a ten-year period, before I joined Substack. My experience will not generalize and most people won’t make lots of money Substacking.]

The San Francisco–based company Just Eat grows cultivated chicken nuggets in vats from real chicken muscle and fat cells; you can buy them at restaurants in Singapore. The Israeli startup Aleph Farms recently unveiled its lab-grown ribeye steak. These nuggets and steaks are just the beginning, according to a new life cycle analysis by researchers at the Dutch consultancy CE Delft.

The report seeks to project how the cultivated meat industry will evolve over the coming decade. It specifically focuses on comparing the costs and environmental footprints of conventional and cultivated beef production.

By 2030, the Dutch researchers project, the costs to produce a kilogram of cultivated hamburger will fall to $5.66, which compares favorably with the current wholesale price of  90 percent lean ground beef at $6.20 per kilogram. They also expect cultivated meats to use much less water, land, and nutrients than conventional livestock production, and to emit considerably less greenhouse gas too. Assuming a 30 percent renewable energy use, the overall environmental impact of cultivated beef in 2030 will be about 90 percent lower than for conventional beef, they conclude. For example, cultivated beef is projected to produce 93 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions and to use 95 percent less land for nutrient production.

Meanwhile, animal-free dairy production is moving forward. For example, Perfect Day Foods uses fungi to ferment plant nutrients into proteins identical to the ones found in conventional milk. These proteins can be blended with other ingredients to produce liquid milk, ice cream, yogurt, and cheeses. Perfect Day says its milk proteins are already 40 percent cheaper than those from conventional cow milk. It also releases 80 percent less greenhouse gas emission, and it uses 98 percent less water and almost no land.

Right now, 50 percent of the world's 104 million square kilometers of habitable land is used for agricultural production. Of that land, 77 percent (44 million square kilometers) is used for livestock and dairy production. If cultivated beef and fermented dairy replaced just half the meat and milk the world's people eat and drink, an area nearly the size of North America could be allowed to revert to nature.

Some are embracing quarantine head-shaving and becoming comfortable with the bald truth.

Colin Ward tried to tell himself he loved wearing hats. But the truth was his hair had started to disappear. Like many 31-year-olds stuck with inconvenient genes, his from-the-back combover was dredging up diminishing returns as the years went on. That was no secret to anyone in his life, but Ward was determined to fight this battle to the end. As far as he was concerned, denial was superior to the bare-naked alternative. It would take something dramatic to shake him out of the pattern.

“I would just try to hide it. Really, I ignored the problem,” says Ward. “Until last spring.”

Ward lives in Winnipeg, and like the rest of Canada, the city locked down all nonessential businesses in mid-March 2020 when the pandemic hit. Suddenly, Ward found himself extremely bored, absurdly isolated, and, yes, thinning out a little bit more with each passing day.

As Covid-19 escalated into a crisis and it became clear that society would be on hold for a shocking length of time, Ward noticed an emerging trend on Instagram and Reddit. All over the world, the follicularly challenged were arming themselves with a pair of clippers and freeing their scalp, once and for all. Ward was struck by a crucial realization: Finally, he had the chance to shave it all without any social implications or uncomfortable public reveals. As it turns out, being stuck at home while bald and being stuck at home with a full head of hair are remarkably similar experiences.

“I was like, ‘I’m just sitting around. I’m on Zoom calls all day. If I’m at home and not seeing anyone, what better time to test it out and see if I like it?’” says Ward. “If I hated it, I could grow it back.”

Colin Ward

Ward attached a guard to his clippers and took a few passes over his head. On his wrist, his smartwatch showed his heart rate was spiking. Invigorated, he removed the guard and went to town, scrapping what was left of his hair into a heap on the floor. That strained combover would never be seen again. He liked the new look instantly and received rave reviews from his partner, his family, and his friends. Ward posted before-and-after photos to r/Bald, Reddit’s foremost hair loss support forum, writing, “Quarantine life got to me, and I decided to go for it.” His fellow Redditors commended his new look (“OMG dude, you look fantastic!” “I’m jealous af”). Like many of the other posters on the forum, the difference is night and day.

The r/Bald community has always provided solidarity to anyone struggling with hair loss, but over the last year, it’s been filled with stories authored by people just like Ward. They’ve watched their tresses disappear for years, and were happy to kick the can down the road indefinitely. But the seismic impact of Covid-19 allowed them the time and space to reconsider their hairlines. A few minutes in front of the mirror with a razor and they’re free.

“The subreddit was just flooded with transformation photos, and in every single one of them I saw they looked better after they shaved it off,” Ward says. “It made me think, ‘Why hold on to a lost cause?’” Ward saw how great people on the subreddit felt and wanted to feel that way about himself.

It is hard to say exactly how many people used quarantine to ditch their hair. In early 2020, as we were still getting accustomed to our new lives, a number of prominent celebrities embraced buzz-cut season. Most of them weren’t balding; they had just grown increasingly annoyed by the moratorium on barbershops. (Ward mentions, though, that the critical mass of everyone going hairless — regardless of the relative thickness or thinness of their mane — was certainly something he noticed.) Last April, The Cut reached out to 17 people who shaved their heads for quarantine, and GQ published a step-by-step guide to a DIY scalp shave. If nothing else, the pandemic has made the hair-free lifestyle pretty chic.

Gershen Kaufman, a former professor of psychology at Michigan State University and someone who has dedicated his life to studying the relationship between shame and body image, believes that the pandemic’s disruption provoked an opportunity for lasting personal change. The beauty industry has made a lot of money rejecting the inevitability of hair loss. There are creams, balms, and laser-powered incubation caps, all of which promise to keep your hair exactly where it is, with varying results. But with trips to the pharmacy off the table and a lot fewer reasons to groom, Kaufman argues that the balding population was then offered a much simpler question: Do you really want to keep this up? Many concluded that they didn’t, and were pleased with what they found afterward.

“I think the pandemic has helped fuel this trend because people have not been attending their usual hair-grooming practices. They have to try something,” says Kaufman. “Once they embrace baldness, they realize that it isn’t so bad. They understand that they can live life this way and feel good about themselves.”

That’s easier said than done. Not everyone owned their new look as sweatlessly as Ward. Josh Rich in Austin, Texas, says he shaved his head as reluctantly as possible. Rich, 39, never liked his hair in the first place. He describes himself as one of those kids who always had hair, but never much of a hairstyle. It was stubbornly curly, always a bit of a mess, and had only grown more unwieldy once it started to disappear. Rich entered the pandemic overdue for a barber’s appointment. There was only one way out.

Still, the idea of shaving it all off — even after reading the success stories on r/Bald — was a hard pill to swallow.

“My wife did it for me. I couldn’t do it myself. I just couldn’t do it,” says Rich. “I had my eyes closed and I just said, ‘Do your best, and we’ll see what it looks like.’”

Rich did not have the kind of joyous experience described by those on the Reddit support group. Instead, he says he had a hard time looking at himself in the mirror for a few days after the purge. He couldn’t quite recognize himself; he was mourning the unkemptness of his adolescent years. (His wife also initially offered a middling reception.) But within a couple weeks, Rich began to fall in love with his new silhouette.

“I was like, ‘This is where it’s at.’ It was so nice to not mess with it on a daily basis. There were some mornings when I was getting ready for work and I was styling my hair to cover everything up,” he says. “I would spend 15 minutes some mornings just trying to fix my hair.”

Rich believes that the pandemic has unleashed chaos into the air. It seems like everyone has intermittently lost their marbles over the last 12 months. He compares his decision to embrace baldness to the many women who dyed their hair pastel hues or cut their own bangs last summer. After all, these grooming choices are born out of plague-ridden thinking — there is little chance of aesthetic backlash or career fallout while living life perpetually indoors.

Frankly, risking it all on a wild new style is one of the strange ways we cope with the manifold tragedies of the pandemic. All of us want proof that we didn’t waste one of our precious few years on the planet staring at the ceiling, accomplishing precisely nothing. So we can approach the anniversary of the stay-at-home orders knowing we tried something new, at least with our hair.

“It caused a lot of people to do things they wouldn’t normally do,” Rich says. “That’s exactly what I told my wife. ‘I don’t know if this is a phase I’m in, but it feels right, right now.’”

Both Rich and Ward have almost logged a full year as proud bald men. This is no longer a test run for either of them. They’ve been blessed with a year to become accustomed to this new phase of their lives, as proud, young bald dudes. They never had to face the humiliation or self-consciousness of walking into a bar as a newly bald person. Instead, all of the growing pains were left in the doldrums of 2020. The lingering apprehension is nowhere to be found. Rich and Ward are leaving the pandemic as different people. The quarantine buzz cut has become permanent.

“I am now fully adjusted. At first it’s not like I hated the look, I thought it looked good, but I was not used to myself. Now, it feels weird to leave it more than a couple days without shaving it,” says Ward. “This is just me, this is how I look, and I’ve come to love it.”

The United States’ newest airline is closer than ever to taking off.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation approved an application for Breeze, a new airline led by JetBlue founder David Neeleman, to begin flying.

The approval, which grants Breeze Aviation Group a formal “Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity for Interstate Air Transportation,” gives Breeze one year to begin flying passengers with up to 22 aircraft, although the airline can apply for permission to increase its fleet size.

New airlines must receive economic authority to begin operations from the DOT, as well as separate safety authority from the Federal Aviation Administration, before it can begin selling flights.

While the timing — with the COVID-19 pandemic still well underway — may seem suboptimal to launch a new airline, most industry observers expect a boom in U.S. domestic travel in the second half of 2020 as the new vaccines continue to roll out, and pent up travel demand is unleashed.

More: JetBlue founder’s new airline Breeze delays launch to 2021

Neeleman — who also founded Brazilian airline Azul and was previously a co-owner of TAP Portugal — has previously said that Breeze would focus on point-to-point flights in underserved markets, eschewing the hub-and-spoke model of most major airlines. Breeze also plans to differentiate itself by functioning as a low-cost carrier.

“We’re looking at 500 city pairs,” Neeleman said in 2020, when the airline’s name was announced. “We only need about 50 people on board to cover the operating cost of the airplane. We don’t really have to be in big markets.”

Want more airline-specific news? Sign up for TPG’s free new biweekly Aviation newsletter!

Breeze plans to reduce costs and expedite its launch by initially leasing 118-seat Embraer E195 jets from Azul. The airline is also in agreement to purchase 60 new Airbus A220-300 jets, which can hold up to 160 passengers. Deliveries were expected to begin in April — it was not immediately clear whether this timeline has been impacted by the pandemic.

The airline will be headquartered in Connecticut, but will locate its operations center in Salt Lake City, according to The Associated Press. Although routes have not been announced, the airline is expected to introduce service along the East Coast.

A representative for the airline told TPG that, pending final certification from the FAA, the airline expects to share its finalized launch plans in the coming weeks.

Featured image courtesy of Breeze Airways.

The Biden administration on Monday announced it would grant temporary protected status to Venezuelan exiles, fulfilling a campaign promise to allow them to live and work legally in the U.S.

The TPS designation offers legal protections for 18 months to Venezuelans fleeing the humanitarian crisis brought on by Nicolás Maduro’s government. It comes after years of Democrats and Florida Republicans pushing for granting TPS to Venezuelans, while former President Donald Trump declined to do so and, instead, secretly deported Venezuelans despite safety concerns.

However, Trump, on his last day in office, used executive power to shield Venezuelans from deportation through the Deferred Enforced Departure program, or DED. Still, Venezuelans have remained in limbo during the first weeks of the Biden administration as officials opted not to open applications for DED and took steps to announce the TPS designation.

“It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crises," Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement.

The designation will be in place until September 2022. Venezuelan nationals already in the U.S. must apply during a 180-day registration period and meet certain eligibility requirements to be shielded from deportation and receive work permits.

Democrats and Florida Republicans were quick to welcome the Biden administration’s move to offer relief to eligible Venezuelans as the country remains in crisis.

“In standing with the Venezuelan people, we are striking a blow to the Maduro regime, which has for years deprived its own citizens of education, healthcare, basic freedoms, and even food,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), who has led multiple efforts to secure TPS for Venezuelans, said in a video statement. “And we are sending a powerful signal to allies and competitors that the United States is once again committed to the cause of democracy.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a longtime supporter of allowing Venezuelans to live and work legally in the U.S., reminded that Trump had first offered Venezuelans protection and said he was “glad the Biden administration shares that commitment.”

Last month, Colombia also granted temporary legal status to nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants in the South American neighboring country.

Extending the status to Venezuelans would protect about 200,000 Venezuelan citizens in the U.S. from deportation, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

TPS is used to protect immigrants who come from countries devastated by natural disasters or armed conflict. It’s the same temporary legal status the Trump administration announced it would phase out in 2018 for more than 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Honduras, Sudan and Nepal over the next few years. Under Biden’s immigration plan, which faces an uphill battle on Capitol Hill, TPS recipients would be eligible for automatic green cards.

The Biden administration’s plan was first reported by The Los Angeles Times.

On January 15, in its last days, President Donald Trump’s State Department put out a statement with serious claims about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. The statement said the U.S. intelligence community had evidence that several researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory were sick with Covid-like symptoms in autumn 2019—implying the Chinese government had hidden crucial information about the outbreak for months—and that the WIV lab, despite “presenting itself as a civilian institution,” was conducting secret research projects with the Chinese military. The State Department alleged a Chinese government cover-up and asserted that “Beijing continues today to withhold vital information that scientists need to protect the world from this deadly virus, and the next one.”

The exact origin of the new coronavirus remains a mystery to this day, but the search for answers is not just about assigning blame. Unless the source is located, the true path of the virus can’t be traced, and scientists can’t properly study the best ways to prevent future outbreaks.

The original Chinese government story, that the pandemic spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, was the first and therefore most widely accepted theory. But cracks in that theory slowly emerged throughout the late winter and spring of 2020. The first known case of Covid-19 in Wuhan, it was revealed in February, had no connection to the market. The Chinese government closed the market in January and sanitized it before proper samples could be taken. It wouldn’t be until May that the Chinese Centers for Disease Control disavowed the market theory, admitting it had no idea how the outbreak began, but by then it had become the story of record, in China and internationally.

In the spring of 2020, inside the U.S. government, some officials began to see and collect evidence of a different, perhaps more troubling theory—that the outbreak had a connection to one of the laboratories in Wuhan, among them the WIV, a world leading center of research on bat coronaviruses.

To some inside the government, the name of the laboratory was familiar. Its research on bat viruses had already drawn the attention of U.S. diplomats and officials at the Beijing Embassy in late 2017, prompting them to alert Washington that the lab’s own scientists had reported “a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”

But their cables to Washington were ignored.

When I published the warnings from these cables in April 2020, they added fuel to a debate that had already gone from a scientific and forensic question to a hot-button political issue, as the previously internal U.S. government debate over the lab’s possible connection spilled into public view. The next day, Trump said he was “investigating,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on Beijing to “come clean” about the origin of the outbreak. Two weeks later, Pompeo said there was “enormous evidence” pointing to the lab, but he didn’t provide any of said evidence. As Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping's relationship unraveled and administration officials openly blamed the Wuhan lab, the U.S.-China relationship only went further downhill.

As the pandemic set in worldwide, the origin story was largely set aside in the public coverage of the crisis. But the internal government debate continued, now over whether the United States should release more information about what it knew about the lab and its possible connection to the outbreak. The January 15 statement was cleared by the intelligence community, but the underlying data was still held secret. Likely changing no minds, it was meant as a signal—showing that circumstantial evidence did exist, and that the theory deserved further investigation.

Now, the new Joe Biden team is walking a tightrope, calling on Beijing to release more data, while declining to endorse or dispute the Trump administration’s controversial claims. The origin story remains entangled both in domestic politics and U.S.-China relations. Last month, National security adviser Jake Sullivan issued a statement expressing “deep concerns” about a forthcoming report from a team assembled by the World Health Organization that toured Wuhan—even visiting the lab—but was denied crucial data by the Chinese authorities.

But more than four years ago, long before this question blew up into an international point of tension between China and the United States, the story started with a simple warning.

***

In late 2017, top health and science officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing attended a conference in the Chinese capital. There, they saw a presentation on a new study put out by a group of Chinese scientists, including several from the Wuhan lab, in conjunction with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Since the 2002 outbreak of SARS—the deadly disease caused by a coronavirus transmitted by bats in China—scientists around the world had been looking for ways to predict and limit future outbreaks of similar diseases. To aid the effort, the NIH had funded a number of projects that involved the WIV scientists, including much of the Wuhan lab’s work with bat coronaviruses. The new study was entitled “Discovery of a Rich Gene Pool of Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses Provides New Insights into the Origin of SARS Coronavirus.”

These researchers, the American officials learned, had found a population of bats from caves in Yunnan province that gave them insight into how SARS coronaviruses originated and spread. The researchers boasted that they may have found the cave where the original SARS coronavirus originated. But all the U.S. diplomats cared about was that these scientists had discovered three new viruses that had a unique characteristic: they contained a "spike protein” that was particularly good at grabbing on to a specific receptor in human lung cells known as an ACE2 receptor. That means the viruses were potentially very dangerous for humans—and that these viruses were now in a lab with which they, the U.S. diplomats, were largely unfamiliar.

Knowing the significance of the Wuhan virologists’ discovery, and knowing that the WIV’s top-level biosafety laboratory (BSL-4) was relatively new, the U.S. Embassy health and science officials in Beijing decided to go to Wuhan and check it out. In total, the embassy sent three teams of experts in late 2017 and early 2018 to meet with the WIV scientists, among them Shi Zhengli, often referred to as the “bat woman” because of her extensive experience studying coronaviruses found in bats.

When they sat down with the scientists at the WIV, the American diplomats were shocked by what they heard. The Chinese researchers told them they didn’t have enough properly trained technicians to safely operate their BSL-4 lab. The Wuhan scientists were asking for more support to get the lab up to top standards.

The diplomats wrote two cables to Washington reporting on their visits to the Wuhan lab. More should be done to help the lab meet top safety standards, they said, and they urged Washington to get on it. They also warned that the WIV researchers had found new bat coronaviruses could easily infect human cells, and which used the same cellular route that had been used by the original SARS coronavirus.

Taken together, those two points—a particularly dangerous groups of viruses being studied in a lab with real safety problems—were intended as a warning about a potential public-health crisis, one of the cable writers told me. They kept the cables unclassified because they wanted more people back home to be able to read and share them, according to the cable writer. But there was no response from State Department headquarters and they were never made public. And as U.S.-China tensions rose over the course of 2018, American diplomats lost access to labs such as the one at the WIV.

“The cable was a warning shot,” one U.S. official said. “They were begging people to pay attention to what was going on.” The world would be paying attention soon enough—but by then, it would be too late.

The cables were not leaked to me by any Trump administration political official, as many in the media wrongly assumed. In fact, Secretary of State Pompeo was angry when he found out about the leak. He needed to keep up the veneer of good relations with China, and these revelations would make that job more difficult. Trump and President Xi had agreed during their March 26 phone call to halt the war of words that had erupted when a Chinese diplomat alleged on Twitter that the outbreak might have been caused by the U.S. Army. That had prompted Trump to start calling it the “China virus,” deliberately blaming Beijing in a racist way. Xi had warned Trump in that call that China’s level of cooperation on releasing critical equipment in America’s darkest moment would be jeopardized by continued accusations.

After receiving the cables from a source, I called around to get reactions from other American officials I trusted. What I found was that, just months into the pandemic, a large swath of the government already believed the virus had escaped from the WIV lab, rather than having leaped from an animal to a human at the Wuhan seafood market or some other random natural setting, as the Chinese government had claimed.

Any theory of the pandemic’s origins had to account for the fact that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus—or, by its official name, SARS-CoV-2—first appeared in Wuhan, on the doorstep of the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2, a virus known as RaTG13 that Shi identified in her lab.

Shi, in her March interview, said that when she was first told about the virus outbreak in her town, she thought the officials had gotten it wrong, because she would have guessed that such a virus would break out in southern China, where most of the bats live. “I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” she said.

By April, U.S. officials at the NSC and the State Department had begun to compile circumstantial evidence that the WIV lab, rather than the seafood market, was actually the source of the virus. The former explanation for the outbreak was entirely plausible, they felt, whereas the latter would be an extreme coincidence. But the officials couldn’t say that out loud because there wasn’t firm proof either way. And if the U.S. government accused China of lying about the outbreak without firm evidence, Beijing would surely escalate tensions even more, which meant that Americans might not get the medical supplies that were desperately needed to combat the rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the United States.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton seemed not to have been concerned about any of those considerations. On February 16, he had offered a totally unfounded theory of his own, claiming on Fox News that the virus might have come from China’s biowarfare program—suggesting, in other words, that it had been engineered deliberately to kill humans. This wasn’t supported by any known research: To this day, scientists largely agree that the virus was not “engineered” to be deadly; SARS-CoV-2 showed no evidence of direct genetic manipulation. Furthermore, the WIV lab had published some of its research about bat coronaviruses that can infect humans—not exactly the level of secrecy you would expect for a clandestine weapons program.

As Cotton’s speculation vaulted the origin story into the news in an incendiary new way, he undermined the ongoing effort in other parts of the U.S. government to pinpoint the exact origins and nature of the coronavirus pandemic. From then on, journalists and politicians alike would conflate the false idea of the coronavirus being a Chinese bioweapon with the plausible idea that the virus had accidentally been released from the WIV lab, making it a far more politically loaded question to pursue.

***

After I published a Washington Post column on the Wuhan cables on April 14, Pompeo publicly called on Beijing to “come clean” about the origin of the outbreak and weeks later declared there was “enormous evidence” to that effect beyond the Wuhan cables themselves. But he refused to produce any other proof.

At the same time, some members of the intelligence community leaked to my colleagues that they had discovered “no firm evidence” that the outbreak originated in the lab. That was true in a sense. Deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger had asked the intelligence community to look for evidence of all possible scenarios for the outbreak, including the market or a lab accident, but they hadn’t found any firm links to either. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There was a gap in the intelligence. And the intelligence community didn’t know either way.

Large parts of the scientific community also decried my report, pointing to the fact that natural spillovers have been the cause of other viral outbreaks, and that they were the culprit more often than accidents. But many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the lab were Shi’s research partners and funders, like the head of the global public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak; their research was tied to hers, and if the Wuhan lab were implicated in the pandemic, they would have to answer a lot of tough questions.

Likewise, the American scientists who knew and worked with Shi could not say for sure her lab was unconnected to the outbreak, because there’s no way they could know exactly what the WIV lab was doing outside their cooperative projects. Beijing threatened Australia and the EU for even suggesting an independent investigation into the origins of the virus.

In May, Chinese CDC officials declared on Chinese state media that they had ruled out the possibility that the seafood market was the origin of the virus, completely abandoning the original official story. As for the “bat woman” herself, Shi didn’t think the lab accident theory was so crazy. In her March interview, she described frantically searching her own lab’s records after learning of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. “Could they have come from our lab?” she recalled asking herself.

Shi said she was relieved when she didn’t find the new coronavirus in her files. “That really took a load off my mind,” she said. “I had not slept a wink in days.” Of course, if she had found the virus, she likely would not have been able to admit it, given that the Chinese government was going around the world insisting the lab had not been involved in the outbreak.

***

A key argument of those Chinese and American scientists disputing the lab accident theory is that Chinese researchers had performed their work out in the open and had disclosed the coronavirus research they were performing. This argument was used to attack anyone who didn’t believe the Chinese scientists’ firm denials their labs could possibly have been responsible for the outbreak.

But one senior administration official told me that many officials in various parts of the U.S. government, especially the NSC and the State Department, came to believe that these researchers had not been as forthcoming as had been claimed.

What they were worried about was something called “gain-of-function” research, in which the virulence or transmissibility of dangerous pathogens is deliberately increased. The purpose is to help scientists predict how viruses might evolve in ways that hurt humans before it happens in nature. But by bypassing pathogens’ natural evolutionary cycles, these experiments create risks of a human-made outbreak if a lab accident were to occur. For this reason, the Obama administration issued a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments in October 2014.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions. But the official told me the U.S. government had evidence that Chinese labs were performing gain-of-function research on a much larger scale than was publicly disclosed, meaning they were taking more risks in more labs than anyone outside China was aware of. This insight, in turn, fed into the lab-accident hypothesis in a new and troubling way.

A little-noticed study was released in early July 2020 by a group of Chinese researchers in Beijing, including several affiliated with the Academy of Military Medical Science. These scientists said they had created a new model for studying SARS-CoV-2 by creating mice with human-like lung characteristics by using the CRISPR gene-editing technology to give the mice lung cells with the human ACE2 receptor — the cell receptor that allowed coronaviruses to so easily infect human lungs.

After consultations with experts, some U.S. officials came to believe this Beijing lab was likely conducting coronavirus experiments on mice fitted with ACE2 receptors well before the coronavirus outbreak—research they hadn’t disclosed and continued not to admit to. In its January 15 statement, the State Department alleged that although the Wuhan Institute of Virology disclosed some of its participation in gain-of-function research, it has not disclosed its work on RaTG13 and “has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.” That, by itself, did not help to explain how SARS-CoV-2 originated. But it was clear that officials believed there was a lot of risky coronavirus research going on in Chinese labs that the rest of the world was simply not aware of.

“This was just a peek under a curtain of an entire galaxy of activity, including labs and military labs in Beijing and Wuhan playing around with coronaviruses in ACE2 mice in unsafe labs,” the senior administration official said. “It suggests we are getting a peek at a body of activity that isn’t understood in the West or even has precedent here.”

This pattern of deception and obfuscation, combined with the new revelations about how Chinese labs were handling dangerous coronaviruses in ways their Western counterparts didn’t know about, led some U.S. officials to become increasingly convinced that Chinese authorities were manipulating scientific information to fit their narrative. But there was so little transparency, it was impossible for the U.S. government to prove, one way or the other. “If there was a smoking gun, the CCP [Communist Party of China] buried it along with anyone who would dare speak up about it,” one U.S. official told me. “We’ll probably never be able to prove it one way or the other, which was Beijing’s goal all along.”

Back in 2017, the U.S. diplomats who had visited the lab in Wuhan had foreseen these very events, but nobody had listened and nothing had been done. “We were trying to warn that that lab was a serious danger,” one of the cable writers who had visited the lab told me. “I have to admit, I thought it would be maybe a SARS-like outbreak again. If I knew it would turn out to be the greatest pandemic in human history, I would have made a bigger stink about it.”

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