I wouldn't be surprised to learn that a vaccine maker is doing research on the virus and what all that entails. What would strike me as "tinfoil crazy uncle" stuff would be if he had said they had plans to release new viruses in order to sell vaccines. But who knows - the profit incentive can drive all sorts of innovation - especially in medicine where the stakes are life and death.
Here is their agenda in their own words:
"Project Veritas journalists working undercover on their own or by, with and through idealistic insiders bring to the American people the corrupt private truths hidden behind the walls of their institutions."
That's classical investigative journalism. But given this mission statement it's pretty obvious why the left thinks they're being targeted: they managed to take over practically all powerful institutions, including media institutions that would once have held up Veritas style reporting proudly and given it awards. How many important American institutions are run by "powerful right wing figures", exactly? Maybe a handful at most? Now how many institutions explicitly and loudly align themselves with the agenda of the left (idpol, Follow The Sciencism etc)? It's uncountably more. Just given the sheer quantities of captured institutions in question, any Veritas style initiative will inevitably uncover more corruption on the left simply because that's where the power actually is.
He didn't say they plan to release new viruses, obviously none of the idiot scientists in this whole sorry saga actually intend to release the viruses they make. What we do know is they seem to delight in using vaccine development as the justification for fiddling with dangerous viruses, even though there's no clear link between the work Wuhan was doing and later vaccine development, that they much prefer doing dangerous work in very low safety conditions because the higher BSL levels are tedious and get in the way, and we also know that they'd rather engage in coverups than admit the possibility that a virus escaped from their own labs.
That's why the executive in the video states clearly that it's a secret, the journalist shouldn't tell anyone, and that the public would hate it if they found out.
Edit: reading a bit more, they say that their biggest scoop ever was an ABC News anchor saying she had the Epstein story and killed it due to pressure from the British Royal Family. So their top hit is actually one that attacks what is arguably the most conservative institution in Britain! It doesn't really get more "powerful right wing figure" than the Queen, yet Veritas didn't hesitate to reveal their machinations. So this far right claim is clearly just a smear.
Are Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell on the right? I would think their success in re-shaping our federal judiciary where laws are actually made. I have not heard of these institutions like follow the sciencism or anything like that, although I will trust your characterization of them as being of the left, I haven’t noticed any influence on my local laws, but as a resident of Southern Texas, I have certainly noticed the right wing influence on local laws, most notably the medical procedures that the women around me are legally allowed to undergo.
I suspect that your example would more be seen as an investigation into ABC (and likely used as an avatar for the “mainstream media”) by the people carrying it out.
Nymag actually had an interesting article on Project Veritas recently that you may want to peruse. Apparently they were after Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary but it caused them some issues. That said, it sounded like they already had some problems brewing before then.
"I suspect that if they could abolish all government and install themselves as permanent monarchs, they would see it as a reasonable start"
We are likely talking at cross purposes then because that's the exact opposite of what I consider right wing. Abolishing democracy and becoming dictator for life is something associated with hard left revolutionaries. Stalin, Mao, North Korea that sort of thing. To me right wing means pro market, pro capitalist, pro democracy, small government, it's all about decentralization of power. Libertarian stuff. If they'd really want to abolish government and take over they'd be the pastiche of WEF-attending elitist globalists, surely.
"Are Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell on the right?"
Maybe? I don't think Trump had politics clearly aligned with any party. He used to be a Democrat and sort of took over the GOP from the outside didn't he. Plenty of never trumpers who were also Republicans. Don't know anything about McConnell, not from the USA, that's too detailed for my knowledge.
Flicking through their results pages, there's one investigation they did into poor conditions in border detention centers. Isn't that normally a topic for the left in the US? I thought the US right normally just want more border enforcement and don't care much about how illegal immigrants are treated.
Despite the group's self description, Veritas are not (only?) journalists, they are also a political spying operation.
But don't trust me on that -- instead review the submitted evidence that convinced the DC Circuit Court to permit describing the group in those exact terms. Start at page 14 of Democracy Partners v. Veritas (PDF):
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-dcd-1_17-cv-010...
> Defendants make clear that they researched plaintiffs and developed the plan for this operation in response to plaintiffs’ activities related to supposed voter fraud and campaign events, supporting the “political” nature of their conduct
That's pretty nuts, saying that investigating voting fraud is "political". Any police force that enforces ballot laws would then be considered political too? They seem to be using it to mean "something related to politics" instead of the more obvious meaning of politically biased.
They also make a big deal out of some passages from a book O'Keefe wrote where he compares an undercover journalist living out a character to the same strategy as used by Soviet spies. Any undercover investigation could be described as spying in this way.
Doesn't seem very convincing overall? I can think of lots of investigations by big media orgs that could be described exactly the same way. The UK had one called cash for questions some years ago where politicians were recorded accepting bribes. Guess that was also a political spying operation lol.
Just the fact that a Pfizer employee would make a serious comment like that is terrifying and should spark investigations into that lab immediately.
Also, there should be investigations to our pandemic leadership for so heavily insisting that it almost certainly was not a leak - especially after the employee’s comments on regulatory capture.
As far as the whole leak thing goes, I always assumed it was just like every plague since antiquity; not a lab leak or creation (I think one of the problems that that crowd had was differentiating themselves from the whole “tinfoil crazy uncle” thing).
It's an open secret that this is a problem everywhere, not just medical regulation. The revolving door was once an issue that the left campaigned on, in fact, but you don't hear much about it any more. Probably because there's no obvious fix beyond ensuring that pay for regulators keeps up with whatever comp the private sector is willing to offer, which is the sort of solution that's not politically popular on that side of the aisle. Also it's hard. The value of less aggressive regulation to companies like Pfizer is very high. Governments meanwhile are ideologically optimized to hire more people at lower wages, not fewer people at higher wages. The whole culture of pay more to hire the best that you find in places like the tech industry just doesn't happen there, and in the USA there's even a rule limiting pay to be lower than the President (which mysteriously doesn't apply to Fauci, wonder how that one works).
You could also try hacks like laws forbidding regulators from (re)joining the industry they regulate, but that'd just make the job even less attractive and ensure that whoever the government does end up hiring are the industry rejects, who will either have an axe to grind or simply not be able to keep up with the technical issues, making them easy to bamboozle.
There's not really a great solution here, beyond maybe just being realistic about what government regulation is capable of. Private sector regulators is also a possibility. Uber is a taxi regulator of sorts, but a much more effective and innovative one, and one whose staff can't be bought off with the carrot of luxury jobs in the taxi sector.
