Wade also quotes the eminent virologist David Baltimore, the former president of CalTech and discoverer of an enzyme used in all PCR-based COVID tests, as saying:

“When I first saw the furin cleavage site in the viral sequence, with its arginine codons, I said to my wife it was the smoking gun for the origin of the virus… These features make a powerful challenge to the idea of a natural origin for SARS2.”

“It’s true that a lot is still unknown,” Cui said when CBS host Margaret Brennan asked about Cotton’s claims. “But it’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous, to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people. For one thing, this will create panic. Another thing is that it will fan up racial discrimination, xenophobia, all these things that will really harm our joint efforts to combat the virus.”

There are some sane if eccentric people on his site (Sailer, Derbyshire, Karlin) that you can benefit from with a critical eye. There are also some very rude people who are distasteful but do have some factual information worth reading (Kersey). I wouldn’t bother with Unz himself or the rest of them.

What’s interesting about this is as follows:

(1) he’s retired from Congress to cash in;

(2) they only spent two years in Congress together; the two do not have some sort of longstanding association.

(3) before he was elected to Congress, Ryan was a low level NGO apparatchik (an employee of one of the ancestors of FreedomWorks, I believe). He has the skills to be a fitness trainer, but the only employment history he’s had outside of political life (and things derived from political connections) consists of part-time and seasonal work of the sort you have as a student. Greater Washington has been his home address since 1993. Cheney has called Washington home for all but 10 of her 54 years, she has minimal employment history anywhere else, her husband’s law office is located in Washington, and the notional residency she and her husband and her daughter maintain in Wyoming is a resort property in the northwest corner of the state.

(4) IIRC, Ryan was a protegé of Jack Kemp and William J Bennett back in the day. I don’t think he had a particular association with the Cheneys (more likely mama than papa if that).

(5) You might as well ask donors to withdraw stacks of benjamins from their bank accounts to use as fodder for a beach bonfire. Jeb! was a better speculative investment.

As always with NeverTrump capers, you have to ask yourself what the 10th planet is here.