The AfD wants Germany to distance relations with Europe and the United States while getting closer to Russia and China. This is weird for a party that claims to want Germany first and to focus on distinct German culture and values. Shouldn’t authoritarian Asiatic empires be the opposite of German values and culture? And don’t other European countries and the US have much closer values and culture? Long-term, and worst case scenarios, China and Russia are empires that would force the world under their authoritarian heel if they could. Despite America’s many flaws and self-interests, its goals are freedom, trade, and defense. True imperialism is antithetical to its ethos. When the AfD says German values, it seems to mean no immigrants and: imperial, anti-enlightenment, anti-Western, and fundamentally unChristian values.
Egypt is allowing China to test their planes against Western fighters. This makes China better able to defeat Western countries in war. Egypt is not a good friend to the United States even though the US gives $1.4 to $2 billion in foreign assistance to Egypt each year.
Trump’s bombastic behavior of threats, tariffs, and war are making the world more skeptical of the United States. China is taking advantage of that and arguing that they are the more reliable power.
“The U.S. said on Wednesday it had disrupted a Chinese hacking operation responsible for break-ins and attempts on the Justice Department, NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Senate, and other sensitive government agencies.”
America’s biggest trade problem is China. Trump started a trade war with China, fought it foolishly, and lost. He escalated tariffs on all goods from China to a level the US couldn’t handle, and that combined with the US need for Chinese rare earths, forced Trump to back down. Tariffs were put on countries who are not rivals and who cooperation with has little to no downsides. Tariffs were put on all sorts of goods, making it difficult for American businesses to operate because they couldn’t afford the inputs to their businesses. China’s strategic cheating on trade affects the whole world. The US could have worked with the world and strategically fought a trade war with China. Instead, the president doesn’t appear to have a basic understanding of economics and world relations, so just blindly tariffed most countries and most goods in such a way that hurt the United States and its people.
Most of the scientific evidence points towards it coming from an animal, not a lab.
“Although they are too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to have been its direct progenitors, closely related ancestral strains have been found in horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus spp.) in southeast Asia. A Betacoronavirus called RaTG13, which shares 96.1% of its genetic code with SARS-CoV-2, was identified in 2013 in China7. (Betacoronavirus is the genus to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs.) Another strain called BANAL-52, which shares 96.8% of its genetic code with SARS-CoV-2, was identified in 2020 in Laos8. This suggests that similar strains circulating in bats in China or southeast Asia might have spilled over to intermediate animal hosts or directly to humans.
We also know that the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan had a significant role in the early transmission and initial spread of the virus.
More than 60% of the known earliest human cases in December 2019 involved people who worked at the market, made purchases there, lived near it or had some other epidemiological link with it9. (At least 175 people were diagnosed with the disease, either through lab testing or on the basis of clinical symptoms before 1 January 2020.)
Two distinct genetic lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were identified in samples from early cases associated with the Huanan market, as well as from the environmental sampling of stalls and run-off water in drains at the market in January 2020. This supports the idea that the virus had already been evolving in animals before it reached the market”
“Metagenomic sequencing of environmental samples collected at the market has indicated that several wildlife species had been there before it was cleaned and sterilized on 1 January 2020 by the Chinese authorities in response to the outbreak. These include raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides), hoary bamboo rats (Rhizomys pruinosus) and palm civets (Paguma larvata), all of which are known to be susceptible to the early strains of SARS-CoV-211,12. These animals could have been the intermediate hosts that brought the virus to the market, leading to the early cases in humans11,12 — although it remains unclear whether the virus first infected humans at Huanan, or whether the spillover event occurred earlier, with the virus subsequently being carried to the market by infected humans or animals.
Adding to all this, there is no verified evidence of the existence of human or animal cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection anywhere else before December 2019. There were retrospective reports of one or two possible cases occurring in November 2019 in Italy and France, and of the virus being detected in a wastewater sample (also in November that year) in Brazil. But in all instances, the positive test results could not be confirmed by independent labs.”
“Most of the scientific reviews we assessed support the zoonotic-origins hypothesis and find no conclusive evidence for a lab leak. Most of the published government-agency and intelligence reports that we assessed (which are listed in our 2025 publication1) assign levels of confidence, such as ‘low’ or ‘moderate’, to the lab-leak or zoonotic-origins hypotheses. But such reports deliver different conclusions, seemingly on the basis of political rather than scientific arguments.
In short, published intelligence reports, which focus mainly on biosafety and biosecurity policies and practices at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, are speculative. None provides concrete evidence of a breach.”
However, they did say that China has not release the information to thoroughly confirm or deny if it was a lab leak, so although the evidence for natural animal origins is strong, it’s possible it came from a lab.
“We did not find evidence to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 resulting from experimental manipulation was a more likely scenario than it emerging from naturally occurring mutations or recombination events.”