00:04Welcome to your news fact-checking show. This is Noah Schumann and you're watching The Cube.
00:08This video of EU foreign policy chief Kaya Callas in Estonia has prompted a wave of posts and
00:14headlines. In Europe, we have a very clear understanding of the diagnosis of the disease,
00:22but we don't have agreement on the cure. And if you have a very, very difficult disease,
00:30like you have a cancer, then you have two choices. Either you increase the morphine or you start
00:36chemotherapy. While Callas' remarks were controversial, some online users are portraying
00:41them as they're calling China a cancer and separately engaging in warmongering. Both
00:47blunt her interpretations that what she actually said. Unlike what the post claimed, Callas did not
00:52call China a cancer. Rather, she was using a medical metaphor while discussing Europe's response to what
00:58she described as Chinese economic coercion and trade pressure. She spoke of morphine referring
01:04to subsidies helping European countries compete and chemotherapy in the context of tougher EU
01:10measures that could trigger Beijing's retaliation. In separate viral posts, user also accused Callas
01:16of warmongering by attributing to her the quote, if Europe cannot defeat Russia, how then are we
01:21supposed to defeat China? But Callas did not actually say this. These comments are from a discussion
01:28hosted by the Hudson Institute in 2025, where Callas argued that failing to pressure Russia over the war
01:34in Ukraine would weaken Europe's credibility in responding to a larger China. Since then, short-term
01:40extract from the discussion have repeatedly resurfaced online and misleadingly been presented as fresh comments.
01:51you
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