Now that the Narrative Wall has come down in a manner metaphorically quite similar to what happened to the civil infrastructure in Jericho, we can see just how devoid of merit is the American mainstream media.
For an entire year these people, aided by the totalitarians who run the Big Tech social media sites (and one way to let the market punish those guys is to click here and join us at The Speakeasy), have done everything they could to squelch any notion that COVID-19 is the product of irresponsible, if not downright evil, virology research gone wrong in Wuhan, China.
This despite the quite obvious factual basis of the lab-leak theory of how the Wuhan virus got out.
It was known a year ago that three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had been hospitalized in the fall of 2019 with symptoms identical to COVID-19. It was also known a year ago that cell-phone traffic had gone dark for 17 days in the vicinity of that facility in October 2019 — a tell-tale sign that the place had been evacuated so it could be disinfected. It was well known that safety conditions at the Wuhan lab were poor at best, and it was a time bomb waiting to go off. It was also fairly well known, particularly among the public health bureaucrats working for the U.S. federal government, that research was being done at that facility on bat coronaviruses to produce something exactly like COVID-19. That was known because the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the agency headed by one Dr. Anthony Fauci, was indirectly funding that research despite it having been banned in 2014. Fauci had created a “national security” workaround from the ban.
All of these things were known. Perhaps not by the public, but by people who were in a position to know.
Months ago, Dr. Robert Redfield, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), publicly endorsed the lab-leak theory. Redfield had enough information to state what was patently obvious; namely, that this virus didn’t come from bat soup cooked up at a Chinese wet market. It had to be engineered to do what it did.
Was Redfield given any credit for having recognized this? No. He was a former head of the CDC, and yet he was treated with yawns.
Why? Because the narrative was already set on the origins of COVID-19. And what was that narrative?
That the lab-leak theory was nuttery. It was a conspiracy theory. It was a racist lie.
And why? Because President Trump, who had access to more information on the subject than most people thanks to his job, correctly identified the lab-leak theory as the most likely explanation for COVID-19’s release into the public.
Now, the legacy corporate media who suppressed that theory for a year have abandoned their efforts and are beginning to catch up to the members of the general public capable of logical analysis.
And their explanation for having suppressed it all this time?
Liberal media reporters and pundits admitted over the weekend they were wrong to dismiss the Wuhan lab leak theory just because it was espoused by former President Donald Trump.
Mainstream reporters had pushed back at the idea that COVID-19 may have originated in a virology lab in Wuhan, China, and openly ridiculed the idea as Trump spoke openly about it in the early days of the pandemic.
But now, those same reporters have admitted that it is possible that the virus came from a lab leak — as more scientists and political officials openly question the virus’ origins.
‘I think a lot of people have egg on their face,’ ABC News’ Jon Karl told Martha Raddatz Sunday morning.
‘This was an idea that was first put out by Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, [and] President Donald Trump,’ he continued on ABC’s This Week, ‘and some things may be true even if Donald Trump has said them.’
He noted that the idea was widely dismissed at the time, but now ‘serious people are saying it needs a serious inquiry.’
New York Times reporter David Leonhardt also said on CNN that he thinks people ‘leapt to dismiss’ the theory too quickly because it was being espoused by then-President Trump and Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who has also said that the 2020 election was stolen.
‘I think a lot of people on the political left and people in the media made this mistake and said ‘Wow, if Tom Cotton is saying something it can’t be true,’ Leonhardt said. ‘Or they assumed that. And that’s not right.
‘Tom Cotton does deal in misinformation about things like election fraud, he’s said some things that are just wrong,’ Leonhardt continued.
‘But that doesn’t mean that everything he says is wrong, and it seems like a lot of people, including a lot in the media, leaped to dismiss the lab leak theory because of where it was coming from, and the reality is we don’t yet know how COVID started.’
David Leonhardt is a pathetic cretin, to be certain, and in his cretinous pathos he has now offered an invitation to open an examination into election fraud — something his fellow cretins in the legacy corporate media have just as vigorously suppressed.
But regardless of how unsurprising as all of this is, it’s still impossible not to be struck by how utterly deficient these people, who are paid well into the six figures by supposedly credible news organizations to offer supposedly credible reporting, are admitting they are.
You didn’t look into the lab-leak theory because Donald Trump was its chief public proponent? Trump was the president of the United States, for Pete’s sake. And you dismissed him on that theory why?
Because Orange Man Bad?
Why would any American with half a brain ever believe anything these pathetic cretins say ever again?
They’ve admitted they didn’t bother covering what is almost assuredly the single biggest news story in recent years — one could make a very good argument that it’s the single biggest news story ever, considering the implications of COVID-19 getting out into the general population and what that’s done to economics, public policy, public health, culture, elections, education, and practically every other facet of life on this planet — because it originally came from Trump.
Once you recognize the likelihood, if not the certainty, that the Wuhan virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and that it’s neither a conspiracy theory nor somehow a demonstration of racism to note this, the dots connect up pretty nicely.
After all, China had shut down domestic travel, but not international travel. While people were being welded into their apartment buildings in Wuhan they were being allowed to take one of three flights a day to Milan. Why do you think that was?
Could it have been that a government that knew exactly what it was making folks in Wuhan sick with had already made up a plan for how to deal with the virus’s release?
You don’t have to believe COVID-19 was a bioweapon or that its release was intentional to recognize China’s actions constituted biological warfare. The minute they recognized the virus was out it didn’t matter how it got out.
And if you’re the kind of evil bastards the Chinese Communist Party are, you do exactly what they did. You keep international travel going while shutting down domestic travel. That way the virus gets out to the rest of the world and it isn’t just China who gets hit. In fact, the rest of the world might get hit even worse than China, because the virus will spread within their communities before they even know what it is.
Which you make sure is the case by lying to the world about the virus for months.
And then you spread the word that to claim it came from a leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is a racist conspiracy theory so there’s no blowback on China for killing millions of people and doing trillions of dollars in economic damage, not to mention causing political upheaval in most of the democracies around the world.
There’s a better than average possibility everything above is an accurate description of what China did after that virus got out from that lab — whether on purpose or by accident.
And that, if it’s accurate, would be the largest news story in the history of the news business.
And Jonathan Karl and David Leonhardt are here to tell you they blew it because Trump was the guy who told them and they don’t believe things Trump says.
Or Tom Cotton, because Tom Cotton thinks Democrats try to steal elections.
Trump used to say all the time — one imagines he still says it — that the legacy corporate media is the enemy of the American people.
Seems like that’s something else he was right about, don’t you think?