[lawnchair_larry]

Haha. No. It’s because of politics and TDS. People were taught that this was a Trump theory. That’s all the media needs to say to ensure that nobody will take it seriously and nobody will tolerate anyone else who takes it seriously.

[knowaveragejoe]

This is a totally fair reaction to all "trump theories".

[bart_spoon]

It is not, and its a sad state of affairs that people believe so.

[chitowneats]

It's so bizarre to me to view him in this way. "Trump thinks something; therefore I must be against it".

I understand not taking his word for anything. But it's such an important issue. To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.

[knowaveragejoe]

> To just dismiss it and not try to investigate it, even at the highest levels of our government and public health bureaucracies, strikes me as negligent at best.

But this is the opposite of what's happened.

[chitowneats]

Apparently you haven't read the Fauci FOIA emails.

[knowaveragejoe]

You said "dismiss it and not try to investigate it".

[garmaine]

No, it is not. Judge ideas on their own merits please.

These same people ridicule the Space Force, for example, despite it being a reorganization of US Space Command that had bipartisan approval years before Trump even ran for office.

A broken clock is still right twice a day.

[Javantea_]

Here I have a little bit of experience. When a person has shown themselves to be a pathological liar, you can't judge their ideas on their own merits because the cost of judging far outweighs the cost of producing garbage ideas. That is why attention is so valuable, there are plenty of people out there who do not make it their trade to espouse nonsense.

[garmaine]

As an everyday heuristic, sure. But when it comes to matters of national importance we all deserve better.

[lawnchair_larry]

This is a good point in general but I don’t think it actually applies here. I don’t know why people keep acting like taking this seriously required believing a word of anything out of Trumps mouth. That isn’t how it went.

Some folks who never supported Trump had their own reasons to examine this. They talked about it, and everyone assumed they got the idea from Trump, and therefore not only did they deserve no attention, but they also deserve no respect, and outright career sabotage by folks like Peter Daszak and to a lesser extent, Anthony Fauci. Many had to work on this in secret because the hyper partisans wouldn’t listen to them, and instead tried to attack them just for talking about it. Take a look at Yuri Deigin and Alina Chan on twitter and go back in their timelines to see how long they have been digging into this.

My hope is not that anyone acknowledges that Trump was correct, although I would view it as a sign of integrity if they did. But whether he was or wasn’t, and whether he got lucky or actually knew something, I don’t care. The real issue comes not from Trump, but their own prejudice, which many are still trying to make excuses for, made them so blind to what, in hindsight, is actually extremely obvious as the most likely explanation. Then they took it further and let their blind hate for Trump also caused them to hate half of their fellow citizens, and they extended that hate to anyone who they even perceived as having thoughts tangentially related to something Trump said.

I could easily come up with probably 5 more examples of something very similar that happened in his orbit that people who only follow left leaning mainstream news have no idea about, or that were spun into complete anti-trump lies by the media and are still believed by people today.

The media are absolutely full of shit. All of them. Real journalism died, hyper partisan “woke” activists have been graduating and taking writing jobs, groupthink and cult-like behavior has amplified, and the executives loved the sky high ratings and revenue they got for being anti-trump. Cancel culture further reinforced this culty groupthink and forced moderate voices out. Hell, people actually try to say Glenn Greenwald went right-wing crazy. Glenn Greenwald! They don’t even realize that it wasn’t him who changed, it was them.

It’s pervasive in tech. People are actually pro-censorship now. And they have convinced themselves that they are the good guys. It’s hard to believe how far we have fallen from rationality in such a short time.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Except that it was a Trump theory.

That doesn't mean it cannot be true. It does mean that after 3 years and several thousand fully documented outright lies, the presumption of truth was no longer being granted.

[fragileone]

Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.

[kaesar14]

Right - instead of trying to debate the veracity of the argument, it was immediately cast as a political battle, and being on the same side as Trump in most urban and most media circles was asking to be ostracized. It’s absolutely poisonous.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

How as anybody going to "debate the veracity of the argument"? What information was anybody going to use?

Even so, in the intervening period, even when Trump was still president, several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab, and one assumes that they had more information than anybody else.

[willcipriano]

>What information was anybody going to use?

I used these three pieces of evidence to come to this conclusion for myself last year.

1. Wuhan is the epicenter of the outbreak.

2. Wuhan has a lab that works with bat covid.

3. China initally tooks steps to hide the virus from the world until that was no longer possible.

>several US agency reports concluded that the virus likely did not originate from a lab.

Keep that in mind next time.

[knowaveragejoe]

Do you believe in anything else considered a "conspiracy theory" by the scientific or academic community? This is roughly the level of reasoning people use when arguing that 9/11 was an inside job.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> Except he was proven right yet again that social media and old media orgs will censor others and lie to the public when it fits their political agenda.

And this differs from "new media" how? You don't like what certain social media and "old media orgs" did? Fine, no problem. There's no media on the planet that doesn't do this to some extent, least of all contemporary conservative US media outlets.

Whether you consider what was done to Trump and others regarding their posts/speeches about COVID and cures for it as censorship depends a lot on how you see the world. Your mileage may vary (because mine certainly does).

[IgorPartola]

I keep seeing this and it just doesn’t make sense. What is more likely, a global conspiracy theory amongst all the tech giants who normally try to outcompete each other into the ground as quickly and with as much humiliation as possible and the Federal government, which they try to evade and subvert at every opportunity?

Or the idea that when COVID first hit it was the conspiracy theorists screaming the loudest about the lab leak origin and given the sudden interest of the US in xenophobia and specifically the anti-Chinese sentiment(hint: it’s not that sudden), it would have potentially resulted in violence against Asian people. And at the same time the crossover theory was pretty much as likely if not more based on what we knew then. Now that more info has been gathered everyone is doing an about-face on covering this issue since it’s become a serious conversation and not a crackpot fringe theory shared with the intent to spread hate.

Maybe what had happened was that initially we knew little and everyone was a bit panicked. Then the crackpots started spreading FUD via the most convenient COVID origin theory to their message. The old media mostly ignored this, dismissing it swiftly without giving it more airtime. Social media was too busy with conspiracy theorist and right wing activists spreading the lab leak theory so they viewed it as false (if 99% of the time what a person says is a lie, why would this particular thing be true?). Then articles like these revived that theory with new information. Most people took in the information as just “hey new data” and left it at that. A few people who were spreading the conspiracy theory version of this story felt vindicated while simultaneously upset because their low quality memes were not really allowed while new the WSJ, the NYT, and Vanity Faire is getting front page treatment because of course excellent writing is more compelling than some guy on YouTube angrily vaping in his mother’s basement.

[lawnchair_larry]

Nope. False dichotomy.

Nothing was revived with any new information. The Venn diagram that includes the circle of people who were following and investigating this, and the circle of conspiracy theorist Trump supporters, did not ever overlap.

One of these circles was about some bill gates funded bioweapon to implant 5G or some nonsense which they suspected was being done in WIV.

The other was scientists who have known about the work at WIV for years, not based on suspicion, but based on the papers they kept releasing, media interviews, sequencing the genome, and doing science.

But you all TDS’d so hard that you wrote the latter off as the former, and the media went along with it.

It isn’t even a conspiracy theory. It had nothing to do with collusion by tech giants. Their hyper partisan employees just fell into the same TDS trap and decided “lab = conspiracy misinformation, no ifs ands or buts” and started purging people talking about it.

The Vanity Fair article is actually quite poorly researched and written, and misattributes much of the source and timeline, but at least people are snapping out of their partisan blindness on this issue now.

[temp8964]

No. It was not a Trump theory. It was commonly believed among Chinese political dissidents. Any Chinese people who don't believe the CCP have speculated this long before Trump even had any thought on this. Please stop relating everything to Trump.

[tehwebguy]

I mean, fair enough right? Figuring out if it started in a lab has zero effect on the mortality rate while Trump making up new lies every day for months about how it's just about to just go away anyway led people to their deaths, plenty of whom probably weren't his followers.