I think that politicians have a responsibility to not tell obvious lies. If they do, then I'm going to stop paying attention to the things they say, and I'll tell everyone else to do the same.
If they eventually say something insightful, well, that's a shame, but they no longer have my attention.
All politicians tell obvious lies. It's part of their career. Biden tells obvious lies. Trump told obvious lies. So did Obama. So did bush. Part of critical thinking is determining which statements are lies and which are not.
Because it’s irrelevant and assumes that anyone participating in the discussion was listening to any politician of any kind to begin with. The problem isn’t with ignoring the politicians - something that is nearly always prudent - it’s assuming that we weren’t also completely ignoring Trump.
This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
The way that people following this were treated was bad enough, but the most worrisome part is the reputational attacks, largely coordinated by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth alliance, that these scientists faced. It was a huge risk on their part to challenge someone of his standing in the community, and he was relentless in spreading the meme that these were fringe quacks deserving of nothing but derision for their “conspiracy theories”. In another massive media failure, they were happy to use him as their subject matter expert without bothering to disclose that he’s the one who ran the very same program. And to a lesser extent, Fauci as well.
To be clear, no one suspects that Daszak and Fauci were anything but well-intentioned in their original pursuits when starting and funding this research program. But it’s obvious why anyone faced with the possibility that their decision may have been the reason that this all happened in the first place. And the implications - that their entire organization and much of their life’s work will be shut down immediately - may put even the most reasonable mind in an extremely difficult position.
How would you react upon realizing that your program may very well have killed millions around the globe and destroyed economies? I’d imagine that must be quite a burden on the conscience for anyone who is not a completely sociopathic murderer.
> This investigation was happening among scientists regardless of whatever Trump or Biden or Cotton or Paul or whoever else had to say. But the mainstream left treated them as though they must be dumb backwards thinking Q anon Trumpers who got this idea from him or Alex Jones or some conspiracy nut.
Maybe I just wasn't following the discourse closely enough? My main memory of this story early-on was in a Vox.com podcast in late Spring of 2020. They went through all of the circulating conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus—that it was caused by 5G, that it was a ploy to embed microchips, etc—and ended on the possibility of a lab leak.
I remember them saying something like "yeah, this is the one theory that could actually be true, and we should investigate further."
