Roger Pielke, Jr. on the COVID Coverup Hearings

We don't know that COVID originated in a lab leak. But we do know that there was a concerted effort to convince us that it didn't. These hearings are about the core coverup among the major players--including Anthony Fauci and perhaps other government officials.

   Of course we didn't know about this in 2020. But we did know that the left generally did what it routinely does now: it chose a side--the least plausible side, as usual--and decreed opposition thereto to be politically incorrect. Any even vaguely rational and objective person could see that the lab leak hypothesis was at least plausible--in fact, it seemed rather clearly to be the most likely of the available hypotheses. Reports, papers, op-eds and news stories in the MSM were created, trumpeted, and used to promote the politically correct position. I was informed by an interlocutor on the internet that I had strayed into "tinfoil hat territory" by taking the lab-leak hypothesis seriously. I watched a discussion among four virologists in which they derided LLH, using arguments that even I could tell were laughably shoddy. 

   Appalling as this all is, of course, it's the world we've been living in for a decade: the left produces (or merely latches onto) abject absurdities, and the institutions the left controls fall immediately into line: science, science communication, the news media, universities... Anyone with the wit and independence of mind to question the Official Story is deemed a kook...or, worse, a conservative...

   Women have penises, men can get pregnant, Trump is a Russian asset, the USA is made of racism, "white supremacy" pervades the world, race and sex have no basis in biology, but are both "social constructs,' i.e. human creations by fiat, everyone has a purely private internal "gender identity"...even children, who must be sexually mutilated do their bodies match it, lest they off themselves, the world is on the brink of climate apocalypse and only socialism and world government can save it, nations and borders are racist, women never lie about rape, all white people are by definition oppressors, the police are committing genocide in the streets against blacks, nothing--not science, not medicine, not math, not piloting an airplane--can be accomplished without "DEI"...and, of course, the Wuhan coronavirus just happened to appear, by purely natural processes, in the back yard of the Wuhan Institute of virology...

   What madness.