Why it Matters if COVID Leaked from a Lab in Wuhan

The Media Needed to be Unmasked

Here is a timeline of the lab leak story as reported by the Washington Post on May 25. They, along with most in the media, are now casually trying to pretend like it wasn’t labeled disinformation, or that people were banned from social media just for talking about it, or that Dr. Fauci basically lied to the American people about what he knew and when he knew it. This story is as explosive as Watergate and yet, it took a village to force the media to report on it.

The first people to bring it up publicly were Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying who talked about it on Bill Maher and they were viciously attacked by social media and the press for being conspiracy theorists.

It took a couple of stories on Medium by New York Times science reporters for the media to start taking it somewhat seriously. Now the Wall Street Journal says it’s likely from a lab.

It’s important to really understand what this country has become, what its journalists have become, what its ruling class has become, what its scientific community has become, what so many have just been willingly going along with. Nothing exposed all of it better than the story of the lab leak - how it came to be a story at all, why it was covered up or why it was labeled disinformation.

While it’s true that there is no knowing for a certainty that it was a “gain of function” virus that escaped the Wuhan lab, it is looking more and more likely. For starters, they have yet to find any evidence of it in the natural world. And now, we have the smoking gun of Dr. Fauci’s emails. Of course, there is a good chance you might not have heard a thing about it. The better reporting is being done in the land of the Verboten - yes, Fox News and Tucker Carlson. That all but guarantees no one on the left will feel the need to pay any attention to it. But unfortunately, most major news sources on the left will report on it in any great detail. At least not in a simple, concise way ordinary people can understand.

To get the news now it is necessary to bounce around different realities in our polarized country and do fact checking on your own. It is far too easy to slip into the nonstop manufactured outrage that exists on both sides. I spend more time on the right because the gaslighting, as least to the things that matter to me, is happening on the left.

Gaslighting has become a catch-all term used by just about anyone to make their point that other people were lying to them. The left says it about Trump, the right says it about Biden and the media, women say it about abusive men, people of color say it about white people, etc. I am using it here as the way the media felt it necessary to commit to a narrative for an entire year. That narrative had to make Trump look bad and the Democrats look good for obvious reasons: to win the election.

I took it personally because I am someone who relies on and seeks out something as close to truth as possible. I don’t like being played. I first noticed that we were being gaslighted about a year ago when the news media and the Democratic Party not only insisted that the protests were “mostly peaceful” but accusing anyone who disagreed with that assessment of being racists. The whole thing played out to a humiliating degree at the New York Times. That was the only the beginning.

Not only weren’t they mostly peaceful but they were not intended to be peaceful at all. They were intended to be disruptive, violent and angry to send the message that the Black community was angry and was fighting back against a system of oppression. At first, CNN was reporting them that way.

That is why a majority of Americans supported military intervention if the cities could not control them, and why Tom Cotton wrote the piece for the Times in the first place. But after that, the narrative had to change. It then became that the violence was never to be reported as violence. The focus had to be on the police and on Trump. Whenever Trump tried to stop the rioting that kept following the protests he was called a fascist.

That is why the COVID lab leak was treated as “disinformation.” And why neither the news, nor the blue check army on Twitter, would validate it and would ridicule, shout down and even get people kicked off of social media for talking about it. This is how it is now on the Left. Every second of every day with very little dissent anywhere.

Much to its credit, Vanity Fair published the kind of story that used to be much more common on the left: actual investigative reporting.

It is harder than ever to find any sort of accurate information online or on the news, which is why that Vanity Fair piece is so unique. It would be great if there were nonpartisan sources but there aren’t.

Even PBS’s Frontline is in the tank for Team Blue. By now, they should have had at least one episode on “cancel culture,” for instance. They won’t touch it. They would never report on the George Floyd case from any other point of view other than the one accepted on the right. They will definitely cover the Wuhan lab leak story but half of it, and I can promise you this - you can check back with me after it airs - that much of their episode will be about Trump - his racism, his lies, his attacks on China, etc. They will eventually get around to China, maybe they’ll mention the media but they will never do the kind of hard hitting expose we really need for it to be a fair and balanced program.

To understand how we got here, and to understand 2020 overall, one has to see things from the side of the “resistance” which genuinely believed they were under attack from Hitler’s Nazi army - amped up on meth, firing guns on them all night, gathering up and putting them on cattle cars to take to the gas chambers, threatening every moment of their waking lives. That is what they believed and how they behaved. They believed, and still believe, they are the ones under siege and they are the ones who must defend themselves. Even though they are in power they still cower every single day in fear of Trump.

The truth is, the left is not the “resistance.” It’s the empire. They have all of the money, all of the power, all of the culture, and now, government. They don’t just want power in America - they want America to be what they want it to be - the utopia it was under President Obama. They want Americans to value what they value, reject what they reject and they want this mind, body and soul - a complete commitment - otherwise, to them, it’s the end of the world. They want to un-Trump the country and that means either getting rid of, silencing or converting the 70 million who voted for Trump.

On the left, all white people are potentially “bad” and all non-white people are “good” Unless they support Trump. Even a regime that is now committing actual genocide, imprisoning dissenters, disappearing doctors and reporters, they are still protected under the left’s somewhat patronizing protection because of their race. The idea that it was racist to even talk about a lab leak was mostly the status quo for months. It was treated as disinformation, like so many other things.

We are Too Easily Manipulated

That brings us to the second reason why it’s important: because Americans have a massive vulnerability that is clearly visible to our enemies. We are deathly afraid of the accusation of racism. It is the one word that can bring our entire nation to its knees. That means anyone who is aware of this vulnerability can very easily launch an attack against our country without ever even launching a weapon. All they have to do is start a fire on Twitter.

A lot was happening in April. Troll armies from both China and Russia had been exposed as spreading massive disinformation campaigns. China, to deflect blame and Russia to disrupt other countries’ ability to handle a crisis. Did this become news? No. Because it was racism, at least where China was concerned. It is simply too risky to overtly and publicly criticize them for any reason.

Right around Memorial Day George Floyd’s death was caught on camera and spread very quickly throughout Twitter. It was seen millions of times. But just as it was hitting the airwaves, a photo of Derek Chauvin, the officer who had his knee on Floyd’s neck for an unbelievable 8 minutes, was depicted in a photo wearing a red hat that said “Make America White Again.” Of course it was fake but it was circulated for quite some time before it was tagged as disinformation and removed. I’m going to bet that more people remember that photo and thought it was real then know it was a fake.

I’m not saying Chinese trolls necessarily spread that photo - but I am saying it was shocking how fast the narrative shifted to “systemic racism” and away from COVID. No one would have even considered that the Chinese might be spreading disinformation to distract the country and the press. Maybe our government knew but the press never chased that story, even though the whiplash between COVID panic to race panic was just a few hours.

At a time when lockdown was a fragile thing, where people were already frustrated and scared, where CNN was playing nonstop COVID panic all day and all night, the public was expected to pivot away from keeping the country SAFE from the spread and towards another kind of virus that could not be seen or tested for - racism.

From Sam Harris “Can We Pull Back from the Brink,” which was written almost a year ago on June 18, 2020:

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

Americans like me who saw the blatant hypocrisy slowly began to drift away from the Left, but those on the left would not have even contemplated this disconnect because it did not support the going narrative that systemic racism was a more immediate and urgent threat than COVID. Most of them still believe that, which is why it is the #1 priority and objective of the Biden administration. Had COVID been a bigger deal, the media would have had to call out the protesters but they couldn't. And they knew it.

The other key thing to note, to illustrate just how deluded the Left has become, during the Derek Chauvin trial, there was video of a seemingly ordinary day in a black neighborhood in the US in a convenience store called CUPP Foods, which is now a famous memorial for Floyd.

Not a single person was wearing a mask indoors. Not one. Not George Floyd, who already had contracted and survived COVID, not the police officers, not the customers, not the store workers. For those who blamed Trump supporters for not wearing masks, how do they explain this? To me it shows that the Left speaks only to the group of people who are tuned into to the media - who read Twitter, obsessively watch CNN. But if you didn’t? How aware were you that COVID was a real threat? You can bet, without a doubt, that a story of the virus escaping a lab would have reached people a lot farther than CNN’s nonstop preaching to the choir.

The death of George Floyd was a life-changing video to watch, no doubt about it. It was heartbreaking and horrifying. It isn’t that the protests should not have happened, but they seemed to ultimately hurt, though indirectly, the same community they were meant to defend. If a virus is killing black people disproportionately why would you want the very people the virus is killing out there on the streets spreading the virus among their own communities?

Yes, the Chinese have our number. Russia has our number. They know we are undone by charges of racism and that it makes us easy to manipulate online with very few people paying attention. This remains true even now. They canceled the Golden Globes, for goodness sake, over charges of racism.

By the way, the Chinese also see it as patronizing. Someday someone will tell that story. The Chinese trolls would not have even needed their government to intervene to take the heat off accusations. They are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. Likewise, the Russian troll army is always there at the ready to make sure America continues to destroy Herself and they are also smart enough to know that racism is the best way to do that. During the 2016 election, one of the key facts in the Mueller Report was how Russian trolls had co-opted Black Lives Matters to heighten division and advocate for violence.

Timing was everything

And that brings us to the third reason why it matters - knowing that the virus had escaped a lab in Wuhan, that it was a virus intended to be “sticky” and highly contagious, that would have given other countries enough of a warning to close their borders and lock people indoors to track the virus. The key with COVID was timing. The sooner people knew to be scared, the sooner they could have taken drastic measures to halt the virus in its tracks.

In the early part of the year, unbelievably, Democrats were bringing Articles of Impeachment against Trump as the Virus was hitting our shores. Literally at the exact same time. You can’t make this up. Future generations will never believe it when they put it all together. How to explain this? You can’t. COVID will resonate through the years much more than whatever they were mad about at the time.

Remember when Bill Clinton was being chased around about the Monica Lewinsky affair? And remember how shortly thereafter we were attacked by 9/11? Years later, many are still shocked the Republicans took so much attention away from our President on the eve of the worst attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. Granted, our media is the propaganda arm for the Democrats, which means they won’t draw this conclusion for many years, maybe never.

Knowing it was a lab leak would have shaken Pelosi and House members out of their obsession to remove Trump from power and forced them to focus on the problem at hand - a once in a century virus was about to kill a lot of people worldwide and most of them in the United States.

They dropped the ball by distracting Trump, distracting the press, distracting the public with something that in the long run will not matter. Not even in the slightest bit. It will remain as a sad footnote of a time of extreme partisanship in our country. What matters more? Saving people’s lives, businesses, and mental health. COVID robbed a generation of its future. My own daughter graduated from college and had to have her graduation on our apartment balcony. For me, as a single parent that was an irreplaceable loss, not to mention a dear friend of mine dying from an overdose because of lockdown depression. COVID is personal for most people and blaming Trump is only going to take us so far in figuring out exactly what went wrong.

Someday people are going to look at how the media worked against Trump every second in 2020, making it harder for all of us to get on the same page. They sent out the message every second of every day that he was incompetent, that he didn’t know what he was doing, that the country was falling apart. That is not what the country needed to deal with this crisis.

This is not to say that what Trump said and did was counterproductive, to say the least, but a lot of it was just flat out false as reported by the media. He did not call COVID a “hoax,” for instance. That never happened. He said the Democrats blaming him for it was another hoax. Drinking bleach? Trump never said it. Not even close.

Yes, he definitely told people to open their states too soon and definitely advocated for not wearing a mask. But now we know, of course, from Fauci’s emails what we already knew when the virus first arrived: masks basically do not work.

Why, because people do not know how to use them and the virus is microscopic. One of the reasons, I think, for the massive amounts of spread and deaths is precisely because Americans were told masks were the ultimate protection from COVID. They weren’t.

Had the American public been freaked out by a genetically engineered virus hitting the streets you bet they would have stayed inside as opposed to relying on masking. They would not have taken to the streets by the hundreds of thousands of MAY wearing only a flimsy mask with fluids flying hither and thither, in the heat of summer, in humid states, with tear gas causing tears, which again helped to spread the virus.

What people on the Left told me when I brought this up on Twitter and Facebook - was first to call me a racist and second to say that it was more dangerous to not protest than to protest. More dangerous, like how? Over 600,000 dead dangerous? The media ran cover for the protests by announcing proudly that no city that held protests had any kind of COVID spike. But they never contact traced protesters. They were ordered not to. So how would they have any clue whether or not it spread?

In order to justify the ongoing protests, which lasted months and months and completely re-ordered American culture and government, they had to make it all about the masks. The flimsy ineffectual masks people wore were kind of like wearing garlic to scare away vampires, the vampires being Trump supporters.

“The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material … I do not recommend that you wear a mask.” - Dr. Fauci, February 2020

Clearly, Dr. Fauci’s main objective was not to panic the public. His job, to my mind, was damage control from day one. He told the people what he thought they needed to hear in order to keep panic down and get the public through something he knew was going to be bad. It always stuck with me when he said “if we do everything right 300,000 people would die.” At that time, only a few thousands had - to me that was an unimaginable number my brain could not make sense of. Why did he land on that number? Well, because he knew that it had come way too far to be contained.

Trump also tried to tell people things so that they would not panic - remember that? Unlike Fauci, who gets massive protection from the press, Bob Woodward wrote a whole book about what Trump knew that he didn’t say for fear of panicking the public. Trump was punished and Fauci rewarded for doing exactly the same thing.

Would the Chinese have wanted to cover the lab leak by heightening racial tensions in the US? Gordon Chang, writing for Newsweek, tried to introduce the concept in June of 2020:

As a part of Beijing's "unrestricted warfare" against America, China has also indulged itself in Russian-type trolling. In mid-March, according to U.S. officials cited by The New York Times, Chinese operatives spread text messages and social media postings to propagate false rumors that Trump was about to invoke the Stafford Act to lock down the entire United States. American officials believe their Chinese counterparts gave orders, in the words of the paper, to "engage in a global disinformation campaign around the virus."

Beijing, in short, has been trying to surreptitiously exacerbate social divisions and racial tensions, something that it did in the open in Canada in January of last year when its then-ambassador, Lu Shaye, tried to mobilize those of Chinese origin against "white supremacy."

The Chinese not only think America’s woke religion is ridiculous but they made sure to mention our problem with racism in the first meeting with the Biden administration - that, my friends, is Check Mate:

We’ll never know just how widespread the trolling was to shift the narrative away from COVID and towards systemic racism. It is considered racist to even ask it. Just as it’s considered racist to ask why poverty and a lack of proper nutrition or education is being addressed right now, or why the rising homicide rates in cities isn’t being addressed. Because it’s so much easier to cancel the Golden Globes and chase around white graduate students or get reporters fired. So the cycle is all but guaranteed to continue because the well meaning privileged whites are treating the symptom. Laying blame where it doesn’t belong. Picking low hanging fruit.

We Will Never Know the Truth

One of the problems with the modern day Left is that many of them appear to not understand how a communist regime actually works. It doesn’t look like they even know who Stalin is. They don’t realize that to make a Marxist or communist utopia people have to be killed, silenced, and forced to comply with the doctrine in order to achieve and maintain that utopia. Individuals don’t matter as much as the collective whole - and in China’s case it really does edge a little closer to fascism now.

China will never reveal their involvement and no scientists or reporters will ever be allowed to talk about what really happened in Wuhan. That is no excuse for those involved here in America to investigate what Dr. Fauci knew and when he knew it. He ought to be confronted and questioned about his knowledge of the lab leak and all of the other contradictions the emails revealed.

We need a trustworthy, unbiased media now more than we ever have. But the left leaning media now, covering their unforgivable sloppy partisan ineptitude, have to keep the focus on Trump and Trump supporters and January 6 as the gravest threat to “Democracy Itself.” It is yet another narrative pushed by them to serve the Democratic Party instead of the American people.

Not a day goes by when someone on the left says to me “why don’t you care about Republicans trying to end Democracy?” Democracy, I say back, is in the eye of the beholder.