Hopefully you haven’t yet gotten sick of us doing posts calling out our supposed moral and intellectual and scientific betters for having made the mistake of outright dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis just to own the cons and Bad Orange Man. If you have, well, we apologize. But there are just some things we can’t let go of, and this is one of them. Because for years, anyone who even suggested that the COVID pandemic may have stemmed from a leak out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology was shamed as a conspiracy theorist and/or science-hater and/or racist and/or all-around bad person, and now, according to people who are actual experts, it’s likely that this was not, in fact, an anti-science, racist conspiracy after all.
Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald was inspired by an intellectually dishonest tweet from Tommy Vietor (is there any other kind?) to do a thread about government and Big Tech’s roles in perpetuating the idea that the lab-leak hypothesis was garbage. And if you suspected that he’d have more to say on this particular subject, you were right.
He’s back today with another damning thread impugning not only the government, but also the media, who, as we have seen, have not only been proven wrong, but have by and large been unwilling to even acknowledge that they should have been more careful:
Note how the official claim about COVID's origins has become: "we don't really know for sure and will likely never find out. "
But for the first 18 months of the pandemic, the official govt/media claim was the *exact opposite*:
We know for sure COVID's origin was zoonotic.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2023
If this were a case where establishment institutions admit error — "we know we insisted for 18 months that COVID's origins were dispositively proven but now see we were wrong" — that would not only be commendable but would also re-build trust.
But they're incapable of that.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2023
Exactly. We could at least respect them somewhat if they owned up to their screwups, but they’re only doubling down. And they deserve absolutely no respect for that. No credibility, either, for that matter.
What you're seeing in real-time is them revising and re-writing history: just creating a completely false universe in which they acknowledged a lack of certainty from the start.
That's what they do when they get caught lying: they deny they spread those lies.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2023
On Sunday, @BrianStelter had the limitless audacity to insist CNN and similar outlets never called the Biden laptop "Russian disinformation." LOL. He knows you remember them repeatedly doing it, but just brazenly lies instead of accepting accountability.https://t.co/kjLH42pbaf
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2023
On the most vital debates and questions, the US corporate media gets caught lying and deceiving over and over, usually because they serve as obedient propaganda outlets for state officials.
And the one thing they never do is apologize. That's because they're doing their jobs.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 28, 2023
They’re not called “enemy of the people” for nothing.
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