Count MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan among the many, many media Guardians of Truth who wasted no time defending their ill-advised kneejerk dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis by shifting the goalposts and trying to discredit the people who were right.
538’s Nate Silver couldn’t help but notice this remarkable, albeit not terribly shocking, pattern of behavior. Not just from the mainstream media, but also from some members of the ostensible scientific community:
Welp. The behavior of a certain cadre of scientists who used every trick in the book to suppress discussion of this issue is something I'll never forget. A huge disservice to science and public health. They should be profoundly embarrassed.https://t.co/nZqzjrvo8F
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 26, 2023
Show us the lie in Silver’s tweet.
SPOILER ALERT: You can’t. Because he’s exactly right.
So it was only to be expected that Mehdi Hasan would take issue with it:
The simple reason why so many people weren’t keen to discuss the ‘lab leak’ *theory* is because it was originally conflated by the right with ‘Chinese bio weapon’ conspiracies and continues to be conflated by the right with anti-Fauci conspiracies. Blame the conspiracy theorists. https://t.co/XnvbnCmBAA
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 26, 2023
It’s hard to have a good faith disagreement about a major issue if the issue itself has been hijacked by bad faith folks.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 26, 2023
Incidentally, some of us did try and host good faith debates on the ‘lab leak’ theory, even back in 2021: https://t.co/JXCmxSEzi0
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 26, 2023
(Mehdi Hasan has never done anything in good faith. Let’s just get that clear right now.)
Also: ask yourself why so many people on the right, lay people, were obsessed with this one specific aspect of the science of Covid, which by the view is still not the majority view amongst scientists? Was it because of their scientific curiosity? Lol.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 27, 2023
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what scientists like to call projection. Mehdi knows he messed up (you’d think he’d be used to that by now), so, rather than taking ownership of messing up, he’s trying to impugn the character of people who were at least willing to acknowledge the possibility that there was something to the lab-leak hypothesis.
Silver summed up the problem quite well here:
This is so refreshingly honest. The Bad People thought the lab leak might be true, therefore as journalists we couldn't be expected to actually evaluate the evidence for it. pic.twitter.com/NueOdLLAol
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 27, 2023
The reason this drives me up the wall is that if you're ever going to pretend that "misinformation" is a useful category, at least acknowledge it was a massive error to label lab leak discussion as "misinformation" when multiple US government agencies now put the chances ≥50%.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 27, 2023
Nailed it.
This is 100% true https://t.co/PwgxBLV2a6
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) February 28, 2023
Naturally, Mehdi Hasan took great offense to Silver’s thoughtful and completely reasonable take on the matter:
Nope, stick to numbers because reading my words seems to be hard for you. The ‘Bad People’ wanted to use ‘lab leak’ to distract from Trumpian incompetence, & push racist messages & insane conspiracies. But some of us still hosted debates about lab leak on our shows – did you/531? https://t.co/rDEf0mlG3f
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 28, 2023
Uh, Mehdi:
What he doesn't understand is HE IS ONE OF THE BAD PEOPLE. https://t.co/MVJU3rJpQ4
— Pradheep J. Shanker (@Neoavatara) February 28, 2023
Not only that, but Mehdi Hasan is the worst kind of Bad People bad person, because he will insist until his dying breath that he is not one of the Bad People. There’s nothing inherently wrong with denial, but there is when it’s intellectually dishonest. And that’s definitely the case with Mehdi Hasan and countless others who are literally incapable of admitting that they screwed up.
It's a virus that killed 6.8 million people! If you ask me, we should limit gain of function research either way. But the debate about COVID origins is ***extremely*** consequential compared to the stupid shit people constantly argue about on here. pic.twitter.com/FvArccxsXW
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 28, 2023
I honestly don't understand the remaining streak of anti-lab leak discourse from the left. Various agencies within the *Biden White House* have decided that it's important to investigate and a lab leak is quite plausible. It's a big, important question. Just take the 'L'!
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 28, 2023
It's worse still coming from people who style themselves as *journalists*. Again, 6.8 million people have died! Much of the world was shut down for a year! Future pandemics are a big threat! Any self-respecting journalist should be "just asking questions" about COVID origins.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) February 28, 2023
Just because a truth happens to be inconvenient doesn’t make it any less true.
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Related:
Late-night lib luminaries try to save face over lab leak with … BS narrative on Dept. of Energy
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