If the Wuhan laboratory leak hypothesis is correct, expect a political earthquake | Thomas Frank

There was a time when the Covid pandemic seemed to confirm many of our assumptions. He threw people we considered villains. It raised those we thought were heroes. It has thrived on people who can easily commute to work from home even as it has caused trouble in the lives of Trump voters who live in the old economy.

Like all plagues, Covid has often felt like God’s hand on earth, flogging people for their sins against higher education and clearly separating the righteous from the exposed wicked. “Respect the flag,” our yard signs warned. And lo! Covid came and forced us to do so, and raised our scholars to the highest seats of social power, where they prevented assembly, trade, and everything else.

We innocently blame those days. We reproached at will. We knew who was right, and we shook our heads to see those who’d miss out on playing in the pools and on the beach. It made perfect sense to us that Donald Trump, a politician we despised, could not understand the situation, suggesting people should inject bleach, and that he was personally responsible for more than one widespread event. Reality itself punishes leaders like it who refuse to submit to experience. Even prestigious media have come up with a way to blame the worst of the deaths on the system of organized ignorance they called “populism”.

In reaction to a foolish Trump, liberalism has fashioned a cult out of the generally accepted hierarchy of achievement

But these days the consensus is not wasting as it used to be. The media is now filled with disturbing stories indicating that Covid may have come – not from “populism” at all, but from lab failures in Wuhan, China. You can feel the moral tensions that begin when the question begins: What if science itself is somehow guilty of all of this?

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I am not an expert in epidemics. Like everyone else I know, I spent the pandemic doing what I was told. A few months ago, I even tried to speak to a Fox News viewer with faith in the laboratory leak theory of the origins of Covid. The reason I did this is because the newspapers I read and the TV programs I watched confirmed to me on numerous occasions that the lab leak theory was not correct, that it was a racist conspiracy theory, which only fooled Trumpists believed it, and that I got countless ratings from my auditors. The facts, and because (despite all the mockery of me) I’m the type to always trust the major news media.

My complacent reflection on this issue was made through the lab leak article published in the Atomic Scientists Bulletin earlier this month; A few weeks later, everyone from Dr. Fauci to President Biden admitted that the laboratory accident hypothesis may have some advantages. We don’t know the real answer yet, and we may never know, but this is the moment to anticipate what this discovery might ultimately mean. What if this crazy story turns out to be true?

The answer is that this is something that could erase the faith of millions. The last global catastrophe, the 2008 financial crisis, shattered people’s confidence in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the new economy, and ultimately in the elites that run both American political parties.

In the years that followed (and for complex reasons) liberal leaders have strived to reconfigure themselves as advocates of professional integrity and entrenched legitimacy in nearly every field. In reaction to a foolish Trump, liberalism has fashioned a cult of science, experience, university system, the “rules” of the executive branch, the “intelligence community”, the State Department, NGOs, old news media, and the generally accepted hierarchy of achievement.

Here we are now in the final days of catastrophic global crisis # 2. Of course, Covid is much worse than a mortgage crash with many orders – it killed millions, destroyed lives and disrupted the global economy more broadly. If it turns out that scholars, experts, NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes in this story, we might very well see expert cult values ​​of modern liberalism skyrocketing into a fireball of public outrage.

Consider the details of the story as we learned it in the past few weeks:

Lab leaks. It is not the result of conspiracies: “A lab accident is an accident,” as Nathan Robinson points out; It happens all the time, in this country and in other countries, and people die because of it.

There is evidence that the laboratory in question, studying bat viruses, may have been conducting so-called “job acquisition” research, a dangerous innovation in which diseases deliberately make diseases more virulent. By the way, right-wingers have not dreamed of “getting a job”: all the great virologists have been doing it (in this country and in other countries) even as the squares have been warning about it for years.

There are strong hints that some of the bat virus research in the Wuhan lab was partially funded by the US National Medical Corporation – meaning that the laboratory leak hypothesis does not refer to China alone.

It seems there has been an amazing conflict of interest between the people who have been tasked with getting to the bottom of it all, and (as we know from Enron and the housing bubble) the conflict of interest is always overwhelming the well-qualified professionals that liberals insist on. We must all listen, honor and obey.

The media, in their enthusiastic watch over the bounds, insisted that Russiagate was absolutely correct, but the lab leak hypothesis was false, and woe to whomever dared to disagree. Reporters swallowed whatever line was most flattering to the experts they quote, then insisted that it was 100% correct and absolutely indisputable – that anything else was just mixed humpback foolishness, that democracy dies when nonbelievers speak up, etc.

Social media monopolies have in fact censored posts about the hypothesis of the lab leak. Of course they did! Because we’re at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to return to true and true faith – as agreed upon by the experts.

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“Let’s pray for the science now,” said a New York Times columnist at the start of the Covid pandemic. The title of his article anchored the founding faith of liberalism in the Trump era: “Coronavirus is what you get when you ignore science.”

Ten months later, at the end of a terrifying essay on the history of “job acquisition” and its possible role in the still-on-going Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker writes: The 21st Century. Could a world full of scientists do all sorts of reckless things combined with viral diseases For many years and that it successfully averted serious outbreaks? The premise was that, yes, it was possible. The risk was worth the risk. There will be no pandemic. “

Except there was. If it really turns out that the laboratory leak hypothesis is the correct explanation for how it began – that the world’s general public have been forced into a realistic laboratory experiment at enormous cost – there is an ethical earthquake on the way.

Because if the hypothesis is correct, it will soon start to show people that our mistake was not enough reverence for the scholars, insufficient respect for the expertise, or insufficient censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically of all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as ultimate experience. Think of all the disasters of recent years: neo-economic liberalism, devastating trade policies, the Iraq war, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail”, mortgage-backed securities, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign – all these disasters are brought to you by reassuring consensus. For the self of highly educated people who are supposed to know what they are doing, as well as the complete satisfaction of the highly educated people who are supposed to supervise them.

Then again, I would probably be wrong to put up with all of these guesses. Perhaps the laboratory leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproved. I certainly hope it is.

But even if you get close to confirmation, we can guess what the next shift in the narrative will be. Experts will say it was a “perfect storm”. Who knew? Besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic no longer matter. go back to sleep.

Thomas Frank is a columnist for the Guardian newspaper. He is the most recent author of The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism

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