Thread by @Itmechr3

1. The "COVID came from a Wuhan lab" conspiracy is a bunch of extremely dangerous bullshit that's been catapulted from from Alex Jones shit into the political mainstream by the right liberal contrarian crowd because their job is to repackage

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2. right wing conspiracies and feed them to the mainstream. We literally had this exact same shit when the pandemic began and Trump and Bannon started pushing it in their attempt to solidify their base through anti-Asian racism. And the scientific

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3. community looked into it and decided it was fucking bullshit because the only evidence of it was that there was a lab kind of close to one of the markets where people got infected. And then the whole thing died off because the summer

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4. insurrection kicked off and after Trump spent his first day in the bunker tweeting about it even he realized that he wasn't going to be able to stop the insurrection by rallying people against China, so he pivoted back around to anti-Black shit

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5. But then in January with the Black insurrection basically contained and anti-Asian violence on the rise New York Magazine published a just completely bullshit article full of bizarre fear-mongering, cherry picking and selective misreading of

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6. scientific papers that did the like "just asking questions" shit you see as the basis of conspiracy theories everywhere, written by a random fucking novelist most famous for writing a book consisting entirely of phone sex on a pay-per-minute

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7. chat line with a book coming out about a bioweapons lab leak from the 50's. Scientists were immediately like this is fucking bullshit and printing it is deeply irresponsible but it didn't matter because the contrarian

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https://twitter.com/maciekboni/status/1346157243226533893?s=20

8. shit libs had already gotten hold of it. And at that point nothing the scientists said about how there's no basis for the lab leak shit mattered and you get everyone from Greenwald to Chait ranting about how the

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https://twitter.com/MoNscience/status/1346117198381797379

9. "anti-science left" won't consider the lab leak (which again there is NO EVIDENCE FOR, and there's decent evidence for the zoological explanation). And from there it was off to the races and you get to see ALL of the classic conspiracy theory

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10. bullshit. The WHO puts out a report about the origin of the virus and you get a bunch of cherry picking about how they didn't conclusively rule it out even though almost the entire report is about how the zoological explanations are

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11. significantly more likely, and then a random group of like 18 scientists are like YOU NEED TO STUDY THE WUHAN LAB MORE and everyone takes it as evidence that it's a real scientific theory and not weird crackpot shit that only hasn't been

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12. completely ruled out because no one has conclusively proved the zoological approach yet because to do that you basically have to find a specific animal that has COVID-19, which took a DECADE for SARS. And here you get one of the most popular

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13. conspiracy theory tactics where people like find a random group of people who are vaguely in the right field and have them sign a letter validating their conspiracy theory becuase people don't understand that you can find 20 scientists who

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14. believe literally fucking anything. Like there's like a thousand people with engineering degrees who think that Bush destroyed the Twin Towers with nano-thermite and put their fucking names down on a statement saying as much, scientists are

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15. just people they believe crackpot shit all the time. But once there was a letter calling for more investigation even the mainstream press was just like reporting it as a serious thing and now there's a bunch of people who believe this shit.

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16. And there's other like fake scandals that people have manufactured, like a WHO team who went to one of the labs to talk to the people there found nothing to suggest the lab was even working on anything that could possibly have been combined to

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17. to make COVID-19 but they also weren't there to do a full forensic search of every vial and they didn't look at every single document so they couldn't technically rule out that the CCP had somehow concealed the leak or some shit and that got

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18. turned into evidence that the conspiracy theory was still viable because they hadn't completely ruled it out. But the problem is that for the virus to have been in the lab and there to be no records of it there'd have to have been a MONUMENTAL

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19. coverup involving the lab itself, probably the police, intelligence services, and the highest levels of the Chinese government all without a SINGLE leak at ANY level, which is fucking ABSURD for a coverup this important.

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20. And even the fucking left started taking it up, I think he deleted the tweet but like Nathan J Robinson got into an argument about it because the lab had US funding and that's become part of the conspiracy now.

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21. So why does any of this actually matter? I've talked about this before but the thing that set of the wave of anti-Asian violence was the connection of China to the virus, which was then projected back onto all Asian

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https://twitter.com/Itmechr3/status/1373669026463879168?s=20

22. people who were portrayed as plague carriers. And the Wuhan biolab shit was one of the first big offensives in the wave of "tie the virus to China" attacks in the press. Bannon started pushing it almost immediately, you got Trump talking about

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23. it pretty quickly, the whole thing went hand in hand with the "China virus" shit. And almost fucking immediately attacks start and they keep intensifying as the propaganda grows and they've never fucking stopped. And the "China created the

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24. virus" shit is absolutely PERFECT propaganda fodder for racists, which is why Bannon jumped on it in the first place. It lets you exploit the nationalist conflation of people, race, and state to churn out propaganda that you can plausibly

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25. argue isn't racist (I'm not saying everyone from China is a plague bearing spreader of bioweapons I just think the disease spread from a lab, pay no attention to the hoards of people who are making exactly that conclusion from the "evidence"

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26. I've just presented, says the right wing propagandist, this is just a criticism of the Chinese state). And it works too because you can accuse anyone who points out that the whole thing is bullshit of being a hysterical leftist who's not

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27. listening to the science like this fucking asshole's trying to do without providing a single shred of evidence that hasn't already been debunked by falling back on the whole "leave it to the scientists" thing as if

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https://twitter.com/marchofer/status/1394469742874959877?s=20

28. we didn't fucking do that already and the scientists almost unanimously said there was no evidence for the biolab shit. And the whole thing was fucking settled scientifically until an erotic fiction author with no scientific credentials

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29. realized he could get clicks with blatant fearmongering and now a bunch of people are claiming that because the WHO hasn't literally completely 100% ruled the biolab shit out (even if it means that the CCP was engaged in an ENROMOUS fucking

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30. conspiracy that there has been literally no evidence of) that everyone has to take it seriously as an explanation. And all the while every time it pops up in the news Alex Jones and the rest of the right wing propaganda crew use it to fan the

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31. flames of anti-Asian racism and more Asian Americans get stabbed in the fucking streets so one dude can promote his fucking book and a bunch of assholes can feel morally superior about their grasp of science.

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