Thread by @davidfrum

From the onset of the pandemic Trump supporters advanced two radically contradictory arguments:

1) Coronavirus, they said, was made in a Chinese lab, a bio-weapon launched against the world.

2) Coronavirus was no big deal, just a cold, could be treated with horse dewormer. 1/x

I caught here Rush Limbaugh making those two contradictory arguments ... in the course of a single monologue in February 2020. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Trump himself toggled back and forth between "It's harmless, my friend President Xi has everything under control" to Chinese super-weapon - and back again. Through January-February 2020, Trump took the "no big deal" line. Then, in March 2020 scmp.com/news/china/dip…

Bare days after market-testing the "China virus" slogan, Trump dropped it - ostensibly to protect Asian-Americans, but really for the same reason that he covered up the virus in Jan-Feb: he desperately needed a face-saving exit from his trade war w China scmp.com/news/world/uni…

In May 2020, Trump toggled back to blaming China, describing the virus as a worse attack than Pearl Harbor or 9/11. bbc.com/news/world-us-…

Trump's strongest and most consistent feeling through the pandemic, as his aides told the press, was that the virus was terribly, terribly unfair to him personally. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Through the pandemic, I wrote about the wanderings of the Trump story line about COVID. Once the vaccines come online, a third story line would join the mix:

1) The virus was a Chinese bioweapon

2) The virus was just a cold

3) The vaccines were a secret plot by globalists

What I did *not* however write about was the lab-leak hypothesis itself. I figured that was an empirical question best left to epidemiologists and intelligence analysts. I wrote about it as something that might be true, eg

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1257029787350175745

The point I made over and over again was that if China had somehow let the virus slip from a lab - that did not in any way exonerate Trump for his callous mismanagement.

https://twitter.com/davidfrum/status/1394682050809155584

I revisit this history because I'm told that last night my one-time Weekly Standard colleague and lunch companion Tucker Carlson apparently went on a rampage against me for supposedly denying the lab-leak theory to cover for China.

As the record manifests (see eg these two pieces in @TheAtlantic) I was and am a lab-leak agnostic. I have written about it in the conditional: "if true."

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

My point has only been to warn against the use of the lab-leak theory by Trump supporters as an excuse - and as a culture war theory against people they hate even more than Chinese communists: American scientists.

The question I kept returning to: how could you a) blame China ; b) deny the virus; and c) malign the vaccines?

It's like saying

a) This is a new Pearl Harbor
b) All the Japanese bombs missed
c) The real villain of the story is the US Navy

COVID denial was bizarre enough, but joining the denial to the bioweapon story was head-spinning. "We were attacked by a totally harmless Chinese bioweapon! Refuse the antidote!"

Carlson of course he has advocated all three of the hyper-contradictory Trump story lines on COVID: it's harmless, it's a bioweapon, the vaccines are a globalist plot. He counts on people not noticing the mess. I noticed, and I guess that got under his skin. Hence the rant.

The more fundamental problem for the MAGA right: to prevail in global competition, America needs

a) to hold its lead in science and technology;

b) social cohesion at home;

c) revenues to pay the price of defense;

d) allies and partners to share burdens.

MAGA rejects all four

MAGA resents expertise, profits from social division, threatens to default on gov't obligations, and despises allies and partners.

"China" exists for them not as a real-world competitor, but as a culture-war totem to be shaken in the faces of the true enemy: fellow-Americans.

I've written before: it does not let China off the hook even if the lab-leak theory proves false. If the virus spread because of unsanitary practices in food markets, that's very nearly as discrediting. Either way, the negligence of the Chinese state fostered deadly global risk.

China needs to clean up its act on multiple environmental fronts, from greenhouse gases to food standards. China won't act on its own, so it needs to be pressured. China is big, so the pressure must be global. "America First" is a pathway to US isolation and therefore US failure.

I'll pause here - but the debate won't end.