I finally read the big Shellenberger et al joint on the virologists' comms about a possible lab leak. It is such tendentious bullshit.

I tried to look for people talking about it here, participate in the discussion. But now I can't. Which was the point of destroying Twitter. The first NINE paragraphs are just the authors congratulating themselves on how amazing they are, without even stopping to offer any substantive evidence for their thesis. Then they spin more bs, complete with screenshots that are too small for their gullible subscribers to read.

I think you screenshotted the wrong tweet, there’s nothing about any of that in there

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1644152867299680263

On a related note it is absolutely wild how unprepared @mtaibbi was for this interview. Will definitely show up on his next performance review with Elon Musk.

Description of his character traits aside, isn’t Logan based in large part on Trump?

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1643815257293438983

Kind of like saying that William Randolph Hearst was the Citizen Kane of American politics

“This a sober day no matter where you fall on the political spectrum” No it’s not, this day rules, more days like this please Look I’m sorry this is great. I don’t even care if the case is weak. Bring the stronger cases so we can see more of this.

https://twitter.com/Omar_fromPR/status/1643322888324358144?s=20

OK so let’s do those too then Cool, let them! Might be tough to establish standing if they’re in a place where the former president doesn’t live or work but hell yes, lfg.

What a dogshit lede On the front page too

Not on yet, at least

https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1641544325245927427

Ah here we go

Not surprised that America’s most gullible lieutenant general fell for that thread, but telling who he cc’d

https://twitter.com/GenFlynn/status/1639701017771081729

This seemingly damning bit of information falls apart when you realize a) there are almost definitely bats much closer to Wuhan than that and b) Guangdong (where SARS 1 started) is just as far away from its most likely bat source.

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1639427482091765760?s=20

Lmao Error in here, @jemimajoanna. She didn’t co-found a university. She co-founded a company that claims it will someday found a university.

[Aware that it’s the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War but also watching the WBBC] USA! USA! USA! This is an uncomfortable mix of emotions! And also that was a great hit!

What do you call a Horseshoe Theory with Matthew Pottinger and a guy from the Atlantic Council on one end and Greenwald/Taibbi on the other nytimes.com/2023/03/19/us/… It’s also funny how the Grayzone just won’t touch this story any more, since backing the lab-leak stuff would make Xi Jinping look bad, but rejecting it would alienate the conspiracy theorists
thegrayzone.com/?s=“Lab+leak”+covid

Here’s me, twenty years ago today, announcing that the president had listened to reason and called off the invasion. Oh no, sorry, I got that mixed up. Twenty years ago today I had just arrived from Chicago into DC as a grad student reporter, just in time to make my first Pentagon briefing. I watched “shock and awe” live on a Fox News cameraman’s monitor.

There was a lot of crazy stuff in this three-hour episode that I couldn’t get to in the newsletter.

For instance, Lindsay reads Mao condeming “Han chauvinism” and decides, “oh, of course, that’s Critical Race Theory.”

theracket.news/p/on-woke-mao-… This is funny for a number of reasons. First because it gets the dynamics backward: Mao was a Han dictator trying to rein in the worst instincts of his majority while crushing alternative nationalisms, while CRT is an academic legal theory developed by members of a minority.

It’s a sports school! Sort of lol

Turns out when you lift the lid on the “Woke Cultural Revolution” discourse, there’s a lot of weird anti-masonic and Christian mystical conspiracy stuff in there. Who knew. theracket.news/p/on-woke-mao-… As part of my research for this newsletter, I listened to a recent Bari Weiss podcast (with the TERF stalwart Helen Lewis) in which she tried to distance herself from Lindsay and the “Intellectual Dark Web” in general. It was hilarious.

But what about the secret evidence pointing to no lab in particular!!??!! theatlantic.com/science/archiv… Reminder that China has not been pushing the market hypothesis, but rather doing everything possible to cover it up, because they’re attached to the idea that COVID came from the United States.

If this is anything like past expulsions, many of the people being sent “back” were born in the DR and have never been to Haiti before

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1636350958182576129

Naturalism fallacy here: The border wasn’t even fixed a century ago. Before 1929 (and really the 1937 partial genocide), there was no “migration” in the transnational sense; Kreyol and Spanish speaking people just lived side by side in the borderlands, often in the same families.

https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1635825375015055361

Does Fox News have access to the Fox News website Hmm who was the source of Elon Musk’s Twitter Files I guess we’ll never know

I've only caught a little of the Taibbi hearings so far, but the best part of what I saw was him denying that he's made a shit ton of money off the Twitter Files on the grounds that he has spent a lot of the money he made I don't know if @atrupar has the clip of that part, it was during DWS's questioning

Grift nearing its final form Matt Taibbi, Republican committee witness. Never thought I’d see the day.