The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
George Orwell, “1984”.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s timeless warning against totalitarianism, works at the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to “Memory Hole” the inconvenient past. Day after day, Smith diligently replaces past issues of The Times with “corrected” ones.
This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to[…]to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date[…]All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.
Fortunately for those of us who care to look, the Memory Holes of our own Ministries of Truth, the mainstream media, are not quite so efficient as Ingsoc’s. “The internet is forever”. The mainstream media can only hope to continually scrape their parchments clean and hope nobody notices.
They’re doing a whole lot of scraping clean, right now – and some of us are noticing.
For nearly 18 months, the mainstream media engaged in journalistic malpractice – quashing any suggestion that COVID-19 could have originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because their arch-nemesis, former President Trump, dared promote this very logical conclusion.
This is the point that David Cole, no fan of the lab theory himself, makes. The evidence hasn’t gotten much stronger than it was, back when “conspiracy theorists” like we at The BFD were reporting it.
But suddenly, the mainstream media are all over the lab-leak theory. “What changed?” Cole asks. “On the left, I can tell you what changed in five letters: T-R-U-M-P. The left will not, cannot let go of Trump.”
When the lab-leak theory first emerged, Trump naturally addressed it as a possibility. Cue deafening screams of “Orange Man Bad!”
Besides their natural reflex of automatically gainsaying anything the Bad Orange Man said, the media were getting paid an awful lot of money to toe the Beijing line. The Chinese Communist Party’s state-run propaganda machine, China Daily, paid millions to US media to run its party propaganda.
Let’s also not forget the deep ties Beijing has formed within the United States, which include universities, entertainment, sports leagues, and of course, Washington DC and its liberal surrogates.
So of course, once the lab-leak theory began to circulate in January, 2020, China’s ‘investments’ in the United States paid off, and the entire liberal media industrial complex furiously peddled the ‘natural origin’ theory, while boldly proclaiming the lab origin hypothesis a ‘debunked conspiracy theory.’
Suddenly, though, the mainstream media have turned on a dime.
That was until the last two weeks, starting with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) shredding Anthony Fauci over the NIH funding US research within the Wuhan lab, followed by a Wall Street Journal report that three WIV lab workers were hospitalized in December 2019 with COVID-19 symptoms.
And with that, the lab-leak hypothesis was legitimized almost overnight – sending liberal outlets scrambling to quietly append their previous reporting.
Zero Hedge
Even social media have done a completely straight-faced u-turn.
Facebook has lifted a ban on posts claiming Covid-19 was man-made, following a resurgence of interest in the “lab leak” theory of the disease’s onset[…]
In February, Facebook explicitly banned the claim[…]Anyone posting claims that Covid-19 was “man-made or manufactured” could have seen their posts removed or restricted, and repeatedly sharing the allegation could have led to a ban from the site entirely[…]
The social network says its new policy comes “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin”.
The Guardian
But nothing has changed, so far as evidence goes. The evidence remains as thin, yet tantalising, as ever. It should be noted, for instance, that the lab workers were hospitalised with flu-like symptoms. Symptoms almost identical to COVID-19. So, it could have been either.
The only thing that’s changed is the occupant of the White House.
With the Bad Orange Man out of the White House, how could the mainstream media keep jerking themselves off while screaming his name? Rand Paul’s expert grilling of the slippery Fauci is the key.
As Paul showed, the WIV was working on “Gain of Function” research: essentially, tinkering with natural viruses to make them deadlier and even target specific hosts. Fauci’s empire didn’t directly fund GoF research at Wuhan, but it did slip some cash to the WIV and not tell anyone about it.
But the golden key for the media is that the Trump White House had reversed an earlier Obama ban on GoF. The Bad Orange Man dunnit!
That’s not quite what happened though. What really happened was that Fauci, who was vocally unhappy about the GoF ban quietly asked some pals in the Deep State to lift it. Like Radar slipping Henry a pile of papers to sign without his even noticing what they are, White House bureaucrats quietly reversed the GoF ban and Fauci packed off some cash to the WIV.
But… the Bad Orange Man!
With the Bad Orange Man to blame again, the media are free to start trumpeting the lab-leak theory as if they just knew it, all along. The fact that they spent the past year screaming that it was a “comic book” conspiracy theory is quietly forgotten.
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