Looking back over this year, and really the last eight years, perhaps the oddest observation is the degree to which the media was apparently motivated by one thing: if Trump said it, it must be wrong!
I started thinking about that this morning when Jonathan Turley observed the degree to which the media and the conventional wisdom combined to suppress and even explicitly censor the theory that SARS-CoV-2, the “COVID virus,” originated in a lab leak.
The whole history of theories of the origin of COVID-19 was full of people announcing with absolute certainty that it originated in one particular way, generally with limited data.
Some of the theories were basically urban myths from the start: “bat soup” was based on the false assertion that the virus originated in the so-called “wet market” that didn’t actually sell live bats, along with a video of a Chinese social media influencer actually eating bat soup years before the outbreak in a market in Malaysia. (By the way, “wet market” is a bad translation — it’s closer to “fresh market." It sold fresh meat and produce.)
Even before the lab leak theory got rolling, there was a paper from India that claimed to have found fragments of DNA that were absolutely from HIV and absolutely proved it was maliciously manufactured. The thing was, the DNA sequences identified were common short sequences from many organisms. That paper was eventually withdrawn.
Still, the notion that it was zoonotic, that it originated naturally from a virus that crossed over from an animal, was plausible. The “wet market” theory was always suspect, simply because only about half of the original cases were connected to the “wet market.”
But SARS-1 originated in the Hubei area of Wuhan, which is one of the reasons the Wuhan Institute was placed there.
The other theory, that it originated in a lab leak, was also plausible, if only because the Wuhan Institute of Virology was in Wuhan.
But Trump said it could be a lab leak, and Trump Must Be Wrong.
The Trump Must Be Wrong contingent had the bully pulpit, all for their own reasons.
The Chinese Communist Party knew Trump Must Be Wrong because if it really was a lab leak, it was the fault of the Chinese Government and thus the Chinese Communist Party, and the Chinese Communist Party is never at fault.
The Democrats picked up on it and asserted that blaming the Chinese government was racist, and Trump was a racist, quod era demonstrandum. Therefore, Trump Must Be Wrong. And a racist.
Of course, the virology community, led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, was vigorously outspoken against the lab leak theory. The evidence is pretty substantial at this point that the Wuhan Institute was doing research that was proscribed in the U.S. and was doing it with covert funding from the U.S.; thus, a lab leak was cutting really close to the bone.
Something else to observe with all this: Trump suggested and arranged funding for a “Manhattan Project” crash program to come up with a vaccine. You could watch Trump Must Be Wrong in real-time: people from Kamala Harris to some outspoken clown in Brooklyn tweeted that they’d never ever take a Trump vaccine.
The actual vaccine actually came out shortly after Biden was inaugurated, at which point it stopped being a Trump vaccine — which meant that it was now a good thing and everyone should take it.
In fact, everyone must be forced to take it. Or else.
So we got to March 2021, and people, lots of people, were committed to the notion that it was a horrible plague, like unto the Black Death.
This wasn’t completely unjustified in the first couple of months — the original paper claimed the virus had a case fatality rate in excess of 50%, and Italian epidemiology was showing a case fatality rate in excess of 10%. Of course, both were from a particular subpopulation of elderly sick people who had been lifetime smokers.
Even the first couple of papers showed that children were the least likely to get really sick and die. In fact, in the first paper that showed interpersonal transmission in a family, the researchers somewhat testily complained that the family’s nine-year-old refused to lie down and be sick.
But, see, Trump also said it wasn’t going to be that big a deal, that the actual case fatality rate was going to be less than one percent, and Trump Must Be Wrong. Now, at that same time, Dr. Fauci was saying he expected it would be less than one percent — one wonders if Trump said it because Fauci told him — but no one noticed, because, of course, Trump Must Be Wrong.
COVID is only one example of the Trump Must be Wrong disorder, part of Trump Derangement Syndrome overall. A similar piece could be written about Trump negotiating with Kim Jong Un in Korea or the peace treaty Jared Kushner negotiated in the Middle East — and its opposing pole, that Trump, with a Jewish daughter and son-in-law whom he depended on, was actually an antisemite.
In the COVID world, the notion that he suggested injecting bleach, or the way ivermectin became poisonous horse medicine, all were Trump Must Be Wrong. The Fine People hoax. The Insurrection hoax. Who knows how many more? (Maybe readers can suggest additions to the list in the comments.)
All of them were and are pernicious. Now, Trump will be re-inaugurated in less than three weeks with both a dominating electoral college vote and an actual majority of the popular vote. I think that was in part a reaction to the way Trump was vilified. The legacy media has lost its audience, and therefore money, by being so glaringly and irrationally biased.
The question is, will it continue?
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