Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!
Facebook reverses course on its lab-leak theory censorship, as Tom Cotton now looks prophetic for his early advancement of the theory in Senate hearings.
The Ministry of Truth (aka Facebook) has spoken from on high: it is now permissable to talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Telling, that the headline of the WaPo article which announces this change in policy frames it in terms of hand-wringing over the potential impact on race relations, fretting that it "could unleash more anti-Asian sentiment". Good grief. Truth and open scientific inquiry: it's so problematic, amirite?
I have been saying to people for more than a year (though apparently not on Facebook) that I thought it was just too great a coincidence to swallow, that this plague originated in Wuhan, which just happens to be home to “the lab that possessed one of the world’s largest collections of bat coronaviruses and that possessed the closest known relative of SARS-CoV-2”. The Wuhan Institue of Virology is a short distance from the wet market where the Chinese government and the American MSM have insisted Covid jumped from bat to human (even though many of the first patients, including Patient Zero, had no connection to the market). The Chinese government's refusal to cooperate with the World Health Organization’s investigation of the virus’s origins sure didn't help dispel this suspicion; nor did the revelation of 2017 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables warning of risky experiments and shoddy safety practices at the lab.
Despite all that, the MSM treated any discussion of a possible lab leak as if it were equally preposterous as Pizzagate. But now that this edifice is crumbling, the new tack is "Well, it may be true, but the truth could put you in chains!"
I missed it when it first happened way back in January 2020, but apparently Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) called it very early, and got blowback from "fact checkers" and other "smart set" media outlets.
His take has aged very well; those of his jeering detractors in the media peanut gallery, not so much.
Now, lest one wonder how I can call myself a centrist who votes Democratic while singing the praises of Tom freaking Cotton, let me be clear that I vehemently disagree with him on a number of issues:
--Cotton wants to repeal the ACA ("Obamacare"), which would throw millions of people off their health plans and force people to go back to worrying about preexisting conditions. We should be expanding health care access to everyone (although I do not support a Bernie Sanders-style single-payer system).
--Cotton proposes to end direct government student loans and go back to subsidizing private lender loans. There is a discussion to be had about student loans' aggravation of rampant inflation in higher education, and loans that go to for-profit colleges are a particular problem, but his proposal would just be a giveaway to big banks.
--Cotton supports making the Trump tax cuts for the rich permanent. Screw that, we need to do just the opposite: really soak the rich (and, ideally, the upper-middle class, if we could get by with it politically) to pay for a robust safety net and balance the budget. (This is an area where I very much line up with the left, and one of the primary reasons it's hard to imagine my ever voting Republican despite all my problems with "woke" Democrats.)
--Cotton is so aggressively anti-immigration, he blocked a benign program to admit a few thousand Irish college graduates, even though it was supported by both parties and the Trump administration. He spread flagrant lies about Biden's immigration policies at CPAC. I think there is a debate to be had about how much immigration the country can amicably absorb in a short amount of time (and I think they have gone past that point in the UK, Germany, and other parts of Europe), but Cotton goes way too far and it is never okay to flat out lie about your political opponents' positions and actions.
Importantly, Cotton did not engage in the worst lie of all, that the 2020 election was stolen, so he still generally deserves to be counted as a reasonable member of the "loyal opposition". And as noted above, he deserves a ton of credit for totally calling it on Covid and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The Arkansas senator has presidential aspirations: if he becomes the GOP nominee in 2024 and the Democratic nominee is not someone crazy like Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, Cotton will not receive my vote. But if he does nevertheless manage to become the next occupant of the Oval Office, I will not consider our republic to be in the hands of a madman (Trump) or an ultra-slimy amoral demogogue (Ted Cruz and many other Republicans). Aside from his troubling lies about Biden's immigration policies, he comes across as a fact-based public servant who operates under a consistent and defensible moral code, even if it is not exactly the same as mine.