The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people's trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties.
There are strong hints that some of the bat-virus research at the Wuhan lab was funded in part by the American national-medical establishment - which is to say, the lab-leak hypothesis doesn't implicate China alone.
The news media, in its zealous policing of the boundaries of the permissible, insisted that Russiagate was ever so true but that the lab-leak hypothesis was false false false, and woe unto anyone who dared disagree.
Of course they did! Because we're at war with misinformation, you know, and people need to be brought back to the true and correct faith - as agreed upon by experts.
If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began - that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost - there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook.
Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are "Too big to fail," mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 - all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they're doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.
Tuesday, June 1, 2021
If the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis is true, expect a political earthquake
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