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Hmmm ... from 'toxic conspiracy theory' to likely reality? Like I've said before I wasn't a conspiracy theory kind of person until Trump exposed how fake the media really is. Now it's just normal to ignore much of what is being said by the media as it's more likely just propaganda for someone.

The liberal media have finally conceded that COVID-19 may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory - after a year spent ridiculing the suggestion....

CNN, which by the end of the Trump administration was brazen in its hostility to the president and his advisors, was almost gleeful in its mockery of the idea that the virus could have come from a laboratory.

The Washington Post, New York Times, and NPR were equally dismissive of suggestions that the virus could have come from a laboratory.

Some outlets, such as the Huffington Post, even branded any suggestion the virus could have stemmed from a lab as a 'toxic conspiracy theory.'

Few were able to suggest that COVID-19 could have stemmed from a research facility without backlash but that didn't stop some media, including the Daily Mail, from questioning the narrative.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9615117/A-year-left-wing-news-TRASHED-theory-COVID-originated-Wuhan-lab-outlets-idea.html

I remember your Chosen Mango trying to convince everyone that the whole thing was just a Democratic hoax.

Nothing that comes from the far right has any credibility any more...you may as well get a big ol' Qanon tattoo on your forehead.

...and it will likely be decades before the stench of Trump wears off enough to seriously consider anything the far right has to say.

And you think the far left is all goody two shoes honest?   Boy, have I got some real estate to sell you

And you expect me to believe leftists are honest and pure, especially the majority of the media outlets?

(http://viperbeam.com/forum/black.jpg)

I'm glad I don't have to jump in this one, you guys seem to have it covered.

Neither of you should make assumptions...I think nothing of the sort.

Actually, Sunstroke and Dave are probably the two most open minded guys on the board.  Neither of them subscribe to "party politics" and they are consistent with looking at each specific topic on it's own merit rather than just espousing the party line. 

Considering they've had multiple posts expressing their disdain for President Trump, which is the best thing that could've happened to America but the leftists don't realize it, that statement is 100% horseshit.

I've only voted Republican and Libertarian my entire life, but I wasn't a huge fan of Trump either.  I liked some of his policies, disliked other ones. 

And if your determination of whether someone is open minded or not hinges solely on whether they liked Trump or not, I'm going to consider your statement to be 100% horseshit too. 

I don't have an issue with people not likeing Trump but if you disagree with him 100% then you don't have an open mind. Several of his biggest stances were shared by previous liberals but suddenly now have become evil with only his election as the only change.

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the virus originated in a lab.

A baseless conspiracy theory with no evidence does not become smart if it's accidentally true.

For example: if I claim that extraterrestrial aliens control our government with no evidence, and then aliens attack and take over the planet, that doesn't mean I'm a genius and a prophet.

What's more: you cannot sieve through Trump's verbal diarreah of the last 10 years, pick out a few choice nuggets of "See, Trump told you COVID was made by China!", and expect people to forget that Trump ALSO said that COVID would be over by Easter 2020, and that we could possibly cure it by injecting disinfectant*.  When you figure out how to tell exactly which crazy Trump statements we should take seriously and which we should ignore as insane trolling, you let us know.

*Just waiting for "When you think about it, vaccines are a kind of disinfectant, so Trump was actually right".

You make this claim a lot, but you never seem to explain exactly which positions these are.

I mean, I like the idea of investing in rebuilding infrastructure, and Trump made a lot of mouth noises about the perpetual Infrastructure Week, but that wasn't "evil"; Trump was merely lying and never did any of it, nor had any intention to.  Same goes for his empty, transparent lies about strengthening Medicare or replacing Obamacare with something better: he never did it, and he never had any intention of doing it.

I would love to hear which "liberal" ideas became "evil" when Trump was elected.

LMAO ... you know that's pretty easy as I and others have spent 4 years pointing to the hypocrisy of the left ... and yes I get that the right is too but that doesn't change anything.  We will start with the biggest and that's illegal immigration and border security. Both Clintons and Obama promised to strengthen border security and stop illegals from coming in. This speech could have been given by Trump, Bush, or many others but it was Obama who actually said it.
My fellow Americans, tonight, I’d like to talk with you about immigration.

For more than 200 years, our tradition of welcoming immigrants from around the world has given us a tremendous advantage over other nations. It’s kept us youthful, dynamic, and entrepreneurial. It has shaped our character as a people with limitless possibilities –- people not trapped by our past, but able to remake ourselves as we choose.

But today, our immigration system is broken -- and everybody knows it.

Families who enter our country the right way and play by the rules watch others flout the rules. Business owners who offer their workers good wages and benefits see the competition exploit undocumented immigrants by paying them far less. All of us take offense to anyone who reaps the rewards of living in America without taking on the responsibilities of living in America.

I hope you have something better than "Obama previously said immigrants should obey the law but once Trump is elected, suddenly obeying the law becomes evil!"

My problem with Trump on immigration is not the (likely non-existent) times he said that immigrants are vital to our country but need to follow the law; it's the times that he called them "criminals," called them "rapists," said they come from "shithole countries," obstructed them from legally seeking asylum, and stole their children from them specifically and intentionally as a deterrent to their arrival.

Another example?

I agreed with Trump on removing our troops from Afghanistan. Too bad he did nothing about it.

Thankfully he was probably the weakest president we've ever had since maybe William Harrison and he was only president for 30 days.

A lot of these things we're talking about are gray issues that don't have a strict right or wrong.  I pro immigration, in general -- I think it's a net positive for the country and gives us much of our cultural identity.  It's kind of what makes America America, IMO.  But I see how if that goes unchecked, we can get overrun.

My biggest beef with Trump's handling of that was the callousness of it.  There are some terrible side-effects of immigration that we need to find ways to do better, but the Trump administration used those things as a feature to discourage it.  I think that was wrong.  And I think that the wall, while not a terrible idea conceptually, having a strong physical border, is antiquated and should've been dropped in favor of other methods.

Nah, shut it down totally for the immediate future and get it all under control. Finish building the wall and fund as many border patrol agents as it takes. Or better yet get our people out of some of those hostile places in the Middle East and have them patrol the northern and southern borders. That would be the better use of the Armed Forces. Then once you get the borders in order you can concentrate on finding the illegal aliens and sending them back to their legal country of residence. That goes for ALL people here illegally. Canadian, Mexican, Danish, Irish, Israeli, etc.

I don't want to turn this entirely into an immigration discussion, but it is well known (https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/686056668/for-seventh-consecutive-year-visa-overstays-exceeded-illegal-border-crossings) that the majority of illegal immigrants are not undocumented border crossers, but people who come into the country legally and then violate their visa to stay (you know, like Melania Trump did).

"Securing the border" is just virtue signalling for "Look how hard we are working to keep out all the people from the Mexican countries."  No one is talking about building a wall in Michigan.

I literally just said that our armed forces should be patrolling the northern and southern borders. And anyone who is currently here illegally should be deported out off US soil regardless of where they are from.

I repeat: there are no calls to build a wall on the northern border.  You can give some lip service about patrolling the northern border, but it's obvious where the actual enforcement priority lies for conservatives.  There were never any kids in detention camps on the Canadian border, and there never will be.

The fact that your earlier post focused entirely on border security and not-at-all on visa enforcement shows exactly where your priorities are.
Even though you've literally never mentioned the word "visa" on this forum, I'll be generous and interpret "ALL people here illegally" as an extremely vague allusion to visa enforcement, despite your consistent single-track focus on border security.  (I think the more reasonable inference is "everyone illegally crossing the border from any country," but whatever.)

Good news. Biden has now ordered intelligence to investigate the Wuhan lab Corona virus link. You know ... the same investigation he suspended because Trump had ordered it. He’s brilliant! Maybe he’ll figure out we need to secure the border next.

So since you're trumpeting the investigation of the origin of COVID, does that mean you'll accept the outcome of the investigation if it says there is no link?
If not, this is just another "Heads I win, tails you lose" bad faith argument from the right.

This...exactly

LMAO. I think we already know the answer since everyone has already jumped off that sinking ship and left their original criticism of the mean twitter guy. I will accept the answer as long as it isn't being funded by China. I've seen several scientists who complained about their findings being disregarded only because they voted republican but are now being sought out. It's amazing how much we have in common when everything out of our mouths or posts aren't politically motivated. Maybe I should say that again and slower ...  It's amazing how much we have in common when everything out of our mouths or posts aren't politically motivated.

What does this even mean?
Isn't the investigation by the US government?

Like who?

You guys on the right have taken this "Some people are saying" Trumpian verbal tick to the level of a religion.

Some unnamed liberals "used to agree" with Trump's orthodox conservative positions "before he was elected."
Some unnamed scientists "had their findings disregarded" because they vote Republican "but are now being sought out"... by whom?

I think you have to be naive to completely dismiss the idea that the Chinese were not working on the virus in a lab in the exact region the spread started. I also think you need to be a bit dismissive of any results because the Chinese have already shown what they consider an open door policy.

It includes exactly what it says in plain English. Anyone here illegally, whether overstaying visas or illegally crossing the border, needs to be removed from the United States. I think you knew that though, you just wanna argue some liberal anger today for your daily therapy. Gotcha...

I think we should probably clarify exactly what we're talking about.

Is the claim that COVID is a Chinese bioweapon that China accidentally lost control of?
Such a claim would require that the conventional understanding - that COVID originated from wild game at a food market - is a lie/cover story.  Because COVID can't be both a government-developed bioweapon and an accidental cross-species infection from the wild.

If COVID is a Chinese bioweapon, why was China the first place to get infected?  Furthermore, if COVID was engineered by China, why did China take just as long as the rest of the world to develop a vaccine?

^^^ How dare you introduce reason into this political discussion... You know that Republicans live for a good conspiracy theory...the more outlandish the better.

Here's what actually happened, according to a friend of my cousin's ex-girlfriend, who may have been somewhere near the hemisphere where the following events occurred:

In 2018, Barack Obama, George Soros, Bill Gates and an entourage of radical Democrats secretly flew to China, where they met with the ghost of Mao Zedong, who is in charge of China's chemical weapons division. Mao assured the group of liberal glitterati that the new chemical formula they've developed works almost perfectly, and releasing it would cause millions of fatalities, but that 75% of the fatalities would be Republicans.

"That's fine," Barack said to the pasty dead Asian dude..."We don't care about the American people, as long as enough of those damned Republicans die that we can continue stealing elections...and all the other evil shit that we like to do."

Mao rubbed his hands together, an impish, ghostly grin creeping across his face. "And our reward?"

Barack reached across the table and shook Mao's hand. "If this works as well as you say, then yes...you get Texas."

The thing with immigration is that I just don't really know what problem we're trying to solve, and what resources it's worth to do it.  And beyond that, how much of the effort is to truly help the people who are citizens here and how much of it is xenophobia to blame others for our problems.  And then there's this nagging feeling that I have, just from a morality standpoint, where it's hard to justify letting someone live a shitty life because they were born on the wrong side of a fence.  I know you can't help everyone, but do what you can, right?

Some immigration is good.   Legal/illegal are just terms that are fluid anyway, so I don't care so much about that.  I do agree that it's important, in general terms to check the amount of it, so that you're not getting flooded faster than your systems can handle it, but I don't know how feasible it is to try and stop it altogether, nor what you'd really get if you did that.

I'm getting to a point in my political views as I get older, where I'm not really an idealist as much as I used to be.  I'm more practical, so I am hesitant to worry about things based on principle and more about looking at what likely outcomes are.  So, if we were to follow pondwater's plan, firstly, I don't think it would work.  But I think it would be antethetical to what makes America great in the first place, which is our promise to blend cultures to bring out the best of all of us

When I was younger, I used to have more hard-line views with things like that, but they've softened as I've aged.  

Will you accept it, and admit Trump was right?

It was a 2011 movie with Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, Contagion.  So, yeah I could see it being a lie/cover story.

Because Canada isn't exactly a poor nation like Mexico is and we don't have a bunch of Canadians trying to sneak across the border or smuggle people across it.  If anything, traffickers in the U.S. smuggle people INTO Canada.  But now that's stopped due to COVID.

If the investigation shows that COVID is a Chinese bioweapon, I'll absolutely accept it.  That isn't the same thing as Trump "being right."

Trump, as President of these United States, had access to the entirety of intelligence available to our government; intelligence that is equally available to Biden.  The fact that an investigation is even needed (and: that Trump couldn't finish one in a year) itself shows that Trump was BSing.  So no, you don't get brownie points for that.

For example: if there's a legitimate, well-controlled study that connects melanin to intelligence, it doesn't mean the KKK was right all along to insist that black people are inferior.  Their claims were not based on well-supported evidence; they were just saying what they wanted to believe.  And so it is with almost everything that comes out of Trump's mouth.

But as I said earlier: that question is pretty pointless if the person asking it has already decided that it's a communist bioweapon no matter what the investigation says.  That's not a good faith question.

If we're talking about movie plots, I prefer the plot of Aliens: it's a bioweapon developed by an ancient alien race, and a corporate middle-manager deliberately sent someone to get infected so he could later sell the bioweapon to the military.

I mean, while we're talking about movie plots.

Then just say that!

Instead of a bunch of song and dance about how we need to secure all of the borders to prevent people coming in from all countries, just say, "No, we just need to keep out the people coming from Mexico."

Then we can have an honest discussion about the real objectives of immigration policy.

I think this sums up the newly-invigorated conservative interest in the origin of COVID (and conservative attitudes towards COVID in general):

(https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2c4314caa3d6bf4900c7eee173b5c1fde8dcf35a5674ff947af4a6694e112171.jpg?w=600&h=315)

^^^ I had to steal that...thanks.

That is pretty funny!  I know that there are definitely some people who think that way.  But I'm really really hoping that is a small subset of conservatives and not the majority. 

That’s funny in a satire way but is such a huge generalization that is resembles almost no facts.

Yeah, it's humorous, but not really a fair criticism because it's not the same people who praise Trump for the mask and also don't wear the mask.

The truth in this is that Trump's supporters are such a weird eclectic group -- he gets credit for creating the vaccine from some, but others refuse that its helpful and they both support him.

It's the same way that his supporters will beat cops to death as traitors to the government, but he'll still get the support of the blue lives matter people.

Here you go twisting peoples words again. All borders need to be secured. If the Mexican border is a problem area then more resources are allocated to that area. It's basically common sense. If the northern border becomes a problem area then resources should be allocated there.

It's like your house spider. Do you let random homeless people walk into your house, eat your food, watch your tv, and fuck your wife? Does it really matter if they came in through the front door or the garage?

Dave, you're off the mark on this one.  The people complaining that Trump doesn't get enough credit for vaccine development are definitely the same people who have been insisting that COVID is overblown while comparing it to the flu.

Borders are NOT the problem.  The problem is the airports. 

Not gonna lie, a really funny dirty comment came to mind immediately when I got to the "Does it really matter if they came in through the front door or the garage" part of your comment.   ;D

Ummm Ok, let me know when we have a crisis at an airport

This is a great article on non Trumpers being disregarded for stating a year ago it was created in the lab.

COVID-19 'has NO credible natural ancestor' and WAS created by Chinese scientists who then tried to cover their tracks with 'retro-engineering' to make it seem like it naturally arose from bats, explosive new study claims

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629563/Chinese-scientists-created-COVID-19-lab-tried-cover-tracks-new-study-claims.html

An explosive new study claims that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab, then tried to cover their tracks by reverse-engineering versions of the virus to make it look like it evolved naturally from bats.

The paper's authors, British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen, wrote that they have had 'prima facie evidence of retro-engineering in China' for a year - but were ignored by academics and major journals.   

Dalgleish is a professor of oncology at St George's University, London, and is best known for his breakthrough creating the first working 'HIV vaccine', to treat diagnosed patients and allow them to go off medication for months.

Sørensen, a virologist, is chair of pharmaceutical company, Immunor, which developed a coronavirus vaccine candidate called Biovacc-19. Dalgleish also has share options in the firm.

The shocking allegations in the study include accusations of 'deliberate destruction, concealment or contamination of data' at Chinese labs, and it notes the silencing and disappearance of scientists in the communist country who spoke out.

The journal article, exclusively obtained by DailyMail.com and slated for publication in the coming days, is set to make waves among the scientific community, as the majority of experts have until recently staunchly denied the origins of COVID-19 were anything other than a natural infection leaping from animals to humans.
While analyzing COVID-19 samples last year in an attempt to create a vaccine, Dalgleish and Sørensen discovered 'unique fingerprints' in the virus that they say could only have arisen from manipulation in a laboratory.

They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.

Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists' theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as 'fake news.'

Over a year later, leading academics, politicians and the media finally flipped, and have begun to contemplate the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China - a lab where experiments included manipulating viruses to increase their infectiousness in order to study their potential effects on humans.

The key sentence:

DailyMail.com exclusively obtained the new 22-page paper authored by British Professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sørensen set to be published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery

So the Daily Mail - seemingly one of your favorite websites, CF - exclusively obtained a study (so, no one else has seen it) that has yet to be published (so, no one else has seen it).

It sounds like these authors made a "Chinese bioweapon" claim over a year ago, didn't provide sufficient evidence to back up that claim, and are just now getting ready to release a paper on it.  And the fact that people didn't believe them a year ago is somehow some sort of anti-Trump conspiracy...?

Call me a mindless zombie, but I think we should wait to see what their study actually says (and importantly: what other epidemiologists say in response) before we declare this study has proven COVID is man-made.

Here you go straw man. They were stopped from publishing there findings. There is much more to the article so you should find plenty of other semantics to argue. 
They said they tried to publish their findings but were rejected by major scientific journals which were at the time resolute that the virus jumped naturally from bats or other animals to humans.

Even when former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove spoke out publicly saying the scientists' theory should be investigated, the idea was dismissed as 'fake news.'

Many people are "stopped" from publishing their papers in reputable scientific journals because those papers don't survive peer review (i.e. they are obviously bogus).

So again, maybe we should wait to see what this paper actually says before we make any further declarations as to what it proves.  If the only outlet these guys are willing to trust with an advance copy is a British tabloid, I have a fairly good guess as to how this study is going to be received.

Hey guys, look what I found (https://www.mailplus.co.uk/edition-news/8666/wild-theories-that-didnt-stand-up-to-scrutiny) from the Daily Mail!

Wild theories that didn’t stand up to scrutiny

Analysis by John Naish
June 5, 2020

BACK in April, a slickly produced investigative documentary, Tracking Down The Origin Of The Wuhan Coronavirus, was released online. It claimed conclusive proof that the Covid-19 virus had been created as a biological ‘weapon of mass destruction’ in a Chinese lab.

At first sight, it seemed a shockingly convincing piece of journalism.

On behalf of this newspaper, I cross-checked every claim: The experts it cited and the factual evidence unearthed. I also researched the backgrounds of its makers.

I then approached some of the world’s best independent scientific authorities to ask their opinion. They all agreed - this enticingly spicy story just didn’t stand up.

It had been produced by a US based anti-Chinese government media organisation called the Epoch Times. Its ‘experts’ were veteran hard-Rightists. Most damningly, its scientific ‘facts’ were twisted out of shape.

So much, then, for the Chinese-manufactured coronavirus conspiracy... Well, not quite. Around the time I was researching the film, I became aware of rumours emerging about a ‘blockbuster’ piece of biological science by British and Norwegian investigators to be published in a reputable journal.

Experts who were sent the paper for ‘peer review’ prior to publication were astounded because it claimed to have established ‘beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 is an engineered virus’.

The authors alleged the Covid-19 virus had ‘unique fingerprints’ that could not have evolved naturally, and were ‘indicative of purposive manipulation’.

In other words, someone had manufactured this virus. Who exactly? The paper reportedly concluded Covid-19 should correctly be called the ‘Wuhan virus’.

When the paper was finally published this week, it sparked global headlines, largely thanks to former head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove. In a newspaper podcast interview he claimed the research was smoking-gun evidence the virus pandemic had ‘started as an accident’ when a man-made virus escaped from a Chinese lab.

The paper - co-authored by Professor Angus Dalgleish, a renowned oncologist and vaccine researcher who works at St George’s Hospital, University of London, and Birger Sorensen, a Norwegian virologist - contains none of the stark allegations that originally stunned its reviewers.

The initial paper that triggered wild rumours failed stringent tests of verification and is understood to have been rejected in April by eminent international journals such as Nature and the Journal of Virology. Biomedical experts from the Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College London are said to have refuted its conclusions.

Then one of the paper’s co-authors, Dr John Fredrik Moxnes, chief scientific adviser to the Norwegian military, asked for his name to be withdrawn. This week, after numerous rewrites, the paper was published by the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery. And those original world-shaking conclusions have now withered to innuendo. No accusation of Chinese manipulation appears.

[etc and so on.]

---

Are COVID bioweapon truthers recycling "soon to be released" studies already published long ago, to try to gin up fake controversy about ideas that are already thoroughly discredited?  Say not so!

Rather than trying to pretend that you guys are making scientific objections, conservatives should just stick with the "Science is corrupt and evil, and cannot be trusted" angle.  At least that's a subjective opinion, instead of a falsifiable claim that's already been debunked.