Yesterday’s Conspiracy Theories Are Today’s Virtues
Good morning, and welcome back to the Bright Morning newsletter! We hope that everyone is taking advantage of the wonderful weather that we have been having (at least in Southern Ontario, or as we like to call it, The People’s Republic of Lockdown). There is not much housekeeping to attend to before we begin, and so we will jump in right away. But first, we would like to remind readers to please share, comment, and like our work so that we know if we are headed in the right direction. Nuancing Conspiracy Theories “Conspiracy Theory” is a phrase that we have all heard a lot over the past year. Like the words racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on, conspiracy theory is also a term that is losing its meaning - and fast. This is because it has been weaponized as a catch-all phrase to discredit any one person or group who is questioning the narratives, motivations, and policies of the parties in power. This is a tough needle to thread because there are legitimate conspiracy theorists out there. People Like David Icke or Alex Jones are known for propagating falsehoods and lies, such as their respective claims that COVID-19 is transmitted through 5G towers or that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. However, as ridiculous as these statements are, sometimes there are kernels of truth baked into the claims of conspiracy theorists. The best example was when Alex Jones propagated the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which was based around the idea that the Clinton Foundation organized underground sex trafficking rings with minors. Of course, Pizzagate was mostly false, but after the murder (not suicide) of convicted pedophile and rapist Jeffrey Epstein, it was revealed that Bill Clinton was a frequent flyer on Epstein’s private jet, believed to be called the Lolita Express (yikes), to Epstein’s private island. Other notable guests included Kevin Spacey. So, is it really plausible to believe that Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and other monolithic figures - all of whom had close ties to Epstein - knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes? Of course, the murder of Epstein has been covered with as much dirt as possible, but it is incidents like this which prove the importance of free speech. That is, sometimes the most ridiculous claims have some kernel of truth deep inside of them, and so it should be up to us to seek out that truth. Now that we have made this distinction, please keep it in mind as we examine how some of the most condemned “conspiracy theories” over the past year have miraculously gained support. Conspiracy #1: The Lab Leak Hypothesis If we wind back the clock to the beginning of the pandemic, the Lab Leak Hypothesis - the argument that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab - was treated with intense scorn. Even to this day, legacy media outlets, such as Forbes, continue calling the theory a “conspiracy,” even if they begrudgingly admit that there is a “germ of truth” to the claim that the virus was created by people. As evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying state, many scientists were either afraid to speak out or smeared as “conspiracy theorists” for merely proposing the idea that we ought to determine if the virus did, in fact, come from a lab. And is this not a reasonable question to ask? Why would this argument be treated with so much condemnation? Well, all roads lead back to Donald Trump. From the onset of the pandemic, Trump insisted on letting the world know that the virus did, in fact, originate in China. At the time, institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) - which have uncomfortable ties to the Chinese Communist Party (to say the least) - were reluctant to assign blame to China, even going so far as to push their official, propagandistic narrative that there was no “human-to-human transmission [of the virus].” In fact, when developing a name for the disease caused by the virus, the WHO landed on “COVID-19” because they wanted to “avoid stigma”