News Brief: "Organized Crime" "Shoplifting Epidemic" Panic Hits San Francisco Media

Indeed! Thanks for the great perspective David.

Barret

hear hear!

Matt

and we have hard evidence for all of those much more important 8 truths without opening up narratives that we aren't sure are true, make us sound crazy (when people already think we are crazy for being right about things with documented evidence such as COINTELPRO or the CIA releasing crack into SKID ROW and having deep longstanding ties to the cocaine trade through Columbia, etc.) and can easily be co-opted into nonsense conspiracies for bipartisan anti-communist narratives and fascists "but the ((((globalist))) (((Elites)))" narratives. So basically, well intentioned and believing himself to be left or not, Nathan is not or at least not doing a very good job of "just asking questions" or being on the left

Yep definitely agree with all of this. It's part and parcel of Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti's incoherent (and ahistorical) project of fusing "left populism" and "right populism." It'll never fly, and if it does, it'll take a pretty ugly form that none of us want to see.

Matt

What's important is that we have a virus that per WHO research is most likely naturally occurring and the u.s. rather than taking it seriously by following China and the WHOs advice and acting diplomatically has 1) busted out full "Dirty Chinese vectors of disease eat animals like savages" 2) put profits over human life 3) acutely killed POC & oppressed people in general through service work, anti-mask groups, and prisons being the hell that they are 4) put profits over human life again with vaccines through IP 5) hoarded and stolen vaccines, masks and ventilators while refusing help from China on said products including wasting products rather than using them or redistributing them to countries because putting ventilators in a landfill was cheaper 6) saw a spike in Sinophobic violent attacks against East Asian peoples of all ethnicities and nationalities including a mass shooting of sex workers 7) is putting profits over people again by opening back up at only 30% vaccination rates and with the vaccine hoarding and the IP blocker likely willing new mutations into existence that will make most vaccinations moot in a year or two by letting the virus run rampant al while 8) conveniently blaming a second subprime recession (remember 2008) that was brought on sooner and exacerbated by COVID completely on COVID

It's also important to remember that when you open up the questions its not very cut and dry that the virus started in China at all (Spanish Flu likely originated is Kansas yadda yadda), we in fact have some evidence the SARS-COV-2 may have been in Italy and/or Spain up to 11 months before the outbreak, a BSL/4 lab in the us.s shut down in Summer of 2019 and a mysterious "vaping disease" that wasn't contagious but was spread across households that summer and a dealier flu season than usual in spite of an effective flu vaccine, as well as a Wuhan Games a month before the outbreak where the u.s. military was in China for nefarious or natural spread as well as other countries militaries in Wuhan for all of which seems conveniently left out by Nathan and none of which is a worthwhile conspiracy to delve into. Unless there is hard evidence that this was not naturally occurring and you would trust the u.s. media to report it objectively (and not either have it vanish into the ether a la the Panama papers or the J.P. Morgan cocaine ship nor have it spin into a Tucker Carlson/QAnon "Chinese (((elites)))" are responsible for the virus" - which frighteningly seems to eb even teh mainstream liberal narrative right now because we really needed a Sick Man of China version of Russiagate apparently!) then it does nothing to help anyone.

Yeah this is a too clever by half third way that ignores the manifest reality of the players at work. It’s like that brief period where some argued we could make RussiaGate serve the interests of the left by reframing it as opposition to global elite or authoritarianism or some such, sounds cutesy wootsy on paper but in reality was never going to happen, it’s a clear as day Cold War narrative especially since the “US” role here in question is the liberal state working with hostile govts on science cooperation—not our military or surveillance state. So what exactly would we be combating stateside here? Infectious disease research? The obvious narrative being fueled here is that of the Tucker right and the softer version needed for liberal empire which is a “(((globalist))) elite” in China and US worked together to unleash covid? There’s only one way this plays out if the “lab leak” theory becomes the Official Narrative and it won’t be undermining US empire ever, at best it would be used to further gut liberal science cooperation within the US already in tatters while effectively blaming China for what is like 10,000 9/11s. Obviously the origins of covid are important to know to prevent future outbreaks but the question is now firmly in the hands of nationalist mythmakers and spooks so any consensus is inherently political and ripe with conflicts of interest and should thus be met with extreme skepticism

Citations Needed

Thanks for the thoughtful reply Matthew. I do see what you're saying and have noted the sudden turn that mainstream coverage of the lab leak theory has taken. The nuance will be lost on most folks and it'll only increase hostility towards China. Not great. :(

Barret

I see what Nathan's saying here, but I think this is a seriously misguided approach. The problem is that 90% of people won't interpret lab leak as "this came from a collaboration project between the US and China, and the work just happened to be at a lab in Wuhan." No, they'll see lab leak as, "This virus came from Wuhan, and it was leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Therefore, the Chinese Communists did it, and they probably did it on purpose." That's what lab leak means to most people, which is why Biden is so excited about investigating it at the same time he's developing a more hostile foreign policy viz China. Plus Nathan's logic is a bit off here. We haven't found THE animal that brought Covid to humans, but this is a disingenuous argument. It's like when creationists argued that there was a missing evolutionary link between humans and other hominids, so therefore it couldn't be evolution so it had to be creation. This is a missing link argument but we know that Coronavirus-2 is remarkably similar to other bat viruses. The fact that we don't know EXACTLY how it got from bats to humans, what the intermediate species was, proves nothing. And take a look at the kind of people purveying this theory. Race science enthusiast Nicholas Wade in his Bulletin of Atomic Scientists piece, an ex-NSA analyst Dan Sirotkin in a paper peer reviewed by his dad(!), Steve Bannon. I think Nathan Robinson has good intentions here and we should figure out where this virus came from, but he's unintentionally being a patsy for anti-Communist right-wingers, and he should know better.

Matt

Matthew, this article might be worth a read. I thought it was a racist theory too but this changed my mind: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/the-stakes-of-finding-covid-19s-origins

Barret

Awesome stuff, guys! You should do a bit on this media surge around Lab Leak. Weird that according to npr/WaPo/NYT this was a racist theory under Trump, and now that Biden is pushing it they're all lapping it up and validating it - even though there's still effectively no evidence for it.

Matt

Wow so the Mafia is making a come back ? Wow 😳 what a claim these folks are making to justify the police state.