Political Quotes

“Mr. President, at the end of May, Facebook announced that it would no longer censor claims that the coronavirus was man-made. The mainstream media, which had savaged the story during the previous administration, suddenly started backpedaling, and the Biden White House, which had reportedly canceled the previous administration's investigation into whether the novel coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab, announced a 90-day inquiry into the virus's origins. The occasion for all this backpedaling was apparently a report in the Wall Street Journal that three researchers who worked at Wuhan Institute of Virology ``sought hospital care'' in late 2019 for symptoms consistent with the coronavirus. In the wake of that report, it became impossible for the President or the mainstream media or Facebook to deny what had always been a plausible theory: that the virus came from the virology lab in Wuhan. Journalists moved to explain their previous rejection of this theory, and some of them openly admitted what had been obvious: that they rejected the theory not because of flaws in the theory itself but because of those who had advanced this hypothesis. We don't know what these revived investigations will ultimately show, but the Wuhan reversal illustrates multiple issues. One, of course, is the need to remember that our social media experience is heavily curated.…”