Scientists: Lab Leak Is All But Proved
“To get to the truth” of COVID-19’s origins, “we need only unleash the power of science,” Richard Muller and Steven Quay declare in The Wall Street Journal. “Based on experience with SARS-1 in 2003 and MERS in 2012, we know that many people are infected by a host animal long before” coronaviruses “can jump from human to human.” But there is “powerful evidence” for the lab-leak theory: “If the novel coronavirus were engineered by scientists pursuing gain-of-function research, there would be no instances of community infection until it escaped from the laboratory. The World Health Organization investigation analyzed those stored samples and found zero pre-pandemic infections,” i.e., the virus likely leaked from the lab. “We have an eyewitness, a whistleblower who escaped from Wuhan and carried details of the pandemic’s origin that the Chinese Communist Party can’t hide. The whistleblower’s name is SARS-CoV-2.”
Iconoclast: Why Workers Hate Joe
President Biden likes to “present himself as a ‘working-class hero,’ ” but Americans don’t seem to agree, Joel Kotkin notes at Spiked Online, with polls showing him tanking among broad swaths of the populace. “One possible cause for the unrest lies with inflationary pressures that have canceled out any income gains for most people outside the oligarchic elites. The sad economic reality of today — real wages are in decline — contrasts uncomfortably with the far better performance for working people under the pre-pandemic Trump administration.” Confidence in Biden’s economic leadership has dropped to nearly 40 percent. “To recover his cred as ‘working-class Joe,’ the president needs to prioritize the concerns of the middle and working classes — such as homeownership, higher-paying jobs, useful education and public safety.”
Tech watch: Dems Don’t Want To Tame Facebook
Last week saw Democrats and media allies swoon over a Facebook whistleblower — but, warns Glenn Greenwald at his Substack, beware: The fresh attention has nothing to do with “a concern over those genuine dangers” posed by the social-media giant. “With the exception of a few stalwarts, neither party’s ruling wing really has any objection to this monopolistic power as long as it is exercised to advance their own interests. And that is Facebook’s only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress.”
From the left: The News Is America’s Religion
Just 45 years after Howard Beale in “Network” “described how America could commoditize anything, even the awful truth that its mass media had raised an illiterate populace that followed The Tube as the word of God,” TK News’ Matt Taibbi writes, “the film’s predictions still look right, but too optimistic” — because our media give us not one but “two religions.” Hence the fake news about border agents supposedly whipping Haitian migrants consumed news cycles, with politicians such as Veep Kamala Harris still denouncing the innocent agents while the right went after those ignoring the truth, while “larger questions, like what happened to the 15,000 migrants who were removed from an encampment . . . faded into the coverage background.”
Conservative: Team Biden’s War on Parents
“School board meetings . . . have always had the potential to become raucous,” observes the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. And yes, sometimes things can get heatedly violent. “The problem today is, can we trust our government to distinguish between the actual threat of violence and the passionate expression of viewpoints by parents? That question became a reality [last week] when Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo suggesting a nationwide federal crackdown on parents at school board meetings.” This is wrong: “Freedom is messy. Our discussions about things that matter to us, such as our children, are chaotic, disruptive, and, yes, divisive.” Hands off, feds! — Compiled by The Post Editorial Board