Propagandaland...a

I have come to prefer highly biased right-wing propaganda. I have been exposed to enough leftist propaganda and slanted journalism to have a pretty clear idea of what that end of the political spectrum is going to say about most events, so the right wingers offer up a different flavor of BS. As a political outsider and independent, I don't have any real loyalty to one or the other side, although populism has caught my interest over the past few years and I've become open to some conservative ideas, despite my liberal upbringing.

It really does seem, at times, that people can live in different but nominally overlapping "realities" depending on the media sources they use to get their information about the world. I recognize this, so a lot of the disagreements on current events I see get chalked up to that. Lefties and righties have different info sources, different base assumptions, and they get their info from people with different agendas and objectives. All the same, biases and partisan talking points aside, there are some things that I'd think would be fairly obvious.

One thing that has me scratching my head lately is the frankly bizarre perspective of leftists on the so-called lab leak theory of the origins of Covid-19. Apparently this is still regarded as an implausible conspiracy theory in some circles, which I find baffling in light of all the circumstantial evidence pointing in that direction. Recently Jon Stewart did a sketch pointing out the obvious signs pointing to the lab-leak theory as being worthy of consideration. I thought he was just pointing out the obvious, but evidently this sketch was considered controversial in some quarters.

Frankly, if the fact that the Covid outbreak occurred in a city where there was a lab engaging in gain-of function research on bat coronaviruses doesn't at least raise someone's eyebrows, I just don't know what to say to them. When I navigate over to a right wing news site to see the outrage of the day, I know exactly what I'm going to get and why I'm getting it, but that doesn't mean that I agree with all, or even most of it. I don't check my critical thinking at the door just because I agree with one position or another. It seems like a lot of modern liberals are happy to let the media do their thinking for them, maybe because its easier to live in a world where Covid was a natural virus and not something cooked up by our enemies and unleashed into the world through either malefic intent or sheer stupid carelessness. The likelihood that our own government helped fund it is another tough pill to swallow, but here we are.

I always call myself a conspiracy "hypothesist" as opposed to a conspiracy theorist, because most "conspiracy theories" are pretty dubious and certainly can't be proven, but in this case I really think where there's smoke there's fire. At the very least, it seems reasonable to question the official narrative on this one, but it's still heretical to consider the idea in some quarters and to me that's just plain weird.