Philipp Markolin

@philippmarkolin.eurosky.social

4691 Followers 689 Following

Science blogger and communicator: www.protagonist-science.com My investigative book about the COVID-19 origin controversy and manipulation campaigns about it can be found here: www.lab-leak-fever.com

US Republicans have long given up on an evidence-based worldview and are engaged in perpetuating political convenient and self-serving fictions detached from factual reality. Any type of “bombshell” they try to conjure up on decontextualized and cherry-picked emails has to be understood as a sometimes sloppy, sometimes more carefully crafted propaganda prop; and arguing within the frame of their baseless accusations without demanding scientific evidence and coherence with scientifically established facts is an error. The reality is that lab leak truthers and conspiracy theorists have failed in 6 years to find a shred of evidence to support their belief in a lableak, or even to formulate a scientific lab leak theory that is consistent with and not contradicted by the evidence we already have. That will not change no matter how many layers of human testimony and partisan interpretations of email communications, intelligence reports or private diaries they try to pile on to obfuscate that simple fact. When journalists and the public are charged with assessing the validity of such supposed “bombshell revelations” (selective disclosures), manipulators count on us to be seduced by the allure of access to secret information, and argue about the content, rather than the context, of the release. Which is a pity, because the content released this week was stale already years ago; yet the context surrounding the manipulative power of politicians and its calculated impact on public perception is more salient than ever today.
The virologists who brought us & the media the "overwhelming evidence" for a natural origin of Covid have been exposed. Their private messages refute their own key arguments for a natural origin & they were fearful that Covid-19 had been genetically engineered in an Wuhan lab. Jul 28 The card-carrying virologists who published just about every influential paper claiming a natural origin of Covid reacted to the Defuse put-furin-cleavage-sites-in-SARS-like-viruses proposal as so: What made me 💢 while reading their messages is they had the same suspicions & reactions to damning evidence of a lab origin of Covid - as one would expect from intelligent scientists - and they wasted years of our lives, pushing nonsensical double spillover raccoon dog theory. It's one thing to have a genuine disagreement with another scientist. It's another to have to waste years of your energy arguing with scientists who are smart enough to know you're right but choose to attack you as an unqualified conspiracy theorist. How many more years of our time and energy are these virologists going to waste when we could be creating better guardrails and oversight for catastrophic pathogen research that's proliferating around the world? Alina Chan Anyone, if you see journalists or scientists or people online citing the double spillover raccoon dog papers, please show them the above slack messages from the senior authors of those papers. Most people should be able to grasp the situation.
During the pandemic, we were snowed in by conspiracy theories. We observed how skeptics rejected public health advice and raged against medical science. We assumed that this was an organic response to a traumatic experience. We thought — hoped, perhaps — that once public health measures fell away, people wouldn’t care so much about trying Fauci for treason, say. And that was certainly true for a great many people. Even if this latent distrust of science lingered, these skeptics rejoined us in society. But for a class of person — politicians and influencers, in particular — they became addicted to the power their stories had earned them. Kennedy was no longer just the bastard child of a storied clan of politicians, he was a cultural force in his own right. He had crafted a tale so detailed, so convincing, that he was within reach of the highest office in the world. Others, with amateurish podcasts or poorly-written Substacks, became celebrated investigators. They could pluck out a detail from within these stacks of documents, or strike a connection that nobody else had considered, and become immortalized in the pantheon of this powerful new meta-theory. The key architects of Trump’s unlikely return to office recognized the weight this carried in the broader MAGA movement. This was a rather inconvenient position: As it meant tacitly recognizing that he, as president, was directly responsible for financing and overseeing this alleged bioweapons plot — and that the vaccines he once celebrated were, in fact, part of the mass-murder. Trump adopted it anyway. What’s more, he sharpened it into an axe with which to hack away at the administrative and scientific state.
Russell Voughts new commandment: We want your obedience, not your knowledge Russell Vought is the current director of the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB in short. The OMB’s powerful role in the administration are to manage and supervise the budget of executive agencies and to implement the agenda of the president. Russell is of course also famously entangled with the Heritage Foundation´s Project 2025, a conservative policy magnum opus full of disdain for liberal democracy, human rights, science, the environment, and anything else that is good in the world in favor of enriching the billionaires who sponsored it and the white supremacists who ideologically shaped it. Russell has been busy to implement the 2025 agenda and now, a good year and a half in power, and after crafting many devastating assaults on the independence of science and proposing dramatic cuts to scientific agencies (that Congress rejected), he offered his next policy plan to completely eliminate the independence of US science, punish US scientists and control their associations, and basically purge anybody not willing to go along with the fascist MAGA project.
About a year ago, Stephan Lewandowsky pulled together a team of scholars and academics to write the anti-autocracy handbook for scholars. In it, we describe how autocrats charge inconvenient citizens with often minor infractions to set an example, discourage dissent and create scapegoats. The FBI famously scrutinized Martin Luther King´s travel receipts, wiretapped his phones, bugged his hotel rooms, and planted informants in hopes of finding ways to delegitimize him. One of our authors, Renee DiResta also wrote about how academics in the US are again facing process-as-punishment: “Often it is not the goal or outcome that matters, but the spectacle along the way.” Now let´s quickly return to the virologists in question; Vincent Munster, head of the virus ecology section at a division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
“Allegedly attempting to smuggle biological materials under the guise of ‘research’ is a serious crime that threatens America’s national and agricultural security,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “We will remain vigilant to threats like these from foreign nationals who would take advantage of America’s generosity to advance a malicious agenda.” “Three Chinese nationals are charged with smuggling dangerous biological materials into the country and made false statements to law enforcement,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem. “Thanks to our brave DHS law enforcement and the FBI, they no longer pose a national security threat. Under President Trump’s leadership, we are ensuring foreign criminals cannot abuse our visa programs to harm the American people." "This case underscores the vital importance of safeguarding the American people and addressing vulnerabilities within foreign student and exchange visitor programs," stated acting ICE Director Todd M. Lyons. "Educational institutions must enhance their admissions procedures to prevent exploitation, which can pose risks to national security, as demonstrated in this instance. I commend the ICE HSI agents and officers who work tirelessly to protect our nation and uphold the rule of law every day." "These charges show the FBI and our partners will aggressively investigate and hold accountable those who violate our laws, and that academic research cannot excuse illegal activity," said FBI Director Kash Patel. "The Chinese nationals charged today allegedly were involved in smuggling biological materials into the U.S. on several occasions. The FBI and our partners are committed to defending the homeland and stopping any illegal smuggling into our country."
Already in the interim report, the HSSCP Republicans stated that their goal is to “reign in the unelected bureaucracy, especially within government-funded public health.” Institutional expertise and independence out, political decision-making in. The Republicans further recommended granting the NIH director or the HHS secretary, both political appointees, not career public servants, “the authority to immediately suspend a grant determined to be a threat to national security.” In other words, they want to make President Trump's action by canceling EcoHealth Alliance’s grant on TV in 2020, which NIH unlawfully enacted, legal for the next Trump administration. In that future, all scientific grants will henceforth be up to the whims of the executive. Good luck with getting funding to study any politically inconvenient topic. The committee also wants to “incorporate the national security and intelligence community into the grant-making process,” specifically for countries they deem a concern—another vehicle to curtail the independence of science in the US and bring it under political control.