There are two forbidden questions in public discourse today.
- The integrity of the 2020 elections;
- The origin of the Covid virus.
John Hinderaker writes: “Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred.”
Touching on the origins of the coronavirus is even more highly charged. A US State Department document put it this way:
For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.
The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.
In a sense the stability of the status quo depends on these two questions not being answered. That is not because the truth is known to a certitude but precisely because it is not.
Books: Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson
Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.