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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33502 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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I wonder how the disclosure of Covid origins information became right-coded.

I think this was simply cemented by May 2020, but it is pretty interesting how that worked out. Circa January 2020, it seemed like a pretty open conversation, but once we entered the full "trust the science" phase of things and "the science" was that it was zoonotic, asking follow-up questions became a distinctly right-coded thing to do. At some point, it even became "racist", which thoroughly closed this off as official badthink.

As I remember it it was after Trump mentioned it. At that point it stopped being a point of legitimate query and started being a matter of acknowledging Trump's query as legitimate. It became tribal. Once Trump was out of the picture it began losing that valence and started becoming legitimate again.

OP's family member "suggested that they've shifted right". Right-coded is still assessing the subject in tribal terms but it's an attenuation from being Trump-coded. And I'm not sure it's grossly off target. Is OP excited about the report because he has a material interest in whether covid came from a lab, an academic interest in "the science", or because he has a political axe to grind? He may well be a pure intellectual, but his family member can have justifiable reasons for assuming otherwise. How many people were excited about virology before covid made it cool and the Trump era made it tribal.

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