I agree with UCal Berkeley econ dude Brad DeLong maybe 75% of the time, though I almost always confine my comments about him to the 25%. Well, this is one of those times.
Like so many of the cool kids, Brad has a substack blog, Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality and recently he took what struck me as a ludicrously gratuitous poke at New York columnist Jonathan Chait under the heading MUST-READ: Vacation Needed?, suggesting that Jon should, well, take a vacation, thanks to a recent post by Jon about the fact that, hey, the notion that the COVID 19 virus might have been the result of a leak from a Chinese laboratory after all is plausible after all.
Now, if you had been following this stuff closely, you might have read about the “lab leak” theory having legs two years ago, in Jon’s own magazine, thanks to this story from Chas Danner, The COVID Lab-Leak Hypothesis Just Got a Big Credibility Boost, but, it seems, when Brad doesn’t want to hear bad news, well, he doesn’t want to hear about it ever, and he signals his displeasure with Jon’s effrontery by linking to someone I never heard of, “Steve M”, who substacks under the nom de plume of “No More Mr. Nice Guy”, an appellation he effortlessly earns via the post Past Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories Are Never Dead. They're Not Even Past., venting, after brief words of praise, on poor Mr. Chait in an overwrought outpouring of foam-flecked outrage that left me murmuring “what the fuck?”
Well, what the fuck is, when a right-wing wacko makes an argument that is nine tenths utter bullshit and one tenth plausible, you are not supposed to say that the one tenth plausible part is indeed one tenth plausible! Ever! Steve M begins his peroration jumping off a paragraph from Jon, to wit:
When the lab-leak hypothesis first emerged [says Chait], its most prominent advocates were Republican politicians who were motivated to shift blame away from the Trump administration’s mishandling of the pandemic. Many of them combined the lab-leak hypothesis with other, more outlandish claims, such as the absurd notion that China intentionally spread the virus through its own country in order to harm America. Numerous early media reports labeled the lab-leak hypothesis a “conspiracy theory.” Some of those reports conflated the lab-leak hypothesis with wilder claims about China intentionally unleashing the virus.
“But the right is still doing it!” bellows Stevie (though not in so few words). Now, saying that the lab leak theory is definitely plausible, as Jon did, and as it certainly is, and faulting, as Jon also does, lefties who are still insisting that the lab leak theory is a right-wing plot, in no way supports, let alone confirms the entirely unfounded “theory” from the right that the COVID was all a Chi-Com plot, but, well, according to Stevie M, it does. Steve goes off on a long harangue regarding conspiracy theorist in chief and favorite Tucker Carlson guest Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who is pushing the intentional unleashing shtick like a motherfucker, as though Chait were somehow supplying her with aid and comfort by simply acknowledging, you know, the truth—that the COVID could have come from a Chinese lab, though inadvertently rather than deliberately.
But the truth, it seems, is something that neither Stevie M. nor Dr. Brad wants to hear. Moans Dr. Brad re Jonathan, “Too much of the time he simply does not see the right wing as it is, or attributes false motives for what we are doing to liberals like me.” Now, the first half of that sentence is pretty vague, and the second half barely coherent, but the effect, for me, is this: “Look, we’re in a life or death struggle here! Quibbling over “facts”, and even criticizing our own side, is not going to win this thing! Suit up or shut up, soldier! Suit up or shut up!” Which, frankly, is a funny way for a “social scientist” like Dr. Brad to talk.
Afterwords
I actually feel the same way about Jonathan Chait as I feel about Brad. In fact, I was planning a beatdown on poor Jonnie, not for being too soft on the right but for being too soft on the left, saying of those “numerous early media reports [that] labeled the lab-leak hypothesis a ‘conspiracy theory’”, that “The government and the mainstream media recognized their error early on and have correctly treated the debate as an open question.” The only problem is, that statement isn’t quite accurate. In fact, as I continued my “research”, by following a link Jon gave in his article to an earlier article that he himself had written (without identifying it as such), I found that Jon had already administered a searing beatdown to the “government and mainstream media” for their sins against science two years ago—a week after the Chas Danner piece—under the head How the Liberal Media Dismissed the Lab-Leak Theory and Smeared Its Supporters, a lead in that I would describe as “sa-moakin’”. And, in the text that follows, Jon doesn’t let up an inch:
The [lab leak] hypothesis is far from proven. But this account of the virus’s origins is highly plausible, and at least as well-grounded as the original story of an infection that naturally leapt from a bat to a person.
This development would come as a shock to anybody who had been following this question in the news, especially its more left-leaning precincts. Many mainstream journalists, though not all, dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis out of hand as a conspiracy theory. In part, they were deceived by some especially voluble public-health experts. In part, they simply took Donald Trump’s bait, answering the former president’s dissembling with false certainty of their own.
It is not too early to grapple with the failures of the media, which reflect the wider struggles of trying to fairly convey the truth in an atmosphere deformed by misinformation. Rather than meet lies with truth, the media often met it with other lies.
And Jon did grapple, back then. But now he lets them off easy, for some reason. But I guess it’s just as well that Brad never saw the earlier piece. If he had, he might have gone absolutely, well, “batshit” insane!
Special Literary Afterwords
I must give Stevie M English major props for riffing on Quentin Compson’s famous lines “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past” from not my favorite Faulkner Absalom! Absalom!
