Crackpots and conspiracy theories

When I consume news, I like to look for common themes, discover trends, and draw analogies. This week was a jackpot. The common thread running through the recent chatter is the unraveling of what were previously believed to be crackpot conspiracy theories. It amuses me to see that a few are proving to be more true than many believed. It makes for some interesting turns of events.

I should start by saying that I try not to harp about left-leaning bias as much as my friends on the far right. I see it for what it is and try to maintain a balanced media diet. The one issue that gets under my skin is when journalists in otherwise non-editorial articles, refer to Mr. Trump's claims of irregularities in the 2020 election as “unfounded” and “false.” They sometimes go so far as to call them “lies.”

Is that necessary? Is that professional? It seems to me that they could as easily point out that he was skunked in tens of lawsuits. That would have the same effect, yet be factual, irrefutable, and objective.

Well, one of the places where he has not yet completely lost is Fulton County Georgia. Although the Electoral College vote favored Mr. Biden, Congress certified the decision, and Uncle Joe was sworn in as president on January 20, Georgia Judge Brian Amero agreed to unseal 145,000 absentee votes for audit.

The storage facility where the ballots were kept was to be guarded by two County Deputies, who subsequently abandoned their post. About twenty minutes later, an alarm went off at the facility and the door was found wide open and unattended. Can our friends on the left continue to claim that there are no irregularities? No shenanigans? Many probably will, but that incident certainly points out that the many anecdotes and affidavits associated with the 2020 election can’t all be wrong.

Next of course, is that sometime this month we are to see the long-awaited report to Congress regarding Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now known by Beltway Wonks as Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAP’s). The original request for the report, which is being produced by a Pentagon task force comprised of representatives from a variety of military and intelligence organizations, asked that it be unclassified so we all can review the materials. That’s not a common characteristic for those organizations, so I am anticipating considerable redactions.

We have been down this road a few times since the Roswell crash in 1948 and the UFO community has never been pleased with the results. Further, the UFO community has always been viewed as extreme conspiracy theorists, yet somehow, this episode has a different feel to it.

It began when the Pentagon released video footage of a 2014 encounter with Navy Jets and unidentified aircraft to the New York Times. Now several members of congress are taking the matter much more seriously, citing it as a possible National threat, and they want answers. I don’t know that the results will satisfy the UFO crowd. They may still line their hats with tin foil, but there are now some very serious people taking the matter very seriously.

Last but not least, the tide seems to be turning on the source of the COVID-19 virus. Both the U.S. State Department and the British intelligence community have each announced that they believe the Coronavirus was indeed leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That view was once dismissed by some as a conspiracy theory, and was sometimes even characterized as “racist,”

Naturally, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has not confessed to as much, nor have they allowed any detailed inspections by parties more neutral than the World Health Organization (who are not so neutral). The conclusion, however, is dictated not only by the mountain of circumstantial evidence but by the process of elimination. All of the alternative theories have been disproven, particularly the transmission from bat to human (or bat to pangolin). Researchers have found no evidence of a natural transmission of the virus, but do have evidence that research on the bat virus was being conducted at the lab, and in the fall of 2019, a hand full of lab employees were ill with similar symptoms.

What further fuels the fire is that Dr. Fauci’s emails were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, and he was essentially caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He apparently had a hand in funding some of that research. Although he denied it in a Congressional hearing, his email trail indicated otherwise.

That’s hard for me. I had been a Tony Fauci fan since back in my swamp-dweller days. I forgave him for his flip-flops on a few COVID issues, because our country hasn’t been through this since 1918 and we didn’t know what to expect, but I can’t overlook this.

At any rate, as we begin to open the country up for commerce, travel and education, we might need to be open to new possibilities. We should at least keep open minds.