[ExI] Reality is a Communist Plot

Sat Aug 1 11:00:46 UTC 2026

On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:03 PM Gregory Jones <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

*> If Krugman forgot to add to his list of conspiracy theories one still
> gaining popularity: that Covid was not a lab leak.  That one is still
> making the rounds.  spike*
>

*I asked Claude (set to Extra) the following question "Was the cause of
Covid a lab leak?" and this was his answer:*
*==*
*Claude:* "There's no scientific or intelligence consensus — the question
remains genuinely unresolved and contested.

*On the intelligence side:* U.S. agencies are split. The FBI assesses a
lab-related origin as most likely with *moderate confidence*, and the
Department of Energy reached a similar conclusion with l*ow confidence*.
The CIA shifted in January 2025 to say a research-related origin is "more
likely" than natural transmission, though only with l*ow confidence*, and
it explicitly stated that b*oth research-related and natural origin
scenarios remain plausible*. Other intelligence agencies continue to assess
natural spillover as more likely, or say there's insufficient evidence to
conclude either way.

*On the scientific side:* A 2025 WHO report found the pandemic's origins
still uncertain, noting much of the information needed to evaluate the
lab-leak theory was never made available to investigators. While a zoonotic
(animal-to-human) origin is currently considered the best-supported
hypothesis by available scientific data, the WHO says the question will
remain inconclusive until more data or information is shared. Scientists
remain divided as well.

*The core arguments on each side:*

   - *Zoonotic spillover*: Early cases clustered around the Huanan wet
   market in Wuhan, which sold live wild animals; this mirrors past
   coronavirus outbreaks (SARS, MERS) that jumped from animals to humans.
   - *Lab leak*: Wuhan hosts a major virology institute with a history of
   coronavirus research; some proponents argue certain genetic features of the
   virus, or the fact that all known cases trace to a single introduction
   event, are more consistent with an engineered or lab-adjacent origin than a
   natural spillover.

Notably, some of this back-and-forth is politically charged — the current
White House has published material asserting lab leak as the "true origin,"
while under the prior administration the *CIA had stayed agnostic for years
before its 2025 shift, which by its own account was a reinterpretation of
existing intelligence rather than new evidence*.

Bottom line: this is an active, unsettled dispute rather than a case with a
definitive answer — treat any confident claim in either direction with some
skepticism unless it's backed by specific new evidence."

*John K Clark*

>
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:32 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Nobel prize winning economist *Paul Krugman* had something interesting
>> to say a few days ago:
>> ===
>>
>> *             Reality is a Communist Plot*
>>
>>
>> *                                                    by Paul Krugman*
>>
>> *The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/a49c1fa7-0056-4810-8036-dfa7a6f60aea?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.
>> But hydroxychloroquine
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/da5a2025-ec96-4773-a734-a0f1be26cb4c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> worked,
>> and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/abcbf591-99ca-4400-8842-fa3dfc792cb1?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>>
>> *Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/c6b894f5-a94a-4880-a265-e80bbe76f163?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> during
>> the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t
>> shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America,
>> not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/3fe8b8c6-18e0-4500-ab3c-750b8fd86d2f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> its
>> 2 million square miles of boreal forest.*
>>
>> *We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a
>> deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result of
>> the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.*
>>
>> *The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59
>> percent approval rating
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/f477f9fb-f775-4864-a952-28d2fd71d2f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>>
>> *Trump won the 2020 election.*
>>
>> *Communism is the greatest threat facing America.*
>>
>> *The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants
>> (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates
>> scientists.*
>>
>> *What the ongoing show trial of Fauci
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/5381f7e7-a885-47be-8dfe-1fe50c569363?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
>> which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what
>> Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they
>> want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points
>> out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to
>> shoot the messenger.*
>>
>> *Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people
>> on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high
>> housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists
>> insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even
>> how most voters think about politics
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/d4a07203-f369-4717-9c8b-c6093004660f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
>> is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.*
>>
>> *I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I
>> try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and
>> admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.*
>>
>> *But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning.
>> It’s something far more extreme.*
>>
>> *If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they don’t
>> hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss
>> scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re
>> perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the
>> face.*
>>
>> *Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which
>> nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has
>> “blackouts and brownouts every weekend
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/b51cede3-a3b6-4f53-a618-0d553187cbe0?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
>> when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that
>> you must show ID to buy groceries
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/a886c68e-c550-4a12-9b0b-db828fbfbe8c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
>> which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.*
>>
>> *Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it,
>> that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even
>> accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says
>> that they don’t.*
>>
>> *George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all about
>> this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/4e798ccd-8d7e-49a0-8d16-ae546e2baf0b?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>”
>> he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:*
>>
>> *In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured
>> what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they
>> must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’
>> existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was
>> always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by
>> almost everyone.*
>>
>> *Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed.
>> Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:*
>>
>> *If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ –
>> well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two
>> and two are five.*
>>
>> *If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the
>> top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?*
>>
>> *What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as
>> if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet,
>> anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any
>> deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members
>> of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many
>> Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between
>> fantasy and reality.*
>>
>> *But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump speeches
>> are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments
>> <https://substack.com/redirect/249c4a19-6eff-4e54-bbd2-b3c11ac10ede?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
>> because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to
>> stop clapping.*
>>
>> *The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as a
>> surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It involves
>> a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious
>> fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a
>> subject to be delved into another day.*
>>
>> *What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on
>> America as a whole.*
>>
>> *Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would
>> have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to
>> refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and
>> other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with
>> Trump or his successor still in charge.*
>>
>> *Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more
>> pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.*
>>
>> *And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because he
>> won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted our
>> weapon stocks with stunning speed.*
>>
>> *But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.*
>>
>>
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