Kathryn Haun was recently on The Ezra Klein Show. I don’t see much in terms of considered opinion coming out of the pro-crypto camp. It’s much more, “Gimme a B! Gimme an I!” What’s that spell? Propaganda!

So normally, I wouldn’t have even listened to the podcast. But Klein doesn’t bring loons on his show. And the truth is, I continue to look for people who can make a good case for crypto. I really do want there to be something with it. But I have begun to despair. It’s looking more or more like a simple scam. (Not that it started that way.)

Haun did approach the podcast with the seriousness that it deserves. But it was quickly revealed that she was not there for an honest discussion of the issues. It reminded me of a Christian apologist going on an atheist talk show. They know they are in a dangerous place so they don’t come on aggressively. But they are only there to push their canned talking points.

Decentralization

Haun trumpeted the glories of sending money with Bitcoin. You see, you can do it without a centralized authority! This is true. People make millions of dollars every year “mining” Bitcoin to allow just that. But who cares?

What bothers me about credit cards is not that there’s some authority involved in the transaction. I’ve been using Banks since I was about 5 years old. I’m fine with it. What bothers me is that it costs me money (indirectly). I think most people feel the same way.

And guess what? Cryptocurrencies cost money when you transfer them! In fact, they cost a lot more! But you’re not beholden to a centralized bank — oh, no! Instead, you are beholding to a distributed group of crypto miners. Hooray!

Ignorance Is Fueling It

The sad thing is that most people who are into crypto simply don’t understand it. That’s not true of Haun, of course. But the current market capitalization of a trillion dollars is built on ignorance. And people in the middle of a bull market tend not to notice that their brokers are siphoning off huge amounts of money.

But eventually, the bull market ends. Then everyone is left with what? A really expensive method of exchange that adds literally nothing new to the technologies we had before?

I’m really kind of sick of this happy talk especially coming from people who clearly do understand the system. Cryptography is really interesting. But in terms of transferring valuable objects from one person to another, the system just doesn’t seem that useful.

And every time I bring this up, crypto people say, “Look at how much money it is worth!” I do see that. We all see it. We also all saw that Theranos was valued at $9 billion dollars when it was worthless.

Blockchain Will Save Musicians!

Haun mentions that you can use the blockchain to transfer other things like songs. Well okay. An artist could release songs on the blockchain. And maybe that would be more efficient than using rights management software.

I don’t really know but I’m open to it because I hate rights management software. But again that’s a case where crypto is just a different way of doing the same old thing. And that’s great! Finding new and better ways to do things is good.

But this is clearly a post hoc rationalization. Bitcoin started as a currency. As time has gone on and it has failed as a currency, true believers continue to look for ways to justify the technology. Certainly, we are better off looking for a way to replace rights management software rather than trying to shoehorn that solution into a technology that has failed at being a currency. Right?

Of course, we aren’t looking for a way to replace rights management software. And as I will discuss below, there is a reason for that. Hint: it involves the interests of powerful people. You know, people like Kathryn Haun!

Interoperability

She also mentions interoperability. Oh, the irony! Over 6,000 different cryptocurrencies have been created. As I write this, there are over one hundred cryptocurrencies with a market cap above a billion dollars. Doctor, heal thyself!

Why is it that the blockchain is what is going to fix our interoperability problems? Consider this: why did we have cassette and 8-track tapes at the same time? Why did we have Beta and VHS at the same time? What about Sirius and XM? We had them because there was a difference of opinion about which was best. Ultimately, the issue was resolved. But how would this work with all these crypto blockchains that are, you know, not controlled by anyone?

Another thing Haun says is that when you buy digital music you don’t own it. Guess what? When you buy an LP you don’t own it either. The problem is not the technology. The problem is our broken IP system.

As with licensing, she’s desperately looking for ways to make crypto relevant. She doesn’t care about rights management. She doesn’t care about IP law. She just cares about use cases that make crypo seem like it isn’t a waste of everyone’s time.

Concentrated Power

It bothers me how much Spotify and other platforms charge. It bothers me even more that TextBroker takes 35% of what I pay writers. But in both cases, this money goes to connecting one person to another. How exactly is a new freelance writer going to find clients? Hell, how is an established one?

Yes: the amount that TextBroker charges strikes me as exploitative. We ought to do something about that. But the blockchain doesn’t seem a particularly fruitful avenue to pursue.

Think about what she’s suggesting: musicians put their songs on the blockchain and you buy it and then own that particular copy! (Again: IP law makes it so you do not own it.) Is that going to happen? No! Spotify or some other powerful interest will find a way to offer the songs for sale even as they are “sold” on a blockchain. So we’ll have a new technology with the exact same system.

This is where we get to the issue of power. And to his credit, Ezra Klein pushed back. Musicians and listeners are getting ripped off not because of the technology but because of the power. But Haun counters that the technology simply isn’t here yet. That just goes to show she doesn’t understand the issue.

Powerful interests are always able to use technology to their own benefit. Yes, there are minor cases here and there where that doesn’t happen. But those in power learn quickly and errors are not repeated. Technological fixes do not stand in their way.

Vertical Marketing to the Rescue

Many times, Haun brought up some form of the idea that early fans might be able to make an investment in an artist. It’s just multi-level marketing. What’s more, there are much better ways to do this.

Dean Baker’s idea of The Artistic Freedom Voucher is great. But it requires a change in the system that harnesses the fact that people want to help out struggling artists that they admire. They wouldn’t do it because they think they’re going to make money off it later.

Virtual Handbags

Haun also notes that Gucci handbags cost more in the Roblox virtual world than they do in reality. But of course that Gucci handbag can only be used in that game. Imagine what it would be like if you could take that handbag to any virtual world?

She isn’t making a joke. She’s deadly serious. Here you have people paying a lot of money for something useless. And she thinks it’s a game-changer that they might be able to have that useless thing in more areas. This is all so absurd!

Of course, I should be clear that most of this is all about fashion. I don’t care about fashion in the real world and so I don’t care about it in the virtual world. So I’m probably a particularly bad person to discuss this kind of thing.

Bitcoin Energy Consumption

She pushed back on the idea that Bitcoin uses a huge amount of energy. She knows quite rightly that newer cryptocurrencies are using Proof of Stake. But as I’ve been ranting about for well over a year now, Bitcoin is by far the biggest and has no plans to change from Proof of Work.

And her solution for the fact that you can’t just change Bitcoin is that most miners are trying to use more renewable energy. Well, no shit! The cost of energy is the main thing limiting profits.

But imagine that Bitcoin was powered by solar energy. It isn’t causing global warming. Hooray! There’s still a huge opportunity cost here. That energy could be going to do something useful. Bitcoin needs all of this energy just to maintain itself. Meanwhile, I have cash in my wallet that works just as well and doesn’t take any energy!

I’m not saying that energy use by Bitcoin isn’t a huge problem. But the moment the issue came up in the conversation, her first reaction was to come out with two or three talking points to minimize it. She’s nothing but a propagandist.

Horror Film Crowdfunding

She said there was a recent movie that was crowdfunded with crypto — apparently Braid (2018). Despite what people argue, there is nothing new about the way that the film was crowdsourced. You can crowdsource dollars and give people a cut of the profits.

The solution is not technology. The solution is collective action. The solution is changing the system.

The Reveal!

For most of the podcast, I assumed Kathryn Haun was a true believer with utopian dreams like I shared with many on the late 1980s internet. But then I learned she was a general partner at the venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, which manages almost $20 billion.

She’s also on the board of Open Sea! For those who don’t know, Open Sea is “the world’s first & largest NFT marketplace.” And for those who don’t know, NFTs are a scam.

But what really bugs me about Haun (and others like her) is that she probably got into this because it really appealed to her and she was a true believer. But she saw that there was a huge amount of money to be made.

She’s not putting money into a non-profit. No Aaron Swartz she!

Conclusion

The takeaway here is that Bitcoin was sold to us as this great technological innovation for currency. And it has failed absolutely. It continues to go up in value but it doesn’t work as a currency. So just as this realization finally seems to be seeping through, we get these new justifications for the cryptocurrency industry.

It’s hard to see the whole crypto world as anything but a giant con for a group of elite people. And sadly it is sustained to a large extent by a lot of utopian idealism pushed by rich elites like Kathryn Haun.

Image of Kathryn Haun taken from her Twitter profile under Fair Use.

After five months, the Arizona Audit released its final report. And it turned out to be exactly what I predicted. They didn’t find any fraud but they used it to push the same talking points that they were pushing before the audit even started.

The audit was always a partisan exercise. Its purpose was to push the idea that we can’t trust the vote. And in that regard, it was remarkably successful!

Months of Coverage and Then: Poof!

There were months of coverage of the audit. True: it was mostly covered in negative news stories in the mainstream press. But you can’t cover this without a lot of people thinking, “They wouldn’t be doing this if there weren’t something nefarious going on!” And, of course, there was: the Republicans are setting the stage to steal the election next time. But that’s not the message that goes out.

After all that, when the report was released, there was relatively little coverage. Part of this could be due to some people in the media saying the report should be given no oxygen. But that strikes me as closing the barn door after the propagandists have gotten all the benefit they can.

And call me cynical, but I feel certain that if Doug Logan and his conspirators had gone all in and announced that Trump actually won the state, the press would have covered it much more. This despite the fact that all of the people involved had been established as untrustworthy.

(Similarly, all the network news shows ignored the John Eastman coup memo. Who did not ignore it at the networks? Jimmy Kimmel (ABC), Stephen Colbert (CBS), and Seth Meyers (NBC). You would think after having been humiliated by The Daily Show in years past, the news industry would do something about this. But no. Just leave it to the late-night comedians. It’s apparently their job to inform the nation.)

Get More Information

If you want to know about what this all came down to, I recommend an excellent article by Jeremy Duda at Arizona Mirror, Arizona “Audit”: A Multitude of Unsubstantiated Claims and No Proof of Fraud. Even better is Maricopa County itself. Their Twitter feed fact-checked the entire audit presentation.

What’s interesting about it is that nothing had to be researched. All the claims are old and have been thoroughly debunked on Just the Facts. What you see again and again is that the people claiming to find problems are really just showing that they don’t know how the system works. And the fact that they continue to make these claims shows that they don’t care about how the system works.

The way the people of Maricopa County have dealt with this shows that contrary to the stereotype, our civil servants really are great.

I’m glad it’s all over. Just the same, I’m sure Cyber Ninjas will get more contracts because they did a smashing job of pushing right-wing propaganda. But I do hope they won’t get the attention they did this time.

Image is detail of Photo by Jeremy Duda | Arizona Mirror under Fair Use.

Correction: an earlier version of this article said that Maricopa Country was liberal. It is not. I should have known. On my only visit there, I was bitten by a vicious dog owned by a bunch of white trash.

So we’ve pulled out of Afghanistan now. And I guess it’s not going well. That’s what people tell me. But it strikes me as going about as well as can be expected. Republicans of course are blaming it all on Biden. And most media elites are largely putting the blame on him without saying what should have been done differently. But that’s all nonsense.

Of course, the Democratic leaders of three committees have already declared that they will be investigating Biden’s actions leading up to this. That’s a joke but also typical. These were people who had to be dragged into impeaching Donald Trump only after it became impossible not to do this.

It’s amazing that these people think this is to their advantage. It is a natural tendency for many professional Democrats to think that the smartest thing is always to abandon the party and attack it. And it never works. It just pisses off democrats. And it doesn’t get Republicans or moderates to vote for them.

Not at all! In fact, it makes a lot of people far less likely to vote for them because it makes them look weak. Makes them look like they’re not willing to stand up for their own side. And it makes them look that way because it’s true.

The “Smart” Take

But it’s become sort of the serious center-left position to claim that this was a mess two decades in the making. And many people want to place particular blame at the feet of George W Bush.

Now that is all true. The current situation in Afghanistan is most definitely the result of two decades of mismanagement. And Bush certainly did take a huge number of resources out of Afghanistan and put them into the absolutely ridiculous Iraq War.

I think the presidential blame should go in this order:

1. George W Bush
2. Barack Obama
3. Donald Trump
4. Joe Biden.

But I think it’s wrong to blame George W Bush for going into Afghanistan in the first place. For one thing, in Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke noted that Bush didn’t even especially want to attack Afghanistan. He only did it because he felt like he had to.

That doesn’t speak well of Bush. It shows that he was disconnected from what was going on. He wanted to use 9/11 for what he already wanted to do. This is why he is very much responsible for the Iraq War. But the Afghanistan War?

Who Wanted This War?

This gets to what I consider the most important thing in all of this: American’s wanted this war!

According to Gallup, when the war started, 89 percent of Americans thought the Afghanistan War was “not a mistake.” It didn’t matter that the country itself didn’t actually attack us. They were associated with the terrorist group that attacked us. And since we couldn’t attack that terrorist group, well, attack what you can! It’s like the war equivalent of the Stephen Still songs.

Many Didn’t Want This War

I was one of many people (in absolute, not relative terms) who were against the war at the time. On 9/11 itself, I predicted that the country would respond inappropriately. And it did not disappoint me! I even had a woman scream at me because I said we should not go to war.

Remember that Barbara Lee was the only person in Congress to vote against going to war with Afghanistan. And her argument was not even that we shouldn’t go to war. It was simply that we needed to slow down. We needed to take a breath.

The Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001 was passed by both houses of Congress 3 days after 9/11. Three days! Bush took longer to sign it — a total of four days! Lee noted that we were not making a rational decision. And we weren’t!

Short-Sighted War Support

I was against going to war for slightly different, more pragmatic reasons. At that time I was studying a lot about the early days of the Vietnam War for a play I was writing. And it just seemed so obvious that this was something we were very quickly going to regret.

I thought the same thing in the lead-up to the Iraq War. But smart people like Clinton and Kerry voted to allow Bush to go to war. (So did Bernie Sanders in the House.) I knew they didn’t think it was a good idea. They were doing it because they thought it was politically savvy.

But it was so short-sighted! I knew that within a year or two (at most) the American people would have turned against the war and a “no” vote would be seen as a badge of honor.

Even when wars go reasonably well, Americans get tired of them fast. Americans were tired of World War II by 1943. And that was, you know, the Good War. It may be good politics for the next 6 months to be in favor of a war. But it is not good long-term.

The only time I can think of a war that actually did remain popular long-term was the Persian Gulf War. And that’s because that war was over very quickly. But even still, George HW Bush lost his next election. He had an 89 percent approval rating right after the war but by the time of the election, it was down to less than 40 percent.

The point is that the American public is fickle. They love the idea of a Good War in the short term. But you can depend upon them to hate it in the long term. So it’s basically always a good idea to oppose yet another war.

We Will Do This Again

Of course, in the case of the Afghanistan war, our political elites and the base of the country we’re together. It was not acceptable to stop for even a second. And that kind of sums up America right there.

If there were a marshmallow test for countries we would fail it.

But the thing is, we as a country need to come to terms with the fact that this was our choice. There have been few things during my lifetime that have been so popular amongst Americans as the Afghanistan War. If we can say that America supported anything, it is this war.

So I wish people would stop blaming Bush or Trump or Biden or four presidents or our security services or anything else. Because this is America’s failure. This is something America was almost giddy about going into. And maybe if we can admit to that, the next time we might not make such a bad decision.

Tucker Carlson is over in Hungary palling around with Viktor Orbán. So I thought it would be a good time to check in with his claim that the NSA was spying on him in order to get his show canceled. Well, if they were, I can’t say that would be counter to trying to keep the US secure. But, of course, the NSA is doing no such thing.

Martin Matishak at The Record reported, NSA Review Finds That Tucker Carlson’s Communications Were Not Targeted. When Carlson first made the claim, I figured that he had been scooped up because he was talking to someone outside the country who the NSA was spying on. But it’s not even that!

Tucker Carlson’s name was “mentioned in communications between third parties.” That’s it. His name was “unmasked.” But that only means that people in the government wanted to know who was being discussed. There’s no there there. Story closed!

Enter The New York Post

The conservative tabloid The New York Post had a different take on the story, Tucker Carlson’s “unmasking” Claim Confirmed by NSA Investigators: Report. It begins:

The National Security Agency has quietly admitted that the identity of Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson was “unmasked” and leaked as he alleged earlier this month, according to a report.

You can see in the headline and the lede that the author, Mary Kay Linge, is trying to deceive with the term “unmasked,” even though it means only that his name was unhidden in a transcript.

And who leaked this? Well, the Tucker Carlson fan who told him. This is what he said on his show:

Yesterday, we heard from a whistleblower within the US government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air

This couldn’t be a more unethical telling of what Matishak reported.

The Post Knows Better

The second paragraph is just a reprint of a Fox News spokesperson’s “outraged” response. The third paragraph begins to tell what happened. But it isn’t until the fourth paragraph that we get what would be the lede in any normal paper:

But the host of Tucker Carlson Tonight was neither a direct nor an incidental target of the agency, the sources said.

So knowing that most people read only headlines and maybe the first one or two paragraphs, Linge and her editors made sure that their readers would be misinformed.

No Accountability

Since the information in The Record came out, there has been no segment on Tucker Carlson Tonight. And with right-wing sources playing interference for him, he won’t need to ever come to terms with his hyperbolic claims.

And the same is true of his audience. This is doubtless one of the reasons that Carlson and many others on the right are so impressed with the authoritarian government of Viktor Orbán. They can continue to get all the good things that go with their power and never have to deal with the bad things like responsibility and accountability.

Afterword

Let’s take a moment to remember when Rutger Bregman forced Tucker Carlson to see that reasonable people all over the world know just what Carlson is. He will at very least be remembered as the Joseph Goebbels of the USA.

Tucker Carlson by Gage Skidmore under CC BY-SA 2.0.

I know that my atheist readers will probably look at that headline and think, “Because they believe in one irrational thing so why not another?” And okay. But we are all irrational even if many of us hide it better than those who believe in the zombie who made God forgive all our sins. I want to look at something a little different: the uselessness of right-wing Christianity in this country.

The Economist recently published an article, What Drives Belief in Conspiracy Theories, a Lack of Religion or Too Much? It looks that a YouGov poll that asked people about their religious beliefs and their support for different conspiracy theories. Here are the questions and the number of percentage points more likely the evangelicals were to believe them than the rest of us:

• Millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2020 general election (34 pp)
• The government is using the COVID-19 vaccine to microchip the population (14 pp)
• Vaccines have been shown to cause autism (15 pp)
• NASA staged the Moon landing (5 pp).

As we go down the list, fewer people believe so the differences decrease. But 67% of white evangelicals believe that millions of illegal votes were cast last year’s election and 15% believe we didn’t land on the Moon. (They are also much more likely to believe in Qanon.)

Some have argued that religious people would be less inclined to believe this nonsense because they have a fulfilling belief system in their faith. The truth must be closer to the opposite.

What Do People Use Religion For?

Religion was not big in my house but I got to see it in the larger family. My father’s family were Catholics of the “We’ll Donate and Attend Occasionally but It Ain’t Getting in the Way of Our Lives” variety. This is probably why I have a higher opinion of Catholicism.

My mother’s family were White Evangelicals. They all had personal relationships with Jesus and were ostentatious in their belief yet seemed only to care about one issue: abortion. In word, they loved the sinner. In deed, they talked about how much they loved the sinner.

And from them, I got the idea that the purpose of their religion was simply to signal their inclusion in the group of Good People. Now, I understand: everyone does this. But you don’t need religion for that. It seems to me rather a waste of a religion.

What Is Theology Good For?

What continues to frustrate me about almost all religious people is that they aren’t much interested in theology. The closest they get to it is this childish belief in Heaven as if Jesus is The Great Pumpkin — come to give the good boys and girls eternal life if they just believe hard enough!

And this stunted form of religious belief does not provide believers with much in the way of meaning. All they get from their religion is that they’ll be one of the Cool Kids that gets into the Party at the End of Eternity. But you know God: he’ll probably let all those hippy Christians in too and that doesn’t make them feel very special.

So they are easy marks for other pseudo-religious scams like Qanon. God supposedly loves them for believing one ridiculous thing. Wouldn’t he love them more if they believed in a dozen similarly ridiculous things? Regardless, every new belief provides them with a dopamine rush that comes from believing they have found The Truth.

Where Does This Leave Us?

I knew when I was a kid as much as I do now: these were the people who burned “witches.” They are authoritarian by nature. Alone, they are harmless — nice, in fact. But they are easy marks for demagogues.

And that’s the takehome from the YouGov poll.

Conspiracy Theory Wall by Harald Groven under CC BY-SA 2.0.

David Pakman was asking why it is the conservatives won’t get the vaccine when they give Trump credit for creating it. I have some thoughts on this.

To start with, that may be an overstatement. Not that much time was spent trying to convince the nation that Trump belched the vaccine out on to a grateful public. So I don’t think that is prominent in the Republican brain.

Regardless, Pakman isn’t taking into account people’s ability to hold two contradictory truths in their minds at the same time. Humans are great at cognitive dissonance but modern conservatives have brought it up to the level of art.

The Anti-Vax Pleasure

But I think the big issue here is that conservatives get a certain amount of pleasure by not getting the vaccine. It makes them feel good that they are depriving liberals of getting something they want.

It’s the same old thing. That’s the basis of modern conservatism. They don’t actually believe in anything except doing things they think will annoy the libtards. In fact, they spend a lot of energy convincing themselves that we liberals are offended even when we really don’t care most of the time.

This is a great example of a self-satisfied conservative thinking he’s offending the liberals and the liberals just not caring.

The (Nonexistent) Anti-Vax Pain

Normally there would be a trade-off. They would realize that by getting this small thrill of sticking it to the liberals, they were losing something. They weren’t getting the vaccine. And as a result, their lives are more limited. But that’s not the case!

These are the people who have claimed almost from the start that there should never have been any shutdown of the economy. There should never have been any mask mandates. Because it’s only the old and sickly who died anyway. Blah, blah, blah…

Also: it is widely believed that Covid-19 is just a hoax. It’s just something the liberals made up so that they could turn America into a communist state. Or whatever. Again that is totally contradicted by their belief that Trump is brilliant and he brought us the vaccine out of his gold-plated lab inside Trump Tower. But who cares?

So there you have it: in the minds of the Republican base, there’s an upside to not getting the vaccine. And there’s absolutely no downside to not getting the vaccine.

Useless Evidence

Now I know that some of you will counter that there are all these stories about anti-vaxxers not getting vaccinated and then getting very sick and even dying. But those are stories that only occur on the regular news.

If you’re watching Fox News and Newsmax and OAN News, you’re not seeing those! And if you happen to hear about them? Well: fake news!

It’s a mistake to think of anti-vax people the way you would others. It’s not that they are irrational. They are, in fact, very rational! They simply believe we live in a different world. The logic is the same; the facts are different!

Conservative Belief in Social Cohesion

It’s kind of funny really. Because for decades conservative intellectuals have made the argument that liberals were dividing the country. It was always liberals who didn’t care about social cohesion. We saw this in many books like a couple by Charles Murray.

Just as with conservative fears of relativism, it turns out that the mechanism was backward. A lack of social conservatism wasn’t tearing our society apart; authoritarianism was destroying social cohesion.

That’s because the people who follow conservative ideology are authoritarians. Why else would a poor person vote for a party that mostly just gives tax cuts to the rich? It’s because they believe in the authoritarian underpinnings of conservatism.

And all the rich people who kept the poor and middle classes wedded to this ideology were sowing authoritarianism. Because that is literally the only thing that conservative ideology offers regular people.

The Freedom to Die

And now we have a deeply divided country. We have people who will not get vaccinated because they claim it is about their freedom. Meanwhile, they are putting all the rest of us at risk. And the entire world at risk. It’s very sad.

And there will never be an accounting. The closest that we might get is that millions will die. But it will not be those great Freedom Fighters who wouldn’t get vaccinated. It will be everyone.

Governor Wolf Receives COVID- 19 Vaccination by Governor Tom Wolf under CC BY 2.0.

Joe the Plumber is a joke on the left. For those that don’t remember, he had a conversation with Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign. He claimed that he was thinking of starting a plumbing business. As a result, he was very concerned about Obama’s plan to raise taxes on incomes over a quarter-million dollars. (Obviously, this shows the usual ignorance of how marginal taxes work.)

It was preposterous. For one thing, he wasn’t a plumber. For another thing, I don’t think he ever made anything close to that amount of money. So his entire argument was that he had a dream that someday he would make so much money that he would be affected by this tax.

In this way, he is the ultimate example of the Republican voter. He wasn’t thinking about what his actual interests were. He was thinking about what his interests were in his fantasy.

Voting Your Interests

I’ve been a strong critic of the notion the people should vote their own interests. I don’t vote my own interest. I vote the way that I consider to be morally right. But Joe the Plumber shows that this is not generally true of Republicans.

They generally do not vote their interests. But this is not because they are wedded to some higher calling. It is because they don’t even know what their interests are. They are, in a word, marks.

This is discussed in the movie 1776 where John Dickinson says, “Don’t forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor. And that is why they will follow us to the right!”

Small Business Delusions

You see this most distinctly with small business people. This is something I know a lot about because my parents were small business people and I have generally been one too. Most of them are extremely conservative. And they vote reliably Republican.

But why? The Republican Party is not good for small businesses. Sure, they talk about small businesses all the time. But their policies benefit multinational corporations. If you’re a small-business person, you’re screwed by the Republicans. And it is amazing that small business people so rarely see this reality.

They are all Joe the Plumber. The Republican Party may not help him today but just you wait! In a couple of years they will have a huge business too! And they will have an army of lobbyists and then all their support of the Republican party will pay off!

Small Business Flattery

But there is something that the Republicans give small business owners: all that smoke that gets blown up their asses.

Sure, the Republican Party may make it harder for them to run their businesses. But what is that compared to being told that you are a Little John Galt?! And that, I suppose, is worth something. We all have our delusions.

Of course, this is all on the margins. The elephant in the Elephant’s Room is racism. But that certainly isn’t the story The Republican voters tell themselves. They don’t see themselves as racist even if they are extremely so.

But it hardly matters. They vote Republican because they think the party supports people like them. The difference is that when it comes to racism that’s true. When it comes to small business policy it isn’t. And that makes the small business owner a bigger mark than the unrepentant bigot.

Image cropped from Joe the Plumber in Elyria today by Rona Proudfoot under CC BY-SA 2.0.

I think we have a problem when we talk about the lab leak theory. There is not one. The original theory was a full-out conspiracy: China had developed it as a biological weapon and then they released it on the world to harm us.

Now the same people who pushed that conspiracy theory want us to believe that the notion that the virus may have leaked from a lab proves them correct. Well, it doesn’t.

So let’s look at the theories here. The Chinese government:

1. Created a biological weapon that they knowingly released to the world.
2. Created a biological weapon that they accidentally released to the world.
3. Was doing work on viruses that was accidentally released to the world.

The first one is absolutely ridiculous. If the Chinese government wanted to release a biological weapon on the world, they wouldn’t do it to their own people much less to the people right outside the lab where they created it.

The second one is less ridiculous but still absurd. This is a really inefficient biological weapon. But more important there’s absolutely no evidence that this virus was created as a biological weapon. This is pure conjecture.

Reasonable Theory

So this leaves us with the third possibility. Scientists were studying this virus and it got out of the lab. This kind of thing does happen. And we should be concerned about this regardless of whether or not it happened in this instance.

Lab safety is an important issue. I’ve heard people suggest things like locating these labs far away from populated areas and requiring quarantine periods for travel from the facilities.

But note that this is never been a concern of the loudest voices regarding the lab leak theory. The number one concern of these proponents is simply to blame China. Implicit in this is to exonerate the Trump administration.

(Note the absurdity here: as though the source of the virus justifies a terrible response. New Zealand was attacked as much as the United States and yet they did a good job of managing the pandemic. No origin story justifies the terrible governmental response to COVID-19.)

Liberal Response

What bugs me about all this is not that Republican apologists are weaponizing it. What bugs me is that liberals are so quick to jump on board. They are so concerned about being seen as anti-science that they jump to the other side of this issue. And then they criticize the left for dismissing this theory in the first place.

In addition to this unfortunate tendency of liberals to attack their own side, there are major problems here. The first is that most people on the left always said that it was possible that COVID-19 came from a lab leak.

Second we still have no actual evidence that it was a lab leak. We are in exactly the same position we were a year ago. It’s possible it was a leak but it still looks unlikely.

The truth is if we get ironclad evidence that this was a naturally occurring virus, the usual suspects will never accept it. And decades from now, we will continue to hear about how the Chinese government released the virus to get rid of the Trump presidency.

Note that this would never happen if the sides were reversed. Conservatives never take the very possibility that they might have been wrong to turn on themselves. In fact, conservatives rarely take ironclad evidence that they were wrong to criticize themselves.

What actually happened was that there was no reason to believe that the source of COVID-19 was a lab leak so it was generally ignored. The theory was used on Facebook and other places to push absurd conspiracy theories. And a year later, we have liberal-ish commentators attacking the left.

That’s almost as absurd as the conservative conspiracy theories.

Lab Zombies image (cropped) by Pop Culture Geek via CC BY-NC 2.0.