COVID came from a lab. We all pretty well know that, even if Joe Biden’s administration is loathe to admit it and the Leftmedia has been ruthless in suppressing it. Veteran journalist Mark Hemingway isn’t going to let the media get away with it so easily, though.

This week, two government agencies — the Department of Energy and the FBI — announced that they had concluded the most likely origin of the Covid virus, which has killed 6 million people worldwide, was that it leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The reaction to this news, which at this point was hardly an earth-shattering conclusion, is more interesting for the question it prompts about the state of American discourse: How do you have an argument with people who will never admit when they’re wrong?

Hemingway recounts the reaction of a “comedian” on the “Daily Show,” which, ironically, used to be hosted by Jon Stewart, who … agrees with the lab leak theory. He goes on to talk about “the textbook two-step that was broadly and institutionally adopted to downplay the significance of the DOE and FBI coming out and admitting they think the lab leak is the most likely explanation for the origin of the virus.”

The first move was to throw cold water on the certainty of the Energy Department and FBI’s conclusions. Yes, other government agencies have concluded that a “zoonotic” origin — that the virus jumped from animals to humans — is more likely. Are the agencies that came to the opposite conclusions as qualified in making their determinations as the DOE or FBI? Who knows? More importantly, who cares? Because the fact there’s disagreement here is entirely beside the point.

The second part of the process was to deliberately revise history to completely misrepresent the nature of the original debate over the virus’ origin, to dismiss the real reason people now feel vindicated. It’s not because the DOE or FBI has settled the debate. It’s because we were never allowed to have a debate over the virus’ origins in the first place.

The media consensus on the lab-leak theory congealed so rapidly that it completely distorted the debate in two more distinct ways. First, it viciously and dishonestly conflated anyone who espoused the possibility of the lab leak with the fringe Alex Jones crowd who was speculating that China had deliberately released an engineered bioweapon against the West. The Washington Post more or less libeled Sen. Tom Cotton for fanning “the embers of a coronavirus theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts,” when the experts quoted by the Post later admitted they misunderstood his remarks.

Second, media “fact-checkers” all weighed in against the lab leak, and for some reason, these incompetent journalistic meter maids are deferred to by Big Tech companies to make rulings about complex political and scientific issues that ultimately determine what you can and can’t say online. The result is that for a year or so you were censored on Facebook for discussing even the possibility of the lab leak.

He notes that one argument from an MSNBC host was basically that “the lab-leak theory was closely associated with people they disagreed with who they themselves deliberately conflated with conspiracists.”

Hemingway concludes with the utterly preposterous charge of racism for only one side in this debate:

Let me see if I have this correct. Our two choices for how the virus originated are:

1) The virus escaped from a sophisticated virology lab doing research with U.S. funding, and the leak was covered up by an oppressive unrepresentative communist government that cared more about preserving its reputation than saving lives.

2) A bunch of poor people half a world away whose dietary habits are fueled by exotic traditions got sick selling and eating bizarre bush meats in an unhygienic “wet market.”

Confronted with those possibilities, somehow blaming the communist government for the pandemic, rather than the Chinese people, is proof of a rising racism and xenophobia in America that must be forcibly silenced?

Read the whole thing here.