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Comment by NotYourLawyer | Hacker News Reader

I’m a lot more interested in how we weren’t allowed to talk about it for a couple years than whether or not it’s ultimately true.

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The President of the United States was claiming that COVID was engineered in China as early as May 2020. I don't know how someone can claim they weren't allowed to talk about it.

Did he claim that or did he just call it the "China Virus"? Honest question.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098

And people called him racist for it. And anyone else who speculated that the obvious, simplest answer might be true was likewise considered racist.

No, people called him a racist for things like calling it the Kung Flu, and some of his positions with regard to Chinese (and Asian in general) people and other racist things he did. No one cared about the lab leak theory, or associated it with being racist, until Trump decided to morph it into a dog whistle for racists.

Possibly because over a hundred million links were repressed by Twitter and Facebook for this.

Or because people who spoke up about received every kind of pushback - firing, demotion, smears, even death threats.

That Trump posed it as a likelihood means nothing in comparison to millions of posts getting flagged, shadowbanned, repressed and completely wiped. You get that, right?

The theory (and even wilder ones, like COVID being a bioweapon) were reported all through 2020 on Fox News and other media sources. It wasn't a silent theory. There were a lot of crazier theories about China manufacturing COVID as a bioweapon, which got lumped into the "Lab Leak" bucket.

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