Project 2025 has big plans for the lab leak myth
An emotional falsehood left standing is a trigger that can be pulled repeatedly, against enemies domestic and abroad
The lab leak allegations: a tired trope?
One might believe that after almost five years, the furor instigated by the false notion that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab would peter out over time. The initial excitement is gone, talking about the pandemic has become a mood killer, everything surrounding the topic feels stale and outdated.
Of course, the usual suspects yammer on with their evidence-free innuendo and talking points since 2021, but hardly any new audience can be won.
It is reasonable to wonder what more can be gained by beating this particular dead horse?
Let´s look a bit deeper, shall we.
The Trump enablers have been busy
Until about March 2024, the lab leak myth seemed finally out of steam. For many months, news headlines and political activities surrounding it had died down. Many virologists believed that no more shenanigans are to be had.
They would be wrong.
Shortly after Trump defeated Nikki Haley in the primary campaign, thereby securing the presidential nomination of the Republican Party again, the winds shifted. His enablers in Congress could now focus on working towards getting him elected, mobilizing voters anew. With Trump’s chances of winning the White House against an aging Joe Biden looking increasingly promising, they needed to create momentum for the next Republican policy agenda: an agenda that became known as Project 2025.
Briefly, Project 2025 is the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing think tanks. The 922-page conservative policy magnum opus and “mandate for leadership” sets out to radically transform the US. It aims to remove a lot of checks and balances necessary for a democratic society, bestowing the executive with unilateral power to implement their agenda and replacing tens of thousands of apolitical bureaucratic positions with pre-screened MAGA loyalists, including in the Department of Justice and scientific institutions such as the NIH, FDA, or CDC.
Here is Dr. Paul Offit‘s triology and Project 2025’s attack on CDC, FDA, NIH pointing out how the Project 2025 agenda will impact science.
Public health measures and climate action would be made virtually impossible under the new regime, which would strip influence and independence from scientific bodies such as the CDC and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and bring them under tight political control. Similar plans are laid out for removing FDA drug approvals for reproductive health care. Project 2025 is an all-out political assault on US science and institutions.
Scientific American quoted Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists, about the Project 2025 agenda:
“The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document.”
Such a radical anti-science policy agenda needs a lot of motivated rationalizations to convince ordinary conservative Americans (who remain overall supportive of science) of their appropriateness.
The HSSCP and other congressional committees were ideally positioned to create the right pseudo-events for that purpose. Any epic drama starts with a great villain, and the lab leak myth had just the right story ingredients to give politicians what they needed.
Widespread, organized and cynical efforts to rewrite pandemic history
It is no secret that Trump, his appointees, and the Republican party fucked up the pandemic response in the United States through incompetence, inaction and malice. Whether it was about incompetent PCR testing, presidential inaction, plans to just let the virus rip and infect everybody, promoting false (and deadly) “miracle” cures, seeding scepticism about vaccines and probably a hundred other failures all contributed to the US having one of the worst pandemic responses of any country. It quite likely cost Trump the re-election.
For political activists, this inconvenient reality was not a point of reflection, but rather of doubling down. Politicians rather sought to make Dr. Anthony Fauci public enemy number one that questions their cult leader’s role in the trauma of the pandemic. A PR problem they worked on for years to resolve in their favor. In 2024, they are quite confident to have succeeded in reshaping public perception and memory.
I have previously written how the HSSCP and other Republican-led House committees have weaponized the government to attack virologists, public health researchers, journal editors, educators and disinformation researchers in an attempt to blame the trauma of the pandemic on scientists, federal institutions and China.
Basically anybody who offered society a more accurate assessment about what went wrong in the pandemic was a mark for congressional hearings and smear campaigns.
Somebody who had a frontrow seat to the action of these revenge committees is disinformation researcher Renee DiResta, she writes:
“The point of the exercise was punishment, not oversight”
She and others had come under fire by Republicans because they tracked disinformation around election interference and influence operations. Their research findings tended to somehow always interfere with what right-wing influencers and politicians tried to sell the public, such as the idea that the election was stolen from Trump or that social media had censored conservatives. So, of course, these researchers had to pay for their audacity to speak the truth too.
Unfortunately, politicians wielding the power of the state against scientists will find many influencers and commentators at big newspapers all too willing to legitimize their abuse. Especially when their interests are aligned to shut up and marginalize those pesky fact-checkers and myth-busters that sabotage the popular narratives that made them powerful.
She, of course, knew what would come her way:
It was glaringly obvious to those of us who study propaganda and disinformation what was going to happen: documents and excerpts of interviews would be leaked to ideologically aligned propaganda outlets, and those mentioned in the resulting coverage would be targeted by online mobs.
Renée DiResta wrote about her experiences in her book. “They retaliate, however, because real power is at stake, and discrediting the people exposing them is the best way to cast doubt,” Renée DiResta would explain.
The Stanford Internet Observatory, where Renée had her research group, was bombarded with subpoenas and lawsuits, racking up legal costs into the millions for the university. Ultimately, Stanford University got the message and did not extend Renée’s employment, effectively shutting down the research group. As a reward for her stellar research, Renée also found herself the villain of a networked smear campaign, alleging that she was masterminding the deep state’s censorship-industrial complex.
Having a front-row seat to a modern-day witch hunt is certainly not how she expected her research on propaganda to go. As attacks on scientists across the board mounted, we kept in touch. She was not happy but remains steadfast for the moment, hoping that reality will eventually exonerate her work and reputation.
“The people who stood up to McCarthyism are the ones history remembers”
Standford University, on the other hand, decided it was time to throw the doors open to well-funded COVID contrarians and doing some pandemic revisionism themselves.
Here is an article from Walker Bragman who investigates the dark-money ties between rightwing think tanks and academic contrarians working hand-in-hand to rewrite pandemic history.
Others have noted the pandemic revisionism that seems to come with these house revenge committees as well. Here is some top-notch reporting by Allison Neitzel that I can highly recommend:
Don’t Let House Republicans Rewrite Trump’s Pandemic History
Heritage Covid Commission Wants China Accountable… What About Trump?
The common thread
After years of activism, powerplays and emotional manipulation, the lab leak narrative enjoys the buy-in of the wider public, as well as motivated conspiracy theorists, activists, influencers, dark-money-funded NGOs, tabloid newspapers, mainstream outlets, politicians, diplomats, even some intelligence agencies and the leaders of nation-states.
A diffuse coalition of convenience, profit, and power, aligned by a shared narrative. That makes the current lab leak alliance no less forceful or dangerous than past ideological movements in my book.
We must understand that scientists are a minority in every society they are embedded in. Science values evidence over tribal affiliation, which is why it has no friends among political camps or extremists that tend to spearhead attacks on them. Because scientists are just not part of any larger political tribe, and most of society is oblivious to what happens to them in today’s fragmented information ecosystem, nobody comes to their defense when anti-science aggressors come for them.
This has some very direct consequences. First, inconvenient scientists are picked off one by one. Second, anybody who speaks up in their defense might become the next target. Third, nobody is safe to pursue independent research that might interfere with popular beliefs or power.
Science as a global public institution for humanity poses a considerable threat to grifters and snake oil salesmen, to populist influencers and narratives, to ideological billionaires, unethical businesses, tech platforms, and of course state actors and autocrats. They all currently dominate in the world of fragmented and bespoke realities. They all cling to their newfound power tooth and nail, seeking to shape public perception in their favor and to entrench themselves and their separate little epistemic fiefdoms permanently.
But how to go about it? In the information age, leading attacks against scientists, gaining ground against the scientific method, and winning decisive battles against an evidence-based worldview has become their avenue of choice to project and defend their influence over society.
Pandemic revisionism is an essential part of the project 2025 agenda; not only to get Trump re-elected, but to prepare the ground for what is to come next.
With so much at stake and so much to gain, participating in the current anti-science (or anti-reality) movement rewards many networked agents of influence handsomely. Almost anybody can gain popularity, profit, persuasion, or power by undermining the authority, function, and perception of science sufficiently well in the information age. The marketplace of motivated rationalizations is constantly looking for new, valuable products.
That’s why all these networked agents, activists, and agendas seek to portray science and scientists as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy. Rather than a public good for the benefit of all, they work hard to cast scientific insights as the opinion of a weird secretive niche interest group, tribe, or cabal. They paint inconvenient scientific research as ideologically subversive and existentially threatening. Independent science is a thorn in their eyes, something that needs to be beaten in the fight for societal supremacy, public perception, and political power. Their acts of anti-science aggression are what we see playing out in real time today.
The consequences to democracy
But what happens when emotional narratives and emotional falsehoods remain unchecked? When they are weaponized for political agendas? When any semblance of a science- and evidence-based worldview is relegated to a thing of the past?
Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky has studied how conspiracy theories and misinformation impact democracies. He and others view the rise of anti-science activism and sentiment as a hallmark of democratic backsliding. “Everything that is a counterweight to power is being undermined,” he explained to me. “I think the goal is to abolish accountability as a stepping stone. That means you got to discredit science.” He and his co-authors argue that science is a critical guardrail for the “epistemic integrity of democracy.” We need a shared set of facts to function in a democracy; without them, any collaboration on shared issues becomes impossible.
“Once you get into this world where truth is a subset of power, it basically means that you can’t have democratic debate anymore”
the Kyiv-born journalist and propaganda researcher Peter Pomerantsev said in his Atlantic podcast Autocracy in America. The congressional witch hunt against Renée DiResta had caught his eye.
Democratic decline has become the topic du jour in intellectual circles. Many scholars, intellectuals, researchers, and historians point towards misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, authoritarian politics, social media, and polarization as root causes.
I believe everybody looks at a valid subset of the larger phenomena, which I would offer is that our modern information environments have changed how information flows through society and thereby restructured our societies into conflicting and mutually incompatible bespoke realities. Unfortunately, the current information ecosystem asymmetrically favors emotional myths and viral narratives over scientifically accurate content, all while incentivizing us to form our identities and communities in opposition to science.
Yet without science as a pin that keeps us attached to shared reality, I worry about losing everything that we have taken for somewhat granted, including living in a democracy.
Or, as the Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist, puts it even more bluntly:
Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without all three, we have no shared reality, and democracy as we know it—and all meaningful human endeavors—are dead.
I’d say that if scientists can indeed be seen as canaries in the coalmine of democracy, carbon monoxide has already filled the chamber. Many scientists went silent and retreated from the public after years of reckless onslaught. Who is going to speak up in the future when the next viral falsehood comes along? We need to act now before it is too late.
The Heritage Foundation’s plan for the lab leak myth
As I write this, the false lab leak myth is gaining steam once again, readily invoked by right-wing politicians and MAGA Republicans in the US. It is used to not only target their domestic enemies or activate voters by giving them scapegoats, but in service of a more sinister authoritarian agenda. Leading the efforts again is the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential conservative think tanks and the key organizer behind Project 2025, the current playbook for enabling the authoritarian takeover of the US. One of their main goals, called “Schedule F,” is to replace tens of thousands of politically independent public servants and career scientists with loyal party apparatchiks, bringing all institutions under the unilateral control of the presidency. Consolidating power in the executive might be a terrible idea both for the independence of science and the future of the Republic.
On July 8, 2024, the Heritage Foundation laid out its grand plan for the false origin myth. They assembled “what we believe will be the most important commission in decades”. A COVID-19 origins group, consisting of former Trump officials involved in the false bioweapon myth like former director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, Deputy HHS secretary Robert Kadlec, and former CDC director Robert Redfield. The group also included Senator Heidi Heitkamp, lab leak activist Jamie Metzl and Matt Pottinger, two former National Security staffer and anti-China hawk looking for influence again. The HSSCP chair Brad Wenstrup was there as well for the launch of “a report with actionable recommendations for the president and legislative branch of government to implement right now.”
If you want to just get one example of the intellectual prowess of this group, here is Robert Redfield’s take on the origin of the pandemic and how it unfolded: “The Chinese understood they had another pandemic in August, September 2019. Unfortunately, they did not tell the world”
Fuck no. What a giant idiot. Every epidemic dating method, every intelligence assessment, everything we have learned from primary interviews with people in Wuhan, or observed about how this virus behaves shows us that
China had no idea about the outbreak until the very end of December
The first cases started somewhen mid-end of November
If the pandemic had started in August/September, Wuhan hospitals would have collapsed by November, and hospitals around the world in places like New York around Chrismas.
Now imagine these motivated idiots, all very familiar with weaponizing the government, would come to decide what to do about the lab leak myth in the future when the Republicans gain power again. Here is their fundamental position: make China the enemy. Jamie Metzl, from Heritage’s origin commission, asserted:
There can be little doubt… that the Chinese government is primarily responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. But for the unique pathologies of the Chinese state, there very likely would have been no pandemic at all.
Various segments in the US, predominantly but not exclusively on the right, have long cast China as an existential villain, not just a geopolitical adversary anymore. In the factional warfare between bespoke realities, we only come together around a shared enemy. Seasoned politicians understand that principle deeply. You do not work on solving shared problems with your mortal enemy.
Subsequently, the commission outright rejected, even mocked, the idea of ever collaborating with China on shared environmental, climate, and public health challenges. According to a snide comment from one of their speakers, working with China in the past was always a misguided idea that had failed spectacularly. The pandemic supposedly proved this self-evidently.
Jamie Metzl further summarized their points of action, asserting that the pandemic resulted in “18 trillion in losses to the United States,” arguing the only path forward, and “as a means of establishing accountability and discouraging similar behavior in the future, …Chinese companies and the Chinese State must be held accountable and liable for these losses.”
Doing anything else, according to him, would just further incentivize the CCP to engage in “dangerous, aggressive, and secretive behavior”
In other words, they want China to pay 18 trillion dollars in reparation to the US, and this will somehow stop the next pandemic, which many of them believe was a bioweapon anyway. An absurd demand and non-sequitur from anti-China hawks designed to escalate tensions further. “We also want other countries to use what we have done as a blueprint to hold China accountable,” John Redcliffe added. He is proposing nothing less than basically a return to a cold war era with China.
Yet should the Republicans win political power and even the White House, these fringe positions of the Heritage Foundations will likely become official positions once again.
The lab leak myth is a trigger they can pull again and again, hitting enemies domestic and abroad.
Other efforts are already planned. Next to ongoing activities by the HSSCP, there is the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability (HCOA) led by McCarthy-era wannabe and lab leak truther Rep. James Comer, and the powerful Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affair Committee (HSGAC).
The HCOA committee has just published a report asking for nothing less than a cold war:
By any reasonable analysis, the United States faces a new cold war, but under the current administration, only its opponent—the CCP—is committed to winning it. Unlike the first Cold War, the adversary is already within, having entrenched itself within U.S. borders, institutions, businesses, universities, and cultural centers by capturing elites in influential circles.
Looking at the likely Republican takeover of the US Senate, things will get even worse there. The Senate’s HSGAC will likely see long-term gain-of-function fearmonger Rand Paul take over chairmanship with the election and Senator Josh Hawley in the driver seat of the next “lab leak”-themed red-scare inquisition.
The first sham hearings were held on June 18, 2024, to smear the virologist and “proximal origin” co-author Prof. Robert Garry as a propagandist while giving Rand Paul’s close collaborator Richard Ebright the stage to spew politically desired falsehoods about bioweapon agents and research. In September, Josh Hawley accused Dr. Carrie Wolinetz, former chief of staff at the NIH, of “actively misleading the American people.”
His fulminating monologue was clipped by Forbes Breaking News and received over 1.8 million views on YouTube at the time of this writing. Thousands of approving comments made it clear that people wanted more of this. Self-serving theatrics aside, much worse is expected to come from these revenge committees weaponizing the conspiracy myth to provoke and attack China.
How bad can it get?
After years of viral propaganda, the lab leak community has grown to include ordinary citizens, online mobs, client propagandists, commentators, mainstream journalists, and captured media outlets all the way to both chambers of Congress.
With such a powerful amplification network in place, it’s unfortunately easy to imagine how the emotionally captivating myth could be quickly re-deployed by another Trump administration.
Utilizing the right-wing outrage machine, agitated crowds, willing influencers, and mainstream media enablers, political leaders might want to recycle the lab leak myth to stir popular demand for further escalation against China, even to justify military aggression. When the other is cast as an existential threat, all manipulators need to do is fabricate a few novel twists to justify the larger narrative. Instigate some fresh pseudo-events that seem to support what most Americans already believe in and ensure that many dedicated amplifiers are willing to push it repetitively.
If you make it trend, you make it true. How about a new story arc about the evil CCP supposedly working on bioweapons to be deployed against Taiwan? Now that would catch eyeballs if it could be made to look real.
Novelty, familiarity, and repetition are not only key ingredients to virality but effective manipulation tactics to persuade the masses and shape their bespoke realities.
While absolutely far-fetched from today’s point of view, some type of military escalation would not be an unprecedented US response either. After the traumatic events surrounding the 9/11 terror attacks, popular fears and misconceptions about terrorism and old tropes about Muslim fundamentalism were merged and weaponized by politicians. The so-ignited emotional energy could later be directed skillfully with the right set of fabricated pseudo-events. Pseudo-events like the supposed existence of compelling “reconnaissance photos, elaborate maps and charts, and even taped phone conversations between senior members of Iraq’s military,” as NPR reported.
These misrepresentations were subsequently brought forward by ostensibly credible voices like US secretary Colin Powell to support the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD) narrative. Emotionally activated citizens, their critical faculties blinded by trauma, rage, and grief, ate it up. The mainstream press not only failed to calm the situation but fanned the flames. Instead of critically questioning the evidence and narrative, it was The New York Times that did the most to legitimize the WMD narrative.
Ultimately, elite belief in its veracity and the constant media drumbeat created wide public support for the military invasion of Iraq. A remarkable outcome considering that political tensions with the country have been going back decades. Escalations have come and gone. War was certainly not inevitable. Few doubt today that the evidence-free invasion the Bush administration was obsessed with would have been possible without 9/11 as a traumatic catalyst.
Do we really believe the trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic that killed far over a million Americans is any less potent a catalyst if hardline warmongers and anti-China Republicans get their way? Especially if we talk about the authoritarian MAGA movement winning power again?
Russia’s Putin already used the fabricated “US biolabs in Ukraine” narrative (another variation from the lab leak genre) as one of his supposed justifications to invade Ukraine. A sizable proportion of Russians (and sadly, also Americans) readily bought into these fabrications.
Every dictator and strongman stirs the emotions of his nation’s people by creating an enemy abroad or starting a war. The purpose of war for autocratic leaders is to legitimize their iron rule at home, to call for unity while using it as a pretense to crack down on domestic dissenters.
What might an authoritarian second Trump administration, keen to enshrine power and supported by the project 2025 apparatus handpicked for loyalty by the Heritage Foundation, be willing to do if given the chance?
I honestly do not know what could happen; the example is provocative on purpose. A scenario to highlight that our failure of imagination often makes us blind to how badly things can escalate if we let them.
We need to find our way back to epistemic clarity about the world we live in. As Russian dissidents will tell you, when nothing is ever really true, any justification for political actions, no matter how absurd, stupid, evil, or unimaginable, becomes possible. Or take the words of Hannah Arendt, a scholar of totalitarianism:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.… And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
That is why I want to fight our epistemic paralysis of the moment; disarming the false lab leak myth so politicians have one emotional trigger less to pull.
Conclusion
Conspiracy myths have always been tools for mobilization against certain individuals, groups, races, or even nations. They are part and parcel of the fascist and totalitarian playbook that we have no excuse to not wise up about. How effective conspiracy myths can rouse our feelings and mobilize voters will be shown most prominently in the next US presidential election.
I strongly believe the all-consuming political myth-making and the ensuing grand narratives of perpetual conflict against a foreign enemy should be relegated to the past, where they belong.
I am hopeful that Americans will do so again this time around; they are known to do the right thing when all other avenues have been exhausted.
So do me, you, and everybody else a favor if you are in the US:
Vote for the competent public servant and inspiring female overachiever, not the hate-filled Hitler-for-dummies and his cackle self-serving bootlickers with their not-so-hidden agendas.
See you all on the other side.
PS: If you are a scientist that has come into the crosshairs of anti-science activists, mobs or politicians, here is a quick overview on what you might be able to do against networked aggression.
Project 2025 has been disavowed and now abandoned.