Strange times make strange bedfellows. Take the liberal — but not woke — TV star Jon Stewart and his unlikely re-tweeter Meghan McCain, a traditional conservative (and former co-host of The View) whose war veteran father famously served in the US Senate for decades. What in the world could Stewart say to make McCain, by way of conservative media outlet Daily Wire, want to retweet it — to pair herself up with Stewart and not even add any commentary of her own?
How about Stewart’s Sherlock Holmesian deduction and consequent speculation that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese lab in Wuhan?
Remember when legacy media was up in arms about Jon Stewart saying that COVID originated in the Wuhan lab?
— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) February 27, 2023
How times have changed…pic.twitter.com/3Hc2UI3rLm
Because that’s what Stewart, to outraged comic effect, told Stephen Colbert despite a reluctance by most scientists to peg the virus’s origins to the Wuhan lab. Stewart is less reluctant while talking to Colbert: “The disease is the same name as the lab!”
Stewart’s conjecture is all correlation not causation, as the famous distinction goes, but Stewart sure does drive this narrative hard. “That could be,” Colbert allows.
Recent research from the Department of Energy points to the Wuhan lab as a likely origin point for the virus that caused a worldwide pandemic. The Guardian reports that even this new Energy Department report “came with a caveat: the department had ‘low confidence’ in its assessment, which was provided to the White House and certain members of Congress.”
Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution told The Guardian of the competing COVID origin stories: “Isn’t this just like everything else in American politics, where a partisan position on one side invites a partisan response by the other?”
But it’s not as simply explained as that, since diverse groups and pairings have united around both narratives, the natural origin and the lab origin for the virus. To wit, the rare instance where Jon Stewart and Meghan McCain can agree.
