Inattention

So, over the weekend, the Department of Energy (not my first guess as to who would be investigating) came out with an assessment that the most likely cause of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was an unintentional release from a laboratory in China. However, their confidence in this conclusion is low.

The same people who shamed us, canceled us, & wanted to put us in jail for saying covid came from the Wuhan Lab, not wearing masks and saying masks don’t work, and taking and recommending ivermectin to treat covid are starting to say what we said all along.
Now do covid vaccines.

Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.)

Okay... except for the fact that there is nothing new here. There was already one intelligence agency (the FBI, as I've heard it) that concluded that SARS-CoV-2 most likely emerged as the result of an unintenional lab leak... and their confidence level is higher than that of the DOE.

One IC element assesses with moderate confidence that the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was the result of a laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. These analysts give weight to the inherently risky nature of work on coronaviruses.

And this is public knowledge, because the intelligence assessment I just quoted from has been declassified. (And not from Donald Trump just thinking about it...) So why is Representative Taylor-Greene acting as if some new and shocking revelation had just been announced?

Most likely because she'll be able to rack up some political mileage out of it. Because, despite the fact that it takes about 20 seconds to find that the federal government believed that the evidence they had was "not strongly diagnostic of either hypothesis" (that the virus spilled over from animals or was being investigated in a lab and was released) and that nothing the DOE has to say changes that, I suspect that not many people in the United States are going to be bothered to do a bit of reading. Mainly because the response to SARS-CoV-2 is now a matter of politics and, more importantly, partisanship.

For voters in, say, Georgia's 14th district, it doesn't really matter whether Representative Taylor-Greene's Twitter post makes any sense or not. The activist Republican voters that she would need to survive a primary challenge have, as I understand it, already decided that she can do no wrong. The "rank and file" Republican voters have already determined that in a race between her and a Democrat, they're voting for her, and Democratic voters have already decided that she's the worst possible outcome and will vote for whatever Democrat is able to challenge her.

And so this becomes about people deciding that what they already understood to be true is true.

The level of partisanship, and negative partisanship, in American politics is a problem because it gives the already mostly passive electorate even less reason to actually pay attention to the context behind the things that people say. People simply nod their heads when someone makes a partisan attack that they agree with, and go on about their days.