Instapundit is right.
The predictive value of a narrative is the real test of its value.
Just how many times has the predictive value of the official narrative failed us recently?
This is not to say the conspiracy theories are necessarily correct but you've got to give them some credence these days in the face of the abject failures of so many official narratives. Look at these recent official narratives that come to mind as I write:
Wearing face masks is essential to public safety.
We now know that they afforded us little if any protection. But they were mandatory because... the official narrative said we had to wear them.
The COVID 19 virus did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
They officially told us back then that the "furin cleavage site" found on the Covid SARS 2 virus, which was principally responsible for it potency and infectiousness, came from an unidentified evolutionary source in nature (remember that brief moment when pangolins were the supposed species bridge?). That explanation does not now seem to hold up to credible analysis. The public health officials appear to have said this to us then primarily to protect their own credibility with the public when we most needed to trust them, during a pandemic. If we had thought then that they had been responsible for unleashing this virus themselves, by conducting "gain of function" virus research in inadequately safety certified laboratories in China, then we would have been unlikely to have listened to their advice on how to deal with the global pandemic which ensued. Now that's an official narrative. False but necessary. The conspiracy theory however looks much closer to the truth.
We just need a two week lock down to flatten the curve.
Ask someone now who lived under Dan Andrews in Melbourne during the pandemic about how long and disruptive those "two weeks" were.
The social costs of lock downs are worth the health benefits of the virus protection.
Tell that to the parents of children whose education and social development has been incurably impaired by the years of lock downs and school closures during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop was a Russian plant.
It seems criminal charges are about to be laid against Hunter for what has been found there. And what about the "big guy"?
Trump was a Russian mole.
Did that really seemed plausible to anyone then, no matter how dislike-able he was and is.
China is merely a benign trading partner.
Ask someone in Taiwan about this.
Russia will take out Ukraine in a matter of weeks.
The official narrative 18 months ago was that Russian military might was all conquering. It now appears that that narrative was a mirage. But we all knew that back then ... not.
The cost of the Net Zero carbon emissions policy is worth it to avert a global climate crisis.
What climate crisis is that again? I know what we have been told for decades what awful things are going to transpire, but.... It still snows at ski resorts ... and other places. Pacific islands remain popular with holiday makers. Cyclones, hurricanes and tornadoes are still relatively rare. Waterfront properties continue to be ridiculously expensive. And it's recommended you rug up in Winter. I'm beginning to wonder where this climate catastrophe, that the IPCC has been predicting for the last 30 years, is.
Tell me again, why man-made global carbon emissions emanating from China, India, Africa, Russia and South America do not count in Western European, North American and Australian morally virtuous campaigns to prevent the impending global climate catastrophe. Are they really expecting us to believe that eliminating fossil fuel usage in the free and rich parts of the world will be enough to save the whole planet from the feared catastrophe from increases in global temperatures in decades to come? What if it is this official narrative that causes global power shortages, increases in poverty and creates widespread suffering in decades to come? Wouldn't it be more responsible and caring for world leaders to be slightly more skeptical, patient and measured about all this fear mongering about impending global climate doom? Especially when its beginning to seem now, after 30 years of vividly terrifying predicted crises caused by man made climate change, that the dramatic rises in sea levels, increases in cyclone and hurricane activity and intensity, more flooding, more frequent and widespread droughts, losses of glaciers, and mass migrations, just aren't happening, at least not as prophesied. At what point will it be OK in polite society to revisit the official narrative on this and say, hey, you experty folk, policy geeks and IPCC types were scaring us, disrupting our societies and impoverishing us excessively and disproportionately to the scale and timing of how this much feared problem has turned out?
If being skeptical and suspicious of the competence and good intentions of government and corporate media official narratives makes you a conspiracy theorist, then you'll have to begin to count me in amongst those who think we are being misled. How can any curious and sentient being just blithely trust contemporary official narratives in the face of their continuous failures to turn out to be correct? They seem to be more often wrong than not, and they are mostly self serving to the interests of the prevailing elites.
Be skeptical. The truth still matters, even if we can't always find it.
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