Rolling Stone’s partisan bias really came through on Tuesday in an article by Kara Voght, who wrote about “Conspiracies running a GOP-controlled house” and its subtitle announced: “How Republicans put disinformation and lies at the center of their governing agenda.”
Without evidence or examples, Voght claims that Republicans, now in the majority in the House of Representatives, are using “the most harmful Internet conspiracies” to “become the subject of official congressional investigations.”
He then goes into a bit more detail, but only to clarify that he’s talking about origin theories surrounding Covid-19, under the heading “Covid-19 ‘Lab Leak’ Theory and Other Pandemic Conspiracies.”
However, Voght is not the only one who is gaining more and more popularity and credibility with this theory. “The committee will hear ‘development of vaccines and treatments,’ a nod to the Republican Party’s unfounded vaccine skepticism,” he writes, without providing any evidence that such skepticism is “unfounded.” He doesn’t even provide evidence of the vaccine’s effectiveness to make his point. Apparently we should take Voght at her word, because she clearly thinks Republicans are evil, and we should blindly agree with that.
As Spencer reported last Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is launching an investigation because Pfizer’s fresh bivalent vaccine “meets the statistical criteria required for an additional study to determine whether ischemic stroke in people 65 years of age poses a risk to security.” ” The news was announced before Voght’s article was published, but on the other hand it does not fit her narrative.
Voght finally moves on to the issue of the lab leak as shown in the headline. Added emphasis:
But the committee’s main preoccupation is the unsubstantiated claim that the pandemic began when the virus – either bioengineered or obtained from bats – escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China. Both Comer and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (D-Ohio) To have he stated that Dr. Anthony Fauci and other Biden officials misled Americans about the origins of the virus because the alleged Wuhan lab received U.S. funding. “Fauci was warned early that the virus looked artificial and pointed to a lab leak, so instead of blowing the whistle, he may have tried to cover it up” – Comer alleged. As part of the fresh panel, Republicans will examine “what the U.S. government knew about the origins of Covid-19 and when the government knew it,” he said.
The so-called “lab leak” theory has never been proven. There is no evidence that the virus was in the lab before the pandemic began, peer-reviewed scientific papers show overwhelming evidence that the pathogen probably passed from animals to humans. Nevertheless, Comer and Jordan sent requests last month to more than 40 government officials and academic scientists, including the president of the nonprofit that subcontracted the U.S.-subsidized Wuhan lab and four co-authors of an academic study that found Covid-19 is not a disease designed in a laboratory. (Fauci, for his part, does previously said however, he has a “completely open mind” about whether the epidemic originated in a laboratory pushed away against lawmakers who supported the lab leak theory in previous hearings).
Again, there is no evidence that this is an “unsubstantiated claim.” The link he uses to point to “overwhelming evidence” comes from scientific article Jon Cohen on October 10, 2022 cites a report from “one panel of experts” in Australia. What’s particularly humorous is how the article quotes Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. If anyone has a conflict of interest in this regard, it is him, because he funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the University of Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Concerns about such research have been raised on both sides, if taken into account Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) co-sponsored the bill known as Suspending the Act on Enhanced Research on Pandemic Pathogens at the previous Congress.
In early 2020, when not much was known about the pandemic, it was more common, though not necessarily exact, to dismiss people who raised what seems increasingly likely to be the COVID-19 virus was created by a laboratory leak on WIV. New York Times he habitually did this Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR). That was three years ago. We know a lot more now than we did then – except Voght still makes it seem like she’s stuck in the past, all so she can throw Republicans under the bus.
Even the World Health Organization (WHO), for all its faults, did not do this excluded further study the theory of laboratory leaks. In July 2021, she admitted that ruling out the issue was “premature.”
Last December, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report examining the origins of Covid-19. During a press call joined by Townhall, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), who serves on the committee and is also a physician, pointed to the lack of evidence that the virus originated in a saturated market. This is because during the origin of the virus can usually be found in the animal world, which was not the case in the animals tested for this virus.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) also led the charge to get to the bottom of the origins of Covid-19. On May 6, 2021 he tweeted long and informative Medium piece by science writer Nicholas Wade investigating origins, which contains some compelling evidence in favor of the lab leak theory.
Vogh is not only months, but years behind schedule. Rolling Stone’s tweet about Voght’s article sparked a storm of comments. Those who spoke included Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist whom Gallagher had previously suggested people listen to.
“[P]”peer-reviewed scientific articles have provided overwhelming evidence that the pathogen has likely spread from animals to humans.”
In which writer Kara Voght reveals that she is scientifically illiterate, deeply dishonest, or both.
— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) January 17, 2023
The article also discusses the Select Committee on Government Armaments, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee, and its investigation of the Disinformation Management Council. The board was created by the Department of Homeland Security last year, and although it has been disbanded, concerns remain.
Also included was a rather biased and selective view of how parents were viewed by the Department of Justice as “domestic terrorists.” “Now this false claim has become a point of questioning for Garland and his agency,” Voght laments, despite the truth about how the parents were targeted.
Voght also defends the employment of 87,000 IRS agents and rejects “Big Tech Censorship,” which, you guessed it, also includes rejecting the Twitter files. Voght not only disregards, but omits a particularly crucial detail that is hidden in the last section and would not have been noticed except by someone who somehow managed to read the entire article.
“ origin the new Weaponization of Government panel is partly due to revelations shared in Twitter Files, which are the result of the cooperation of Twitter owner Elon Musk and conservative journalists to illustrate the collaboration between government agencies and social media platforms to achieve this goal,” Voght writes with added emphasis.
Her remark is ridiculous not only because these are independent journalists, but one of them who has published a significant number of batches is Matt Taibbi. Not only is he not a conservative, but he actually worked for Rolling Stone. His podcast “Useful Idiots” was published by Rolling Stone until an announcement in March 2021 indicated that it would be coming from his Substack. But Vogh never mentions it.
Moreover, it’s not just that Republicans are bad, but Democrats are good and worth defending. This includes Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and his affair with Fang Fang, a Chinese spy. A congressman who has been promising for some time to be fired from the House Intelligence Committee, Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), now Speaker of the House, is even quoted to evoke sympathy.
That Voght has a problem with congressional oversight and seeks to at least get to the bottom of many of the problems facing this country, to the extent he has the authority to do so, is beyond laughable. Again, it clearly seems biased. But it’s also ironic that Rolling Stone is now the leading voice in defense of any government authority, according to a Twitter conversation between CNN’s Mary Katharine Ham and Ed Morrissey of our sister site HotAir.
Let’s all enjoy watching Rolling Stone turn into a defender of The Man and the establishment, and now screams when people ask those in power questions about surveillance.
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) January 18, 2023
I know, right? Even if I inevitably question, say, Oversight Committee D’s strategy or whatever, I wouldn’t say, “Eh, we’re letting them study the federal government’s dataset of Americans?!” Icky!”
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) January 18, 2023
If the name Voght sounds familiar, it’s because she was the reporter who profiled Giselle Fetterman, now the wife of Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), even going so far as to suggest that Ms. Fetterman is in fact a “de facto candidate.” As Matt pointed out last October, Voght deleted her tweet to avoid giving the impression that the senator’s wife was actually in charge.
