We have become so used to government actors being malefactors, being lied to, and being pushed around that it becomes natural to suspect that when anything bad happens, somebody is behind it.
The truth is, stuff happens. Mistakes are made, and acceptable risks sometimes lead to bad results. Usually, you can smell the stench of bulls**t if you sniff deep enough, and sometimes the BS is hidden enough that it takes a long time to come out. As often as not–more often than not–the term “conspiracy theory” is thrown out to label a perfectly plausible explanation for something as beyond the pale.
The “lab leak hypothesis” was labeled a conspiracy theory not because it was an extraordinary explanation for COVID, but because it was an inconvenient one that needed to be slandered to hide the truth.
But in most cases of bad things happening, it is the result of…
