SA, ah ha! I sense the opening of an interesting discussion. With you, that is; I’ve met Dave’s modus operandi before, and found it pointless to deploy reason; false claims will be recycled no matter how many times they are discredited.
I did note that an article on the New Hampshire Politician site was authored by someone from Fox News. Nevertheless, the 21 million closed cellphone accounts is evidence of something, and along with the mobile crematoria may help build a more accurate picture of covid-19’s impact in China, which almost certainly has been suppressed by the Chinese authorities’ stranglehold upon information. I therefore blessed the article with a single sentence of my effort which included the word ‘may’.
But I also noted that there’s a link to another article about the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a biolab. This is a vitally important issue that has been played down, even in academic sources. Of course, that article pretends that Chinese biolabs are somehow less safe than Western biolabs, not mentioning that the second UK foot-and-mouth epidemic was traced to a lab escape in the UK, nor that the 2001 blackmail anthrax was deliberately exfiltrated from Fort Detrick. Chinese biolabs are much like Western biolabs; staff work 9 to 5 in city centres, rather than far more gruelling and therefore expensive three-month live-in work commitments in remote locations.
The New Hampshire Politician articles are propaganda rather than conspiracy theory; no ever-widening, hermetically secret conspiracy is required to support the claims they make. However, I propose that conspiracy theory is a common human response to constant immersion in propaganda.
This is a fundamental problem, because almost all media is propagandistic to some extent. In particular, each propaganda source systematically omits whichever facts contradict the impression it’s trying promote, so that we have to fish through opposing propagandas in our attempt to build a complete picture.
I further propose that propagandists will recognise information as propaganda but only when it opposes their ideological position, whereas conspiracy theorists deny that there is any such thing as conspiracy theory whatsoever. Distortion reaches its nadir on social media with commenters like Dave, who shamelessly deploy conspiracy theories in the service of their favourite propaganda agendas.