Sam Husseini may run for Congress in Maryland. Sam, as long as you steer away from the conspiracy theory that Zionists whacked Jack,
you'll get all the non-monetary support I can give from afar. Go down
that road, though, and you're toast with me, and I'll bet with voters as
well.
The "may" is in scare quotes in the header because the Maryland Green Party has already chosen him. What, is Husseini going to pull an Uncle Billy Sherman and decline to run? I just learned that with teh google after already working on this piece, which adds an additional bit of spicyness.
But, on his website, all he says is "exploratory committee" (which still asking for dinero). Sam, you've been nominated, and as a Green, not part of the duopoly. Intellectual dishonesty, like napalm, is apparently leaving a morning aroma.
So, let's nuance that support more. I may nuance it completely away by the end.
A couple of years ago, Husseini went beyond
legitimate (legitimate in terms of science, not in terms of
thought-policing) questions about the Wuhan Institute of Virology to
claims about bioweaponization of COVID. Husseini does nuance himself on his Substack by noting a lab leak is not necessarily indicative of lab origin. But, in that same piece, he then goes down the nutter shitpile with:
The attempts to further define away dangerous lab work are even more nefarious when one considers that this entire field is arguably a euphemism for biowarfare.
Uhh, no. First, as I've noted on this issue, China would never allow US scientists access to Wuhan in such a case. Second, like the USSR with its pre-1989 bioweapons research, a Chinese bioweapons lab would be in a place far less populated than Wuhan. That's a serious level of lack of critical thinking.
He continues in that same vein in the next paragraph, using "accidental lab leak" and "biowarfare" in the same sentence.
Two paragraphs later, we go further down conspiratorial rabbit holes:
"Lab leak" implies accident. From the available information, it's possible that the pandemic origins had nothing to do with a lab (less and less likely by the day), it's possible that it accidentally leaked out a lab in Wuhan -- and it's possible that there was intentional release. There are a number of possibilities on the last possibility that I plan on fleshing out in a future piece. The most obvious is that someone was out to frame the Chinese.
Again, no. How could US government agents break into the Wuhan Institute of Virology and leak coronavirus-19? With that question mark, I now place Husseini into the realm of "just asking questions." Hold on to that thought.
Oh, I'm not alone in wondering. Black Agenda Report, when it was still good, called him out. (This was the just about the top hit when I googled "Sam Husseini" + conspiracy theorist.) It nails the same things I did with this:
Husseini first pulls off this canard by arguing that there is no meaningful difference between biowarfare and biodefense. This is hardly true. Although there is always some overlap between basic science, medicine, preventive research, and warfare, there are also serious differences in emphasis, approach, practice, and funding that he glosses over. Husseini has to assert this tenuous proposition in order to implicate the Wuhan lab in suspected biowarfare malfeasance (or error), and to claim that there is a global biowarfare arms race between China and the US (rather than by the US against its opponents). That linguistic sleight of hand, in particular, the equivalence of biowarfare and biodefense is factually not true, and is certainly not true in one very obvious way regarding the Wuhan lab: if there were a biowarfare arms race happening around the world, the countries putatively at war with each other--the US and China--would not share or allow access to their labs to a competitor state, collaborate, or exchange their research and researchers.
And, the other shoe on that?
As a point of contrast, no one, not a single Chinese national has ever set foot in Fort Dietrick, the key US biowarfare research lab. No Chinese university has ever collaborated with them. No Chinese funding has been directed to it. No one knows exactly what they are researching.
Yeah, handwaving, conspiracy theory version.
Also at my second piece, tying
to the top link in the third paragraph, he claims Mossad whacked Karen Silkwood. My take
is that someone was indeed trying to intimate Silkwood, to the possible
point of running her off the road, but not killing her, first, and that
said person was working for Kerr-McGee, if anybody, and not Mossad.
He's also kind of clueless with VotePact.
And, per the "about" page on his Substack, he also thinks the 2014 Ebola outbreak was a lab leak. Here's more that he's written on that. The main problem is that the paper argues from silence. Even if the "official" individual line that bats caused Ebola didn't find infected bats in the relevant area of West Africa doesn't mean that lab leak is the automatic alternative. (His own piece notes that Ebola symptoms are highly variable and West Africans on the ground suggested malaria as an alternative in some cases.) Wiki's long page on the outbreak indicates the "official" framing was never as precise as Husseini portrays it.
Now we get to the nutgraf, 1/3 through his piece on Ebola. That's that it could have been a lab leak from a US lab in Zaire (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Wiki's page addresses that; it notes a 2014 outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo showed the viral strain there closely related to previous outbreaks in Central Africa, but the West African outbreak showed no links.
And, at this point, I don't really feel like even grokking through the other 2/3. Why? Because it's the same level of fucking stupidity as his take on COVID.
Let's add that he has defended Brainworm Bobby against charges of antivaxxerism. Speaking of, here's Brainworm Bobby aping Husseini's line of thought with nutbar claims that Lyme disease and RSV were also created by gain-of-function research. Per the first link in this paragraph and my top link, it also sounds like Husseini was already a JFK conspiracy theorist before latching on to the "zionists did it" angle. This Shitter link of his offers further confirmation. Furthering the nuttery, the person he quote-Shits, Monika Wiesak, apparently believes that JFK Jr was also "whacked" rather than being an underskilled, irrationally overconfident pilot. Otherwise, Monika Wiesak is a total fruitcake herself, and contra her "JFK: Myth vs Reality" the real myth vs reality is guzzling the Camelot Kool-Aid versus knowing the reality of NSAM-263 in Kennedy foreign policy and knowing that in domestic policy the best thing Jack ever did for civil rights was to have Lee Harvey Oswald blow his head off so LBJ could make him into a martyr for the cause.
So,
actually, my thought is, best of luck against Glenn Ivey. I do know
that Maryland has a fairly strong Green Party to help. But, I won't go
out of my way in offering support from afar. And, if you were running against a non-Zionist Democrat, I wouldn't give you the time of day. Even against Ivey, were I in MD-4, I'd have to hold my nose.
My second thought is, once again, contra Noah Berlatsky, who's not really a leftist himself, this shows that horseshoe theory is true and the likes of Husseini illustrate that.
