Throughout Chris Cillizza’s long career as a “journalist” and “political commentator,” he has shown himself repeatedly to be a dutiful propagandist for the left, never daring to get even close to an independent thought and instead faithfully reflecting whatever the political and media elites wanted him to think. And that is still largely the case, but these are unusual times, and even Cillizza has demonstrated a shocking level of independence for a leftist journo, even daring to say that Donald Trump, the veritable focus of evil in the modern world, may have been right about something. Et tu, Cillizza? Yes: for the left, it has come even to this.
Cillizza wrote on X Monday: “I screwed up. Back in May 2020, I wrote how Anthony Fauci had ‘crushed’ Donald Trump’s lab-leak theory for how Covid-19 originated The CIA said over the weekend that they now believed the virus leaked from a lab.”
To get an idea of how big this admission is, consider that Cillizza’s Substack bears a heading that boasts about Trump’s disdain for him: “So What: Donald Trump once called me ‘one of the dumber and least respected of the political pundits.’ So I got that going for me. I write about politics — mostly — with humor, transparency, and authenticity. 2-3 posts a day.” Well, he writes about politics, anyway, and actually approached some transparency and authenticity in his Monday thread on X.
Cillizza noted a recent assessment from the CIA — and they wouldn’t lie to us, now, would they? “Here’s a CIA spokesperson: ‘CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting.’” Since this so sharply differs from what the CIA and the entire political and media establishment were telling us at the time, it is worth crediting, even though it does come from the CIA. And Cillizza was man enough to recognize its implications for his previous “reporting.”
Hellbound and Down 