SO NOW "AMERICA IS LYING AND RUSSIA IS TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT UKRAINE BIOLABS" IS THE MIDDLE-GROUND POSITION

Last week, NBC's Ben Collins reported this about the would-be truck blockaders who were, at the time, beginning to congregate in Maryland:

... as its Covid mission has become less clear, the group’s channels have turned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where conspiracy-minded thinking has flourished.... QAnon and anti-vaccine contingents within the groups have seized on a false conspiracy theory that the war is a cover for a military operation backed by former President Donald Trump in Ukraine.

The conspiracy theory, which is baseless and has roots in QAnon mythology, alleges that Trump and Putin are secretly working together to stop bioweapons from being made by Dr. Anthony Fauci in Ukraine and that shelling in Ukraine has targeted the secret laboratories.

A couple of days later, I asked:

How many days before Tucker Carlson endorses (or semi-endorses) the "Fauci has bioweapons labs in Ukraine" conspiracy theory?

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) March 8, 2022

Carlson hasn't gone full Q on this question, but he's partway there now, Just Asking Questions. From his monologue last night:

Wednesday, we told you that the Biden administration is funding a number of secretive biolabs in Ukraine, labs that are conducting experiments on highly dangerous pathogens. Now, that's not a story as we told you, that we wanted to do. In fact, we didn't think it could be true.

... then out of nowhere, the Biden official in charge of Ukraine confirmed the story. Toria Nuland, the Under Secretary of State, casually mentioned in a Senate hearing on Tuesday that actually, yes, the Biden administration does fund a series of biolabs in Ukraine and whatever is in these labs is so dangerous that she is deeply concerned these materials will fall into the hands of the Russian military.

Carlson doesn't believe the U.S. government's assertion, widely accepted within the mainstream media, that, with regard to biological agents, its “priorities in Ukraine are to consolidate and secure pathogens and toxins of security concern and to continue to ensure Ukraine can detect and report outbreaks caused by dangerous pathogens before they pose security or stability threats.” It's the U.S. government! Everyone knows our government would never tell us the straight story! Carlson creates a straw man -- the program has existed since 2005, and so if it's designed just to secure Russian biological agents, why has that taken seventeen years and why is it still ongoing? Never mind the fact that Russia still threatens its foes with bioweapons, and it might be necessary for Ukraine to have ongoing activity to deal with the ongoing threat.

And the truth is, we're not interested in what Russian propagandists say about these Ukrainian biolabs. We're not interested in what the propagandists at CNN say about these biolabs. We're Americans, so we would like, in fact, we think we have a right to demand the Biden administration to answer simple questions, straightforward questions. These are obviously questions important enough to make [the State Department's] Toria Nuland very nervous. But why? We don't know. They won't answer.

Notice where we are now. When "Fauci has biolabs in Ukraine and hero Trump is conspiring with Putin to destroy them" is the crazy extreme, then "Russia says Ukraine is the real biowar threat" becomes the middle-ground position.

And yes, Carlson's Brazilian hype man, Glenn Greenwald, is also pushing this argument:

We don't know if biological weapons are in Ukraine. We do know there are dangerous "biological research facilities" there: which we know because Victoria Nuland, shocking Rubio, warned about.

But the history of US programs gives the lie to WH denials about bioweapons in general.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 11, 2022

Manwhile, Jeannine Pirro was a guest on Fox's The Five yesterday floating the uncut Fauci speculation:

“What I think is interesting about these biolabs... we deny, we deny, we deny. ‘It’s preposterous. Don’t waste any ink on it,’” Pirro said. “And yet, isn’t it interesting that we haven’t heard or seen Fauci in weeks?” she said....

The right has always been savvy about this sort of thing, providing different degrees of propaganda for different markets. Right now, I don't think Republicans are in warring pro-Putin/anti-Putin camps so much as they're generating different kinds of anti-Biden, anti-Democratic, anti-"New World Order" outrage for different markets. This generally works very well for them. And it's easy to toggle between the two if you're not sure which camp you're in. You can choose the most emotionally satisfying option. The result is the samez no matter what you choose: Democrats are evil.