Rarely has the press corps been so dismissive of something about which it knew so little.Of all the grotesque political reactions that follow the news that there has been a mass shooting, perhaps the ugliest comes from those who hope aloud that the crime has been carried out by a certain sort of person.

We’ve all seen this phenomenon. First comes the initial report. Next come the initial reactions. And, then, the moment there is space to be filled, certain players within our media ecosystem begin crossing their fingers, bowing their heads in mock prayer, and saying, in effect, “Please let the killer have whatever collection of immutable characteristics and political beliefs is likely to allow me to advance my worldview online.”

Typically, this behavior is described as “ghoulish.” And, indeed, it is. But, I’d venture, there is a better word for it than that: It is ideological. A person who sits at home hoping that a given crime has been committed by a given type of person is ultimately doing so because he wishes to weave that crime into an absurdly simplistic view of the world, in which all emotionally resonant news must be marshaled in defense of a particular outlook. In this way of thinking, the complexity of the human mind is invariably ignored — indeed, it is subordinated to the observer’s personal obsession; motivations — the examination of which is crucial to all liberal systems of criminal justice — are dismissed; and detail becomes the enemy. In consequence, the victim, the perpetrator, and the universe that existed between them are relegated to mere avatars, and the truth is bent to match the prejudice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has played out on a much wider stage than any mass shooting or terrorist attack could ever achieve, and yet our debates over its provenance have been infected with precisely the same ideological germs. On Sunday, we learned that American intelligence services were looking into the possibility that three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology became seriously sick last November — and, by extension, that, despite this theory having been roundly dismissed as a conspiracy theory for a year, this may suggest that the proposed “lab leak” theory of COVID-19’s origin is correct.

On the face of it, it is odd that it took more than a year before this entirely plausible notion elicited more than scoffs, for, in spite of the vehemence with which they have engaged, almost nobody who has been involved in that discussion has had even the slightest training in any of the disciplines that would be necessary to arrive at a meaningful answer. Why, one might ask, was someone such as the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin — a woman who couldn’t tell a pangolin from a giraffe — so extraordinarily invested in the idea that the coronavirus had come from animals? Like almost all of her fellow eye-rollers, Rubin is not a virologist or an epidemiologist or a zoologist; she is a journalist, whose only real-life experience has been in enthusiastically changing her mind.

On closer inspection, though, the reason for this investment comes clearly into view: that, like the people who openly root for a shooter to be of a particular color or political persuasion, Rubin and Co. believe that the answer to the question, “Where did the virus originate?” is much less important than the answer to the question, “What will Americans make of the answer to the question, ‘Where did the virus originate?’” Or, put another way: What has really mattered to those who have been scornful of the “lab leak” theory was not the underlying scientific question of whether it is true, but what the people they dislike might think and say as a result of its being discovered to be true.

And, indeed, if it is true that the COVID-19 outbreak was the result of an accident at a laboratory in China, we might well come to reevaluate some things. We might come to see virologists both as the villains and the heroes of the piece. Western criticism of the Chinese Communist Party — which far too many left-leaning Americans have decided represents “xenophobia” — might increase. There might be a great deal of justified anger aimed at the handful of people who have caused this much suffering and damage. We might have to acknowledge that Tom Cotton was right about something. And we might end up less worried about Donald Trump’s having called it the “China virus.” It is certainly not a coincidence that the people who have been the most dismissive of the lab-leak theory are the people most desperate to avoid these eventualities.

A long time ago, when Barack Obama was president, the blogger Ace of Spades complained correctly that substantive politics had given way to a focus on “Macguffins.” What mattered to the press, Ace suggested, was not the detail of a given policy or aim, but who wanted that policy and who opposed it. If Barack Obama hoped to achieve something, Ace argued, that became the story, and everyone else in the saga was placed according to that fact, with those who agreed with him playing the role of the good guys and those who stood in his way playing the role of the bad guys.

It is impossible not to have noticed this trend throughout the recent coronavirus pandemic, during which everything that Republican governors did was met with eye rolls at best and charges of homicide at worst, while Democratic governors were held up on pedestals even when they were responsible for precisely the sort of “Neanderthal” decisions for which their counterparts had been lambasted. It is impossible, too, not to have seen it in the discussion around the “lab leak” theory, which has seen the skeptics reflexively cast as outré in defense of a theory that has always been little more than a guess. Rarely in the history of human discourse has the press corps been so dismissive of something about which it knew so little. Rarely has it been so obvious what it was doing.