I just had a conversation with a seemingly intelligent person who is convinced that bio-threat surveillance labs (especially in Ukraine) MUST be weapons labs.
His reasoning was that the Department of Defense would never spend money on bio labs just for bio-threat defense, they only spend money on weapons.
He also insinuated that the $200 million dollars that the DoD spent on biolabs in Ukraine last year proves that the DoD is engaging in weapons development.
Ignoring the general idiocy of that belief, I asked what his source for the $200 million number was.
The link he sent me was to the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.... which is parroting the number from TASS, the official Russian state news agency.
I'm virtually certain that my interlocutor was a "salt of the earth", "hardworking American middle-class" middle-of-the-road kind of guy.
If that's true, the American polity is intellectually screwed