Politics

Jen Psaki accidentally revealed government’s secret COVID plan according to new conspiracy theory

Press Secretary Jen Psaki holds a Press Briefing, Wednesday June 2, 2021, in the James S. Brady White House Press Briefing Room. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
Press Secretary Jen Psaki holds a Press Briefing, Wednesday June 2, 2021, in the James S. Brady White House Press Briefing Room. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith) Photo: White House

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s job involves talking. A lot of talking. So it’s not surprising that every now and then she’s going to have a slip of the tongue.

One of those mistakes happened on August 25, when Psaki accidentally said “plandemic” instead of “pandemic” when talking about what President Joe Biden will be discussing during his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Related: Jen Psaki shuts down reporter demanding China pay “reparations” for COVID-19

The mistake didn’t get much coverage in the media because it was clearly just an error and most people wouldn’t think it’s important, but this week the slip has gotten a lot of attention from the online right.

“She said it lol,” wrote @ArtValley818_, a conservative Twitter user with a large following, posting the clip of Psaki’s mistake, edited to make it appear more significant than it was.

Their tweet of the video – which is currently the pinned tweet on their account – started a conversation among people who believe, apparently in earnest, that it was actually a Freudian slip. That is, that Psaki accidentally told the truth that the COVID-19 pandemic was planned in advance.

Someone even complained that the official transcript of the briefing edited out her error… because even copy editors are part of the conspiracy.

Psaki’s slip has been getting mentioned out of the comments on the original post.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement in April that “the Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified.” While the Biden administration has called for an investigation into the possibility that the virus was leaked from a lab that was studying coronaviruses, that’s far from saying that there was a global conspiracy to engineer the entire pandemic before it happened.

And there is no evidence that Psaki herself was involved in any such conspiracy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories, with or without Jen Psaki saying one syllable incorrectly as she spends hours each day talking with the press. But this one video clip could be cited by the online right for months to come.

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