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It's very important to the state-run propaganda arm of the Chinese authoritarian regime to accuse President Trump of racism and xenophobia for properly and logically pointing out that the COVID-19 coronavirus began and rapidly spread in the Wuhan Province of mainland China.
So, naturally, liberals in the media and their Democrat partners in politics are doing their best to fulfill the Chinese totalitarians' needs.
As Andrew McCarthy points out at The Hill, not only is the designation of this coronavirus strain as the "Wuhan virus" or "Chinese virus" rational and factual, it also has an important legal component to back-up the president's executive actions:
Consequently, the origination of the virus in China and its transcontinental spread across the globe are highly relevant. They rationalize the president’s authority to address the emergency with Washington’s awesome resources. As President Trump put it in his letter this weekend:
“Only the Federal Government can provide the necessary coordination to address a pandemic of this national size and scope caused by a pathogen introduced into our country. It is the preeminent responsibility of the Federal Government to take action to stem a nationwide pandemic that has its origins abroad, which implicates its authority to regulate matters related to interstate matters and foreign commerce and to conduct the foreign relations of the United States.”
Moreover, the president’s letter elaborates, Congress has explicitly authorized the chief executive, in an emergency, “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”
In other words, the president can't engage some of the broad policies he has enacted without the statutory requirements laid out by Congress that there must be a specific international threat facing the nation. If President Trump is to use his awesome power, he must do so within the context of an international threat, and the only legal way to do that is to identify that threat as originating in China. But, if he does that, he is called a racist. And, if he does not engage the power of his office to stop this threat, he is accused of doing nothing.
See how it works?
The fact is, China's authoritarian communist government is facing an existential threat. If at the end of this global crisis (and yes, it will end) the major countries of the Western world collectively recognize the danger of relying on mainland China for the manufacturing and fabrication of almost everything that drives our economies, the entire Marxist Ponzi scheme constructed by the Maoists in Beijing comes tumbling down.
So, China is doing what China does. It is using misinformation, propaganda and intimidation to try to change peoples' words and even their thoughts. Don't blame them for it... they're communists. This is what they do. This is what they've always done.
"Racism is not the right tool to cover your own incompetence," tweeted the China Xinhua "News," a propaganda arm of the Beijing government.
They've even gone so far as to plant an evil bit of misinformation accusing the United States military of bringing the virus to the Wuhan province.
"Further evidence that the virus originated in the US," tweeted Lijian Zhao, spokesperson and Deputy Director General for the "Information Department" in China's Foreign Ministry.
The noteworthy reaction to this obvious attempt to deflect is not to state the obvious, that a communist country will resort to lies and propaganda to deflect blame and scrutiny of its incompetence and failures—nothing noteworthy about that. What's remarkable and important for all Americans to understand is that the majority of those in our mainstream press and in our pop culture is following suit and parroting these lies in America.
From cable news to The New York Times to broadcast news to outraged intelligentsia on Twitter, each time the president or, frankly, anyone refers to this virus as originating in the place it undoubtedly originated, they echo the exact deflection approved of by the "Information Czars" in Beijing.
"Your racism won't divert blame for your failures," they all scream as if they're doing anything but providing cover for a murderous, totalitarian regime.
Thankfully, it's not working. Americans know better. We've been called "racist" by these mental midgets for decades now, and at this point, it has literally zero impact. What it does accomplish is to add yet another item on the ledger to reconcile at the end of this temporary situation. When the chips were down, did our liberal thought leaders oppose a totalitarian, deceitful communist regime or carry its water?
We now have that answer.
Make no mistake; this ordeal will pass. And, when it does, our nation and our Western allies will re-think our dependence on the unreliable communist Chinese regime. Gone are the days when our shoes and shirts and phones and televisions and computers and even our antibiotics are all produced in one, dodgy corner of the world. Lesson learned.
Will we also be wise enough to divest from those in the media who ran interference for Beijing so they could have one more tweet attacking the American president? We shall see.
Larry O'Connor hosts two separate radio programs on WMAL in Washington DC and on KABC in Los Angeles. He has a daily, 30-minute podcast covering U.S. Politics and featuring interviews with newsmakers and pundits on the biggest stories of the day. Subscribe here.