House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) hit the cable networks on Sunday, running with two main talking points: the first being the blatant lie that President Donald Trump said the Wuhan coronavirus is a "hoax," the second being that the president didn't take the virus seriously from the get-go.
During a Sunday morning interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace, the journalist pressed the speaker on her own actions. Back in February, Pelosi encouraged residents in her San Francisco district to visit Chinatown because "everything is fine."
"If the president underplayed the threat in the early days, Speaker Pelosi, didn't you as well?" Wallace asked.
"No," Pelosi said, smiling. "What we were trying to end the discrimination, the stigma that was going out against the Asian American community. And, in fact, if you look, the records show that our Chinatown has been a model of containing and preventing the virus so I have confidence and our folks there thought it was necessary to offset some of the things that the president and others were saying about Asian Americans and making them a target, a target of violence across the country."
Wallace pressed back, asking the speaker if she was playing into that perception by walking around without a mask, telling people that it's "perfectly safe" to be out in public, that "there wasn't a threat generally."
"No, I was saying that you shouldn't discriminate against Chinese Americans, as some in our administration were doing by the way they were labeling the flu," Pelosi explained.
The speaker said, once again, that if Wallace checked the record he would find San Francisco's Chinatown has been a "model" for containment and prevention.
Pelosi has a lot of nerve to say that she took the Wuhan coronavirus seriously from the get-go. If she did, she wouldn't have encouraged people to visit Chinatown. Even if she wanted to put a stop to so-called "racism," she could have reminded people that Asian Americans are not responsible for this pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party is. People don't have to go attend parades or eat in Chinatown to appreciate their Chinese neighbors. Encouraging tourism wouldn't halt racism, assuming it existed. If anything, it encouraged people to gather in large crowds when this virus is known to be highly contagious. The worst part of this whole thing: Pelosi is smiling and thinks this is a game.
Pot meet kettle. pic.twitter.com/jbQ4V1gYRk
— Beth Baumann (@eb454) April 19, 2020
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