Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Anti-Americanism in the Age of the Coronavirus, the NBA, and 1619


Table of Contents:
I) Anti-Americanism and Double Standards in the Era of the Coronavirus
II) The Current Anti-Americanism Is But Part of a Much Larger Picture

I) Anti-Americanism and Double Standards in the Era of the Coronavirus

It's time to remind everybody of one of the initial reasons in 2020 that MSM could "inform" us, again, to what extent Donald Trump is racist (as well as xenophobic): when the news of the Corona virus (belatedly, thanks to the CCP) broke out in early January, the president  almost immediately blocked travel from China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) to the United States. (Later, I was told by a furious European that "America blames Europe for the virus," because Trump banned airplane entry from the EU.)

Five to six weeks later, it turned out that America's president seems to have been prescient, because, one after the other, all other countries not only followed suit, but basically shut down their borders to the entire world, and by March, the entire planet had done the same.

Now, did the press then remain consistent and call the leaders of all other countries racist (and xenophobic)? No, of course not. Did the MSM at least apologize to Donald Trump or did it simply express regret, more generally, some kind of mea culpa, to its viewers? No, of course not. Instead, the media silently dropped the matter.

All that the Left's drama queens are interested in is all of Trump's actions before, during, and after the initial outbreak — but only insofar as they are (or can be presented as) nefarious or, at best, blunders.

Indeed, one reason for dropping the racist (and xenophobic) angle was that the MSM had found a brand-new reason, or angle, to demonstrate that President Trump is racist (and xenophobic): the President referred to the Coronavirus as the Wuhan virus and as the Chinese virus! (Terms that, incidentally, the… journalists themselves had been using for… weeks.)

Listen to Gail Herriot as she mentions the following precedents:
Examples include Asian flu, Bolivian hemorrhagic fever, Brazilian hemorrhagic fever, Ebola, German measles, Japanese encephalitis, Lyme disease, Marburg virus, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), Pontiac fever, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Spanish flu, Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, and West Nile virus.
Don Payne gives some more examples:
Trump calls it “Chinese Virus” because it IS a virus... that DOES come from China.

Ever hear of: Spanish Flu? Hong Kong Flu? Asian Flu? Ebola Fever? Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever? Swine Flu? German Measles? Bright’s Disease? Guillain-Barre Syndrome? Down Syndrome? Hansen’s Disease? Parkinson’s Disease? Bird Flu? Lou Gehrig Disease? Legionnaires Disease? Lyme Disease? West Nile Virus? etc.?

A GREAT many diseases, conditions and syndromes are named for the location... or the source... from which the disease originated... the researcher that identified the malady... a notable group, or individual patient, who contracted the disease... etc.

Calling the current outbreak the “Chinese Virus,” is right, proper, traditional and customary. It is NOT racist, demeaning, or prejudicial, to refer to it, using that term.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Evan Sayet mentions "Other disasters, too.....the Johnstown flood, the San Francisco earthquake, the Chicago Cubs", while Don Payne adds that
Anyone avoiding Chinese Food restaurants... or, allegedly, attacking Asians... as a result of hearing that term... is either ignorant, uneducated, pathologically criminal or just stupid, beyond belief.

This follows the typical pattern of the Democrats, and their attack dog media, trying to create an issue, where NONE exists, for the purposes of smearing a President... to create a false justification for calling him a “hateful racist.”

This is a low, dirty, despicable, dishonest, dishonorable and shameful propaganda campaign... nothing more.

Democrats... always stirring the pot... even in a time of national crises.

Unconscionable.
Over at the American Spectator, Scott McKay does not find the term Kung Flu offensive at all. Saying that the the Perpetually Offended do not recognize what is nothing more than a workplace joke, he sets the record straight:
Weijia Jiang isn’t fooling anybody. We know this is all partisan hackery. She isn’t offended by “Kung Flu”; what she’s offended by is the fact Donald Trump is the president and her party and political persuasion is in no particular condition to dislodge him. So she throws “Kung Flu” at the wall, hoping it sticks.
In the perspective of the 10 Ways the Left Has Politicized the Coronavirus Pandemic by Matt Margolis, David Catron adds in the American Spectator that
the Democrats see the coronavirus outbreak as an opportunity rather than an epidemic. Having failed to bring down President Trump with ridiculous conspiracy theories involving Russia and Ukraine, they are desperately attempting to convince the public that he is somehow exacerbating the COVID-19 crisis … the current Democratic rhetoric was a grotesquely cynical ploy to mislead and frighten the public for the usual tawdry political purposes
Moreover, the New Neo's third point for calling it the Chinese virus (after "(1) Many viruses are still called by place names signifying their point of origin" and "(2) The virus actually did originate in China") is:
(3) And most of all, the Chinese engaged in a huge coverup of what was happening back when alerting the world in a timely fashion might have prevented COVID-19’s spread (see this).
Which is why the Epoch Times has chosen to call it the CCP virus (otherwise known a the ChiCom virus or the Chinese Communist Party virus).

But the government had complained. No, not the U.S. government, silly. (In that case, the mainsteam media only cares if a Democrat is in the White House.) The Chinese government.

Of course, nothing China's communists (or, for that matter, Russia's communists) do, or have done for the past 20 to 30 years, or for the past 60 to 70 years (including to their own people), has ever seemed to shock or offend many of America's media outlets and their Perpetual Outrage machines.

In that perspective, Sarah Hoyt links to John "Breitbart" Nolte's All the Establishment Media’s Dangerous Coronavirus Lies. In HOW THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA SWEEP THEIR MISTAKES UNDER THE RUG, the Washington Free Beacon editors denounce
the insidious way in which the mainstream media, which have spent the past three years obsessing about the spread of fake news, operate like a cartel [think JournOlism], ruthlessly enforcing standards on outsiders but refusing to police themselves.
As it happens, most of the so-called investigative media outlets — who, again, happen (sic) to be echoing China's commmunist party — have not shown an iota of interest where the virus came from, or who is guilty, or who is at least responsible.

It is the old use of the passive when a far left government are in power — in the U.S. or abroad — suggesting a leftist political project turns out to be some kind of natural disaster. It just happened. Unexpectedly. (Madeline Osburn offers a top-notch example in which one MSM outlet, the Atlantic, seems to have become the water boy for China's Communist Party.)

For a media that has ranted and raved non-stop about so-called whistle-blowers in Washington for the past year or two, they have shown little interest, or none at all, in the scandal of Beijing overlords' silencing of whistleblowers, turning a local outbreak into a global epidemic in the process.

Imagine, now, if you will, if some illness originated somewhere in the United States? What a contrast! Then, you can bet your ass that everybody in the world, first and foremost the American people, would join in calling it the Pittsburgh flu, or the Texas virus, or the U.S. epidemic.

Indeed, in that case the media — which, remember, is not the enemy of the American people (how can you believe such a thing?!) — would have a field day, and a tidal wave of the harshest criticism imaginable would rain down upon America as well as on the country's system (capitalism). 

These people hate your guts, America.

II) The Current Anti-Americanism Is But Part of a Much Larger Picture

Doesn't all of this remind you of 2019? Here is a hint (via Instapundit): Nike updates Kaepernick slogan, “Believe in something, unless it upsets the Chinese government”

The New York Times spent 2017, the centennial of the Russian Revolution, seeking for anything and everything to laud about the Soviet Union's communists. In September 2019, the "newspaper of record" sent out a commemorative tweet ignoring the Islamist terrorists ("airplanes took aim") and managing to downplay the number of the victims. And (speaking of China as well as of communists) the Times sought to hail Mao Zedong as someone who "began as an obscure peasant" and who "died one of history's greatest revolutionary figures."

Such perspectives lead Greg Price to observe that:
I would genuinely like to ask the editors of the New York Times if they regret the outcome of the Cold War

But: the NYT spent half of 2019, the 400th anniversary of an obscure (if admittedly heinous) and rather accidental commercial transaction in a tiny Virginia town involving at most 25-30 people (including the 20some African slaves), positing that the previously unknown transaction is more reflective of an entire country and of an entire people than historical documents 157 years (the Declaration of Independence) and 168 years (the Constitution) later that concerned every single one of its two and a half million inhabitants, as well as the power structure of the entire Western world.
• Full-length article: 1619, Mao, & 9-11: History According to the NYT — Plus, a Remarkable Issue of National Geographic Reveals the Leftists' "Blame America First" Approach to History
After a torrent of criticism of the 1619 Project, to which the New York Times smugly failed to react in any substantive manner, the paper was forced to do so after the publication of a devastating article by… the newspaper's… very own fact-checker (!).

In her original essay, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, an a sort of an abstract, that
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. 
Now she had no choice but to amend it:
Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.
“The clarification is small — just two words — but important,” Hannah-Jones claimed on Twitter.

Noticing that Hannah-Jones's title does not feature a single change, Becket Adams reacts:
Along with not understanding the difference between “all” and “some,” it appears the New York Times reporter struggles also with the definition of the word “small.” Because amending her essay to say that some of the colonists revolted to preserve slavery, as opposed to asserting it was a driving force behind the entire revolt, is a hell of a lot more than a “small” clarification.
Indeed: to add that couple of words (some of), which happen to undermine the 1619 project's entire premise, while retaining the abstract's postulation — i.e., the phrase "Conveniently left out of our founding mythology" — has now become clearly fallacious, obviously deceitful, and plainly deceptive.

These people hate your guts, America.
• Full-length article: Fake But Accurate — The People Behind the NYT's 1619 Project Make a "Small" Clarification, But Only Begrudgingly and Half-Heartedly, Because Said "Small" Mistake Actually Undermines The 1619 Project's Entire Premise
All this ties in with the rest of the culture in the past few years and decades. Think of America's valiant leftists and SJWs bravely stepping up to attack the Confederate flag. Mentioning a slippery slope after the Charlottesville riots, President Donald Trump said (in a speech that was deceitfully reported to make the president sound racist) that this would eventually lead to objections to the American flag, as well as to the banishment of statues and depictions of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — something that was mocked across the leftist sphere. (This is something I too had predicted, back in June 2015, just as I predicted in October 2008 that charges of racism against the United States, in spite of the (then-hypothetical) election of a black man, will never cease…) 

It didn't take long for the drama queens (i.e., the very people who had mocked Trump) to prove the Donald (and myself) right. Indeed, in 2016 (after eight years of a black president), a professional sportsman managed to unite leftists in awe, as the football player — one Colin Kaepernick — started kneeling during the national anthem, for the salutary reason to protest police brutality as well as racism in the USA. Since the Star-Spangled Banner ain't Dixie, isn't brave brave Sir Colin's virtue-signaling akin to protesting, if not (yet) demanding the outright removal of, not the Stars and Bars but the Stars and Stripes?!

So: woke and superwoke drama queens are heralded for their fight against oppression (when it — allegedly — concerns American deplorables alone), but…

Not only do the brave sportsmen of the NBA who courageously vowed to boycott North Carolina for its "inhumane" transgender bathroom policies refrain from protesting the Chinese flag or the communist anthem, not to mention Chinese repression (regarding the NBA or just in general); they censor their (own) speech, they clamp down on spectators' free speech, expelling them in the process, and they shut down journalists (even MSM reporters).

(From Instapundit, again)
• Full-length article: The Abhorrent Double Standards of the Left in Sports As Well As in Every Other Aspect of Life
As can be seen with reporters and sports figures and millennials in general, the latest generation of American school children and college students graduating to adulthood have been brain-washed, by superwoke drama queens, with propaganda stating that there are only deplorables inside the U.S. of America (or, more generally, the West), and none outside of it.

One of the most urgent matters for reform now (are you listening, Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos?) is a thorough reform of America's educational system.

Why?

Because these people hate your guts, America.
Post-Scriptum:

The author of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President, Allen C Guelzo addresses the 1619 project in the City Journal:
Designed largely by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and members of the New York Times editorial staff, the 1619 Project aspires—through essays, poems, and short fiction—to rewrite entirely the narrative of American slavery, not as an unwilling inheritance of British colonialism but as the love-object of American capitalism from its very origins. It reviews slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated with the understanding that it must soon evaporate, but as the prize that the Constitution went out of its way to secure and protect.

 … The 1619 Project is not history: it is polemic, born in the imaginations of those whose primary target is capitalism itself and who hope to tarnish capitalism by associating it with slavery.

 … Again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory. And like all conspiracy theories, the 1619 Project announces with a eureka! that it has acquired the explanation to everything, and thus gives an aggrieved audience a sense that finally it is in control, through its understanding of the real cause of its unhappiness.

  … And again: the 1619 Project is not history; it is ignorance. It claims that the American Revolution was staged to protect slavery, though it never once occurs to the Project to ask, in that case, why the British West Indies (which had a far larger and infinitely more malignant slave system than the 13 American colonies) never joined us in that revolution.

… Finally: the 1619 Project is not history; it is evangelism, but evangelism for a gospel of disenchantment whose ultimate purpose is the hollowing out of the meaning of freedom, so that every defense of freedom drops nervously from the hands of people who have been made too ashamed to defend it.
• Full-length article: Allen C Guelzo: The New York Times offers bitterness, fragility, and intellectual corruption—The 1619 Project is not history; it is conspiracy theory
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