Mike Huckabee
In George Orwell’s ever-timelier masterpiece “1984,” what’s true today has ALWAYS been true. Oceania is at peace with Eurasia and at war with East Asia; it has always been so. It would be “thoughtcrime” to believe otherwise, even if way back in the recesses of one’s memory, one can dimly recall a time when Oceania was at war with Eurasia and at peace with East Asia.
So it is with many things in America in 2020, particularly critiques of President Trump’s response to the Wuhan virus. Oops, it’s also thoughtcrime to think of it as the Wuhan virus, or Chinese virus, even though it’s from Wuhan, China. And it has been thoughtcrime to believe the virus might have originated not in the wet market but in one of two biolabs in Wuhan studying infectious disease. One of these is a mere 900 feet from the wet market. We are supposed to believe that it first “jumped” into a human at the market. Better yet, accept the newer Chinese line that U.S. soldiers brought the virus to China.
RELATED READING: What if we had listened to the Trump-hating media?
As time goes on, mainstream media coverage is getting worse; the narrative has done a full-180 when it comes to who did what, when. It increasingly mischaracterizes conservative media’s response to the virus, insisting that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh minimized the threat. Questioning untested computer models or thinking twice about shutting down the entire American economy does NOT make one a pollyanna about an unknown virus.
But it’s only now, the narrative goes, with thousands infected, that Trump and conservative media can see the true impact of the virus. Trump’s effort is too little, too late, and he’s responsible for people dying, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
This is the same Nancy Pelosi who on February 24 said “Come to Chinatown...come join us.”
Uh-oh, that’s thoughtcrime. Watch out for the Thought Police. Even worse, I just wrote it for you to read, and linked to the video so you could see it for yourself, instead of dropping it down the memory hole like a good Winston Smith.
Remember when President Trump first introduced the idea of closing the United States to air traffic from mainland China? He boldly called for that at the end of January, saving untold Americans from infection and possible death. Remember the reaction at the time? Why, Trump was xenophobic (the word of the year); he was a racist. This virus was just an excuse to shut down the borders, they said, just as he’s always wanted to do; the threat was mild. We’ve all seen the montages created by Sean Hannity and others of Democrats underplaying the danger of social contact. Democrats did this not because it was true but because Trump was articulating the danger, and he couldn’t be allowed to be right.
Then there’s Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who was smeared by the media in mid-February for daring to to ask questions about the Level 4 biolab and another nearby facility and their coronavirus studies. The nerve –- pointing out the lack of transparency from the Chinese. Democrats and the media (I repeat myself) called him a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
But he never did accuse the biolabs –- he just raised the question and wanted answers. As we’ve said here, and as reported by A. G. Hamilton in NATIONAL REVIEW, “Cotton specifically said that ‘we don’t have evidence that the disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says.”
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There’s nothing conspiratorial or paranoid or false or even political about this statement, so the media had to twist his words, just as they deliberately twist and/or misinterpret much of what the President says. Once they’ve twisted it to say something different, it’s easy to debunk. In this case, they debunked the claim that there was evidence China was making bioweapons, which Cotton never said. Hamilton points out that they repeatedly quoted one of the leading biosecurity experts in the world, Richard Ebright from Rutgers University, to debunk that fake claim, even though he is known to AGREE with Cotton’s ACTUAL claim that COVID-19 could possibly have spread from the Wuhan lab. The media didn’t quote him on that part!
This story is evolving as we obtain more evidence that a Wuhan biolab might have been responsible. So the media have to play tricks to avoid retracting their earlier false accusastions. They’ll ease into the new story, as the WASHINGTON POST did when it finally said that “scientists don’t rule out that an accident at a research laboratory in Wuhan might have spread a deadly bat virus that had been collected for scientific study.” That statement is consistent with what Cotton was saying and continues to say. But to my knowledge, no one has retracted any misquotations attributed to him, let alone apologized to him.
We talk about not being able to trust the narrative from China, but it sure would be nice to have reason to trust the one being spun by our own media. Sadly, when it comes to the truth, many in American media have little more in common with it than the ChiComms do. They’d parrot a line straight from President Xi if it meant another chance to slam the leader they REALLY hate, President Trump.
By the way, the World Health Organization has made it easy for the ChiComms to lie. Highly recommended reading...
5 Keys to Unlocking WHO’s Ties to China and Its Response to COVID-19
Cotton was on Sunday’s LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN, saying we need to look at “the reasons why it is gonna be necessary to fundamentally take stock and reassess our relationship with China at the end of this pandemic, because China has to be held accountable, and there must be a reckoning for their behavior.” Indeed. I think one interesting way would be to tally up our astronomical financial hit from this and subtract it from the amount of our debt they hold.
Cotton understands all too well why the media are trying to tune out President Trump’s daily press briefings. As one of the best-informed on this issue you’ll find, he considers these briefings to be quite valuable. “The President has really taken charge,” he says, “over this last couple of weeks.” He still gives Trump high marks for going against a lot of advice he got at the time and shutting down flights from China.
I’ll leave you with the positive words of Senator Cotton, which will be ignored if not ridiculed by the hysterical media: “I commend the President. I know that we’ve got many tough days ahead of us, as he said, but I, like so many other Americans, are praying for him and praying for all the brave men and women who are working on his task force, or working in hospitals, growing our food, getting [it] into grocery stores, helping care for our communities. Again, that shows the true spirit of America and why, when this pandemic is behind us, we’ll be stronger than ever before.”
That was true yesterday, it’s true today, and, God willing, it’ll be true tomorrow.