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Fake News Tuesday, COVID-19 Edition, Part 2

As part of the media’s tireless (and ever-more-tiresome) attempts to gin up as much divisive rage and fear over President Trump as possible, on Monday, “CBS This Morning” aired footage of an overcrowded hospital room in coronavirus-raged Italy and claimed it was a hospital in New York City.

https://www.westernjournal.com/cbs-used-fake-covid-video-ny-hospital-footage-italys-hardest-hit-city/

When called on it, CBS News removed the video from all its shows and web platforms, and blamed it on an “editing mistake.”

It’s nice to know that with so many things we take for granted uprooted due to the CHINESE coronavirus pandemic, there are still some reliable touchstones that remain as solid and unchanging as Mount Rushmore:

1. Never believe anything you hear on Rachel Maddow’s show.

2. When Trump makes a mistake, he’s a LYING LIAR WHO LIES, but when the media lie, it’s always just a mistake.

Switching gears

March 31, 2020

At his Monday press briefing, President Trump introduced another leading business person who is joining the government in the coronavirus response. Mike Lindell, founder of the phenomenally successful American company My Pillow, praised Trump’s actions and encouraged Americans to use their enforced home stays to spend time with their families, pray, read the Bible and reconnect with God.

Lindell has refocused 75% of his pillow factory output for the time being on making much-needed N95 surgical face masks for health care workers, with plans to produce 50,000 masks a day. You can see video and read more here:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mypillow-founder-mike-lindell-at-white-house-coronavirus-briefing-tells-people-to-pray-during-crisis

I’m not at all surprised to see Mike Lindell putting public service over profit, and speaking out about his religious faith in a place where that’s often mocked and scorned. Indeed, some snarkers on the Internet tried it, but I sense that we have entered a more serious new era, and Americans are fresh out of patience for juvenile partisan sniping from people who would rather criticize and attack than pitch in and help.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/03/30/lefties-are-triggered-because-american-businesses-are-taking-part-in-the-coronavirus-briefings-n2566013

Here’s a specific example of an attempt at adolescent eye-rolling at Trump and Lindell that brought a perfect response. It suggests that these leftists’ 15 minutes as the self-proclaimed “cool kids” of social media (that stretched into three annoying years) are at long last over:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/363220/

Mike Lindell is one of the great American success stories, and so popular with Americans that when he appeared on my TBN show in 2018, the studio audience was more excited about seeing him live and getting his autograph than any other celebrity or politician on the show (certainly more than about seeing me!) And that success is well-deserved. If you don’t know the story of how his life was nearly destroyed by drugs and alcohol, and how his faith in God not only saved him but led him to undreamed-of success that he now uses to help countless others in similar peril, then you need to see my interview with him. Trust me, you will be inspired:

https://youtu.be/rwB3EPgDZZU

Let’s also throw a grateful thank-you to the suit maker Brooks Brothers, which is stepping up to start making 150,000 face masks a day. Brooks Brothers is one of the last remaining companies that still makes clothes in the USA instead of in foreign cheap labor markets. Wow, whoever imagined that there might someday be a reason America would want to encourage manufacturers to keep those jobs in America?

https://www.gq.com/story/brooks-brothers-medical-masks

One day, we’re going to know not just how the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) came to be a pandemic but how it came to "be" in the first place. Right now, though, it’s tough to find reliable information. Politics, not science, informs (infects?) most media commentary, and that applies not just to what’s being said but what is not said. (Aside: This is especially true with the promise of hydroxychloroquine/zithromycin/zinc therapy that we've been staying on top of.)

It’s amazing how, with 24/7 coronavirus coverage, so much information can be ignored in favor of the same fake stories over and over. CNN, MSNBC and other outlets are so loaded with misinformation --- which we often debunk here --- that one might as well be listening to Nancy Pelosi. Or the Chinese Communist Party.

We see that when public officials contradict President Trump or say things that otherwise further the anti-Trump narrative, they get love and kisses from the media. But as soon as they find reason to temper their comments or even (yikes!) agree with him, the media turn on them and try to shut them down, sometimes not bothering to air their reports.


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"Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci are not political people,” former Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz said Sunday evening on Steve Hilton’s show. “They worked in the administration when it was the Obama administration. These are serious scientists who have the lead; there’s a reason why the President, time after time, brings them out...and for the American people not to see these...health care professionals giving advice, telling them what needs to be done, advising the President, does a total disservice to the American public. But I think the American public, fortunately, figures that out.”

I would add that just as these researchers aren’t politicians, neither is President Trump, really. It’s refreshing to have someone in office who doesn’t just talk in focus-grouped politi-speak and is candid with us. On the rare occasions when something he says doesn’t ring true --- such as a positive word he might say about Chinese leadership --- we know he has solid diplomatic reasons for putting it out there.

Anyway, certain scientists and elected representatives have been trying for months to uncover the real source of the virus and what China did in the early weeks of their epidemic that allowed it to become a raging pandemic that has killed over 2,000 Americans. The Chinese Communist regime has been very cloak-and-dagger about it by hiding evidence, refusing to admit American scientists from the Centers of Disease Control, “disappearing” doctors and researchers, and expelling American journalists who might sneak the truth out to the rest of the world.

Arkansas Rep. Tom Cotton, appearing on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES with Maria Bartiromo, referred to a study published in THE LANCET that concluded the virus did not originally come from the “wet market” in Wuhan. Cotton was really the first elected official to express serious concern about the emerging virus; he nailed it back on January 30, when he called it “the biggest and most important story in the world” and asserted that China was lying about it. He could see it didn’t make sense that China was downplaying the virus while “locking 75 million people into their homes and apartment buildings,” he told Maria.

And they’re still lying. “You see it again today,” Cotton said. China announced they had no new cases, no more deaths, but they've just re-closed the movie theaters nationwide after having them open for a few days. Certainly they wouldn’t do that unless what they’re telling us about the end of the contagion is false. Cotton also noted that a single mortuary in Wuhan has just ordered more than 5,000 urns. The Chinese Communist Party lies because it’s the Chinese Communist Party, just as a scorpion stings because it’s a scorpion. They’re behaving exactly as one would expect the Chi-Coms to behave when trying to cover up the biggest story in the world.

You can bet that when Trump says something gracious about the president of China, he’s well aware of that deception. There are many elements at play, such as the reality that much of our basic productive capacity for making medicines was outsourced to China long ago. As Cotton said, “I think most Americans have been shocked to learn that we depend upon China for things like penicillin, antibiotics, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, to say nothing of dozens of basic pharmaceutical ingredients.” That will have to change, but it can’t happen overnight. Cotton is sponsoring legislation to use tax incentives and the government’s purchasing power to bring this manufacturing back to the U.S. and eventually halt the importation of all Chinese drugs.

A month ago, Cotton was saying we didn’t know where the virus originated but that we had to get to the bottom of it. He pointed out that just a few miles from the wild-animal “food” market where they’d said the virus broke out is China’s one-and-only biosafety Level 4 superlaboratory that researches human infectious diseases. “Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” he said at the time, “[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, and China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.”

We don’t know much more than we did a month ago, Cotton said on Sunday, and that is very little. But we now KNOW the virus did not originate in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as China claimed. That’s right: It didn’t “jump” from one of the live delicacies they sell there such as badgers and koala bears (kid you not) to a human host, and even the Chi-Coms can’t continue to claim that it did. They had to ‘fess up in February. But as early as December, this was known; THE LANCET published a study showing that of the first 40 cases of coronavirus, 14 of them had no contact with that infamous market.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2020/02/22/beijing-admits-coronavirus-didnt-start-in-wuhan-food-market-senator-cotton-tweets-vindication/

So, the virus had to have been brought by someone into that market, which became an “accelerant” for its spread. The market is crowded and dirty, with animals crammed into filthy cages to await their fate. Customers reportedly prefer to watch their future meal being slaughtered. Isn’t multiculturalism great?

https://www.breitbart.com/asia/2020/02/24/study-china-lied-wuhan-virus-did-not-originate-in-meat-market/

Rep. Cotton said we still don’t know what they do in this lab. It sure would be interesting to know if even one of those first 14 cases not having any connection to the market did have a connection to the LAB. Is it possible that any of these infections can somehow be traced back there? Inquiring minds want to know.

It should be said that the study of this particular virus wasn’t necessarily sinister. It’s their failure to contain the outbreak and then lying about it that led to many thousands dying around the world –- THAT’S sinister. This Level 4 biolab has apparently researched coronaviruses before, and there are legitimate reasons for doing so. I would strongly suggest, however, that in the future they might want to think about doing it at Level 5.

……………….

A postcript: China has taken the “highly unusual move” of exonerating 33-year-old Dr. Li Wenliang, whom they “reprimanded” for spreading the word about the outbreak and who later died of the disease himself. In other words, he was exonerated posthumously. Wasn’t that nice of them?

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/china-outbreak-doctor-vindicated/2020/03/19/id/959141/

God is with us

March 30, 2020

I know you’re all under a lot of stress, having to self-quarantine, social distance and other things that have upended our lives that were unheard of only a month ago. Some of you are only dealing with the stress of trying to avoid the COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus, while others have actually suffered it, or seen loved ones contract it and even die from it. But before I start getting into the grim updates, I want to say something to help you keep a positive outlook.

I said this at the end of this weekend’s “Huckabee” on TBN, and I want to share it with you here, too:

“I want to offer you some encouragement. All the talk about the virus and the upheaval it’s brought to our jobs, our schools, our sports, our daily routines, is unsettling. And we really don’t know yet what’s to happen, or if we’ll ever be the same financially or emotionally.

But when things in this world become more uncertain, I’m comforted by the certainty of God’s love and purpose. The virus may indeed separate me from my events or my friends or my travels. But it won’t separate me from God or His love. And He’s got a bigger purpose for you, me and the world than for us to live in fear. I’m going to keep my sense of humor. Keep my faith. And keep believing that greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world.

We’re going to be back next week, and I hope you will, too. In the meantime, keep smiling, keep believing, and keep looking up. God is with us!”

Welcome to a very special edition of the Huckabee Show here on TBN. Special because we are now in our 2nd week of the Coronavirus version, without our studio audience, our guests coming to us mostly from their homes via Skype, and your host actually in government-imposed exile, some 461 miles from our theater and coming by way of a fiber-fed transmission line from a virus-free studio.

The Coronavirus and the resulting shut-down of our nation is proving to be a genuine hardship for all Americans, especially those in the service sector whose jobs virtually disappeared overnight, and for many, may not return. The travel and tourism industry is decimated. The stock market imploded, and of all things, toilet paper became a more precious commodity (or should I say commode-ity) than dollar bills. If you are from the rural south and grew up several decades ago, you weren’t worried about the toilet paper shortage—you knew just to eat more corn on the cob…and save the cobs. When I mentioned that on Twitter, I was excoriated for my lack of sophistication. But I ask my snobby critics, so what is YOUR solution when there’s no Charmin to squeeze? I don’t think I even want to know.

Are there any positive things to come from this pandemic and the economic and social disaster it’s caused? You bet. For one, maybe we’ve finally learned that globalism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and we ought be thinking more about America being strong, self-sufficient, and independent of countries like China, whose communist government kept hidden the blunt force of the virus until they finally slammed their fist on the population of Wuhan, China and turned it into a gulag. But by then, it was too late, and the virus had already started to spread throughout the world. President Trump immediately put a halt to travel from China and of course was promptly labeled a racist by Nancy Pelosi, other Democrats, and their co-conspirators in the media. Interestingly, even publications like the Washington ComPost and the NY Slimes themselves demanded a travel ban in the early days on what even they then called the Chinese virus. Now the use of that term is of course racist, which means all those years we’ve dealt with the Spanish Flu, German measles, MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), and I never knew we were ALL racists for calling it a disease from its point of origin.

We’ve learned to appreciate some real heroes we take for granted. Like truck drivers. As bad as this has been, it’s the truckers who have kept this country moving and stocked with food and supplies. When you see a trucker on the highway, say a prayer of thanks for him or her. They’ve been your lifeline. We should be more grateful for health care workers, and not just the doctors who get the attention, but the nurses, front office staff, nursing home workers, technicians, and even the people who clean the buildings where all those folks work. They have been exposed to more germs in a week than most of us will be in a lifetime. And our policemen, fire-fighters, and 1st responders. They don’t get to stay home and wait it out. They are on call 24-7, to clean up the messes humans make. And be grateful for those who deliver mail and packages—whether Post Office, UPS, Fedex, or whoever. I’m getting stuff shipped to my house to keep from venturing out. And those folks in the warehouses, shipping platforms and the drivers getting it to my neighborhood are real heroes to help the rest of us practice social distancing. And grocery clerks and stockers, and pharmacy workers also deserve our deep thanks.

Finally, we are shaken to our roots to realize that with March Madness, the NBA, Major League Baseball, and every sporting event canceled, athletes can’t save us. With the theaters closed, and movie sets shut down, Hollywood and actors can’t save us. And with the financial meltdown, money can’t save us. And with the Congressional bungling of a rescue bill and Pelosi trying to add money for non-virus nonsense like funding abortions and NPR and the Green New Deal, politicians sure can’t save us—in fact, they may end up killing us! But when human institutions fail, God never does. His comfort, His healing, His promises bring us peace when nothing or no one else does or even can. And that’s something we’ve learned from all this.