Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Lee Smith: The American Elite's Primary Allegiance Is No Longer to America, But to the Communist Party of China, That Makes Them Rich and Keeps Them In Power

Evidence the pandemic didn't start in a Wuhan wet market was published as early as January 2020, days after Beijing implemented the lockdown on Jan. 23. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, 13 of the first 41 cases, including the first one, had no links to the market. In May the head of China's center for disease control and prevention confirmed that there was nothing to link COVID-19 and the wet market. "The novel coronavirus had existed long before" it was found at the market, said the Chinese official.

After the Lancet report, Republican officials close to the Trump administration disputed Beijing's official account. "We don't know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that," Sen. Tom Cotton said in February. "We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases." Cotton said the Chinese had been duplicitous and dishonest. "We need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says," Cotton said. "And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all."

The corporate American press disparaged Cotton's search for answers. Jeff Bezos' Washington Post claimed that Cotton was "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." Trump was derided for contradicting American spy services when the president said he had a high degree of confidence that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. Sen. Ted Cruz said that in dismissing obvious questions about the origins of the pandemic the press was "abandoning all pretenses of journalism to produce CCP propaganda."

The January publication of a New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker arguing the same case that Trump and GOP officials had been making since last winter raises useful questions. Why did journalists automatically seek to discredit the Trump administration's skepticism regarding Beijing's origin story of the coronavirus? Why wait until after the election to allow the publication of evidence that the CCP's story was spurious? Sure, the media preferred Biden and wanted Trump gone at any cost--but how would it affect the Democrat's electoral chances to tell Americans the truth about China and COVID-19?

China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face--for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn't the bad guy here--it's a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China's lead. And by March, with Trump's initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.

Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer--$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone--while impoverishing Trump's small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)