Quick question: How do Democrats and liberals in the media square their criticism that the administration slow-walked its response to the spread of the coronavirus with their constant carping about how what we call the virus is literally “hurting” people?
Is this an urgent health crisis we need to address right now with every available resource, or do we need also to spend time pondering the ramifications of referring to a deadly, highly contagious virus by a name that offends a grand total of three people?
Trump has referred to the coronavirus as “Chinese” for the absolutely shocking reason that it originated in China! China, by the way, is a country where a large portion of the public continues illegally to traffic and eat wild animals not regulated for consumption.
In response, California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu wrote Wednesday in the Washington Post that the president’s “repeated insistence on calling coronavirus the ‘Chinese virus’ is more than just xenophobic; it causes harm both to Asian Americans and to the White House’s response to this life-threatening pandemic.”
This is the thing social justice liberals do all the time. They hear an American refer to something in terms of ethnicity, nationality, or race and then immediately deep scan it for reasons to call it bigoted.
As evidence that referring to the virus as “Chinese” is causing “harm” to anyone, he referred to three separate incidents, none of which are really evidence of anything other than that liberal, Democrat-led cities such as Los Angeles and New York do perhaps have some racial conflict to address.
One incident involved a viral internet video of unknown origin wherein someone in a surgical mask is seen apparently chasing after someone, who then turns around and hits the person chasing him. CNN spoke to the unnamed witness who took the video and said the mask wearer was Asian and the person she was chasing was a black man, who allegedly called the mask wearer a “diseased b—-.” That’s not seen in the video, and it’s impossible to discern the identity of the mask wearer. CNN would only say the person, wearing a jacket, hood, mask, and eyewear, “appeared to be Asian.”
Yet another New York incident involving an internet video showed a black man who repeatedly asks a fellow subway rider to move away from the door. When the man doesn’t move, the first one picks up a can of something, reportedly Febreze, and sprays it in his direction. It is, again, impossible to know the race of the second man, though CBS said he is “believed to be Asian.”
The third incident referenced by Lieu is, once again, a viral internet video wherein a man is seen saying, “Everything comes from China because they’re f—ing disgusting.” His face is blurred out, though he certainly has a southwestern Latino American dialect, and it’s unclear whether he is referring to the outbreaks of coronavirus or perhaps SARS, both of which originated in China in the past two decades. Nonetheless, this is the “harm” Lieu is fretting over while our hospitals threaten to burst at the seams and elderly people here and abroad are dying.
“There is a difference between saying the virus is from China and saying it is a Chinese virus,” he wrote. “In a time of unease and uncertainty, such language stokes xenophobic panic and doesn’t get us closer to eradicating this virus.”
True, naming viruses doesn’t make them go away, but it helps us understand them, and one would hope that, in understanding, there is future prevention. China is to blame for the spread of this problem both because its government lied about what it knew in the early days of its proliferation and because its law enforcement has been unable and unwilling to get a stranglehold on illegal animal trafficking.
It might be a good idea going forward to know this about China so that the rest of the world might pressure the place to fix itself.
But, if we’re not allowed to attach a stigma to the contagion, maybe the media should come down on the journalists who were eager to call it the “Trump virus.”
Calling it the Trump virus doesn’t get us closer to eradicating it!
Yes, the administration was slow to grapple with the virus and hasn’t done much to give the impression otherwise. But Lieu and the rest are embarrassing themselves just the same by worrying about what we should and shouldn’t say about where we all know the virus came from.
