RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few decades ago, the conventional wisdom was that trade with China will democratize and soften the communist regime. The coronavirus pandemic has killed that myth, except perhaps among the malignant American media.

NBC News reporters like Kelly O’Donnell grow incensed about Sean Spicer asking a question as a credentialed member of the media. If you call this Chinese virus a Chinese virus, the malignant American media remain fully attached to the pre-Corona world where anyone cares.

The truth is that this virus originated in China.  Worse, decisions by the Chinese communist regime after the virus appeared accelerated the problem.

Like the malignant American media, the Chinese communists can’t help it either.  Communism is a system built on lies. Keeping the shiny polish on the regime is more important than the truth. That’s why the Chinese communists downplayed the threat of the coronavirus for months.  This is how communists behave.

When another communist regime faced a nuclear cataclysm at Chernobyl in 1986, they were also hardwired to lie.

At first, the Soviets portrayed the meltdown of Chernobyl’s reactor core as a minor incident fully under control.  Early efforts to clear debris from the blown reactor core included turning to West Germany.  The Soviets wanted a robot called “Joker” to help clear debris.  But Soviet lies extended even to the amount of radiation that Joker was expected to encounter.  The Soviets lied to the West Germans, underplaying the radioactive carnage in order to keep the truth about Chernobyl from the world.

When Joker was activated at Chernobyl, the circuitry was promptly cooked by radiation levels many times what the West Germans were told.

Communists even lie when it means their own people die or their own cataclysms get worse.

Elite global organizations validated the Chinese lies about the early days of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization was one.  A World Health Organization tweet on January 14 said: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in #Wuhan.”

So let’s get this straight.  As recently as January 14, the Chinese communists were telling WHO that human-to-human transmission of the virus didn’t occur.

The first case of coronavirus emerged in Wuhan on November 14 from someone associated with the Wuhan wet market. Chinese doctors who warned the world about the threat either died or vanished.

This is the same regime that would stop acting like communists, we were told, if only American manufacturing jobs were sent to China and we bought the cheaper versions of goods we once produced in America.

Free trade is good 95 percent of the time.   Welcome to the 5 percent when it isn’t.

And the Chinese communists have leveraged their industrial power against us in this crisis, with the state-controlled media threatening to cut off drugs to treat coronavirus.

The drugs we need to fight disease are produced overseas, you ask? As I noted here, 100 percent of all active pharmaceutical ingredients consumed in the United States are made in either communist China or India.  Imagine the American jobs if those products were made in the United States.

The Church of Free Trade will warn us that those drugs would cost more if they were made in the United States.  Right about now, I’d wager most Americans wouldn’t care.

Let’s return again to the myth shoved at us for the last 30 years since the bloodbath at Tiananmen.  Recall, the story goes, if China and the United States become tight partners through trade, eventually the blessings of capitalism will soften the communist tendencies of the regime.

Economic vibrancy will reform the country.  Democratic institutions will slowly erode the iron grip of the communist party.  Unicorns will play with wolves.

That’s the sort of thing we heard for 30 years.  Now we are paying a price.

In reality, our technology was stolen by patent pirates as part of a deliberate, state-sponsored economic espionage program.  A growing Chinese military presence in the Western Pacific threatens American strategic dominance. The Chinese are making leaps in submarine technology and nuclear missile capability that threaten American cities.  That threat didn’t exist 30 years ago.

Instead of American trade policies softening the regime, the Chinese communists have grown bold.

This brings us to the question of what’s on the menu?

Some have been aware of the threat of a novel coronavirus for over a decade.  The cause? A crazy Chinese diet.

“How crazy,” you ask?

Before you see the menu, I must ask if we are allowed to talk about what is for sale at Chinese wet markets. Not at some publications, because it is “racist.”

Scientists, thank Heaven, still live in the world of facts.

A paper published in 2007 in Clinical Microbiology Review said the crazy meats the Chinese love were a global health threat.

The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored.

What sorts of animals?  I won’t post the videos here, but you can Google “three squeaks” or “ying-yang fish” or “dog hot pot” yourself.

More troubling than dog or rats is the Chinese taste for bats, that bats that likely started this mess and can be bought at Chinese meat markets.  But it’s not just bats and rats, menus from the suspect market also include snakes, frogs, salamanders, civet cats, centipedes and hedgehogs.

NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell might worry less about Sean Spicer and a bit more about the role Chinese cravings for bats and rodents may have had in launching coronavirus.  It won’t be the first time bizarre Chinese meat preferences got people killed around the globe.

Don’t expect Kelly O’Donnell and her pals to worry more about Chinese communist lies and the fare for sale at the wet market anytime soon.  Meanwhile, we can expect some version of the Hong Kong Flu-SARS-MERS-Corona cycle to repeat.