Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden is now promoting the absurd idea that President Trump is using the Chinese Virus to promote anger and hatred against Asians.
Speaking at an openly racialist event, Biden, who faces a credible sexual-assault allegation from a former staff member, claimed Trump’s response to the Asiatic pathogen has been “nakedly xenophobic.”
Biden’s proof?
Trump and his supporters attacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for encouraging people to visit Chinatown as the pandemic began, and Trump had a run-in with a Chinese-immigrant reporter for CBS.
“Familiar Forces Of Hate”
Biden was speaking “virtually” to the Asian American and Pacific Islanders Victory Fund, a hard-left group that is “focused on mobilizing Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) eligible voters and moving them to the ballot box.”
Biden, The Hill reported, accused Trump of “denials, delays and distractions, many of which were nakedly xenophobic”:
“The pandemic has unleashed familiar forces of hate, fear and xenophobia that he always flames … that have always existed in this society,” Biden said. “But this president brought it with him, has brought with it a new rash of racial messages, verbal and physical attacks and other acts of hate, some subtle, some overt, against the Asian American and Pacific Islanders.”
Biden was one of the top Democrats and leftists who denounced Trump’s banning travel to and from China, where the virus originated, U.S. intelligence officials believe, in a poorly-run lab in Wuhan.
Trump, of course, was right, but that didn’t stop Biden, who “pointed to Republicans criticizing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) for touring businesses in San Francisco’s Chinatown in late February and Trump’s exchange with an Asian reporter in the Rose Garden last week as evidence of his animosity toward the AAPI community.”
“The AAPI community deserves better than a president who never ever misses an opportunity to stoke innuendo and fan the flames of hate,” Biden said.
“We deserve better than a president who attacks the Speaker of the House for visiting a local Chinatown business in San Francisco. We deserve better than a president who aggressively and childishly insults [an] Asian American reporter. Think of that, the president of the U.S. for the whole world to see, insults an Asian American reporter in the Rose Garden for doing her job and asking a direct question. You deserve a partner and a friend in the White House.”
Another False Narrative
Biden’s account isn’t, of course, quite right. Nor is The Hill’s recounting of Pelosi’s Chinatown foul-up or the reporter’s exchange with Trump.
Figures “on the right” criticized Pelosi not just for encouraging people to visit Chinatown, but because she criticized Trump for dithering on the virus response at the same time she was telling San Franciscans all was well.
“It’s lovely here,” Pelosi said. “The food is delicious, the shops are prospering, the parade was great. Walking tours continue. Please come and visit and enjoy Chinatown…. Don’t be afraid…. It’s a good time to come.”
Amusingly, when Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Pelosi if she, too, didn’t downplay the virus, the ice-cream hoarder claimed she was only trying to stop “discrimination” against Chinese because “[of] the way they were labeling the flu.”
As for the put-upon CBS reporter, during a news briefing, Trump had said that U.S. testing for the Chinese Virus is ahead of other countries.
The reporter, Chinese immigrant Weijia Jiang, bristled. “Why does that matter?” she demanded to know. “Why is this a global competition when everyday Americans are still losing their lives?”
Replied Trump: “They’re losing their lives everywhere in the world. And maybe that’s a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me, ask China that question, OK?”
Unsurprisingly, Jiang threw down the race card: “Why are you saying that to me, specifically?”
“I am not saying it specifically to anybody,” Trump said. “I am saying it to anybody who would ask a nasty question like that.”
Jiang uses the race card adroitly.
On March 17, she claimed that a White House official called the Chinese Virus “Kung Flu.”
“This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face,” the prickly reporter tweeted. “Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.”
Jiang has not identified the “White House official.”
Biden, by the way, is no stranger to what leftists would say is racially inflammatory language if uttered by a conservative or Republican.
In 2015, at a campaign stop during the Democrat presidential primary contest, Biden tried to illustrate how many Indians have immigrated to Delaware: “You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I’m not joking.”
Image: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
R. Cort Kirkwood is a long-time contributor to The New American and a former newspaper editor.
