You might think that after unleashing the Wuhanvirus upon the world, China would strike a conciliatory tone. Instead, the nation’s official news service and government mouthpiece has not only asked everyone else for an apology, but has threatened to “ban exports to the United States” of medical products, which it said would cause us to “fall into the hell of a new coronavirus epidemic.” This should be taken seriously because we’ve long been dependent on China for pharmaceuticals, including for an estimated 95 percent of our antibiotics.
How does the world’s greatest nation (us…still) find itself at the mercy of another power for medicine? It’s the result of decades of naïve, internationalist, faux free trade policies that have decimated our manufacturing base, including in areas vital for national security.
Intrepid Fox News host Tucker Carlson sounded this alarm on the Friday and Monday episodes of his nightly show, warning that the main threat we face today isn’t “Russian election interference” (which amounted to about $150,000 in Facebook ads), “global warming,” “racism,” or even the Wuhanvirus.
The real threat is “extortion” by China.
Moreover, the “people who told us there was no downside to living in a borderless world were lying” and “deserve to be punished,” Carlson stated. “Make them eat their words; strip them of their power.”
Unfortunately, China has been incrementally stripping us of our power — and the people we should strip of theirs continue to help them.
In reality, these internationalists could have predicted an epidemic/pandemic. Not only do these events occur periodically — e.g., medieval Europe’s bubonic plague, smallpox in the New World — but the continual population mixing of our mobile, interconnected world makes disease spread all the more likely.
These people also could have predicted that rampant disease would place us at the mercy of China, a despotic enemy state bent on world domination. Nonetheless, while “the rest of us were arguing about sexism and transgendered bathrooms, China took control of our health care system,” said Carlson on his Friday show.
“China dominates the world market in pharmaceutical ingredients. Compounds used in virtually every essential medicine for high blood pressure, for cancer, for Alzheimer’s disease, and many more come from China,” he continued.
“So do the key components in vital medical technology, including CT scanners, X-ray machines, ultrasound equipment.”
“As of now, more than 95 percent of all the antibiotics in America are manufactured in communist China. Yes, 95 percent,” Carlson also informed.
Of course, antibiotics won’t help with the Wuhan disease because they only combat bacterial infections, not viral ones. But imagine “watching one of your children die from an infected cut,” Carlson later said, adding perspective. “China has the power to make that happen. The Chinese government is acutely aware of this power. Last year, a prominent Chinese economist suggested cutting off the supply of antibiotics to the United States as leverage in the trade war” (video below).
This was echoed last week by Xinhua, Beijing’s official news service and mouthpiece. After asking the world for an apology for putting an onus on China over Wuhanvirus, the media organ warned, “If China retaliates against the United States at this time, in addition to announcing a travel ban on the United States, it will also announce strategic control over medical products and ban exports to the United States.”
“If China announces that its drugs are for domestic use and bans exports, the United States will fall into the hell of a new coronavirus epidemic,” Xinhua continued.
“In other words, they’re threatening to kill us,” Carlson noted (video below).
Despite this, our Left is intent on helping them. When President Trump announced travel restrictions on China to combat Wuhanvirus, they called the move racist. When the virus is associated with Wuhan (where it originated), that’s racist, too. And presidential contender Bernie Sanders just said that he wouldn’t close the borders in response to the disease because that would be racist and “xenophobic” (in reality, our real problem is xenophilia).
Translation: It’s best to be “woke” even if you’re dead.
As for “Wuhanvirus” being racist, this concern over associating disease with places is strangely absent vis-à-vis the German Measles, Spanish Flu, Marburg Virus Disease, and Ross River Fever (my, what could the difference possibly be?!). Such concern is also absent when demonizing pre-germ theory era Renaissance Europeans for infecting American Indians with smallpox (which, mind you, also originated in Asia).
Returning to Chinese aggression, at issue isn’t just medicine. We rely on China as well for sensitive components used in our weapons systems and other products, and the nation steals our technology. Beijing also censors our movies, strong-arms American businesses into conforming with its propaganda, and manipulates our schools’ curricula via its Confucius Institutes. This is called the projection of “soft power.”
But then there’s how we got into this predicament: soft American heads housing underpowered minds. Appearing on Carlson’s show last night, Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) not only had some ideas about restoring American drug manufacturing, but also made the observation that the prevailing philosophy in Washington has been “‘Don’t worry, we’re going to open up to China, and capitalism is going to change China’” (video below).
“Instead,” Rubio lamented, “it’s China that’s changed capitalism and weaponized it.”
Of course, greed has driven the China pandering, too. Big business wants to make money off the nation’s huge market, and politicians do businesses’ bidding in exchange for donations. This also encourages China delusion because, as Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Nonetheless, Rubio is right about the mentality.
A common human failing is “projection,” the ascribing of your own mindset to others. This is evident regarding China, the Islamic world, and other foreign entities: Moderns who once railed against “ethnocentrism” are themselves guilty of it, unknowingly, as they assume other civilizations will embrace our “values” (even as these moderns swear these values are “relative”).
But different peoples are called “different peoples” because, well, they’re different. In Beijing’s case, it has no interest in our “values.” It considers its culture and race superior and, for this reason, apparently believes its destiny is to dominate the world. This is the politically correct view in China.
So the real lesson here isn’t about a Chinese virus that infects some hundreds of us but a lie that infects most of us: The situational insistence that all groups be painted with the same brush — and that refusing to do so makes you a bigot.
Image: narvikk via iStock / Getty Images Plus
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
