They All Lied About COVID-19’s Origins
For the past year, you’ve been lied to repeatedly about a matter of great consequence: Where did the COVID-19 plague come from? Were its origins natural or man-made?
But during the past two weeks, and in particular the past 48 hours, we’ve seen the roof cave in on the Left’s sneering, antiscientific, increasingly improbable Trump-deranged insistence that it occurred naturally, that it came straight from a bat cave.
Yet we know the truth: COVID-19, the killer of nearly 3.5 million people worldwide, came from a Chinese lab.
Why is this important? First, because learning the truth helps us prevent it from happening again; second, because it exposes the evils of Chinese communism; and third, because it gives the world permission to hold Xi Jinping’s murderous regime accountable.
The evidence just keeps piling up. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
In April 2012, six miners here fell sick with a mysterious illness after entering [an abandoned copper] mine to clear bat guano. Three of them died.
Chinese scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were called in to investigate and, after taking samples from bats in the mine, identified several new coronaviruses.
Now, unanswered questions about the miners’ illness, the viruses found at the site and the research done with them have elevated into the mainstream an idea once dismissed as a conspiracy theory: that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, the city where the first cases were found in December 2019.
Indeed, that “conspiracy theory” is fast becoming fact. We most recently covered this just over two weeks ago when we quoted Nicholas Wade, who for 30 years reported on science for the New York Times. As Wade put it, “It’s very hard on the natural emergence scenario to imagine how the virus broke out someplace else, built itself up into a real good human pathogen, and, without infecting anyone else, the guy who was infected jumped on a train to Wuhan, didn’t infect anyone on the train, and it was only when he got to Wuhan that he started spreading. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.”
Others in the scientific community were also taking notice. As the Journal reported on May 13, “In a letter published … in the journal Science, an international group of 18 biologists, immunologists and other scientists criticized the findings of a report released in March by a World Health Organization-led team into the pandemic’s origin and called for a more extensive evaluation of the two leading hypotheses: that the pandemic virus entered the human population and began spreading after escaping from a lab or after jumping to humans from infected animals.”
Even the always-wrong and increasingly unpopular Tony Fauci is finally coming around.
But the most troubling question is this: What took everyone so long? We already know the answer. Leftists and their media enablers couldn’t bring themselves to admit that then-President Donald Trump might be right.
Trump regularly called COVID-19 “the China Virus,” and he said more than a year ago that he had a “high degree of confidence” that COVID-19 came from a Chinese lab. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was also suspicious, and so was brave and lonely Senator Tom Cotton, who was roundly mocked for sharing his spot-on instincts about the ChiComs as early as January 2020.
Trump’s certitude on the origins of the virus thus put his haters in a bind. After all, they couldn’t be seen to support him. On anything. Especially not on a matter of substance regarding the most consequential news story since 9/11. And certainly not in an election year. The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, in fact, blamed Trump for the media’s failure to cover the lab-origin theory.
“I do think it’s important to remember that … both [Trump and Pompeo] suggested they had seen evidence that this was formed in a lab … but they refused to release the evidence showing what it was,” Haberman told CNN’s “New Day” on Monday. “And so because of that, that made this instantly political.”
Actually, Pompeo launched an investigation to follow the evidence. Team socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden shut it down. And Haberman and The Paper of Record simply moved along. Nothing to see there.
Haberman wasn’t alone, of course. As PJ Media’s Victoria Taft writes, “The self-described ‘fact-checker’ of The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, admits in a splashy article that because Leftist legacy media reporters (my words, not his) didn’t like President Donald Trump, they ignored his warnings that the ‘China virus’ possibly escaped from a Wuhan, China, lab. They denounced it as a ‘thoroughly debunked theory.’ And they ignored him and his legitimate warnings because they believed the usage of the term was racist.”
Clearly, then, these other terms are “racist”: SARS, MERS, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Spanish Flu, Lyme Disease, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
So, without evidence, the mainstream media slammed the lab-leak theory again and again and again.
As for the pathology of this deception, National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke puts forth a powerful analogy:
Of all the grotesque political reactions that follow the news that there has been a mass shooting, perhaps the ugliest comes from those who hope aloud that the crime has been carried out by a certain sort of person.
We’ve all seen this phenomenon. First comes the initial report. Next come the initial reactions. And, then, the moment there is space to be filled, certain players within our media ecosystem begin crossing their fingers, bowing their heads in mock prayer, and saying, in effect, “Please let the killer have whatever collection of immutable characteristics and political beliefs is likely to allow me to advance my worldview online.”
And the Left, including the “media ecosystem” mentioned by Cooke, subordinated its integrity to its Trump-hating narrative.
If Trump espouses X, then we must reflexively and collectively denounce X regardless of the evidence. One need only consider Trump’s support of hydroxychloroquine to see this scenario at work.
As our Mark Alexander writes, “Beyond the growing conclusion that the ChiCom Virus pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute’s P4 lab, the next logical question is this: Did they release the virus intentionally?” Venerable journalist Brit Hume cautiously teased that question this week: “[The Wuhan lab source] becomes undeniable, and more clear than ever, but this is a rogue state. This is an outlaw state. This is not a ‘member of the international community.’ … This is a nation which will suppress the truth, maybe wipe out people in their own ranks who try to tell the truth. … So far as we know the Chinese did not [deliberately release the virus] but it hasn’t been disproven, and given the way China acts, I don’t believe you can completely rule it out.”
Again, we — all of us — have been lied to repeatedly. But sunlight is the best disinfectant, and the truth about COVID-19 is finally seeing the light of day. ~The Patriot Post
Racist Confirmed to Lead DOJ Civil Rights Division
The Democrat Party has a long, sordid history when it comes to racism. Of course, its modern-day members dubiously project that history onto the Republican Party, the party that fought to free the slaves and pass the Civil Rights Act. However, the Democrats’ embrace of racist ideology is not merely a thing of the past — it continues to this day with Critical Race Theory, ironically rebranded as “anti-racism.”
Evidence of this reality was demonstrated with Tuesday’s Senate vote confirming socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Social Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke. The final vote was 51-48, with all 50 Democrat senators voting to confirm and one lone Republican, Susan Collins, foolishly crossing the aisle to join them.
The vote on a cop-hating racist was intentionally timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death, a fact made clear by Senate Majority Leader Chuck scumbag/liar-Schumer’s sanctimonious declaration immediately prior to the vote: “As we continue to pursue strong policing reform legislation, the fight for racial justice by confirming Kristen Clarke on the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder is particularly poignant and appropriate.” Virtue-signaling political theater would be a more accurate description.
Clarke serves to check the Democrats’ all-important identity boxes, as she is both black and the first woman to lead the Civil Rights Division. Apparently, that is the only thing that matters to the mainstream media as well.
Unfortunately, the ramifications of this vote will be significant. “As legislative gridlock on voting rights and criminal justice reform continues, Clarke’s office will become the locus for the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration’s civil rights agenda,” observed the Washington Free Beacon. “Even if legislative accomplishments prove elusive, the department can notch victories that will outlast the administration by entering reform agreements with police departments or prevailing in litigation.”
The last person America needs leading the Civil Rights Division is a racist with an axe to grind, but that’s what we got. Expect even more “woke” racist CRT ideology to be shoved onto the American people, all in the name of “justice.” The first example? The current website URL for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is justice.gov/crt, not “crd” as one would expect. It’s almost like CRT is literally the Left’s domain. ~The Patriot Post
Team socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s Mask Mania
Thanks to the COVID-19 vaccines, “15 days to flatten the curve” may finally come to an end after about 15 months.
All around the nation, even a few left-wing governors have relented in the face of mounting evidence that the shots are working. They’re in the process of opening up to life as it used to be, without the need for face masks if the subject has already been inoculated. Some without the masks may merely identify as vaccinated, of course, because this is all on the honor system. And Americans should continue to reject vaccine passports.
So, despite the outward signs of normalization inside the White House — such as restoring 50% capacity at press briefings — why is the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) set to finalize an emergency temporary standard (ETS) that could mandate employees continue to wear the hated face apparel despite being vaccinated against the Wuhan flu? Is it just a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing?
Considering OSHA was supposed to have guidance ready by March 15, White House Press Secretary liar-Jen Psaki’s claim that OSHA needed “time to get it right and time to ensure it’s right” rings ever more hollow. OSHA’s tardiness has also drawn the ire of Republican members of the House Committee on Education and Labor, who sent a letter to Labor Secretary Marty Walsh calling on him to drop the standards entirely.
“Given the latest and ever-evolving science and current state of the virus,” writes the committee, “it is unfathomable that OSHA would continue to pursue this rigid, one-size-fits-all national ‘emergency’ regulation. Now more than ever, an ETS is a completely unnecessary response that would only tie the hands of business owners who have already taken extraordinary and unprecedented efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus in the workplace.” Add in the fact that OSHA has not issued an ETS since 1983 and it’s clear that the agency’s “time to get it right” was time enough for the danger to pass.
This isn’t to say that all people will be comfortable with the decision to shed the masks, but it’s their prerogative to exist as a maskaholic. We don’t have an issue with individuals or businesses making such a choice, but we draw the line at the “one size fits all” edicts that some states have kept in place months after their more aggressive peers opened up their economies and reaped the benefits, all without a significantly worse infection rate than states remaining masked and regulated.
In the last 15 months, we have seen two different styles of governance that couldn’t be more diametrically opposed to each other. Some governors (and our president at the time) applied the lightest touch possible to a once-in-a-century pandemic. They were also the ones who lifted state emergency regulations the quickest and have basically brought their little corners of the country back to what could pass as normal.
On the other hand, we have the tyrants — those who have dragged out their states of emergency and tried to assume and maintain dictatorial powers over their subjects, er, citizens. We don’t have to go over all those names because most have been glowingly portrayed in the mainstream media. But if there were a COVID Hall of Shame, they would be enshrined — along with the Communist Chinese government — for their part in ruining lives. OSHA would be grabbing themselves a late entry into this Hall of Shame by continuing their ill-advised emergency order. ~The Patriot Post
Can Harvard Keep Discriminating Against Asians?
Harvard University discriminates against Asian Americans on the basis of race. That much is pretty well established. The only question now is whether the Supreme Court will take up Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and follow the ancient (i.e., 2007) wisdom of Chief Justice John Roberts: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
In order to admit more blacks and Hispanics, Harvard manipulates its admissions requirements in ways that limit admission rates for Asian American applicants in particular. This includes requiring higher SAT scores for Asian Americans, as well as penalizing them on an entirely subjective personality rating system. Astoundingly, since the suit was first filed in 2014, Harvard has won repeated victories in lower courts, more or less on the logic that it can continue to discriminate as long as it’s not too blatant about it. It’s what we’ve mockingly called the Not-Too-Blatant Standard™.
Students for Fair Admissions has appealed to the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide whether to take the case. Harvard, naturally, claims it doesn’t merit review because it’s just trying to increase diversity and equity.
On the contrary, given the justices’ inconsistency in previous race-based cases over the last four decades, it’s high time for some clarity.
In fact, it is the Court’s 2003 ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger that has given universities carte blanche to set up discriminatory regimes. Writing the Court’s opinion in that case, Sandra Day O'Connor infamously concluded, “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in student body diversity] approved today.” In other words, racial discrimination was justified for another quarter-century. We’re still seven years from reaching that arbitrary date.
On the surface, this case is only about Harvard. Yes, the particulars of the Harvard case are somewhat unique. Yes, the Roberts Court tends to rule narrowly on cases so as not to overreach with precedents. But thanks to the Left, race has become the defining issue in our nation, and dividing along racial lines is how leftists address almost literally everything. College admissions, law enforcement, corporate boards, airline pilots, professional sports, federal farm subsidies, job preferences, COVID vaccines — all of it has been racialized by the “Unity” Party.
As for the case at hand, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal put it plainly: “The 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law, and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act makes discrimination by race illegal. What the plaintiffs ask is for the Court to affirm, at long last, that these words mean what they say.”
~The Patriot Post
Canceling CRT
Tennessee has joined a growing number of states rejecting so-called “Critical Race Theory” curriculums in K-12 government school classrooms. Twenty state attorneys general have put the Department of Education on notice that they object to CRT, declaring, “The proposed priorities are a thinly veiled attempt at bringing into our states’ classrooms the deeply flawed and controversial teachings of Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project.”
CRT, a metastasization of the New York Times’s revisionist 1619 Project, is the latest of many leftist endeavors to indoctrinate America’s next generation with a syllabus utilizing a contrived revision of American history to pollute young minds. Under the banner of “equity,” leftist-controlled states are force-feeding insidious CRT propaganda to children.
Tennessee Governor Bill Lee noted: “We need to make sure that our kids recognize that this country is moving toward a more perfect union, that we should teach the exceptionalism of our nation and how people can live together and work together to make a greater nation, and to not teach things that inherently divide or pit either Americans against Americans or people groups against people groups.”
The ACLU responded with an apt description of the CRT agenda: “With the stroke of a pen, the governor has silenced constructive dialogue that would educate individuals on the discrimination and systemic barriers that people of color still face in this country — including long-term inequalities in educational outcomes, incarceration rates, economic advancement and health outcomes — as well as ways we can move forward together.”
In January, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden terminated the 1776 Commission in order to promote the Left’s fake racist narrative. CRT is now being aggressively funded and promoted by the Biden/Harris regime. It is their effort to offset the growing conservative movement to reintroduce genuine civics curriculums, such as those advocated by the 1776 Project and 1776 Unites — curriculums that promote a historically factual understanding of American history. Of course, that understanding is antithetical to the Left’s statist agenda.
The Left’s CRT advocacy has been supercharged by erroneous and now ubiquitous claims that America is besieged with “systemic racism.” However, as I have noted before, the most consequential “systemic racism” in America is the institutionalization of socialist Democrat Party social policies, which have enslaved poor black citizens on Demo-controlled urban poverty plantations for generations. The Democrat Party platform has, by design, kept poor people in bondage to the welfare state and, consequently, is the blueprint for the most enduring racial exploitation architecture in America. ~The Patriot Post
The Guard Finally Goes Home
First things first: To the nearly 26,000 National Guardsmen who left their friends, their families, and their communities to take part in a nearly 20-week deployment in our nation’s capital, we say, Thank you.
By now, the Guardsmen are back home where they belong. They left DC to little fanfare, and the $521 million tab for their services was money poorly spent. Of course, that’s no fault of their own; it’s simply what we’ve come to expect from Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Chicken Little Democrats.
We’ve also come to expect the mainstream media to misreport the news, and the Associated Press didn’t disappoint. “Nearly five months after being deployed to the U.S. Capitol to help quell the Jan. 6 insurrection,” the AP wrote on Sunday, “National Guard troops were set to leave and turn over security of the area to Capitol Police.”
Other than the fact that it wasn’t an “insurrection,” and that the earliest Guardsmen didn’t arrive at the Capitol until well after the non-armed non-insurrection was over, the AP’s lead sentence was accurate. At least the news service didn’t call it a “deadly insurrection,” because then we’d have had to point out that the only death that occurred within the Capitol was that of 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed supporter of Donald Trump and 14-year Air Force veteran who was shot by a still-unnamed Capitol policeman.
As it turned out, and as all sentient observers had naturally expected, the Guard’s DC tour was a quiet one — at least from a violence standpoint. The rioters had, after all, made their point on January 6, and they’d long since been rounded up and put behind bars for 22-23 hours a day to await due process for such deadly serious crimes as knowingly entering or remaining in restricted grounds without authority and obstruction of an official proceeding. Nearly five months later, they’re still waiting, much to the disgrace of the District and its mayor, Muriel Bowser. (We should note that a Capitol policeman, William “Billy” Evans, was murdered near the Capitol on April 2 by Noah Zaeem Muhammad, an acolyte of Nation of Islam hatemonger scumbag-Louis Farrakhan.)
As for the Guard’s lodging, it wasn’t exactly The Four Seasons. As the New York Post’s Bruce Golding reports, “The National Guard’s stay in the capital has been marked by controversy, including stunning photos of troops forced to sleep on the marble floors of the Capitol ahead of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s inauguration. About 150 guard members also reportedly tested positive for the coronavirus in late January, and more than a dozen were reportedly later sickened by undercooked meat in their meals, some of which were also found to contain metal shavings.”
Also in January, the Guard was unceremoniously kicked out of the Capitol complex and forced to bivouac in a nearby parking garage, apparently because a Massachusetts Democrat, Bill Keating, saw a single Guardsman at a Dunkin Donuts — horrors! — without a mask.
Russel Honoré, a retired Army lieutenant general and avowed Trump hater, oversaw a security review in the wake of the January 6 riot, and he told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the Capitol itself will be secured by Capitol Police from here forward, but that the complex will remain closed to the general public because of the strain on the police force.
Closed to the public, eh? What a disgrace. So much for “The People’s House.”
Back on February 5, as we neared the one-month anniversary of the Guard’s presence in DC, we argued that scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats had milked their presence for all it was worth and that it was long past time to thank them and return them home to their communities. Nearly four months later, they’ve finally headed home — to their credit, and to the speaker’s shame. ~The Patriot Post
DeSantis Takes on Big Tech
Florida has become the latest state to protect its residents from Big Tech’s abusive “power grab on speech, thought and content,” as Governor Ron DeSantis signed a measure he termed the Big Tech Bill. “This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’ — real Floridians across the Sunshine State — are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites,” DeSantis stated, adding, “If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”
The bill, SB 7072, will allow Florida residents to sue Big Tech companies that fail to follow or enforce their content rules with transparency. According to a press release from the governor’s office, “This reform safeguards the rights of every Floridian by requiring social media companies to be transparent about the content moderation practices and give users proper notice of changes to those policies, which prevents Big Tech bureaucrats from ‘moving the goalposts’ to silence viewpoints they don’t like.” It creates a provision for the state’s attorney general to take action against a social media company should it violate this law.
Furthermore, the legislation prohibits social media companies from deplatforming political candidates, with penalties of $250,000 per day on companies should they deplatform state-wide candidates and $25,000 per day over deplatformed national candidates.
It’s not deplatforming that poses the greatest threat to free speech, however, but shadow banning — or algorithmic suppression of reach. Conservatives still may technically “have a platform” because their social media accounts are active, but the number of people who see their content is greatly limited. Remember the suppression of the Hunter liar-Biden bombshell right before the election? Thus, the law also prohibits “any action to censor, deplatform, or shadow ban a journalistic enterprise based on the content of its publication or broadcast.”
DeSantis made it clear that he sees social media companies as the modern equivalent of the “public square,” and as such they must be held to account for infringing on Americans’ right of free speech.
“We are now, though, in a situation where we have things that were probably unforeseen by the Founding Fathers,” the governor contended. “Whereas they established a First Amendment to protect people’s freedom of speech, religion, and association from government overreach, we now have a situation in which some of these massive, massive companies in Silicon Valley are exerting a power over our population that really has no precedent in American history.” Moreover, he continued, “These big tech monopolies are exerting way more influence over our society than the monopolies of the early 20th century, which led to antitrust and a lot of trust-busting. So we’re in a situation here where these platforms have become our public square.”
DeSantis is right about that, and he’s leading the way in an unfortunately necessary battle. ~The Patriot Post
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