“You’ve said many times that the US is doing far better than any other country when it comes to testing. Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you when every day Americans are losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases, every day?” asked Weijia Jiang, a CBS reporter.
The president is a cheerleader for American success. He is trying to give Americans some hope that the nation is on top of the situation. It’s Trump’s modus operandi to be upbeat and patriotic. His attitude is in stark contrast to those in the establishment who are pessimistic and reflexively down on America. Trump’s optimism, which is characteristic of his business career, is interpreted in the frame of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a syndrome fueled by a grim view of American exceptionalism.
Trump responded calmly to an absurd question: “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.” Trump has frequently deflected criticism of his presidency and the administration’s response to this crisis by pointing to China. Anybody who has watched only a handful of his press conference is well aware of Trump’s pivot-to-China strategy.
In back of Trump’s response is a frustration that the president and I share. Why aren’t reporters going after China? China failed to contain the virus and lied about and distorted the situation for weeks while the virus spread across the planet. The deaths in question should be laid at the doorstep of the Chinese Communist Party. Moreover, indeed especially in light of China’s culpability, why is the press praising China’s response to the virus while treating criticisms of China as “racist” and “xenophobic”? Trump was responding to a pattern. His intent behind his question is obvious to an objective observer. But journalism is not objective. It’s partisan.
You see the pattern in conversations with people on social media. Recently, I was accused of pursuing a “yellow peril” narrative when I criticized the totalitarian regime of China for its actions. I pursue a critique of the Chinese Communist Party because, as a Marxist, I care about the working class generally and the proletarians of China in particular (since they’re the ones under the thumb of the CCP). The CCP as the embodiment of the Chinese people is a necessary assumption in order to make the claim that criticism of the CCP is racist—an assumption that is on the face of it absurd. Noam Chomsky was recently recorded pursuing this absurdity in an attack on populism. The tick emanates from the stealth Maoism that has long demented the Western left.
But don’t expect the media to explain that to you. They have an agenda. It just so happens that the reporter who asked the question is Chinese-American. Without hesitation, she leveraged her racial identity to fashion an opening for the media to once again push the narrative that the president is a racist. The charge is blindly accepted by the regressive left: a racist president at the helm of a racist nation obsessed with liberty.
Ms Jiang said to the President: “Why are you saying that to me—specifically—that I should ask China?” Her question was a rhetorical one, of course. Fleshed out it reads: “I am racially Asian and ethnically Chinese, how could you say such a thing to me? Because you’re a racist. Didn’t you call this the ‘China virus’?”
Reflect on this for a moment: “Why are you saying that to me—Specifically—that I should ask China?” Because you’re the one who asked the question?
The president responded with, “I’m not saying it specifically to anybody, I’m saying it to anybody that asks a nasty question.”
“That’s not a nasty question,” Ms Jiang stated.
But it is a nasty question. And Jiang exploiting her racial and ethnic identity to paint the president as a racist is just as nasty. I regret that it has be pointed out that there was nothing inherent in that answer that makes it racist, but in the present situation, I have to point that out, even if it means that I will be accused of supporting a racist president (I don’t support Trump, for the record). I’m making this point not only to defend the person who has been unjustly treated in this regard from the very beginning, whatever his flaws, but as an observer who is deeply concerned with the way in which the establishment uses race to polarize the American people in order to advance the managed decline of the American Republic and, more broadly, Western civilization. The goal of making this about race is all about delegitimizing a populist president in order to increase the likelihood that the establishment candidate (presently Joe Biden) will win the White House and the power elite who have been running down this country for decades will once again enjoy the power to push their globalist agenda, which includes empowering China culturally, economic, and politically.
Those who pursue this agenda have no shame. The utterly mediocre Brian Stelter at CNN said that “what we saw in that exchange with Weijia Jiang was something that has racial overtones. It’s racist to look at an Asian American White House correspondent and say, ‘Ask China.’” For Stelter and others the race of the person asking a question carries magical powers that transform a question that has nothing to do with race because Stelter and his ilk can only see people in racial terms. Jiang, a US citizen, is routinely identified as an “Asian American reporter.” When is a white reporter ever announced as a “European American reporter”? Answer: never.
As we have seen, progressives, aided by the establishment media, are trying to pin a murder in Georgia on the president (see my blog entry “Did Arbery Die to Perpetuate a False Narrative About Contemporary American Society?”) This is a pattern.
Remember when the media took Trump’s “Some very find people on both sides” remark, made in the context of the Charlottesville situation in the summer of 2017, out of context to make it appear as if he supported white nationalism? Rosie Gray, of The Atlantic, a publication that recently lamented Western concern for personal liberty while praising China’s systematic violation of it, wrote at the time, “President Trump defended the white nationalists who protested in Charlottesville on Tuesday.” In the case of Jiang, the media are making out Trump’s frustration at the failure of the media to hold China accountable for their actions to be anti-Chinese racism (the trilateralists pulled a similar trick during the 1970s-80s when Americans workers grew concerned over Japan’s unfair trading practices). They set him up for this up weeks ago by demanding that he talk about the virus in a way we have never before talked about virus, by avoiding reference to it by its origins.
Rank and file progressives are out of touch with reality. But the work they’re doing with their accusations of racism has a function, namely to marginalize those who raise questions about a totalitarian regime that the transnational elite counts among its partners in the global network of banks and corporations, a structure that is in its fundamental character set against the interests of working people.
Jiang is also female, which is also being leveraged against Trump. He’s a sexist. Indeed, Joe Biden must be elected president whether he pushes a staff member against a wall and forcibly inserts his fingers into her vagina because Trump is a sexist. That’s Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I remember as a kid that we said we were striving to overcome racism because it divided the people. But the establishment realized that dividing the people this way was too good of an idea to let it go. So they kept it going. The New Civil Rights is about keeping racial antagonisms going, leveraging them as a weapon to wield against ideological enemies. And Trump is the ideological enemy of the moment. But Trump is, of course, the face of populism in the moment. Populism must be stopped. That’s how somebody like Adam Schiff can persuade half of Congress to impeach and vote to remove the president. The people narrowly avoided the overturning of a fair and democratic election. They do not intend to allow four more years of this.
freedom and reason 