The Chinese coronavirus pandemic news cycle was the one the media had prepared for (prayed for?) throughout the Trump era. It was the opportunity of a lifetime: a chance to massively expand government power, an opportunity to elevate the world’s biggest corporations while crushing the individual and small businesses, and most important, an opening to convince Americans that our country had become a horrible, almost uninhabitable hellscape because of the Bad Orange President. Jane Fonda wasn’t being ironic when she said COVID-19 is “God’s gift to the Left.” Of course it is.1 Government hadn’t grabbed such a foothold on the way Americans live their lives in generations, maybe ever. The freedom to operate a small business, send your children to school, dine at a restaurant (even in their parking lots), and the ability to legally exercise alone outdoors without covering your face were taken from us.
These rights went away quickly, sometimes overnight. And when the science made clear that most of the new mandates were an ineffectual overreaction, government kept their boot on the citizenry.
And many Americans were pretty much fine with all that. Or at least they weren’t upset enough to do anything about it. Huge sections of the public actually seemed to love the sudden erosion of rights; a November 2020 YouGov poll suggested 64 percent of Americans would support a temporary lockdown in their state, and a December Vox.com poll showed that just over half of voters would support a one-month lockdown.2
After all, Donald Trump had done this to us, and we were all his victims. And the victimhood was exquisite. It just felt so good.
Many Americans even chastised those who didn’t relish their new restraints. A May 2020 viral video of a woman getting hounded out of a Staten Island grocery store by other customers for not wearing a mask heralded months of COVID shaming that would intrude on all of our lives.3
The next day, MSNBC mask-shamed Wisconsinites in a live segment where anchor Katy Tur asked reporter Cal Perry if Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, residents were “not worried about their personal safety?” “I haven’t met anybody who is,” the reporter responded. “You can see here, nobody’s wearing [masks].”4 It was at this moment that a bare-faced citizen passing by on the street chimed in, “Including the cameraman.” Perry agreed with him, humiliated. “Including the cameraman,” he parroted back. The hero citizen continued, now off camera: “Half your crew isn’t wearing ’em.”5 It was pure television bliss, but also enraging hypocrisy.
Tom Hanks went on an unhinged mask-shaming rant: “Wear a mask, social distance, wash our hands,” he said. “Those things are so simple, so easy, if anybody cannot find it in themselves to practice those three very basic things—I just think shame on you. Don’t be a pussy, get on with it, do your part.”6
The New York Times mask-shamed: “Trump May Have Covid, but Many of His Supporters Still Scoff at Masks,” they reported, without citing evidence that more face-diaper usage would have prevented Trump from getting the virus.7
An anonymous Instagram account published photos of University of North Carolina students who were not following protocol.8
The message was clear: conform or get publicly targeted for harassment.
So, most of us obeyed. It’s less hassle.
Additionally, all of the Left’s favorites thrived during the pandemic.9 Democrat politicians and unelected career bureaucrats became the heroes of the coronavirus narrative. The world’s billionaires, most of whom are globalists and advance the agenda of the establishment wing of the Democrat Party, saw their wealth expand at a record rate. No sector saw their wealth and power increase more than mega-corporations.
The country’s biggest businesses, such as Target, Walmart, and especially online retailers like Amazon were deemed essential while their smaller competitors were not.
Houses of worship were deemed superspreaders while liquor stores and pot shops thrived. As of November 2020, beer, wine, and liquor sales were up 18 percent, 24 percent, and 31 percent especially due to the pandemic and online sales were growing at a rate over 500 percent at one point, according to Nielsen.10 Legal marijuana also hit record numbers.11
China made out like bandits.12 Despite the virus originating in Wuhan, the communist regime was able to sell unfathomable amounts of protective equipment and work-from-home essentials.13 From a December 2020 Fortune magazine report:
Demand for pandemic-related products fueled the exports responsible for much of China’s economic uptick this year. Medical device exports soared 46% in the first six months of 2020, textile exports—including face masks—jumped 32%, and notebook computer exports grew 9.1% in the same period, reflecting a global shift to work from home and remote schooling.14
The pandemic also revealed America’s dependence on generic drugs made in China.15 China produces about 97 percent of all antibiotics in the United States and 80 percent of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) that are used to make drugs in the U.S., according to the Council on Foreign Relations.16 For example, the United States imports about 95 percent of our ibuprofen (the drug found in Advil and other common brands) and 70 percent of our acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) from China, according to Rosemary Gibson, an editor at the peer-reviewed medical journal the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).17
China also has a dominant share when it comes to medical supplies. For example, Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed to produce over 70 billion masks in just the months of March through May 2020 (for comparison, all the countries on earth produced about 20 billion masks total in 2019).18 A functional monopoly when it comes to personal protective equipment, China sometimes demands public praise in order to get access to the PPE they make. Elizabeth C. Economy (yes, that is actually her name), a Hoover Institution fellow and the director for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said she was struck by “the extent to which the Chinese government appears to be demanding public displays of gratitude from other countries; this is certainly not in the tradition of the best humanitarian relief efforts.” “It seems strange to expect signed declarations of thanks from other countries in the midst of the crisis,” she continued.19
Desperate industries and nations needed to do even more business with the communist regime than before the Chinese virus broke out in order to keep capital flowing. Struggling companies prioritized their own bottom lines over holding China accountable. Most businesses behave this way in boom times; the pandemic only exacerbated this behavior. It is no coincidence that the United States’ trade deficit with China surged in 2020 to a fourteen-year high, despite the fact that the communist country was responsible for the plague.20
In fact, China was the only major economy to grow during 2020.21 They grew by 2.3 percent that year, which is much lower than the 6.1 percent growth rate they achieved in 2019,22 but it’s still remarkable considering the United States, Europe, and Japan all contracted.
Beijing’s massive global infrastructure initiative, “Belt and Road,” fared surprisingly well during the pandemic.23 China saw a big manufacturing sector expansion during this time.24 While America’s entertainment industry was crippled for months, China surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest film market.25
The Chinese virus seemed to be benefiting, of all places, China, at least economically. And considering that China has limited press freedom, the world largely accepted their propaganda that they were also vanquishing the virus. As of February 2021, China had only reported a total 4,829 COVID-19 deaths, or less than 1 percent of the deaths America had reported at that time. So either China beat the virus almost instantly, or they simply stopped counting. I think any intellectually honest person assumes it’s the latter. Multiple reports from March 2020 suggested that the death toll in Wuhan was ten times the communist nation’s official numbers.26
Many establishment outlets, to their (mild) credit, acknowledge on occasion that China’s numbers are understated, but the outrage is insufficient. Some in the corporate press even have praised China for their handling of the virus. In September 2020, Newsweek ran the headline “How China Beat Coronavirus Over the Last Six Months.”27 In October 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that “China Beat Back Covid-19.”28 The Washington Post used the exact same expression in December: “China beat back covid-19 in 2020.”29 How could they possibly know that China had “beaten” it? As far as I can tell, only through Beijing propaganda.
The New York Times put out a piece in February 2021 that rivals any propaganda printed by the CCP itself in their story “Power, Patriotism and 1.4 Billion People: How China Beat the Virus and Roared Back.”30 From the article:
With equal measures of coercion and persuasion, it has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called a “people’s war” against the pandemic—and won.31
It’s as if Xi Jinping wrote the sentence himself.
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said on New Year’s Day 2021 that China “essentially vanquished the virus without a vaccine.”32 At the very moment Beijing was in “emergency mode,” dealing with an outbreak of the virus, according to the South China Morning Post, a Beijing mouthpiece.33 Seemingly, Zakaria and CNN were going even farther than the CCP propagandists to praise China.
Disturbing. But anything to make America look bad in the eyes of the people.
It began in mid-March 2020, with President Trump’s “15 days to slow the spread.”34 The objective was pretty clear and most all Americans were on board: everyone shut down as much as humanly possible for a couple weeks so that we can “flatten the curve.” “Flatten the curve” was the catch-all for collectively doing whatever we could in the short term to make sure our hospital system didn’t get overwhelmed with sickly and dying Americans. The objective wasn’t likely to eradicate the virus in that brief time frame, but it would potentially buy time for the nation’s medical facilities to catch up on knowledge, PPE, medicines, ventilators, and hospital beds.
Then the guidelines were extended an additional thirty days.35 As I said on my national radio show at the time, when the goalposts are moved once, there is no guarantee they won’t be moved again. And again. And again. Potentially for infinity.
Trump and the coronavirus task force led by Vice President Mike Pence, to their credit, began phasing out this first set of national guidelines thirty days later, but much of the nation, especially in states with Democrat governors, embraced a lockdown culture where the new normal became government mandates restricting privileges we had taken for granted.
In many of these states, lockdowns were imposed on a one-size-fits-all basis. This meant that even if there was no outbreak and hospitals were not overwhelmed (that is, the curve was flat), lockdowns and slowdowns often remained in place.
Next came the mask mandates. It seemed to dawn on the establishment media and Democrat Party overnight that covering your mouth and nose with pretty much anything was the key to beating the virus. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had been the lead doctor on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, told 60 Minutes in early March, “Right now, in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.”36 He continued: “Wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences; people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.”37
“It might even block a droplet”? It was clear he didn’t believe at this time that the science suggested that masks would save us all. It sounds like he thought masks were a symbol of public health conscientiousness. (In May 2020, he literally said masks are “a symbol for people to see that that’s the kind of thing you should be doing.”)38
But all of a sudden in April 2020, when the virus had been in the United States for over two months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began recommending voluntarily wearing cloth face coverings in public.39 Little was done to educate the public on how to keep a mask clean and sterile (if that’s even possible), how often masks should be replaced, the functional difference between cloth masks, surgical masks, and the N95 respirator masks (among other options), or if there are any health issues that should preclude someone from wearing a mask. We all were simply told to mask up! And don’t ask too many questions. What’s more, a paper published in a CDC journal suggested that cloth masks “may give users a false sense of protection against coronavirus.”40 That doesn’t sound good!
A close family member who is a doctor and treated patients on the coronavirus “front lines” went through an elaborate fitting process to match her with the perfect N95 for her specific face shape. Yet we normal civilians were told, essentially, that if we all wore a piece of fabric we got at the Gap or a paper made-in-China face diaper handed to us before we enter Whole Foods, we would drastically alter the course of the virus. Maybe that’s the case, but would someone please show us the data? Would someone please explain the science?
Though governments and establishment media took a strong pro-lockdown and pro-mask-mandate line, it is not obvious that states that impose the strictest rules fare generally better when it comes to death rate than states with more lax rules. If there is clear empirical data to support the suggestion that lockdowns and masks are the key to vanquishing COVID-19, the media and the Democrats certainly don’t do a very good job elucidating it to the public.
Instead, what we heard were appeals to patriotism. (And I remember when Trump was mocked for jingoism.)41 On July 4, 2020, Andrew Cuomo said “real patriots wear masks.”42 On August 13, 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom tweeted, “Be a patriot, wear a mask.”43 Joe Biden himself offered this sentiment throughout the campaign; on Halloween 2020, he posted a video to social media stating emphatically, “Be a patriot. Wear a mask.”44 No, he wasn’t talking about a Michael Myers or scary clown mask. Though I suppose those wouldn’t hurt.
If the evidence is on their side (and maybe it is), why not just cite it? Why do we have to take their word for it? Can’t these Democrats trust the public with the truth? Or are they being disingenuous with us? Or did they really mean that “patriots” are only those who obey Democrats, unquestioningly?
Americans largely obey their government overlords despite their egregious hypocrisy. Democrat stars like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (caught maskless at a hair salon in August), Dr. Fauci (spotted with his mask under his chin at a Washington Nationals game in July), and New York governor Andrew Cuomo (caught bare-faced at a presser in October) all got busted not practicing what they preached when it comes to masks.45 Anti-Trump CNN journos Kaitlan Collins and Chris “Fredo” Cuomo let their masks slip, literally. Collins was caught removing her mask while in the White House press briefing room near other journalists moments after the TV cameras stopped rolling.46 Tucker Carlson reportedly obtained a letter from the management of Fredo’s New York City apartment building stating he was failing to abide by the building’s mask protocols; the governor’s baby bro has been known to say “wear a damn mask” on television.
Yet, as of the beginning of 2021, Americans were still being told by the government to cover up their faces in dehumanizing masks, sometimes even while alone in open spaces. When will this end? No one knows. Perhaps years. One British professor finally said what many of us secretly fear: we might wear masks forever.47 Elected leaders certainly aren’t putting a timetable on things. The citizenry and media haven’t demanded the authorities commit to benchmarks that could be met that could trigger an end to the face-diaper ordinances.
There is practically no discussion of mask sterility protocols. Admit it, your favorite mask is filthy. How do you properly sneeze while wearing your mask? Where do you place them when you take them off? On a filthy tabletop or in your pocket? How and how often should you wash your visage diapey?
All of these are basic questions that go without answers in our press.
Why is that? Why wouldn’t the media want to distinguish between the masks that might keep us safe and the ones that probably won’t? Why wouldn’t they want us to have the necessary information to keep our countenance nappies as fresh and sterile as possible? Do they even care about our health at all?
Ahhh. Maybe the media is not interested in these questions because for most of them, masks are not about public safety as much as they are about power. The control over people’s lives dictated from our ruling class appears to be their true objective.
California governor Gavin Newsom, who famously directed his subjects to pull their masks up in between bites even while eating dinner out with their own families, was caught violating a number of his own ordinances.48 In November 2020, he attended a dinner birthday party at the ultra-posh French Laundry restaurant in California wine country. He was there to celebrate the birthday of well-known lobbyist Jason Kinney. The French Laundry may be the single most opulent restaurant in the United States. The price of a meal can easily exceed $1,000 per person, especially if you order the truffle or wagyu supplements off the chef’s tasting menu. And if you really want to indulge, why not try the sommelier’s recommended wine pairings, too? Newsom is a wine industry veteran. The total number of guests at the event seemed to exceed Newsom’s own state guidelines. The governor’s pals went maskless. The dinner appeared to take place inside (Newsom lied by saying it was outside, during a pseudo-“apology”).49
Pretty appalling, even for a bubbled plutocrat in a single-party state like California. While this hypocrisy might not be overly surprising, it revealed an important point about our modern-day political elite: they don’t actually believe their own bullshit.
And why would they? On January 9, 2021, Reuters published the following headline: “ICUs clogged on the way in, morgues on the way out in California’s COVID crisis.”50
That’s because keeping America safe was always a secondary objective; keeping the citizens under control was mission critical.
And they were succeeding at that, spectacularly.
“Hong Kong Expands Power to Isolate Individuals to Fight Chinese ‘Mystery Pneumonia.’ ”51 This was the headline of the first story on the Wuhan coronavirus we posted to Breitbart News way back on January 7, 2020. “The Chinese Communist Party has documented 59 cases of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan in the past two weeks,” wrote our world editor, Frances Martel. The number of cases would soon be in the tens of millions. The communist regime was able to rule out that the mysterious plague was a recurrence of SARS or MERS, but it was clear early on that a coronavirus was suspected.
Hong Kong, which was being reabsorbed by the communist mainland controlled by Beijing, was concerned that the massive prodemocracy protests that had flooded its streets could lead to devastating health consequences. (Western media was not nearly as concerned that protests could be superspreader events when Black Lives Matter protested and rioted throughout the United States and beyond in the summer of 2020.)
Two weeks later, on January 22, senator and China hawk Tom Cotton would call for a travel ban from China, a scoop broken at Breitbart News.52 On January 31, President Trump took his advice and banned travel from China, which possibly slowed the spread and saved lives.53
Joe Biden, ever the leader, suggested that Trump’s plan was rooted in “hysterical xenophobia.”54
The Democrat Media Complex took Biden’s lead. The global pandemic that started in Wuhan, China, and would devastate quality of life all over the globe was originally viewed as a racial issue. People concerned about the outbreak were bigots. Our media wasn’t afraid of the virus; they were afraid that China would get in big trouble, and, more important, Trump would have been right.
So, they suggested we were all racists.
On January 24, 2020, NPR posted the headline “Wuhan Coronavirus 101: What We Do—And Don’t—Know About the Outbreak Of COVID-19.” They’ve since revised the article to remove “Wuhan” from the headline, but the rest of the article remains unchanged.55 On March 3, NPR posted a story titled “When Xenophobia Spreads Like a Virus.”56
On January 29, left-wing tech mag Wired posted this story: “We Should Deescalate the War on the Coronavirus,” which included this passive: “Fear, finger-pointing, and militaristic action against the virus are unproductive. We may be better off adjusting to a new normal of periodic outbreaks.”57
On January 31, CNN wrote, “As the coronavirus spreads, fear is fueling racism and xenophobia.” This article is a bit schizophrenic because it simultaneously shows that CNN is wound up about bigotry but still refers to the virus as “Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.”58
On January 29, New York Times writer Farhad Manjoo published a column with the title “Coronavirus is scary. How we respond to it may be worse.” Some choice quotes:
So far, the Wuhan coronavirus is not much more frightening than the outbreaks of other recent coronaviruses like SARS in 2003 or MERS in 2012, each of which killed fewer than a thousand people around the world. The new virus’s death toll has just exceeded 130; for context, according to the CDC, about 15 million Americans have been sickened by the seasonal flu so far in the 2019–2020 flu season, and 8,200 have died from it.59
Manjoo also explained that his real fear, seemingly, was—racism!
It might be used to justify unnecessarily severe limits on movement and on civil liberties, especially of racial and religious minorities around the world.
Considering that this column aged like a banana, Manjoo recanted much of his original position a few weeks later. Though, he tried to save face by saying his analysis was mostly “on point.”60
In February, Vox lamented the paranoia that was causing people to wear masks and stop shaking hands, even in low-risk areas. “The coronavirus exposes the history of racism and ‘cleanliness.’ ”61
The Daily Beast was concerned that Italians are super-duper racist for not going to Chinese restaurants. From a February article: “Italians refused to go to Chinese restaurants and shops when the virus first emerged. Now they are being shunned worldwide. The stigma is spreading faster than the virus itself.” “The reality is that the real problem is not fear of catching the virus, but fear of getting caught up in the global reaction to it,” the Beast declared.62 Italy went on to have one of the highest death tolls from COVID in all of Europe.63
Donald Trump continued to sound the alarm on the Chinese virus in his 2020 State of the Union address, way back on February 4. Nancy Pelosi famously—and obnoxiously—ripped up the speech during a House floor tantrum. On February 24, Pelosi unequivocally promoted tourism in San Francisco’s Chinatown: “We think it’s very safe to be in Chinatown and hope that others will come. It’s lovely here. The food is delicious, the shops are prospering, the parade was great…. Please come and visit and enjoy Chinatown.”64
By late April, Pelosi was criticizing President Trump’s travel ban for not going far enough.65
As they always do, the media allowed her to skate on this. (Fox News’s Chris Wallace pressed her on whether she “underplayed the threat” of the issue in April; she responded by saying that she was “offsetting” what Trump was saying at the time, which had made Asian Pacific Americans “a target of violence across the country.”)66
In July, the House Speaker declared on Joy Reid’s always-credible MSNBC program that “the Trump virus” was rolling like “a freight train” and “this president has been the biggest failure” in U.S. history.67
Pelosi wasn’t alone in being a reverse xenophobe. New York mayor Bill de Blasio said on February 14 that the virus “should not stop you from going about your life, should not stop you from going to Chinatown and going out to eat. I’m going to do that today myself.”68
When it became clear that the coronavirus was here to stay (at least for a while) and it was not a racist conspiracy by the Deplorables, the Democrat Media Complex had to change their approach. (They had to have seen this coming; major media had called the virus the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus literally dozens of times themselves.)69 The narrative they settled on was that the virus was Trump and conservative America’s fault. They hyped this narrative aggressively in order to push past criticisms that the Democrats were waging a pro forma impeachment fight as the virus initially spread throughout the United States.
Trump was shamed for a reported shortage of testing. While testing is necessary, it also quickly accelerated the scary infection and death toll numbers that were used to bludgeon Trump.
He was (reportedly) desperately slow to address the alleged ventilator shortage. Yet, months later, tens of thousands of emergency ventilators hadn’t been used.70
He was also potentially killing people by recommending hydroxychloroquine.71 Headlines like this one from the BBC, “Trump drug hydroxychloroquine raises death risk in Covid patients, study says,” were rampant across the Internet in May 2020 after the vaunted medical journal Lancet published a bombshell report.72 Two weeks—and countless articles dunking on the Bad Orange Man later—the study was retracted.73 The media even tried to blame Trump for a guy in Arizona who died from drinking fish tank cleaner that contained chloroquine. The lede sentence from an NPR report dated March 24, 2020: “An Arizona man is dead and his wife was hospitalized after the couple ingested a form of chloroquine, a chemical that has been hailed recently by President Trump as a possible ‘game changer’ in the fight against the novel coronavirus, according to the Phoenix hospital that treated the couple.”74
(Remember the rules: Within a given article, information that confirms the paper’s preferred narrative is to be featured at the top of the article, ideally in the headline and or the first [lede] sentence.)
No, Donald Trump never suggested drinking fish tank cleaner. If he did, trust me, far more people would have tried it.
Why Trump didn’t defund taxpayer-funded fake news like NPR, I’ll never know.
Maybe HcQ wasn’t the miracle cure Trump World had hoped, but the antimalaria drug was long ago approved by the Food and Drug Administration and you theoretically need a prescription to get it. Of all the threats facing our country, HcQ wasn’t in the top thousand. Yet, for a few crucial weeks in the middle of a pandemic, the media seemed obsessed with taking it down. Neil Cavuto of Fox News might have been the most hysterical of them all, proclaiming on television after Trump announced he was taking the drug that (in the case of certain vulnerable people) “it will kill you. I cannot stress that enough. This will kill you.”75
All of these narratives came, were used to bludgeon Trump, and went.
By mid-March, the fake news trial balloons were constant:
Never Trump commentator Max Boot wrote in the Washington Post that the “[c]oronavirus wouldn’t have happened if Hillary Clinton had won.”76 Actually, Clinton did not show much leadership during the early stages of the pandemic. Her public proclamations were generally simplistic and banal. She accused Trump of “racist rhetoric” and demanded more testing.77 This is not exactly bold or visionary, nor does it offer the public any clear sense of where her coronavirus plan would have meaningfully differed from Trump’s.78
They couldn’t believe that Trump told the states to find their own ventilators! Actually, he said try to find ventilators but the federal government will help, too.79
Horrible Trump dissolved the CDC’s pandemic preparedness division! Actually, the Washington Post framed it as a “reorganization” and said that critics have “misconstrued or intentionally, misrepresented.”80
Trump called the virus a hoax! Actually, Trump thought the Democrats weaponizing the virus against him was a “hoax”; even establishment fact-checkers acknowledged that.81
Trump is muzzling Dr. Fauci! Actually, Dr. Fauci was on video so often during 2020 that I’m pretty sure I saw him in a few of my home movies. Fauci even said relatively early in the crisis on MSNBC that “I’m not being muzzled.” (Though you should take that with a grain of salt, because Fauci contradicted himself on a number of occasions, most notably with regard to masks.)82
Check out this chaotic footage of an overcrowded New York hospital! Actually, that’s Italy, a country with socialized medicine.83
Check out this chaotic hospital footage of an overcrowded Philadelphia facility! Actually, that’s also Italy.84
Well, Sean Hannity killed a guy by convincing him to go on a cruise! That was fake news from the New York Times.85 Actually, the man had disembarked more than a week before Hannity made the remarks that allegedly convinced him to go on the trip. They couldn’t even prove that the deceased contracted the virus on the trip. The Times quietly updated the article to include the exculpatory evidence that clears Hannity from any direct responsibility.86
Well, we know the evangelicals are the superspreaders. Actually, some people believe keeping houses of worship closed while Walmarts are open is a violation of the First Amendment.87
And the South is the worst! Worse than New York and New Jersey? Do you understand math? Also, I thought Cuomo was the victim-hero of Trump and his horrible policies. Why is a surge in New York Trump’s fault, but a surge in the Sun Belt is the South’s fault? Oh yeah, Southern governors are mostly Republicans.88
And the hospitals will be overrun! Actually, the American Hospital Association estimates that hospitals lost over $200 billion in revenue between March 1 and June 30.89 This didn’t only hurt hospitals, it also damaged the broader economy: “approximately half of the annualized 4.8% U.S. GDP decline in the first quarter of 2020 is attributed to health care services, especially delayed elective procedures,” the Harvard Business Review reported.90 This led to mass layoffs.91 When restrictions eased, doctors were met with a massive backlog of patients.92 That means people were suffering with other ailments.
But that’s just because hospitals postponed or limited elective surgeries. Exactly, but we’re not talking about (only) boob jobs and rhinoplasties. Many states’ stay-at-home orders applied to medical procedures deemed “non-essential,” but what does that mean?93 According to Harvard Business Review: “most elective surgical cases fall somewhere between vital preventative measures (e.g., screening colonoscopy) and essential surgery (e.g., cataract removal). Ample literature across surgical specialties demonstrates worse patient outcomes and higher costs when these treatments are delayed.”94
China’s numbers are far better than the United States. They really know what they’re doing. Actually, China’s data is so cooked that the British government refuses to recognize it.95
All of the above stories were fake, most were repeated over and over, and few were ever “fact-checked.” I have witnessed Facebook’s fact-checking hypocrisy firsthand at Breitbart News. We consistently have to fend off what we regard as erroneous fact-checks while we have documented left-wing, establishment, and Chinese media outlets that have gotten away with reporting what appear to be falsehoods.96 This ensures the fake news continues. Consistently—and uncritically—the establishment parroted figures put out by the communist regime in China, that is, CCP propaganda.97
CNN was particularly disgraceful throughout 2020, shamelessly brandishing coronavirus cases and death toll numbers. Touting the number of “cases” does not have much purpose at all beyond making Americans feel upset and fearful about the virus; public health officials are primarily concerned with hospitalizations and deaths. A “positive test” when someone shows no symptoms is essentially meaningless to anyone other than the postive person who is supposed to quarantine for a couple of weeks so as not to infect others.
While the coronavirus death toll is a big, scary number, it is dispalyed on CNN and elsewhere without any context whatsoever. For example, some areas around the country group those who died with COVID and those who died of COVID as the same. In other words, if someone tested positive and was asymptomatic but died of cancer or a car accident or a spelunking mishap, they might go up on CNN’s board. The way COVID deaths are counted isn’t always clear or consistent. How many regular CNN viewers know the numbers are much more complicated than the data that appears on screen?98
How big is the number who died with COVID but not of COVID? Maybe it’s one-in-twenty, but maybe it’s closer to one-in-three, as one group of Oxford researchers reported.99
Heart disease accounts for about 650,000 deaths in America every year.100 Cancer causes another 600,000.101 Smoking-related conditions kill about 480,000 annually, according to the CDC.102 Now consider that many on CNN’s board are in the dubious “died with coronavirus” group. I say this not to minimize the Chinese virus; I say this because there is no CNN ticker for those conditions, nor should there be.
On CNN, every COVID death is portrayed as another healthy and prosperous American cut down in their prime due to Trump’s virus and Trump’s virus alone. Data paints a much more nuanced picture. As of September 2020, here was the CDC’s data on COVID-19 survival rates: 0–19 years old, 99.997 percent; 20–49 years old, 99.98 percent; 50–69 years, 99.5 percent; and 70+ years old or older, 94.6 percent.103 Long story short, the virus hits the elderly much harder than other demographics. Also according to the CDC, 94 percent of COVID-19 deaths involved underlying medical conditions.104
Yet, on shamelessly partisan CNN, the corona ticker constantly took up about a third of the on-screen real estate on every show throughout much of the last year of Trump’s presidency. Once Biden took office, the data display was limited drastically, only returning for segments on the coronavirus.105
Shameless, yet hardly surprising.
But changing television programming doesn’t necessarily change the course of a virus. Whether CNN likes it or not, daily deaths were constantly at near-record levels throughout the early days of Biden’s presidency. For example, the COVID-19 body count in Biden’s first three week was over 73,000 Americans, which is more than all Americans who lost their lives in the Vietnam War. That meant more Americans were dying each day of the Chinese virus on average than died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet CNN decided that now was the time to limit the death toll display.
It looks to me like this is virtually an admission that the point of the graphic was just to make Trump look like a killer.
Yet young, healthy Americans were forced to forgo athletic seasons and school semesters. They were told that if they played sports, they would get the virus and maybe be fine but probably infect their family and maybe kill them. One Breitbart reader told me his college javelin season was canceled due to coronavirus. Javelin! What activity is more socially distanced than throwing spears?
Why would anyone trust CNN on the virus anyway after anchor Fredo Cuomo’s hoax quarantine back in April 2020? Fredo, who contracted the virus, claimed he was quarantining in his basement over Easter weekend, but that strains credulity. The New York Post reported that Cuomo was spotted outdoors and was confronted by a sixty-five-year-old East Hampton resident who reportedly said, “Is that Chris Cuomo? Isn’t he supposed to be quarantined?”106
It was. And he was.
He was busted. So, Cuomo attempted to BenSmith the news himself on his SiriusXM radio show, ranting that he was a victim of “some jackass, loser, fat tire biker” who got in his face. Breitbart and other outlets featured the radio clip prominently. The BenSmithing plan was backfiring, but it didn’t stop Cuomo from fake-emerging from his basement during his CNN show as if he had been trapped in quarantine for two weeks, like a good little subject of his brother, Emperor Governor Cuomo.
It’s almost impossible to be more dishonest than this unless you’re a pathological liar. But it is the Cuomos we’re talking about, so who really knows.
If there was any doubt the crazies had taken over the proverbial asylum, it was eliminated in May 2020 when CNN featured teen green activist Greta Thunberg on a live town-hall panel on the virus.107
In the midst of a once-in-a-century pandemic, who does Jeff Zucker tap for his panel? The Climate Change Kid.
It became clear that the establishment media was avoiding any coronavirus discussion that could make the plague seem even a touch less horrifying.
But in fact, a broader national discussion about public health is probably warranted at this point. Obesity, for example, is at epidemic levels in the United States, but is rarely discussed unless in the context of “body positivity.” Not only is obesity a problem in its own right, but it makes many other health-related issues even worse. Obesity vastly increases a person’s risk of developing hypertension and/or diabetes, which can be a deadly cocktail when mixed with COVID-19.108
But instead of doing anything actually helpful, like leading a frank discussion about behavioral changes Americans can make to save lives (and if you want to be honest, trillions of dollars on health care costs), we get Cosmopolitan magazine printing multiple covers of obese women with the caption “This Is Healthy.”109
No, this is Orwellian.
Suicides, opioid usage, alcohol abuse, depression, missed vaccinations, canceled chemotherapy; the health problems other than coronavirus we largely ignored during the 2020–21 pandemic were myriad.110 There is a deep concern that mask mandates will affect a child’s emotional and intellectual development.111 Even NBC sounded the alarm on the coronavirus’s effect on children:112
It means higher rates of suicide. Higher rates of depression, addiction, mental illness and physical disability, particularly for young children who are growing and developing right now. They’ll face more developmental delays leading to deficits in their education as they grow.
It will probably take years to determine exactly how much health and psychological damage was done by the reaction to the coronavirus pandemic. I, for one, dread what we will learn.
Divorces spiked (up 34 percent from March through June 2020, year over year), separations spiked, even domestic violence got much worse (over 61 percent of women living with their abusers in the United Kingdom reported worsening abuse during lockdown, according to advocacy group Women’s Aid) during the pandemic.113 At least one Massachusetts hospital found “a significant year-over-year jump in intimate partner violence cases who sought emergency care.” Abuse hotlines rang off the hook. Yet all of this was rarely of interest to our national media.114
After all, if the media did consider some of these horrifying facts, maybe we might decide to reopen the country and take back control of our own lives. But that would involve not using the coronavirus to beat up on Trump, and the media certainly wouldn’t have that.
Obviously the psychosocial distresses of the pandemic are a far greater burden on children than the virus itself.115 Yet, as is often the case, the children are disenfranchised by our establishment media. The teachers’ unions made sure kids stayed home despite the consensus that the children were likely safer in the classroom than elsewhere.116 The doctors knew this, but the politicians favored the unions over the science.
In July, MSNBC host Craig Melvin was stunned when an NBC News/MSNBC segment featuring pediatricians unanimously agreed they would send their kids back to school in the fall.117
By November, CDC director Robert Redfield and Dr. Anthony Fauci said the science was decidedly on the side of keeping schools open.118 But this didn’t carry sway in some parts of the country. Right around that time, Bill de Blasio enacted more school closures in New York.119 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) tweeted that “the push to reopen schools was rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” (They deleted it later.)120 A CTU leader who identifies as “socialist” emphatically asserted that schools were “unsafe”—from a sunny vacation in Puerto Rico.121 Los Angeles had some of the most intense school closures in the country at the time, even as they saw the nation’s worst virus outbreak, suggesting the lockdowns weren’t having much of an effect, if any.122
In single-party Democratic cities like Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago, the real coronavirus authorities aren’t doctors or even the politicians; they’re the teachers’ unions, and our children are just their political cannon fodder in their battle to get paid to not work.
Our establishment media carried water for the Democrats and the unions while our children suffered.
Biden repeated the mantra “science over fiction” throughout the 2020 campaign, but once sworn in, he started to defy the recommendations of his own handpicked scientists, including his own CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, a Johns Hopkins–trained physician with a master’s of public health from Harvard. Walensky told reporters, “There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated.”123 “Current data from schools, from summer camps and whatnot also suggested that the children not only have decreased rates of symptoms, but have decreased rates of transmissibility,” she said.124 White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki dismissed the scientific recommendation by Biden’s handpicked actual scientist by saying Dr. Walensky “spoke to this in her personal capacity.”125
This is a stunning rebuke considering that the media had peppered us with headlines that it was Trump who had put too much political pressure on the CDC. “Trump officials interfered with CDC reports on Covid-19,” wrote Politico in September 2020.126 From CNN in August 2020: “CDC was pressured ‘from the top down’ to change coronavirus testing guidance, official says.”127 And from the New York Times in September 2020: “Behind the White House Effort to Pressure the C.D.C. on School Openings.”128 All of these articles advanced the narrative that Trump chose politics over science and we must keep our children home.
Now Biden is in office, and his CDC director was openly defied if not outright disparaged from the White House briefing room.
After President Trump lost reelection, some more frank discussion about the secondary effects of the virus all of a sudden started to appear in the establishment press. Some notable examples:
With teen suicides regularly in the news, MTV announced the release of a documentary about depressed and suicidal young people.138 That’s nice, but what would really help is if people with major platforms simply took a bold stand to reopen the schools—and the rest of the country.
Other victims of the lockdowns deserve consideration, yet get almost zero. Women, particularly working mothers, were forced out of the workforce during the pandemic. Workforce participation declined for both sexes during this time, but mothers dropped out at nearly three times the rate of fathers.139
Black families were hit perhaps the hardest of any during the pandemic.140 First of all, black Americans suffered significantly from the Chinese virus itself, mostly due to the fact that they are more likely to have more than two medical comorbidities, according to JAMA (JAMA also noted that when controlling for age, sex, and comorbidities, black Americans’ survival outcome is at least as good as whites’).141 Black Americans were nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized and nearly twice as likely to die with COVID-19 than whites.142 Black families were considerably more likely to have fully remote learning than higher-income white families. Blacks were 19 percent less likely than whites to choose to return to school, which the media attributed to skepticism of the system.143 Considering that the media had spent much of the last five years convincing American citizens that we’re a racist country, this isn’t exactly a surprise. Black families on average have fewer recourses and more single-parent households; this again favors the children of affluent whites.
So many Americans were ignored by our press as they pursued their narrative of blaming the virus on Trump. The damage it caused to the public health, both mental and physical, will never fully be known.
A teachable media moment amid the pandemic chaos was the contrast between the way the press portrayed New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Florida governor Ron DeSantis.
When it came to the China virus, New York fared the worst of any state in the union, by far. There is virtually nothing good that can be said about the way the Empire State handled itself. It had some of the most deaths on earth, arguably the greatest level of economic devastation in America, and long, recurring lockdowns.
President Trump even sent the USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed hospital ship, to New York Harbor; it had only twenty patients on it before being sent back to its home port in Virginia.144 The Comfort was supposed to be used for non-coronavirus patients, but with the lockdowns, there were far fewer car accidents, construction accidents, gunshot wounds, and many other injuries that would precipitate an emergency room visit. The New York Times reported, “Guidelines disseminated to hospitals included a list of 49 medical conditions that would exclude a patient from admittance to the ship.” Furthermore, Americans avoided medical care for much of the year due to fear of the virus and running up medical bills during the economic crisis.145
Still, Democrat governor Andrew Cuomo enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings in the country.146
The New York governor messaged to the press like the situation was well under control, or at least on the way to being under control. “Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do,” Cuomo said during a March 2 news conference with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. “We have been ahead of this from Day 1,” Fredo’s big bro said.147 He directly contradicted himself during a March 30 press conference, stating, “I am tired of being behind this virus. We’ve been behind this virus from day one.”148 About six weeks later, New York State would cross one thousand coronavirus deaths in a single day.
Cuomo said in April 2020 that “data suggests we are flattening the curve so far.” If that was the case, why did it take until February 2021 for indoor dining to return to New York City?
Cuomo brazenly published a book on pandemic-era leadership on October 13, 2020. On that day, New York recorded 1,391 new coronavirus cases. New York then experienced a massive coronavirus surge, hitting 19,560 new cases on January 8, 2021, fourteen times more than the day Cuomo’s book was released. All the while, the statewide lockdowns crushed countless businesses and even entire industries. Unemployment for the state hit 14.7 percent in April, the highest rate since the great depression.149 By September, Yelp reported that over 11,000 New York City businesses had closed. Most closures—63 percent—were expected to be permanent. The Partnership for New York City estimated that perhaps 80,000(!) of the city’s small businesses would not outlive the pandemic.150
But beyond the economic devastation in New York, Cuomo was responsible for the single most devastating public policy decision of the entire pandemic: cramming sick patients into nursing homes, essentially sentencing many other patients to their deaths. The number of New York nursing home coronavirus fatalities is still unknown, but the number is believed to be about 15,000 as of February 2021.151 Cuomo attempted to blame federal guidelines for this policy, that is, Trump’s coronavirus task force; the task force told me Cuomo wildly misinterpreted their recommendations.152 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) administrator Seema Verma laid it out in an interview on Breitbart News Daily:
The governor continues to be confused about the policy…. And he keeps saying that it was federal guidelines that allowed him to create the policy that he had, and I just want to be very clear with your listeners and the public, because it’s important to protect our most vulnerable citizens. Our guidelines very clearly say that a nursing home can accept somebody that’s COVID-positive, as long as the facility can follow the CDC guidelines around isolation. But it also says—and I’m reading this—it says, “If a nursing home cannot, then it must wait until these precautions can be discontinued.” So the guidance couldn’t be any clearer.
Cuomo’s rhetoric only escalated as the virus wore on. “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York,” he said on September 8.153 In October, he told the ladies of The View that he’s holding Trump “responsible for every” coronavirus death in the United States.
Pretty absurd, especially considering the virus originated in China and that parts of Europe struggled with it at least as badly as the United States (it’s impossible to truly know how nations with dictatorships and closed press fared with the virus).
Yet this level of Trump derangement wasn’t even the most over-the-top in the establishment media. Government-funded PBS host Alexander Heffner told Al Sharpton on Sharpton’s MSNBC show that Trump’s coronavirus response was “genocidal” and “mass murder.”154 This type of talk wasn’t atypical.
Florida, meanwhile, kept its economy mostly open and still fared relatively well with the virus. A candidate for line of the year came in a failed attempt by PolitiFact to ding Governor DeSantis for exaggerating his success against the virus: “Only about half of the 10 most stringently regulated states saw rates of cases, deaths and hospitalizations that were twice as high as Florida’s—DeSantis’ benchmark.”155 This is a gobbledygook argument, but I think the point they are making is that only five out of the ten states they looked at were twice as bad as Florida. Take that, Ron! But the “fact-check” does admit that “Broadly speaking, we found that Florida’s record, at least as of the beginning of December, compared favorably with most states across the country, including those with tighter restrictions.”
Florida has the largest population of over-sixty-five-year-olds in the United States other than California; they have about a million more seniors than does New York. Seniors make up over 20 percent of Florida’s population, compared to New York’s 16 percent. Yet, as of March 2021, according to New York Times data, Florida’s death rate is less than two-thirds of New York State’s and nearly identical to New York City’s. Also as of March 2021, 247 New Yorkers and 355 New York City residents out of every 100,000 died of COVID-19, respectively,156 compared to 149 out of every 100,000 Floridians.157
Data changes, and the virus is still with us, but it paints a clear picture that Florida’s coronavirus strategy was superior to New York’s.
The chickens began to come home for Governor Fredo’s Brother in late January 2021. Democrat New York attorney general Letitia James found that New York had been drastically undercounting the COVID-related deaths in the state’s nursing homes.158 “The state’s acknowledgment increased the overall death toll related to those facilities by more than 40 percent. Ms. James’s report had suggested that the state’s previous tally could be off by as much as 50 percent,” the New York Times wrote when James’s report was released in January 2021. This revelation meant that the New York nursing home death count surged by at least 3,800.
The New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, New York’s secretary to the governor, said that the data was covered up specifically to avoid a potential investigation from the Trump Justice Department.159
All this information came out, conveniently, just a few weeks after Joe Biden had been sworn in as president.
This devastating information about Cuomo’s failures was probably surprising to people who only get news from the establishment media. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo ignored the story when it broke, choosing neither to criticize nor defend his governor brother at his darkest moment. As the scandal grew, Chris Cuomo acknowledged it on air but said “obviously I cannot cover it because he is my brother.”160 Perhaps the rationale for this editorial decision was that it’s a conflict of interest (it is), but the network didn’t appear at all concerned when Fredo did coronavirus prop comedy while on-air with his brother Andrew, teasing him back in May with multiple oversized nasal swabs, joking about the coronavirus test.161
More women came forward.
Eventually, in March of 2021, left-leaning journalism non-profit Poynter wrote that “CNN has a Cuomo problem.” (I think it’s safe to say at this point the May Q-tip segment was inappropriate.)
Right around the time the Cuomo bros were playing games on CNN while New York’s elderly died en masse, Florida governor Ron DeSantis was beating expectations. Even left-wing Politico wrote in May 2020—the sentiment still holds true—“let’s just come out and say it: DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response.”162 Stunningly, the beltway-centric publication noted that the media was biased against DeSantis, despite the numbers:
Yes, there’s media bias, too. Cuomo also has something else DeSantis doesn’t: a press that defers to him, one that preferred to cover “Florida Morons” at the beach (where it’s relatively hard to get infected) over New Yorkers riding cramped subway cars (where it’s easy to get infected).
The “Florida Morons” remark was a reference to media like the New York Daily News attacking DeSantis for opening beaches in April.163 The quote also obliquely mentions an MIT study that raised concern that the filthy and still fully operational New York subway system was leading to a surge in the virus.164
Despite their large elderly population, Florida continues to outperform other states, even with relatively mild shutdowns and mask rules. DeSantis continues to be vindicated despite the media’s insistence that he had put the entire state in jeopardy. Here is a smattering of headlines when Disney World reopened (at limited capacity and with various safety precautions in place) in July 2020:
It seemed as though every single establishment media outlet took the exact same angle. Though technically accurate, it’s clear that the objective was to frame Florida’s Republican government as reckless, putting us all in jeopardy. After all, DeSantis and Company shouldn’t be trusted because virus cases were on the rise at the time.
(Recall the media rules: Within a given article, information that confirms the paper’s preferred narrative is to be featured at the top of the article, ideally in the headline and or the first [lede] sentence.)
Few of these outlets doubled back and noted that hysteria over Disney World’s opening was entirely misplaced. Florida cases went down after the reopening and no outbreaks were traced to the theme park. The New York Times, to their credit, is an exception, though they waited several months to report the good news. They reported in October 2020, “At Disney World, ‘Worst Fears’ About Virus Have Not Come True.”174
Governor Gavin Newsom did not get the memo out in California. Disneyland in Anaheim, California, would remain closed for roughly a year, most of that time after Disney World in Florida had successfully reopened.175 Disney parks were open all over the world, including in China. The decision for the California parks to remain locked down had devastating economic consequences. Despite many reopenings, Disney hemorrhaged over $2 billion in operating income from their parks in the first quarter of fiscal year 2021.176 They had to lay off tens of thousands of workers. Even local businesses were crushed by the lack of economic activity in the area. According to the Wall Street Journal, Dara Maleki, who owns pizza restaurants near both Disneyland and Disney World, saw sales dip 90 percent at his SoCal location but only 30 percent in Florida.
DeSantis continued to ignore the establishment media haters.177 He lifted major restrictions in late September 2020, including shutdowns and mask mandates, which did not lead to any outbreaks.178
The DeSantis “hero” profiles from the establishment press were nonexistent. But while he isn’t being rewarded by our broken media, he is being rewarded in other ways. In February 2021, the New York Post ran the headline “New Yorkers are fleeing to Palm Beach—and NYC businesses are following.” “New York City is alive and well—in Palm Beach, Florida,” the Post wrote.179
Fox Orlando reported in February 2021 that Disney was considering moving some operations from California to Florida.180
It’s not difficult to imagine why.
In a moment that the most genius satirists could never have dreamt up, Andrew Cuomo won an International Emmy award for “masterful use of TV to inform & calm people around the world” in November 2020.181 Like President Trump, Cuomo held regular press briefings but with a decidedly more tranquil atmosphere. How many people did Cuomo lull into a stupor as the virus raged on? How many journalists who attended these episodes of daytime reality television were missing the biggest stories of the moment, such as the bodies piling up (but not being accurately counted) in our nursing homes?
We’ll never know the full extent of the damage caused to New York by Andrew Cuomo’s failures. But we do know that the media and entertainment class found him simply dazzling.
Of all the narratives covered in this book, the coronavirus is perhaps the most difficult to write about, especially as someone without a medical education. (Thankfully, I’m blessed to have a number of doctors in my family, even a “frontline” doctor who treated coronavirus patients, who helped me immeasurably to frame issues responsibly.) First of all, this is a novel virus. The facts are constantly changing. The COVID-19 landscape is certainly going to be different the day you read this book than when I wrote this chapter. At Breitbart News, we were among the first American outlets to express concern about the virus, and among the first to frame the lockdowns and crackdowns as seemingly ineffective against the virus and devastating to many Americans’ finances and our collective psyche. All of these things can be true at the same time! The virus has in fact been a menace, especially to the elderly and the infirm. (To be clear: I have never been in the camp of people who thought the coronavirus was “just the flu.”) Yet the discussion about the virus on a national level was controlled by an agenda-obsessed establishment press who looked to take advantage of the pandemic to frame Donald Trump as unfit for office.
Trump hurt himself with endless daily press conferences where only national reporters from the establishment media were allowed to ask him questions. There was never a panel of doctors assembled. Local news and new media were mostly excluded. What’s more, as social distancing became the norm, many outlets on the periphery of the White House press pool, like Breitbart News, had less of a chance to get into briefings to ask questions due to limited space. He handed the narrative to the worst group of people imaginable: the permanent White House press pool. This was one of the few colossal blunders of his administration.
Trump correctly warned about one thing, though: “the cure” could become “worse than the disease.” We were at first unprepared for the pandemic, then we wildly overreacted to it. Instead of learning lessons along the way, we appeared to get increasingly irrational. Shutdowns and mask mandates are apparently not panaceas, but any suggestion they are not is batted down instantly by armchair fact-checkers. Few if any of them are doctors and rarely do they offer empirical evidence for their ardent claims, and they are all too keen to advance infringement on freedoms.
In January 2021, Dr. Fauci said that “there’s no data that indicates” double masking would work. Days later, the CDC updated their coronavirus guidance to recommend wearing multiple face diapers at the same time in certain cases. So, which is it? And if double masks really were the answer, why did no one think of this nine months ago? Confusion like this from our medical community creates a sense of societal chaos. And it has been constant since the virus crossed into our country.
The notion of personal responsibility was rarely considered throughout the pandemic news cycle; trusting Americans to manage their own risk was taken off the table immediately in many states. Who took that discussion off the table? Politicians and corporate media elite who favor a bigger state and a diminished citizenry. As noted multiple times throughout this book, no group benefited from the pandemic more than the world’s biggest companies.
As is often the case, the establishment media’s coronavirus coverage was counterproductive for Americans. We were constantly told to remain locked down, masked up, and bummed out. Any digression from this was met with public condemnation, unless of course you were Nancy Pelosi maskless in a salon, or Anthony Fauci maskless at a ballgame, or Governor Newsom maskless at a dinner party, or… We could have been collectively examining states and countries that performed better than others and made adjustments accordingly. But we didn’t do that. The Democrats and their allies in the media saw red. Or actually blue. They knew that the worse the virus seemed, the more likely they could use it to oust Donald Trump in November.
Science was irrelevant, unless it could help them achieve their ends.
Consider the surreal juxtaposition of the media and Democrats openly encouraging the Black Lives Matter protests, which were obsessively described as “mostly peaceful” but often devolved into full-blown rioting. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, for example, enacted some of the most stringent and longest-lasting lockdowns in the country; LA children were forbidden from attending school well into 2021. Yet Garcetti appeared maskless at a massive Black Lives Matter rally in June (he was not socially distanced). Coronavirus data showed a big spike in cases in the city after the rally.182
Kamala Harris encouraged her Twitter followers to pay for bail for protesters via the Minnesota Freedom Fund. The MFF, an organization that has advocated for “defunding” of police, also raked in cash from Hollywood stars like Justin Timberlake, Steve Carell, and Seth Rogen. These funds can go to releasing violent criminals, including those who have been charged or convicted of rape and murder.183 Not only did the then-senator rubber-stamp horrific violence, but this also is a de facto endorsement of the superspreader protest events.
The goal was never to stop the spread. The goal was to oust the Bad Orange Man.
In time, the Democrat Media Complex would use the “Trump virus” to make the aforementioned fundamental changes to the voting process. I believe these changes were an essential factor in Joe Biden’s victory.