American Consequences - April 2021

motivated research, is perhaps something we will never know, given that China is still a one-party state with secret police and gulags. But examining how Beijing responded after the virus appeared is crucial to our understanding of what really happened and how we can prepare for similar occurrences. While the WHO was grappling with the truth of what COVID was, some say with difficulty given communist China’s unhealthy influence over the organization, the Beijing authorities were hard at work using information warfare to cover its culpability and use the virus to undermine its adversaries... U.S. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian incredibly spread the conspiracy theory that COVID had nothing to do with China, but was in fact carried to its territory by the U.S. military in some kind of covert mission to make the

surprise no one, so let us move on to our response to the pandemic... Was it the right one? One of my Salem Media colleagues, Dennis Prager, who I consider to be one of the wisest men I have ever known, has been the standard bearer for a rather radical assessment of how the free world responded to COVID-19. After the two weeks to “flatten the curve” rapidly tuned into a yearlong universal lockdown of businesses and schools, social distancing, and multiple masks, he called the decision the greatest mistake in history.

The fact that dictatorships are prepared to exploit a disease and the deaths should surprise no one, so let us move on to our response to the pandemic... Was it the right one?

People’s Republic of China look bad. Although this ploy may have seemed

transparently absurd, the concerted effort by the regime and its proxies was so successful that not only were U.S. media outlets happy to paint China as the new honest leader in world health, but even leading American politicians eventually propagated talking points that could have been written by Beijing’s propagandists. It seems that some have learned little from our nation’s experience with another erstwhile Communist regime, the Soviet Union, which also used disease-related influence and information operations to undermine America, the worst case being Moscow’s lies about how AIDS was an American-made bioweapon. The fact that dictatorships are prepared to exploit a disease and the deaths should

This assessment may shock some at first, given the original estimates for COVID’s lethality from the global lockdown guru, disgraced Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, who early on painted the apocalyptic future of more than 2 million dead in the U.S. alone. And it was these grim forecasts that drove the draconian COVID-response policies or most nations. But if we look at the actual global experience of the pandemic, a very different picture appears... Math does indeed matter, and we must apply it honestly to the past year’s global experience. As of this writing, there

American Consequences

American Co s quences

57

57

Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online