Editor’s Note: Say What? is the segment of Liberty Nation Radio where we unveil some of the most wacky, astonishing, and damnable things uttered by politicians and the chattering class.
Tim Donner: We're going to talk about China, because that's where this bat virus was spawned. And, boy, are things going to change in our relationship with the Chinese once this virus has finally run its course. We don't know if the virus was created accidentally in one of the two research labs in Wuhan, or exactly how it spread, and we probably never will for sure. But we know what the Chinese did once the virus was identified. They shut down travel between Wuhan and the rest of China but continued sending thousands upon thousands of their people on planes to fly here and elsewhere.
They protected themselves and said nothing about it to us, or at best downplayed it, until it was already too late. There have been many other transgressions by the Chinese in this worldwide crisis, but the biggest problem we've got here at home is that the left continues to coddle China, refusing to criticize them, while laying waste to President Trump day after day. Listen to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), back in the saddle and ready to unleash a fresh wave of attacks on the president.
Adam Schiff: I think what they're clearly trying to do is deflect attention away from the administration's terrible mishandling of this virus, and all of the false narrative that the president was putting out early on about this going away on its own, being no worse than the flu, that we were going to contain it down to zero. And so they've chosen to go after China.
Tim: And you wonder why President Trump won't let Dr. Anthony Fauci testify in the House, which would, of course, be instantly turned into a star chamber of universal leftist condemnation of the president. But it's not just the political class that's protecting China. Listen to the richest man in the world, or close to it, Bill Gates.
Bill Gates: China was the first to have to deal with this. It's always hardest to be the country where something emerges first, because so little is known about it. But now what China did is helping the rest of the world … Once the government was fully engaged in the second half of January, the idea of reducing that contact, that quarantine idea that goes back for a long time, that was done in a very serious way.
Tim: So we should be grateful to China, according to the world's richest man, or close to it. Never mind how the Chinese protected themselves and exposed the rest of the world. Peter Navarro, White House economic adviser and Defense Production Act policy coordinator, says the opposite.
Peter Navarro: China spawned that virus and they hid it for six weeks. They could have contained it in Wuhan; they didn't. They seeded the world with this, with hundreds of thousands of Chinese getting on aircraft to Milan, to New York and other places. During that six-week period what they did was they vacuumed up the world for personal protective equipment, over 2 billion masks, depriving public health care workers around the world from the defenses they need. And today, China's profiteering, basically, from this situation.
Tim: On the home front, it's become increasingly clear that the left wants to grant the federal government even more power than they've already asserted during this crisis. Listen to the frightening language employed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer about testing for the virus.
Chuck Schumer: Put a military czar in charge. Get them to manufacture enough tests, get the supply lines to supply everything for enough tests, and then we put money in the COVID-3.5 bill, the most recent bill to give the states money, to administer the tests and to do contact tracing. There's a pattern of success now in South Korea, in Germany, in Australia, and New Zealand. For some reason we are not following it. The president will invoke the Defense Production Act for meat plants, but not for testing.
Tim: So Schumer suggesting we need to get more testing done is not outside the bounds of reason, but it's the enforcement mechanism he described that sends chills up the spine. A military czar to grant even more federal power to the power-hungry politicians who've used this crisis to attend to their personal agendas. First instinct of the left, always: The federal government must be given more power to fix whatever problem arises.
But opposition to Trump does not reside strictly on the political left, where you can at least understand fierce opposition to any president of the opposite party. No, there's that pesky bunch of Never-Trump Republicans still incensed and inflamed by Trump's election and still making bed with the left. These are supposed Republicans or conservatives who hate Trump so much personally that they actually turned their backs on every policy they'd supported for their entire adult lives, and supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Joe Biden here in 2020. So now they've created a formal name for themselves, the high-sounding Lincoln Project, signaling that their virtue is comparable to that of Abraham Lincoln, of course. And this week they provoked Trump with an ad called Mourning in America, spinning off the Reagan re-election theme of 1984, only these Trump-deranged Republicans spell morning M-O-U-R-N-I-N-G.
Speaker 6: There's mourning in America. Today, more than 60,000 Americans have died from a deadly virus Donald Trump ignored. With the economy in shambles, more than 26 million Americans are out of work: the worst economy in decades. Trump bailed out Wall Street, but not Main Street … And now Americans are asking, "If we have another four years like this, will there even be an America?"
Tim: Right, four more years of Trump and we shall cease to exist. Get your doomsday prepping started, folks, while the getting's good. But the president's reaction to this collection of bitter Trump Republicans was just so Trump.
Donald Trump: These are losers from day one. Guys like Bill Kristol, 0-32. George Conway, you take a look at him, just take a look at that guy. The man's a stone-cold loser. So they should not call it the Lincoln Project, it's not fair to Abraham Lincoln, a great president. They should call it the Losers Project.
Tim: These Never-Trump Republicans represent a brand-new phenomenon of the Trump era: hardcore, hysterical opposition to a president within his own party.
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Read more from Tim Donner.
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