Tuesday, March 31, 2020

CHINA'S PROPAGANDISTS GO ALL IN ON CORONAVIRUS CLAIMS

China's propagandists go all in on coronavirus claims

COVID-19 now blamed on American team at Military World Games



[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Investigations.]
By Richard Bernstein
Real Clear Investigations
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn't start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
Its effectiveness may provide a new illustration of how fake news, if repeated loudly and often enough, uses social media as a carrier to spread misinformation around the globe.
Recently, for example, Global Times, an English-language mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, called on the American government to release the medical records of all the members of the American team that competed in Wuhan, so as “to end the conjecture about U.S. military personnel bringing Covid-19 to China.” In asking the United States to be “transparent,” the paper was giving credence to a claim at the heart of the conspiracy theory, that a 50-year-old bicycle racer named Maatje Benassi, a member of the American delegation, was “patient zero,” the first victim of the disease, which would mean that the virus was brought to China by the United States. This claim has been amplified across Twitter.
Among the ironies in this is that the demand for transparency is coming from China, one of the most secretive and opaque regimes in history. Another is that the idea that Benassi is “patient zero” stems from an American conspiracy theorist named George Webb. In a Youtube video earlier this month, Webb advanced that notion, along with the theory that the virus was created, not in China, but at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
It's not the first time that China has given quasi-official sanction to the rewriting of the recent coronavirus past. The theory that the American army created the coronavirus has been propagated on Twitter, for example, by Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China's foreign ministry. What's become clearer over time is the possible goal of China's effort: to win respectful treatment for its evidence-free claim, to present the question of the virus's origins as undecided, something urgently requiring further research and disclosure.
Chinese websites are carrying numerous videos detailing what one of those sites, dubbed Sharp Arrow Military News, calls “America's ugly truth.” Slickly produced and professionally narrated, the videos list various supposedly incriminating facts about American behavior and spin them into a tale of a dark anti-China plot -- for example, that as late as February President Trump seemed unconcerned about the spread of the virus to the United States.
One video making the rounds recently provides one of the more elaborate presentations of the theory to date. It's not entirely clear who created it, or how broadly it is circulating in China or how great its influence is. A brief, unscientific survey of people inside China, mostly well-educated middle-class city dwellers, turned up nobody who actually believed its claims.
But the video is professionally done, with a Chinese-language narrator speaking with very much the style and intonation of official Chinese news broadcasts. It has the look and format of other videos that have been put out by a Chinese army propaganda unit in Wuhan, though it could not be confirmed whether this new video was produced in this way or not.
“We have to find patient zero, the first coronavirus case,” the narrator says at the beginning of what appears to be a piece of investigative journalism, a supposedly sincere and objective effort at sifting through the facts to arrive at “the truth” of the virus's origins. “At the beginning, everybody thought it came from a seafood market in Wuhan, but now it appears maybe not,” the narrator says, going on to advance the theory that the video will explore: “Maybe it's related to the Wuhan military competition.”
In support of that notion, the narrator - according to RealClearInvestigations’ translation – reminds viewers that the 2019 World Military Games were held in Wuhan in October last year, with participation by some 10,000 athletes from more than 100 countries, including the American team with nearly 300 athletes and staff. The U.S., which, the narrator says, “has very strong abilities,” did poorly in the competition, and indeed, the American team won just eight medals, none of them gold, compared to China's 239.
Isn't this a strange thing? the narrator goes on to say, putting the poor American performance into a sinister light and using it to support the theory that the coronavirus must have originated in the U.S., not in China.
“Do you think the Americans came to Wuhan to buy soy sauce?” the narrator asks sarcastically. “They didn't come to compete; they came because they had a job to do,” and while he doesn't say so explicitly, the implication is clear: the “job” was to plant the new virus in Wuhan, thereby framing China as the creator of the new disease.
And from there, the video moves to other suspicious “facts” about the epidemic, among them: that some Japanese who had never been to China came down with the virus after vacationing in Hawaii; that more strains of the virus have been detected in the U.S. than in China; that Fort Detrick was mysteriously closed by the Centers for Disease Control last July.
The narrator also repeats some by now discredited claims, notably that Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC, admitted at a press conference that some Americans believed to have died of the flu last fall actually died of Covid-19. Redfield admitted this “very firmly,” the narrator says, thereby, he contends, providing irrefutable confirmation of the theory that the virus was in the U.S. before it was in China.
What Redfield actually said during congressional testimony in March, well after the virus had begun to spread in the U.S., was that it is possible that some people whose deaths were believed to have been caused by the flu might actually have been victims of the coronavirus but weren't tested for it. He did not say that people died of Covid-19 last fall, before the disease appeared in China.
The Chinese video then goes on to answer its question regarding the identity of patient zero: It was Maatje Benassi, the army bicycle racer.
“The circle is complete,” the narrator says, and then addresses President Trump: “What is your response?”
The outward circulation of the Chinese claims on platforms like Twitter and YouTube (whcih are banned in China), could be in part a simple matter of national pride, a concern for the country's international image, and a response to President Trump's use of the term “Chinese virus” to refer to the disease, which has infuriated many Chinese. But some commentators point out that China's withholding of information was a breach of international law that could make it legally liable.
China's failure to provide timely information about the virus and its level of contagion to the World Health Organization, for example, “is more than a moral breakdown,” James Kraska, a professor of international maritime law at the Naval War College, wrote recently. “It is also a breach of a legal duty that China owed to other states under international law, and for which injured states – now numbering some 150 – may seek a legal remedy.”
To be sure, conspiracy theories are legion around the world, whether it's the claim that the 9/11 attacks were a CIA plot to give President Bush an excuse to invade Iraq, or whether it's the notion, reiterated by Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, that the virus originated in a high-tech biochemical lab in Wuhan itself.
The difference with China is that misinformation there has been used as an element of state policy, sometimes officially, sometimes more informally, but in either case without any possibility that a free press or an independent judicial machinery will challenge the official “truth.”
Perhaps the most blatant and well-known example of this in China was the country's denial that its military massacred civilian demonstrators when it brought an end to the massive pro-democracy protests in Beijing in 1989. Almost immediately after the army moved in to crush the protest movement, killing hundreds of people in full view of thousands of eyewitnesses, Chinese television was saying that the only people killed that night were brave army soldiers attacked by “hooligans.”
The disinformation effort on the coronavirus hasn't reached that point; it isn't a massive propaganda campaign inundating the media. Indeed, some efforts to propagate the idea of American responsibility for the virus have fallen flat. Earlier this month, for example, a blogger in China's Guizhou Province posted a video of a Caucasian man slyly putting spittle on a subway pole. "This is a solid proof showing that Americans were spreading the virus during the Military World Games,” the blogger wrote, asserting that the man in the video was a member of the U.S. Army team and was riding the subway in Wuhan.
In fact, the video showed a man riding a subway, not in Wuhan at all, but in Brussels, Belgium, where he was arrested and the subway car disinfected. When other social media users in China pointed that out, the blogger retracted his claim, though not before his original post had been viewed by an undetermined number of people.
But the idea that Maatje Benassi was patient zero and that there is now a “debate” between China and the United States over the origins of the virus has spread around the world, as a Google search of Benassi's name shows. China's demand for the U.S. to be “transparent” by releasing the military team's medical records has appeared on everything from websites about international cycling to 24-hour news sites across the globe.
Meanwhile, there has been no retraction of the lengthy video “investigation” of the coronavirus's origins with its claim that it was insinuated into China by the American military. While some Chinese officials are giving credence to that claim, the government has not officially endorsed it. It seems content to put it out there, to spread an idea that might shift discussion about the virus from China's responsibility to the question: Did it actually originate in America?
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Investigations.]

AMERICA, IT'S BEEN GOOD KNOWIN' YA

America, it's been good knowin' ya

Exclusive: Scott Lively spotlights 'forced house arrest,' surveillance, government enforcement


During the Great Depression, in the Dust Bowl of Pampa, Texas, folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote the song "Dusty Old Dust," which became famous for the apocalyptic line 
"It's been good to know ya" in the chorus. 
It was a time of depression and end-of-the-world speculation, sort of like ours.
Guthrie is most famous for his song "This Land is Your Land," which he wrote as a Marxist-leaning retort to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" 
– which had become the de facto national anthem of the Depression era.
"This Land is Your Land" isn't a bad song, per se. 
But its purpose was to shift the focus away from God to man. 
It was a Humanist hymn to compete with a Judeo-Christian one (Berlin was Jew who wrote Christian songs) at a time when people were turning back to God in large numbers.
This was similar to the push for the slogan "United We Stand" to replace "God Bless America" in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 
"United We Stand" emphasizes "We," in place of God. 
Again, not a bad slogan, per se, but a subtle maneuver by the Marxists in a time when circumstances would otherwise cause people to reflect on their relationship with their Creator and perhaps repent.
I remember with astonishment the name Jesus Christ being invoked respectfully on national news programs in the days following 9/11, and the entire Congress sang "God Bless America" together on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. 
Three weeks later, however, the media were back to 100% hard-core secularist perspectives, and over the following months, "United We Stand" became the almost universally invoked slogan in reference to that crisis.
During both of those critical periods of U.S. history, patriotic constitutionalism lost significant ground to globalist Marxism in law and social policy. 
Big-government quasi-socialist Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was elected president in '32 and moved the entire nation significantly to the left during his four terms 
– during which time the influence of God, the Bible and Christianity were purged from interpretations of constitutional law. 
The First Amendment was in effect reinterpreted to serve as a tool for suppression of the church, and the concept implicit in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments 
– that the federal government has only limited delegated power granted by the people (ninth) and the states (tenth) – was also turned on its head.
After 9/11, the Bush Dynasty pushed through the "Patriot Act," which gutted the Fourth Amendment protections against "search and seizure," establishing broad surveillance powers – the right to spy on Americans. 
These included a major expansion of the powers of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), introduced in 1978 by Ted Kennedy. 
The certainty of political abuse – indeed weaponization – of the FISA Court powers was proved in the recent Russian collusion hoax against President Trump and key members of his team.
Now comes the orchestrated COVID-19 pandemic and the de facto suspension of virtually the entire Constitution under the emergency powers of "our" government(s).
Now, lets set aside the analysis of whether this is a deliberate campaign by the globalists to take down the world economy, break the nationalist rebellion against them and usher in a global socialist order. 
For the sake of argument, lets pretend this is a legitimate spontaneous disease outbreak and not a worldwide "regime change."
Let's also set aside the questions about whether this disease is actually a pandemic or just roughly equivalent to a bad flu season 
– although I will repeat that I'm astonished that NO ONE is comparing COVID-19 to the 2017/18 flu season with its estimated 35 million infections, 710,000 hospitalizations and 80,000 deaths. 
And I'll point out that only 35 million Americans were infected of our total population of about 327 million (11%), with no special precautions taken to prevent the spread.
Let's instead just focus on the exercise of emergency police powers by several Democratic governors. 
I'm talking about the forced house arrest of American citizens combined with high tech surveillance and active real-time punishment of dissenters. 
I'm talking about night-vision drones enforcing curfew orders and reports of state police conducting house-to-house searches for out-of-staters.
Consider the logic and the implications of these totalitarian impulses. 
Keep in mind: This is not the bubonic plague! 
The vast, vast majority of people who get this disease will not even notice they have it. 
So the only justification these governments have to enforce house arrest on the entire population under their jurisdiction is to reduce its impact by a tiny fraction. 
How many other exercises of American freedom carry similar or greater risks in the minds of these leftist autocrats? 
How about drinking large sugary soft drinks? 
Criticizing certain special-interest groups purported to be susceptible to suicide? 
Owning guns? 
Interfering with "abortion rights"? 
Driving fossil-fueled cars? 
God forbid that the Democrats take back the White House as a result of this crisis, because they will never voluntarily give back these powers to the people.
Thank God that President Trump has not invoked these same powers at the national level, which argues against certain voices in the conservative movement accusing him of complicity with the globalists. 
I've noticed that he has been very reluctant to go along with any of the nanny-state remedies and has only adopted a few of them as actual on-the-ground circumstances and unavoidable political realities warranted. 
The unfortunate $2 trillion bailout falls into the latter category (and if it works to prevent economic collapse, we'll have a chance to pay it back during a restored and booming manufacturing-based economy).
Most importantly, President Trump has been unashamedly invoking God and prayer throughout the crisis 
– because without God's mercy and favor, there is no hope at all.
What's the takeaway here? 
The Marxists will gain major ground again if we allow the historic pattern to repeat. 
The only way to break that pattern is never to give up our slogan and prayer: 
"God Bless America." 
And I call on America to make that our de facto anthem again today.
God bless America, land that I love, Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above.
From the mountains to the prairies, to the oceans white with foam
God bless America, my home sweet home,
God bless America, my home sweet home.

LEFTIST: LET'S USE CORONAVIRUS TO ELIMINATE 'THE FAMILY'

A commentary published by a far-left publication funded in part by left-wing billionaire George Soros says some good could come from the coronavirus pandemic.
For example, the total elimination of "the family."
"We deserve better than the family. And the time of corona is an excellent time to practice abolishing it," wrote radical-feminist activist Sophie Lewis on the website openDemocracy.
...See More
WND.COM
A far-left publication that gets some of its support for the liberal billionaire George Soros says there could be some good that comes out of the coronavirus pandemic.

CORONAVIRUS COULD TRAVEL 27 FEET, STAY IN AIR FOR HOURS: MIT RESEARCHER

(NEW YORK POST) -- Social-distancing guidelines to stay 6 feet from others may be woefully inadequate, one scientist warns — saying the coronavirus could travel 27 feet and linger for hours.
MIT associate professor Lydia Bourouiba, who has researched the dynamics of coughs and sneezes for years, warns in newly published research that the current guidelines are based on outdated models from the 1930s.
Rather than the assumed safety of 6 foot, Bourouiba warns that “pathogen-bearing droplets of all sizes can travel 23 to 27 feet.”
WND.COM
(NEW YORK POST) -- Social-distancing guidelines to stay 6 feet from others may be woefully inadequate, one scientist warns — saying the coronavirus could travel 27 feet and linger for hours. MIT associate professor Lydia Bourouiba, who has researched the dynamics of coughs and sneezes for years, w...

IS THE PANDEMIC KILLING BIDEN'S BID?


Is the pandemic killing Biden's bid?

Pat Buchanan: If the president is seen as the victor over coronavirus, Joe is toast



"This is the question that is going to dominate the election: How did you perform in the great crisis?"
So says GOP Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma in today's New York Times.
GOP National Committeeman Henry Barbour of Mississippi calls the crisis "a defining moment. … The more (Trump) reassures Americans, gives them the facts and delivers results, the harder it will be for Joe Biden."
Indeed, it is not a stretch to say Trump's presidency will stand or fall on the resolution of the coronavirus crisis and how Trump is perceived as having led us in that battle. 
Recent polls appear to confirm that.
Though daily baited by a hostile media for being late to recognize the severity of the crisis, in one Gallup poll a week ago, Trump was at 49% approval, the apogee of his presidency, with 60% of the nation awarding him high marks for his handling of the pandemic.
What was the public's assessment of how Trump's antagonists in the media have performed in America's great medical crisis?
Of 10 institutions, with hospitals first, at 88% approval, the media came in dead last, the only institution whose disapproval, at 55%, exceeded the number of Americans with a favorable opinion of their performance.
The media are paying a price in lost reputation with the nation they claim to represent by reassuming the role of "adversary press" in a social crisis where, whatever one's view of Donald Trump, the country wants the president to succeed.
If Biden begins to mimic a hostile media, baiting Trump at every turn, pointing out conflicts in his views, Joe will invite the same fate the media seem to have brought upon themselves.
Since that Gallup poll, Trump has been seen daily by millions in the role of commander in chief. 
He speaks from the podium in the White House briefing room or the Rose Garden just outside the Oval Office. 
He is invariably flanked by respected leaders in medicine, science, business and economics. 
All appear as Trump allies, and Trump treats them as his field commanders in the war on the virus.
And Joe Biden? 
He pops up infrequently in interviews out of the basement of his Delaware home where, sheltering in place, he reads short scripted speeches from a teleprompter.
And Biden's presence has been wholly eclipsed by daily televised appearances of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is at the epicenter of the crisis in New York. 
Cuomo is taking on the aspect of both rival and partner to Trump.
What Trump is doing calls to mind Richard Nixon's "Rose Garden strategy" in 1972. 
Though goaded by the press, Nixon avoided attacking his Democratic opponent, George McGovern, and declined to engage him on issues. 
Instead, Nixon used the Rose Garden to highlight popular initiatives.
Candidate Nixon's campaign strategy in 1972 was not to campaign.
But if Biden cannot gather crowds to hear him in a time of social distancing, how does he get his message out? 
How does he attack Trump without appearing to undermine the president in his role as a wartime commander in chief, where America wants Trump to succeed?
How does a basement-bound Biden compete with Trump in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, East Room and Rose Garden?
Whom does Biden call upon to rival Trump's instant access to respected leaders eager to come and stand beside the president in the most serious crisis since World War II?
How does Biden recapture the spotlight of Super Tuesday?
Sen. Bernie Sanders wants Biden to come out and debate. But that seems a no-win proposition.
Moreover, when Biden appears on camera, he often seems confused and forgetful, loses his train of thought and doesn't remember what he came to say. 
The sense that Biden is losing it is taking hold, and not only on the Republican right.
Democrats have to be looking closely at Cuomo's success, as they wonder how Biden will stand up in the debates with Trump six months from now.
And what lies ahead for Democrats when spring turns into summer?
The Tokyo Olympics, scheduled to begin July 24, have been postponed until 2021. 
The Democratic National Convention, scheduled for Milwaukee even earlier in July, has yet to be postponed.
But if Tokyo recognizes it would be a terrible risk to the health of athletes and spectators to have people come from all over the world to Japan this summer, would it not also be an intolerable risk to have Americans from all 50 states and U.S. territories arrive for a week of mingling in midsummer in Milwaukee?
For Biden to win this election, Trump must lose it.
And the one way Trump can lose it is the perception on the part of a majority of Americans that he has proven an ineffectual president in America's worst pandemic since the Spanish flu of 1918.
If Trump is seen as the victor over the virus, Biden is toast.

IS AMERICA'S RESPONSE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC BEING EXPLOITED

Dr. Ron Paul hits nail on the head in no-nonsense coronavirus interview


Dr. Ron Paul, retired Republican congressman from Texas and three-time presidential candidate, thinks that America's response to the coronavirus pandemic is being exploited to bloat government budgets and increase government power.
Paul is best known for his libertarian views -- he was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 1988 -- and mistrust of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States.
But in an interview with Wealth Research Group editor Lior Gantz posted Friday on YouTube, Paul took things a step further, calling recent measures to control the spread of COVID-19 a "grab bag" for some in government.
Paul, a physician, conceded that the coronavirus pandemic is serious, and he no doubt understands the gravity of the situation as his own son, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, is under quarantine after he tested positive for the virus on March 22.
What Ron Paul said he is worried about is that some in government have inflated the risk and response for their own political gain.
"I think it's blown way out of proportion to the danger," Paul told Gantz.
"It seems that some people benefit from crises like this, people who want more government power and more control over people and want to get big appropriations and get their special deals passed, and that's what happening now," Paul said of the federal and state governments' coronavirus response. "It's a grab bag. ...
"It's used as an excuse by those who have a special interest to use that. I think that is sad."
As of Monday, 29 states have been put under "stay at home" orders, restricting citizens' rights to assemble, do business or even be out on the streets in an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus.
There is no end in sight for these extreme measures, with President Donald Trump announcing Sunday that social distancing measures were being extended through April 30.
As a result of the ongoing restrictions, jobless claims have climbed to five times the previous record as businesses are shuttered or restricted across America in enforced social distancing.
To mitigate the damage, Trump signed into law the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act on Friday.
"I just signed the CARES Act, the single biggest economic relief package in American History -- twice as large as any relief bill ever enacted," the president said on Twitter following the bill's signing. 
"At $2.2 Trillion Dollars, this bill will deliver urgently-needed relief for our nation’s families, workers, and businesses."
While in some respects this bill was absolutely necessary to offset damage directly caused by government restrictions to combat the pandemic, Paul said the economic downturn is a holdover from existing problems.
"I think there's way too much concern given with potential danger of coronavirus, and very little concern and a serious understanding of why we're in a real bad economic mess," he said.
Paul has long opposed the Federal Reserve's influence and published a 2009 treatise titled "End the Fed." 
As recently as August 2019 in his column for the Ron Paul Institute, Paul warned that cutting interest rates and printing money were repeating the mistakes of the 2008 financial crisis.
In addition to the hefty federal spending on the coronavirus relief bill, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to 0 percent on March 15.
"It's impossible, it won't solve the problems," Paul said of the government spending and slashing of interest rates, "because we got into this by too much spending, too much debt, too much inflation, too much manipulation, too much drive for zero interest rates, and that's what they're doing.
"They're solving the problem by spending even more, printing even more, and get the interest rates below zero and they think that's going to solve the problem but it isn't."
What Paul said rings true -- some of these issues were in place long before the coronavirus surfaced in the United States. 
He also made an astute point that this kind of crisis can easily be exploited to grow the power and scope of government.
Although he is right to be skeptical of government financial interventions, the crisis is unprecedented in that most of the damage was caused by direct orders from federal and state governments. 
The response, then, must be a balance of government righting its own wrongs while not overreaching even further.
Governments are by nature prone to inflation, and people in power are by definition desirous of increased control over their constituents. 
Therefore, it is important that this crisis not become an excuse for both to run amok.
The coronavirus is undeniably a serious threat, but it is important that the government not be allowed to grow unchecked in power and spending as a result.
Long after the last restrictions are lifted and the last major outbreak abates, America will be left with the political aftermath. 
It's of the utmost importance to balance both the need to keep America healthy with the need to keep America free.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.