CNN has just breathlessly announced that it has uncovered a “vast trove of leaked documents show[ing] China underreported COVID-19 numbers” and deliberately covered up the seriousness of the epidemic.
The only trouble with CNN’s blockbuster is that it is almost a year old.
The rest of the world has known since February or so that China’s Communist leaders hid the epidemic from the world for as long as they could. After the outbreak began late last year in the city of Wuhan, they silenced their own doctors and blocked visits from outside medical investigators. They lied about the virus to the WHO, and then got the WHO to lie for them. They allowed travelers from China to spread the virus to more than 180 countries at the same time they were putting tens of millions of their own people in quarantine.
Beijing did all this while reporting such ridiculously low numbers of cases and deaths that most credible news organizations were skeptical.
Real journalists, such as those who work at our government-funded Radio Free Asia, started digging. RFA reported at the end of March that the death toll in Wuhan was many times higher than the 2,500 or so that Beijing was claiming at the time. As bodies piled up in the city’s crematoria and truckloads of funeral urns arrived for the ashes of the deceased, they estimated the actual number of coronavirus victims at 46,800.
CNN, on the other hand, swallowed Beijing’s narrative whole and soon began regurgitating its propaganda in the same fashion.
On April 15, 2020, for example, CNN reported that “not a single serving member of the country’s military has been infected.” America, however, wasn’t doing so well:
“The reported absence of cases among China’s armed forces comes despite the fact that thousands of military personnel were sent to Wuhan to assist in front line medical efforts. It also comes in sharp contrast to … the United States, which ha[s] seen an uptick in cases in recent weeks.”
What was CNN’s source for its report that China’s military was handling the coronavirus much better than America’s armed forces? The website of the People’s Liberation Army of Communist China, which of course is no fan of the US military.
Over the past year, CNN has lifted a lot of its coronavirus stories directly from Beijing’s propaganda broadsheets, but my all-time favorite is this gem from April 7, 2020:
“China reported no new novel coronavirus deaths or locally transmitted cases yesterday, according to the country’s National Health Commission … There were 32 new cases — all of them imported from abroad.”
Leave aside the predictable effort to shift the blame for the epidemic onto foreigners. They are always a convenient whipping boy for the xenophobic CCP.
Just consider the claim of “no new cases” in a country the size of China. And ask yourself this: If that were true, why were the 11 million inhabitants of Wuhan, along with millions elsewhere in China, still under lockdown? It’s absurd on the face of it.
Could it be that the woke elites at CNN were more than happy to report, virtually verbatim, the most outrageous claims of the CCP simply in order to make the United States and President Trump’s handling of the epidemic look bad by comparison?
And now that the election is over, have they perhaps decided that it’s time to stop serving as the unofficial propaganda arm of the CCP — at least where the coronavirus is concerned — lest they make the next president look bad?
As for me, I will stay glued to CNN, waiting with bated breath for their next “exclusive.”
Maybe by next year CNN will “discover” that the China Virus came from … China.
Now that would be news.
With The Media, Some Things Never Change
The election hasn’t been decided yet, but the current state of uncertainty gives us time to indulge in ruminations of times past.
Ever since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the Left has hectored him endlessly. One of their favorite taunts has been, “will he allow a peaceful transition when he is defeated in 2020, or will we have to send in the military to haul him out?” Of course, the Ministry of Truth has never accepted the fact that he won in the first place.
So it’s no surprise that the Left wants to shove Trump out to the curb before the election is decided. After all, they’re only being consistent. They’ve tried to destroy his presidency, along with tens of millions of Americans who support him, for four years. But right now we don’t know how the current constitutional process will play out. In fact, we won’t know until at least December 14th, when the Electoral College members of each state cast their votes to elect the next president – or fail to do so.
So we find ourselves with a moment of reflection, having celebrated (we hope) a blessed Thanksgiving and faced with another fortnight of uncertainty.
Let’s consider one of our many possible futures. In this episode, let’s assume that “Catholic Joe” Biden is sworn in as president on January 21st, 2021. Meanwhile, mountains of evidence have come to light in December and early January proving beyond any doubt that the election was stolen.
Now, the Establishment elites have hated Trump passionately for years. In light of these irrefutable revelations, will their hatred finally give way to compassion? Will they join an outraged public in a strident demand that justice be done?
For our answer, we turn to precedent – and it is not heartwarming.
Hate Has A Long History
The year is 1960. The most hated man in Establishment America is Richard Milhous Nixon. He has earned this status because of a mortal sin he committed long before. As a member of Congress from California, he had played a key role in exposing the Communist menace in our country, “the enemy within,” as it’s been called.
Nixon’s grit and determination had helped the world learn about the Soviet Union’s startling success in infesting the Roosevelt-Truman presidential administrations with Communist spies.
Now, in 1960, the already-hated Nixon is running against the Democrat ticket of John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas. When the votes are counted on election night, the Kennedy-Johnson ticket has won with 303 electoral votes.
However, massive fraud was alleged to have occurred in Illinois, where Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had the ultimate say in the vote count, and Texas, where “Landslide Lyndon” had been famous for years for insisting that every tombstone in the cemetery be given its equal right to vote. And reversing the electoral votes of those two states alone would give Nixon the victory.
Outrage abounded, and Republicans in several states mounted objections and demanded investigations. Nixon ignored them. Three days after the election, he conceded.
And the question arises, what did the Establishment do then? Did the elites hail Nixon’s patriotism, his selfless refusal to throw the election, and the country, in turmoil?
Not quite. Instead, they hounded Nixon mercilessly, and hailed the dawn of the Kennedy Myth, with Camelot as its guiding star. In fact, their continuing campaign of contemptuous vituperation lasted through 1962, when they helped Pat Brown defeat Nixon in California’s gubernatorial election.
The day after the California loss, Nixon made no bones about the media’s hatred. It was his “last press conference,” he said. “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”
Well, actually, they’re still kicking him around, but that’s another story. Here we observe that in 1960, Nixon-haters didn’t change their tune in the face of simple civic virtue, nor were they interested in the possibility of heinous political heists.
After all, they were happy that their guy had won. (By the way, so were our Catholic bishops.)
Back to January 2021. In light of our scenario’s bombproof evidence, is it likely, or not so likely, that the haters will come to their senses and humbly acknowledge that Trump had really won in November?
Extra credit question: how about the bishops?
Revolution And Rewards: A Primer
As we survey our rapidly-changing scene, we notice other similarities with times past.
We’ve learned from Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville that the preamble to revolution percolates for a long while – until the “spark” (Lenin’s “iskra”) ignites the carefully-laid kindling.
Then it all bursts into flame – and all Hell breaks loose.
In the revolutions of the twentieth century, chaos and terrorism played an indispensable role. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the throne in March 1917, and the Russian Empire collapsed. Vladimir Lenin quickly moved in, using his terrorist shock troops – the Cheka – to intimidate his rivals and the public while seized power.
“The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize,” Lenin famously observed – because it works.
The Sturmabteilung – the “Brownshirts” – performed the same role in the 1920’s as Hitler consolidated his power. In 1922, Mussolini’s Squadri d’Azione – the “Blackshirts” – played a similar role. Perhaps because Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini had all been in prison early in their careers, their shock troops naturally comprised many criminals in their ranks (it’s no surprise that this is also true of Antifa today).
In the past year here in America, Marxist Black Lives Matter agitprop plays the “respectable” role while
Antifa wreaks chaos in cities throughout the country. Notably, the defeat of Russia, Germany, and Italy in the Great War gave the terrorist groups the disorder and discord necessary to be viable. Today’s America hasn’t lost a war, but many of its more rancid politicians – a significant number to be sure – have treated our citizens like a defeated population.
Disoriented, discouraged, and dismayed by power-lusting virus manipulators, millions of Americans are bereft of any means of response, much less resistance, to the assault on our freedoms. The fabric of our sense of community has been frayed to the shredding point. In many states, citizens are not free from the Kommissar’s jackboot even in their own homes.
And what do we know about the wannabe tyrants? They are more afraid of each other than they are of us. History provides irrefutable precedent: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Kim – once they attained total power, their first targets were not the people but the competition.
The conclusions Thucydides reaches about human nature from his analysis of the revolt at Corcyra are not very positive. He begins by saying “Death thus raged in every shape; and, as usually happens at such times, there was no length to which violence did not go” (Thucydides 3.81.5) 427 BC
If America’s tyrants do consolidate their power – and we can’t rule out that prospect – all the Establishment elites will expect to be rewarded for their undying support of the new leader.
Instead, they will be the new enemy. Tyrants have no need of the pirouetting media, academic, cultural or business big shots who helped them gain power. No longer needed, they will be tossed in the dustbin of history, while real criminals take over.
The revolution always devours its own.
Second segment
Children Are Prime Targets of Pandemic Panic
A June survey by the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, found that “more than 40 percent of women surveyed changed their plans of when to have children or how many children to have, because of the pandemic. One-third of women (34 per cent) planned to get pregnant later or have fewer children.”
Amidst all the power-plays using the Pandemic Panic as their template, the war on community, family, and children qualifies as the most grotesque. And the prospect of a possible Biden Administration has them salivating all the more.
Had the China Virus not been dumped on the United States this year, Donald Trump would have won reelection with ease. His success lay not only in the economy but in the culture, especially in his pro-life advocacy and the policies it produced.
Joe Biden would reverse all of it. Recognizing that abortion is the driving force that unites every Democrat faction, he has promised to write Roe v. Wade into law –undoubtedly going further to proclaim loud and clear a potential death warrant for any and all unborn.
Moreover, Biden would force the taxpayer to pay for all abortions here at home, and millions more abroad: he would strike down Trump’s expanded Mexico City Policy – the one that keeps tens of millions in U.S. taxpayer funds from paying for murdering Third-World unborn children. Of course, those are primarily what Margaret Sanger called the Blacks and Browns, echoed by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
While Donald Trump’s America First agenda has defended our independence from globalist intrusions, Biden would warmly welcome the one-worlders back into the White House. Americans would once again be funding the international Deep State at the United Nations, beginning immediately with strong support of its population control programs. He would embrace the World Health Organization, a totally-owned subsidiary of the Chinese Communist Party. U.S. embassies worldwide would once again impose the HillObama priorities for abortion and population control as essential ingredients of U.S. aid programs that were once designed to help the poor, rather than to exterminate them.
Archbishop Cyprian Kizito Lwanga of Kampala, Uganda, has been out front in opposing the globalist population control agenda. but these outfits have a lot of money – and a Biden Administration would give them millions more. Ugandan Archbishop Lwanga and many of his African colleagues have warned women about the dangers of the abortifacients that the controllers are peddling, as well as the moral devastation that contraception would inflict on the family. Will “Catholic Joe” Biden pay them any mind?
Corruption and its Consequences
Some 20 years ago, I was seated on a transatlantic flight next to a woman who was heading for Berlin. She was a researcher for Transparency International, a nonprofit devoted to examining the causes of corruption (and the means of ending it) in countries and cultures all over the world.
At the time, I was gathering supporters in the international community for an effort to expand and update the century-old international treaties prohibiting the international trafficking of obscene materials, known in today’s vernacular as “hard-core” pornography.
It was a long flight, and after trading war stories and vignettes, my seat mate and I made a humorous bet: whose cause would win? Would pornography or corruption be eradicated first?
Since then, thanks to the Internet, pornography has become so ubiquitous that it’s not even called pornography anymore. In the same vein, we might say that corruption also continues to be so common that it is hardly called corruption anymore. It’s just business as usual, or politics as usual, even life as usual. It’s similar to what we’ve addressed before about hypocrisy. The hypocrite, says la Rouchefaucauld, “bows to virtue,” as he indulges in vice. But the advocate of Justice Kennedy’s “Mystery Passage” doesn’t have to acknowledge virtue at all. Soon, “corruption,” “hypocrisy,” even “virtue” will survive only as empty vessels, devoid of content because there is no standard by which to judge them. Folks can fill them with any swill they please, because they feel good using old words to disguise new vices.
And they get away with it. After all, “who am I to judge?” It’s such a common practice that a new term has been introduced to describe it: “virtue-signaling,” the practice of uttering popular platitudes in order to gain applause while slyly demeaning those who disagree with you.
We can’t blame Mr. Justice Kennedy for all this. He merely spelled out in dialectical gibberish the notion that had been eroding our moral sense for a generation and more. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life,” he wrote in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992).
Well, with that kind of “liberty,” one can “define one’s own concept” of virtue without limits. Instead of bowing to universal truths, one can simply strut onto the stage and take a bow for being so original, so superior, so liberated from the chains that virtue, in the old days, had imposed on his passions, his appetites, and his ego.
For the autonomous man, hypocrisy and virtue have become indistinguishable. And so too the man for whom corruption has become a way of life. He cannot escape Aristotle’s philosophical anthropology, but he can defy The Philosopher and embrace bestiality (theriotes), like a wild animal, and habituate his callous conscience to celebrate his moral depravity as an ethical success.
In the current post-election tumult, we are witnessing the raw sinews of corruption emerge from the back room to manipulate the body politic for its own ends. Operating for years under the disguise of “mainstream media” and “social media” and similar stalwarts of the culture, corruption now roars like Aristotle’s beast to finish off what is left of our civic community and our common culture, infecting from without as well as within.
Third Segment
On Definition
The Latin root of corruption, “corrumpere,” means “to seduce,” “to bribe,” “to break,” “to destroy.” On reflection, that’s often exactly the way it happens. The tempting opportunity to profit from an evil act is first presented, and then secured with the payoff. This breaks down the wall that virtuous habit has built, and then destroys the character within.
Consider abortion. The temptation is sex without consequences. The bribe is public support , even encouragement, from the “pro-choice” crowd. The natural bond between mother and child is broken (if it ever existed), and the child is destroyed.
Consider adultery. Tempted to illicit sex, bribed with the promise of pleasure, the Sacramental bond is broken, and the marriage is destroyed.
Consider language. Confucius emphasizes the importance of restoring the proper meaning of words. A word has no meaning if it does not firmly rooted in reality – a reality that is the same for all of us. Many who rebel against reality could easily make up new words to reflect their own version. But that’s hard work. Why bother, when there are plenty of old words that have accrued a traditional authority that makes them persuasive in themselves?
The payoff is generous at first, but the protection of the true is broken and the truth is then destroyed. Thus Big Brother’s propaganda apparat is called the Ministry of Truth, and his torture chamber is the Ministry of Love. And the NewSpeak Dictionary’s Eleventh Edition will destroy most of language altogether, so that no words will be left to describe “tyranny,” “evil,” or even “corruption.”
Virginia’s own Patrick Henry once observed that “[a] vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom.” But Justice Kennedy literally invites the “corruption of the public conscience,” doesn’t he? He guarantees to each individual the right to define reality for himself. Man becomes autonomous, like Rousseau’s Noble Savage or Karl Marx’s “truly Socialist man.”
The Promethean temptation breaks the bond of civic virtue that glues the individual to society. Justice Kennedy confers on each of us the right – if not the power – to be our own private Leviathan.
“Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue,” wrote John Adams. But Justice Kennedy asks, “Who am I to judge what ‘virtue’ is?” Fortunately, the prevailing public virtue of two centuries ago inoculated our society with salutary civic habits that persist to our own day, but we have no common language with which to discuss them or to defend them. Our common understanding of Confucius’s “proper meaning of words” has been broken into tiny egoistic shards. And with that, our liberties face the danger of being a victim of the final stage of corruption – destruction.
Consequences Temporal – And Eternal
As our Berlin-bound researcher attested, corruption acknowledges no borders. It is an equal-opportunity destroyer. As if we don’t have enough of our own, we’re allowing millions of foreigners to enter our country – some immigrants, some illegal – virtually all of whom come from cultures and countries more corrupt than our own. As Thomas Sowell puts it, “An immigrant brings his [home] culture with him.” Immigrants from a corrupt culture will naturally gravitate to the most corrupt party in our own country.
Moreover, as we’ve learned from the Biden family scandal, there’s a corollary: a foreign country can corrupt you without leaving home. First the seduction, then the bribe, breaking the bond of civic virtue and ultimately destroying the individual, his family, and very possibly his country.
A final thought: we are surrounded by corruption. Yet we know that countless “Corruptos,” domestic and foreign, will escape justice here on earth. The bitterness abides, and it is justified.. For their whole lives they will prosper, while the innocent suffer.
Unjust!
But for how long? For how long? Fifty years? Even a hundred?
No matter. God is Justice personified. Eternity is forever.
We best repent – and pray.
