Nobody’s saying it’s not bad. It is bad. People are dying. And as we’ve been told from the beginning by credible epidemiologists and others, including members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, it is going to get worse before it gets better. It is, however, looking on several fronts as if the pandemic will never get as bad as some of the worst-case models predict. As far as can be ascertained this early, mitigation seems to be working wherever it has been scrupulously deployed.
We can only hope, but it is conceivable that we will look back on this episode and the measures taken to counter COVID-19 as amounting to one gigantic overreaction. An overreaction that from certain perspectives may end up being worse than the disease. That’s another column, which is being writ large across conservative media, backed-up strongly by deep thinkers like Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore, and Victor Davis Hanson.
It is important not to forget that coronavirus is only one of several plagues upon the nation. From a conservative standpoint, illegal immigration and the destabilizing “progressivism” permeating our core institutions have to be counted as serious invasive threats to the American way of life. And while it doesn’t remotely compare with COVID in terms of human suffering, we’ve also got a pandemic of media hate speech to contend with. It doesn’t kill, but it does dispirit. It does not attack the human respiratory system; it attacks and sickens the body politic.
The goal of the media’s viral agents is to portray President Trump as dangerously incompetent. As NBC’s Chuck Todd strongly intimated, and the Boston Globe replicated as a headline, Trump has “blood on his hands.” They’re looking to fix Nancy Pelosi’s charge that Trump is “fiddling while people die” in the minds of the populace.
The “mainstream,” “legacy,” or whatever-the-hell-you-want-to-call-it media are entering a lockstep mode aimed at politicizing the pandemic, hurting Trump’s reelection prospects, and ensuring that this crisis does not go to waste. They seek to characterize as apocalyptic where we stand against the coronavirus as a direct result of having Donald Trump as our president.
In reality, a reality not twisted by this latest outbreak of unhinged leftism, it is crystal clear to fair-minded Americans that the president has been magnificent in his response to the virus, while the Democrats have been found wanting, and hating, at every turn.
There are myriad examples of this hyped hysteria, and unseemly schadenfreude from the media’s dark prophets.
One textbook example came when MSNBC host Rachel Maddow smugly delivered her fake news about how U.S. Naval hospital ships “Comfort” and “Mercy” were weeks out from their arrival in New York City and Los Angeles respectively; it repellently seemed as if she was pleased about the delay. The ships arrived within 10-11 days, fully operational.
One need only compare the varying tone of coverage on CNN and MSNBC to the coverage on Fox News to grasp the extent of the political and ideological divide. On Fox, they’re taking the virus very seriously, of course, but they are avoiding the pre-packaged alarmism of the hate-Trump left. Furthermore, they are providing a platform for strong conservative voices who warn that unless we calibrate our response to allow for the damage being done to our economic health, the cure will definitely be worse than the disease.
Bulwarked by certain politicians, the media narrative promulgating the idea that Trump has mishandled COVID gets more traction.
When warned in 2015 that ventilators were in alarmingly short supply in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo passed on a chance to purchase a potentially game-changing stockpile. Mayor de Blasio has spent his time in office banning Big Gulps and warning about climate change catastrophe. Shadow presidential candidate Joe Biden made a show of first claiming Trump’s Chinese travel ban was racist. He’s finally come around to admitting the ban was a propitious move, months late, and, if you look at his campaign coffers, millions upon millions of dollars short.
Now comes Rep. Adam Schiff, down some ignoble staircase with his hate-obsessed entourage, vowing to launch another investigation, this time into the president’s handling of a pandemic that key Democrats had been warned about, but never prepared for. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is now demanding House oversight of the $2 trillion stimulus/relief monies, after siphoning off millions of those dollars to fund pet projects like the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and aid and comfort to illegal aliens and migrants worldwide.
In Trump Country, it is within the realm of plausibility that the recovery will come sooner than later. By April’s end, expect states and municipalities only peripherally affected by COVID to start reopening for business. With influential Democrat elected officials like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer calling for a federally mandated national lock-down, Mr. Trump’s instinct is to respect states’ rights.
Despite the media’s partisan hue and cry, the Trump administration has jump-started relief efforts, issued directives for emergency device and gear production, and provided a collaborative public/private infrastructure for around-the-clock medical research into the virus. When this happens again, and it will, the response template Trump is putting together will be thrown over the invading microorganisms like a wet blanket soaked in alcohol.
In the DNC media centers, deliverance from evil and suffering takes a different form: coronavirus “spin” destroys Trump as surely as Earth’s infectious bacteria killed off the alien invaders in War of the Worlds. Donald Trump’s America First agenda succumbs as a result. Democratic Socialism and Marxist globalism rise to power.
If that ever happens, the Chinese virus will look tame by comparison.
We don’t yet know the full extent of how this will play out. We pray to whatever deity guides and sustains us through the valley of death, summoning faith, and a collective will to defeat the viral scourge.
It is clear now who isn’t helping the situation. We have identified the rotten media players, have endured their prevaricating and irresponsible “coverage.” The “lamestream” media is chanting a defeatist mantra that is anathema to the exceptionalism and resiliency of the American spirit. Even factoring the theoretical harm done to the Trump administration by the onset of COVID-19, their political party is in extreme ill health going into 2020. They are fully aware, and if concocted doomsday scenarios have any chance of harming Trump’s chances for reelection, they’ll come down on the side of a dire and protracted prognosis every time.
The media’s dark prophets will not be silenced, nor will they be shamed. Their punishment is consignment to that yellow circle of journalistic hell where all credibility is lost.
Mark Ellis is the author of A Death on the Horizon, a novel of political upheaval and cultural intrigue. He came aboard at PJ Media in 2015. His literary hangout is Liberty Island. Follow Mark on Twitter.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member