One of the more despicable actions by mentally unstable demagogue and bigot Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump has been his and his enablers' shifting attention away from their own failure on the COVID-19 pandemic to China, which deserves to take some heat for their opaque behavior. However, Trump's references to the "China virus" have signaled to his red cap cult that it's permissible to engage in senseless, racist acts against not only Chinese Americans, but Asian Americans in general. Trump's bigoted attack on CBS reporter Weijia Jiang after she asked him about his "global competition" obsession in testing by telling her to "ask China", followed by his abrupt ending of the press conference when she asked why he mentioned China to her specifically.
As the Washington Post reports, the attacks on Asian Americans have spread to the very frontline doctors and nurses that are saving lives and putting their own at risk:
"Across the country, Asian American health-care workers have reported a rise in bigoted incidents. The racial hostility has left Asian Americans, who represent 6 percent of the U.S. population but 18 percent of the country’s physicians and 10 percent of its nurse practitioners, in a painful position on the front lines of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. Some covid-19 patients refuse to be treated by them. And when doctors and nurses leave the hospital, they face increasing harassment in their daily lives, too." (our emphasis)Trump's white supremacist trade advisor Peter "Bizarro" Navarro has been pushing the racial angle to the COVID-19 pandemic, to deflect attention from his leader's abject failure in addressing it from the start. Last Sunday, Navarro launched into a bizarre conspiracy theory about China:
"The Chinese, behind the shield of the World Health Organization for two months, hid the virus from the world, and then sent hundreds of thousands of Chinese on aircraft to Milan, New York and around the world to seed that," Navarro claimed, without offering evidence such travel was directed by the Chinese government.It's no wonder that low information, bigoted Trump cultists hear unmoored hate speech like that from Trump's inner circle and want to go out and verbally or physically harass a person of Asian heritage. It's what their cult leader demands of them.
"They could have kept it in Wuhan, instead, it became a pandemic," he continued. "So that's why I say the Chinese did that to Americans and they are responsible now." (our emphasis)
(photo: Steve Senne, AP)
1 comment:
It's difficult to keep up with different hate groups these days. We're all targets, and unfortunately the number of innocent people who are being threatened keeps growing.
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