Last week in this space, I highlighted an object lesson in the stupidity attendant to people of color embracing the left’s racialist orthodoxy in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. People of color are obviously not the only group that has demonstrated markedly lower intellectual function during this crisis; many of our fellow Americans have revealed themselves to be so mindblowingly stupid that they present a danger to themselves and others just going about their day, pandemic or no pandemic.

This week’s installment also addresses elements of our stupidity, but is intended to cover a wider range of attitudes and behaviors to which this crisis has given rise.

We’ve seen a great deal of naked opportunism amongst far-left politicos and activists evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is clear that many deeply relish the disruption and disorder that’s come about and would prolong it for as long as possible. Their actions are craven, odious and illustrative of just how dangerous they are.

Yes, the pandemic has given rise to draconian overreach and ludicrous proposals on the part of some governors and lawmakers, respectively. The crisis has resulted in some local government officials revealing their autocracy and nanny-state stripes. As an aside, I hope that this causes our citizens to take stock of those in their local governments, since some of these have the power to compromise civil liberties as readily as those in high office.

And yes, we’ve gotten a closer look at the sinister machinations of China’s Communist government. It’s obvious that they have been far less than forthright in their reporting of when and how the COVID-19 virus made its way out of a lab and into street markets in Wuhan, and what efforts they put forth to contain it. They’ve lied about their infection and mortality rates, inexplicably attempted to blame America for the pandemic and are likely committing atrocities on a daily basis in dealing with the crisis domestically.

It is also apparent that China’s response has served to mobilize the entirety of their propaganda machine, which has influence around the globe, and has engaged international agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), globalists in our government and the press.

Did I mention that the Chinese are Communists?

Behind the justifiable outrage we’re seeing on the part of citizens and pundits who’ve observed all of this cheap political theater, however, there appears to be a measure of naïveté in their expectation of forthrightness and accountability from people whose stock-in-trade is deceit. In this case, I’m going to go as far as to say that it is willful ignorance, but we’ll need to look back a few decades to put this into perspective.

Despite having been forced to resign from office in 1974, President Richard Nixon still claimed the crowning achievement of having opened up China to the West with the help of his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. As we know, Nixon did more to sully the Republican brand than anyone in our nation’s history, and in subsequent years, Kissinger has proven himself to be the globalist’s globalist.

Much of the jubilation that ensued attendant to China ostensibly becoming more open had to do with the opportunities this presented for Western capitalists. Unfortunately, as I’ve articulated on many occasions, the attitude of Western business interests has come to resemble that of Western politicians: They tend to view themselves as some sort of global royalty whose money and power render them immune to geopolitical machinations.

The problem here is that the People’s Republic of China continues to view itself as a nation, which of course it is. It’s also quite evident that its government intends for China to become the world’s preeminent superpower. Experts in the Asia-Pacific region and even astute lay observers have had no difficulty in discerning this, though Western political leaders have allowed China’s march to dominance to continue unabated.

In fact, while news consumers in the West were admonished to see the exploits of Nixon and Kissinger as a seminal moment in geopolitics nearly 50 years ago, their opening up China was more accurately analogous to a father presenting his 21-year-old son with a syphilitic prostitute as a coming-of-age present.

In the decades since Nixon and Kissinger, China became more amenable to trade and other relations with the West, but their means and methods have been singularly duplicitous and have by design undermined Western solidarity, the West in general and America in particular. In their own short-term self-interest, American businesses have allowed us to become economic hostages to Communist China. Tangential to this, Beijing cultivated relationships with the most disloyal individuals of influence in the U.S., who have done nothing to stultify Chinese hegemony nor mitigate the erosion of our influence on the world stage.

At this point, there are probably as many conspiracy theories out there concerning the COVID-19 pandemic as there are Facebook group pages – but I’m going to throw another one out just for grins. For the sake of argument, let’s call it a mental exercise:

Elements of the Washington establishment, facing the political equivalent of a mortal injury represented by the presidency of one Donald J. Trump, and facing his almost certain re-election, conspire to neutralize this threat by striking at Trump’s biggest achievement – the economy, which is always uppermost in the mind of Americans during an election cycle.

They enroll their Chinese counterparts in an intrigue involving the “accidental” release of a deadly pathogen into the Chinese population, with the objective essentially being what we are witnessing today. The Chinese government – which also sees the threat in Trump’s nationalistic bent and could definitely do with thinning out their population a bit – are more than happy to provide the instrument of Trump’s destruction (and that of the U.S. economy): the novel coronavirus.

Frankly, I don’t believe that the coronavirus pandemic came about this way at all – but it’s more than plausible. I wouldn’t put it past any of the players (theoretically) involved and neither should anyone reading this.

Article posted with permission from Erik Rush