By Gary Wickert

The famed psychiatrist Karl Menninger once wrote, "The extraordinary propensity of the human being to join hands with external forces in an attack upon his own existence is one of the most remarkable of biological phenomena." We are seeing evidence of this during our country’s struggle with the coronavirus, as governments order thriving businesses to shutter their doors, people to stay indoors, and criminal penalties for walking in the park with your family. Thermal cameras are being installed to monitor the body temperature of those who walk past it. This isn’t a scene out of a dystopic, Orwellian horror movie. It’s America, and it’s really happening.

Let’s start with why the Covid-19 virus should more appropriately be called the “Wuhan Flu.” For starters, the pandemic which has resulted in more than 80,000 deaths worldwide is 100% the fault of a dirty, backwards country in Asia and its totalitarian government. It began in the Huanan seafood wet market in the city of Wuhan, located in the Hubei province of China, in late 2019. Because of a lack of refrigeration, it is a live animal market where animals are waiting to be slaughtered. As a result, there is a lot of blood spread around and it can spray onto animals, people, or vegetables nearby. Stock footage of pangolins – a scaly mammal that looks like an anteater, suggest this animal could have been the rallying point for the virus before it spread to humans. Others maintain it was bats. But there is no disagreement that it originated at the Hunan wet market. Analysis of the first 41 Covid-19 patients revealed that 27 of them had direct exposure to the Wuhan market. Pangolins were not listed on the inventory of items being sold in Wuhan, although this omission could be deliberate as it’s illegal to sell them.

The smog-ridden country with dirty skies, pit toilets, and workers strolling out of factories with black soot marks under each nostril has the worst pollution in the world. Thick clouds of smog chase people indoors, disrupt air travel, and damage the health of millions. Almost every resident of China smokes cigarettes. Their birth rate is plummeting and the gender gap is growing. Their repressive regime lies to its people, makes up statistics, and there is falling productivity. It is a time bomb waiting to go off. This is a country that fears information. A country of environmental catastrophes, political graft, corruption, and endless frauds and scams. If you were an American victimized by an online scam, odds are it originated in China. China mishandled the 2003 SARS epidemic much the same way it mishandled the current coronavirus pandemic.

The behind-the-curtains look the Western World is allowed to take in China is not the real China. In November of 2009, after visiting Beijing and seeing selected eye-candy architecture following the Beijing Olympics, Obama praised China’s infrastructure – their ports, train systems, and airports - as “vastly superior” to ours. He was praising China, a country with zero pollution controls, no labor unions and rampant child labor. China, with its complete lack of construction standards in the countryside that allows the collapse of thousands of buildings including schools when a moderate earthquake hits, killing tens of thousands. China, with its millions suffering malnutrition, its polluted rivers and its holes in the ground that serve as toilets. Industrial pollution has made cancer the country’s leading cause of death.

Following the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China did virtually everything wrong. And the world is paying the price. It is a country without a balance of power politics as we have in the U.S. The government decides what to do and does it. There is no dissension or discourse. China’s government minimized the threat and delayed announcements about the virus as the infection spread to the rest of the world. Eight Chinese scientists who tried to warn the world were castigated, silenced, and reprimanded by the government. They then covered up the facts of its outbreak and wouldn’t allow experts from other countries inside their borders. Infected individuals were allowed to travel to and from the Wuhan Tianhe International Airport and were free to travel around the world, spreading the virus as they went.

Dr. Li Wenliang was one of the first people to sound the alarm about coronavirus. He was sending messages through his superiors in China and was soon was ordered to rescind his messages and publicly apologize. Shortly thereafter he said, “I’m sorry I have been panic-mongering.” President Xi Jinping and his minions were lying to the World Health Organization, saying that the virus was not spread person-to-person, even though they knew better. And today, they are claiming there have been no new cases of corona virus and no deaths in a country of 1.3 billion people. Even if China was capable of determining this, it is a pretty amazing statement and very hard to believe given their credibility. In other words, the only thing they have quarantined is the truth. They even tried to tell the world that the virus was introduced by members of the United States Army who visited Wuhan in October.

China uses statistics like the Democrat Party uses identity politics and hate. They flip back and forth between whether they count somebody who has all the symptoms, or only people who have been tested and have the genetic marker for COVID-19. To make matters worse, there is no free press. The actual number in china is considerably higher and the country’s willingness to cooperate and provide information is making the problem they created and allowed to spread even worse.

Reports now indicate that the virus isn’t nearly as deadly as we originally thought. Every year the seasonal flu kills 650,000 people across the world. COVID-19’s tally stands at around 80,000. The WHO originally guessed that the mortality rate was around 3.4%, but more recent estimates show it is much closer to 0.6%, compared to the 0.1% associated with the seasonal flu. Around the country governors are simply ordering all “non-essential” businesses to close in an effort to avoid the spread of the virus. Churches have closed and friends no longer get together. The economy is on life support, once-thriving businesses are being closed permanently, and millions of people have lost their jobs.

Here in Wisconsin, our governor autocratically ordered businesses to shut down based on incorrect information and exaggerated infection numbers. He even tried to suspend the mid-term elections. The Department of Health Services model on which Evers based his totalitarian edict predicted 22,000 positive cases of coronavirus and 440-1,500 deaths by April 8. It didn’t even approach that number.

The coronavirus has become the 2020 election’s October surprise. It just came a little early. You may recall Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel saying, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” The concept is both profound and wise. In countries like China where there is a totalitarian political regime and no balance of power politics, nothing derails the Deep State. But in a sprawling, contentious constitutional republic like America, competing interests suspend their squabbling only when they have to confront an alarming common threat like COVID-19. The Democratic Party is already politicizing the pandemic and their new hoax is arguing that Trump caused the spread and he singlehandedly ruined the best economy in history (an economy which they previously had failed to acknowledge). It is no coincidence that most Democrats are wringing their hands and like Joe Biden, suggesting that America will have to be shut down for 18 months, but quickly adds that we can’t postpone the November election.