COVID-19 Is the New Global Warming

 

By Steve Feinstein

Despite their supposed apolitical nature, some issues develop along hyper-partisan fault lines and become a litmus test in identifying where someone rests along the ideological spectrum.  One might never think topics like patriotism or merit-based admissions or respect for law enforcement or the recognition of human XX vs. XY chromosomes would be cause for political friction and strife, but in today's America, they are.

 

Take anthropogenic global warming as a prominent example.  This has been a central calling card for the Progressive cause.  They claim it's entirely the fault of conservatives — that heartless Republican businesspeople, in their relentless pursuit of immoral profits, willfully and callously disregard the environment and run their businesses in a deliberately "dirty" manner in order to maximize their earnings and keep their expenses, like best environmental practices and the purchase of costly pollution-reduction devices, to a minimum.

 

When the warming that was promised in the late '80s and early '90s failed to materialize by the early 2000s, Progressives changed the terms of the discussion from "global warming" to "climate change."  That way, they could blame any weather-related anomaly or damaging event on what they saw as conservatives' willful disregard for the environment.

 

The intent here is not to re-fight the entire matter of global warming.  It's simply to point out that one's position on the question defines in explicit terms the political ZIP code of the neighborhood in which that person resides.

 

Now there's another — perhaps even better — ZIP code–revealer:  COVID-19.  This subject is imbued with so many points of contention that it's hard to know where to start.

 

Everything about COVID is controversial.  A person's position on every one of these points marks his political leanings:

 

The name.  Is it the China Virus?  COVID-19?  Coronavirus?  We call them "West Nile" and "Ebola" and "Legionnaires Disease" to reflect where and how they originated.  But "China Virus" is now all of a sudden racist to the wokeists.

 

Where/how it began.  In a lab, as an experiment gone wrong, or perhaps a failed bio-weapon effort?  At a so-called wet market?  Progressives scoff at any suggestion of evil Chinese intent.

 

President Trump's early stages response.  This varies from a hands-off failure, where he totally underestimated and intentionally downplayed the threat, to a sterling effort that involved such fast action (like the hospital ships to L.A. and NYC and the initiation of Operation Warp Speed) that he even received enthusiastic support from both Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom.

 

Dr. Anthony Fauci.  He has transitioned from being seen by most of the public in the early days of the pandemic as sort of a neutral America's Doctor figure to conservatives now thinking he's nothing more than a flip-flopping, Progressive-pleasing, anti-Trump opportunist, willing to say anything — no matter how inconsistent or blatantly false — to enhance his own stature.

 

 

Source: American Thinker