Cooking Up a Viral Moment

Written by Robert Knight

Two theories are circulating about the origin of the COVID-19 coronavirus.

The media are still selling the idea that it probably arose from an infected bat at an outdoor live animal food market in Wuhan.  That’s also the Chinese Communist Party’s line.

The media don’t want people thinking that communist researchers at the Wuhan Virology Institute’s BSL-4 lab might have been directly responsible.

However, a plausible scenario is that the virus was, indeed, cooked up in the lab. Former CIA officer Clare Lopez makes that case in her April 20 article “Made in China” for the Citizens Commission on National Security.

Beyond debate is that the communists covered up the outbreak for weeks – assisted by the World Health Organization (WHO) – as it morphed into a worldwide pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands and crushed the world’s economy.

Not everyone is unhappy about the latter.

New York U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) says she’s thrilled by the crash of the oil industry, which has cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and could put many U.S. producers out of business.

“You absolutely love to see it,” she tweeted. “This along with record low interest rates means it’s the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.”

Well, this should go over big in the oil and gas patch, including states that have prospered via fracking, such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, West Virginia and North Dakota.

AOC’s lurch into green insanity was promptly deleted. But it was only the latest such blast from the young face of the Marxist wing of the Democrat Party, which has taken over its host.

Last Wednesday, on the new Vice TV talk show “Seat at the Table” featuring author Anand Giridharadas, AOC urged people to stay unemployed even after the lockdowns end.

“When we talk about this idea of reopening society you know, only in America does the president — when the president tweets about ‘liberation’ — does he mean ‘go back to work,’” she said.  “When we have this discussion about going back or reopening, I think a lot of people should just say no — we’re not going back to that.”

Well, okay. Working people of the world unite – you have nothing to lose but your unemployment benefits, which are in many cases more money than previously employed people could earn by working.

A Portland, Oregon restaurateur opined in the Wall Street Journal that the $600 federal bonus in the Cares Act on top of regular unemployment benefits means that he will have great difficulty attracting his employees back. Line cooks are making $1,016 for not working, as opposed to a starting salary of around $640 per week. Since the bonus program doesn’t end until July 31, this provision looks almost as if it were designed to keep unemployment high.

Why would anyone want to do that? Oh. Right. November.

But on the Republicans’ bright side there’s always AOC and her Squad.  I have a theory about mad scientists concocting viruses in labs.  Could it be that the Republicans have their own version somewhere, maybe in an abandoned Nike base outside of Washington, D.C.?   There, white-coated Victor Frankensteins are concocting AOC clones to be a sort of virus within the Democratic Party.

Their first major victory was AOC’s ridiculous Green New Deal, ripe for flatulating cow jokes.

Next, they egged Nancy Pelosi into the impeachment fiasco, which was so flimsy that surveys show it raised President Trump’s stock among voters.

The next benefit to the GOP was AOC’s aggressive backing of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who has pushed the party even to the left of, well, Nancy Pelosi.

Although the Sanders campaign was a casualty of the coronavirus pandemic, with voters demonstrably leery of turning the nation over to a wild-haired communist, Joe Biden has kowtowed to AOC and the Squad to keep their leftwing legions happy.  This won’t help the Dems attract independent voters.

In a virtual press conference on Facebook on April 20, AOC clone U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) called the Trump’s administration’s policies “akin to war crimes. Criminal negligence, science denial, a sluggish response…. We just have to reject any calls for a return to normal because that normal was what was slowly killing people.”  Well, the Left has been at war with “normal” for some time now.

As protests grow across the country over some of the more absurd lockdown edicts by mostly Democrat officials (fining churchgoers for sitting in their cars) the Left is growing increasingly dependent on censorship.

YouTube and Facebook, which acted admirably last August by removing communist propaganda aimed against Hong Kong protesters, appear to be taking a dangerous line against liberty in the United States.

In early March, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media giant would take down “false claims and conspiracy theories” about the coronavirus while giving WHO free advertising.

Facebook said it would also take down protest notices for “events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing.”

YouTube announced that it, too, would remove videos promoting anti-government lockdown protests around the country.

Does this sound like America or some other place halfway around the world?

This article was originally published at Townhall.com.