Leo has been away working elsewhere in recent months, but he is back now and focusing his journalistic skills and analytic mind on the COVID ‘crisis’ that has brought our beloved country to its knees.
Today he highlights the media bias (and downright fakery) that is allowing the goals of the cultural Marxists to advance in weeks in a war that has been going on for a century.
Here is the photo with which he opens his post, but that is only the first of several stunning revelations (you have been hearing about some of them, but they are all in one place here).
The staff was asked to come out and line up their cars for a staged photo!
Why isn’t this front page news everywhere? Why does it take the Asia Times,Gateway Pundit, Powerline blog, and other smaller media to get this story out.
Thanks to reader Paul for alerting me to a Powerline blog post yesterday where blogger extraordinaire John Hinderaker wraps with this paragraph:
Wouldn’t it be great if we had a free press that might ask questions about reports like this one? The problem, of course, is that Dr. Fauci would be the guy on the hot seat, and he is a revered “expert” in the press’s narrative. Even more important, Fauci’s enlistment of the Wuhan lab to do research banned in the U.S. happened in 2015–that is to say, during the Obama administration. If it had occurred during the Trump administration, there would be nothing else on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Please go read it all! Follow the links for more information.
There are some good things that will come from the Chinese virus crisis and one of those just could be a resurgence in the ‘Made in the USA Movement.’
Frankly, I wasn’t paying much attention to where my purchases were being produced, whether it was a new mattress or the food I’ve been putting in the freezer.
LOL! Our microwave quit a few months ago and my husband insisted we find one made in America. No luck after hours of research on the net and a phone call to our local appliance store. So now we get by the old fashioned way—without one!
However, the Smithfield Foods fiascoand the near complete dominance of China in many aspects of our consumer lives that has been revealed in recent weeks has me paying more attention.
Many of you may have seen a facebook post circulating which makes a couple of claims including these:
FOOD FROM CHINA… Smithfield Farms, the largest pork producing farm in the USA, was sold in September to China with the unanimous support of its stockholders! The hogs will still be raised here, but slaughtered and packaged for sale there before being sent back here.
[….]
Chickens
The same applies to many chickens. They can now be shipped there, but when they come back all that needs to be labeled is that they ‘WERE RAISED IN THE USA’. Not that they were processed in China!!!
This morning I wanted to see where the information was coming from and what was being said about it.
I don’t believe anything that the biased Snopessays, so I didn’t go there. And, I am not saying that USA Today’s ” fact checkers” are any more reliable, but they did provide some information especially about the ownership of Smithfield Foods that appears legit.
LOL! But USA Today glossed over some of the other issues raised in the post.
By the way, it makes no sense to raise hogs here and ship them live to China for processing as the facebook post claims is happening. Indeed that is why China bought at least one BIG MEAT company here—much easier to ship pork to China and elsewhere once it is packaged!
For readers of Refugee Resettlement Watchyou might recall that China was looking to build and own a beef plant in Montana a couple of years ago. It only makes sense to go where the cattle are still on the hoof and slaughter there!
I searched around and found an organization called “The Made in America Movement.” I’m way out of my comfort zone on this topic so I can’t vouch for them, or others like them, but it is worth having a look!
So, now I am headed to the freezer to read some labels!
Editor: This is a guest column by my friend Bob Enos of Willmar, Minnesota. Regular readers of Refugee Resettlement Watch may remember Bob who compiled a great deal of information on the economic cost of migrant and refugee labor and wrote several articles for RRW in the past.
Go hereto read previous posts at RRW either written by him or about his work.
As the hysteria-driven lockdowns of coronavirus persist, constitutional conservatives are slowly emerging from under their beds. Spear carriers for social isolation and economic constriction in America have reacted to critics with the same derision accorded wearers of red MAGA hats. In less than thirty days, Americans have been persuaded to swap Constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties in exchange for the illusion of protection from a virus that has touched a relative few.
This is not to say that the virus does not exist, nor that pockets of America do not suffer disproportionately from the health consequences of COVID-19.
However, neither the vast majority of Americans, nor family, friends, or neighbors, have been infected by the virus. Yet, the American public is expected – no, required – to support a one-size-fits-all national response that, to this writer, is akin to killing a flea with an elephant gun.
As international travel is acknowledged as the world’s COVID-19 courier, I’m led to an inescapable conclusion:
COVID-19 is, first and foremost, an unintended consequence of three factors, in order of significance: Open Borders movement, business globalization, and international tourism.
Presently, the nation of Sweden has the most relaxed posture in western Europe regarding COVID-19; she has no lockdown whatsoever. Many media pundits are nearly gleeful in reports of higher infection rates in Sweden compared to the rest of Europe. However, in its daily briefings on the virus, the Sweden Department of Public Health insists that its infection rate would be much lower, had the government enacted screening measures early on, for Swedish vacationers returning from Italy.
According to the state department of health here in Minnesota, our rate of infection as a percentage of the population is the lowest of any state in the nation.
The mean age for deaths attributed to COVID-19 here is 86. Pre-existing health problems accompany nearly all the fatalities, and the majority have been residents of nursing homes.
This past week, several meatpacking companies throughout the Midwest – names like Smithfield, Cargill, Tyson, and Brazilian conglomerate JBS – reported closures of plants in which anywhere from 20 to 80 employees tested positive for corona virus. What do nursing homes and meatpacking plants share in common? The majority of workers in both industries – industries hard-hit by labor shortages- are recent arrivals from third-world nations; populations for whom international travel is commonplace.
New York City – the epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States – is also America’s symbol for the “nation of immigrants.” Additionally, she is a preeminent international business center. Business travelers from across the globe travel in and out of New York City by the hundreds every single day.
Finally, New York City may be the most popular tourist destination in America for foreign travelers. Walk down Fifth Avenue on any given weekend in Autumn if there is any doubt.
Is it any wonder, then, that COVID-19 fatalities in the New York Tri-state area make up as much as half of the nation’s COVID-related deaths?
What we are witnessing is the unintended consequence of unbridled, open borders migration, be it for business, escaping third world poverty, or tourism.
Globalists are hard at work on damage control. Their messengers of doomsday scenarios will claim victory regardless of the outcome. If the death count is high, they’ll say “we told you so”. If the death rate is low, they’ll take credit for convincing the world to heed their warnings.
And let’s not forget the icing on the cake.
Leftists the world over are not about to pass up an opportunity to exploit a crisis that could hurt the President’s re-election campaign. If turning a blind eye to civil liberties sends President Trump packing and derails the conservative/national sovereignty contingent, well, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette. Collateral damaged be damned.
And the collateral damage? There are many versions of death. Nearly all agree that economic recovery will be long and drawn out, at best. The fallout will certainly be the death knell for many rural towns throughout the Midwest that have been hanging on by fingernails for years as it is.Hospitals will go broke. Record numbers face unemployment. Children are kept from schooling. Small retail businesses and the hospitality industry are crushed, many for good. Socializing is verboten. All in the name of containing a virus for which attributable deaths in New York’s Tri-state area (a population of nearly 20 million) make up roughly FIVE ONE HUNDREDTHS OF ONE PERCENT of its population.
My late mother, a nurse, had a one-liner of dark humor she picked up on the hospital floor: “the operation was a complete success, and the patient died.”
….which means there is a great opportunity for any of you who want to launch your own web-based media either national or more importantly state and local websites and blogs.
I have for years—a dozen actually—been urging all of you to consider writing your own blogs.
There is a crying need for citizen investigative journalists who would follow various government programs as watch dogs.
And, as local newspapers die, you should consider becoming the news outletin your own community, county or state. What are you waiting for!
There may be silver linings to be found with this COVID crisis after all. Small local newspapers are likely to go down, see here at The Hill last week:
Local news outlets struggle to survive coronavirus fallout
Sad (maybe), but if your city or county is like mine, the local newspaper was long ago gobbled up by a Left-leaning mega media company blatantly putting its slant on the local news.
Enough of the nagging, here is what I wanted you to see that should bring a smile to your faces.
From Kurt Schlichter writing at Town Hall (hat tip: Paul):
Our Super Smart Elite Shines During This Pandemic!
We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.
They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.
It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces.
[….]
The media largely fell for the Imperial College Apocalypse Flu scenario, but then they wanted to. It’s more fun to be chronicling the Fall of Rome than Just Another Day in the Third Century A.D. under Emperor Elagabalus. The doomsayers ended up walking back their zillion dead to a few thousand dead, and the media just sort of ignored it because “Phew! Dodged a bullet!” doesn’t have the same resonance as “WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE (and it’s Trump’s fault, not our ChiCom friends’ fault).”
[….]
Our media is garbage, full of clowns and dilettantes with no experience and less common sense. The media is now complaining that the pandemic is hurting its industry badly and that some of the media may go under because of the Woking Pneumonia.
Read it allbecause we all need a good laugh these days!
