Asian students with European-sounding last names were told to check White on the ethnicity box, so they could avoid the "race penalty" getting into Berkeley or NYU and when a lawsuit was finally filed, it won at the Supreme Court. But even that court case was brought by a white student. Asians were so jaded by chronic progressive intolerance against them, they had just accepted their plight.
Not so since 2020. Suddenly, progressives who once discriminated against them loved Asians, and all it took was President Trump being critical of the Chinese government's cover-up and disinformation related to investigating the SARS-CoV-2 virus that erupted in Wuhan in 2019.
Denial of the potential for a lab leak has changed. Dr. Fauci, a government disease expert since the Reagan years (hated by the left then because he said that gay men not using condoms was the problem and therefore using better judgment was the solution) is appearing today before Congress to discuss his involvement in helping funding coronavirus studies in Wuhan and then discussing preventing any talk of China as a potential lab leak while even the New York Times has a piece wondering how evidence for an accidental lab leak was swept under the rug by career bureaucrats.
Career government employees are 90% Democrats in Washington, D.C. so it looked strange that they were engaged in blatant obstructionism in an election year (1) but it wasn't a huge shock. That it cost so many lives, and then they managed to blame Republicans for that, will be taught in Master Classes on political maneuvering 100 years from now.
On the positive side, the left began to embrace Asians, a demographic they had distrusted politically because they were legal immigrants who came to America for a better life and did not believe more taxes was the way to go. Asians didn't trust Democrats either, because it was clear they controlled universities and discriminated against Asians.
The pivot happened in the summer of 2020. Progressive humanities scholars were producing anecdotal papers claiming "hate crimes" against Asians were up...because of Republicans.
Except they weren't hate crimes the way the public thinks of a hate crime, it could only be considered that by twisting the overly broad Hate Crime Statistic Act, which says a hate crime is "prejudice based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity." Basically, if you feel that it is a hate crime, it is a hate crime in your academic paper about how mean Republicans are.(2)
They suddenly said wanting to know if the COVID-19 pandemic had resulted from shoddy protections in a lab where a researcher had already been convicted of selling lab animals to their nearby Wuhan wet market was a hate crime. Racism. Xenophobia. Except Asians in America were not suddenly seeing increased insults or attacks at their place of business, there were no protests demanding that terrorist groups inside China were right. Basically, all of the things Democrats are doing to Jews right now were not being done to Asians by Republicans, yet it was still a claim that any talk of a Chinese lab leak was racist.
Talk about an icy chill effect. If you wanted to know if incompetent biosafety culture at the Wuhan lab may have been involved, you were guilty of a hate crime.
Except it was completely valid to wonder. The Chinese arrested whistleblowers who said it was a serious problem in Wuhan before it took over the US, the Chinese removed their coronavirus database of some 16,000 samples to prevent anyone from reverse-engineering a link to the lab. The World Health Organisation we now know was openly colluding with the Chinese dictatorship to remove China from consideration.(3)
This is not like cholera, where American Protestant elites blamed Catholics, and then Jews for tuberculosis and Italians (Catholics again) for polio, this was a coronavirus unlike anything the world has seen. And it appeared just 16 and seven years after two other coronavirus pandemics and gain-of-function research to try and halt even more severe pandemics was undertaken.
Wanting to know if the Chinese communists and their fake BSL ratings screwed up isn't xenophobia, it's an IQ test.
But at least it got progressives to start loving Asians, so that is a good thing. Maybe if a Republican suggested Israel was involved in the pandemic Democrats will stop the hate crimes against them.
NOTES:
(1) Career CDC managers actively refused to send out COVID-19 testing kits until Republican appointees made them, and then when they grudgingly did it they sent out ones with faulty reagents so the results were useless. When Secretary Biden said Trump was risking American lives by "rushing" a COVID-19 vaccine to market, the CDC and NIH agreed. Only FDA acted like it was a crisis and they knew how to cut out 10 years and a billion dollars of pointless paperwork safely and get one to market.
And they did. A vaccine that Democrats said was dangerous suddenly became a win for the self-proclaimed Party of Science, who forgot they had opposed it. Now, predictably, Republicans have taken up the anti-vaccine charge that Democrats dominated for 25 years prior.
(2) Unless you are the new "wrong" minority, like Jews, in American progressive culture. Harvard, which expelled people for using the wrong pronoun, decided that hate speech against Jews was protected by the First Amendment. Columbia also. Nearly every wealthy university on the US coasts did the same. Funny how the definition of tolerance changes when your agenda is using the weight of government and institutions to penalize people different from you.
(3) When they did finally do an "investigation" they sent a team picked by China who went to a closed and scrubbed lab and a closed and scrubbed wet market and did no tests. They instead sat and listened while the communist government claimed...American frozen food was probably how COVID-19 started.
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