This Is About China. Period.

Among the many virulent Twitter critics of Friday's commentary on Real Time, one of America's premier anti-Semites wants you to know

Bill Maher has been a racist misogynist Islamophobe for YEARS. All of a sudden, everyone is like 😱😱😱😱. https://t.co/CdzuFExm89

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) April 11, 2020

A Yahoo reporter explains

During the “New Rules” segment of Friday’s episode of “Real Time,” Bill Maher waded into some contentious waters when he argued that it should be perfectly OK to refer to coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”

Of course, the Trump administration has been trying since March to popularize the term “Chinese virus,” which critics say is racist and may have inspired racist attacks on Asian-Americans. But in Maher’s view, the term is useful for understanding where the infection originated and not only that, he argued that China bears some responsibility for its spread.

“Scientists, who are generally pretty liberal, have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time,” Maher said in the segment, delivered like the rest of the episode from his house. “Zika is from the Zika Forest. Ebola from the Ebola River. Hantavirus, the Hantan River.There’s the West Nile Virus and Guinea worm and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and of course the Spanish flu.”

(Sidenote: The 1918-1920 influenza pandemic didn’t actually originate in Spain. But Britain, Germany, France, the U.S. and other nations had imposed severe media censorship during World War I and suppressed information about the illness. Meanwhile in Spain, which didn’t participate in the war, media was free to report on the devastating plague, hence the association. Researchers believe the most likely points of origin are either battlefields in Europe during the war, or Kansas in the United States. Researchers have also suggested possible origins in China.)

“MERS stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome,” Maher continued. “It’s plastered all over airports and no one blogs about it. So, why should China get a pass? Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted, ‘The virus is not constrained by country or race. Be just as stupid to call it the Milan Virus.'”

“No, that would be way stupider because it didn’t come from Milan,” said Maher. “And if it did, I guarantee we’d be calling it the Milan Virus."

He's right on target. We would be calling it the Milan Virus. And if it originated in France, it would be the Paris Virus or if in Sweden, the Stockholm Virus.  If it started in Belgium, it would be the Brussels Virus.and if in Germany, the Berlin Virus. But you get the point.

No one would have good reason to complain about that because, as Maher points out, because

...we can't stop telling the truth because racists get the wrong idea.  There are always going to be racists out there who want to indulge their prejudices..

Sorry,Americans, we're going to have to ask you to keep two ideas in your head at the same time. This has nothing to do with Asian-Americans and has everything to do with China. We can't afford the luxury anymore of nonjudginess (sic) toward a country with habits that kill millions of people everywhere because this isn't the first time. SARS came from China and the bird flu and the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu.

As Sarsour's ignorant comment indicates and Maher recognizes, the far left has a blind spot toward the evil that is mainland China. Unfortunately, much of the center-left also has, presumably because of its preference for commerce over freedom. If Democrats don't come to terms with this and continue to slam realists such as Bill Maher, a malicious Donald Trump will turn the public's skepticism toward China into a stream of prejudice against Asian-Americans.

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