(John Hinderaker)
Revelations of recent years have expanded the range of the thinkable. Four years ago, I would have considered the idea that the Department of Justice, the FBI and the CIA would team up to swing a presidential election to their favored candidate, and failing that, would try to disable the incoming administration, a paranoid fantasy, the stuff of fiction. But it happened. And it was highly successful, due to the predictable behavior of the Democratic Party and its news branch at the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on.
If you ran the Chinese Communist Party, what would your number one strategic goal have been in late 2019? Undoubtedly, to get rid of China’s nemesis, Donald Trump, and replace him with Beijing Joe Biden. How far would China’s rulers have gone to achieve that goal? Look what they have done to get rid of the Uighurs, a minor annoyance.
Could the Chinese have deliberately arranged for the worldwide dissemination of the Wuhan virus? Yes, rather easily. They could have created the virus, too, but that isn’t necessary. Once the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, by means unknown, the rest was probably inevitable.
Of course, the virus did some damage within China, but nowhere near enough to pose a threat to the regime. And to the extent that there was collateral damage in Europe and elsewhere around the world, such damage, from the CCP’s point of view, was a helpful distraction at a time when China is building up its armed forces and extending its military footprint across Asia.
Does anyone think China’s rulers are either too inept or too principled to unleash the Wuhan virus on purpose? If so, why? They have done worse. And here, they would have been playing for enormous stakes–restoration of the pro-China, globalist regime that preceded Trump’s America First rebellion. Hardly any price would have been too much to pay.
And, having watched the first three years of the Trump administration unfold, China’s rulers could well have calculated that a pandemic originating in their homeland stood a good chance of reshaping America’s electoral landscape. The desperate Democrats and their press would blame the president and his administration for the disease–something that has never occurred before in American history, but was sure to happen this time. If the Chinese did seek to influence our presidential race, they were successful. President Trump has gone from being a prohibitive favorite in January to an underdog today, and the reason is the Wuhan virus.
Do I think China’s leaders deliberately unleashed the Wuhan virus on the world? I don’t know, but I no longer consider the idea outlandish. The virus’s origins are shrouded in mystery, and investigation of those origins has been discouraged, to put it mildly. Indeed, even mentioning the disease’s place of origin–Wuhan–has been denounced as “racist.” The virus may bring about the Chinese Communist Party’s number one goal. I don’t see any reason for a conclusive presumption that this fact is a coincidence.
