“We’re At War, Make No Mistake” – White House Official Blasts China Over COVID-Contagion

Outspoken White House official Peter Navarro cranked up the anti-China rhetoric to ’11’ this morning, telling Fox News that the US is currently “at war” with China:

“We are at war, make no mistake about that. The Chinese unleashed a virus on the world,” the Trump adviser told Fox & Friends on Monday.

The outspoken China hawk went on to explain how mad he was about Disneyland…

“It crossed me that Disneyland in Shanghai is opening this morning, while my own Disneyland in my own homeland in Orange County, in Anaheim, where Disneyland was born, is still shut because of the Chinese Communist Party. That makes me mad.”

And reiterated that China will owe the US “some form of compensatory damage” following the pandemic.

Peter Navarro: “It crossed me that Disneyland in Shanghai is opening this morning, while my own Disneyland in my own homeland in Orange County, in Anaheim, where Disneyland was born, is still shut because of the Chinese Communist Party. That makes me mad.” pic.twitter.com/Z6Onr98wkn

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) May 11, 2020

The White House trade advisor’s stetement echoes that of hedge fund manager Kyle Bass who recently said “They [China] are the most lying, coercive, manipulative government in the world.”

I just think it’s important…  for the world to think about what really happened in a timeline, and not some conspiracy theory because China won’t allow us in, and won’t allow our scientists to try to find patient zero and origin of the virus. And in fact, you’ve probably seen recent communiques between the Chinese Communist Party and their labs that their lab output has to be censored by the CCP, or that has anything to do with the Wuhan virus, [has to be approved] before it goes to the rest of the world. So, they are very sensitive on this topic—number one.

And number two, if you look back to the timeline, and you understand what happened, China has an enormous culpability. They actually have a legal liability, and one that’s a financial liability. I don’t know if you’ve seen various interviews in the last few days of U.S. legislators but there is a growing tide, of not only resentment, but a growing tide of people in the legislative branch of the U.S. and the UK governments, and now it’s bleeding into Australia and Canada, where they’re starting to say that we need to use the rule of law, the U.S. rule of law, the British Common Law, to start talking about reparations and getting the Chinese government to pay for their malign actions. And I think it’s important to note: on December 31, there were already 104 cases and 19 deaths in Wuhan. The Wuhan scientists, the heroes who first found this strange new pneumonia that was propagating itself so freely in Wuhan, not only were they arrested, and punished, and forced to retract statements that they had put on WeChat, but as you know, since then, one of the doctors who was 33 years old has died from the Wuhan virus.

Secondarily, that all happened in December. So by December 31, the government of Taiwan sent a white paper to the World Health Organization explaining that they had full evidence that there was human-to-human transmission, and that it was going to be a new global pandemic. And if you remember, on January 14, Tedros said to the world in a proclamation on a Tweet that this is not a global pandemic, and that he had just consulted with Xi Jinping and the Chinese, and that there is no evidence of human-to-human transmission—this is January 14. And then January 23, Xi Jinping closed down all air traffic from Wuhan to the rest of China. But he allowed Wuhan air traffic to travel to the rest of the world. Essentially, Xi Jinping knowingly infected the rest of the world. … “If he’s going to go down, the world is going to go down with him,” essentially what he was saying. That is not a responsible actor. That is not a government who’s ideologically aligned with the rest of the West. This is a government that basically covered up the truth. And we all know that they covered up the truth, but now, it’s actually after Neil Ferguson’s Boston Globe article, and now you see that the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on February 2 that it is xenophobic to close anyone’s borders to the Chinese, and that travel restriction shouldn’t be made. Xi Jinping himself shut down Wuhan, January 23; this is February 2, they’re telling the world this.

They are the most lying, coercive, manipulative government in the world, and you and I both know, they are committing the largest crimes against humanity prior to this outbreak of the sinister virus that God knows where it really came from—somewhere between the Wuhan wet market, the Chinese Center for Disease Control, which is right across the street, or maybe 20 miles north, at the Biosafety Level 4 lab in China. But the bottom line is, this disease has been unleashed on the rest of the world, and it was knowingly done so. And that’s why I’m so visibly upset about this.

And I think that you probably saw the Jackson Foundation in the UK, the Harvard professors in the U.S., are starting to set forth a legal framework for which international laws (that) China has broken, and the fact that there is a financial liability…

Navarro’s comments come after President Trump likened the virus “attack” to 9/11 and Pearly Harbor last week.

“This is worse than Pearl Harbor. This is worse than the World Trade Center,” Trump said at a White House event.

“It should have never happened,” Trump continued.

“It could have been stopped at the source. It could have been stopped in China. It should have been stopped right at the source, and it wasn’t.”

And follow Secretary of State Pompeo, who also criticized China:

“They knew. China could have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. China could have spared the world descent into global economic malaise,” Pompeo told a State Department news conference.

“China is still refusing to share the information we need to keep people safe.”

The Trump administration has become increasingly critical of China as the death toll in the US has risen, blaming it for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and demanding the country be more transparent about its handling of the disease.

As Kyle Bass ominously conclude: “We will never out-lie, we will never out-cheat, will never out-steal, the Chinese Communist Party—they’re the “best” in the world. But what we can do is we can use the foundational bedrock of our countries, the rule of law, and we can exercise and enforce our laws on them for their malfeasance. And that is the play, that is how we level the playing field, against such a tyrannical lying actor.”