Senators Urge Trump to Create Task Force to Counter Beijing’s CCP Virus Propaganda
Three Republican senators are calling for the creation of a new task force to counter Beijing’s escalating disinformation campaign against the United States surrounding the CCP virus.
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), in a March 23 letter to President Donald Trump, propose the establishment of an interagency task force, under the command of the White House National Security Council (NSC), to counter propaganda spread by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) amid the worldwide pandemic.
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the CCP’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
“Now that COVID-19 has spread rapidly around the globe, the CCP and its officials have the audacity to spread disingenuous claims that the United States is responsible for this pandemic. This is not simply dishonest, it is dangerous,” the senators wrote.
They added: “The Chinese Communist Party is manipulating facts surrounding a global pandemic that originated due to their own incompetence. While the rest of the world scrambles to clean up the CCP’s mess, they continue to seek geopolitical advantage and undermine the U.S. at every turn.”
The senators said that the taskforce should produce a white paper on the origins of the outbreak and subsequent CCP efforts to conceal its severity.
It should also provide guidance to U.S. government employees and U.S. embassies on how to counter false CCP narratives.
The escalating global outbreak started in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei Province, in December 2019.
Since early March, the Chinese regime has been aggressively pushing a global propaganda campaign to deflect attention from its initial mishandling of the outbreak.
Chinese officials have suggested that the virus did not originate from China, and have even accused the United States of being responsible for the outbreak that has now spread to over 180 countries and regions and killed more than 10,000 people outside of China.
On March 13, the U.S. State Department summoned China’s ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, after Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson of China’s foreign ministry, accused the U.S. Army of bringing the CCP virus into Wuhan.
China’s state-run media CCTV and Xinhua have added their voices to the disinformation campaign. For instance, a commentator on state-run media CCTV recently claimed that the United States was quick to start working on a vaccine for the virus because it possessed the CCP virus long before the outbreak began.
State media has also recently targeted Trump, promoting hashtags such as “#Trump Pandemic” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The three senators wrote that China’s propaganda “threatens to undermine the worldwide coordination necessary to combat this coronavirus,” in addition to “being a despicable exploitation of a global emergency.”
The taskforce would include representatives from multiple U.S. departments, including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department, as well as agencies within the intelligence community.
“It is critical that our country fight back against this propaganda and an interagency taskforce under the aegis of the NSC is a distinctive tool to formulate a coordinated, USG-wide response,” the senators wrote.
The senators suggested that Trump could allocate funding for the taskforce under the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA).
ARIA, which became law in December 2018, calls for increased U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific while countering China’s strategic influence in the region.
Three Republican senators are calling for the creation of a new task force to counter Beijing’s escalating disinformation campaign against the United States surrounding the CCP virus.
Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), and Mitt Romney (R-Utah), in a March 23 letter to President Donald Trump, propose the establishment of an interagency task force, under the command of the White House National Security Council (NSC), to counter propaganda spread by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) amid the worldwide pandemic.
The Epoch Times refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the CCP’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
CCP VIRUS SPECIAL COVERAGE
“Now that COVID-19 has spread rapidly around the globe, the CCP and its officials have the audacity to spread disingenuous claims that the United States is responsible for this pandemic. This is not simply dishonest, it is dangerous,” the senators wrote.
They added: “The Chinese Communist Party is manipulating facts surrounding a global pandemic that originated due to their own incompetence. While the rest of the world scrambles to clean up the CCP’s mess, they continue to seek geopolitical advantage and undermine the U.S. at every turn.”
The senators said that the taskforce should produce a white paper on the origins of the outbreak and subsequent CCP efforts to conceal its severity.
It should also provide guidance to U.S. government employees and U.S. embassies on how to counter false CCP narratives.
The escalating global outbreak started in Wuhan, the capital of central China’s Hubei Province, in December 2019.
Since early March, the Chinese regime has been aggressively pushing a global propaganda campaign to deflect attention from its initial mishandling of the outbreak.
Chinese officials have suggested that the virus did not originate from China, and have even accused the United States of being responsible for the outbreak that has now spread to over 180 countries and regions and killed more than 10,000 people outside of China.
On March 13, the U.S. State Department summoned China’s ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai, after Zhao Lijian, a spokesperson of China’s foreign ministry, accused the U.S. Army of bringing the CCP virus into Wuhan.
China’s state-run media CCTV and Xinhua have added their voices to the disinformation campaign. For instance, a commentator on state-run media CCTV recently claimed that the United States was quick to start working on a vaccine for the virus because it possessed the CCP virus long before the outbreak began.
State media has also recently targeted Trump, promoting hashtags such as “#Trump Pandemic” on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
The three senators wrote that China’s propaganda “threatens to undermine the worldwide coordination necessary to combat this coronavirus,” in addition to “being a despicable exploitation of a global emergency.”
The taskforce would include representatives from multiple U.S. departments, including the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department, as well as agencies within the intelligence community.
“It is critical that our country fight back against this propaganda and an interagency taskforce under the aegis of the NSC is a distinctive tool to formulate a coordinated, USG-wide response,” the senators wrote.
The senators suggested that Trump could allocate funding for the taskforce under the Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA).
ARIA, which became law in December 2018, calls for increased U.S. engagement in the Indo-Pacific while countering China’s strategic influence in the region.
The curious political path of the Chinese virus
In our hyper-politicized world where Democrats and the media frame all events, past and future, against a political backdrop and an upcoming presidential election, why shouldn’t the all-consuming news event of this year, the Chinese virus, be viewed through a similar political lens?
A coincidence is, “A remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection.” The viral pandemic, along with the public and governmental reactions are indeed remarkable. In the Trump presidency, there have been a number of events that one might tie into the current viral outbreak.
It’s easy to brush off such coincidences as having no “apparent casual connection,” yet upon closer scrutiny, they may be closely connected. As the mysterious and enigmatic Q would say, “Do you believe in coincidences?”
The Q group, a small military intelligence team working in the shadows with and for the president, frequently points out such coincidences from their team’s birdseye view. And did so recently. Let’s start with the virus itself.
For those who have observed the incessant effort by the deep state and the left to destroy the Trump presidency, the events of the past few months fall into a well-established pattern.
SARS coronavirus was first identified in 2003 after infecting humans in southern China in 2002. A microbiology review paper published in 2007 concluded, “Coronaviruses are well known to undergo genetic recombination, which may lead to new genotypes and outbreaks” With the Chinese cultural practice of wet markets, mixing the viral laden secretions of multiple exotic wild animals, “The reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories” was a “time bomb” and “the need for preparedness should not be ignored.”
The time bomb warning fell on deaf ears. Or was someone actually listening and preparing? A time bomb sits idly until activated. Once the fuse is lit, the bomb will explode at a predetermined time in the future.
An interesting coincidence is that this virus started in Wuhan, China which just so happens to be the home of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, China’s only level 4 biosafety lab.
Suggesting that the virus originated in the lab is called a conspiracy theory, debunked by a “consensus of scientists.” As a reminder, other consenses of scientists tell us President Trump is mentally ill, that man-made global warming is destroying the planet, and that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.
The virus could have developed naturally within the wet markets, according to experts who are adamant that: “Humans could have never dreamed this up.” Could those same wet market conditions be replicated in a laboratory, producing similar results? Given Chinese secrecy we may never know for sure.
Beyond the science is the politics. The timing of events is curious when looking at the Trump presidency and upcoming election. The Chinese coronavirus was first noted in in China in December 2019. What was happening politically at that time in the U.S.?
“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
“All in all, it was an incredible victory for the Chinese government. Feinstein has done more for Red China than other any serving U.S. politician. “ Trevor Loudon
China Uses Coronavirus
Crisis to Bulldoze Churches
and Temples
4:14
Religious freedom watchdog groups are accusing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of using the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic as an opportunity to intensify their crackdown on religion, bulldozing some churches and placing others under heavy surveillance.
“China is now holding itself up as a model for fighting the coronavirus. But fighting the pandemic hasn’t stopped communist officials from persecuting Christians,” Todd Nettleton, a spokesman for the nonprofit group Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), told Fox News on Tuesday.
Another prominent activist, Bob Fu of China Aid, shared a video of Chinese officials demolishing a church in the city of Yixing:
Religious persecution continues even in the midst of #WuhanVirus March 11 Xiangbaishu Church in Yixing city, Jiangsu province was destroyed by #CCP govt. Cross is our Glory大疫当前,江苏宜兴香柏树教会,于3.11日遭到强拆.举国上下深感人民的苦难,但谁知道在十字架上那位上帝之子的苦难?
Other churches have reportedly been vandalized by Chinese officials and orders have been given that effectively ban “unregistered” religious services on the grounds of public health. On the bright side, VOM saw the prevalence of medical masks due to the coronavirus as an opportunity to evade China’s pervasive facial-recognition systems and proselytize with less fear of being identified and persecuted.
Buddhists and Taoists also reported the suppression and demolition of their temples, a process that appeared to be intensifying just as the coronavirus exploded out of Wuhan. Worshipers bitterly noted that local officials have a habit of abruptly deciding that temples built with their approval failed to meet some obscure building code and must be demolished immediately. Not even hoisting Communist flags and papering temples with posters of China’s authoritarian ruler Xi Jinping was enough to save the targeted temples.
“Unconditional cooperation with the government means that no photos of the demolition can be taken, no negotiations initiated, and no compensation demanded. This is typical behavior of the CCP government,” one Buddhist complained to the Bitter Winter human rights website.
“The Communist Party is as evil as a mafia. Under the tyranny of those modern bandits, even sacred Buddhist temples cannot enjoy peace,” said another.
Churches that do not get knocked flat are encrusted with surveillance cameras to terrorize the congregations, and perhaps build up “evidence” of incorrect speech that can be used as an excuse to wipe out the church, as detailed in another Bitter Winter post:
According to a Three-Self preacher from Lankao county in Henan’s Kaifeng city, powerful cameras, over 10,000 RMB (about $ 1,400) each, have been installed in at least eight Three-Self churches, images from which are displayed on a large screen in the hall of the county’s Two Chinese Christian Councils. Who leads Sunday services, what sermons are about, and how many congregation members are present—everything is under the government’s close surveillance.“The surveillance equipment is powerful; it can catch every single word in the church,” a Three-Self church director in Lankao county explained. “We can get into trouble for making an incautious remark. Believers don’t dare to even chitchat with each other under such surveillance.” He once received a phone call from a local official less than one hour after he complained about the government.In August 2019, over 100 cameras were installed in several Three-Self churches in Yi’nan county in Linyi, a prefecture-level city in the eastern province of Shandong. A local government insider revealed to Bitter Winter that the Religious Affairs Bureau and United Front Work Department use the cameras to monitor activities in churches, and those refusing to have cameras installed would be shut down.
As some preachers and church directors learned to their cost, unplugging the security cameras is treated as a crime and swiftly punished by arrest, interrogation, confiscation of church property, and possibly destruction of the church, or even the personal residence of the preacher. According to several sources in China, the CCP now grades churches on a 100-point scale of obedience, deducts points for offenses such as improperly-displayed Communist flags and slogans, and shuts houses of worship down if their score falls under 60.
FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
Reps. Jim Banks, Seth Moulton Introduce Bipartisan Bill Condemning China
3:07
Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Seth Moulton (D-MA) introduced a bill condemning the Chinese government for its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, in a sign of bipartisan anger against China.
The bill expresses the sense of the House of Representatives that the “Governmentof the People’s Republic of China made multiple, serious mistakes in the early stages of the COVID–19 outbreak that heightened the severity and spread of the ongoing COVID–19 pandemic.”
The text said those mistakes:
…include the Chinese Government’s intentional spread of misinformation to downplay the risks of the virus, a refusal to cooperate with international health authorities, internal censorship of doctors and journalists, and malicious disregard for the health of ethnic minorities.
Banks, a U.S. Navy reservist, said in a statement:
As the Chinese Communist Party pushes propaganda and lies to try and blame the United States for coronavirus, we need to make the case to the world that China is ultimately responsible for this outbreak. They tried to cover-up news of the virus, jailed doctors warning of a possible pandemic, and prevented the CDC from coming to study the disease. In all, they cost the globe two months in time to prepare for this virus. I hope this begins a conversation about how China can be held accountable for their negligent coronavirus response.
Moulton, a Marine veteran, said in a statement:
The Chinese Communist Party’s leaders responded to the coronavirus outbreak first with disinformation and misdirection. China’s leaders kicked out American journalists who were covering the virus’ spread and the lives it claimed. China’s leaders silenced doctors, some of whom died sounding the alarm to the world. And while the clock was ticking, China’s leaders were focused on spreading propaganda that said the American military caused the virus, downplaying its severity.
He continued, criticizing Trump, but said, “The American people should hold our leaders accountable, and their representatives should hold China accountable for its part in this pandemic.”
GOP Reps. Kevin Hern (OK), Austin Scott (GA), Trent Kelly (MS), Brian Babin (TX), Barry Loudermilk (GA), Adam Kinzinger (IL), Greg Steube (FL), Larry Bucshon (IN), Mike Rogers (AL), Dan Crenshaw (TX), Mike Gallagher (WI), Kelly Armstrong (ND), Guy Reschenthaler (PA), Michael Waltz (FL), and Jason Smith (MO), Anthony Gonzalez (OH), Denver Riggleman (VA), Jim Hagerdorn (MN), Ralph Norman (SC), Rick Crawford (AR), Bill Johnson (OH), Elise Stefanik (NY), Randy Weber (TX) have co-sponsored the bill.
FEINSTEIN HAS SPENT HER POLITICAL LIFE STALKING THE HALLS OF CONGRESS SNIFFING OUT DEALS THAT PUT HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN HER POCKETS.
No comments:
Post a Comment