Coronavirus and climate change: Two different panics, same old playbook

Watching the panic that has gripped the nation over the last week, what with the stock market roller coaster and the emptying of toilet paper from store shelves far and wide, I couldn’t help but wonder why all this seemed so familiar—and then it struck me.  The kind of fear that the news media have been stoking over the novel strain of coronavirus—or Wuhan Virus to all you ten-toothed bigots out there—is precisely the same fear that they’ve been trying to gin up for years over global warming.  Millions of deaths, social upheaval, massive disruptions to everyone’s lives—all of these things have been hyped as the inevitable result of climate change driven by the insatiable demand for fossil fuels required by the greedy capitalist system.  Only problem was, the best our activist media could threaten us with was Armageddon in another hundred years or so—and that didn’t exactly terrify people they way they had hoped.

Then lo and behold, along comes coronavirus.

And so the media shifted gears and stomped on the gas, so to speak, because here they finally had something they could use right now! to whip the masses into a frenzy—and boy, was it a doozy.  An exotic virus of mysterious origin, straight out of a Hollywood thriller, escapes containment from China to the West where it stands poised to kill, kill, kill!   Call it Outbreak 2: Electric Wu-hu, a sure-fire hit to make everyone forget all about that floperoo Climate Change, Actually.

Of course, true to Hollywood form, they used the same old marketing team.  How can you tell?  Just check out the similarities between this campaign and the last one.

1.  IT’S JUST A HOAX, FOLKS

Global warmists—i.e., the media—are fond of snickering at us right-wing rubes for not “believing” in climate change, even when all the hard evidence points to an ever-changing climate on Planet Earth.  This is just a rhetorical slight-of-hand, though, one that sidesteps the real argument made by climate skeptics—namely that climate change absolutely exists, as it has for all of geological time.  It’s just a bit harder to pin down exactly how much human activity has contributed to it.

In the same fashion, Democrats and the media—but again, I repeat myself—have attempted to cast Donald Trump’s remarks about the media’s shoddy coverage of the coronavirus outbreak as him saying the whole crisis is a hoax.  This could not be farther from the truth.  Quite the contrary, the President has taken the situation quite seriously, and took affirmative steps to restrict travel from China to the United State—at a time, by the way, when Democrats were consumed with impeachment.  Ironically, the very same Democrats and media who misrepresent Trump now castigated him for imposing the restrictions earlier.

2.  IT’S POLITICAL, NOT FACTUAL

Criticizing the media for pushing a political agenda is a lot like yelling at Eric Swalwell for flatulence:  it’s just the way they are, and they’re not going to change.  So it only stands to reason that when they expend a lot of time and energy on a story, there’s probably an agenda involved.  All the fuss over global warming?  It had more to do with manipulating the public into turning away from the capitalism that has made them, on average, the wealthiest people in the world and toward what they present as a kind of feel-good socialism, where there are no winners and losers and a benevolent government is in control.

Coronavirus coverage is no different—except that in this case, the goal is to cast the Trump Administration’s handling of the outbreak as incompetent.  Oh, and then there’s spooking the markets in an attempt to drive the country into recession, conveniently ahead of November’s election—thus taking away Trump’s strongest campaign issue, a thriving economy that his policies helped create.  Everything that the media emphasizes is directed toward those two objectives, which is why you’re seeing a freakout at levels we never saw during Ebola and H1N1—which, not coincidentally, happened under Barack Obama’s watch.

3.  LET’S RUIN THE ECONOMY JUST IN CASE

Have you noticed that the proposed methods for dealing with anthropogenic global warming all end up basically wrecking the world economy and consigning us all to shorter, poorer lives in which we have fewer freedoms and have to make do with far less?  Oh, and they also consolidate government’s power in ways that ensure that we’ll have less and less say in how things get run.  If that sounds a lot like full-bore socialism, pat yourself on the back—you’ve figured out the ultimate end game of the global warming crowd.  Even at that, however, we’re told that all this is necessary just in case the warmists are right.  After all, with life on Earth hanging in the balance, the stakes are simply too high not to try.

As we’ve seen, the template for coronavirus is pretty much the same.  Has it killed a bunch of people?  Sure—but nowhere near the same scale as the ordinary flu, or H1N1 from a few years back.  Yet somehow the country didn’t begin shutting down, canceling travel, closing schools and generally start resembling abandoned towns from The Walking Dead.. Still we’re told that this epic freakout is necessary just in case the virus turns out to be as bad as the media say.  Meanwhile, real lives are affected, real jobs lost, real 401(k)’s are taking a big hit and people everywhere are seeing real disruptions in their lives.

And for what?  The truth is, at this point, we really don’t know.

Perhaps we should figure that part out first, instead of setting our hair on fire.  In that regard, we would all do well to pay less attention to the media, thus taking away their matches.

"Call it Outbreak 2: Electric Wu-hu, a sure-fire hit to make everyone forget all about that floperoo Climate Change, Actually." @MarcGiller #CloseTheSchools #ToiletPaperApocalypse #WuhanMediaVirushttps://t.co/KWDR4c70V6

— JD Rucker (@JDRucker) March 11, 2020

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