(Ken Silva, Headline USA) At Tuesday’s inaugural hearing of the special House committee dedicated to countering China, human rights activist Tong Yi denounced the oppressive COVID-19 lockdowns perpetrated last year by the Chinese Communist Party.
“In late November of last year, students and others in several large cities gathered … to protest lockdowns that Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy imposed on millions of people,” Yi said, wondering how “one muddle-headed dictator could impose so much harm.”
After her speech, Democrats on the committee expressed support for Yi, with Rep. John Torres, D-N.Y., asking whether President Xi is willfully sacrificing economic growth in his quest to centralize his power.
But what Democrats didn’t mention was that the CCP lockdowns denounced by Yi are some of the same policies supported by their party, as well as some Republicans, in the first two-plus years of the pandemic.
While lockdowns in the U.S. weren’t as long or as extreme as in China, they did entail business shutdowns, stay-at-home orders, park closures and a variety of mandates.
When Americans opposed these mandates, they were demonized by the Democrat-friendly media as “Anti-Vaxxers” and “Neo-Nazis”—as the New York Times deemed them in 2020.
CNN also published an open letter in 2020 from “over 1,000 health professionals,” who denounced anti-lockdown protests as “rooted in white nationalism”—while at the same time admiring “China’s Covid success compared to Europe.”
Moreover, Canada did have CCP-like restrictions that were supported by the U.S., which helped Justin Trudeau crush anti-lockdown protests.
Even amidst the anti-lockdowns in China last year, Democrat patron saint Dr. Anthony Fauci justified lockdowns to enforce vaccine mandates.
“When you want to shut down in order to interrupt immediately the spread of an infection, there should be a purpose to it—like, if you want to make sure you get enough ventilators or PPE or you want to get your population vaccinated,” Fauci said on CNN last November. “You have to have an end game. You have to have a purpose. If the purpose is to get all the people vaccinated, particularly the elderly, then OK.”
Amid protests of unprecedented scale, Fauci tells CNN that China’s totalitarian Covid lockdowns would be fully justified so long as the purpose was to “get all the people vaccinated.”
“America’s doctor” everyone.pic.twitter.com/FYc7FmXHoq
— LLadany (@lladany) November 29, 2022
Instead of addressing their own failings, Democrats promised to join Republicans in their effort to get tough on China.
The committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., urged his Democrat colleagues to get on board.
“Time is not on our side. Just because this Congress is divided, we cannot afford to waste the next two years lingering in legislative limbo or pandering for the press,” he said. “We must act with a sense of urgency.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
