Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (37 page)
Read Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink Online
Authors: Sean Hannity
- “Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus response”
- “Trump melts down in angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings”
- “Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes”
- “Trump attacks media after series of reports he ignored warnings as virus spread”
- “Angry Trump uses propaganda video produced by government employees at taxpayer's expense”
- “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session”
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So CNN was angrily melting down as it accused Trump of having an angry meltdown.
The mob was also provoked by Dr. Birx, who had the audacity to express agreement with the president and support his policies. For the media, that's over the line. The only acceptable position toward Trump
on every issue and every controversy
is outright condemnationâanything short of that is treason against the press corps. When Dr. Birx questioned predictions of a shortage of ventilators and hospital bedsâa shortage that never happenedâreporters tried to smack her back into line. The
New York Times
' Noah Weiland and Maggie Haberman claimed Dr. Birx has “accommodated herself to the political winds with the kind of presidential flattery that Mr. Trump demands from aides.”
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In a tweet pitching her story, Haberman all but portrayed Dr. Birx as having been brainwashed. “An astute Trump adviser once described the president as âturning' people so they start to adopt his views, in a binary Trump sees as him vs media. Some fear Dr. Deborah Birx is the latest example,” she said.
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More bluntly, when Dr. Birx praised Trump's attention to detail and understanding of the relevant data,
Vox
's Aaron Rupar denounced her comments as “shocking, hackish stuff.”
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Viewing Trump as some sort of superhuman force for evil,
Mother Jones
's David Corn chimed in, “Trump ruins everything and everyone he touches.”
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Later, when Dr. Birx criticized the media for blatantly taking out
of context Trump's comments about studying the possibility of using disinfectants and ultraviolet light to fight the virus inside infected patients,
Rolling Stone
's Peter Wade accused her of “pandering.” “The public's need to trust the media during a pandemic is of utmost importance, and one of America's top health officials sowing seeds of distrust is dangerous,” Wade warned.
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You got that? That's the media warning you that no one should question the media.
In case that point is too subtle, the
Atlantic
ran a story by two professors in which the authors approvingly cited increased online censorship of coronavirus topics and argued for Chinese-style internet censorship in America. “In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network,” they said, “China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society's norms and values.”
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Who can argue with that Orwellian “logic”âthat we need “significant monitoring and speech control” to have a “flourishing internet”? Seeing the American media argue
for
censorship is shocking, but they obviously think it'll be their political opponents who will be censored, not them. And I'm sure that would be true at first. But this is a dangerous door to open, and it's easy to imagine how what begins as “limited” speech restrictions against conservatives will expand and eventually boomerang against the mainstream media in one way or another.
The unhinged media tried again and again to get Americans to understand that President Trump was responsible for people
dying
. They sounded ghoulishly gleeful when an Arizona woman claimed her husband had died after the pair responded to Trump's hopeful comments about hydroxychloroquine by drinking a fish tank cleaner containing a chemical with a similar name. The woman stated that they drank the chemical after seeing Trump on “every channel” on TV saying it was “basically pretty much a cure.” She warned afterward, “Don't
believe anything the President says.”
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The media understood that was their cue. “The president has blood on his hands. There's literally no debate about it,” said the
Intercept
's Mehdi Hasan.
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For the get-Trump media, the story was too good to check. But in interviews with the
Washington Free Beacon
, people who knew the couple cast doubt on the story. One said it was hard to believe the man would foolishly swallow fish tank cleaner since he was an intelligent, retired mechanical engineer.
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It also seems strange that the woman would drink hydroxychloroquine supposedly at Trump's command, considering she had donated thousands of dollars to
Democratic
causes and candidates during Trump's presidency. Although she initially blamed her own actions on Trump, she later backpedaled and told the
Beacon
, “We weren't big supporters of [Trump], but we did see that they were using [hydroxychloroquine] in China and stuff.” Police are now investigating the incident, and I wouldn't be surprised if there is more to come on this story.
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It was inevitable that the mob would extend these accusations to Fox Newsâthe only network that didn't blame Trump for a virus spreading out of China. In a column titled “Fox's Fake News Contagion,” the
New York Times
' Kara Swisher accused Fox News generally and me personally of spreading “dangerous misinformation” in the early days of the coronavirus crisis. Using her own elderly mother as a prop for the story, Swisher explained that her mom refused to believe Swisher's warnings about the danger of the virus because of misinformation her mother heard on Fox News. Her mom got her information on the virus exclusively from Fox, Swisher said, to the point that “it sometimes feels like Fox News is eating my mother's brain.” But don't worry, the story had a happy ending because eventually her mom began disbelieving Fox, even though she continued watching it.
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You almost have to admire the nerve Swisher shows in completely rewriting history just a few months after the fact. First, any Fox viewer knows that our coverage from the beginning was informative and reflected the best scientific understanding of the virus as it broke out
and spread. I had three different physicians including Dr. Fauci on my January 28 radio show to discuss the virus's likely trajectory, the challenges of tracking its spread, the incubation period, and its asymptomatic transmission. This was my whole approach to the virus from the beginningâto get out the facts. But Swisher, and a lot of the rest of the media herd, portrayed any criticism of the media's get-Trump coverage of the virus as an evil attempt to “play down” the threat. This is the real misinformation, but you know that only if you actually watch Fox News or listen to my radio show, which the target audience for this propaganda do not regularly do.
In her hit piece, Swisher totally ignored huge parts of the public record that contradict her imaginary world where Fox downplayed the virus while the mainstream media got it right. There's no mention of
Vox
guaranteeing there would be no pandemic, or
BuzzFeed
, the
Washington Post
, the
Daily Beast
, and Anderson Cooper insisting the flu was a bigger threat, or Swisher's fellow
New York Times
columnist denouncing Trump's China travel ban and asking whether it was even necessary. There was no reference to Nancy Pelosi encouraging tourists to congregate in San Francisco's Chinatown at the end of February, the same time Swisher claims she was so concerned about her mom. No, in Swisher's fake universe, none of that happened, and everyone reported responsibly except the brain-eating conservatives at Fox News who were corrupting her helpless mother.
The Democrats and the media mob are working overtime to ensure the virus brings down Trump's presidency and torpedoes his reelection. But his handling of this crisis, in fact, has been his finest moment. Can you imagine if Sleepy Joe Biden were in charge of the response? They'd trot him out once a week to mechanically read a dumb speech off a teleprompter, and meanwhile no one would have any clue who was really calling the shots. With Trump, it's crystal clear who's in charge. And if you look outside the mainstream media, it's also clear how incredibly effective his response has been.
When I began writing this book the coronavirus had not yet reached pandemic proportions, but the American left's rapid acceleration toward socialism had long since begun. While President Trump's America-first, capitalist agenda was making great strides in beating back this socialist menace, the national emergency fed the left's enthusiasm for an expansion of federal powers. They eagerly exploited the crisis to try to cram their massive leftist agenda down our throats, including a smorgasbord of transformative Green New Deal items that had zero connection to the virus. Nancy Pelosi even said the coronavirus should open the door to adopting a universal basic income.
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Their response to the crisis should have focused on saving lives and minimizing the economic damage, but it only whet their appetites for more federal control over our money and our lives.
As the virus was approaching peak levels in America, with hundreds of thousands being infected and tens of thousands dying, President Trump urged governors to take charge of their own states, assuring them that the federal government would provide adequate production and stockpiling of equipment for distribution to the states as needed. Some criticized Trump for being too authoritative while others were demanding he be more so. Though Trump threatened to put the federal hammer on certain recalcitrant companies to up their production
of certain supplies, the threats themselves were usually effective without further action, and throughout he assured Americans he strongly preferred to defer to the governors to manage their own states.
So even during a declared federal emergency, President Trump's conservative instincts guided him to resist exercising excessive powerâand this applied not just to management of the medical supply chain but also to decisions to shut down and reopen economies, which he largely left to the discretion of the states. While the success of Trump's approach validates our federalist constitutional structure, Democrats will argue that only the federal government could keep the nation financially afloat during this period, and that this proves the glories of central planning.
The left will look back on this dark period as evidence of the wonders of federal power without lamenting the loss of individual liberty that always ensues. Conservatives, by contrast, will regard it as a time that conclusively shows that the American private sectorâsmall and large businesses, individual entrepreneurs, manufacturers and industries, and white- and blue-collar workers throughout the landâis the lifeblood of the American economy; not the public sector, which creates no wealth on its own. Conservatives will reflect with pride on the American spirit and the essential role of the private sector in ramping up production to meet government needs. They will celebrate Americans' eagerness to reopen the economy and resume their lives as proof of their dedication to liberty and their precious constitutional rights. Though President Trump has been given little credit for this, the virus exposed America's precarious dependence on foreign nations for necessary essentials and vindicated Trump's long-held determination to restore America's self-sufficiency as a manufacturing powerhouse.
You get the point. The left is relentless in pushing their extreme agenda. They were horrifyingly committed to statism before the virus; they are even more so today. You can count on it, which makes this year's presidential and congressional elections exponentially more important than they already were. The left has now fully unmasked
itself. The American electorate will face a clear choice in November between those who love America and want to protect it, and those who resent it and want it to become another failed socialist state. The Democrats' media machine may try to downplay the party's extremism, but there's no longer any denying it, as I've shown throughout these pages.
Prior to the virus, we watched Democrats and the media deny the spectacular success of the American economy under President Trump. Their message during the post-virus recovery is predictable: they'll say the economy was a disaster waiting to happen and the virus just hastened the inevitable. Or they'll admit that there were signs of growth but that they benefited only the richâdespite all the evidence to the contrary. But we can't let them get away with it.
No matter how much devastation the virus caused, it in no way erases Trump's phenomenal economic record. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to absorb those losses. This makes resuming his agenda even more important going forward. Just as he led the fight against the virus, he has been leading the fight to unleash our economy once again.
President Trump knows America can recapture its economic vitalityâand he leaped into action to prove it. Having fulfilled his campaign promises on economic growth and demonstrated decisive crisis leadership, hasn't he earned our trust? Having resurrected the American economy when ill-informed economic policies had driven it into the dirt, how much more so will he lead us to recovery?
Not only must President Trump's economic agenda be reinvigorated, but his contagious spirit of hope and optimism is every bit as essential. His patriotism, his love for the American people, his faith in the American worker, and his unwavering belief in the free market are indispensable to America's recovery.
