On Friday's Real Time show on HBO, host Bill Maher delivered another of his lectures against his fellow liberals on the issue of political correctness as he argued that they should stop trying to shield China in its culpability for allowing the deadly COVID-19 virus to get out by claiming that valid criticisms of China are racist.
The HBO host listed a significant number of times that serious diseases have been named after the geographic locations from which they originated, and several of the viruses that have come from China over several decades.
Maher's commentary came at the end of the show's regular "New Rules" segment. The HBO host began:
You can't yell at someone for breaking a rule you just made up. Scientists -- yes, scientists, who are generally pretty liberal -- have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time. Zika is from the Zika Forest -- Ebola from the Ebola River -- Hantavirus, the Hantan River. There's the West Nile Virus and Guinea Worm and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and, of course, the Spanish Flu. MERS stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome -- it's plastered all over airports, and no one blogs about it. So why should China get a pass?
He then read a tweet from California Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu who complained about giving COVID-19 a name that identifies it with China. Lieu wrote: "The virus is not constrained by country or race. Be just as stupid to call it the Milan Virus."
Maher then shot back:
No, that would be way stupider because it didn't come from Milan. And, if it did, I guarantee we'd be calling it the "Milan Virus." Jesus f**king Christ, can't we even have a pandemic without getting offended? When they named Lyme Disease after a town in Connecticut, the locals didn't get all ticked off.
After noting that China's wet markets are being allowed again even though it is believed that is where COVID-19 originated, the HBO host complained about his fellow liberals:
I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear this (shows image of Muslim women wearing burkas) was just a different way rather than an abhorrent human rights violation. It's not racist to point out that eating bats is bat s*** crazy.
He then quoted from researchers at the University of Hong Kong who predicted that such a pandemic would happen some day, and quoted Dr. Anthony Fauci calling for the wet markets to be banned.
Maher soon insightfully pointed out that, if China had intentionally caused the deaths of so many Americans, the U.S. would go to war with them, but that liberals nevertheless are more fixated on fears that just criticizing China is racist.
Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Friday, April 10, Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO:
Real Time With Bill Maher
4/10/2020
BILL MAHER: You can't yell at someone for breaking a rule you just made up. Scientists -- yes, scientists, who are generally pretty liberal -- have been naming diseases after the places they came from for a very long time. Zika is from the Zika Forest -- Ebola from the Ebola River -- Hantavirus, the Hantan River. There's the West Nile Virus and Guinea Worm and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, and, of course, the Spanish Flu. MERS stands for Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome -- it's plastered all over airports, and no one blogs about it. So why should China get a pass?
Congressman Ted Lieu tweeted: "The virus is not constrained by country or race. Be just as stupid to call it the Milan Virus."
No, that would be way stupider because it didn't come from Milan. And, if it did, I guarantee we'd be calling it the "Milan Virus." Jesus f**king Christ, can't we even have a pandemic without getting offended? When they named Lyme Disease after a town in Connecticut, the locals didn't get all ticked off. ...
Seriously, it scares me that there are people out there who would rather die from the virus than call it by the wrong name. This isn't about vilifying a culture -- this is about facts. This is about life and death. We're barely four months into this, and the wet markets in China -- the ones where exotic animals are sold and consumed -- are already starting to open. The PC police say it's racist to attack any cultural practice that's different from our own.
I say liberalism lost its way when it started thinking like that and pretended that forcing a woman to wear this (shows image of Muslim women wearing burkas) was just a different way rather than an abhorrent human rights violation. It's not racist to point out that eating bats is bat s*** crazy.
In 2007, researchers at the University of Hong Kong wrote: "The presence of a large reservoir of SARS-CoV-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb."
Dr. Fauci says we should force a global closure of the wet markets because the current crisis is a, quote, "direct result" of them. On Monday, the UN's acting head of biodiversity said the same thing.
So when someone says, "What if people hear 'Chinese virus' and blame China?" The answer is: We should blame China. Not Chinese-Americans, but we can't stop telling the truth because racists get the wrong idea. There are always going to be idiots out there who want to indulge in their prejudices, but this is an emergency. Don't we have bigger tainted fish to fry?
(…)
We can't afford the luxury anymore of non-judginess towards a country with habits that kill millions of people everywhere because this isn't the first time. SARS came from China. And the bird flu and the Hong Kong flu, the Asian flu. Viruses come from China like short stops com from the Dominican Republic.
If they were selling nuclear suitcases at the wet markets, would we be so nonjudgmental? And isn't this pretty close to what they are selling? And the next one could be even worse. If the Chinese military had purposefully infected this country with corona as a bioweapon, we'd be at war with them.
