Republican Senator Tom Cotton offered some harsh words for The New York Times on Wednesday after they published an op-ed from a Bejiing scientist trashing the American response to the coronavirus. The provocative headline was "My Relatives in Wuhan Survived. My Uncle in New York Did Not."
Chinese neurobiologist Yi Rao complained that while his relatives in Wuhan – the epicenter of the global pandemic originating in China – survived the outbreak, his uncle in New York City – the first American epicenter -- died.
Cotton and other conservatives have expressed amazement that Cotton's op-ed advocating the use of federal troops to quell anti-police rioting forced the resignation of Times editorial page editor James Bennet, while propaganda from foreign dictatorships is published without internal objection.
Explicit Chinese propaganda? No problem, he wrote:
Yi Rao argued the US could have done much more, so effortlessly aligned with the New York Times view that Trump has bumbled everything:
The United States had two months or more to learn from China’s experience with this coronavirus, and it could have done much more to lower infection rates and fatalities. My father is struggling to accept his brother’s death partly, too, because he believes that he could have treated Uncle Eric — that in China Uncle Eric would have been saved.
As the pandemic rages on in the United States and throughout the world, with some smaller outbreaks in China, the United States and China are not collaborating, but competing, in the search for a successful vaccine for the virus and treatment measures for the disease....Now, my father and Uncle Eric have been separated once again. This time that outcome doesn’t speak well of America.
This op-ed also pleased the internal leftist caucus at the Times by veering off the central argument to go on an anti-Bush/Cheney rant in the middle:
I applied for American citizenship and obtained it in 2000. My children were born in the United States.
But then 9/11 happened, and this axis of evil emerged: Dick Cheney (vice president); Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defense); David Addington (counsel to the vice president); John Yoo (Justice Department lawyer and author of the “Torture Memos”). These men were ready to do anything to advance their agenda, imposing their own law — meaning, really, no proper laws and no rule of law — in Iraq, at Guantánamo and elsewhere. And too many Americans went along. That period proved to me that America was not the democratic beacon many of us had thought it to be.
So he renounced his citizenship and went back to communist China! As if that's where you find a "democratic beacon" where the "rule of law" is sacred.
Zachary Evans of National Review pointed out this gave an incomplete picture of Comrade Yi:
The Times did not disclose that Peking University, where Yi teaches, has cracked down on dissent and deepened its ties to the Chinese Communist Party since 2018....
The Times also did not disclose that Yi has been denied a visa to enter the U.S. despite multiple applications since 2016. The reasons for the denials were not given by the U.S. government.
Yi has been harshly critical of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, and has mocked President Trump’s handling of the crisis on his blog on the Caixin website, 40 percent of which is controlled by a state-owned media conglomerate.
“On June 5, 1981, AIDS was reported in the US for the first time,” Yi wrote in one post. “According to the ‘stable genius’s’ logic, shouldn’t AIDS be called American Sexually Transmitted Disease, and HIV the American Sexually Transmitted Virus?”
