Abandoned Packard automobile factory, Detroit

Walmart, with Missiles

Ilana Mercer, in hollowed out America

On March 31, the number of Americans dead from Coronavirus stood at 3,900! A mere month on, at the time of writing, 63,801 Americans have perished. American deaths by Covid account for a fourth of the world’s, including those in the undeveloped world. To ignore this Third-World-like specter is to dismiss the dead and the dying. It’s tantamount to Cancel Culture!

China sucks. But if the United States must rely on the Chinese government to keep its citizens safe, then what kind of a micky-mouse country is it? If the American people can be convinced by their government to saddle a foreign power with the responsibility for their existential welfare—what kind of people are we?

China didn’t force the traitors of the American economy to shift crucial production lines to its country and strand Americans without surgical and N-95 masks and medication; homegrown turncoats made that decision, all by their lonesome. Decades ago, the political, corporate and industrial leaders of the West chose to enmesh the fate of their pliable people with that of the vigorous, voracious Chinese.

Like the U.S., another hard-hit region—Northern Italy, so progressive and tony—had swung its tollgates open. Like greedy, northern, Yankee industrialists, Italy outsourced whole production lines to China. Free trade in goods is great. But trade goods, not places. The tollgates were swung open to human trade, or population replacement. Since the Chinese had begun settling in Northern Italy and buying up assets, I hazard that, much like youngsters of King County, in Washington State—local Italian girls and boys have had a hard time affording life in their homeland. And now, their grandparents and parents are dying.

Italy constructed gleaming tarmacs to accommodate the many direct flights to and from Wuhan. Over 100,000 citizens from China moved to Italy. As the Chinese accrued wealth over the past two decades, still more took up residence in Northern Italy, and bought-up Italian firms. See if you can spot the trend. New York City, by Wikipedia’s telling, is home to far and away “the highest Chinese-American population of any city proper.” Courtesy of an Italian strain of Covid-19, the New York metropolitan area has been as badly struck as Italy. In early April of 2020, it was said that “coronavirus was killing a person roughly every four minutes in New York state, and about every six minutes in New York City.” In my state of Washington, the overwhelming majority of Chinese reside in King County and Snohomish County, where the infection was seeded and from where it spread.

The West’s political and corporate leaders, not China’s, opened their borders to the world’s flotsam and jetsam. Agreements to exchange goods and people reflected the choices of these gilded global elites, not those of their people. The sphinx like Bill Gates, we are told, foresaw the pandemic. But he also pioneered the outsourcing of American lives to China (and India). I say “lives,” because, as it has become abundantly clear, in the wake of COVID, the very stuff of life has been outsourced to China. Not mere jobs; but careers, not just some products, but entire production lines; not one or two manufacturing plants, but the means of production.

Engineers who can think hate Bill Gates. America’s best and brightest have done time supervising and titivating squalid, sub-par Chinese factories, when they knew full well that instead of cheap, nasty, and disposable, their colleagues back at home could have delivered classy, attractive, durable and sustainable products and production capability, around which real communities would have coalesced.

Instead, Mr. Gates’ vision has given us transient labor that flits between Wuhan and Washington, for, these “global beasts with their vast balance-sheets” aren’t interested in the kind of economic growth around which authentic, organic, enduring communities congregate. The attitude of American business toward economic growth is rooted not in healthy, community-based practices (stateside and abroad), but in some aberrant economic gigantism; in an economic elephantiasis undergirded by hubris and greed.

Bill Gates, who pontificates about pandemic best practice, was among the power brokers who decided, with his benefactors in D.C., that the “new economy” would hum not in America, but in China and India. And it’s not merely for profit. Tech superstars like Gates are true believers in the borderless, multicultural state. These arrogant CEOs and their minions are social-justice warriors, not just giants of industry. They are cosmopolitans who believe consumption alone makes the world go round. Community? That’s when you press flesh with George and Amal Clooney, at the World Economic Forum in Davos!

To the gilded globalists, America is not a country to be bounded by strictly controlled borders and patrolled and policed against viruses and villains. Rather, Bill Gates’ conception of America is a territory for trade, not a nation – Walmart, with missiles. Whereas China has positioned its cohesive people for success, the American ruling class, Democrat and Republican, have sold their countrymen out. It is American leaders, left and right, who’ve convinced their population that Americans are nothing unless strangers are streaming into their country at a rate of 2 million a year, speaking in tongues and inaugurating wet-markets in New York City. This is who we are, they tell us.

No such thing did the Chinese government perpetrate on its people. It doesn’t welcome immigrants. Several [Chinese] “women vow to leap off the Great Wall rather than marry a foreigner,” reports the Economist, with consternation. Indeed, the Chinese people have no qualms or fear about expressing Han racial superiority, this, as the West embraces a multicultural mess of pottage that is now killing it and consigning us to years of penury. Stupidity is not a virtue.

Ironically, and although almost all reinfection in China involves Chinese nationals, “curbs on foreigners are tightening,” and the “border has been shut to most of them.” Conversely, the American travel ban was nothing more than a rerouting of the Chinese influx to allotted U.S. airports, where thermometers were pointed at foreheads, and tens of thousands of Chinese were sent on their merry way, entrusted to go home and self-quarantine.

The outcome of future pandemics hinges on the American people’s ability to strike fear into the hearts of their leaders, irrespective of party affiliation—a fear that’ll make it impossible for these shiftless characters to shift blame for their failings.

The U.S. government and its proxies would like to gull Americans into blaming China alone for the litany of suffering Americans are enduring. A free people takes responsibility for its own welfare. Federalism dictates that this ostensibly free people delegate certain responsibilities to the state, national and local. This is what the U.S. Constitution compelled. Defined duties have been delegated to government.  Repelling invaders is one of them. Thus the same free people must saddle their own leaders, in D.C and the CDC, with mass deaths ongoing.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has ordered that China be investigated for concealing “information early on about the novel coronavirus.” Fine. There is merit in the allegation and the investigation. But just so long as Americans understand that government committees are where accountability goes to die. Governments create committees to conceal their own culpability. So long as Americans know that the Chinese will continue to settle this country by the thousands, while their relatives back in China supply Americans with essential goods. So long as Americans know that the U.S. State and its corporate cronies do not intend to repatriate life-sustaining supply chains. Hate on the Chinese government if you wish, but hold your own government responsible for hollowing America out like a husk by inviting the word to invade it and infect it.

Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s on Twitter, Facebook & Gab. Latest on YouTube