Kaiser Wilhelm II did not originate the term “Yellow Peril,” but after his “Hun speech” of 1900, he became forever synonymous with it. The German monarch was addressing soldiers who were shipping off to China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, and what he said was so crass—even for the notoriously half-witted, insecure, and capricious heir—that the Prussian foreign office’s official transcript of the speech omitted its most “diplomatically embarrassing” paragraph. “Just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one that even today makes them seem mighty in history and legend,” the kaiser had said, “may the name German be affirmed by you in such a way in China that no Chinese will ever again dare to look cross-eyed at a German.”
One hundred and twenty years later, partisans of Donald Trump—like the kaiser, a “bad-tempered, distractable doofus” who inherited an increasingly precipitous empire—are turning to Yellow Peril rhetoric to rally support for their regime as it faces an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has rapidly emerged as the excuse everyone has been looking for to start a conflict with China—a trend that’s disturbingly spreading beyond Republican politics.
The strategy, such as it is, began early, with Trump congratulating himself for a late-January ban on travel to the United States from China—long after the virus had already arrived stateside, probably from Europe—and his subsequent insistence on calling the contagion “the Chinese virus”or “Wuhan virus,” a telling emphasis on the crisis’s origins over any White House actions against its spread. But in recent weeks, Republican Party hawks have taken the racist football and run with it.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, another folksy war addict cut from nineteenth-century Prussian cloth, has pivoted from his perennial demands for a U.S.-Iran confrontation to issue new demands for a U.S.-China confrontation, citing what he calls Beijing’s “malign, deliberate actions to send the virus around the world.” He was referring to the theory, increasingly popular on the right, that a government-run laboratory in Wuhan developed the deadly virus as a biological warfare agent. There is no evidence that the virus was released from a lab there, intentionally or otherwise. But Cotton’s rampage continued this week, when he proposed a law to bar Chinese students from obtaining visas to study science in America. “If Chinese students want to come here and study Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, that’s what they need to learn from America,” Cotton said Sunday, apparently forgetting that Stratford-upon-Avon is not in the United States. “They don’t need to learn quantum computing and artificial intelligence from America.”
Cotton has plenty of wingnut company. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, a “post-liberal” whose main achievement thus far has been to reintroduce anti-Semitic coding to mainstream conservative political messaging, is spearheading the party’s move to allow Americans impacted by the coronavirus to sue the Chinese Communists “to learn the full extent of the damage the CCP has inflicted on the world.” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who reaches for any fruit that hangs low enough, rolled out a proposal Tuesday to bar the Pentagon from cooperating on productions with Hollywood studios that create edited versions of their films to placate Chinese censors. “The SCRIPT Act will serve as a wake-up call by forcing Hollywood studios to choose between the assistance they need from the American government and the dollars they want from China,” Cruz said in a press release that would fill up any right-wing-buzzword bingo card.
The White House has loaded up its agenda with plenty more anti-Chinese paranoia. In fealty to Cotton’s Fox-friendly conspiracy theory about the virus’s origins, the National Institutes of Health this week halted funding to a half-decade-old program that had studied how coronaviruses can spread from bats to humans. The rationale was that some of the funding might have filtered to a Wuhan virus lab. This has led some Republicans to recalibrate their racist attacks in an absurd about-face: In March, Texas’s John Cornyn blamed “the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that … that’s why China has been the source.” This month, Cornyn shifted from that Yellow Peril thesis to more narrowly suggesting that the Chinese government “unleashed a weapon on the world.”
If all this racism feels orchestrated, that’s because it is. Last Friday, Politico revealed that Senate Republicans were working from a 57-page internal memo guiding them to evade questions about Trump’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis by blaming China. “Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,” the talking points state. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban—attack China.”
All of this is proceeding according to the Steve Bannon playbook. Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and Trump-whisperer who went largely forgotten by the U.S. electorate after he was bounced out of the White House in 2017, always viewed himself as a Bolshevik, someone willing to use a great emergency to build a technocratic dictatorship that operated on behalf of the agitated, propagandized masses. The populist linchpin of this Bannonism-Trumpism has always been xenophobia, and its key object—even more than brown Americans, or global Islam—has been the specter of Chinese dominance, an obsession for Bannon since his youth as a Navy officer.
Though Bannon no longer works at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he continues to bang the “blame China” drum as a means of power consolidation for Trump. “This is about a totalitarian regime, every bit as brutal, every bit as cold-blooded, every bit as tough as the Nazis in the 1930s,” Bannon told Fox News last Sunday. “They’ve got to be confronted.” The same day, he toldTheWall Street Journal “that voters will see a powerful central government as essential as the U.S. moves into a long-term era of confrontation with China, where the coronavirus originated.”
Bannon’s occidentalist acolytes also continue to drive White House decision-making. It’s easy to forget that last year, Peter Thiel—the anti–First Amendment, German-born, South African immigrant billionaire PayPal co-founder, who worked closely with Bannon on an ideological underpinning for Trump’s surprise presidency—dramatically “left” Silicon Valley in 2018 over its “liberalism,” arguing that a glut of Asian-born CEOs had helped Big Tech become a traitorous fifth column for Chinese government influence. Thiel, who still somehow considers himself a libertarian hero in the Atlas Shrugged corporate-titan mold, now has a contract with Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services to track the coronavirus through Palantir, his data-mining and surveillance company, which fits with the racial profiling Palantir has already done for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (As Alexander Zaitchik has written for TNR, Thiel also founded a conservative newspaper at Stanford University, when he was an undergraduate there, that later became a platform for Hawley, the Republican senator; ultranationalism is a flat circle.)
Blaming China is a lovely treat for the Trump administration’s emerging nationwide Freikorps of nativist white men who will protest, under arms, anything from state-level social distancing rules to Roger Stone’s indictment. It also serves the more doctrinaire segment of Trump’s electoral base, evangelical conservatives, who still seek to “open” the Communist People’s Republic of China to the Gospel with the zeal of the Protestant missionaries who descended on that “heathen” land in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps it’s also an attempt to hold onto the votes of American senior citizens, a majority of whom voted for Trump in 2016 and now find themselves unable to avoid the uncomfortable truth that he is a solipsistic dope who is killing people they know.
All of this was alarming enough before Democratic politicians got in the act, too. Mid-pandemic, as the global economy implodes, millions of Americans lose their incomes and employer-tied health insurance, and the virus buzzsaws through the country, Team Trump has succeeded in dragging November election opponent Joe Biden into a pissing match over who’s “softer” on China. Last week, Team Biden pounced on this bait like an emaciated mouse on a rattrap’s soft cheese, releasing a viral ad insisting that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese; he took their word for it.”
This, my colleague Alex Pareene notes, “is what it looks like when a campaign tries to appeal to people it assumes are rabid xenophobes.” Nor is it the exclusive province of Biden’s centrist campaign entreaties; on Tuesday, Democratic Senators Chris Murphy and Ed Markey sent the State Department a letter demanding information on old diplomatic cables that suggested U.S. authorities had concerns about security at one of the Wuhan labs at the center of the coronavirus conspiracy theories. “We still have more questions than we have answers about the origin of this virus,” Murphy told TheWashington Post.
Because we live in this kind of America—where a Democratic senator is just asking questions that just happen to reinforce the right wing’s Yellow Peril conspiracy theories—here is where old media conventions oblige me to insert a “to be sure” paragraph into my analysis to appear even-handed: To be sure, China’s government is totalitarian, anti-transparency, and proven to be fundamentally dishonest toward its own citizenry and global citizens regarding the deadly virus that originated in its borders. And, while scientists say it’s highly unlikely that the coronavirus originated from a lab in Wuhan, it can’t definitively be ruled out until the origin of the virus is discovered (if that ever happens).
None of which excuses these politicians’ bad-faith xenophobia. Trump and his acolytes—and, increasingly, his chief Democratic opposition—are all racing to position themselves as global cops looking for an outside arsonist to prosecute, while Americans are left to put out the fires raging on at home. Rather than making November’s ballot a referendum on Trump’s citizen-killing incompetence, insouciance, stupidity, and caprice, both major-party establishments are engaging in a competition to convince Americans to fear the Yellow Peril and to entrust their leadership with saving them from it. We are free to choose a different kaiser, it seems, but loath to forge a better America.
Opinion: Brad West been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization
Get the latest from Vaughn Palmer straight to your inbox
Published Apr 22, 2024 • Last updated 2 hours ago • 4 minute read
Article content
VICTORIA — Port Coquitlam Mayor Brad West fired off a letter to Premier David Eby last week about Allan Schoenborn, the child killer who changed his name in a bid for anonymity.
“It is completely beyond the pale that individuals like Schoenborn have the ability to legally change their name in an attempt to disassociate themselves from their horrific crimes and to evade the public,” wrote West.
Advertisement 2
THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account.
Get exclusive access to the Vancouver Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on.
Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists.
Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists.
Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.
SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES
Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada.
Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account.
Get exclusive access to the Vancouver Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on.
Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists.
Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists.
Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword.
REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES
Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience.
Access articles from across Canada with one account.
Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments.
Enjoy additional articles per month.
Get email updates from your favourite authors.
Sign In or Create an Account
or
Article content
Article content
The Alberta government has legislated against dangerous, long-term and high risk offenders who seek to change their names to escape public scrutiny.
“I urge your government to pass similar legislation as a high priority to ensure the safety of British Columbians,” West wrote the premier.
The B.C. Review Board has granted Schoenborn overnight, unescorted leave for up to 28 days, and he spent some of that time in Port Coquitlam, according to West.
This despite the board being notified that “in the last two years there have been 15 reported incidents where Schoenborn demonstrated aggressive behaviour.”
“It is absolutely unacceptable that an individual who has committed such heinous crimes, and continues to demonstrate this type of behaviour, is able to roam the community unescorted.”
Understandably, those details alarmed PoCo residents.
But the letter is also an example of the outspoken mayor’s penchant for to-the-point pronouncements on provincewide concerns.
He’s been one of the sharpest critics of decriminalization.
His most recent blast followed the news that the New Democrats were appointing a task force to advise on ways to curb the use of illicit drugs and the spread of weapons in provincial hospitals.
Informed Opinion
A daily roundup of Opinion pieces from the Sun and beyond.
By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.
Thanks for signing up!
A welcome email is on its way. If you don’t see it, please check your junk folder.
The next issue of Informed Opinion will soon be in your inbox.
We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again
Article content
Advertisement 3
Article content
“Where the hell is the common sense here?” West told Mike Smyth on CKNW recently. “This has just gone way too far. And to have a task force to figure out what to do — it’s obvious what we need to do.
“In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”
He had a pithy comment on the government’s excessive reliance on outside consultants like MNP to process grants for clean energy and other programs.
“If ever there was a place to find savings that could be redirected to actually delivering core public services, it is government contracts to consultants like MNP,” wrote West.
He’s also broken with the Eby government on the carbon tax.
“The NDP once opposed the carbon tax because, by its very design, it is punishing to working people,” wrote West in a social media posting.
“The whole point of the tax is to make gas MORE expensive so people don’t use it. But instead of being honest about that, advocates rely on flimsy rebate BS. It is hard to find someone who thinks they are getting more dollars back in rebates than they are paying in carbon tax on gas, home heat, etc.”
Advertisement 4
Article content
West has a history with the NDP. He was a political staffer and campaign worker with Mike Farnworth, the longtime NDP MLA for Port Coquitlam and now minister of public safety.
When West showed up at the legislature recently, Farnworth introduced him to the house as “the best mayor in Canada” and endorsed him as his successor: “I hope at some time he follows in my footsteps and takes over when I decide to retire — which is not just yet,” added Farnworth who is running this year for what would be his eighth term.
Other political players have their eye on West as a future prospect as well.
Several parties have invited him to run in the next federal election. He turned them all down.
Lately there has also been an effort to recruit him to lead a unified Opposition party against Premier David Eby in this year’s provincial election.
I gather the advocates have some opinion polling to back them up and a scenario that would see B.C. United and the Conservatives make way (!) for a party to be named later.
Such flights of fancy are commonplace in B.C. when the NDP is poised to win against a divided Opposition.
Advertisement 5
Article content
By going after West, the advocates pay a compliment to his record as mayor (low property taxes and a fix-every-pothole work ethic) and his populist stands on public safety, carbon taxation and other provincial issues.
The outreach to a small city mayor who has never run provincially also says something about the perceived weaknesses of the alternatives to Eby.
“It is humbling,” West said Monday when I asked his reaction to the overtures.
But he is a young father with two boys, aged three and seven. The mayor was 10 when he lost his own dad and he believes that if he sought provincial political leadership now, “I would not be the type of dad I want to be.”
When West ran for re-election — unopposed — in 2022, he promised to serve out the full four years as mayor.
He is poised to keep his word, confident that if the overtures to run provincially are serious, they will still be there when his term is up.
LIVE Q&A WITH B.C. PREMIER DAVID EBY: Join us April 23 at 3:30 p.m. when we will sit down with B.C. Premier David Eby for a special edition of Conversations Live. The premier will answer our questions — and yours — about a range of topics, including housing, drug decriminalization, transportation, the economy, crime and carbon taxes. Click HERE to get a link to the livestream emailed to your inbox.
New York Times reporter and CNN senior political analyst Maggie Haberman explains the significance of David Pecker, the ex-publisher of the National Enquirer, taking the stand in the hush money case against former President Donald Trump.
Comments