What’s Newt Reading; April 3, 2020

Keep Punching, Mr. President By Craig Shirley Newsmax The news cycle perpetuates itself by ending broadcasts of chaos, doom, and gloom with a promise of more chaos, doom, and gloom. “Reporting must beget more reporting,” and hope kills the 24-hour news cycle, causing people to change the channel. So, it’s not surprising that the media has “lionized” the grim predictions of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and “condemned” the rosier predictions of President Trump regarding the coronavirus pandemic. The media and other elites celebrate “dystopia and the dusk of America” while conservatives celebrate “the dawn of America.” FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, and President Trump all share a vision of hope and optimism, understanding that presidents must lead the American people and give them courage. “Trump should defer to the experts and trust their opinions, but he should also keep calling for optimism and hope,” in part to reassure Americans that the coronavirus pandemic will end and that he is fighting for their future. Advancing American innovation, with emergency FDA approval, is on full display in the effort for fast testing for the coronavirus. - Newt Answering the Coronavirus: Exponential American Innovation By The Editorial Board New York Post As the coronavirus continues to devastate the US, American inventors and entrepreneurs are rising to the occasion. Abbott Laboratories, for example, has a new test that is the fastest available at the point of care, capable of delivering a positive result in five minutes and a negative result in under 15. The Food and Drug Administration just gave Abbott, which expects to deliver 50,000 of these tests a day, emergency-use approval. Other companies have developed fast tests that are promising. And this just scratches at the surface. Startup BioIntelliSense, to give another example, has developed a wearable sensor that can measure coughing, temperature, heart rate, and other vital signs and transmit them to clinicians in near-real time. “With the pandemic’s peak still ahead, take some consolation in the fact that innovators’ responses are expanding exponentially, too.” On Jan. 20, the US reported its first case of the coronavirus, while the Senate approved the impeachment resolution. By Feb. 5, if the Senate had approved additional witnesses, the overall parallel outcome would have been disastrous for our country. – Newt Just Two Months Ago, ‘Crisis’ Meant Impeachment By Rich Lowry New York Post The US confirmed its first case of the coronavirus on Jan. 20, when America’s political and media elite were obsessing over Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s just-announced resolution governing the impeachment trial of President Trump. For the next several weeks, as the coronavirus began to spread across the US, Congress and the media were focused on the impeachment proceedings. If the Senate had approved additional witnesses, the trail would have overlapped even more with the outbreak. Indeed, “if the trial hadn’t ended expeditiously, the Senate easily could have been still seeking the testimony of, say, former White House counsel Don McGhan about the details of the non-firing of special counsel Robert Mueller — at the same time everyone expected the administration to be shifting into a war footing against the virus.” Since President Trump entered the White House, national politics has been in constant crisis-mode. Every presidential tweet is a major event. “The epidemic has put in stark relief the pettiness and absurdity of much of what has transpired in our national life since Trump won the presidency.” The virus is the real deal. If you listen to Dr. Birx: The lack of preparedness for COVID-19 falls squarely on China because they likely held back significant data. China’s incomplete data showed the virus trended more like SARS than a global pandemic. – Newt Dr. Birx: Any Lack of Preparation Due to ‘Significant Amount’ of Missing Data From China By Ryan Saavedra Daily Wire White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx indicated on Tuesday that any lack of preparation from American officials on dealing with the coronavirus outbreak happened because they were likely “missing a significant amount of the data” from China. “When you talk about could we have known something different, you know, I think all of us, I was overseas when this happened in Africa and I think when you look at the China data originally, and you said, there’s 80 million people, or 20 million people in Wuhan and 80 million people in Hubei, and they come up with the number of 50,000, you start thinking of this more like SARS than you do this kind of global pandemic,” she said. Birx described how, when she looked at the data from China early in the outbreak, she did not think we would see a global pandemic because of how densely populated the affected area was compared to the number of infections that China reported. “So, I think the medical community interpreted the Chinese data as this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected because I think, probably, we were missing a significant amount of the data” from China, Birx said. China is now using Democrat and left-wing media soundbites as propaganda in their own country. Now is the time for all Americans to be on the same side in this war against the coronavirus. – Newt Chinese Propaganda Is Now Citing US Journalists' and Democrats' Coronavirus Rhetoric By Becket Adams Washington Examiner The Global Times, a state-run Chinese newspaper that publishes propaganda for the ruling Communist Party, released a new video this week that highlighted various American journalists and Democratic leaders who repeated Beijing’s talking point that it is racist to refer to the coronavirus by its country or city of origin. The video features CNN's Chris Cuomo and NBC News’s Richard Engel and also cites Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. A separate video produced by the Global Times highlighted CNN’s Chris Cillizza. “The push to get people to stop referring to as the ‘Chinese virus’ or the ‘Wuhan virus’ is part of a broader propaganda campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to absolve itself of responsibility for the spread of the pandemic that spread solely because of its lies and its cover-up.” And American journalists and politicians took their talking points straight from Beijing.

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