Conservatives who've watched Trump shit the bed, perhaps literally, on coronavrius have found a new angle: That we are underutilizing a powerful weapon against the disease, and that weapon is racism!
The headline of Rich Lowry's National Review column is "It’s not racist to call it ‘the Wuhan virus'" but he seems not at all concerned how Chinese people or people of Chinese descent might feel about it -- his point is more in the time-honored tradition of "How come they can say 'Wuhan' and we can't?"
Such international contention over the name of a virus or disease isn’t new. Syphilis was the Neapolitan disease, the French disease, or the Polish disease, depending on who was naming it. The 1918 influenza came to be known as “the Spanish flu,” although Spaniards called it “the French flu.”
See, liberals, you're denying us the pleasure of making up a fun name for the disease our President is too corrupt and senile to handle, just because it pisses off the Orientals!
Naturally Rod Dreher, who's in a constant state of panic about the bugs these days, is in on this: A New York City science teacher, apparently of Eastern descent, wants to teach her kids not to be racist about it ("Our students have a very limited black-white, and interpersonal, understanding of racism, and I hope the #coronavirus presents an opportunity for us to connect our content to our public health and humanity"), and Dreher suddenly snaps out of his terror to make fun of her:
If there’s one thing teachers should be doing now, it’s using the global pandemic to police the racial thoughts of their students. (But seriously, can you imagine being a grown woman and bursting into tears when one of your middle-school students refers to bat-eaters?)
Of course if someone makes fun of white Southerners around Dreher, he shits his pants.
The best avatar of this nonsense is longtime rightwing crackpot Andrew Klavan, who announced he was calling coronavirus "the yellow peril" because lol libtards. Again, their belief system and representatives in government are revealed by the crisis to be totally inadequate, and their audience includes a lot of people who can't quite choke down another "it's all the liberal media's fault" excuse. So what else do they have but racism? Hope it offers them some comfort when their moms choke on their own phlegm.