America, Steve Bannon Punk’d You

The article should instead be headlined:

“Former Hong Kong University Post-Doctoral Student And Chinese YouTuber Start False Coronavirus Rumor, Steven Bannon And Fugitive Chinese Billionaire Amplify Message”

-or-
perhaps the more succinct:

“America, Steve Bannon Punk’d You.”

 

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news.yahoo.com

How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation

by Amy Qin, Vivian Wang and Danny Hakim
Friday, November 20, 2020, 7:10 AM CST

Dr. Li-Meng Yan wanted to remain anonymous. It was mid-January, and Yan, a researcher in Hong Kong, had been hearing rumors about a dangerous new virus in mainland China that the government was playing down. Terrified for her personal safety and career, she reached out to her favorite Chinese YouTube host, known for criticizing the Chinese government.

Within days, the host was telling his 100,000 followers that the coronavirus had been deliberately released by the Chinese Communist Party. He wouldn’t name the whistleblower, he said, because officials could make the person “disappear.”

By September, Yan had abandoned caution. She appeared in the United States on Fox News, making the unsubstantiated claim to millions that the coronavirus was a bioweapon manufactured by China.

Overnight, Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Donald Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero. Nearly as quickly, her interview was labeled on social media as containing “false information,” while scientists rejected her research as a polemic dressed up in jargon.

Her evolution was the product of a collaboration between two separate but increasingly allied groups that peddle misinformation: a small but active corner of the Chinese diaspora and the highly influential far right in the United States.

Each saw an opportunity in the pandemic to push its agenda. For the diaspora, Yan and her unfounded claims provided a cudgel for those intent on bringing down China’s government. For American conservatives, they played to rising anti-Chinese sentiment and distracted from the Trump administration’s bungled handling of the outbreak.

Both sides took advantage of the dearth of information coming out of China, where the government has refused to share samples of the virus and has resisted a transparent, independent investigation. Its initial cover-up of the outbreak has further fueled suspicion about the origins of the virus.

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that

America Is Under Attack

FaceBook criticism is nothing new. In fact, there’s an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to it, which began, interestingly enough, in 2007 – a mere two years after the company, under CEO Mark Zuckerberg, settled a lawsuit with brothers Cameron, and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra claiming that he had stolen the idea for the company, which at the time was valued at US$10 Billion. It’s now worth more than 40 times that.

FaceBook’s IPO was May 21, 2012, opened selling at $26.21 per share, and now trades around the $150 mark. The last time it was near that price was June 12, 2017, while the highest it’s ever been was $190.28 on January 29, this year. So this momentary decline is a mere hiccough, or passing fancy of algorithmic computer-based trading, from which humans are largely excluded. FaceBook’s market capitalization, aka 
“market cap” is very nearly $450 billion, which is the total dollar market value of a company’s outstanding shares.

Less than a year later, in 2013, FaceBook was resoundingly publicly criticized for not having protections in place to guard against online stalking, child sexual predators, and bullies after loosening restrictions on

Thinking about @POTUS @realDonaldTrump? Me too.

Recently, President Trump was criticized – and sued in Federal Court – over one of his first Executive Orders in the first days of his office.

More specifically, it was his Executive Order No. 13767, signed January 25, 2017, and published January 30, 2017, entitled as “BORDER SECURITY AND IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT IMPROVEMENTS” which has caused a justifiable stir.
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Search the historical record of Executive Orders:
https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/disposition.html

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Some are all up in arms, again, justifiably so, not merely because of the mass confusion which it has created. In essence, what many have complained about is that many Permanent Resident Aliens (so-called “Green Card” holders) would have been denied re-entry into our United States for a period of 90 days if they were a citizen of, or have visited one of 7 so-called “nations of concern”: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

It should be remembered, however, that the so-called 7 “nations of concern” first began during the Obama administration.

In December 2015, President Obama signed H.R.158, the