The Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro said the mainstream media’s insistence that it is racist to call COVID-19 coronavirus the “Chinese virus” is “the dumbest possible stuff” on his self-titled podcast Thursday. Shapiro’s comments follow President Donald Trump’s verbal spar with a reporter Wednesday in which the president said calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” was “not racist at all.”
“He [Trump] is right about all this; everything he says here is true,” Shapiro said. “It is not racist, it is not culturally insensitive to point out that eating pangolins and bats has externalities and is a bad idea.” While the source of the virus is believe to be a live-animal market in Wuhan, China, the theory that coronavirus originated specifically from “bat soup” in Wuhan, China, as captured in a viral video, is not true.
“China is responsible for all of this,” Shapiro said, referring specifically to the Chinese government. “This hasn’t stopped the media from, in their desperate hatred of Trump, trying to pretend that Trump is a racist for pointing out that China is responsible for all this.”
Even though Shapiro’s criticisms were directed toward the government, such phrasing is discouraged by the World Health Organization, whose director general reasoned that calling it such would stigmatize Chinese people.
“You want to call it the commie virus, I’m fine with that too,” Shapiro said.
Since the global outbreak, hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise.
