Rep. Dan Crenshaw Skewers Media Coronavirus Hypocrisy

There's a lot of quotes out there from media and from, oh here, from pundits, from Twitter users but I only quote people who are well known, either they're well known journalists or they're politicians. But it usually goes along the lines of exactly what you just said you were worried about, which is Trump is more concerned about the stock market than people's lives. That's the typical one you hear and it's certainly been said quite a bit. My fear is that it continues to be said and it prevents us from having a reasonable debate because we truly need to have that reasonable debate. The other thing that frustrates me about these bad faith arguments is that the people saying them made the same claims themselves. February 1st, Washington Post, here's a headline, Get a Grip America, the flu is a much bigger threat than the coronavirus. February 1st, USA Today, coronavirus is scary but the flu is deadlier and more widespread. February 3rd, Washington Post, why we should be wary of an aggressive government response to coronavirus. These same papers are now destroying the president. Oh, you didn't act early enough. You didn't do anything. You have the blood of people on your hands. That's amazing. The reality is, yeah, the hypocrisy is insane. I have so many more. It's just those quotes. Go ahead New York Times. Who says it's not safe to travel to China? This is following President Trump's extremely, at the time, a very bold move to restrict travel from China. Of course, all of these papers and prominent people are now saying something different. I go through a timeline, too, where I look at because, again, my Democrat colleagues are very quick to continue to accuse this administration of just dropping the ball, doing all these bad things. But I have to remind everybody how this is a good one. On the same day that Trump implemented the restriction on travel, this was January 27th. And then they announced the ban on travel as well as the task force. January 31st, the Trump administration implemented the restriction on travel. January 31st. And also declared it a public health emergency. On that same day, Nancy Pelosi promoted a bill called the No Ban Act, which would limit the president's ability to impose travel restrictions. So you just can't say that this guy wasn't acting in the public's best interest and then have facts like this when I do remember this, too. And I pointed this out at the time because a lot of people were not talking about coronavirus in February. And on February 28th, which is a few days before February 28th, the Trump administration asked for $2.5 billion from Congress to combat the spread. So that was money that had already been spent by HHS, by CDC that needed to be reimbursed. So the Trump administration has already been dealing with this. And they're like, hey, Congress, we need more money. We need more supplemental funding. He got slammed. I don't know if everybody remembers this, but he got destroyed. He got told he wasn't taking it seriously. Why isn't he asking for more money? President's response to that was, OK, fine, give me more money. Like I'm just write something. That week, we voted on on the House floor. We didn't vote on more money. OK, they had days to give more money because this was earlier in the week. We actually voted on that week, which was 2339, which is reversing the Youth Tobacco Epidemic Act. That was a bill to ban flavored tobacco. According to House Democrats, things like hookah, grizzly wintergreen, which is maybe what I might like, is now illegal. It never got into law, of course, because it never went through the Senate. But I want people to understand, like, I'm not I'm not blaming Democrats either because there was a lot that we all just didn't know. And I just want I just want to point these things out because it's important to give each other to grace to be like, hey, not everybody knew what was happening. It wasn't until early March that it was exploding as a virus in Iran and Italy and South Korea. These things happened. And it wasn't it wasn't clear that there should be massive, massive lockdowns of society. Those are very bold moves. And it's so easy to have this 2020 hindsight and and act holier than now and point fingers. But it's it's highly disingenuous. And I built this whole timeline out to show it. And I also point out that the timeline can end. You know, from here on out, we could just we could just give each other some grace and solve these problems together because it will be very easy to blame each other for the deaths of Americans no matter what the decision is. It will be easy because the counterfactual is impossible to prove. And the fact that it's so easy, that political opportunism is so easy, is is what worries me the most. And like we have to have those conversations, though, about reopening society and when to do it. And we have to have the conversations about this political opportunism and shaming it and calling it for what it is and really being honest with those quotes from The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today and letting people know, no, we didn't know what this was. We didn't see it coming. And when it was coming, we were real confused as to what the consequences are going to be. And we're also not getting honest data out of China. Right. China China is just they are not honest about the body count. They're not honest about any of it. We don't really know what happened over there. The version that we're getting is got holes in it. Oh, yeah, let's talk about that. I did find the quotes that I told you I had. OK, sure. They're from people like Jen Rubin, like CNN. So Jen Rubin, Trump death toll equals Trump dead lives that would have been spared had he acted on warnings. The rest of victims, the rest are victims of Trump's stupidity and narcissism. This is from a prominent Washington Post columnist. Again, I'm not choosing random Twitter users. You know, from The New York Times, President Trump was so focused on fabricating threats involving Central American caravans that he was oblivious to the real threats. So again, I could keep reading. I have a bunch.