By the way, since the left goes absolutely nuts when Trump calls the virus, the "Chinese Virus" or "Wuhan Virus", will they be calling the LA Times, "racist' for referring to this is the "Spanish Flu" ?
I won't hold my breath.
Whelp, number one "Spanish" is not and has never been a race, so that's a non-starter. "Spanish" is a nationality (or a language). And in the case of so-called "'Spanish' Flu" entirely disingenuous. It didn't come from Spain at all, actually it most likely came from Kansas. The only reason it got called "Spanish" was that Spain was the only major affected country that reported its numbers honestly, while Britain, France, Germany and the US all LIED about it. Seems a flu pandemic was thought to be bad for the business of war, so this is a case of literally blaming the victim.
Food for comparison thought in other ways too. Fascist President Wilson bubbled up his own Ministry of Information ("Committee on Public Information") to sanitize the news (but not the populace) and put down reports about it. Wilson himself contracted the virus, and lied about it.
>> CPI staffers cranked out press releases, often republished word-for-word in newspapers around the country, that ginned up support for the war effort and sugarcoated the situation at home.
The consequences of this campaign would be an unknowable number of American lives. In Philadelphia,
newspaper editors wary of disloyalty accusations avoided publishing doctors’ warnings about the public health risks of an upcoming parade. Within 48 hours of the event, thousands in the city fell sick with Spanish flu,
but public officials continued to insist it was business as usual. “Bodies remained uncollected in homes for days,” researchers at the
National Academy of Sciences write, “until eventually open trucks and even horse-drawn carts were sent down city streets and people were told to bring out the dead.”
Despite mounting death figures in Chicago, one local public health official stated he would do “
nothing to interfere with the morale of the community.” A Wisconsin newspaper that factually reported on the danger posed by the flu was targeted for
prosecution by an Army general under the terms of the Sedition Act. <<
Yep, you could actually
go to jail for criticizing the government, First Amendment or no First Amendment. That's why Eugene Debs had to run for President from prison. He was a
political prisoner.
One of the millions of victims of that pandemic was Rump's own grandfather Frederick Trump, who perished in 1918 from it at the age of 49, which makes Rump's
claim to be ignorant that people could die from the flu all the more bizarre.
