The New "Red Scare": Big Business Cashes In

SHORT TAKES: The Phony Border Crisis; "Red Scare" Part II--The Immorality of the Cuba Blockade; Who Knew? The Tax System Is Racist

LONG TAKE

These days, you can’t go through a single day without reading some traditional media new tidbit that fans the flames of the new “Red Scare” menace: China.

One day it’s the economic competition from China. The next day it’s the military threat China poses. And, then, we have the most recent kerfuffle pinning the eruption of COVID-19 on an escaped virus from a lab in China.

This is dangerous stuff, people. The world lost countless lives and mountains of money that could have been used for human needs because of the mindless decades-long Red Care-generated Cold War (and I write this on the birthday of one of the long-time promoters of the Red Scare, one of the great war criminals of the 20th Century, Henry Kissinger). Here we go again. And this time with the added heavy dose of racism thrown into the cauldron.

It’s helpful to understand all of this by, if possible, shedding oneself of—or, at least, putting aside—some mistaken fealty to “American Exceptionalism”, the notion that so…