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Divided We Stand

Divided We Stand
New book about the 2020 election.

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Bad Coronavirus Messaging

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. The update looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.  Our next book will explain 2020.  Coronavirus has suddenly become a major part of the story.  




The comment echoes a now-debunked myth that the outbreak began after a woman ate bat soup. The misinformation emerged after a video went viral showing a woman eating bat soup for a travel show, however the video was filmed in 2016 and she was not in China.
USA Today reported that the National Council of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders replied to the remarks in a tweet, saying that “there are over 1M Asian Americans in your state. These are wildly irresponsible comments when anti asian hate crimes are on the rise.”
Cornyn’s comments also drew swift criticism from the two Democrats competing to challenge him in November, MJ Hegar and Royce West. Hegar, the former Air Force helicopter pilot, tweeted that Texans “deserve better than racist dog whistles,” and West, the Dallas state senator, tweeted at Cornyn that his “focus should be on how to solve this crisis, not rhetoric and scapegoating.”
Still, when asked whether his comments could be seen as racist toward Asian Americans, Cornyn implied that he didn’t see a correlation.
“We’re not talking about Asians,” he said. “We’re talking about China, where these viruses emanate from, which … created this pandemic.”
“China has been the source of a lot of these viruses like SARS, like MERS and swine flu and now the coronavirus,” he said. “So I think they have a fundamental problem, and I don’t object to geographically identifying where it's coming from.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, swine flu was first detected in the United States in 2009. MERS, meanwhile, was first identified in Jordan in 2012.
In Defying the Oddswe also discuss the role of the media, particularly conservative media.