New York Post - 27.08.2019

New York Post, Tuesday, August 27, 2019

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RESIDENT Trump got slammed by all sides for suddenly escalating

his economic war with China on Friday. But for Americans who have

lost a family member or friend to the Chinese-made street drug fen-

tanyl, Trump’s harsh pivot is the right move.

He hiked tariffs on Chinese goods, labeled President Xi an “enemy” and

told US companies manufacturing in China to pull out. Wall Street went

into a tailspin, and partisans called Trump “unhinged.”

By Monday, Trump changed his tone, in response to friendly overtures

from Beijing. But the reality is that harsh words and economic threats are

what’s needed. China has been waging chemical narcotic war against

Americans for several years, flooding our neighborhoods with poison.

In the last three years alone, fentanyl and similar synthetic opioids man-

ufactured in Chinese labs have

killed some 79,000 Americans.

That’s more than the American

combatants killed in Vietnam, Af-

ghanistan and Iraq combined. And

like those combatants, most fenta-

nyl victims are young.

Chinese-made narcotics started

showing up on our streets in 2013,

according to the Centers for Dis-

ease Control and Prevention. Each

year, overdose deaths soared, but

the Obama administration never

confronted China to stop its

deadly assault.

Trump is fighting back. Instead

of soldiers and bullets, he is using

tariffs and other economic sanc-

tions. How civilized of him. “We’re

losing thousands of people to fen-

tanyl,” Trump tweeted. “This is

more important than anything else

that we’re working on.”

Trump explained on Friday that

China’s refusal to curb the flood of

fentanyl is a major reason for the

tariff hikes. Outraged by the tens of

thousands of deaths caused by Chi-

nese-made fentanyl, Trump

tweeted “President Xi said this

would stop — it didn’t.”

In fact, China is refusing to

cooperate with US law enforce-

ment. Federal authorities have

indicted three Chinese drug king-

pins who manufacture fentanyl

and fentanyl ingredients and mar-

ket the lethal drugs over the inter-

net to Americans. China won’t

extradite the accused to America

and instead is allowing them to

continue to operate freely.

Trump’s critics, like Bryce Pardo

of RAND Corporation, claim get-

ting tough with China is futile, be-

cause China doesn’t have the

inspectors and law enforcement to

shut the poison factories. That’s

nonsense. A country with the bru-

tal totalitarian apparatus to enforce

a one-child policy — which China

did for years, dictating what went

on in the bedroom — can control

what gets sold on the Internet and

put in the mail. China’s synthetic

opioid factories typically employ

hundreds of people seated at Inter-

net terminals, openly selling their

lethal wares.

The Obama administration, and

many Democrats even now, insist

the right strategy is to fund drug-

treatment programs and expand

Medicaid, curbing the demand for

killer street drugs instead of cut-

ting off the supply.

Actually, we need to do both —

attack the supplier and treat the ad-

dicts. In war, you don’t stop fight-

ing the enemy while you are ban-

daging the wounded.

For years, the United States

Postal Service has been the Chi-

nese drug dealers’ shipping

method of choice. The feds did

nothing until Congress passed a

law in 2018 requiring that every

package from China be labeled

with the content and origin. Still,

only about 100 of the 1.3 million

international packages coming in

every day actually get inspected by

Customs and Border Protection.

Friday, Trump tweeted: “Ordering

all carriers to SEARCH FOR AND

REFUSE all deliveries of fentanyl

from China.” A daunting task.

Some of the Chinese fentanyl

supplies are actually shipped to

Mexico, then smuggled across the

southern border to the United

States. Inspecting packages at that

border for fentanyl, a congressional

report concluded, is like “finding a

needle in a haystack.”

Trump knows that stopping the

drugs on our border is less likely to

succeed than stopping China from

sending them.

Meanwhile, Monday morning

Trump announced that Chinese of-

ficials had called their US counter-

parts Sunday night and said, “Let’s

get back to the table.”

Will Trump’s hard-line stance on

trade stop the drug massacre on

America’s streets? It’s possible.

Trump said Monday morning,

reflecting on China’s change of

tone, that the Chinese “understand

how life works.”

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieu-

tenant governor of New York.

Trump’s Defending Us

From Xi’s Narco-War

BETSY

McCAUGHEY

T

HE New York Times, an orga-

nization devoted to gathering

and publishing information,

doesn’t want others to gather

or publish information inconve-

nient to it.

A group of Trump-supporting

operatives has been finding and

archiving old social-media post-

ings of Times employees and other

journalists for use in the ongoing

brawl between the president and

the press.

There’s no indication that this

is dumpster-diving rather than an

effort to scour readily available

sources for stupid, embarrassing

or offensive things that journal-

ists have said publicly under their

own power.

The Times broke the news of the

campaign in an alarmed-sounding

report. It related that “the material

publicized so far, while in some

cases stripped of context or pre-

sented in misleading ways, has

proved authentic, and much of it

has been professionally harmful to

its targets.”

It isn’t clear what makes this dif-

ferent from what happens in our

public life... every... single... day.

Head-hunting based on past of-

fenses, real and imagined, is the

norm, indeed one of the Left’s fa-

vored forms of ideological combat.

Nonetheless, the press and its pro-

gressive allies act as though the First

Amendment is being endangered if

journalists apologize for past things

they’ve written or — depending on

the decisions of their own organiza-

tions — get cashiered for them.

“The goal of this campaign is

clearly to intimidate journalists

from doing their job,” thundered

Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger,

“which includes serving as a check

on power and exposing wrongdo-

ing when it occurs.”

A spokesman for CNN went fur-

ther, saying that when government

officials, “and those working on

their behalf, threaten and retaliate

against reporters as a means of

suppression, it’s a clear abandon-

ment of democracy for something

very dangerous.”

The MSNBC host Joy Reid

tweeted (then deleted), “Welcome

to the age of digital brownshirtism.”

This is the usual hysteria yoked

to the usual foggy thinking. The

First Amendment is an important

protection of press freedom. Yet

nothing in it protects members of

the press from criticism, let alone

criticism over things they have

written. Such criticisms are exer-

cises of free speech in response to

other exercises of free speech —

i.e., public debate.

If the Times and others don’t like

the weaponization of foolhardy

and untoward social-media post-

ings, they can start pushing back

against it across the board.

The left-wing organization Me-

dia Matters exists to publicize (al-

legedly) controversial statements

by conservative media figures

toward the end of getting them

fired or ushered off the air. If

re-circulating the past tweets of

employees of liberal news organi-

zation is undemocratic, why isn’t

the work of Media Matters also

dangerously authoritarian?

The Times may say that it won’t

be “intimidated,” but it has readily

surrendered to such pressure

from the Left. The paper pulled

the plug on its hiring of tech

writer Quinn Norton last year

when it emerged she had tweeted

offensive terms about gays and

blacks, albeit sardonically.

The hounding of conservatives

isn’t considered beyond the pale;

it’s considered sport. Much of the

Left would be rendered practically

mute if it weren’t braying for peo-

ple to be fired.

When The Atlantic had the

temerity to hire my colleague

Kevin Williamson, a fearless and

brilliant libertarian controversial-

ist, seemingly every liberal outlet

in the country joined in the

pile-on. Williamson’s hiring was

swiftly revoked, with none of his

critics detecting a threat to democ-

racy in the episode. (Williamson

has written a keen book about his

experience, “The Smallest Minor-

ity: Independent Thinking in the

Age of the Mob Politics.”)

I think it’s a bad idea for either

side to rummage through old

social-media postings and writings

looking for firing offenses. It’s an

inherently punitive project and

often an unfair one (no one is the

sum of their tweets). But the rules

of this game were established by

the Left long ago. It should either

change them — or stop whining.

Twitter: @RichLowry

The Hypocrite Times

rich

lowry

POSTOPINION

‘

Fentanyl manufactured in Chinese labs

has killed some 79,000 Americans.

’