Cameron, Barr and the GOP want to use China to distract us. Don’t let them.
The day after both Gov. Andy Beshear and state Rep. Charles Booker called on Attorney General Daniel Cameron to investigate the death of Breonna Taylor — killed with eight gunshots in her own bed by Louisville police — Cameron put out a press release.
However, it did not mention Taylor, or yet another police shooting of an unarmed black person, a scourge in this country about which Cameron, as the first black Constitutional officer independently elected in Kentucky, would presumably be concerned. Instead, the Thursday press release announced Cameron was joining 14 other states in “Calling for a Federal-State Partnership to Hold China Responsible for the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
It’s just .... breathtaking. Instead of looking into the hundreds of issues our chief law enforcement officer could be helping Kentuckians with, from police shootings to how to cope with COVID-19 in our prisons, he’s going to investigate China because its government tried to silence experts and downplay the seriousness of the disease? Does that sound familiar?
Not that Cameron is alone. Our own Congressman Andy Barr called for a bipartisan effort to investigate China’s handling of the COVID-19 panic; he’s now serving on such a Congressional task force.
Call the task force what it is: The Great Distraction To Save Donald Trump’s Re-Election. Instead of focusing on the terrible job his administration has done in this pandemic, which has now killed 80,000 Americans, let’s scapegoat one of our favorite targets, China. Cameron and Barr are just doing what they’re told: A Republican strategy memo distributed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, first reported on April 24, stated: “Don’t defend Trump, attack China.” China is now the party line and Cameron and Barr are nothing if not loyal party members.
This feint, from Frankfort to Washington, D.C., attempts to distract us from a lot of important issues we should be thinking about instead.
There’s the fact that Trump followed the same authoritarian playbook as the Chinese government by constantly downplaying the seriousness of coronavirus, documented 44 times at least by the Washington Post, and sidelining experts who warned the public, like Deborah Messonnier of the CDC.
It distracts from the Trump administration’s really criminal response to the virus once it was here, from putting Trump’s unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of what turned into a Wild West show over getting enough supplies, to Trump’s lack of support for governors trying to save their own citizens when he would not.
But more importantly, this kind of propaganda distracts from macro societal issues like widespread economic inequity, our broken healthcare system and a lack of safety nets for the 30 million Americans and more than 700,000 Kentuckians who are out of work.
It distracts us from injustice like the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, who was killed for jogging while black in Georgia.
It allows us to ignore the fact that COVID-19 is attacking and killing black and brown people at disproportionate rates, one more unspeakably cruel injustice against minorities in this country. Preliminary studies by the CDC found that 30 percent of Covid-19 patients are black, despite making up only 13 percent of the total U.S. population. We’re seeing the same numbers in Kentucky. Blacks make up 15 percent of COVID-19 cases, despite being just 7 percent of the population. In Lexington, blacks make up 33 percent of cases while Hispanics are at 11 percent. As of last week, of the 10 people who have died in Lexington, five were black. We could talk about the 200 years of white supremacy that created these healthcare, access and resource problems and what’s needed to solve them, or we could talk about China. Which do you think Trump would prefer?
Daniel Cameron is one small cog in the machine, but given recent events in Kentucky, he should be doing more than political water carrying on abstract issues. His spokesman, Elizabeth Kuhn said that once the Louisville investigation is complete, he will be reviewing it and taking action, but will not comment further.
Taylor’s case could become a national flashpoint on police brutality. As Rep. Charles Booker wrote to Cameron on Wednesday: “History shows us that police killings like this one are disproportionately carried out against people who look like Ms. Taylor, like me, and like you.” Let’s hope Cameron isn’t too distracted by China to give this — and other injustices in his state — his full attention.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 10:09 AM.
