One reason the leftist ruling class does not object to authoritarianism is that restrictions do not apply to them. Unlike the deplorable little people, billionaires like Google cofounder Larry Page can travel wherever they please. They are not likely to die because lifesaving medical treatment has been denied in the name of the ChiCom virus, even in a place that has totally succumbed to Covid tyranny like Australia.

While millions of regular people have been financial ruined by pointless lockdowns, WaPo-owning zillionaire Jeff Bezos saw his wealth grow by $billions upon $billions.

Covid has been so good to our moonbat elite, it is no wonder no one in power is willing to let it go. Thanks to the DAISNAID policy of our arrogantly hypocritical rulers, they live free as we endure increasing totalitarianism.

The coming climate lockdowns (see here, here, and here) will similarly crush us while making them still more powerful — unless serious pushback gets underway.

On tips from KirklesWorth and Occam’s Stubble.

The “smoking bat” Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) mentioned has turned up, not at any wet market, but at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and in large numbers, as Sharri Markson reports on Australia’s Sky News:

From the beginning, the West helped make a monster by assisting the ChiComs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The French helped them build it, then were kicked out. US taxpayers apparently helped finance their gain of function research thanks to Tony Fauci. The ChiCom-friendly Democratic Party and its affiliated establishment media have continued to lend the tyrants a hand by suppressing the origin of Covid. But this is not something they can hide forever.

The question now is not so much whether Covid is an engineered bat virus that escaped from this lab, as whether it was intended as a bioweapon, and whether it was released onto the world deliberately.

On tips from KirklesWorth, Dragon’s Lair, Varla, Troy H, and ABC of the ANC.

In terms of people killed, the communist government ruling China is the most malevolent that has ever existed. It killed as many as 80 million people under progressive icon Mao Zedong. It appears to have killed millions worldwide (including over half a million Americans) by creating Covid, releasing it, and covering it up instead of giving warning.

But as Mao’s role model Stalin said, one death is a tragedy; a million deaths are just a statistic. To fully appreciate how evil communist China is, get a personal perspective from Sayragul Sauytbay, who knows a little about the hundreds of concentration camps in which the Chinese Communist Party incarcerates millions of people:

Sauytbay was forced to work as a teacher at one of them, before her release in 2018 and subsequent escape to Sweden.

Near the guardhouse was a torture chamber called the “black room,” from which she heard screams “like the raw cries of a dying animal.”

She recalls seeing chains on the walls in the black room, and chairs with “nails sticking out of the seats” where inmates would be tied down. Torture devices on the walls “looked like they were from the Middle Ages,” including “implements used to pull out fingernails and toenails,” and a spear-like rod “for jabbing into a person’s flesh.” Electric chairs, “iron chairs with holes in the back so that the arms could be twisted back above the shoulder joint,” and other chairs designed to pin victims down lined one side of the room.

As Sauytbay praised the warmth of self-sacrificing patriarch Xi Jinping, her “students” would lose consciousness from what they had endured and fall off their chairs.

One 84-year-old woman Sauytbay remembers was accused of making an international phone call. Despite her denial, the camp guards punished her by ripping out her fingernails.

ChiCom horrors have a modern twist. Some inmates are slated for organ harvesting.

As we learned from Covid, what happens in China does not stay in China. Sauytbay reports having seen classified papers detailing plans for world conquest that are already in their initial stages, Hong Kong having fallen without a peep from the rest of the world. The plans call for the occupation of Europe somewhere between 2035 and 2055.

This threat is credible, because the West has been so turned against itself by leftist politics that it is incapable of fighting back. In their moral degeneracy, many side with the ChiComs against freedom and decency. The entertainment industry offers many examples, including John Cena:

Cena, the professional wrestler and star of the newest “Fast and Furious” movie, apologized to Chinese fans and professed his “love” to China on Tuesday after he faced backlash for calling Taiwan a country during a promotional interview.

Taiwan has been a separate country since 1949. But you mustn’t say so, because the ChiComs plan to annex it. After that comes the Korean peninsula, Japan, the Philippines, Australia…

Cena apologized in Mandarin for a statement he made in an interview with the Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS, where he said “Taiwan is the first country that can watch the film.”

Cena’s bulging biceps are less impressive in light of him groveling before his ChiCom masters in their language, which he did because China is the world’s biggest movie market.

Sports are no better. When Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey expressed support for democracy in Hong Kong, the righteous social justice warrior LeBron James denounced him. China banned NBA broadcasts for a year, costing the league up to $400 million. The NBA will make certain to toe the ChiCom line in the future.

The CCP’s influence extends to the top of our government. Biden’s Big Tech backers engaged in such heavy-handed censorship to suppress the Hunter laptop bombshell because it drew attention to his financial ties to the Chinese regime. Now CNN admits that the Biden Administration has shut down a State Department investigation into Covid’s likely origin inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

The existence of the State Department inquiry and its termination this spring by the Biden administration — neither of which has been previously reported — comes to light amid renewed interest in whether the virus could have leaked out of a Wuhan lab with links to the Chinese military. …

Those involved in the previously undisclosed inquiry, which was launched last fall by allies of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, say it was an honest effort to probe what many initially dismissed: that China’s biological weapons program could have had a greater role in the pandemic’s origin in Wuhan…

The Chinese government is party to the major international agreements regulating biological weapons which prohibit developing, producing, transferring or stockpiling of bacteriological and toxin weapons. The US government has said that it believes China maintained an offensive biological weapons program even after joining the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention in 1984. …

Pompeo put out a statement as the Trump administration was leaving office that said the US had determined collaboration between the Wuhan lab where Covid-19 research has been conducted on bats, and secret Chinese military projects.

Yet we have Dr Fauci apparently funding their gain-of-function research efforts with our money.

The Biden administration’s effort to investigate the origins of the pandemic is primarily focused on rallying pressure and support for the WHO’s investigation to be transparent and fulsome, explained a Biden administration official.

The WHO is largely controlled by the ChiComs. This is why Trump cut US funding to it. Biden immediately restored that funding.

China can accomplish this much dominance just with money. Meanwhile, as our military focuses on wokeness and purging patriots, China already has the world’s largest navy.

On tips from Angel Artiste and ABC of the ANC. Hat tip: Maggie’s Farm.

If we are going to please our leftist overlords by driving expensive electric cars, we are going to need a lot of lithium. This is bad news for the environment — particularly for Tiehm’s buckwheat, a species that could be driven into extinction by lithium mining in Nevada.

From the moonbats at CNN:

Environmentalists say the benefits of Tiehm’s buckwheat could be vast… [B]otanists say they’re impressed with Tiehm’s buckwheat’s ability to thrive where few species can — poor soil that’s full of boron and lithium.

That may turn out to be the plant’s undoing.

Ioneer, an Australian mining company, has said it’s ready to break ground on a lithium mine later this year on the land where Tiehm’s buckwheat grows. Under the barren soils lies 146.5 million metric tons of lithium and boron.

Based on the improbable notion that electric cars will prevent the climate from fluctuating, Biden is blowing $174 billion on electric cars as part of his “infrastructure” looting spree.

Electric vehicles can’t happen without lithium — and a lot of it. Lithium is a critical mineral in the batteries that power electric vehicles. The world will need to mine 42 times as much lithium as was mined in 2020 if we will meet the climate goals set by the Paris Agreement, according to the International Energy Agency. Existing mines and projects under construction will meet only half the demand for lithium in 2030, the agency said.

Better dig up Nevada and hope Tiehm’s buckwheat survives being relocated to someplace where it doesn’t belong. Otherwise, the climate might fluctuate.

Environmentalists shouldn’t shed too many tears for the plant. Its extinction is nothing compared to the environmental havoc that will be inflicted trying to generate electricity for all those vehicles without using fossil fuels or nuclear energy. Bird-chopping wind turbines will have to line the horizon coast to coast.

Fortunately, academia has stepped forward to solve the Tiehm’s buckwheat conundrum. All we have to do is abandon the last vestiges of liberty and submit to Soviet-style central planning:

Dale Jamieson, a[n] NYU professor [who] studies environment and philosophy, said the United States would be better off with centralized industrial planning to help navigate sticky situations like what to do with Tiehm’s buckwheat. …

There’s a risk, he said, of businesses responding to short-term economic incentives without longer-term strategies.

Big Government would never do that. If it did, we would have to worry about massive spending sprees and even the handing out of free money to those who don’t work, which would crush the country under a millstone of debt and potentially cause runaway inflation.

On a tip from Steve T.