According to industry reports, Chinese restaurants in the U.S. have suffered a precipitous drop in patronage” since the initial outbreak of coronavirus. Business in some localities is off by a staggering 70%.
The situation is lamentable, as is the downturn in business among many sectors, such as air travel.
But leave it to market analyst and bartender extraordinaire Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to explain why Americans are shunning Asian restaurants. You might suppose it is related to fears of infection, however unfounded, but according to the New York congreswoman there is a deeper more insidious cause.
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She prefaces her remarks with the superfluous proviso “honestly it sounds almost so silly to say.” By now anyone who pays any attention to her at all is aware that everything the emanates from her piehole is too “silly to say.”
So what is her explanation for why “people are literally not “patroning [sic] Chinese restaurants”? Racism, of course. Watch:
Ocasio-Cortez says people are not eating at Chinese and Asian restaurants right now because they are "just straight up" racist about the coronavirus pic.twitter.com/egtpRDEDhO
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) March 11, 2020
Ocasio-Cortez is not the first liberal to use racism and coronavirus in the same sentence. As The Guardian notes:
Senior Republican figures are facing backlash over an apparent effort to label Covid-19 as ‘Chinese coronavirus” — as China accused some US politicians of “disrespecting science” in order to “stigmatize” the country.
It seems like a petty quibble, but the argument is at least logical.
The same cannot be said about Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks. Liberals are no less concerned about contracting the virus than conservatives: If anything they are more so. If one of the precautions they take is avoiding “patroning” a Chinese restaurant, does that make them racist?
