Live from Virginia Tuesday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia, WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 PM) Hampton Roads, WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke and Weekdays 6-10 am and 24/7 Stream –  host Fredericks welcomed media personality, Steve Cortes to the program.
During the show, Cortes explained his recent article citing how the media is covering up denying Joe Biden’s xenophobic statements he made in Iowa after President Trump introduced the travel ban on China in response to the coronavirus.
Fredericks: Joining us now Steve Cortes, senior strategy advisor for Trump-Pence 2020. Steve great to have you with us man.
Cortes: Good morning John. Thanks for having me.
Fredericks: Steve, always good to have you on, because we’ve got 49 days until election day, and then of course after that, they’ll be trying to steal it over and over. But that’s for another time. Right now, Steve, I want to talk about the article that you just published the other day that I thought was pretty spot-on, and I was hoping that you could elaborate. You basically said that the media is gaslighting America on Joe Biden’s coronavirus record. Do you want to give us a little insight into that Steve?
Cortes:Â You bet. Absolutely.
Fredericks: Thank you.
Cortes: Looking at the American polls and that the media overall is trying to gaslight America. They are trying to convince us of something that we know isn’t true. Yet they push this myth and lie upon us anyway. And the myth is now because Joe Biden realizes that he has a problem because he harshly criticized Donald Trump’s early decisive actions all the way back to January regarding coronavirus. Here’s the reality. I know you mentioned the Woodward book and what a sham and myth that book is.
The idea that Donald Trump was not taking action and ignoring the coronavirus simply isn’t true. That the facts are that January 31st he put the travel ban on regarding China from the howls of condemnation from corporate media and Democrats including Joe Biden, who that very day was campaigning in Iowa and referred to the travel ban as ‘xenophobic.’ That wasn’t the only time he did it. He did it several times. In my article, I cite two more times when he called his travel ban xenophobia.
However, on Sunday Jake Tapper of CNN was interviewing Peter Navarro, the White House economic advisor talking about the coronavirus response. And Navarro pointed that out and said by the way these are called xenophobic. And Tapper said that I’m going to fact check you, that that didn’t happen. I put it in air quotes fact-checking. He wasn’t fact-checking. When I looked into it I found out that Jack Tapper has been doing this for a month.
He’s been trying to provide cover on this issue. He wrote an article all the way back in April about Joe Biden where he claims that Joe Biden never said what Joe Biden, in fact, did say, and said repeatedly. So in my article, I give the links to the citations. We have to do what the liberals don’t do. Let’s give the actual evidence and provide transcripts.
Let’s give an unedited version of what was said. I did that in my article. I know you do it on the air. Obviously we give the receipts and the proof, unlike the lying liberals. And in this case, it’s important. Look, let’s face it, all the Democrats really have left as far as an issue in this campaign is to try to say that Donald Trump fumbled and that he mishandled the coronavirus.
They don’t have much else to talk about. Let’s face it. So the media is desperate to provide cover for them on that issue. But the reality is that while our Commander in Chief was making really, really tough decisions, banning travel from China and eventually banning travel from Europe as well. Eventually and effectively, John, sealing off the United States borders, which was something that hadn’t been done since 9-11, and making the hard decision that a commander has to make and making them in the fog of war, where a lot of information was coming at him.
Some of it is contradictory. We know that from experts in the field, whether it’s the doctors and scientists or economists. What he did was synthesize all of that information, cut through and made decisions, and he clearly made decisions that protected the American people. That’s the reality. We can’t let Joe Biden or his media allies like Jake Tapper get away with lying to the American people about it.
Fredericks: How do they just make up the fact that he didn’t say the day that President Trump banned travel from China that he didn’t say hysteria or xenophobia? When right here, you have it right in the article. Trump is live, he said it campaigning in Iowa.
And let me just read it to you. He said, ‘In moments like this,’ this is Joe Biden in January in Iowa said, ‘This is where the credibility of a president is most needed,’ as he explains what we should and should not do. ‘This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, hysterical xenophobia, and fear-mongering to lead the way instead of science.’
Cortes: Right.
Fredericks: So how can they dispute that?
Cortes: I know. No rational person could. Here’s the sophistry that they try to use to explain it away. They try to say that he was talking about general xenophobia and that Donald Trump just has an overarching philosophy of xenophobia. That’s ridiculous. The news of the day was clearly was the China travel ban. It was in the news for weeks!
It actually dominated the headlines. It was announced hours before that Joe Biden appearance, and he was talking about that very issue. It’s ludicrous. It’s a complete leap of logic, or really illogic, to presuppose that he was talking about something other than the travel ban. And just to build my case more in the article, and I’m like ok if you don’t accept that, but if somehow you can’t accept that evidence, I’m going to give you two more instances. Both of them are in writing.
So it’s not a slip of the tongue, in writing where he directly responded to the president. And he responded with the term xenophobia. They are dishonest obviously, John. And they want us to suspend our reason. That’s why I’m saying they are gaslighting us. They want us to believe things we know are not true. But we have to hold them to account like Jake Tapper pretends and positions himself as a journalist. He’s not a journalist. He’s an activist who’s masquerading as a journalist.
But we need to pull off that mask to really show who he is. That’s also what I point out in the article. There is nothing wrong with activists, by the way, but I am transparent about it. They are not. People like Tapper and a lot of his colleagues at CNN, and the other legacy news platforms out there both print and broadcast, they should get honest. And honestly, a lot of them belong working for the Biden campaign rather than working for AT&T or CNN.
Fredericks: They do work for the Biden campaign, Steve. That’s the problem. They all do work for the Biden campaign. Stephanopoulos, Tapper, and all of these people including Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, they all work for the Biden campaign. They run interference. His offensive line. They play defense. There are two quarterbacks. It’s asinine the nonsense that’s coming out of them every day. There is no credibility there, Steve, whatsoever.
And to even try to defend Biden on this thing, he didn’t mean ban the travel. If he didn’t mean it then he would have said well the president made the right decision. He never said that right? He blasted the decision. Called it hysterical and xenophobia. Where in any of these statements does he say the President is doing the right thing? In fact, he could have said we should probably ban other countries and ban all travel. He didn’t say that either.
Cortes: Right. And I was going to say that he had similar statements about Europe when we banned travel from Europe. And I didn’t include that in the article because I wanted to stay focused on what Jake tapper and Peter Navarro were talking about China-specific. But he said similar things about Europe, believe it or not. I guess somehow the President is xenophobic because you are European? That’s a new one. That he hates Norwegians or something?
But my point is that Biden, it’s easy to sit in the cheap seat and take potshots at a leader who is in the middle of a biological war, and that is the reality. We were hit with an epidemiological Pearl Harbor, and it came from the Chinese Communist Party. Donald Trump is not responsible for the virus. Neither is Joe Biden. Neither is any American. The Chinese Communist Party are the only people on earth who are responsible for this tragedy. It could have been adverted. It could have been contained to Wuhan.
If that wasn’t possible, and if they were being transparent with the world and being honest, we at least would have been better prepared to deal with it earlier. We would have known far more about the scientific basis of it. Instead, they lied. They obfuscated. They deceived. And they knowingly deceived the world. And I’m not talking about whether or not it was manufactured. We don’t know those details. We will someday I’m sure. Regardless of how it emanated.
What we do know is that the Chinese very early on, at least in December if not earlier, they knew that they had human to human transmission in Wuhan, and they sealed off Wuhan from the rest of China. They protected Beijing and they protected Shanghai.
They did not protect the rest of the world. They allowed citizens of Wuhan to travel all over the world. To Milan and to New York. Everywhere. And they knowingly infected the world and ended up crashing the global economy. CCP has to pay a price for that.
Listen to the full show here:
