Condemning All Forms of Anti-Asian Sentiment As Related to Covid-19
Floor Speech
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Mr. BIGGS. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Madam Speaker, I join in condemning racial discrimination of all kinds. It should never be tolerated. I wish we had the perfect society and everybody recognized everybody in a colorblind way, but what this bill does today is it doesn't address that.
When I heard the chairman of the Judiciary Committee just refer to calling the virus that originated in China the Wuhan prefecture, when I heard him say that this is somehow equivalent to the Chinese Immigration Exclusion Act or somehow equivalent to the Japanese internment camp experience that we had where over 100,000 Japanese were removed from their homes and taken to camps, I said: This really is the woke culture on steroids. This has gone beyond.
If this would have been a condemnation of anti-Asian discrimination, I probably would have been right there signing this. I lived in northeast Asia for 2 years. I speak Japanese. I have traveled extensively in Asia. This doesn't address that. What it does is says: You know what, we want to do something when we are about 6 weeks out from an election. That is what this resolution is about. You can't tell the truth here.
Let's just recite some of the things we know:
The West Nile virus, that is because that virus emerged from the West Nile district of Uganda, 1930.
The Saint Louis encephalitis virus broke out around St. Louis in 1933.
The Japanese encephalitis virus broke out in Japan in 1870.
Coxsackie, New York State; Marburg, Germany; Hendra, Australia, all have viruses named after them.
You will always have the ignorant who act out on racial animus. We condemn that. But let's tell the truth. The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome virus in 2012. We call that ``MERS.''
This week we learned from Chinese virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan that not only did this virus originate in China, but it may have been manufactured and released intentionally by the Chinese Communist Party.
So when the media refers to this as the ``Wuhan virus'' or the ``China virus,'' and other officials, including folks from this party over here, it is not because they have an existing racist sentiment, but it is rather to describe its origination as has been done historically.
This resolution today is even more than a measure to appease the woke and tolerant and politically correct leftists. It is an attack on President Trump and all who support President Trump.
It is a crying shame that you can't take the actual issue that you want to address and address it. You have to expand it that way for political purposes. I urge my colleagues to vote ``no.''
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