In 1942, America began the Manhattan Project. It was driven by the fear that Nazi scientists were developing an atomic bomb and that Adolf Hitler was prepared to use it. Today, America needs a new Manhattan Project to respond to the reality that China — an enemy every bit as determined to rule the world as the Nazis were — controls the supply of 80% to 90% of U.S. antibiotics. And for those Americans who think the word “enemy” is too strong, the Chinese Communist Party’s media mouthpiece has boasted about that nation’s ability to impose pharmaceutical export controls that would push America into “the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

That media mouthpiece is a state-run agency known as Xinhua. It is now casting China as heroic for containing the virus as long as it did. “We should say righteously that the U.S. owes China an apology, the world owes China a thank you,” an editorial stated. That would be the same China that blatantly lied about when the outbreak began, ignored offers of outside help for weeks, and arrested whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, forcing him to sign a letter saying he spread “untrue speech” about the danger. Li subsequently succumbed to the virus.

In America, succumbing to communist thugs, to the point where loyalty and patriotism have been completely supplanted by the globalist agenda, has now reached catastrophic levels. It’s a catastrophe enabled by a self-anointed “New World Order” elitist class that no longer hides its contempt for ordinary Americans who’ve seen their cities and towns decimated by outsourcing leading to despair, homelessness, massive drug abuse, and now a communicable disease that threatens our entire way of life — even as they are told globalism is a “net benefit” for the nation.

Net benefit? Ordinary Americans were supposed to be mollified by cheap consumer goods, while elitists amassed historically unprecedented levels of wealth. Moreover, those same elitists lectured us about how the nationalist agenda of the Trump administration was akin to Nazism, and that any hesitation to embrace globalism was xenophobic. Even now, despite this being the second virus originating in China (SARs emerged in 2003), our own media insists that referring to COVID-19 as “Wuhan virus,” the “Wuhan coronavirus,” or the “Chinese coronavirus” is racist.

In the midst of a pandemic, it doesn’t get more intellectually or morally bankrupt than that. The hypocrisy is astounding: Many of the same media sources now browbeating Americans for their racism initially used precisely the same terms to describe the virus.

So what changed? Politics.

A media ostensibly concerned with the well-being of Americans is more concerned with undermining a Trump administration that has proved largely antithetical to the globalist agenda. An administration that facilitated the creation of millions of new jobs supposedly impossible to create, because the “new normal” of low expectations professed by the Obama administration was said to be an immutable reality.

And above all else, an administration that finally challenged the odious assertion by both parties that accommodating a totalitarian nation would eventually “democratize” it.

It was all a lie. “Fact is, choosing to invest in China versus the United States is not a simple dollars-and-cents, bottom-line calculation,” explains columnist Curtis Ellis. “Certain ‘externalities’ enter into the equation. Externalities such as national security. Externalities such as the continued existence of the United States. Externalities such as the continued existence of freedom of thought, freedom of religion, and individual liberty in this world. By now it should be crystal clear to anyone but the willfully blind that the communist party ruling China holds and promotes values antithetical to our own.”

Willfully blind? Willfully greedy, stupid, and corrupt is more like it. To the point where the massive theft of intellectual property, the “editing” of Hollywood entertainment, and the coerced silence of NBA players — to name only a handful of examples — is willfully granted in exchange for access to a billion Chinese consumers.

And now, as many people are discovering for the first time, drug companies and their supply chains are an integral part of the sellout. One that has left us as vulnerable as any outright war or terrorist attack could. “I have no doubt,” retired Brig. Gen. John Adams told Fox News, “that they would consider weaponizing their dominance of the pharmaceuticals market if they felt that that would give them an advantage over us strategically.”

The president is attempting to do something about it. On Friday, he declared a national emergency, fast-tracking testing for the virus, enlisting Walmart, Walgreens, Target, CVS, and others to facilitate the process. He is also expected to announce an executive order that will tighten “Buy American” laws that would require federal agencies to purchase American-made pharmaceuticals and medical equipment.

That may be a heavy lift. The last plant in the United States to manufacture the key ingredients for crucial antibiotics like penicillin was Bristol-Myers Squibb, which closed its factory in East Syracuse, New York, in 2004. Even then, American politicians knew of the possible consequences of outsourcing critical drug-supply chains. But even then, as now, national security — because this is all about national security — took a back seat to bottom-line considerations.

“The coronavirus outbreak has been a wake-up call that we must combat America’s supply-chain vulnerabilities and dependence on China in critical sectors of our economy,” stated Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) in response to Trump’s forthcoming order.

Our entire nation has been turned upside down in a way that may prove as deleterious as 9/11 — if not more so — and that’s what it takes to wake up?

And wake up whom? Millions of Americans have borne the brunt of the globalist agenda for decades, and the bet here is the only reason our Ruling Class and its globalist benefactors give a damn this time is because viruses know no class boundaries. Thus, those who long believed they were insulated from every self-serving policy and program they inflicted on the rest of America are suddenly as vulnerable as everyone else.

Regardless, they still have defenders like Joe Biden. The same presidential contender who slammed the Trump administration’s response to the crisis — even as he cautioned Americans not to “fall back on xenophobia” — is the one who told us as recently as May that China is “not bad” and “not competition for us.”

Utterly preposterous. Moreover, like so many others in his party, as well as their media lapdogs, the idea that politics “stops at the water’s edge” in times of crisis is officially dead.

Next November, Americans have a critical choice to make. Between now and then, one hopes the current fear will turn to righteous anger and that a majority of voters will realize the host of contemptible agendas that define globalism — outsourcing, open borders, sanctuary cities, media-generated divisiveness, and hysteria, the crushing boom-and-bust financial cycles, and now, life-altering pandemics (all of which have been promoted as a “reasonable” tradeoff for worldwide “interconnectedness”) — is finally seen for what it truly is: a mortal threat to our constitutional republic.

America will never be completely isolationist. However, going forward it might be useful to embrace a new trade and supply-chain strategy. One as easy as ABC:

Anybody But China.