GOP Rep. Stewart rips Fauci, AOC over China issues

Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart on Monday excoriated Dr. Anthony Fauci and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their seemingly lax attitudes to the security threat Beijing poses to the United States.

Speaking on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show, Stewart first addressed the prospect of a nationwide TikTok ban and lamented that some Democrats, such as Ocasio-Cortez, appeared to oppose such a measure, in part on the basis that former President Donald Trump supported that action.

"AOC, unfortunately, is one of the deep thinkers and policymakers among the Democratic Party, but she's just wrong on it," he said. "And many of her colleagues notice she's wrong. And we've been warning about this for a couple of years."

"I think of it, the reflexive reaction to TikTok because President Trump, of course, wanted to ban it and did so as much as he could," Stewart noted. "And then the Democrats, whatever the president, or the previous president wanted to do, they just instinctively thought that's a bad idea."

The Utah Republican went on to assert that use of TikTok would expose individual user data to the Chinese Communist Party, noting that the app can track personal activity. He went on to label the platform as "emotional heroin," and celebrated growing bipartisan consensus against the platform.

He then segued toward other concerns about China, such as its bioweapons program, with which the Wuhan Institute of Virology had close ties. Stewart accused Fauci of lying about the nature of the WIV's activities and contended that the U.S. ought to cease funding malicious Chinese research. 

On the matter of COVID-19's origins, he suggested that a "seven-year-old" could connect the dots and conclude that the virus leaked from the WIV before excoriating Fauci for professing Chinese innocuousness on the issue despite their efforts to obfuscate the WIV's alleged role.

"Now, we'll never know that because the very first thing that China did was destroy all of their samples of COVID, so that we couldn't compare them," he said. "And if that could prove their innocence, like Dr. Fauci and others have claimed, why in the world, would they have destroyed those samples?

"Why would they not want to preserve those and said, 'Look, WTO and others, compare them and we can-you can prove genetically, you could prove molecularly, that this is not the same virus,' but instead they destroyed them," he concluded. "But once again, the circumstantial evidence is nearly overwhelming that the virus came from the lab."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.