In this photo released by Xinhua News Agency, Chinese President Xi Jinping visits the Chuanshan port area of the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in east China’s Zhejiang Province, Sunday, March 29, 2020. Authorities in China are working to restart its industries as number of new coronavirus cases and deaths fall in the country. (Ju Peng/Xinhua via AP)

For the last two or three weeks, you couldn’t visit any of the mainstream media without being told that, thanks to the incompetence of #OrangeManBad, the United States now had more Wuhan virus cases than did Communist China. The not-very-subtle message was that, yes, totalitarianism is bad but sometimes killing people to make them do what the bureaucracy demands of them is warranted. Now, our Intelligence Community, in a…my gosh, I can’t believe I’m keyboarding this inanity…secret report reveals that…I’m dying…the ChiComs lied.

China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.

The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.

And not just a tad bit fake, orders of magnitude fake.

If this is what we employ the Intelligence Community to do, I’d like to go on record as demanding we shut the entire place down and give hardworking Americans a refund based on what we’ve paid for this collection of goons and doofuses for the past decades. The falsity of the numbers has been in been obvious from open source reporting and empirical observations for over a month.

The reality is that the Chinese probably neither know nor care about the extent of the pandemic, what they do care about is controlling the message. Chinese secret police are not disappearing critics because they rounded a decimal the wrong way, they are offing them because the told a tale at odds with the party narrative (oddly enough, that is basically what happens to you on Twitter if you contradict the Democrat party line on the Wuhan virus; our colleague Nick Arama’s Twitter account was shut down for calling bullsh** on some Obamanaut who was telling verifiable lies).

The Intelligence Community presence in China, which was gutted by a ChiCom mole thanks to the stupidity of senior CIA officials, is, quite honestly, incapable of doing much more in the way of gathering information on the Wuhan virus than reading newspapers and social media from Chinese nationals who have managed to evade government censors. That the Chinese lied is not surprising, what is shocking is that it has taken our Intelligence Community three-and-a-half months and untold millions of dollars to produce a secret report that was intuitively obvious to anyone who was not an editor at CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS/PBS/MSNBC/Washington Post/New York Times.

The second observation here is that our national media, out of malice, stupidity, or treachery (or some combination thereof) deliberately spread Chinese propaganda on a scale not even imagined possible by the Russians in 2016. Whether the purpose was just to get clicks or to damage the Trump administration in the middle of a crisis is immaterial. The fact remains that any outlet who parroted the line that we had more Wuhan virus cases than the Chinese based on data produced by China acted as an agent of a foreign power against the interests of the United States.