Political correctness is not just harmless virtue-signaling navel-gazing by a bored “elite” first-world populace. It is both a weapon and a disease that kills.

On January 31, on a day when the entire national press corps was fully focused on unserious impeachment theater, President Trump declared a national health emergency and implemented a travel ban to and from China.

Apparently unhappy that Trump wasn’t curled up in the fetal position, all the usual suspects on the left screamed bloody murder, convinced he was trying to distract from their important issue. Only a couple countries followed suit, since most were afraid they would be labeled as xenophobic or branded with the dreaded scarlet R.

Joe Biden called it “hysterical xenophobia.” He’s still thundering about Trump’s xenophobic bans during his occasional lucid moments.

Yet, this single action bought incredibly precious time, perhaps the most valuable commodity when trying to defend citizens from this virus.

It is the reason we aren’t already like Italy or Spain, societies that have been wrecked. It gave us time to observe and study the disease and to implement the best defensive measures. It drove home the critical importance of social distancing as the single most important step in slowing its spread.

It also bought time to overcome our bloated and ineffective bureaucracy while marshalling private industry.

Quite simply, putting American lives first while shrugging off political correctness saved many lives, the number of which we will never truly know.

Even the ridiculous controversy over the name of the illness is an ode to political correctness. It is important to identify this illness with its Chinese origins for the already clear reason that it makes it that much harder for Chinese, Russian, and Iranian propaganda blaming the United States to take hold.

When justifying endless funding for nonsense programs, liberals are quick to claim that if their favored program saves just a single life, it justifies the cost. But political correctness killing thousands, or even millions? That’s just fine.

This is one of many examples where political correctness produces a lethal outcome. The same dynamic is at work in the immigration debate.

There is nothing racist about enforcing borders or building a wall. This type of thinking aids power-hungry Democrat politicians eager for new votes at any societal cost, while paralyzing opposition. It helped facilitate the rise of MS-13 and other dangerous gangs who have done so much damage near where I live in northern Virginia and led to a significant increase in violent crime.

There are plenty of Kate Steinles out there, whose precious American lives were sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

Another important story playing out even as the Wuhan flu sucks all oxygen out of the room is Turkey’s attempt to flood Greece with Syrian migrants, which has created a border crisis.

T urkey knows they have Europe over a barrel on this issue since European countries have been unable to articulate why they don’t want massive numbers of new Muslim migrants flooding across their borders, nor have they taken the necessary actions to stop it. It’s a form of blackmail since they know Europe will provide concessions to prevent another flood of immigrants they cannot and should not handle.

For Europe, the train has already largely left the station. Islam is there in force and growing, largely because political correctness hampered any meaningful response even after the negative impacts on culture and society were becoming obvious to everyone.

It is going to get exponentially worse as the demographics shift dramatically in the years ahead.

I found it interesting when Dr. Anthony Fauci commented at a press conference on the virus, “We would like the country to realize that as a nation we can’t be doing the kinds of things we were doing a few months ago.” He’s right, of course.

But Europeans have long been changing their behavior permanently to account for their changing societal math. When I lived in Germany in the 1990s, there were regular and fantastic festivals and communal gatherings.

When I returned twenty years later, there were noticeably fewer festivals and they weren’t as cheery or heavily attended and usually involved far more security and active screening.

What had changed? Could it be incidents like that in which a terrorist drove a truck through a Berlin Christmas Market? The vibrant and different European cultures had also taken on a drab sameness.

If a brutally contagious disease that kills a small percentage of people is going to change society’s behavior in the short-term (and it should), then a far higher percentage of radicals in a country’s Islamic community is certainly going to change behavior and culture, particularly as the overall numbers grow in society.

Even if 90% of that population were perfectly peaceful and wonderful citizens, the math would still be staggeringly bad.

And yet noting the implications of this within society is considered off-limits. So, people die. Or they learn to live in their houses in fear and avoid large gatherings, which sounds kind of like the current environment from the Wuhan flu. All because their leaders were too weak to even acknowledge reality.

Political correctness is not a harmless phenomenon that sprang up of its own volition. It is a poisonous weapon intended to stifle debate and to shut down logical thinking. It is a mass exercise in denying reality and a close cousin to the identity politics that is a prime animating spirit of the left.

Political correctness deems it appropriate to put a man in a boxing ring with a woman if he identifies as a woman, even as he gleefully cracks the skulls of his physically weaker opponents. Most people are stunned at the idiocy of such a decision even as leftism continues to use political correctness cover to advance their toxic agenda.

This was a cancer that metastasized unchecked for far too long, and it became a valuable tool for the left. They embedded it in everything the culture now produces. And then President Donald Trump showed up on the scene and took a sledgehammer to that noxious political bludgeon, inspiring other Americans to follow suit. That’s one of a few reasons the left despises him so much.

Americans were tired of the doublespeak that directly contradicted what was so obvious to them.

Luckily for America, the president was unwilling to be handcuffed by political correctness even as many other foreign leaders made fatal mistakes. We are at an inflection point in history. The Wuhan flu demonstrates once again that we can no longer afford politicians who worship at the altar of political correctness or attempt to weaponize it to overturn society. Stated another way, we no longer have the luxury of electing Democrats.

Fletch Daniels can be found on twitter @fletchdaniels.