Take heed, America, and remember this when the crisis passes.

Mark Tapson is the Shillman Fellow on Popular Culture for the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – although right now it just seems like the worst of times, with the world stricken either by the Chinese coronavirus itself (that’s right, I called it Chinese) or by the media-fanned panic about it. But a silver lining of any crisis, perceived or real, is that it swiftly reveals who one’s friends really are – whom you can trust when the chips are down – and that is a vital lesson for Americans to take to heart.

Conversely, of course, a crisis also exposes who one’s enemies are, and that may be an even more valuable lesson to digest. Whom has the coronavirus pandemic shown to be the enemies of the American people? Let us run down the list.

China is not your friend. More specifically, the Communist Chinese regime – not the Chinese people as a whole – is not your friend. This should come as no surprise to most Americans, but as Bill Gertz notes in his recent book Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China’s Drive for Global Supremacy, in past decades American governments, both Democrat and Republican, have suffered from a willful blindness about that country stemming from the false assumption that “if the United States simply conducted business with China, the Communist regime in Beijing would eventually evolve into a free market, democratic system,” and then we would be partners. Unfortunately, the plain fact is that China is driven not only to position itself as the world’s preeminent superpower, but to destroy America in the process.

The coronavirus originated in China (and may even have been weaponized in a lab; the leftist media treats this possibility as a conspiracy theory, of course) and the regime did its utmost to suppress any information about it even as countless numbers of Chinese travelers spread it abroad. For that reason, the culpability for the many thousands of coronavirus deaths worldwide, as well as the devastating economic impact, can be laid directly on the regime’s doorstep. China officially continues to deny responsibility and has even attempted to shift blame to the United States, because the left’s automatic, go-to strategy is to accuse others of that of which you are guilty.

Our willful blindness has been reinforced by the establishment news media’s obsession with Russia since 2016, which has provided recent cover for China’s dangerous ambition. Which brings us to…

The leftist news media is not your friend. American patriots have long known that the Democrat-controlled news media is the enemy of the people, never more so than during the age of Trump. Indeed, he occupies the Oval Office in large part because he relishes exposing so many so-called journalists as the leftist activists they are, and goading them into confirming their bias every day.

News propagandists at every network have disseminated Chinese disinformation about the coronavirus, whipped up hysteria about it, ignored positive developments, and steered blame toward Trump. Chuck Todd (pictured above, with Joe Biden), to name one media hack, shamefully declared that the President has “blood on his hands.” Citizens who care about the truth and about making America great again must choose from two options: tune them out or call them out. Either way, never forget that they have no interest at heart but Democrat power. And that leads us to…

The Democrat Party is not your friend – even if you are a Democrat. Again: no surprise to those on the right. But decades of Democrat lies, media complicity, ideological conformity, and demonizing of Republicans as racist troglodytes have deluded many millions of Americans into believing that Progressives are the party of hope and change, love and tolerance, flowers and unicorns.

From the very moment the coronavirus outbreak hit the news, the Democrats saw an opportunity to exploit it and weaponize it against President Trump, the man they had failed to take down first through a fruitless three-year investigation into his purported collusion with Russia, and then through a shamefully partisan stab at impeachment. They fantasized that this pandemic could be Trump’s Katrina, a disaster they could pin on him just in time for the coming election. It mattered not whether hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans could die, as some Democrat leaders and their media enablers hysterically warned they will; what matters is that the pandemic could tank the economy, which had been booming under Trump.

In an echo of former Obama strategist Rahm Emanuel’s notorious line about never letting a crisis go to waste, House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn reportedly told fellow Democrats on a recent conference call, “This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” This is not a bipartisan statement of concern about American lives; this is a naked admission of the Democrat lust for power. A political party that cannot set aside partisanship in a time of crisis for the sake of the country’s citizens, but instead seizes upon that crisis to hold the country hostage in order to push its insane socialist policies through, is a party that does not care whether its citizens – Democrats included – live or die.

Globalists are not your friends. Yale historian Frank Snowden declared last month that the coronavirus pandemic “is emphatically a disease of globalization.” Globalist entities like the anti-American United Nations, the power-mad elites at the European Union, and the worthless World Health Organization, all of which resent and oppose nation-state independence, have exacerbated the pandemic by protecting China, pushing for mass migration and open borders, and condemning border security concerns as racist and fascist.

Totalitarian bureaucrats are not your friends. Low-level politicians of any party who leap at the opportunity to shut down your business as “nonessential,” keep you under house arrest, shut down gun shops while opening up prisons to avoid a potential jailhouse epidemic, and report the license plate numbers of churchgoers to officials do not have the best interests of American citizens at heart. Similarly, your fellow citizens who are eager to report you to the authorities for protesting such totalitarian decrees are also your enemies. They are all totalitarians exploiting the coronavirus as an opportunity to wield and expand their power by diminishing your rights and freedoms.

And who has proven to be our friends during this pandemic? As the late, great Fred Rogers once said, in times of trouble, there are always helpers -- look for them. The helpers during this pandemic, as always, are not snarky celebrities or media talking heads or grandstanding politicians but “ordinary” Americans, everyday heroes working tirelessly and mostly anonymously to provide essential services and keep America running – sometimes literally putting their health and safety on the line: first responders, medical personnel, farmers, ranchers, truckers and the like. These are the Americans in every community you can trust, the Americans who care about their neighbors and their country.

Some corporations, too, have proven to be better friends than our political leaders and institutions. Leftists always scorn corporations and look to big government to rescue us, but in fact it has been capitalist entities that have dived into anti-coronavirus efforts with more drive and alacrity – and no bureaucratic red tape – than the government. For example, My Pillow founder and Trump friend Michael J. Lindell announced last month that 75% of his company’s production would be retooled to make cotton face masks for health care workers – a decisive action of service to his fellow Americans that the anti-Trump news media hatefully scorned as mere self-promotion. (The unhelpful media also attacked Lindell for daring to urge America to focus more during the pandemic on God and family, two anchors of our civilization that the left despises.)

Someone once noted that sports do not build character; they reveal it. It is the same with a crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has revealed, and continues to reveal, whose character is heroic, trustworthy, honorable, and compassionate, and whose is self-serving, opportunistic, and ruthless. Take heed, America, and remember this for when the crisis passes.