When anything draws as much attention for as long as the coronavirus outbreak has, it comes as no surprise that people in the “mainstream media” will have widely divergent views on that topic.

That concept was demonstrated on Friday, when New York Times contributor and "Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, Viet Thanh Nguyen used the opportunity to criticize the “myth” that the United States is the “greatest country on earth.”

Only the Times would find a global pandemic the perfect opportunity to trash American patriotism. In his piece, “The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus," Nguyen claims, "what might die after Covid-19 is the myth that we are the best country on earth."

The columnist then described the “symptoms” of the supposed malady as “inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities," while taking shots at President Trump for the alleged "racist blowback against Asians and Asian-Americans for the “Chinese virus.”

Nguyen argues that America's real problem isn't the coronavirus, it's the "structural inequalities of our society." He paints a bleak picture of America as a dystopian society while imagining what it could be like if his society's "structure" was reworked, in a not-so-subtle reference to socialism: