It’s time for a conscious uncoupling from China before this miscreant mess of a rogue state destroys the economy and kills us all.

Imagine this scenario: You have a bunch of kids on a school bus. Most of them, all but one, are behaving themselves. They’re bathing regularly. Brushing their teeth. They’re not going around touching everyone else. They’re not acting up, not sneezing on other kids, or getting in anyone else’s face or causing problems.

But then there’s this one kid. He’s a total mess. He’s acting up and popping off on all the other kids around him. He hasn’t bathed since God knows when. He’s got a runny nose. He’s wiping that nose on his sleeves and on the other kids around him. He’s disgusting, and every time he gets in another kid’s face his spittle lands on them. Every time he slaps or touches another kid, that kid is liable to pick up whatever bugs this kid has.

Every kid who was within arm’s reach of the misbehaving mess is probably getting sick, and carrying the disease with them, spreading it all over the place. Those kids will take it home, give it to their parents, and their parents will take it to work and spread it around some more.

We have one planet. We have one school bus.

The behaving kids are Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, France, Finland . . . most of the world. The misbehaving kid is China. And he’s a clear and present threat to the whole interconnected world now.

It may be time to open the school bus’s emergency exit door.

The news media are gaslighting us all out of using the very accurate shorthand description they themselves used for COVID-19 just a few days ago: Wuhan coronavirus. It’s accurate because the disease COVID-19 comes from a coronavirus, but there are lots of strains of coronavirus. As we’ve all read countless times on social media by now, the common cold is usually caused by a coronavirus—just not this coronavirus.

This coronavirus, the one that has caused a global pandemic and shut down all sports, music festivals such as SXSW and other large gatherings for the time being, originated from Wuhan, China. Wuhan is a city in the Hubei province of China. The virus, some say, probably came from people there buying live exotic animals in “wet markets,” taking them home and eating them. And if not, then possibly it escaped the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory.

So, in order to distinguish this coronavirus from other ones, it’s handy to call it the Wuhan coronavirus. There’s nothing racist about that. It’s geography.

We still call the 1918 bug, which caused the last great pandemic and killed 20 million to 50 million people, the “Spanish Flu.” It’s not called that because anyone hates Spain. Everyone loves Spain. It’s achingly beautiful in the golden light by the Mediterranean. It’s where crazy people run with live agitated bulls. The Spanish Flu is called that because, at the time of the pandemic, scientists believed it originated in Spain.

So Wuhan coronavirus is a handy moniker for COVID-19. Big deal. And by the way, this isn’t even the first time a global, deadly plague has originated in China. The Black Death, which was the greatest human catastrophe in recorded history, killed an estimated 60 percent of Europe’s population in the 1400s. It menaced the world for about 400 years.

The Black Death originated in China in about 1308. From there it spread to Italy in 1346. Sound familiar? Today Italy is again at the epicenter of an outbreak that started in China, and its 60 million people are on lockdown, thanks to the virus that spread from Wuhan to there.

COVID-19 originated in Wuhan. Even worse, the Communists who rule China with an iron fist may have delayed the whole world’s response to the virus. The South China Morning Post, which is based in free Hong Kong, reports that the Chinese Communists knew about the virus a month earlier than they have admitted.

China gave the world the bug and delayed response by covering it up. But to hear some Democrats and the media now, it’s “racist” to call this coronavirus the Wuhan virus. What the hell is wrong with these people? Our priorities are all wrong.

Actually, that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is not what’s wrong with them but rather to ask who’s paying them.

Remember when a Houston Rockets official criticized the Chinese communist government a few months ago? He sided with the freedom protesters in Hong Kong. That escalated quickly, and pretty soon the whole NBA was acting like an arm of the Communist Party, suppressing dissent wherever it popped up.

Then a backlash began in the United States and the NBA whined that it was going to lose piles of money from its Chinese fan base if it couldn’t get along with the ChiComs. The ChiComs hate free speech, and the NBA valued greenbacks more than liberty. It was a shameful spectacle. The NBA looked terrible.

Is that what’s happening in the media now? We know the Chinese have a stranglehold on pharmaceutical supplies and manufacturing, thanks to years of bipartisan Clinton-Bush-Obama fecklessness in Washington. China owns a huge share of the world’s supply chains and manufacturing, and it has all but cornered the rare earth minerals supply. Those are necessary to build the smartphone in your hand, among other things. So China has American corporations by the short hairs, and American corporations advertise on big media. Big media know who feeds them, and it’s not you, Mr. and Mrs. America. Ultimately, it’s the ChiComs. You’re just the chump in the chair listening to the funeral dirge.

Since our current mortal enemy doesn’t like being blamed for the virus that sprung up from people buying live bats and eating them in Wuhan, they’ve yanked corporate America’s chain, and here we are: Saying the name of the town the virus came from is “racist.” Wuhan has become Voldemort, the One Who Must Not Be Named.

That’s stupid. The virus is Chinese. It’s the Wuhan coronavirus. Period. China touches everything and everyone, everywhere, whether we like it or not. And it’s a mess. And it lies about the disasters it spawns. It’s time for a conscious uncoupling from China before this miscreant mess of a rogue state destroys the economy and kills us all.