For the past few weeks, the coronavirus has caused turmoil and panic across the globe.  Although the virus originated in China, cases have been reported in several countries, including the United States.

To address the problem, President Trump, who is in charge of protecting the homeland, did something almost any president would do in the midst of a possible outbreak: he created a task force, aptly named the President's Coronavirus Task Force.

On January 29, the White House released the following statement: "Today, President Donald J. Trump announced the formation of the President's Coronavirus Task Force.  Members of the Task Force have been meeting on a daily basis since Monday."  Sounds good so far.

The statement continued, "The Task Force is led by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar[.] ... It is composed of subject matter experts from the White House and several United States Government agencies, and it includes some of the Nation's foremost experts on infectious diseases."  No major problem here.

The press release also noted, "The President's top priority is the health and welfare of the American people[.] ... The Administration, led by the President's Task Force, will continue to work to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus."  Seems like common sense.

And then all hell broke loose.  The president tweeted: "We will continue to monitor the ongoing developments," and "We have the best experts anywhere in the world, and they are on top of it 24/7!"  As he is wont to do, Trump included a few photos of the task force meeting on his Twitter feed.

Immediately, outcry reverberated from the corridors of CNN and several more mainstream media outlets.  Within the blink of an eye, the fake news media were in full shrill mode, fueled at least in part by their chronic case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Why, you might ask, did the mainstream media erupt in a tizzy?  Because, gasp, the president's task force lacked the diversity requirements super-woke CNN espouses.

According to CNN, "[w]ho are these experts?  They're largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who've dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning."

Oh, my!  Stop the press!  The task force was not created by a CNN-approved algorithm that ensures the exact ratio of race and sex and age as reflected in the country.

Then CNN compared Trump's task force to one created under President Obama to fight the Ebola outbreak. According to the woke-masters at CNN, "By contrast, former President Barack Obama's circle of advisers in the face of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was hardly so monochromatic.  Neither was it so abysmal in terms of gender diversity.  (Of course, to contextualize, Obama's administration, on the whole, was far more diverse than Trump's.)"

CNN, and many other mainstream media outlets, are so woke-obsessed that they fail to judge the task force members through any prism other than race, sex, etc.  Instead of analyzing the credentials of each individual member, which would actually require a smidgen of journalism, CNN and others have resorted to painting with the broad woke brush.

In other words, rather than acting on their own words of inclusivity and colorblindness, CNN is single-mindedly viewing and analyzing members of the task force on the color of their skin and their sex — which, by the way, has no impact on the effectiveness of the task force.

Maybe CNN should have taken a page from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s script and judged others by the content of their character (or their expertise in dealing with deadly outbreaks), instead of making snap judgments based on superficial factors.

Earth to CNN: race and sex have absolutely no impact on the task force's ability to perform its job well.  Therefore, shame on CNN for lobbing ad hominem and shallow attacks at the task force based upon the totally subjective grounds of modern wokeness.

In some ways, super-woke entities such as CNN (and many others) are the antithesis of the progressive, liberal values they supposedly espouse on a daily basis.  In reality, the fatal flaw of wokeness is that it sets us all back to a dark time when people were judged (almost exclusively) by traits such as their race, sex, and age.

Such is why wokeness has run amok in 2020.  Hopefully, President Trump will create another task force — to mitigate the scourge of wokeness.  If CNN has any say, that task force had better use race, sex, and age as the overwhelming criteria to ensure total wokeness.

Chris Talgo (ctalgo@heartland.org) is an editor at The Heartland Institute.