As over 4,000 rockets are fired into Israel by Hamas, the establishment of the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.
It is not just that they fear that the squad, Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and the woke institutions such as professional sports, academia, and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel.
They are in terror also that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon the Democratic Party will end up disdained as much as was the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and often has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.
The Left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust, while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?
It was not just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise—whether the infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim or Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
The Left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strong man ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.
If history and democratic values cannot explain fully the hatred of Israel on the Left, perhaps human rights violations do. But here too there is another radical asymmetry. Arab Israeli citizens enjoy far greater constitutional protections than do Arabs living under either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
Is the Left bothered by the allies of Hamas? After all, most are autocracies such as Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.
We return then to other reasons for the woke furor directed toward Israel.
In part, the Western Left despises the unapologetically successful—as if they are always beneficiaries of unfair privilege. Underdog Israel was not so hated from 1947-1967. Then it was poor, more socialist, and in danger of being extinguished by its many neighboring enemies.
But after the victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the Israeli military proved unconquerable, no matter how large the numbers, wealth, and armaments of its many enemies.
For the Left, Israel’s current strength, confidence, and success mean it cannot be seen as a victim, but only as a victimizer. The more its Iron Dome missile defenses knock down the flurry of Hamas rockets, the more its planes take out those who launched them, so all the more the Left bizarrely believes Israel wins too easily and acts “disproportionately.”
In the virtue-signaling world of the contemporary West, Israel has become caricatured as playing the role of the American white police, the Palestinians a foreign version of the oppressed Black Lives Matter movement. The Palestinians then are woke, the Israelis not so much.
The Left also has a strange idea of current “imperialism” and “colonialism.” The general rule is that Westerners cannot settle in numbers in the non-West. But the reversal is certainly not true. Millions of Middle Easterners are welcomed into Belgium, France, Germany, the U.K., and the United States.
Yet, Jews have been in what is modern-day Israel since nearly the dawn of civilization. And their 1947 borders only grew after they were attacked and threatened with extinction.
Again, the Left always claims that its anti-Israelism has had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
But it is almost impossible now to make that distinction when woke criticism obsesses over democratic Israel and ignores far greater oppressors and oppressed elsewhere.
Why are there no demonstrations in major Western cities damning the Communist Chinese government that has put 1 million Muslim Uighurs in camps? Why are the world’s millions of former refugees—the Volga Germans, the East Prussians, the Cypriot Greeks—long ago forgotten, and yet the Palestinians alone deified as perpetually displaced by the Jews?
Our formal NATO ally, Turkey, received little global pushback for its treatment of the Kurds, or its frequent intolerance of religious minorities. Why then does the Jewish state alone always earn such venom?
Hating democratic Israel while it is under attack is not just a reflection of the new woke and ethically bankrupt Left. It is also a symptom of a deeper pathology in the West, one of moral equivalence, amoral relativism—and self-loathing.
Hating Israel, then, has become the surrogate Western way of hating oneself.
Hey gang, remember that time Biden got caught faking Mario Kart? And remember the liberals trying to claim the one micro-moment "video" of Biden's second allegedly won race didn't actually prove he wasn't controlling the character on screen even though our own functioning eyeballs informed us otherwise?
Supposedly he was playing as Luigi, thus giving new meaning to the decade old meme of winning by doing absolutely nothing. Well, Biden's pit-stop in Mish's very own fraud state produced yet more vehicular hilarity proving once again that this clown world we're living through is nothing without a clown car to go with it.
Credit to TheGatewayPundit for the video:
Much like in the case of Mario Kart, when Biden cuts the wheel hard to the right, the vehicle doesn't respond. In this video the truck keeps going straight despite Biden's incompetent inputs.
Really sums up the actual state of the union. Biden is a puppet, and someone else is behind the wheel.
Maybe that's good thing, considered how poorly Biden really drives...
the leader of the free world making a mockery of us on the golf course. hate to see it. pic.twitter.com/oYRGrQtBWJ
Also worth noting is that the truck Biden's not driving is electric. Pretty big coincidence so soon after a major gas line shutdown in the South, as well as Mish's Mommy Whitler shutting down some pipeline in the northern part of the state. I guess seeing as how the Biden regime is driving gas prices sky high, Ford is going to need all the electricity America's nuclear, coal, and natural gas plants can generate.
I would make an issue out of Biden telling a "journalist" to get in front of the truck before he punches it so he can run him over, except that doesn't bother me, so I'll say Biden's brain farted out a good idea for once.
Other than that, screw dementia-ridden mental patient and commander in thief election stealer Xio Bi Den and the old folks tourist charter short-bus he rode in on.
The U.S. Treasury said the Biden administration’s proposal to
strengthen tax compliance includes a requirement for transfers of at
least $10,000 of cryptocurrency to be reported to the Internal Revenue
Service.
“As with cash transactions, businesses that
receive cryptoassets with a fair-market value of more than $10,000 would
also be reported on,” the Treasury Department said in a report on
tax-enforcement proposals released Thursday.
The Treasury said that comprehensive
reporting is necessary “to minimize the incentives and opportunity to
shift income out of the new information reporting regime.” It noted that cryptocurrency is a small share of current business transactions.
The
IRS in 2020 added a line about cryptocurrency on the Form 1040, the
individual tax return, in an effort to gain more visibility into virtual
currency transactions.
President Joe Biden’s administration is also calling for banks to report on account flows to help boost tax-payment compliance.
“Cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by
facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion,” the
Treasury said.
Democrats were trying to push through the vote on a “Jan. 6 Commission” today in the House.
They succeeded, with 35 Republicans crossing over to vote in favor of it, not seeming to care that it’s going to be a “bash Republicans” effort, rather than any sort of real investigation. There are already multiple investigations going on, so there wasn’t any need for an additional. This is simply an opportunity for Democrats to bash Republicans.
How do we know how biased this will be? Because we can already see how slimy Democrats are being about it.
Right before the vote on the Commission, the office of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-RI) tried to spread a letter to members of Congress purportedly from “members of the Capitol Police” on Capitol Police letterhead. The letter claimed that the officers were upset with the position that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had taken against the Commission.
Politico then reported the letter was from the Capitol Police.
Except there was a small problem with this whole letter, as the Capitol Police explain: It didn’t come from them.
The Capitol Police made it clear that it “wasn’t an official statement.” Not to mention, they couldn’t even confirm any of their people wrote it — and they do NOT take positions on legislation.
A CNN reporter said one officer was behind it, with that officer claiming he represented others. Yeah, that sounds reliable and not at all political or prompted by Democrats.
Police don’t take positions on political legislation and they know better than to do so. Except when Democrats try to manipulate the situation right before a vote. Reminder that Raskin was the lead House Manager trying to impeach President Donald Trump and isn’t above sliminess.
But that didn’t stop the fake story from going everywhere while the correction got far less attention.
Zivia Lubetkin was adamant—there would be no more talk. At 28, she was a leader of her youth group and a born fighter . . . a Jewish girl, who less than three years earlier had smuggled herself back into German-occupied Warsaw from the Russian zone as Germany invaded Poland. She knew what was in store for her since the Nazis had been running concentration camps for Germany’s Jews since 1933, but she went anyway. Now it was July 1942, and the Nazis had just deported the first 56,000 residents of the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka death camp—without resistance from the ghetto’s residents.
Against the wishes of the Jewish leadership in Warsaw, who counseled obedience to Nazi authority out of concern for reprisals, Zivia and several members of her underground youth group decided it was time to form an armed resistance movement. There, in their makeshift safehouse at 34 Dzielna Street, with no money and only two stolen pistols, they started the first armed resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jewish Fighting Organization Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, or ZOB—“because it is better to be shot in the ghetto than to die in Treblinka!”
Shortly thereafter they launched their first partisan action. For a young, ad hoc, and untrained partisan fighting group, it was a fairly complex three-pronged operation. They would conduct an information operation to disseminate posters declaring the truth that Treblinka was a death camp from which there would be no survivors, a sabotage operation to burn warehouses full of Nazi loot stolen from deported Jewish residents, and the assassination of the Jewish ghetto police chief. The operation was a success, although their assassination target did not die from his gunshot wounds.
Zivia believed the ZOB had accomplished a great victory for the doomed residents of the Warsaw ghetto. She was shocked when she learned that the ghetto’s leaders were furious and that her posters were being torn down. ZOB members were attacked and beaten by many of the ghetto’s residents.
Zivia and the ZOB continued their heroic fight against the Nazis, while the leaders of the ghetto continued to advance the Nazi fiction that deportation from the ghetto was for “resettlement” elsewhere. The ghetto’s leaders silently watched as 265,000 of their people were deported to Treblinka, where, on arrival, they were gassed to death and incinerated.
By April 1943, when only about 60,000 residents remained in the ghetto and the truth that “resettlement” meant death could no longer be ignored, many of the remaining residents decided to fight in what became the 1943 Warsaw Uprising. In the end, although the ZOB’sactions were heroic, it was too little too late. Thousands died in the fighting and the remaining 50,000 residents were deported to Treblinka and killed. Only 34 ZOB members, including Zivia, made it out of the ghetto alive.
An Internal Enemy
A frequently used tactic of tyrants is to create an internal enemy. The Nazis’ Final Solution wasn’t just about Hitler’s hatred for the Jews; it was about the Nazi party creating an internal enemy to help focus and unite Germany, and later all of Europe, under Nazi rule.
Within several weeks of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, communists, gypsies, political opponents, and German citizens of Jewish ethnicity were designated as internal enemies and marked for persecution and eventual extermination. The Dachau concentration camp opened a mere two weeks after Hitler assumed power. As the Nazi war machine rolled through Europe, it exported its program of extermination of these designated ethnic and political groups under the guise of ridding Europe of alien, non-European groups who were said to be dangerous to society.
The Nazi extermination machine was an efficient monster, thanks in part to the help of American corporations like IBM, Ford Motor Company, and Coca-Cola—all of which did business with the Nazi government. IBM was especially effective in working with Nazi officials to create an exceptionally accurate census database that was used to identify ethnically Jewish German citizens for extermination. Ford produced turbines for the dreaded Nazi V2 rockets, and of course, Coca-Cola kept the German war machine and its fighting men of the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht supplied with their signature beverage. Never underestimate the power of money and what oligarchs will do to keep it flowing in their direction.
This tactic of creating an internal enemy is the political extension of G.W.F. Hegel’s “othering,” which is a method of negating another person’s or group’s humanity. Behaviorally, it is an important intermediate step to dehumanize a targeted group before doing bad things to them. For a tyrant’s supporters, dehumanizing their internal enemy makes persecuting that enemy more acceptable—especially when that persecution is being done in the name of “restorative justice,” the “betterment of society,” or for the “benefit” of the persecuted group’s own well-being.
In the United States, the current regime has begun othering its political opposition.
The regime’s national security apparatus recently warned that politically conservative and independent Americans are potential domestic terrorists, extremists, and white supremacists—dangerous to our society. The Justice Department is persecuting political protesters and hundreds of people who are, essentially, political prisoners are now being held without bail, many in pre-trial solitary confinement for allegations of misdemeanor protest activity.
In ironic fashion, a fascist-like coalescence of government and private corporations, as well as journalists, are publicly stamping out free speech. And in blue-run cities, modern Brownshirts under the banners of Black Lives Matter and Antifa spent most of last year freely burning local businesses and attacking and murdering wrong-thinking citizens. It is no accident that 2021 America is beginning to look and smell a lot like 1933 Germany.
Positioning the Oligarchy
The current culture war in America is driven by the ruling elite and funded by a China-sympathizing class of oligarchs under the guise of protecting marginalized groups of Americans. In other words, a bunch of rich white kids supported by U.S.-based multinational corporations and government bureaucrats are doing the bidding of uber-wealthy robber barons, who traditionally couldn’t care less about racism or equity, all supposedly to stamp out racism in a country that is probably the least racist country in the world.
It doesn’t make sense . . . and that’s because it’s bullshit.
The oligarchs are doing what they’ve always done, making sure the money keeps flowing their way. That means money is flowing into their pockets by tapping Chinese markets, cheap Chinese labor, and inexpensive Chinese industrial capacity.
In fact, the same corporations that are donating millions of dollars to “social justice” groups like BLM and forcing their employees into critical race theory struggle sessions are also heavily involved in business with the world’s most oppressive government, China. The same Apple corporation allegedly concerned with the racist treatment of brown people in America is totally OK with profiting from Uighur slave labor in Chinese concentration camps where forced sterilization, organ harvesting, and religious reeducation are standard fare.
The same corporations, Google and IBM, that claim to care so much about systemic police racism in America are providing mass surveillance and censorship technology to an oppressive Chinese government that uses it to identify and disappear political dissidents. Once again, American companies are doing business and making money with an oppressive foreign government running concentration camps in order to stamp out a race and culture they have deemed alien and a danger to their society. So, yes, it smells like 1933 Germany again.
The truth is the oligarchs are worried. They’re worried they can’t get enough Chinese money to keep the power-elite party going. Robert Michels’ “Iron Law of Oligarchy” defines oligarchy as a power structure in which power rests with a small elite number of people and into which all complex political organizations inevitably devolve. The problem for the oligarchs? The U.S. Constitution and the concept of the United States as a sovereign nation under the rule of law, not of men.
The oligarchs know they need to remove these hurdles to get the most from their global business interests. In order to do this, they must dismantle the culture in America that makes Americans overly fond and protective of the Constitution, the rights of individual liberty, a sovereign nation with defined borders, and equal justice under the law. Enter the oligarch’s deconstructor: antiracism, equity, and critical race theory.
The Fruits of Division
Every tyranny has its useful idiots. Lenin had his Bolsheviks, Mao his Red Guards, and Hitler his Brownshirts. The tyranny that is the American oligarchy has its own power-hungry government apparatchiks: Antifa, BLM, and assorted identity politics hustlers. Historically, most of the useful idiots end up like Hitler’s Brownshirts—dead, imprisoned, or broken. There is money to be made in being a useful idiot, however, if you know how to play.
The anti-racism, critical race theory, and equity business is an example of how profitable useful idiot work can be. Take just a few examples: Ibram X. Kendi, Patrisse Cullors, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo. They are riding the racism train to the very top of the industry, raking in personal millions in the process, and splitting off franchise racism consulting businesses in both the private and government sectors.
But what are they really doing? How are they making anyone’s but their own lives better? After all, demonizing one class of humans over another is what tyrants throughout history have done. In actuality, the anti-racism, critical race theory, and equity industry looks like Hegel’s othering. Are they getting paid to race hustle, or are they working to help create an internal enemy to help consolidate the oligarchy’s power?
The truth is that nobody in the entire chain of the diversity-inclusion-equity rebellion that is consuming America right now is any better off for it . . . that is, except for the rich and powerful at the top.
Throughout human history, the rich and powerful have stayed rich and powerful by exploiting the weak and powerless and making sure no one was in a position to challenge their status and authority. In Allen G. Johnson’s Power, Privilege, and Difference he points out:
Subordinate groups are often pitted against one another in ways that draw attention away from the system of privilege that hurts them all.
This has certainly been the strategy of the tyrant. Pit one man against the other so neither notices they are both slaves to the same master. As long as the common man is divided, the elites will feel safe.
Resist
The corrupt government apparatchiks who service the oligarchy can handle the little fires of a few awakening citizens, but they know if those fires merge or get out of control, then they’re done. They know that in the end, they are equally vulnerable as the common man is to the bullet of retribution.
The one thing the oligarch fears more than anything is a people united, a people who can see through the façade of racial division, and a people who are no longer willing to suffer as subjects of a ruling elite. In warfare, if your enemy fears something, it’s best to give them as much of that thing as you can muster.
Hope is a powerful thing. It can carry you through the toughest times, but it can also kill you. The Jewish leaders in the Warsaw ghetto hoped that the Nazis were being truthful about deportation and resettlement. They saw themselves as good people who had held important positions in Polish society. They hadn’t done anything wrong, so why would anyone want to do evil to them? Even as word came back that Treblinka was a death camp, they held onto their hope for too long. It took a 28-year-old young woman with a couple of stolen pistols and incredible courage to eventually break them out of that false hope.
In America right now, we have a choice. We can keep allowing ourselves to be played and divided by the oligarchs and their enforcers and self-load into the cattle cars when our time comes. Or we can stand up together, like Zivia Lubetkin, before it’s too late, and say enough. There is a time to stop being obedient, there is a time to stop relying on hope, and there is a time to become defiant. For all Americans, that time is now. United we may still stand, but if we remain divided we will most assuredly fall.
Antifa: a violent group of domestic terrorists, or brave anti-fascists, punching Nazis right in their stupid faces? There are a lot of opinions and fake news floating around out there about this controversial group of activists. It's a good thing you're reading The Babylon Bee, then, because we're the best at cutting through the crap and giving you the truth.
Origins: Aiden Paulson, a rich, white, liberal 14-year-old, was playing his Xbox in the summer of 2009 when his mom asked him to do the dishes. He said, "Mo-ooooom, you're literally being like Hitler, ugh." He decided to form Antifa, which his mom was cool with, because then he was out of the house most of the day screaming at Nazis.
Beliefs: Antifa believes that Nazis are bad. It's right in the name: Anti - Fascist. The group stands against Nazism in all its forms. And if you question them at all, you are pro-Nazi. It's pretty genius marketing, actually. It's like naming a political group "Anti-Puppy-Murder" and then screaming at anyone who disagrees with you, "WHY DO YOU HATE PUPPIES!?"
Methods: Antifa fights Nazis with lots of very effective methods that are guaranteed to ensure that fascism never rears its ugly head again. Here are a few of them:
Using political violence against their enemies
Marching through the streets in lock-step
Throwing bricks through store windows of undesirable business owners
Burning books that contradict their political philosophy
Chanting slogans in unison and punching people who refuse to chant the slogans
Making a special salute with their hands and punching people who refuse to do the salute
Targeting undesirable members of the community for cancelation and violence
Notable accomplishments: Burning down black neighborhoods, beating up journalists, tearing down statues of old white guys.
How to spot an Antifa member: Hasn't showered in days, face masked because they are really proud of what they're doing, expensive smartphone purchased by parents.
Famous Antifa members: Joseph Stalin, Xi Jinping, Rachel Maddow, Brian Stelter, that lady who screamed at the sky when Trump was being inaugurated, the entire population of Portland, Oregon.
Famous enemies of Antifa: The Constitution, history books, gainful employment.
The Middle East is in turmoil again. From Kabul to Riyadh, and Beirut to the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem, people are frightened and forced to hear the horrifying blasts of emergency sirens that had long been silenced. If one were to search anywhere other than in Iran for the detonators of these blasts, they would be wrong again.
An explosion in front of a girls’ school in Kabul, Afghanistan two weeks ago killed dozens of innocent people, embarrassed the Afghan government, and jeopardized the Biden administration’s plan to withdraw U.S. forces by September 2021. There is no question that such a heinous crime, which will cause further insecurity in Afghanistan, only benefits the regime in Tehran, which thrives on crises beyond its borders.
As most victims were from the Shiite Hazara ethnic minority, the Iranian state authorities and media claimed to protect that community and argued that the Afghan government has failed to protect the “most persecuted community.”Some arealready arguingthat “the Hazaras must pick up arms and defend themselves.” Guess who’s feeding these talking points?
Similarly, the mullahs reaped the windfalls of sectarian conflict in Iraq because the carnage increased their leverage during every negotiation. Political observers remember all too well how the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds forces killed Shiites in Iraq. They then laid the blame on Sunni groups in order to fuel the cycle of sectarianism in the hopes of pushing the United States out of Iraq, thereby allowing the Iranian regime to fill the remaining vacuum.
Around the same time as the school explosion, the U.S. Navy seized a ship carrying thousands of Iranian weapons and ammunition headed towards Yemen to arm the Houthis. A U.S. Navy initial investigation found that the vessel came from Iran. This is yet more proof that the Iranian regime is actively arming the Houthis despite a United Nations arms embargo.
The Houthis were removed from the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) list in February this year, allegedly because some voices in Washington were arguing that the blacklisting was hindering human rights organizations from providing aid to the Yemeni population.
Last week, the same proxy group targeted the Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia with an explosive-laden drone last Monday. While international media reported that the Saudi-led coalition had intercepted eight drones and three missiles, the Houthis and Iranianstate-run mediainsisted that “the operation was conducted successfully and the target was hit accurately.”
On the very same day, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps speed boats harassed the U.S. Navy in the Persian Gulf, trying to provoke a military confrontation. Add to this the recent developments in the Gaza Strip and the alarming escalation of hostilities that could lead to a regional war.
One might wonder why is all this happening all at once? The answer lies with the mullahs in Tehran and their representatives in Vienna. Ever since the new administration has taken office, the Iranian regime has resorted to what it does best: terrorism and extortion.
Before the Vienna talks, the regime’s economy was suffocating under crippling international and U.S. sanctions, impeding funding its proxies in the Middle East and the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). Enraged over four decades of oppression and censorship, Iranian citizens were suffering further from the regime’s vast and endemic corruption.
Since 2017, severalnationwide uprisingsand constant street protests have shaken the regime to its core and the religious dictatorship has had to resort to bloodshed to prevent its overthrow. Thus the regime’s leadership had no other choice but to accept to engage in talks, albeit indirectly, with a foe it called the “Great Satan” for decades.
But as it increased its aggression against the U.S. military in Iraq and ramped up uranium enrichment during January, March, and April, Tehran only heard calls for more engagement and diplomacy from Western capitals. That is why it was emboldened to increase its uranium enrichment and to blackmail the Biden administration and its European partners back to the negotiation table.
As the United States started to show signs of goodwill and promised to lift sanctions, the regime demanded “lifting all sanctions at once.” It detected weakness and reluctance to take firm action against its belligerence on the part of its international interlocutors.
There is one thing that diplomats in Vienna are not discussing: the Iranian people. If Western negotiators were to pay attention to the numerous waves of unrest and daily protests in Iran since 2017, they might be in a better and stronger position.
The regime only understands the language of strength. A coward regime that hides behind proxies and kills innocent people should not be rewarded with international credibility and concessions.
For years, Iranian lobbyists in Washington cried wolf about war with Iran to legitimize appeasement with the biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Now the Biden administration should take stock of how that kind of “diplomacy” is bearing fruit in the Middle East.
It might be wise to start thinking about a third option: standing with the Iranian people and their resolute and repeated calls for the overthrow of the ruling theocracy, reflected in the chants of “death to the dictator” by millions during the January 2018 and November 2019 nationwide uprisings.
The West knows that showing weakness in front of bullies invites even more aggression. So it should consider a change in approach.
The deal that the American elite chose to make with China has a precedent in the history of Athens and Sparta
In Chapter 5 of The Prince,
Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power
might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin
them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a
state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”
The
example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta
established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404
BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of
democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that
Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military
aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were
periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman
status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the
low-born. The pro-Sparta oligarchy used their patrons’ victory to undo
the rights of citizens, and settle scores with their domestic rivals,
exiling and executing them and confiscating their wealth.
The
Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its
traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role
and function helps explain what is happening in America today.
For my last column I spoke with TheNew York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article
he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack
Obama’s presidency. His important piece documents the exact moment when
the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them.
Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod
over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the
hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.
A
trade consultant told Friedman: “The need to compete in a globalized
world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager,
the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what
the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the
party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of
ideological naysayers.”
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times
columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while
enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that
is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social
enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular
society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their
children.
Undergirding
the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade
Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the
corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that
Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and
even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese
Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why
did they trade with an authoritarian regime and send millions of
American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working
Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by
telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was
big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides,
the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could
defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?
Returning
those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal
immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency,
and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. Trump was hardly the
first to make the case that the corporate and political establishment’s
trade relationship with China had sold out ordinary Americans. Former
Democratic congressman and 1988 presidential candidate Richard Gephardt
was the leading voice in an important but finally not very influential group
of elected Democratic Party officials and policy experts who warned
that trading with a state that employed slave labor would cost American
jobs and sacrifice American honor. The only people who took Trump
seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him
when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.
What
he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment
of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have
nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly
elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave
them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for
solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public
and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices
and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same
center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class
was born.
Connections
that might have once seemed tenuous or nonexistent now became lucid
under the light of Trump’s scorn, and the reciprocal scorn of the elite
that loathed him.
A
decade ago, no one would’ve put NBA superstar LeBron James and Apple
CEO Tim Cook in the same family album, but here they are now, linked by
their fantastic wealth owing to cheap Chinese manufacturing (Nike
sneakers, iPhones, etc.) and a growing Chinese consumer market. The
NBA’s $1.5 billion contract
with digital service provider Tencent made the Chinese firm the
league’s biggest partner outside America. In gratitude, these two-way
ambassadors shared the wisdom of the Chinese Communist Party with their
ignorant countrymen. After an an NBA executive tweeted in defense of
Hong Kong dissidents, social justice activist King LeBron told Americans
to watch their tongues. “Even though yes, we do have freedom of
speech,” said James, “it can be a lot of negative that comes with it.”
Because
of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from
the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what
Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back,
further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United
now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of
circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist
Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its
slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the
People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks
and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for
American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of
Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned
of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. But
the schools and their name faculty were in fact in the business of
selling that research, much of it paid for directly by the U.S.
government—which is why Harvard and Yale among other big-name schools
appear to have systematically underreported the large amounts that China had gifted them.
Indeed,
many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not
particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a
research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted
for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP
institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in
furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and
national security.”
But
if Donald Trump saw decoupling the United States from China as a way to
dismantle the oligarchy that hated him and sent American jobs abroad,
he couldn’t follow through on the vision. After correctly identifying
the sources of corruption in our elite, the reasons for the
impoverishment of the middle classes, and the threats foreign and
domestic to our peace, he failed to staff and prepare to win the war he
asked Americans to elect him to fight.
And
because it was true that China was the source of the China Class’
power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for
its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite
that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small
businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal,
burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the
last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history,
culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.
For
nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our
economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to
themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s.
China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes.
Lockdowns are not public health measures to reduce the spread of a
virus. They are political instruments, which is why Democratic Party
officials who put their constituents under repeated lengthy lockdowns,
like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are
signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen
immediately now that Trump is safely gone.
That
Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands
of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is
irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to
boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they
succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and
brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was
Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may
have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the
philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question
everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power,
Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.
Riding
the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power
within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been
Democratic preserves.
The
poisoned embrace between American elites and China began nearly 50
years ago when Henry Kissinger saw that opening relations between the
two then-enemies would expose the growing rift between China and the
more threatening Soviet Union. At the heart of the fallout between the
two communist giants was the Soviet leadership’s rejection of Stalin,
which the Chinese would see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet
communist system—and thus it was a mistake they wouldn’t make.
Meanwhile,
Kissinger’s geopolitical maneuver became the cornerstone of his
historical legacy. It also made him a wealthy man selling access to
Chinese officials. In turn, Kissinger pioneered the way for other former
high-ranking policymakers to engage in their own foreign influence-peddling operations, like William Cohen,
defense secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who greased
the way for China to gain permanent most favored nation trade status in
2000 and become a cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The Cohen
Group has two of its four overseas offices in China, and includes a
number of former top officials, including Trump’s former Defense
Secretary James Mattis, who recently failed to disclose his work for the Cohen Group when he criticized
the Trump administration’s “with us or against us” approach to China in
an editorial. “The economic prosperity of U.S. allies and partners
hinges on strong trade and investment relationships with Beijing,” wrote
Mattis, who was literally being paid by China for taking exactly that
position.
Yet
it’s unlikely that Kissinger foresaw China as a cash cow for former
American officials when he and President Richard M. Nixon traveled to
the Chinese capital that Westerners then called Peking in 1972. “The
Chinese felt that Mao had to die before they could open up,” says a
former Trump administration official. “Mao was still alive when Nixon
and Kissinger were there, so it’s unlikely they could’ve envisioned the
sorts of reforms that began in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership.
But even in the 1980s China wasn’t competitive with the United States.
It was only in the 1990s with the debates every year about granting
China most favored nation status in trade that China became a commercial
rival”—and a lucrative partner.
The chief publicist of the post-Cold War order was Francis Fukuyama, who in his 1992 book The End of History
argued that with the fall of the Berlin Wall Western liberal democracy
represented the final form of government. What Fukuyama got wrong after
the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t his assessment of the strength of
political forms; rather it was the depth of his philosophical model. He
believed that with the end of the nearly half-century-long superpower
standoff, the historical dialectic pitting conflicting political models
against each other had been resolved. In fact, the dialectic just took
another turn.
Just
after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new
life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western
democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment
acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of
the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.
In
1978, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended
Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of
China. As mayor of America’s tech epicenter, her ties to China helped
the growing sector attract Chinese investment and made the state the
world’s third-largest economy. Her alliance with Jiang also helped make
her investor husband, Richard Blum, a wealthy man. As senator, she
pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by rationalizing China’s
human rights violations, while her friend Jiang consolidated his power
and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by sending tanks into
Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no local police,”
Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,” the senator
from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One learns
from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a
lesson.”
Yet
the past actually should have told Feinstein’s audience in Washington a
different story. The United States didn’t trade with Moscow or allow
Russians to make large campaign donations or enter into business
partnerships with their spouses. Cold War American leadership understood
that such practices would have opened the door to Moscow and allowed it
to directly influence American politics and society in dangerous ways.
Manufacturing our goods in their factories or allowing them to buy ours
and ship them overseas would’ve made technology and intellectual
property vulnerable.
But
it wasn’t just about jeopardizing national security; it was also about
exposing America to a system contradictory to American values.
Throughout the period, America defined itself in opposition to how we
conceived of the Soviets. Ronald Reagan was thought crass for referring
to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” but trade and foreign policy
from the end of WWII to 1990 reflected that this was a consensus
position—Cold War American leadership didn’t want the country coupled to
a one-party authoritarian state.
The industrialist Armand Hammer was famous because he was the
American doing business with Moscow. His perspective was useful not
because of his unique insights into Soviet society, politics, and
business culture that he often shared with the American media, but
because it was understood that he was presenting the views that the
politburo wanted disseminated to an American audience. Today, America
has thousands of Armand Hammers, all making the case for the source of
their wealth, prestige, and power.
It
started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to decouple human rights from
trade status. He’d entered the White House promising to focus on human
rights, in contrast to the George H.W. Bush administration, and after
two years in office made an about face.
“We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive
framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions
were appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then
AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about
democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people,
matter most.” Some Democrats, like then Senate Majority Leader George
Mitchell, were opposed, while Republicans like John McCain supported
Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, Robert
E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become an ever larger and more
important trading partner.”
More than two decades later, the number of American industries and companies that lobbied
against Trump administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese
technology from its American counterparts is a staggering measure of how
closely two rival systems that claim to stand for opposing sets of
values and practices have been integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well as Qualcomm
and other semiconductor manufacturers that fought to continue selling
chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the other leg
planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. To protect both
halves of their business, they soft-sell the issue by calling China a competitor in order to obscure their role in boosting a dangerous rival.
Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China. From Wall Street—Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley— to hospitality. A Marriott Hotel employee was fired when Chinese officials objected to his liking a tweet about Tibet. They all learned to play by CCP rules.
“It’s
so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,” says
former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding.
Unsurprisingly,
the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the
forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only
proposed tariffs but also his call
for American companies to start moving critical supply chains
elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense
Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense
contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. “Just about all
contractors doing work with the federal government,” said a spokesman
for the trade group, “would have to stop.”
Even
the Trump administration was split between hawks and accommodationists,
caustically referred to by the former as “Panda Huggers.” The majority
of Trump officials were in the latter camp, most notably Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin, a former Hollywood producer. While the film
industry was the first and loudest to complain that China was stealing
its intellectual property, it eventually came to partner with, and
appease, Beijing. Studios are not able to tap into China’s enormous
market without observing CCP redlines. For example, in the upcoming
sequel to Top Gun, Paramount offered to blur the Taiwan and
Japan patches on Tom Cruise’s “Maverick” jacket for the Chinese release
of the film, but CCP censors insisted the patches not be shown in any
version anywhere in the world.
In
the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there
was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China.
On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push
back.”
Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against
the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in
office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United
States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing
genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting
Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority
groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced
Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide.
The
idea that countries that scorn basic human and democratic rights should
not be directly funded by American industry and given privileged access
to the fruits of U.S. government-funded research and technology that
properly belongs to the American people is hardly a partisan idea—and
has, or should have, little to do with Donald Trump. But the historical
record will show that the melding of the American and Chinese elites
reached its apogee during Trump’s administration, as the president made
himself a focal point for the China Class, which had adopted the
Democratic Party as its main political vehicle. That’s not to say
establishment Republicans are cut out of the pro-China oligarchy—Senate
GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s shipbuilder billionaire father-in-law James
Chao has benefited greatly
from his relationship with the CCP, including college classmate Jiang
Zemin. Gifts from the Chao family have catapulted McConnell to only a
few slots below Feinstein in the list of wealthiest senators.
Riding
the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power
within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been
Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not
to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly
served. Accommodation with even the worst and most threatening aspects
of the Chinese communist regime, ongoing since the late 1990s, was put
on fast-forward. Talk about how Nike made its sneakers in Chinese slave
labor camps was no longer fashionable. News that China was stealing
American scientific and military secrets, running large spy rings in
Silicon Valley and compromising congressmen like Eric Swalwell, paying
large retainers to top Ivy League professors in a well-organized program
of intellectual theft, or in any way posed a danger to its own people
or to its neighbors, let alone to the American way of life, were muted
and dismissed as pro-Trump propaganda.
The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied
intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence
and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to
support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. It’s no wonder
that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the
technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web
Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.
For
those who actually understood what the Chinese were doing, partisanship
was a distinctly secondary concern. Chinese behavior was authentically
alarming—as was the seeming inability of core American security
institutions to take it seriously. “Through the 1980s, people who
advanced the interests of foreign powers whose ideas were inimical to
republican form of government were ostracized,” says a former Obama
administration intelligence official. “But with the advent of globalism,
they made excuses for China, even bending the intelligence to fit their
preferences. During the Bush and Obama years, the standard assessment
was that the Chinese have no desire to build a blue-water navy. It was
inconvenient to their view. China now has a third aircraft carrier in
production.”
Loathing
Trump provided their political excuse, but the American security and
defense establishment had their own interest in turning a blind eye to
China. Twenty years of squandering men, money, and prestige on military
engagements that began in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” have proved
to be of little strategic value to the United States. However, deploying
Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly
benefited Beijing. Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took
advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil.
In
Afghanistan, the large copper, metal, and minerals mines whose security
American troops still ostensibly ensure are owned by Chinese companies.
And because Afghanistan borders Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is worried that
“after the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist
organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan
may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia.” In other words, American
troops are deployed abroad in places like Afghanistan less to protect
American interests than to provide security for China’s Belt and Road
Initiative.
“There’s
a belief that we are not in the same type of conflict with them as we
were with the USSR,” says the former Obama official. “But we are.” The
problem is that virtually all of the American establishment—which is
centered in the Democratic Party—is firmly on the other side.
As
late as the summer of 2019, Trump looked like he was headed for a second
term in the White House. Not only was the economy soaring and
unemployment at record lows, he was rallying on the very field on which
he’d chosen to confront his opponents. Trump’s trade war with Beijing
showed he was serious about forcing American companies to move their
supply chains. In July, top American tech firms like Dell and HP
announced they were going to shift
a large portion of their production outside of China. Amazon,
Microsoft, and Alphabet said they were also planning to move some of
their manufacturing elsewhere.
It
was at exactly this same moment, in late June and early July of 2019
that the residents of Wuhan began to fill the streets, angry that
officials responsible for the health and prosperity of the city’s 11
million people had betrayed them. They were sick, and feared getting
sicker. The elderly gasped for breath. Marchers held up banners saying,
“we don't want to be poisoned, we just need a breath of fresh air.”
Parents worried for their children’s lives. There was fear that the ill
had suffered permanent damage to their immune and nervous systems.
Authorities
censored social media accounts, photos and videos of the protests, and
undercover policemen watched for troublemakers and detained the most
vocal. With businesses forced shut, there was nowhere for protesters to
hide. Some were carted off in vans. They’d been warned by the
authorities: “Public security organizations will resolutely crack down
on illegal criminal acts such as malicious incitement and provocation.”
What
sent the residents of Wuhan to the streets at the time wasn’t
COVID-19—which wouldn’t begin its spread until the winter. In the early
summer of 2019, what threatened public health in Wuhan was the plague of air pollution. This is a hitherto untold part of the story of America’s ghastly last year.
To
deal with the mounds of garbage poisoning the atmosphere, authorities
planned to build a waste incineration plant—a plan that rightly alarmed
the people who lived there. (In 2013, five incineration plants in Wuhan
were found to emit dangerous pollutants.)
Other cities had similarly taken to the streets to protest against air
pollution—Xiamen in 2007, Shanghai in 2015, Chengdu in 2016, Qingyuan in
2017—each time sending waves of panic through CCP leadership, which was
fearful of the slightest echo of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in
Tiananmen Square and of the prospect of unruly democracy protests in
Hong Kong making their way to the mainland and igniting a popular
brushfire. What if unrest spread from one city to the next, with the
entire country, 1.4 billion people, eventually spinning out of control?
The
way to keep unrest from going viral, the CCP had learned, was to
quarantine it. The party has shown itself especially adept at
neutralizing the country’s minority populations, first the Tibetans, and
most recently the Turkic ethnic Muslim minority Uyghurs, through mass
quarantines and incarcerations, managed through networks of electronic
surveillance that paved the way to prisons and slave labor camps. By
2019, the grim fate of China’s Uyghurs had become a matter of
concern—whether heartfelt or simply public relations-oriented—even among
many who profited hugely from their forced labor.
The
country’s 13.5 million Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang, or East
Turkestan, a region in northwestern China roughly the size of Iran, rich
in coal, oil, and natural gas. Bordering Pakistan, Xinjiang is a
terminus point for critical supply routes of the Belt and Road
Initiative, Xi’s $1 trillion project to create a global Chinese sphere
of interest. Any potential disruptions of the BRI constitute a threat to
vital Chinese interests. Xi saw an April 2014 attack in which Uyghur
fighters stabbed more than 150 people at a train station as an
opportunity to crack down.
Prepare
for a “smashing, obliterating offensive,” Xi told police officers and
troops. His deputies issued sweeping orders: “Round up everyone who
should be rounded up.” Officials who showed mercy were themselves
detained, humiliated and held up as an example for disobeying “the party
central leadership’s strategy for Xinjiang.”
According to a November 2019, New York Times report,
Chinese authorities were most worried about Uyghur students returning
home from school outside the province. The students had “widespread
social ties across the entire country” and used social media whose
“impact,” officials feared, was “widespread and difficult to eradicate.”
The task was to quarantine news of what was really happening inside the
detention camps. When the students asked where their loved ones were
and what happened to them, officials were advised to tell “students that
their relatives had been ‘infected’ by the ‘virus’ of Islamic
radicalism and must be quarantined and cured.”
But
it wasn’t just those most likely to carry out terrorist attacks—young
men—who were subject to China’s lockdown policy. According to the
documents, officials were told that “even grandparents and family
members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared.”
When
a real virus hit in the fall of 2019, Chinese authorities followed the
same protocol, quarantining not just prospective troublemakers but
everyone in Wuhan in the hope of avoiding an even larger public outcry
than the one they’d quelled in the same city just months before.
There
is a good reason why lockdowns—quarantining those who are not sick—had
never been previously employed as a public health measure. The leading
members of a city, state, or nation do not imprison its own unless they
mean to signal that they are imposing collective punishment on the
population at large. It had never been used before as a public health
measure because it is a widely recognized instrument of political
repression.
At
the end of December 2019, Chinese authorities began locking down social
media accounts mentioning the new virus, doctors who warned of it or
spoke about it with their colleagues were reprimanded and another,
allegedly infected by COVID-19, died.
All domestic travel in and out of Wuhan was stopped. If the purpose of
the lockdowns was really to prevent spread of the contagion, it’s worth
noting that international flights continued. Rather, it appears that the
domestic travel ban, like the social media censorship, was to keep news
of the government’s blunder from spreading throughout China and leading
to massive, perhaps uncontrollable, unrest.
If
Wuhan’s streets had filled in June and July to protest the authorities’
deadly incompetence when they concealed plans for an incinerator that
would sicken the population of one city, how would the Chinese public
respond upon discovering that the source for a respiratory illness
destined to plague all of the country wasn’t a freak accident of nature
that occurred in a wet market, as officials claimed, but the CCP’s own
Wuhan Institute of Virology?
In
January, the Trump administration’s former Deputy National Security
Adviser Matt Pottinger told British officials that the latest American
intelligence shows that the likeliest source of COVID-19 is the Wuhan
Institute of Virology. Pottinger, according to The Daily Mail—a
British publication was one of the few Western press outlets that
reported Pottinger’s statements—claimed the pathogen may have escaped
through a leak or an accident.
According to a State Department fact sheet
published in January, the United States “has reason to believe that
several researchers inside the Wuhan lab became sick in autumn 2019,
before the first identified case of the outbreak.” The fact sheet
further explains that the Chinese government lab has conducted research
on a bat coronavirus most similar to COVID-19 since 2016. Since at least
2017, the WIV has conducted classified research on behalf of the
Chinese military. “For many years the United States has publicly raised
concerns about China’s past biological weapons work, which Beijing has
neither documented nor demonstrably eliminated, despite its clear
obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention.”
Evidence
the pandemic didn’t start in a Wuhan wet market was published as early
as January 2020, days after Beijing implemented the lockdown on Jan. 23.
According to the British medical journal The Lancet,
13 of the first 41 cases, including the first one, had no links to the
market. In May the head of China’s center for disease control and
prevention confirmed
that there was nothing to link COVID-19 and the wet market. “The novel
coronavirus had existed long before” it was found at the market, said
the Chinese official.
After the Lancet
report, Republican officials close to the Trump administration disputed
Beijing’s official account. “We don’t know where it originated, and we
have to get to the bottom of that,” Sen. Tom Cotton said in February.
“We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is
China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human
infectious diseases.” Cotton said the Chinese had been duplicitous and
dishonest. “We need to at least ask the question to see what the
evidence says,” Cotton said. “And China right now is not giving any
evidence on that question at all.”
The corporate American press disparaged Cotton’s search for answers. Jeff Bezos’ Washington Postclaimed
that Cotton was “fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has
been repeatedly debunked by experts.” Trump was derided for contradicting
American spy services when the president said he had a high degree of
confidence that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. Sen. Ted Cruz
said
that in dismissing obvious questions about the origins of the pandemic
the press was “abandoning all pretenses of journalism to produce CCP
propaganda.”
The January publication of a New York Magazine article
by Nicholson Baker arguing the same case that Trump and GOP officials
had been making since last winter raises useful questions. Why did
journalists automatically seek to discredit the Trump administration’s
skepticism regarding Beijing’s origin story of the coronavirus? Why wait
until after the election to allow the publication of evidence that the
CCP’s story was spurious? Sure, the media preferred Biden and wanted
Trump gone at any cost—but how would it affect the Democrat’s electoral
chances to tell Americans the truth about China and COVID-19?
China had cultivated
many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays
Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that
China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th
the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In
legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China
but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige
from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead.
And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials
imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial
powers throughout history to silence their own people.
Eventually,
the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits
the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85
billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s
small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat,
city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least,
lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its
chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates
had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the
duration of the Presidential campaign. And yet in a sense, Joe Biden
really did represent a return to normalcy in the decadeslong course of U.S.-China relations.
The new American oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own exclusive right to power.
After Biden’s election, China’s foreign minister called for a reset
of U.S.-China relations but Chinese activists says Biden policy toward
China is already set. “I’m very skeptical of a Biden administration
because I am worried he will allow China to go back to normal, which is a
21st-century genocide of the Uyghurs,” one human rights activist toldTheNew York Times after the election. With Biden as president, said another “it’s like having Xi Jinping sitting in the White House.”
In November a video circulated on social media
purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese
think tank close to the Beijing government. “Trump waged a trade war
against us,” he told a Chinese audience. “Why couldn’t we handle him?
Why is that between 1992 and 2016, we always resolved issues with the
U.S.? Because we had people up there. In America’s core circle of power,
we have some old friends.” The appreciative crowd laughed along with
him. “During the last three to four decades,” he continued, “we took
advantage of America’s core circle. As I said, Wall Street has a very
profound influence … We used to rely heavily on them. Problem is they
have been declining since 2008. Most importantly after 2016 Wall Street
couldn’t control Trump … In the U.S.-China trade war they tried to help.
My friends in the U.S. told me that they tried to help, but they
couldn’t. Now with Biden winning the election, the traditional elites,
political elites, the establishment, they have a very close relationship
with Wall Street.”
Is
it true? The small fortune that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has
earned for simply speaking in front of Wall Street audiences is matter
of public record. But she had hard words
for Beijing at her confirmation hearing last month, even criticizing
the CCP for “horrendous human rights abuses” against the Uyghurs. But
the resumes of Biden’s picks for top national security posts tell a
different story. Incoming Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines
and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked at a Beltway firm called
WestExec, which scrubbed its work on behalf of the CCP from its website shortly before the election.
Longtime Biden security aide Colin Kahl, tapped for the No. 3 spot at the Pentagon, worked
at an institute at Stanford University that is twinned with Peking
University, a school run by a former CCP spy chief and long seen as a
security risk by Western intelligence services.
As
head of the Center for American Progress think tank, Biden’s pick for
director of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden, teamed up
with a U.S.-China exchange organization created as a front “to co-opt
and neutralize sources of potential opposition to the policies and
authority” of the CCP and “influence overseas Chinese communities,
foreign governments, and other actors to take actions or adopt positions
supportive of Beijing.”
Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow
at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western
intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State
Security.
U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield gave a 2019 speech
at a Chinese-government-funded Confucius Institute in Savannah,
Georgia, where she praised China’s role in promoting good governance,
gender equity, and the rule of law in Africa. “I see no reason why China
cannot share in those values,” she said. “In fact, China is in a unique
position to spread these ideals given its strong footprint on the
continent.”
The family of the incoming commander-in-chief was reportedly given an interest-free loan of $5 million by businessmen with ties to the Chinese military, while Biden’s son Hunter called
his Chinese business partner the “spy chief of China.” The reason that
the press and social media censored preelection reports of Hunter
Biden’s alleged ties to the CCP was not to protect him—$5 million is
less than what Bezos has made every hour during the course of the
pandemic. No, for the pro-China oligarchy, the point of getting Joe
Biden elected was to protect themselves.
Reports claiming that the Biden administration will continue the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to roll back
China’s technology industry are misdirection. The new administration is
loaded with lobbyists for the American tech industry, who are
determined to get the U.S.-China relationship back on track. Biden’s
Chief of Staff Ron Klain was formerly on the executive council of
TechNet, the trade group that lobbies on behalf of Silicon Valley in
Washington. Biden’s White House counsel is Steve Ricchetti whose brother
Jeff was hired to lobby for Amazon shortly after the election.
Yellen
says that “China is clearly our most important strategic competitor.”
But the pro-China oligarchy is not competing with the country from which
it draws its wealth, power, and prestige. Chinese autocracy is their
model. Consider the deployment of more than 20,000 U.S. armed forces
members throughout Washington, D.C., to provide security for an
inauguration of a president who is rarely seen in public in the wake of a
sporadically violent protest march that was cast as an insurrection and a coup;
the removal of opposition voices from social media, along with the
removal of competing social media platforms themselves; the nascent
effort to keep the Trump-supporting half of America from access to
health care, credit, legal representation, education, and employment,
with the ultimate goal of redefining protest against the policies of the
current administration as “domestic terrorism.”
What
seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an
American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and
sword against their own countrymen. Like Athens’ Thirty Tyrants, they
are not simply contemptuous of a political system that recognizes the
natural rights of all its citizens that are endowed by our creator; they
despise in particular the notion that those they rule have the same
rights they do. Witness their newfound respect for the idea that speech
should only be free for the enlightened few who know how to use it
properly. Like Critias and the pro-Sparta faction, the new American
oligarchy believes that democracy’s failures are proof of their own
exclusive right to power—and they are happy to rule in partnership with a
foreign power that will help them destroy their own countrymen.
What
does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the
Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their
property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The
good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.
