Be All You Can Be

New Army ads emphasize winning, but under the Biden junta the possibilities for losing are truly limitless.

by Lloyd Billingsley for American Greatness

In the run-up to the NCAA Final Four basketball tournament, the U.S. Army was set to deploy a new commercial featuring Jonathan Majors, star of “Creed III” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” The Army’s ad campaign soon encountered a major SNAFU. 

Majors was arrested in New York on charges of strangulation, assault, and harassment. The Army pulled the ads and replaced them with revamped commercials based on the “Be All You Can Be,” slogan from the 1980s. 

As the ad opens a male voice says, “What does it mean when people say America is a land of opportunity?” A female Hispanic in camo gear says, “It means we strive to be a nation of limitless possibilities.” 

It’s not clear if those shown in uniform are actual Army soldiers. Viewers might think the cast is the Ethnic and Diversity Studies Department at Stanford or UC Santa Cruz. 

“Exploring those possibilities isn’t just an inclination,” a voice says. “It’s our greatest strength, the power to discover.” In short order, a series of male and female voices says, “To redefine yourself, to improve yourself, to challenge yourself, to be all you can be.”

Above scenes of various activities, the script emerges through multiple speakers. 

“It means never assuming something can’t be done, and if it’s the right thing to do, never stopping until you achieve it. That’s how the U.S. Army has succeeded since the founding of this country. Since the founding of this country. Giving people an open field to do what they do best. With the best tools, the best training, the best technology in the world. The possibilities really are endless, and the world sees that.” 

Viewers then see what at first glance looks like HHS Admiral Rachel Levine, without the glasses. It’s actually Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth. Wormuth ran the International Defense and Security Center at the RAND Corporation and held positions in the Department of Defense and the Pentagon. The Secretary is married to a retired Naval officer but she never actually served in the Army. 

“It’s what we fight for every day,” the secretary says, and a series of voices echoes “every day, every day.” An avuncular, bemedaled officer then appears. 

“Seeing those possibilities then going out and achieving them, that’s winning,” he says, “and we all know that winning matters.” The narrative continues through multiple voices, with quick cuts like a music video. 

“Having possibilities matters. It’s what makes every soldier swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. America was built on embracing possibilities” as others repeat, “This is what we do. This is what we do. This is what we do. We bring out the best in the people who serve. Because America calls for nothing less.” 

Wormuth adds, “So you can be all you can be,” but her tone and expression imply “get down here and enlist right now!” The “be all you can be” theme closes out the video. Those who remember the original won’t find it familiar, and the target youth audience has reason for doubt. 

The U.S. Army is a command structure. Those who want to “be all they can be” will be given orders to do things they don’t want to do, and that’s not just cleaning latrines. Army soldiers, even though at little risk from COVID, were told to accept injections of vaccines that failed to prevent infection or transmission. 

Refusing the jab, for any reason, could get troops booted from the military. Those forced out are not likely to return, even if Paige Spirinac was the one making the pitch instead of Christine Wormuth. Army soldiers also face indoctrination in critical race theory. 

As CRT holds, from “the founding of this country,” the United States of America was nothing but a bastion of slavery and racial oppression. According to CRT, it remains so today, primarily because of pale people and their “white privilege.” 

This racist propaganda will destroy esprit de corps and unit cohesion, vital for any fighting force. Military leaders know this, but if they refuse to implement, their career is done. Young people who have encountered CRT in school will not be eager to endure it in the Army. 

“Seeing those possibilities then going out and achieving them, that’s winning,” says the Army ad. That raises questions about current military leaders. 

Back in 2013 in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Mark Milley said “Right now I would say that the conditions are set for winning this war.” As it turned out, they weren’t.

General Milley became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in 2020 he appointed himself commander-in-chief, telling his Chinese counterpart he would tip them off if the United States launched an attack. On Milley’s watch in 2021, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving billions in military gear, including an entire airbase, to the Taliban.

That’s not winning, and that humiliating defeat is not likely to draw new recruits. That’s the real back story to the new Army ads. 

Last year the U.S. Army missed its annual recruiting goal by 25 percent or 20,000 soldiers, more than an entire division, which includes 10,000-20,000 troops. The National Guard missed its target by 9,000 recruits and applications to West Point and Annapolis are down more than 20 percent. This dearth of recruits has the Pentagon looking for new ways to fill the ranks—or maybe reinvigorate some old ones. 

Retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr does not believe a revival of the draft is imminent, but “2022 is the year we question the sustainability of the all-volunteer force.” If that means conscription, the mechanism is already in place. Men ages 18-25 still must register with the Selective Service System. 

Last July, the Senate Armed Services Committee voted 20-6 to require womento register for the draft as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. The proposal is back on the table in the 2023 NDAA, sponsored by Senator Jack Reed, (D-R.I.) a West Point grad but not a veteran of Vietnam.

Of the approximately 2,700,000 American men and women who served in Vietnam, 25 percent of those in combat zones were conscripts. The Vietnam War claimed the lives of 58,220 Americans, including 40,934 killed in action. The average age of those killed in Vietnam was 23.1 years. For all their faults, maybe the 60s protesters were on to something. 

“Hell no, we won’t go!” chanted those conscripted for Vietnam. “Hey, hey, LBJ,” they wondered aloud, “how many kids did you kill today?” As Country Joe McDonald sang, “Be the first one in your block to have your boy come home in a box.” 

In 2023, potential recruits and draftees should understand what they would face under the Biden Junta. 

“Born in November 1942, Biden came of age amid the Vietnam War,” USA Today explains, “but unlike millions of men of his generation, he never served in the military.” As an undergraduate and law student, Biden received five student draft deferments. In 1968 he was classified “1-Y,” eligible to be called up only in a national emergency. 

Biden is on record that China’s Communist rulers are “not bad folks” and not even competition for the United States. Biden allowed China to maneuver a surveillance balloon over most of the nation, including sensitive military bases. 

That’s strange behavior for the man who is supposed to be commander-in-chief, and who takes an oath to defend the nation. In similar style, military leaders seem to be confused about their basic mission. 

Despite growing threats from China, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro has made climate change one of his “top priorities.” The Space Force booted Lt. Colonel Matthew Lohmeier, commander of a missile warning unit, for blowing the whistle on Marxist-racist indoctrination. This woke long march through our military institutions gives potential recruits and conscripts plenty to ponder. 

Going to war with the second-best military is like playing poker with the second-best hand. You have two choices: bluff or fold. Under the Biden Junta, the possibilities for losing are truly limitless. 

X22, And we Know, and more- April 10

 

Spinoff of very trashy ABC soap opera tries to paint pro life centers as evil 🙄

 

Little something to snack on while I wait on Dave to post: https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/04/10/shonda-rhimes-abc-drama-station-19-pushes-abortion-agenda-with-crisis-pregnancy-centers-smear/

Woke Hollywood producer Shonda Rhimes continued her pro-abortion campaigning with a cross over to her ABC Drama series Station 19 on Thursday in which she characterized pro-life pregnancy centers as “deceptive” places run by “fake doctors.”

The pisode was part two airing after the cross over with Rhimes’ ABC series Grey’s Anatomy, which gave viewers a graphic and detailed step-by-step abortion scene and portrayed pro-life advocates as violent fanatics.
Of course, Grey’s Anatomy itself has been accused of faking the medical experiences it uses for its storylines.

In the April 6 episode, entitled “It’s All Gonna Break,” abortion clinic operator Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) decides to go “under cover” into a crisis pregnancy center to “catch” them lying and deceiving pregnant woman in order to “trick” them into going through with their pregnancies and eschew abortion.

As Dr. Bailey heads to her self-assigned duty, her husband Dr. Ben Warren (Jason George) warns her that pro-lifers are violent and dangerous and asks her to take Mace with her for protection, advice she refuses. Warren follows Bailey to the targeted crisis pregnancy center that Rhimes portrays as filled with liars.

Warren, for instance, asks Bailey where they are and then tells her that the crisis pregnancy center has “almost the same name as your clinic.”

“Yeah. That’s how they trick all these women into thinking they’re providing abortion care,” Bailey scoffs in reply.

The plan, Bailey says, is to get the crisis pregnancy center people to offer a pregnant woman false medical advice so that they can then take the evidence to the state to get the center fined $1,000 for disgorging lies to clinic patients. To achieve that, they bring along Dr. Carina DeLuca (Stefania Spampinato) to pose as a pregnant woman seeking an abortion to try and trip up the pregnancy center staff.

“We need to know what they’re saying to the patients to better arm ourselves as we try to get them shut down,” Bailey adds.

In another scene inside the pregnancy center, Rhimes offers her actor doctors refuting studies that show a link between abortion and breast cancer.

The worker at the center tells Bailey, Warren, and DeLuca of the cancer link, saying “I do need to tell you about some of the risks that nobody talks about. For instance, did you know that studies are being conducted investigating the link between women who abort their fetuses and an increased risk of developing cancer?”

“Breast cancer is also a risk factor that could increase after abortion,” the woman adds to which Bailey responds “No, it’s not!”

But as NewsBusters notes: “Actually, there are many, many studies that have confirmed a link between abortion and breast cancer.”

Unsurprisingly, the segment inside the center ends with Rhimes’ heroes delivering an impassioned attack on the pro-lifers by conflating the Foster Care system to babies being given up for adoption when the clinic worker brings up the option.

Dr. Warren gets his dander up and exclaims “Just adopt, huh? Do you have any idea how overburdened the foster care system is? I mean, do you ever go see how those kids that you force women to have are doing?”

Dr. DeLuca then indignantly adds “Do you know that the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country? You didn’t even ask me if I had a previous problem with a pregnancy. You didn’t ask me if I had a condition that might lead to serious complication. Nothing. I’m an ob. I’ve seen those complications. I’ve seen women bleed out. But of course, you don’t even know because you’re just wearing a white coat, playing doctor.”

And when the woman notes that “If you don’t like it, call your congressperson. This is your tax dollars hard at work,” that sends Warren into another rant.

“So they’re tricking women into going to what they think is your clinic, but it’s with fake doctors and fake nurses and people like Nancy here who pretend to care, and I’m paying for it? Oh, no, no. No. Nope. Hey, how do you do it? How do you lie to vulnerable people? he barks.

The episode is a cartoonish presentation of what goes on in crisis pregnancy centers and is meant to mislead viewers about what really happens in them — especially the claim that pro-lifers are violent and dangerous, when in fact, there have been dozens of violent attacks on pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in the last several years, while attacks on abortion mills are rare.

---------------------

Extra comments by me: Been wondering if Breitbart was ever going to report on this. (I've been wanting to report on this ever since that disgusting Grey's episode aired a couple weeks ago!)

I sure wish we could go back to the days where shows were axed on bad quality and bad ratings instead of renewed year after year not just because they 'make money' elsewhere, but also because they're the only 'popular' shows the network has! (Seriously, ABC would be worse off then NBC and CBS if it wasn't for these 2 disgusting, and overrated nighttime soap operas!)

Fiddling America Away ~ VDH

We fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The last few weeks, the world had been writing off the United States as either crazy or irrelevant as it watches America cannibalize itself. 

Friends tremble at our sudden decline. Enemies rejoice. Neutrals make the necessary adjustments to join the ascendant non-American side.

The symptoms of our decline abroad appear everywhere. The more Joe Biden brags about the crippling oil sanctions on Russia, friends like India and allies like Japan ignore them. And why not, when Biden has no idea how long the war in Ukraine will last, or how much wherewithal the United States can, should, or will give Kyiv, or how its on-to-Red-Square blank check will finally end?

Big Biden talks about more solar and wind farms, and green new deals won’t fill the gas tanks in Munich or heat the homes of Kyoto, or lower the price of imported oil in the United Kingdom. Claiming the Afghanistan mess was a success fools no one.

Allies ask who are our leaders. An impaired Joe Biden who never is quite sure where he is, what he is doing, or whom he is with?

Kamala Harris, whose only interests appear to be demagoguing racial and social tensions with a shrinking vocabulary? 

Senator John Fetterman (D-Penn.), who was elected on the argument it was unkind not to vote for a candidate who was physically and mentally impaired?

Energy Department kingpin Sam Brinton, the cross-dresser in lipstick, now charged with felonies for stealing women’s luggage at airport carousels?

Pete Buttigieg, our transportation secretary, who virtue signals melodramas of the past when he is clueless how to fix crises in the present?

Our Pentagon brass who fixate on saying the correct thing now to ensure the lucrative defense contractor billets later? 

Allies fear that after abandoning billions of dollars in weaponry in Kabul to the terrorist Taliban, and pumping billions of dollars more of arms into the Ukrainian meat grinder, and failing to increase U.S. armaments production, Washington simply does not have the resources to match China in either a looming proxy or head-to-head war.

Browse through any media account of the U.S. military, and the storyline is one of racial, gender, gay, or transgendered wokeism, or a looming manpower shortage—not a new lethal weapon, a new division of veteran soldiers, or a new program to up the level of training, physical prowess, and mental attitude among the ranks.

The men and women, whom Russia and China most fear, feel that they are unwelcome in the U.S. military and so no longer join. Those whom our enemies hope do enlist, sign up to the delight of their quota-driven, identify politics recruitment officers—and our enemies as well.

NATO member Turkey is calling for an ecumenical Islamic effort combining Shiites and Sunnis, Persians and the Arabs, Middle Easterners and all Muslims—to unite against Israel. And why not when Biden had gratuitously insulted and yet begged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf exporting states, ignored the Abraham Accords, ostracized Israel, radically cut back on U.S. energy production capability, and groveled to Iran to reenter the Iran Nuclear Deal?

China now openly talks of war with the United States. Beijing claims the Taiwan Strait as its own de facto territorial waters. It partners with Russia to add to a growing alliance of Iran, and North Korea, and beckons Turkey, ostensibly a NATO ally. 

After refusing to come clean about its birthing in Wuhan of the gain-in-function, engineered COVID-19 virus that killed 1 million Americans, China is unapologetically defiant about sending a spy balloon over key classified sites throughout the continental United States—part of the continual, humiliating follow-up to its inaugural smack down of Biden’s diplomats at the Anchorage mini-summit.

Oil producers, China, hostiles like Russia and Iran, and opportunists like Turkey and India all foresee the end of the dollar as the international currency. After the American humiliation in Afghanistan, the Islamic world, particularly on the West Bank and in Syria, all see the United States as increasingly weak. 

The Biden Administration brags that it has saved NATO by pouring weapons into European Ukraine. But Europe is starving for fossil-fuel energy, about exhausted with emptying its arsenals in aid to Ukraine, and terrified that Biden is just enough a multilateralist to lead the alliance into a confrontation with Russia, but also so incompetent as to ensure either an economic depression or nuclear standoff. 

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador basks in the publicity of helping an ailing Biden mount stairs, as he brags that 40 million Mexican nationals have entered the United States—the majority of them illegally. He prods Mexican expatriates to vote for Democrats to ensure the border is wide open and a perpetual vehicle for Mexican, not U.S. interests, in ensuring billions of dollars in remittances, defusing social tensions at home, and encouraging them abroad in the United States. Do we help defend the borders of Ukraine because we cannot defend our own? Are 100,000 dead Americans due to imported fentanyl mere collateral damage from open borders? 

The more our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and secretary of defense tour the world, sound off on contemporary strategic issues, or weigh in on domestic politics, the more apprehensive our allies become, wondering how the once-vaunted U.S. Armed Forces have descended into some bizarre woke commissariat.

The international financial community is terrified of $33 trillion in aggregate U.S. debt, a record 130 percent of annual American GDP. It was aghast as the Biden Administration blundered ahead printing money to encourage labor non-participation during a supply chain crisis, inciting inflation, inviting high interest rates, and all but ensuring bank collapses.

The world abroad will tolerate no more lectures from American grandees about the evils of tribal hatred or the benefits of democracy—not when race relations in America are regressing to Balkan-like venom. Anti-democratic rogue regimes indict their former presidents; they put on trial their current political rivals; and they let criminals go free if they serve ideological ends. Now the United States does the same, driven by the Left’s paranoid and irrational hatred of Donald Trump, and its eagerness to destroy all customs and traditions to vent its antipathy to all things Trump.

Foreigners assume that downtown  Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Memphis, San Francisco, or Washington are medieval—filthy, unsafe, vacant, and malodorous. Western civilization discovered 2,500 years ago how to remove excrement from its city cores; now it has either lost or forgotten that ability along with the knowledge that crime and disease thrive amid sewage and garbage. 

The U.S. media was once the world’s gold standard. The New York Times claimed it was the paper of record. Network news was liberally slanted but often fair. Crusading independent journalists often kept government honest. But all that has now become a global laughingstock: ridiculously wrong about “Russian collusion,” predictably partisan about “Russian disinformation” and Hunter Biden’s laptop, egging on Alvin Bragg’s pathetic indictment of candidate and former president Trump, and giddy when an ex-president’s home is raided by FBI, or he is tried as a private citizen by a partisan Senate.

So as the military, political, financial, economic, and cultural status of the United States reaches a nadir, what is the reaction of a blinkered America? 

What remedies are Americans preparing, as they totter on the abyss of disasters comparable to the U.S. Civil War, Great Depression, World War II, or 1960s-style cultural madness?

Marshall Plans to balance budgets? A 600-ship navy? Two more crack army divisions? A continental missile-defense system? A restoration of the cores of American cities? Plans to secure the border? To ratchet up oil and gas production? To drop the racial and sexual tribalism and restore a meritocracy? To reform higher education? To begin charging criminals with the felonies they have committed? A cleaning of the FBI, CIA, Justice Department, and IRS?

Hardly.

Instead Americans are wondering why a local prosecutor has charged with felonies the first president in history, and currently the leading 2024 presidential candidate, for having a purported liaison 16 years prior and concluding a non-disclosure agreement supposedly to hide it.

A man pretending to be a woman is cashing in on his media-created persona, winning million-dollar advertising contracts from woke corporations for hawking their beer and sports bras. Do these corporations believe that America’s women are so un-endowed that CEOs must hire a man without bosoms to become their national spokesperson for best accommodating cleavage he doesn’t have in a competition he doesn’t enter?

America’s downtowns are reaching a breaking point of vacancy, vagrancy, and violence that makes life there unsustainable, while the country argues over gender pronouns. As violent crime soars, especially hate crimes, interracial crimes, and inner-city crime, a mostly black woman’s championship basketball team stages a media psychodrama of pouting and hurt feelings—as it claims it was “disrespected” by left-wing First Lady Jill Biden and will not go to the White House but prefers instead to be hosted at one of the Obamas’ three mansion estates—a duo not heretofore known for welcoming in strangers, especially of the poorer sort.

What else rises to America’s fiddling attention as the world burns up abroad?

Students in American universities, whether at Stanford Law School or San Francisco State University, shout obscenities at federal judges or seek to beat up invited speakers. Their disruptions are encouraged by their own deans’ silence or active encouragement. The common denominator in both cases is that the disrupters and attackers freely admit they violate university rules and/or the law, and yet assume their ideology and their claims on victimhood exempt them from any consequences for their atrocious conduct. And they are proven right on both counts.

All know that a few expulsions of the elite and pampered lawbreakers would restore sanity to lectures; all know that administrators either side with the culprits or fear their own careers would suffer should they enforce the rules they are charged to uphold

As transgenderism sweeps the country and wins the attention of the White House, the media do their best to hide the facts that the transgendered mass murderer in Nashville wrote a blueprint of how and why she would soon be killing 9-year-olds, that another would-be transgendered mass killer was stopped just in time in Colorado, that another transgender would-be assassin traveled to the home of Supreme Court Justice Kavanagh to murder him. 

To speak the truth that men not just in cross-dress perform sexualized dance skits for audiences that include children, but remain both exempt from legal ramifications and are in hot demand is nearly felonious. Best-selling novelist J. K. Rowling, tennis great Martina Navratilova, and All-American swimmer Riley Gaines—they all cannot go out in public alone without assuming they will be physically attacked by the “peaceful” transgendered community. Their sin? The mere suggestion that those born as biological men cannot declare themselves women and thus assume thereby they are.

So America suffers the sins of omission—squabbling over the nonessential—and commission—losing wars, going broke, ruining its economy, flirting with civil war. We know these are all self-inflicted wounds. But apparently, we believe their remedies are worse than the original maladies. And so we fixate only on the irrelevant that we think we can address while ignoring the existential we know we no longer can solve.

The world is terrified and stunned at the result—and increasingly looking elsewhere to non-American solutions.

The West Needs To Stop Believing China Can Reform Itself

Revered China expert Frank Dikotter’s latest book, ‘China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower,’ paints a damning portrait of gullible Western leaders unwilling to pressure the CCP.

Helen Raleigh reporting for The Federalist

One of the West’s most significant foreign policy blunders was its blind faith that economic engagements with China would empower moderate Communist party members to launch political reforms. Such wishful thinking, unfortunately, is not the only China illusion the West has fallen for, according to Frank Dikotter’s new book “China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower.”

Dikotter, as the chair professor of humanities at the University of Hong Kong since 2006, has a front-row seat from which he can observe Chinese history. He’s also traveled to China many times and sifted through thousands of municipal and provincial government archives and primary source materials. All of this research enabled him to author the award-winning “People’s Trilogy,” a series of books that document the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power and how its ideology and policies inflicted unimaginable pain on the Chinese people from 1945 to 1976, the year Chairman Mao, the worst mass-murder of human history, died.

Dikotter’s new book picks up from 1976 to the present and covers significant political events such as the CCP’s internal power struggle after Mao’s death and the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The book also devotes many pages to analyzing China’s economy. An immense contribution of this book is that it shatters the image of a more open and powerful China. 

Socialism Persists in China

A common misbelief about China is that through four decades of “economic reform,” the Chinese economy has become more market-oriented than it was under Mao’s rule. According to Dikotter, the term “economic reform” is inaccurate. In actuality, the CCP was “tinkering with a planned economy” and misleading the public about economic reform whenever it needed to attract foreign investments or seek memberships to international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Thus, China’s economy today is as much a socialist one as it was under Mao since the state still controls all the means of production. Dikotter writes, “To this day, the land belongs to the state, a great many raw material resources belong to the state, major industries are controlled directly or indirectly by the state, and the banks belong to the state … 95 of the top 100 private firms belong to current or former party members.” To this point, the state-owned banks distribute capital as political goods to state-owned enterprises to pursue political goals. The Chinese government still follows the former Soviet Union’s central planning model by issuing an economic plan every five years. Capital is not allowed to flow freely in China.

So how did China’s socialist economy still generate visible economic growth in the last four decades? The Chinese people pulled themselves out of poverty by disobeying the party’s orders. According to Dikotter, “Even before Mao died, villagers in many parts of the countryside sought to regain control [not ownership] over the land … In some cases, local officials quietly distributed land to the farmers. In others, they merely looked away.”

The party fought against this bottom-up de-collectivization movement, insisting, “We do not allow family farming, we do not allow the division of land, and we do not allow individuals to strike out on their own.” But eventually, the party had to give up after the production figures from family farming had consistently surpassed those from government-run agriculture collectives. Unwilling to admit defeat, the party presented the de-collectivization as its own idea, repackaged it under the title “Contract Responsibility System,” and promoted it throughout the countryside long after many villages had already implemented something similar.

What the Chinese farmer did is a typical example of how people must “subvert the master plan” to survive in a socialist regime. Quoting the historian Robert Service, Dikotter wrote, “Disobedience in the Soviet Union was not so much the grit that stopped the machinery as the oil that prevented the system from grinding to a complete standstill.” Thus, cheating or disobeying party policies is not only a must-have self-preservation skill under socialism but also what keeps preventing China’s socialist economy from collapsing.

There Are No Moderate CCP Leaders

The CCP always points to China’s economic growth as indisputable evidence that the party has competent and wise leaders who know how to deliver growth and prosperity for the Chinese people. In truth, Mao’s successors, including Deng Xiaoping, who was widely praised as the “architect of economic reform,” were neither competent nor wise. For instance, after Britain’s Prime Minister Margret Thatcher met Deng Xiaoping and other senior CCP leaders in 1983 to discuss the future of Hong Kong, “she concluded that none of the leaders in Beijing understood international finance or the concept of freedom under a system of law,” according to Dikotter.

There is no moderate CCP leader either. Take Zhao Ziyang as an example. Zhao was premier from 1980 to 1987 and CCP general secretary from 1987 to 1989. After the CCP leadership ordered the People’s Liberation Army to violently suppress the Tiananmen Square protesters, Zhao was placed under house arrest until he died in 2005. The West has lionized Zhao as a moderate party member who paid a personal and professional price for trying to build democracy in China, except that image was far from the truth.

In the 1950s, Zhao ruthlessly repressed farmers when as a provincial official in Guangdong, relying on torture to force them to surrender their crucial food supplies to the state. Zhao reached the peak of his power and became the premier of China and later the General Secretary of the CCP after winning a power struggle against his predecessor Hu Yaobang, claiming Hu wasn’t tough enough against the influence of bourgeois Western democratic ideas. In October 1987, Zhao told the Party Congress: “We will never copy the separation of powers and the multi-party system of the West.” A few months earlier, Zhao conveyed to Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany, that “Once their living standards had been raised, people in China would acknowledge the superiority of socialism. And then, we can gradually reduce the scope for liberalization further and further.”

Zhao appeared to be sympathetic to protestors in Tiananmen Square because he had hoped to exploit the event to gain power over China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, who had the final say on all essential matters. Zhao’s gambit didn’t pay off, and he was purged after losing the inner party power struggle. He was no martyr of freedom and democracy as many in the West chose to depict him.

The West should stop searching for moderate CCP leaders because there are none.

The West Has Failed to Learn

After the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, the West should have realized that there are no moderate CCP leaders and that China remains a brutal socialist tyrannical regime. Had leaders in Western democracies united in imposing severe economic sanctions on China, they might have been able to compel the liberalizing political reforms. Instead, China apologists, such as Henry Kissinger, promised the CCP that they could count on him as an old friend of China. Speaking to a global audience in the White House, U.S. President George H.W. Bush said, “I don’t think we ought to judge the whole People’s Liberation Army of China by that terrible incident.” Even though Deng Xiaoping ordered the massacre, Bush exonerated Deng by calling the Communist butcher a “forward-looking leader.” Bush opposed the use of sanctions against Beijing because he believed that commercial contacts would overcome these “unfortunate events” and inexorably move China towards democracy.

A month after the massacre, President Bush’s National security adviser Brent Scowcroft met Deng Xiaoping in Beijing and assured him, “President Bush is a true friend, a true friend of you and of China.” The CCP quickly realized that it should fear no one and change nothing. Western politicians eagerly welcomed the regime into international institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and opened their markets for Chinese exports. Foreign businesses brought their products, technologies, and money to China. The West’s wishful thinking and greed helped extend the CCP’s longevity and facilitated the rise of a formidable adversary that now threatens Western democracies and democratic values.

The only good news to emerge from Dikotter’s book is that Communist China is not as powerful as it projects. Its economy is “built on speculation, and everything is over-leveraged.” The nation also faces a demographic crisis as its population ages, and its size is expected to halve by 2100. In Dikotter’s words, “China resembles a tanker that looks impressively shipshape from a distance, with the captain and lieutenants standing proudly on the bridge, while below deck sailors are desperately pumping water and plugging holes to keep the vessel afloat.”

But a weak China can be even more dangerous than a powerful one. Beijing may learn from Russia and attempt to claim its relevancy by taking aggressive actions abroad, i.e., invading Taiwan. The West should learn from past policy mistakes by seeing through the CCP’s illusions and preparing for the worst. 

SFSU Releases Shocking Statement on Riley Gaines Assault

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

As RedState previously reported, Riley Gaines, a top collegiate swimmer, was assaulted and held hostage after speaking at San Francisco State University recently. Shocking videos showed the chaotic scene as police tried to rush Gaines through the hallways only to leave her barricaded in a room for three hours. Outside, militant trans activists could be heard demanding money for her release.

In the end, not a single person was arrested, and now, SFSU is praising those who attacked Gaines. In a truly insane statement, Jamillah Moore, Vice President for Student Affairs, lauded the “protesters” as brave and in need of healing while failing to even mention the violence that occurred by their hands.

Dear SF State community, Today, San Francisco State finds itself again at the center of a national discussion regarding freedom of speech and expression. Let me begin by saying clearly: the trans community is welcome and belongs at San Francisco State University. Further, our community fiercely believes in unity, connection, care and compassion, and we value different ideas, even when they are not our own. SF State is regularly noted as one of the most diverse campuses in the United States—this is what makes us Gators, and this is what makes us great. Diversity promotes critical discussions, new understandings and enriches the academic experience. But we may also find ourselves exposed to divergent views and even views we find personally abhorrent. These encounters have sometimes led to discord, anger, confrontation and fear. We must meet this moment and unite with a shared value of learning.  

Thank you to our students who participated peacefully in Thursday evening’s event. It took tremendous bravery to stand in a challenging space. I am proud of the moments where we listened and asked insightful questions. I am also proud of the moments when our students demonstrated the value of free speech and the right to protest peacefully. These issues do not go away, and these values are very much at our core.  

This feels difficult because it is difficult. As you reflect, process, and begin to heal, please remember that there are people, resources and services available and ready to receive our Gator community, including faculty, staff members, coaches and mentors who are here to support you.    

Campus resources are also available: 

1. Equity and Community Inclusion 

2. Counseling and Psychological Services  

3. Dean of Students Office   

The well-being of the SF State campus community remains our priority.    

Sincerely, 

Jamillah Moore, Ed.D. 

Vice President for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management

SFSU has decided that the real victims, in this case, are the screeching, hysterical trans activists who physically assaulted and kidnapped someone for using their First Amendment rights.

I’d call the statement tone-deaf, but it’s not tone-deaf because this is exactly the tone that SFSU is shooting for, which is to claim that those committing violent acts (or just being generally deranged) are actually the ones who were victimized. Moore even provides links to counseling and “equity and community inclusion” services in the email. Don’t get me wrong, every single one of those “protesters” needs counseling (and more), but not in the way that Moore is suggesting.

How else am I supposed to read that statement except as an open admission that trans activists are above the law, both in regard to the state and the universities they attend? They can apparently assault people and violate the rights of others with impunity. You literally had a hostage-taking captured on video at SFSU, and the police made zero arrests while the university praised the hostage-takers. What are normal people supposed to even do with that?

The answer is becoming more clear: Get out.

You will not be protected in these far-left jurisdictions because the systems are stacked with partisan activists from top to bottom. We saw that with the recent murder conviction of Daniel Perry. The cops are activists, the university administrators are activists, and the district attorneys are activists. I understand the desire to fight back and retake ground, but you aren’t retaking SFSU, and at some point, your personal safety and the safety of your family have to come first. If you remain in these deep blue areas, it’s just a matter of time before you are victimized.

Lastly, Gaines needs to take legal action here. She needs to sue the university, those who attacked her, and the police department (if they refuse to make arrests). I’m not a lawyer, so I understand it’s more complicated than my one-sentence demand, but there are absolutely legal remedies to pursue in this case. The only way this stops is when consequences are put on the table.

Riley Gaines Rips Apart the Outrageous 

Statement From SFSU About Assault on Her

Nick Arama reporting for RedState

As we previously reported, All-American swimmer and women’s rights activist Riley Gaines was assaulted and surrounded by a screaming mob of trans-activist students when she went to speak at San Francisco State University. The campus police had to rush her to a room where they were barricaded inside for three hours. She said they were afraid to confront the crowd outside in a truly scary moment. The “activists” were caught on video talking about demanding money for her release. She wasn’t able to leave until the city police finally showed up and were able to free her from the crowd.

Yet, so far, there have been no arrests according to the university police department, despite those violent actions taken against her. Indeed, there was an incredible statement issued by Jamillah Moore, Ed.D., SFSU’s “Vice President for Student Affairs & Enrollment Management.”

Click on it to see the full statement.

She praised the people “who participated peacefully” and said how “proud” she was of them. Nowhere was there any mention of the violence of the mob, and nowhere was there a condemnation of those actions. If you read that, you’d be having flashbacks to 2020 and the “mostly peaceful” BLM riots. Indeed, her concern was not for Gaines, who had been assaulted, or the university being so out of control that speakers can’t be safe there, but for the students who needed to “heal” after Gaines’ visit. The poor ranting fascistic students who wanted to shut down speech that they didn’t like were, in her mind, the victims.

But Riley Gaines was having none of that. On Saturday, she said that this wasn’t going to deter her. She told Tucker Carlson she would not be silenced as she described the scary situation to him. One of the most shocking things was the response of the police and how they were afraid to respond because they were afraid of what the mob “was capable of.” She also said that she would be seeking legal action against the people involved and that they would face “repercussions.”

Now, Gaines is responding specifically to that statement from Jamillah Moore.

“I’m sorry did this just say PEACEFUL…. I was assaulted,” Gaines declared. “I was extorted and held for random [ransom]. The protestors demanded I pay them if I wanted to make it home safely. I missed my flight home because I was barricaded in a classroom.” “We must have different definitions of peaceful,” she said.

Yep. It’s fascinating how the definition of “peaceful” changes for those on the left when it involves people on their side of the aisle. When it involves anyone from the left, even if the person is violent, it’s peaceful and the violence is the fault somehow of the people on the right. Even setting fires is “mostly peaceful” to liberal reporters as the flames engulf the buildings over their shoulders. If the people in question are not on the left or are on the right, then mere words can be violent and an “assault.”

Gaines pointed out the ambush was “the opposite of peaceful.”

She also tweeted some more about what happened during the attack on her, to Moore.

Warning for graphic language:

How much do they think they can get away with it? You can hear one of them justifying their actions against her by blaming Gaines, saying if she didn’t want this, “she should not have came here.”

Gaines is lucky to have made it out without further injury, and it’s shameful that the school has not condemned this and there has been no action taken against anyone, so far. Gaines knows where to start in terms of any action she takes. She could take action against a variety of people here, including the school for the failure to act properly to protect her on their campus. The school might want to reconsider its approach because right now, it’s just digging itself a bigger hole with its response.