Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 55

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide

Today, I am publishing a speech delivered at Hillsdale College by Christopher Cladwell, author, editor, and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He provides a compelling explanation for the extreme hostility and divisiveness that is ripping our nation apart–the worst I have seen in my lifetime, and I lived through and experienced the divisive and discordant 1960s. 

The Roots of Our Partisan Divide

By: Christopher Caldwell

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on January 28, 2020, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation lecture series.

American society today is divided by party and by ideology in a way it has perhaps not been since the Civil War. I have just published a book that, among other things, suggests why this is. It is called The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the election of Donald J. Trump. You can get a good idea of the drift of the narrative from its chapter titles: 1963, Race, Sex, War, Debt, Diversity, Winners, and Losers.

I can end part of the suspense right now—Democrats are the winners. Their party won the 1960s—they gained money, power, and prestige. The GOP is the party of the people who lost those things.

One of the strands of this story involves the Vietnam War. The antiquated way the Army was mustered in the 1960s wound up creating a class system. What I’m referring to here is the so-called student deferment. In the old days, university-level education was rare. At the start of the First World War, only one in 30 American men was in a college or university, so student deferments were not culturally significant. By the time of Vietnam, almost half of American men were in a college or university, and student deferment remained in effect until well into the war.

So if you were rich enough to study art history, you went to Woodstock and made love. If you worked in a garage, you went to Da Nang and made war. This produced a class division that many of the college-educated mistook for a moral division, particularly once we lost the war. The rich saw themselves as having avoided service in Vietnam not because they were more privileged or—heaven forbid—less brave, but because they were more decent.

Another strand of the story involves women. Today, there are two cultures of American womanhood—the culture of married women and the culture of single women. If you poll them on political issues, they tend to differ diametrically. It was feminism that produced this rupture. For women during the Kennedy administration, by contrast, there was one culture of femininity, and it united women from cradle to grave: Ninety percent of married women and 87 percent of unmarried women believed there was such a thing as “women’s intuition.” Only 16 percent of married women and only 15 percent of unmarried women thought it was excusable in some circumstances to have an extramarital affair. Ninety-nine percent of women, when asked the ideal age for marriage, said it was sometime before age 27. None answered “never.”

But it is a third strand of the story, running all the way down to our day, that is most important for explaining our partisan polarization. It concerns how the civil rights laws of the 1960s, and particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, divided the country. They did so by giving birth to what was, in effect, a second constitution, which would eventually cause Americans to peel off into two different and incompatible constitutional cultures. This became obvious only over time. It happened so slowly that many people did not notice.

Because conventional wisdom today holds that the Civil Rights Act brought the country together, my book’s suggestion that it pulled the country apart has been met with outrage. The outrage has been especially pronounced among those who have not read the book. So for their benefit, I should make crystal clear that my book is not a defense of segregation or Jim Crow, and that when I criticize the long-term effects of the civil rights laws of the 1960s, I do not criticize the principle of equality in general or the movement for black equality in particular.

What I am talking about are the emergency mechanisms that, in the name of ending segregation, were established under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These gave Washington the authority to override what Americans had traditionally thought of as their ordinary democratic institutions. It was widely assumed that the emergency mechanisms would be temporary and narrowly focused. But they soon escaped democratic control altogether, and they have now become the most powerful part of our governing system.

How Civil Rights Legislation Worked

There were two noteworthy things about the civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965.

The first was its unprecedented concentration of power. It gave Washington tools it had never before had in peacetime. It created new crimes, outlawing discrimination in almost every walk of public and private life. It revoked—or repealed—the prevailing understanding of freedom of association as protected by the First Amendment. It established agencies to hunt down these new crimes—an expanded Civil Rights Commission, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and various offices of civil rights in the different cabinet agencies. It gave the government new prerogatives, such as laying out hiring practices for all companies with more than 15 employees, filing lawsuits, conducting investigations, and ordering redress. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, economic, and political life to direction from bureaucrats and judges.

Demonstrators march down Constitution Avenue during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

To put it bluntly, the effect of these civil rights laws was to take a lot of decisions that had been made in the democratic parts of the American government and relocate them to the bureaucracy or the judiciary. Only with that kind of arsenal, Lyndon Johnson and the drafters thought, would it be possible to root out insidious racism.

The second noteworthy thing about the civil rights legislation of the 1960s is that it was kind of a fudge. It sat uneasily not only with the First Amendment but with the Constitution as a whole. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed largely to give teeth to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal rights for all citizens, did so by creating different levels of rights for citizens of southern states like Alabama and citizens of northern states like Michigan when it came to election laws.

The goal of the civil rights laws was to bring the sham democracies of the American South into conformity with the Constitution. But nobody’s democracy is perfect, and it turned out to be much harder than anticipated to distinguish between democracy in the South and democracy elsewhere in the country. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions—under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.

Still, no one was too worried about that. It is clear in retrospect that Americans outside the South understood segregation as a regional problem. As far as we can tell from polls, 70-90 percent of Americans outside the South thought that blacks in their part of the country were treated just fine, the same as anyone else. In practice, non-Southerners did not expect the new laws to be turned back on themselves.

The Broadening of Civil Rights

The problem is that when the work of the civil rights legislation was done—when de jure segregation was stopped—these new powers were not suspended or scaled back or reassessed. On the contrary, they intensified. The ability to set racial quotas for public schools was not in the original Civil Rights Act, but offices of civil rights started doing it, and there was no one strong enough to resist. Busing of schoolchildren had not been in the original plan, either, but once schools started to fall short of targets established by the bureaucracy, judges ordered it.

Affirmative action was a vague notion in the Civil Rights Act. But by the time of the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision, it was an outright system of racial preference for non-whites. In that case, the plaintiff, Alan Bakke, who had been a U.S. Marine captain in Vietnam, saw his application for medical school rejected, even though his test scores were in the 96th, 94th, 97th, and 72nd percentiles. Minority applicants, meanwhile, were admitted with, on average, scores in the 34th, 30th, 37th, and 18th percentiles. And although the Court decided that Bakke himself deserved admission, it did not do away with the affirmative action programs that kept him out. In fact, it institutionalized them, mandating “diversity”—a new concept at the time—as the law of the land.

Meanwhile, other groups, many of them not even envisioned in the original legislation, got the hang of using civil rights law. Immigrant advocates, for instance: Americans never voted for bilingual education, but when the Supreme Court upheld the idea in 1974, rule writers in the offices of civil rights simply established it, and it exists to this day. Women, too: the EEOC battled Sears, Roebuck & Co. from 1973 to 1986 with every weapon at its disposal, trying to prove it guilty of sexism—ultimately failing to prove even a single instance of it.

Finally, civil rights came to dominate—and even overrule—legislation that had nothing to do with it. The most traumatic example of this was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. This legislation was supposed to be the grand compromise on which our modern immigration policy would be built. On the one hand, about three million illegal immigrants who had mostly come north from Mexico would be given citizenship. On the other hand, draconian laws would ensure that the amnesty would not be an incentive to future migrants, and that illegal immigration would never get out of control again. So there were harsh “employer sanctions” for anyone who hired a non-citizen. But once the law passed, what happened? Illegal immigrants got their amnesty. But the penalties on illegal hiring turned out to be fake—because, to simplify just a bit, asking an employee who “looks Mexican” where he was born or about his citizenship status was held to be a violation of his civil rights. Civil rights law had made it impossible for Americans to get what they’d voted for through their representatives, leading to decades of political strife over immigration policy that continues to this day.

A more recent manifestation of the broadening of civil rights laws is the “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Obama Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights in 2011, which sought to dictate sexual harassment policy to every college and university in the country. Another is the overturning by judges of a temporary ban on entry from certain countries linked to terrorism in the first months of the Trump administration in 2017.

These policies, qua policies, have their defenders and their detractors. The important thing for our purposes is how they were established and enforced. More and more areas of American life have been withdrawn from voters’ democratic control and delivered up to the bureaucratic and judicial emergency mechanisms of civil rights law. Civil rights law has become a second constitution, with powers that can be used to override the Constitution of 1787.

The New Constitution

In explaining the constitutional order that we see today, I’d like to focus on just two of its characteristics.

First, it has a moral element, almost a metaphysical element, that is usually more typical of theocracies than of secular republics. As we’ve discussed, civil rights law gave bureaucrats and judges emergency powers to override the normal constitutional order, bypassing democracy. But the key question is: Under what conditions is the government authorized to activate these emergency powers? It is a question that has been much studied by political thinkers in Europe.

Usually, when European governments of the past bypassed their constitutions by declaring emergencies, it was on the grounds of a military threat or a threat to public order. But in America, as our way of governing has evolved since 1964, emergencies are declared on a moral basis: people are suffering; their newly discovered rights are being denied. America can’t wait anymore for the ordinary democratic process to take its course.

A moral ground for invoking emergencies sounds more humane than a military one. It is not. That is because, in order to justify its special powers, the government must create a class of officially designated malefactors. With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the justification of this strong medicine was that there was a collection of Southern politicians who were so wily and devious, and a collection of Southern sheriffs so ruthless and depraved, that one could not, and was not morally obliged to, fight fair with them.

That pattern has perpetuated itself, even as the focus of civil rights has moved to American institutions less obviously objectionable than segregation. Every intervention in the name of rights requires the identification of a malefactor. So very early on in the gay marriage debate, those who believed in traditional marriage were likened to segregationists or to those who had opposed interracial marriage.

Joe Biden recently said: “Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.” Now, most Americans, probably including Joe Biden, know very little about transgenderism. But this is an assertion that Americans are not going to be permitted to advance their knowledge by discussing the issue in public or to work out their differences at the ballot box. As civil rights laws have been extended by analogy into other areas of American life, the imputation of moral non-personhood has been aimed at a growing number of people who have committed no sin more grievous than believing the same things they did two years ago, and therefore standing in the way of the progressive juggernaut.

The second characteristic of the new civil rights constitution is what we can call intersectionality. This is a sociological development. As long as civil rights law was limited to protecting the rights of Southern blacks, it was a stable system. It had the logic of history behind it, which both justified and focused its application. But if other groups could be given the privilege of advancing their causes by bureaucratic fiat and judicial decree, there was the possibility of a gradual building up of vast new coalitions, maybe even electoral majorities. This was made possible because almost anyone who was not a white heterosexual male could benefit from civil rights law in some way.

Seventy years ago, India produced the first modern minority-rights based constitution with a long, enumerated list of so-called “scheduled tribes and castes.” Eventually, inter-group horse-trading took up so much of the country’s attention that there emerged a grumbling group of “everyone else,” of “ordinary Indians.” These account for many of the people behind the present prime minister, Narendra Modi.

Indians who like Modi say he’s the candidate of average citizens. Those who don’t like him, as most of the international media do not, call him a “Hindu nationalist.”

We have a version of the same thing happening in America. By the mid-1980s, the “intersectional” coalition of civil rights activists started using the term “people of color” to describe itself. Now, logically, if there really is such a thing as “people of color,” and if they are demanding a larger share of society’s rewards, they are ipso facto demanding that “non–people of color” get a smaller share. In the same way that the Indian constitution called forth the idea of a generic “Hindu,” the new civil rights constitution created a group of “non–people of color.” It made white people a political reality in the United States in a way they had never been.

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefitted by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.

A Party of Bigots and a Party of Totalitarians

Let’s say you’re a progressive. In fact, let’s say you are a progressive gay man in a gay marriage, with two adopted children. The civil rights version of the country is everything to you. Your whole way of life depends on it. How can you back a party or a politician who even wavers on it? Quite likely, your whole moral idea of yourself depends on it, too. You may have marched in gay pride parades carrying signs reading “Stop the Hate,” and you believe that people who opposed the campaign that made possible your way of life, your marriage, and your children, can only have done so for terrible reasons. You are on the side of the glorious marchers of Birmingham, and they are on the side of Bull Connor. To you, the other party is a party of bigots.

But, say you’re a conservative person who goes to church, and your seven-year-old son is being taught about “gender fluidity” in first grade. There is no avenue for you to complain about this. You’ll be called a bigot at the very least. In fact, although you’re not a lawyer, you have a vague sense that you might get fired from your job, or fined, or that something else bad will happen. You also feel that this business has something to do with gay rights. “Sorry,” you ask, “when did I vote for this?” You begin to suspect that taking your voice away from you and taking your vote away from you is the main goal of these rights movements. To you, the other party is a party of totalitarians.

And that’s our current party system: the bigots versus the totalitarians.

If either of these constitutions were totally devoid of merit, we wouldn’t have a problem. We could be confident that the wiser of the two would win out in the end. But each of our two constitutions contains, for its adherents, a great deal worth defending to the bitter end. And unfortunately, each constitution must increasingly defend itself against the other.

When gay marriage was being advanced over the past 20 years, one of the common sayings of activists was: “The sky didn’t fall.” People would say: “Look, we’ve had gay marriage in Massachusetts for three weeks, and I’ve got news for you! The sky didn’t fall!” They were right in the short term. But I think they forgot how delicate a system a democratic constitutional republic is, how difficult it is to get the formula right, and how hard it is to see when a government begins—slowly, very slowly—to veer off course in a way that can take decades to become evident.

Then one day we discover that, although we still deny the sky is falling, we do so with a lot less confidence.

Christopher Caldwell

Christopher Caldwell is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books, and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. A graduate of Harvard College, he has been a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. He is the author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West and The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.

The Height of Hypocrisy

I received the following commentary from a person who apparently wishes to remain anonymous—and for good reason given the ill-advised and treacherous “cancel culture” that exists in America today.

The writer points to the hypocrisy of the media and those on the left who are quick to condemn the hundreds of thousands of Americans who gathered in the Ellipse to hear the president speak on January 6 but not the marauding gangs of thugs who rioted and burned down hundreds of businesses in several cities last summer.

I think he makes some valid points. We are living in a country where crime and punishment are handled differently depending on your political allegiance. Conservatives insist those on the left are treated much more leniently by the nation’s justice system than those on the right.

Decide for yourself after reading the following commentary:

The Height of Hypocrisy

Remember in 2011 when tens of thousands of Democrats stormed the Wisconsin Capitol building in Madison and physically occupied it for more than two weeks? We were told, “This is what democracy looks like.” 

Remember in 2016 when Obama was President and hundreds of BLM rioters blocked interstate highways and violently accosted police (even killing several)? We were told, “To assign the actions of one person to an entire movement is dangerous and irresponsible.”  

Really? Then why are Democrats doing just that to the thousands of protestors who didn’t lay siege to the Capitol building?

Remember in 2018 during the Kavanaugh hearings when a mob of Democrats stormed the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, and pounded their fists in rage on the door. We were told, “It’s understandable.”

Remember last summer’s riots in major cities across the country when groups of Democrats marched in the streets, set buildings on fire, looted businesses, assaulted and even killed bystanders and police?  We were told, “These are mostly peaceful protests.”

Remember when Democrats seized several blocks of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in downtown Seattle, declaring it an autonomous zone? Remember the guns and deaths and utter destruction? We were told, “It’s a block party atmosphere.” 

Remember when a crazed mob gathered after the Republican National Convention and attacked Rand Paul, a sitting U.S. Senator? We were told, “No justice, no peace.” 

Remember how police were told to stand down, governors refused to call in the National Guard, and Democrats, like Kamala Harris paid the bail for violent protesters and looters who were arrested? We were told, “This is the only way oppressed people can be heard.” 

I have condemned violent protests and lawlessness every single time they’ve been reported. I condemn the actions of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6.

But I refuse to condemn hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors because a handful (100 arrested to date) chose to be lawless and to defy everything the vast majority of the crowd stood for. Conservatives are defenders of the Constitution, the police, and the rule of law. Because a relative few people decided to do something stupid doesn’t nullify the concerns of the many.

The real culprit here? The mainstream media has been telling us for years that violence is the only way people who feel oppressed can be heard, it’s the only way to get justice, and this is what democracy looks like. Apparently, a few who were in the crowd on January 6 listened to them.

The inflammatory and hateful rhetoric of the Left and the mainstream media need to take responsibility for dividing Americans. They have humiliated those who support the President or conservative ideals. They have pushed people to the brink, even while claiming, “It’s time for unity.”

In fact, it’s time for careful reflection and change on all sides, otherwise our nation will continue to rip itself apart politically and socially.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

And that concludes the commentary from our mystery pundit.

Karl Marx

Let me, however, add a few choice comments from Karl Marx, the German founder of communism who remains the socialist left’s central political maharishi even after his death 138 years ago in London.

Because speech or written commentary can get you censored and canceled these days if it’s perceived by the doyens of high tech and social media as advocating violence, I wonder if these comments by Marx would pass muster on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, etc. Somehow, given the hypocrisy we are seeing, I suspect they would.

From the lips of Karl Marx:

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.Communism begins where atheism begins.When the sufferers learn to think, then the thinkers will learn to suffer.The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

Thank you, Herr Marx. Further commentary is unnecessary.

 

 

 

How to Catch Wild Pigs: An Allegory for Our Time

According to the dictionary, a fable is a usually short narrative making an edifying or cautionary point and often employing as characters animals that speak and act like humans.

With that thought in mind, I would like to share with my followers the following short fable about catching wild pigs that someone sent me recently. The author of this little allegory is anonymous, but I am happy to share it anyway.

Frankly, I am not sure Aesop could have penned a better fable to describe what is in store for America the next four years under a Biden administration.

Please read on.

Once upon a time, there was a university chemistry professor who had some exchange students in his class.

One day while the class was in the lab, the professor noticed one young man, an exchange student, who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if he was in pain.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting socialists and Communists who were trying to overthrow his native country’s democratic government.

In the middle of his story, he looked at the professor and asked a strange question.

“Do you know how to catch wild pigs?”

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said that it was no joke. Then he proceeded to enlighten the professor on the art of capturing wild pigs, which are exceptionally dangerous creatures.

“You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and spreading a lot of corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free food.

“When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the spot where they are used to coming. When they get used to that fence, they return and begin to eat the corn again. Then you put up another side of the fence.

“Eventually, they get used to that and return to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate on the last side.

“By now the pigs are used to the free corn and come blithely through the gate again and again to eat that free corn.

Once you have a good sized herd in the pen, you slam the gate on them.

“Suddenly the wild pigs realize they have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they can’t get free. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They get so used to eating the corn that they forget how to forage for themselves in the woods and eventually they accept their captivity.”

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening in the United States during the next four years. The Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will continue pushing us toward socialism/ communism by dispersing the “free corn” in the form of federal entitlements and give-away programs in return for votes.

Meanwhile, we will lose our freedoms, a little at a time—and most people won’t even notice it.

Think about what the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin said: “Remove one freedom per generation and soon you will have no freedom and no one will have noticed.”

 You can draw two morals from this little tale:

There is no such thing as a free lunch!God help us all when the gate slams shut!

I will end with this sobering thought:

“The problems we face today are there because the people who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Breaking up the Social Media Giants? Here’s a Little History of Trust Busting in America!

We knew it was coming. America’s powerful big tech monopolies moved over the weekend to silence conservative voices and online platforms.

The first casualty in this war of words was Parler—a place where conservative Americans went when they found their commentaries censored by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social media outlets.

Parler’s fate was sealed when Amazon’s AWS unit stopped providing Parler with cloud services and Apple and Google booted the network out of its app stores.

“We are now living in a country where four or five companies, unelected, unaccountable, have the monopoly power to decide, we’re gonna wipe people out, we’re going to erase them, from any digital platform, whether it’s selling things and the like,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said.  “The social media industry’s sway over public conversation is too great.”

That’s what the U.S. Congress thought in the late 1800s and early 1900s when it passed antitrust laws designed to break up monopolies and trusts in the railroad, oil, steel, and sugar industries—all of which were found to be restraining trade and manipulating markets.

One of the classic trusts was the Standard Oil Company, which bought its rivals or established business arrangements that effectively stifled competition. Other companies in other industries followed the model of Standard Oil, which organized itself as a trust in which several component corporations were controlled by one board of directors.

In 1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to provide some federal regulation of trusts. Despite the Sherman Antitrust Act, by 1902, the 100 largest corporations held control of 40 percent of industrial capital in the United States.

One of the most egregious trusts was the American Sugar Refining Company, which was taken to court for controlling approximately 98% of the US sugar trade. In 1895, just 5 years after passing the Sherman Act, US courts ruled in favor of the American Sugar Refining Company and refused to dissolve its hold over the industry.

Teddy Roosevelt, Trust Buster

However, when President Theodore Roosevelt took office in 1901, all of that changed. In 1902, Roosevelt revived the Sherman Act by suing J. P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, a railroad trust that controlled the Great Northern Railway; Northern Pacific Railway; and the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad. The court decision broke the conglomerate.

“Where a trust becomes a monopoly the state has an immediate right to interfere,” Roosevelt said.

In 1903, Roosevelt worked closely with Congress to establish the Elkins Act, which made it illegal for railroad companies to provide discounts to large farming establishments. These discounts made it difficult for smaller farming enterprises to take part in railroad services and the act served to make that access more equal across the board.

An examination of social media companies today reveals a similar pattern of monopolization.

The late Jack Welch, legendary CEO of General Electric and still considered by many to be the ultimate business guru, once offered this simple formula for success: “Number one, cash is king… number two, communicate… number three, buy or bury the competition.”

Social media companies like Facebook and the other monopoly-minded tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Twitter, have taken Welch’s advice to heart.

Even before Big Tech’s recent censorship of public discourse and its take-down of Parler, the hammer was threatening to fall on Google and Facebook. Both social media platforms are being sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and nearly every U.S. state. The suits charge that both companies use a ‘buy or bury’ strategy to snap up rivals and keep smaller competitors at bay.

While stifling competition by crushing or buying up small competitors is bad enough, I am more concerned with what these monoliths are doing to free speech and public discourse in our country.

They see the First Amendment of the Constitution as something to be ignored, even spat upon. In what may prove to be a violation of the First Amendment, every social media company has suspended President Donald Trump’s accounts either temporarily or permanently in the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. Capitol building.

Additionally, payment processing company Stripe cut ties with Trump’s campaign while Twilio, Okta, and other tech companies stopped providing services to Parler. Reddit banned the subreddit r/DonaldTrump while Twitch disabled Trump’s channel. Shopify took down two online stores affiliated with Trump.

What’s next?

“Right or wrong, they made a political decision,” said Jonathon Hauenschild, director of the communications and technology task force for the American Legislative Exchange Council. “Attention on the tech giants was there, to begin with. Now the spotlight is fully on.”

The question is whether or not a Biden Administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will take the steps necessary to rein in the social media giants.

It’s possible Big Tech and Social Media censorship will come under more scrutiny if Congress turns its attention to Section 230 – the part of U.S. law that grants broad protections to platforms for user-generated content. President-elect Joe Biden has previously said he wants to repeal Section 230.

In the meantime, Parler has fired back at Amazon with a lawsuit alleging Amazon violated anti-trust laws and breached its contract by suspending the Parler app. The suit charges that Amazon is using a politically-motivated double standard compared to its treatment of other mainstream social networks like Twitter.

Amazon alleges Parler was not doing enough to remove posts that incite violence. Since then, Amazon’s stock has fallen as investors remain concerned over Big Tech’s allege bias. Twitter shares have also taken a nosedive after the app moved to permanently ban President Trump from the platform.

Meanwhile, Parler CEO John Matze says the network may be down longer than expected because “Most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us.”

Where is Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

 

Donald Trump’s Regrettable Plunge into Washington’s Political Pigpen

I wasn’t going to blog about what happened in and around the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. Folks from all sides have already weighed in with their comments—both efficacious and flawed.

However, in the aftermath of that shocking event in which five people have died, I just can’t keep silent.

The knee-jerk reaction is that the several hundred thousand (some say it was close to one million) Americans who gathered in Washington D.C. to hear President Trump talk and then who walked the one mile or so to the Capitol building, were a raging mob bent on death and destruction.

That is not true. The videos I saw showed that most of those demonstrating walked, even strolled peacefully from the Ellipse, where Trump had delivered his fiery speech, to Capitol Hill. Once there, they circled the building to protest what they believed was a fraudulent presidential election, which was their right under our Constitution.

“We’re representing the seventy-five million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and who have now lost their voice because Democrats are going to do everything they can to silence and disenfranchise them and force socialism down their throats,” I heard one woman tell a reporter. “But we will not be silenced.”

Sadly, once at the Capitol, things quickly deteriorated as a minority of protestors forced their way into the building.

That never should have happened. I don’t condone it and neither do most Americans no matter what their political stripe.

By the way, I didn’t condone the riots and looting of private businesses and public buildings that occurred in several cities last summer in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis policeman.

So now where does that leave us?

It leaves us even further divided as a nation than we were before the election. It leaves millions of people with a deep sense of pessimism and sadness—perhaps even depression—that our country is so riven and fragmented. It’s painful to see Americans so alienated from one another because of such a torrent of political dogmata that rational conversation is now almost impossible without a plummet into violence.

Joe Biden, our president-elect, promises to bring the country together, “to heal the wounds.” Judging from the last few public statements he has made, that pledge rings hollow. If anything, his statements that likened legitment protesters to a mob bent on an “insurrection” have driven an even larger wedge between us.

“This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition, and it must end now,” he said. In fact, with the exception of a violent minority of demonstrators who broke into the Capitol building, those who assembled at the Ellipse to hear a speech by the President were exercising their Constitutional right of assembly and to demonstrate—just as Black Lives Matter did this past summer.

The radical left is not the only group in America that is allowed to stage massive protests. All sides of our political spectrum have that right—the objections and disparagements voiced by unhinged talking heads on cable news networks notwithstanding.

Now we hear calls to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office and failing that, to once again put the nation through the agony of another impeachment process.

We know how much House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer hate Donald Trump. We know how frustrated they are that they were not able to remove him from office during the past four years and thereby overturn the 2016 election. We know they would like nothing better than to drive him from the White House in disgrace even though he has less than two weeks remaining in office.

But is this what our nation needs right now? Is this how Biden and the Democrats are going to “heal our country, restore democracy, decency, honor, and respect for the rule of law” as Biden declared Wednesday?

I am not excusing President Trump from his responsibility for what happened. While he never told demonstrators to attack and rampage through the Capitol, his words were rife with disappointment and anger over what he and millions of other Americans consider an election stolen by Democrats.

However, the media are being disingenuous by insisting that Trump purposely instigated the violence.

Here, in fact, is what he said:

“it’s now up to Congress to uphold democracy”. . . .”we are going to walk down to the capitol to cheer on our brave senators, congressmen and women” . . . . “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

Once again, I am not giving Trump a pass here. I can’t count the number of times in the past four years that I thought to myself, “Trump needs to stop tweeting and hurling insults at those who disagree with him. Sometimes, he just needs to take a few deep breaths and cool it—perhaps even ignore the slings and arrows.”

 Of course, he never did that. Then I would think, “Well, Trump is a brash and brassy New Yorker. He’s a brazen scrapper. He fights back. That’s his nature. He’s not a politician and God knows he’s no diplomat or tactician when it comes to responding to or countering an insult or attack.”

It saddens me to watch the many successes Donald Trump had as president shoved aside because of a handful of idiots who chose to storm the Capitol: a vibrant and flourishing economy; unprecedented job growth and unemployment especially in minority communities; a historic Middle East peace agreement; the restoration of our depleted military; his tough stance against unfair trading partners such as China; the creation of more than 4 million jobs, 400,000 of which were manufacturing jobs; and median household income at the highest level ever recorded. Trump also signed the VA Choice Act and VA Accountability Act, expanded VA telehealth services, walk-in-clinics, and same-day urgent primary and mental health care.

And the list goes on. But because of what happened last Wednesday, those amazing accomplishments will soon be forgotten.

For four years Trump owned the bully pulpit of the Presidency. He had incredible power to answer critics without crawling into Washington’s notoriously sordid political pigpen. He chose, however, to engage the partisan swine on their fetid turf. And that was a mistake.

As someone once said: “Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Good Riddance to 2020: Our Anno Horribilis

In all my years on this planet, I never experienced a year as horrible as 2020. I am sure there are others with six or seven decades under their belts who feel the same.

I wasn’t around during the Great Depression. That began in 1929 and lasted until just before America’s entry into World War II. My mother and father were, however, and they told me appalling stories about the devastating dust bowl that enveloped the Great Plains and destroyed farming.

They experienced the effects of 25 percent unemployment, homelessness and grinding poverty, mass migration, mortgage foreclosures and widespread bank closings, soup kitchens, and breadlines, and rampant crime. As was the case with many people back then, disease, starvation, and death were always close at hand.

Breadline in 1930

So I imagine as bad as 2020 was for most Americans, if my parents were still around they would undoubtedly say it doesn’t compare with the unrelenting ten years of misery and anguish that resulted from the economic and social collapse 90 years ago.

In fact, 2020 is probably as close as I will ever come to experiencing the misery created by the stock market crash of 1929.

Nevertheless, you can argue that 2020 was our Dust Bowl, our exposure to breadlines, joblessness, loss of income, rising crime, sickness, and unparalleled death.

Let’s face it, 2020 was our anno horribilis, a most horrible year.

As we know, the year began with the coronavirus pandemic which was unleashed on the planet by China. That was the first of a troika of events that intersected to make 2020 one of the darkest years in American history.

As the nation was dealing with the pandemic several of the nation’s cities were battered with the Black Lives Matter/Antifa-inspired riots that ensued after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Almost simultaneously came the vehement assault on free speech that we now know as “cancel culture.”

Then came a presidential election that deteriorated into a catastrophe and which still threatens to rip our nation into two warring camps—Americans who voted for Donald Trump and those who voted for Joe Biden.

Looking back at the onset of the pandemic, American medical experts were told by the Imperial College of London that the United States could expect 2.2 million deaths. That alarming prediction became the scientific basis for a nation-wide lockdown that resulted in the far-reaching cancellation of personal liberty and economic freedom.

The Imperial College’s model was later adjusted and by May it was clear that the death totals would be far fewer than that forecast. But by that point it was too late. The lockdowns originally sold as a temporary expedient to “flatten the curve” persisted and impacted the U.S. economy for the balance of the year.

Then during the summer of 2020, American cities exploded. Thousands of people took to the streets (in the midst of a pandemic) to protest “systemic racism,” whatever that was. However, while “mostly peaceful protestors” ran amok, schools were closed, church attendance was strictly limited, as were visits to restaurants, stores, sporting events, hair salons, and even funerals.

But the ban on funerals didn’t impact Floyd. At a time when ordinary people couldn’t have funerals for their loved ones, Floyd managed to have four. Floyd, who had a long criminal past, was basically transmuted into Mother Theresa.

Then, along came cancel culture, which went from tearing down statues and public art to censoring speech. Suddenly, words or expressions innocently used for decades, were deemed to have “racist connotations.”

How bad is cancel culture? This month (January 2021), a committee appointed by San Francisco’s school board will vote on whether to  from public schools of men and women they’ve deemed guilty of racism. This list ranges from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to none other than Abraham Lincoln.

Ironically, the indictment against Lincoln emphasizes not his alleged failure to recognize that “Black lives matter,” but his treatment of Native Americans during the Civil War. After 1862’s Sioux Uprising in Minnesota, caused by white encroachment on Dakota lands, a military tribunal sentenced 303 warriors to death. Lincoln personally reviewed the sentences, commuting the sentences of 265 but permitting 38 to be hanged.

Now “cancel culture” has moved abroad to the United Kingdom. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling was recently smeared for being “transphobic.” When a tax researcher was fired for saying, “Identifying as a woman does not make a person a woman,” Rowling tweeted, incredulously, “Force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?”

Rowling insists she has nothing against trans people, but she’s “concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition.”  The Twitter mob claimed her “hate” was “killing trans people.”

“It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” Rowling tweeted. She also mocked a charity that used the phrase “people who menstruate” instead of women, tweeting: “There used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wubben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Of course, Rowling is the rare person popular enough to be able to resist the cancel culture mob and her publisher spoke up for her, saying, “Freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing.”

Within this extraordinary and mindboggling setting, America held an unparalleled presidential election. The pandemic provided the ruse for the country to adopt a new system of questionable mail-in voting. While it was deemed entirely safe for people to cram into a Wal-Mart, Costco, or grocery store, voting in person was deemed to be too hazardous.

The result was an election that nearly half of registered voters believe was fraudulent. A new Rasmussen poll found that only 47% of registered voters believe Joe Biden won in a fair and secure election while another 47% believe there was rampant voter fraud. Only 10% of Republicans think Biden won fairly in an election free of significant fraud. Nearly nine of 10 Democrats believe otherwise.

Among Republicans, 35% believe Trump’s victory was stolen, and another 35% believe there was widespread fraud but aren’t sure if it changed the outcome.  Significantly, 80% of very conservative registered voters believe the election was stolen or there was enough fraud that it might have been.

And there you have the year 2020 in a nutshell. It’s a year that has left our nation more divided than ever and we still aren’t out of the woods yet regarding the pandemic which continues its deadly rampage through our nation and the rest of the world.

What does 2021 portend? I don’t know, but I can’t see the New Year being any worse than the one we just survived.

It just couldn’t be, could it?

Journalism Today: Not My News Media

I spent 28 years as a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. It was a great career—one that I’m proud of.

I won my share of major journalism awards and was nominated a couple of times for a Pulitzer Prize.

But prizes or for that matter, money, were not the reasons I became a journalist.

I considered journalism a calling. Okay, not a calling like a priest, a teacher, or an artist. But when I studied journalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas I felt a deep alignment between myself and the important work a journalist does.

Journalism and a free press are critical to maintaining our republic by providing accurate and unbiased news so citizens can make informed decisions about their lives, their government, and their families.

Sadly, I don’t think that is the case today. Journalism today seems more intent on providing propaganda than impartial news.

That is not just me talking. A Gallup and Knight Foundation report published a few months ago entitled: American Views 2020: Trust, Media and Democracy showed a widening gulf between American aspirations for and assessments of the news media.

Gallup &Knight Foundation polled more than 20,000 U.S. adults and found continued pessimism and further partisan entrenchment about how the news media delivers on its democratic mandate for factual, trustworthy information. Many Americans feel the media’s critical roles of informing and holding those in power accountable are compromised by increasing bias.

Reporters, the report said, have decided that just reporting the news accurately without bias or favor is no longer enough. Many have decided that it is their job to persuade readers and viewers to adopt viewpoints that coincide with theirs or with those of a certain political party or belief.

That is not the way I learned how to practice journalism.

In short, today’s journalism is NOT MY NEWS MEDIA—or at least not the news media I cut my teeth on.

Maybe a little historical context is in order and what better way to provide that than with a look at my own background in the news business.

I was offered a reporting job at the Chicago Tribune immediately after I earned my journalism degree in 1969. Needless to say, I was enthusiastic, if not a little bit anxious and nervous about going to work for one of the nation’s top four newspapers in the most competitive newspaper city in the country. After all, I was a rank novice.

I survived those jitters and spent almost five years covering the streets of Chicago, including police, crime, courts, city and state politics, social issues, catastrophes, and anything else I was asked to cover, including visits to the city morgue. I worked terrible hours, including 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. and 9 p.m. to 5 a.m.  Eventually, after paying my dues, I was put on a normal 9 to 5 schedule.

Journalism in Chicago at that time was fiercely competitive. No matter what story you were working on, chances were reporters from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily News, or Chicago Today were covering it too—not to mention several television and radio stations, City News Bureau, the Chicago Defender and a handful of suburban newspapers.

Add to that the relentless pressure of meeting deadlines, beating your competition, and dealing with demanding, crabby editors, and you have some idea how I learned to be a reporter.

It was the best training ground a reporter could have.

As I was entering my fifth year at the Tribune, I guess I was doing something right because I was offered the post as the paper’s Far Eastern Correspondent based in Tokyo.

Being a foreign correspondent is about the highest form of trust a news organization can bestow on a reporter. It says you have shown an ability to report and write just about every kind of story there is with speed, completeness, and accuracy. It also says the organization trusts you to represent it ethically, competently, and favorably no matter what country or story you are covering.

During my career as a foreign correspondent, I endeavored to provide unbiased and evenhanded stories even as I covered the horrors of war and revolution in Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Guatemala—not to mention uprisings in places like South Korea and Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

When it came to voicing my opinions, I did so in the Tribune’s Perspective section, which was devoted to opinion—not in my news stories. If I was angry or troubled, or saddened by an event I had covered, I vented in a clearly labeled opinion piece.

That is NOT what I see happening today on the journalistic landscape. Today, I see reporters attacking and demeaning those they disagree with on air and in stories that Nazi propaganda minister Dr. Joseph Goebbels would have praised during World War II.

When not doing that, reporters are refusing to cover stories that they differ with or dispute without doing the legwork to determine a story’s legitimacy.

There are two recent stories I can point to today: The Hunter Biden scandal and its connection to president-elect Joe Biden and Rep. Eric Swalwell’s disturbing relationship with an alleged Chinese spy named Fang Fang.

Neither of these stories has received coverage of any significance in the mainstream media. Why not?

According to the Gallup report, it’s because of political bias or a conscious decision to ignore stories that don’t agree with the predisposition or views of the news organization.

That is NOT the way I learned journalism. Reporters should report stories without fear or favor and let the chips fall where they may. Their job is not to protect a like-minded politician, nor is it to attack one with an opposing view or political philosophy.

Clearly, in too many cases, that is not happening today.

In fact, things have gotten so bad, that I would suggest a new award for those journalists who persist in biased and one-sided reporting: The Joseph Goebbels Prize for Deceptive and Distorted Reportage.

Regrettably, it’s a prize that too many journalists today deserve to win.

 

3 Ways America’s Mainstream Media Resemble China’s Communist Media

During a 27-year career as a reporter and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, I covered Asia, including Communist China. I was in Tiananmen Square in 1989 when the ruling Chinese Communist Party sent troops and tanks into the square to slaughter thousands of student and anti-corruption demonstrators who had occupied it for weeks.

I have reported on purges, mass incarcerations of hundreds of thousands of people on the CCP’s “enemies lists,” and its belligerent construction of man-made “islands” in the South China Sea that are used as military bases.

China, as I have often said in my posts, is not our friend. Its oft-stated plan is to overtake the United States economically, politically, and militarily, and it is well on its way to doing that. Now, with what is expected to be a compliant Biden-Harris administration and a complicit mainstream media, China’s path will undoubtedly be less challenging and more straightforward.

Recently, I read a comment from a Chinese academic who said: “We thought China was going to become America. Instead, America is becoming China!”  That’s a sad commentary, but it speaks volumes about what is happening in the United States to our political system and our mainstream media.

Today, I am pleased to reprint a commentary in the Epoch Times from Diana Zhang, who grew up in the Peoples Republic of China. Here she explains that America’s mainstream media resembles the state-run media in today’s Communist China. Read on, I think you will find Ms. Zhang’s commentary fascinating. Ron Yates.

3 Ways America’s Mainstream Media Resemble China’s Communist Media

Diana Zhang

On Thanksgiving Day, President Donald Trump held a press conference, and the media relentlessly pressured him with questions about whether he would leave the White House, in effect repeatedly calling on him to concede. The scene reminded me of the Cultural Revolution in China and how the media attacked Liu Shaoqi.

Liu, the Chinese regime’s chairman between 1959 to 1968, was attacked by the media day and night after the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) decided to get rid of him. Within a few days, he was removed. Abused, he died alone, without even his family being informed. At the crematorium, he was an anonymous body—the workers didn’t even know this was a former high official. Parades celebrating his downfall were held nationwide.

When I was growing up in China, the communist state-run media were the only voices we were exposed to. We were told that only the CCP could take care of the people. Socialism was the only correct path for human life, and the only way to provide us with a happy life.

As I grew older, immigrated to America, and lived a different life in which I read more and traveled more, I started to understand that the communist media machine is like poison. It poisons minds and plagues society.

First, the communist media are not meant to inform. They are a machine the communists created to lie. It is made to hide the truth and to use lies to control the people. It is not meant for small lies, but to systematically lead the entire society to believe in its lies.

By pushing a theory, a narrative, an ideology that is against human nature, against human tradition, and against our cultural heritage, they can brainwash the entire country to such an extent that there is no longer any standard of right and wrong. They actually set up the opposite standard: Evil is treated as right, and good as wrong.

Second, the communist media are not meant to foster mutual understanding. They sow division. The communists destroy human society by driving people into opposite groups, creating hatred and leading people to fight.

Because of communist propaganda, peasants killed landlords, workers killed business owners, and within every small group, people killed each other. This is why in the Soviet Union, Russians killed Russians, and in communist China, Chinese have killed Chinese. Under communism, 80 million Chinese have been killed, more than the total number of deaths in the two world wars combined.

Third, Communist propaganda can be hard to spot because it disguises its evil intentions with political correctness. The communists claim that they are “serving people,” achieving “equality,” and “helping the poor.”

It sounds like idealism, which is why it has been effective in attracting young people. Before communism took over China, it named itself the “savior” of the people. Once it took power, communist leaders got busy fighting for power among themselves and enjoyed a comfortable life. The rich became poor, and the poor became poorer.

Here in the United States, we now can see our media acting like those in communist countries.

CNN and The New York Times dress themselves in good intentions by telling us we have a serious problem with racism, just as the communist media claim to be serving the people. In fact, by pushing this narrative of racism, the mainstream media in the United States are fomenting division. It is no accident that this summer we saw young people rioting and burning in our big cities. They have been trained to hate, just the communists trained the Chinese people to hate.

But in China, the tool used was class struggle. “Racism” in the United States is for our mainstream media what class struggle was in China.

In reporting on America in the world, the mainstream media portray the United States as evil and say it should feel guilty for its power and prosperity. This is similar to how the media in communist countries call on the rich to confess their sins.

The mainstream media have told us America is in decline, which is exactly what the propaganda of the Soviet Union said and what the CCP media have been saying. The communist media have never stopped calling on America, the free world’s leader, to concede.

WASHINGTON, DC – NOVEMBER 26: President Donald Trump speaks on Thanksgiving on November 26, 2020.

On Thanksgiving, we saw the mainstream media pressuring Trump to concede. In fact, these media outlets have never accepted Trump as legitimate.

For instance, according to the Media Research Center, in March through May this year, coverage of Trump by ABC, CBS, and NBC was 94 percent negative, with the coverage reaching an unprecedented 99.5 percent negative in May. Since Trump was elected, the center has regularly found network coverage that was 90 percent or more negative.

This unanimity of perspective is what one expects out of communist media. It is a propagandistic attack.

As with the political correctness employed by communists, behind this unanimity is a conviction that Trump and conservatives simply have no right to their opinions.

Hundreds or even thousands of people have come forward to expose fraud in the 2020 election, but the U.S. mainstream media have not reported what they have to say. This is a deliberate control—or censorship—of people’s voices.

The nonstop attacks on an opposing leader, the political correctness, the silencing of viewpoints—these are all the hallmarks of a communist-style press.

The United States has been the envy of the world for its freedom and prosperity, and American media have been considered the exemplar of a free press. Media in other countries follow American media and trust them. Do we still have a free press in this country? If America falls, the whole free world falls. Who will win? America or the communists?

Diana Zhang, Ph.D., has 20 years’ experience in the study of China. Based in the United States, she uses a pen name to protect her family members in China.

 

 

Book Review: Not Your H.G. Wells Time Machine

As I was reading Fifty-Seven Years and Fifty-Seven More by Richard Schwindt, I found myself constantly amazed at the author’s far-reaching range of creativity. This is a book about time-travel, a genre I really enjoy reading. But it is unlike any other time-travel book I have ever read—certainly not like H.G. Wells’ classic “The Time Machine,” upon which so many of today’s time travel novels is based.

Our time-traveling protagonist is Richard George Sutton, a man who has lived before in other times. Even more fascinating is the fact that Sutton knows when the life he is currently living ends, he will return to a life he has already lived once. Sound confusing? Maybe. But it’s not really.

I would rather say the story is infuriatingly unforeseen and unpredictable. I certainly wasn’t expecting many of the twists and turns in this remarkable yarn. There is a rare honesty about it that pulls and tugs at you as you flip the pages on your Kindle—or turn them on a softcover version of the book. As someone who lived through the turbulent Sixties as a college student, I can relate to the book’s protagonist. But even if you weren’t part of the Sixties revolution, seeing the past through the eyes of the time-traveling Richard George Sutton is a hoot!

Read all my Goodreads reviews:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/26874432-ronald-e-yates?shelf=read

Wake Up America! China is NOT our Friend

China is NOT our friend.

Yes, I said it. And I will say it again.

China is NOT our friend!

In fact, China is not only our main economic and commercial competitor, it is our number one adversary with an oft-stated goal to overtake and replace the United States economically and militarily.

I hope this fact is not lost on Joe Biden, who has a long-standing love affair with the Chinese Communist Party–the brutal entity that controls China and its 1.2 billion people with an iron fist.

However, given Hunter Biden’s lucrative financial connection with the CCP (currently under investigation by the Justice Department), I predict that a Biden administration will return the United States to a subservient relationship with China.

Add to that recent revelations that a Chinese Mata Hari named Fang Fang allegedly seduced Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Cal) while turning him into a Chinese asset, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that China has its claws deep in the halls of power in Washington. When Fang Fang was exposed, she beat it back to China where I am sure she received ample praise and rewards for her “work” with Swalwell.

Rep Swalwell and Chinese Spy Fang Fang

I haven’t even mentioned China’s responsibility for the world-wide Covid-19 pandemic. China is the source of the pandemic that is crushing world economies and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

The coronavirus pandemic is just the latest chapter in the story of Chinese dishonesty and propaganda – but there is another contagion made in China that is spreading silently through America: China’s mass infiltration and theft of American research and intellectual property at our colleges and universities.

I spent 13 years at the University of Illinois as a professor and college dean and witnessed thousands of Chinese students engaged in doctoral and post-doctoral research in the university’s world-class Computer Sciences Department. They were also heavily involved in the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)–a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science, and engineering. NCSA houses the Blue Waters supercomputer–a behemoth capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and working with quadrillions of bytes of data.

Blue Waters Supercomputer, U of Illinois

America’s higher education system has long been regarded as a beacon of learning, creativity, and academic excellence. Our colleges and universities show the power that freedom of knowledge and information can harness in the fields of science, health care, our military operations, and global development.

But while our universities are home to some of the best and brightest scholars, they are also plagued by Chinese espionage and intellectual theft that puts America at risk.

Two Chinese programs – the Thousand Talents Program and Confucius Institutes – have given mainland China’s Communist regime the freedom to take full advantage of our academic openness and steal it – all to be used for a New World Order where China calls the shots.

The Thousand Talents Program was launched in 2008. It incentivizes Chinese students engaged in research and development in the United States to transmit the knowledge and research they gain here to China – in exchange for salaries, research funding, lab space, and other benefits. China sends nearly 400,000 students to American universities every year – more than any other foreign country.

I covered China off and on as a foreign correspondent in the 1980s and 1990s when it was viewed primarily as a struggling Marxist-Leninist-Maoist power.

Just as it was in 1989, when it murdered thousands of students and anti-corruption demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, it remains authoritarian at home and arrogantly indifferent to the rest of the world.

But today, that view requires some recalibration.

Today’s China has transformed itself into a neo-Confucian nation in which rapid economic growth has enabled the state to dredge up ancient traditions of submission and deference to the government, its institutions, and its Mandarin overlords.

This compulsion and craving for more and more economic growth, individual wealth, and authoritarian stability not only hooked China’s people, for some perverse reason it appealed to many of the world’s political and business leaders who saw the country as a boundless source of new markets.

They were content to overlook China’s downward spiral into full-blown dictatorship headed by “President for Life” Xi Jinping, who now has total control of the country. He not only runs the government and the communist party, but he also controls the Chinese military. There are no “checks and balances” on his power, and there are no prospects of any.

 

Many CEO’s and political leaders from Europe, the United States, and some parts of Asia were okay with Xi’s iron-fisted rule as long as the profits kept rolling in.

So China became our largest trading partner. Most of the stuff we buy today is made in China. You can go there on vacation. But China is not like the United States. The people there are not free. While the communist states of Eastern Europe and Russia could not bring themselves to shoot their own people when they demanded more freedoms some 30 years ago, the Chinese government had no problem doing so in Tiananmen Square in 1989. According to British intelligence sources, the Chinese army murdered as many as 10,000 students and protesters in and around Tiananmen Square between June 3 and 4.

I saw them do it with my own eyes and I will never forget the carnage.

Now that the global marketplace is tanking and people are dying everywhere, that laissez-faire attitude toward China has changed dramatically. We are now learning that China lied to the world about the severity of the COVID-19 virus, covered up its own incompetence and culpability in dealing with it, and arrested and likely executed medical experts who dared tell the truth.

Most recently, it expelled American reporters for daring to report accurately about the Chinese government’s attempts to conceal the seriousness of the Coronavirus.

When the White House challenged China on its behavior, what did China do? It threatened to cut off all pharmaceutical shipments to the United States and then went so far as to say the virus was created and planted in China by the U. S. Army. Incredible.

And now, here we are. World economies have collapsed at a rate not seen since the Great Depression of the last century, and we are faced with a deadly pandemic.

I do not doubt that the pandemic will pass, and so will the irrational panic it has engendered. And eventually, the world’s economies will recover.

But what I hope will not be forgotten is how indifferent, irresponsible, and self-centered China was in dealing with the pandemic.

China is NOT a country that the world can depend upon for altruistic, unselfish, and dependable leadership.

China is a nation obsessed with dominating Asia and, eventually, the world economically and politically. That obsession applies particularly to the United States, which it views not only as a global economic competitor but as a viable political and military menace.

President for life Xi has laid out his strategy for world domination with a 30-year plan to transform the country and surpass the United States to become the world’s largest superpower.

God, help us!

And I will say it once again.

Wake up, America!

China is NOT our friend.