THE DOCTRINE OF THE N.A.F.T.A. GLOBALIST DEMOCRATS IS TO SERVE THE BILLIONAIRE CLASS WITH ENDLESS WAVES OF INVADING 'CHEAP' LABOR SUBSIDIZED WITH WELFARE FUNDED BY TAXES ON MIDDLE AMERICA.
In many speeches, Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elites’ opinion about “the values of our country,” Mayorkas claims.
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
Exclusive–James Comer 95% Sure Hunter’s Artwork Sold to Chinese, Compromising Joe Biden
Rep. James Comer (R-TN), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, told Breitbart News Saturday he strongly suspects that Hunter Biden’s artwork was sold to Chinese oligarchs, potentially implicating president Joe Biden.
“With respect to China, since Joe Biden’s been president, that we didn’t even talk about in the press conference, was the fact that Hunter became an artist for a week, if you’ll remember, and he sold some very expensive artwork,” Comer prefaced, noting his Thursday press conference in which he said the Biden family will be investigated for nine potential violations.
Hunter has reportedly sold five paintings worth $75,000 each to an anonymous buyer. Hunter’s art dealer, Georges Bergès, has previously boasted he had strong ties to businessmen in Communist China, which has concerned many due to the Biden family’s business ventures abroad.
“We are 95% sure that that artwork went to China,” Comer said. “We don’t know where exactly that went to in China, but we’re going to try to find out when we get subpoena power.”
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki has defended Hunter’s art scheme and his contact with potential “anonymous” art buyers as “reasonable, claiming Hunter “is not involved in the sale or discussions about the sale of his art,” and that Hunter will not be “informed” of “who is purchasing his art.”
The newly Republican-controlled House will have the power to compel testimony from key individuals, including Hunter, to reveal just how deep Joe Biden’s involvement in the family business is.
Comer gave a second example of potential Biden family wrongdoing while Joe Biden was president, citing the president’s policy decision to sell the Strategic Petroleum Reserves to China, which Comer suspects involved CEFC, a defunct Chinese energy company. Hunter had been trying to work a deal with the CEFC in which Joe Biden would receive a ten percent equity stake in the deal, according to whistleblower Tony Bobulinski.
“He sold the strategic reserves to a Chinese energy company,” Comer said. “We believe that parts of that energy company were the remnants of the CEFC.”
“We have plenty of quality whistleblowers that were on the inside,” Comer said, probably eluding to Bobulinski. “They were president of his company. They were, you know, business partners,” he said. “So we have that. We believe that some of the former owners of CEFC were part of this group that purchased oil from the oil reserves.”
Comer then slammed Joe Biden for potential wrongdoing with China while not raising pressing concerns about China’s role in failing to police the sale of fentanyl components.
“Joe Biden goes to China and he never mentions fentanyl, which has killed one hundred thousand people since he’s been president. He never mentioned a lot of the unfair trade practices that our manufacturers have, the fact that China is stealing our patents and our trademarks,” he said.
“This looks like a president who’s compromised by China. And you look at some of what little bank records we have, and Hunter Biden’s received millions of dollars from China. So this is worthy of an investigation,” he concluded.
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’s investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said that if Democrats want to embarrass Republicans for their statements about Hunter Biden, they don’t need a war room, the Bidens can just release suspicious activity reports on the Biden family and prove them wrong if they really believe Republicans are wrong.
Comer said, “[I]f the Democrats want to embarrass Republicans on the Oversight Committee for making allegations that aren’t true about the Biden family, then all they have to do is prove that what we say is not true, turn those bank records over, those suspicious activity reports. This is the most damning thing with respect to what this White House has done to block congressional investigations and to protect Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family from all of their influence-pedaling overseas. They have changed the rules to where Congress can’t have access to those suspicious activity reports. That shouldn’t be something that we have to subpoena. We will if we have to. But, at the end of the day, Maxine Waters, once Joe Biden changed that rule, put language in legislation to give Congress that authority back. I think that’s something the Financial Services Committee can do early on to try to get Congress to have the ability to access those suspicious activity reports.”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
..... AND DEMS ARE RIGHT THERE TO HELP $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
But the Chinese leadership, especially current president Xi Jinping, has always been clear on what it wants: global dominance, utter loyalty to the CCP, military victory, and weakening of rivals.
After studying the documents on the Hunter Biden laptop, former criminal prosecutor and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani concluded that: “What Hunter Biden is, is a bagman… I’ve prosecuted many cases like this. He’s collecting Joe’s bribes that come to about $12 million from Ukraine and $3.5 million from Russia. But the big money comes from China. And the amount of money involved is in the tens of millions of dollars.” Today, there is documented proof that that the Biden family has received at least $31 million from entities controlled by the CCP, with greater Chinese payoffs yet to come.
This Foreign Company Wants To Mine Massive Amounts of Lithium in Nevada. First, It Must Overcome Its China Problem.
Top China hawks aren't sold on Canadian company Lithium Americas' move to distance itself from top Chinese investor
A lithium mine in Chile (Getty Images)Collin Anderson • November 26, 2022 5:00 am
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A Canadian company hopes to use Biden administration loans to open the largest lithium mine in North America. But first, it must convince government officials and prospective partners that it's adequately decoupled from its top shareholder: a Chinese enterprise led by known Chinese Communist Party members.
Lithium Americas—whose largest shareholder is Chinese mineral giant Ganfeng Lithium—earlier this month announced its intention to split the company into two separate entities, a move that comes as it works to obtain a Biden administration loan to fund "the majority" of its lithium mining project in northern Nevada. The company told the WashingtonFree Beacon it expects the separation to ease "geopolitical" concerns from government officials and investors over its relationship with Beijing-tied Ganfeng, given that the split would decouple Lithium Americas' Nevada mine from its more controversial mining projects in South America, which Ganfeng holds direct ownership stakes in. But leading China hawks in the Republican Party are not satisfied with the separation, prompting them to sound the alarm over Lithium Americas' potential to receive federal funding.
That dissatisfaction stems from the fact that under the proposed split, shareholders will receive stakes in both Lithium Americas' North American and South American entities proportional to their current holdings. Because Ganfeng is the only entity that owns more than 10 percent of Lithium Americas' shares, it will remain the largest shareholder of both companies following the split, a Lithium Americas official confirmed to the Free Beacon. As a result, Ganfeng will still have a sizable financial interest in Lithium Americas' mine unless it decides to divest—financial interest that has former secretary of state Mike Pompeo calling the split a "half measure" that is "nowhere near enough to guarantee that the CCP will not have any amount of control over a key source of America's lithium supply."
"Until we know that no CCP-controlled shareholder is involved in this project, the Treasury Department should not allow it to move forward," Pompeo told the Free Beacon. Rep. Mike Waltz (R., Fla.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) echoed Pompeo's sentiment, with Waltz calling Lithium Americas' separation plan a "shell game" and Cotton urging President Joe Biden's Energy Department to "do its due diligence and not fall prey to any trickery orchestrated by Ganfeng."
It's unclear whether Lithium Americas' corporate split will convince the Biden administration, which did not return a request for comment, to award the company a loan. A Lithium Americas official told the Free Beacon the company expects to receive a final decision on its loan application in the near future, meaning it could receive federal funding before it finalizes its separation plan next year. "It definitely won't be far," the official said of the Biden administration's loan decision. "We have gone through the entire Department of Energy process."
Should Lithium Americas obtain a Biden administration loan, the company still may not be in the clear when it comes to federal oversight. Waltz told the Free Beacon that a Republican-controlled House could investigate loan recipients as they work to avoid a repeat of the Obama administration's failed green energy loans, which went to a number of startups—including an electric battery maker—that went on to declare bankruptcy.
"There will absolutely be efforts—they're already underway. Now that we'll have subpoena power, we'll shine a big spotlight on it," Waltz said of House Republicans' plans to conduct energy-related investigations. "I think the next two years we’ll be investigating, getting to the bottom, having hearings, putting on a spotlight. And then we’ve got to win the Congress and the White House to actually start rolling some of this stuff back."
Lithium Americas plans to break ground on its mining site in northwestern Nevada, which is home to tens of thousands of tons of lithium, next year. The project is a clear priority for the Biden administration as it works to promote electric vehicles, which require large amounts of lithium for their batteries. Those batteries, however, are almost impossible to source from the United States—China controls roughly 60 percent of the world's lithium resources and dominates the electric battery supply chain in general.
In an attempt to undermine that dominance, the White House in December 2021 announced $17 billion in federal loans to "support the domestic battery supply chain," a move Democratic Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto said would "benefit national security by leveling the playing field with China." Lithium Americas applied for such a loan in April, but the company's deep ties to the very same nation the White House hopes the loan program will deter—China—have plagued its plot to obtain federal funds. Beyond its status as Lithium Americas' largest shareholder, Ganfeng has a tight relationship with China's state-owned banks, which helped the company fund mining projects in South America and Australia.
Ganfeng's executives also have extensive ties to Beijing, the Free Beaconreported in September. Ganfeng president Li Liangbin, for example, serves on a number of Chinese Communist Party-aligned committees and advisory boards, and executive vice president Wang Xiaoshen—who serves on Lithium Americas' board—got his start in the lithium sector through Chinese state-owned enterprises. Lithium Americas acknowledged in an interview with the Free Beacon that Xiaoshen's role on the company's board prompted questions from investors following media reports.
This is not the first time Ganfeng's sizable stake in Lithium Americas has sparked concern from federal officials. Following the Free Beacon‘s September report, Cotton wrote a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm demanding "strict oversight regarding potential federal funding of CCP-owned or -controlled entities."
"As the government continues to invest in battery supply chain programs, it is critical that DOE ensure taxpayer funding does not go to corporations with CCP ties and does not increase U.S. mineral dependence on China," Cotton wrote. "Ganfeng and any other Chinese entities with CCP ties should divest their stakes in Lithium Americas before the company is offered this loan."
..... AND DEMS ARE RIGHT THERE TO HELP $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
But the Chinese leadership, especially current president Xi Jinping, has always been clear on what it wants: global dominance, utter loyalty to the CCP, military victory, and weakening of rivals.
Elaine Chao’s -- Mitch’s wife -- family has made a fortune in shipping, primarily off the People’s Republic of China. McConnell and Chao, per Peter Schweizer, have both played key roles in furthering the Foremost Group’s interests. That’s James Chao’s -- Elaine’s dad’s -- company. Since 2004, the McConnells’ fortune has ballooned to as much as $36.5 million. How do two D.C. lifers get that rich?
But no stink on Mitch and Elaine for -- as Schweizer terms it -- “corruption by proxy.”
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
TOM FITTON - JUDICIAL WATCH
After studying the documents on the Hunter Biden laptop, former criminal prosecutor and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani concluded that: “What Hunter Biden is, is a bagman… I’ve prosecuted many cases like this. He’s collecting Joe’s bribes that come to about $12 million from Ukraine and $3.5 million from Russia. But the big money comes from China. And the amount of money involved is in the tens of millions of dollars.” Today, there is documented proof that that the Biden family has received at least $31 million from entities controlled by the CCP, with greater Chinese payoffs yet to come.
U.S. Expands Bans of Chinese Security Cameras, Network Equipment
Drew FitzGerald - Yesterday 6:16 PM
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The Federal Communications Commission voted 4-0 to ban sales of new telecom and surveillance equipment made by several Chinese companies, arguing that their ownership and practices threaten U.S. national security.
The rule change affects 10 companies already subject to other restrictions and prohibits them from marketing or importing new products. They include security-camera makers Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co., Hytera Communications Corp. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. and telecom equipment makers Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp.
The FCC made its order public Friday. The latest order stops short of requiring U.S. equipment buyers to remove items they have previously purchased or stripping authorizations for electronics models that already exist.
A spokesman for Hikvision said the FCC’s decision won’t protect U.S. national security, “but will do a great deal to make it more harmful and more expensive for U.S. small businesses, local authorities, school districts, and individual consumers.”
A Huawei spokeswoman declined to comment. Representatives from Hytera, Dahua and ZTE couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. The technology companies have spent months protesting the proposed ban in regulatory filings.
The FCC’s move is the latest by U.S. officials to crimp China’s technology sector and could challenge a tentative rapprochement struck by President Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping earlier this month. The two leaders agreed to try to arrest the downward spiral in U.S.-China relations and to resume high-level contacts and find areas of cooperation, like working on climate change.
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Since the Biden-Xi meeting at midmonth, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen held talks with China’s central bank governor and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also met with his Chinese counterpart.
Still, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, has said the onus on improving ties is on the U.S., which he said must respect Chinese interests. Among the sore points is an October decision by the Biden administration to ban the export to China of cutting-edge semiconductors and the tools to make them to hobble key Xi goals to boost Chinese technology and military capabilities.
ZTE and especially Huawei previously have been hit by U.S. export controls and faced pressure campaigns by Washington on other countries to restrict business with the Chinese telecommunications equipment makers. The surveillance equipment makers have also been recent targets of the Biden and Trump administrations and U.S. regulators.
Russian security software maker Kaspersky Lab is also on the list of tech companies covered by the sanctions.
Hikvision said earlier this month in an FCC filing that a ban would represent an “unprecedented, unjustified, and unlawful action to ban authorization of end user video surveillance equipment that may never be connected to any public telecommunications or broadband networks.”
Chinese companies have made limited inroads in U.S. cable and cellphone networks over the past decade, but their foothold in the commercial surveillance market runs deeper. Hikvision is the top worldwide seller of professional security equipment by revenue and ranks No. 5 in the U.S., according to market researcher Omdia.
The bipartisan FCC decision adds to a growing list of U.S. rules designed to choke off Chinese technology companies’ access to American infrastructure that officials consider especially vulnerable to potential spying or disruption. The FCC in 2019 blocked businesses that receive federal telecom subsidies from buying Huawei or ZTE equipment. That restriction hurt Huawei’s fledgling sales to rural cable and wireless companies, but stopped short of an outright ban.
The FCC later launched a rule-making process to draw a list of foreign technology companies that “pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.” The agency in 2021 said it was considering whether its authority over radio signals could be used to restrict covered companies’ authorizations to sell wireless devices.
—Charles Hutzler contributed to this article.
Write to Drew FitzGerald at andrew.fitzgerald@wsj.com
Our country may be nearing the conclusion of the most dangerous game of political “chicken” in history.
We have just experienced the second great election steal in two years. Will the Uni-Party of Democrats and RINOs succeed in evaporating the Red Wave?
RINO politicians and media are complaining that conservatives were too lazy to vote in November, but Republicans, independents and even Democrats turned out in such huge numbers that the cheating had to be so blatant that it is now impossible to overlook. The “big four” shows on FOX, normally famous for exposing Democrat stupidity and corruption, could have focused on the fraud in a different city or state for each segment since the election, but instead have prattled on about every shiny object except 2022 fraud.
Will corrupt legislators, governors, and politicians succeed in quashing the protests and legal challenges?
A series of developments is providing hope that the entire web of deceit, manipulation, and corruption may soon be unraveled. People all over the world are figuring out what is going on with tainted elections and are protesting.
In Brazil, fraud using the exact same techniques, including unsecured voting machines, has been discovered in their recent presidential election, where the socialist candidate, who had been charged with illegalities, was exonerated by Brazil’s corrupt Supreme Court and allowed to run for office. There have been massive protests and strikes throughout the country.
In Mexico, hundreds of thousands protested far-left President López Obrador’s plan to eliminate Voter ID and remove election safeguards.
The news about the fraud in the November 8th elections continues to leak out on a few fearless websites including video evidence on Rumble.com and BitChute.com. Thousands have reported voting irregularities that have yielded results that are mathematically impossible without rampant cheating. Democrats themselves have stated repeatedly that our voting machines are easily hacked and manipulated.
In Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, election “officials took a detour on election night with the county’s ballots and v-drives into a closed building for six hours. Poll watchers were prevented from entering the building at the time.” Legal complaints have been filed.
In California, the non-partisan Election Integrity Project has been granted “standing” to file their lawsuit alleging that years of election law changes in the state have led to voter disenfranchisement.
But the tilting of the scales against conservative candidates isn’t limited to just the Democrats. The RNC is accused of distributing a flawed database to volunteers in Wisconsin and other states with information that was so out of date it was worse than useless.
The GOP Senate and congressional campaign committees are supposed to remain strictly neutral in primaries, but Anthony Sabatini writes in Chronicles, “To the surprise of few, it was recently revealed that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spent a considerable portion of his $180 million war chest to help establishment Republicans defeat America First candidates in the GOP primary elections.”
When his candidates lost, McConnell withheld funding for the winners.
Kevin McCarthy, the presumed new Speaker of the House of Representatives, is speaking very strongly for some sorts of conservative issues, but Sabatini continues, “According to the Washington Post, the political machine around McCarthy directed millions to be spent against Republican candidates in GOP primaries associated with the America First movement.”
It is possible that the true conservative Republicans in the House will refuse to elect him as speaker in January, and insist on a different candidate, perhaps one who will begin serious investigations into 2022 and even 2020 voter fraud.
But the most damning issue that may challenge the plans of the Uni-Party to eliminate our freedoms and turn the United States over to the globalists and Red Chinese is the scandal involving the crypto-currency FTX. This is turning out to have been a gigantic scheme to defraud investors into buying shares of a practically nonexistent company.
Political Moonshine, an open-sourced investigative website, reported extensively on the complex relationship between billions of U.S. tax dollars, Ukraine, FTX, Biden and the Democrats, and RINO Republicans.
They claim “Tens of billions of U.S. dollars have been funneled to Ukraine, laundered through FTX, and the laundered money now in the form of FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to Democrats and the Bidens… FTX gave at least $40 million to Democrats in advance of the 2022 midterms and funded congressional campaigns for members overseeing the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC),” which was investigating FTX.
Bankman-Fried was the #2 donor to the Democrat party.
The money laundering circle was: Democrats vote to send funds to Ukraine, Ukraine invests in FTX, FTX cryptocurrency was funneled back to the same Democrats.
To tie everything together, it appears that Kevin McCarthy used money from FTX to take out MAGA candidates, including Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina.
And now we are hearing that Tether, a “stablecoin,” is in just as bad shape as FTX was, and is tied closely to FTX, “US government-backed rebels in Myanmar, along with al-Qaeda-affiliated Sunni rebel groups of Syria, drug cartels, which, according to some journalists, are deeply intertwined with U.S. three-letter agencies, including the CIA.”
Revolver.news has reported extensively on the whole confusing mess.
If any of this is true, our leaders and institutions may be more corrupt than we can imagine. A cabal of globalists, Communist Chinese, and drug cartels may be manipulating our elections and suppressing the evidence of fraud in order to weaken the United States where we will be completely controlled without our people knowing it, at which point they will be so thoroughly entrenched that nothing can stop it.
Which side will win this game of “chicken?” The cabal, with their money, power, and deceptions, or a few brave patriots willing to risk everything to expose the corruption and restore fairness to our elections?
The biggest deception China has successfully perpetuated in the West is that it would rise peacefully, gradually liberalize and present enormous business opportunities. Behind that veneer of reform, Beijing has played a masterful influence game, ensnaring governments, academia, think tanks, cultural groups, and businesses in the West to further its goal of global preeminence.
Analyst Alex Joske’s revealing book, Spies and Lies: How China’s Greatest Covert Operations Fooled the World, explains how China’s intelligence apparatus, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), revamped espionage from cloak-and-dagger ops alone to a sophisticated collection of innocent-seeming front groups. He shows how these groups, speaking the language of transparency, globalism, and cultural, academic, and business exchanges, influenced key persons in every sphere of endeavor in the West, masking China’s quest for world dominance, its military build-up, its stealing of technology, its human rights violations, and its territorial expansionism. Appearing eager for cultural and business reciprocity, China presented intelligence operatives as journalists, scholars, and trade and tourism representatives. The U.S. – and other western governments – engaged with China, mistaking it for a useful partner, and often acting under pressure from businesses that sought lucrative deals with Beijing.
BLOG EDITOR: GEORGE SOROS IS OBAMA'S GODFATHER AND A MAYOR CAUSE OF THE MASSIVE CRIME TIDAL WAVE ACROSS THE COUNTRY.
According to the book, billionaire George Soros, who is still in quixotic and dangerous pursuit of his flawed notion of an ‘open society,’ was one of China’s earliest dupes. Chinese intelligence and its numerous fronts used Soros and his funds as an entrée to the West, creating what has grown into a omnipresent cloud of influence, ubiquitous yet impossible to pinpoint and hence combat or dislodge. But more on Soros later.
The focus of MSS’s elite influence operations is on inveigling targets into promoting narratives of China’s choice, often making them believe they are being welcomed into the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – a route to proprietary access and mutually beneficial networks. In this the MSS draws on the party’s united front work tradition, which harks to the revolution. At that time, the party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) sought to gain influence beyond party members, using networks to suppress dissent, indoctrinate those sympathetic to the cause, find and train leaders, and so on. Later, the same methods were deployed abroad, providing networks, covers, and institutions for furthering the party’s purposes.
Lulled into a false sense of security, many elites chose to cooperate with Beijing, underplaying all its atrocities, espionage, and aggression, and hoping perhaps that China, welcomed into the sphere of western nations, would reform. But the Chinese leadership, especially current president Xi Jinping, has always been clear on what it wants: global dominance, utter loyalty to the CCP, military victory, and weakening of rivals.
Joske’s book is based on open-source documentation and interviews with former intelligence operatives and experts. He himself has been at the receiving end of intimidatory united front activity. When his articles critical of China started appearing, he was followed around by Chinese student groups that accused him of racism. Indeed, a university alumni association is among the many fronts he names, with documentary proof, as being controlled by the MSS. Here's a partial list: four publishing houses, a Japanese magazine, a well-known think tank, an arts troupe, an international travel agency, a film production company, a California bookstore, a calligraphy competition, and countless international conferences.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CCP decided to both check the entry of western ideals into China and infiltrate foreign powers. The MSS began small, by monitoring and mobilizing Chinese communities abroad. But by 2000, it understood how the U.S. foreign policy system worked, and realized the benefit of focusing on targets who would escape the concern of the intelligence community – scholars, policy wonks, retired officials, business leaders and the like. So, MSS agents took on these very roles to mingle with American counterparts and influence them, and through them up-and-coming American politicians. Using this cadre, posing in the West as liberal reformists, Chinese intelligence struck at unprotected parts of the U.S. democratic system.
Having learned of the role and status of American think tanks – particularly the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Rand Corporation – and how they can provide connections to government, the bureaucracy, civil society, and academia, the MSS used them as a fertile arena of its influence operations. Many Chinese agents have held positions as visiting scholars and policy experts and used those positions to open doors, make introductions, gather intelligence in diverse venues, and push exactly the narrative the CCP chooses.
The MSS is keen on getting involved with politicians early in their careers for the advantages this will offer when they advance to higher office. Bribery and honeypot operations are par for the course.
US President Joe Biden had his first face-to-face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping since his inauguration, pledging to “manage” the United States’ trade war with China, which he referred to as “competition.”
Biden, in the words of the White House readout of the discussion, “reiterated that this competition should not veer into conflict and underscored that the United States and China must manage the competition responsibly and maintain open lines of communication.”
The readout continued, “President Biden explained that the United States will continue to compete vigorously with [China], including by investing in sources of strength at home and aligning efforts with allies and partners around the world.”
Speaking after the meeting with Xi, Biden declared, “We’re going to compete vigorously. But I’m not looking for conflict, I’m looking to manage this competition responsibly.”
Biden’s emphasis on “managing” tensions and keeping open lines of communication may indicate a tactical shift by Washington and a temporary deescalation of sharp tensions with Beijing.
Over the past several months, the Biden administration has relentlessly escalated pressure on Beijing. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi staged a visit to Taiwan in a deliberate provocation against the Beijing’s claims of sovereignty. Biden declared that the US would commit troops to defend Taiwan in the event of an invasion by mainland China.
Washington placed a ban on trade in advanced microchips with China, a measure of economic warfare targeting China’s core interests. China is isolated in a world in which every other country, led by Washington, has abandoned all public health measures to deal with the pandemic.
China’s Zero-COVID policy is also under intense attack. With its war games and military deployments, Washington has brought the Korean Peninsula, vital to China’s own interests, to the brink of the resumption of armed conflict. Biden has repeatedly and baselessly accused China of “genocide.” The war in Ukraine, provoked by the US and NATO, has profoundly destabilized the Eurasian landmass and ruptured China’s trade and political connections throughout the region. And all this in less than a year.
The meeting between Biden and Xi on the sidelines of the G20 summit witnessed a stepping back by Washington from this year of unrelenting incendiary rhetoric and military provocation. In his remarks to the press after a three and a half hour meeting with Xi, Biden characterized Xi as “direct and straightforward” and “willing to compromise.”
There would be no “new cold war” between the US and China, Biden declared, and added that he believed that China had no imminent plans to invade Taiwan. This is a reversal of numerous earlier warmongering statements issued by the Biden administration, the legislature and the Pentagon.
The term “New Cold War” was used to describe the 2018 speech by Vice President Mike Pence that raised the prospect of economic “decoupling” between the United States and China in order to prevent China from seizing the “commanding heights of the 21st century economy.” While denying he is seeking such a “New Cold War,” Biden has in fact embraced the doctrine of “strategic competition” with China pioneered under the Trump administration.
Biden said that Washington would “oppose unilateral change in the status quo” of relations between mainland China and Taiwan “by either side.” This was the first time that the US president had spoken against a growing Taiwanese separatist movement to which he had until now been giving open encouragement.
Biden announced that as a means of “managing” the “competition,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken would travel to China to meet with his counterpart, and various US and Chinese teams would meet to set in place mechanisms for meetings to discuss the resolution of differences.
The Global Times quoted Xi as responding that he “looks forward to working with the US president to push bilateral relations back on the track of healthy and stable development.”
The United States is committed to a strategic course that leads inescapably to war with China. China’s economic growth directly threatens US hegemony and Washington will use trade war measures and open military conflict to hold onto its world dominance.
The changed rhetoric at Bali may express Washington’s attempt to drive a wedge between Russia and China as it pursues the imperialist breakup of Russia coming out of the war in Ukraine. The tactical deceleration of its drive to open war against Beijing is being coupled with the institutionalization and normalization as “competition” of its trade war measures taken against China.
These trade war policies were initiated by former US President Donald Trump, and are expressed in the doctrines of economic “decoupling” and deglobalization that have been embraced by the entire US political establishment.
An editorial in the Financial Times explained the meaning of Biden’s efforts to “manage” its “competition” with China:
Washington’s determination to restrain Beijing’s ambitions to surpass it as the world’s leading military and economic power means further decoupling from China is inevitable. But Washington must at the same time manage relations with Beijing with care. It should be guided by three principles: that decoupling should not crash the global economy; that war must be avoided; and that China’s co-operation is still needed on a range of global issues.
The newspaper continued:
Washington’s drive to slow Beijing’s acquisition of leading-edge military technologies should be combined with co-operation in areas of mutual concern. These extend not just to the green transition, but also nuclear proliferation, pandemic prevention and debt restructuring for emerging markets.
In other words, the economic doctrines of free trade and globalization, in which the flourishing of global economic activity would “lift all boats,” has been entirely rejected by the political establishment, replaced with two alternatives: mercantilist trade war aimed at achieving military supremacy without the use of force, or open military conflict.
The line between the two, however, is entirely fluid. For all of Biden’s declarations that he is merely seeking a trade war and not a military conflict, his statements are openly contradicted by his own policy documents. While its tactics may shift, the explicitly stated strategy of Washington is preparation for military conflict with China.
Just one month before the meeting of Biden and Xi, Biden penned an introduction to the new US National Security Strategy in which he declared the United States will “seize this decisive decade to advance America’s vital interests” and “position the United States to out maneuver our geopolitical competitors.”
Biden declared, “We are in the midst of a strategic competition to shape the future of the international order.”
He added, “In the contest for the future of our world, my Administration is clear-eyed about the scope and seriousness of this challenge. The People’s Republic of China harbors the intention and, increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit, even as the United States remains committed to managing the competition between our countries responsibly.”
In other words, Biden’s declarations about “managing” its economic war with China are fundamentally consistent with his administration’s plans for military conflict with China in what he called the “decisive decade.”
There are growing signs that in an effort to deescalate tensions with the United States, China is making moves to adopt the mass infection COVID-19 policies championed by the US and other imperialist powers.
In an editorial, the Economist declared that Chinese “officials released 20 measures adjusting zero-covid policies to make them a little less onerous and costly to administer.” It called these moves “the biggest relaxation of the country’s pandemic stance since covid began to spread,” while likewise hailing the abandonment of measures to reduce real estate speculation.
There can be no doubt that the United States, the world’s leading imperialist power, has the skill and shrewdness to provide Chinese officials rewards in exchange for sacrificing the lives of tens of thousands of Chinese workers, in the process boosting the profits of American corporations—all the while continuing their long-term plans to economically and militarily subjugate China.
There also appear to be quiet moves by China to distance itself from Russia amid the US-led proxy war.
Reuters wrote, “Chinese Premier Li Keqiang emphasized the ‘irresponsibility’ of nuclear threats during a summit in Cambodia, suggesting Beijing is uncomfortable with strategic partner Russia’s nuclear rhetoric, a senior U.S. official said on Monday.”
Hailing these statements, US proxy and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared, “In particular, it is important that the United States and China jointly highlighted that the threats of using nuclear weapons were unacceptable. Everyone understands to whom these words are addressed.”
The US, Russia and China are each facing massive social and domestic crises. Despite the talk of “decoupling” and “deglobalization,” the inflationary surge and looming economic recession are threatening every single country of the world. The upsurge of the class struggle in the United States, exemplified by a looming rail strike, will weigh heavily on the White House’s plans.
Under these conditions, the United States may be seeking to make tactical reorientations, including accepting concessions from China or even Russia, in order to temporarily stabilize surging prices and head off an economic collapse.
The overall policy of the United States remains, however, the militarist and war-mongering strategy expressed in last month’s National Security Strategy, pledging to “win the competition for the 21st century” through trade war, military threats and the massive buildup of military spending.
The comforting belief that democratic freedoms have history on their side and will eventually prevail everywhere has always been tinged with wishful thinking. World events of the past two or three decades have shown that we can no longer take these things for granted. Universal human rights, democratic practice and the rule of law have powerful enemies, and China under the Chinese Communist Party is arguably the most formidable.
It is with these words — direct, forceful, and ominous — that Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg's well researched book Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinese Communist Party Is Reshaping the World begins. In an earlier work, Silent Invasion, Hamilton had warned of the deep reach China had gained in Australia by routing huge donations to political parties through Chinese businessmen, and of how Australian institutions had been "penetrated and shaped by a complex system of influence and control overseen by agencies serving the Chinese Communist Party." In Hidden Hand, Hamilton and Ohlberg show how China is deploying that insidious strategy worldwide to shape the world in its own image.
In 1989, CCP leaders were shocked by the Tiananmen Square protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the latter leading to the breakdown of the Soviet Union. So they gave razor-sharp focus to ideological security, imposing political education (or indoctrination at school) and preventing the entry of hostile ideas. The U.S. was painted as a formidable enemy with nefarious plans to dominate China. Ordinary Chinese came to believe they are in a life-or-death struggle. The home front thus secured, over the next few decades, the CCP embarked aggressively on achieving tianxia, or world domination.
Culturally, the Chinese think and communicate in imagery; embrace subjectivity; and prize skill in allusion, subterfuge, doing by not doing, and winning without fighting. So it is not surprising that CCP strategists, well versed in Sun Tzu and weiqi, have worked indirectly to win Western countries from within rather than through direct aggression from outside. Their well planned campaign of influence, backed by substantial economic resources and technological advances, has masterfully manipulated the Western elite, media, entertainment, universities, NGOs, and think-tanks to control the narrative on China. Businesses and politicians have been won over with deals, creating dependencies that China has expertly exploited.
Hidden Hand is outstanding because it gives a detailed map of China's tactics. A sampling: Wai yuang nei fang (round outside, square within, or flexible in strategy, firm in principles); xiao ma da bangmang (big help with a little badmouth, or allowing some criticism by friendly forces so they gain credibility); yi shang bi zheng (using business to pressure governments); nongcun baowei chengshi (using the countryside to surround cities); and difang baowei zhongyang (from the periphery to the center). With numerous examples of how such tactics have been used, the authors hope to shake the West out of its complacency.
They warn that China isn't the Chinese people; it is the CCP, for the people have been indoctrinated or forced into submission. Foreigners fail to recognize the many incarnations of the party, which is segmented into work groups for different spheres of influence. For example, the United Front Work Department (UFWD) is responsible for guiding overseas Chinese and suppressing dissident voices. The International Liaison Department (ILD) is charged with influencing political parties and developing links to NGOs in target nations. Chinese friendship associations, and even businesses, focus on building influence networks at the local level. Behind them all, always exerting control, is the party, its officials double-hatting and double-plating to fool the West.
Beijing, the authors write, has made an art form of studying the centers of influence and power in each country. Elites in business, academia, politics, think-tanks, media, and politics are carefully targeted. This has ensnared successive U.S. administrations. Even President Donald Trump, who initiated a trade war with China and tried to block the CCP's inroads into America, found his efforts thwarted. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, his wife Elaine Choi (secretary of transportation), Wilbur Ross (commerce secretary), Steve Mnuchin (Treasury secretary), Gary Cohn (director of the National Economic Council), White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, and Trump's daughter Ivanka — all had strong business interests in China.
In Europe, the CCP has insinuated itself into the highest levels of decision-making. Hamilton believes that the 48 Club, founded in 1954 by British communists, has been "grooming" leaders in the U.K. They are so entrenched in the influence network that there's no extricating Britain from Beijing's orbit. Such networks have long thrived in other European countries, too, so they look past China's human rights violations and territorial aggression.
China has also co-opted Big Business, Wall Street, and financial institutions in America and Europe. Big Business sees China as a market. Finance firms often hire the red aristocracy — children of CCP leaders — in the hope of gaining business but leaving themselves open to espionage and influence. They have invested billions of dollars from pension funds in Chinese companies, compounding China's leverage. When President Trump took on China, the globalist billionaires of Wall Street pressured the White House, prompting trade adviser Peter Navarro to call them "unregistered foreign agents."
Beijing devotes significant resources to industrial and state espionage, tapping into overseas Chinese communities — professionals, business people, students, and even tourists — to recruit agents of influence and spies. Under the Thousand Talents program, initiated in 2008, China sent its brightest to obtain Ph.D.s from American universities and either bring back knowhow or take on top jobs to gather intelligence for China's agencies. Today, China leads in A.I.
The authors quote a National Endowment for Democracy report that says that when China speaks of soft power, it always means sharp power that furthers its worldview. To this end, China has been spending $10 billion yearly to create its own CNN — a "flagship media [outlet] with strong international influence." Meanwhile, the CCP partners with foreign media to place its own content, using persuasive techniques, incentives, and threats. But it's a one-way street: China remains closed to foreign media. Similarly, China has gained unidirectional influence in academia through the notorious Confucius Institutes and by funding programs at cash-strapped foreign universities in the spirit of "academic exchange." Of course, the three Ts — Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen — are censored.
The list of China's successes through coercion — soft and hard — runs long. Most Western countries now treat Taiwan as a part of China. As the second largest contributor to the U.N., China has managed to keep Taiwan out of the U.N. since 1971. The WHO excluded Taiwan from meetings during the pandemic, and the International Red Cross has not admitted Taiwan's Red Cross Society. Many Western democracies now have extradition treaties with authoritarian China, so dissidents abroad are sent home to be punished. Some are kidnapped or return after their families are threatened. So the world doesn't often hear of China's human rights violations.
Hamilton and Ohlberg say that China's most ambitious Trojan horse is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project. The project draws on a phrase popularized by Xi Jinping — "new type of international relations," ostensibly a cooperative, win-win approach. In fact, it has robbed poorer nations of sovereignty and resources and pushed them into debt traps. The plan always was, in the words of the PLA Navy, to "meticulously select the location, deploy discreetly, prioritize cooperation and slowly infiltrate." As of 2019, over 60 countries, including 18 E.U. countries — two thirds of the world population — had signed on. Driven by a debt crisis, Italy, the third largest economy in the E.U., too joined the project. With CCP-linked companies investing in roads, ports, dams, airports, railways, energy networks, and other infrastructure across the globe, the vulnerability is obvious.
Even so, the authors believe it's not too late. Despite short-term costs, open societies can end unrestrained engagement with China. But politicians, businesses, and influence groups must first break free of the Chinese net in which they have entangled themselves over three decades.
China Working To Undermine Midterm Elections, Cybersecurity Group Says
China, Russia, Iran sowing dissent ahead of midterm elections
BEIJING, CHINA - OCTOBER 24: Chinese President Xi Jinping (C) and other Chinese politicians and delegates listen to the national anthem duirng the closing of the 19th Communist Party Congress at the Great Hall of the People on October 24, 2017 in Beijing, China. The 19th CPC National Congress is set to run 7 days and a new central committee of CPC will be produced. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)Adam Kredo • October 31, 2022 3:10 pm
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Communist China is behind a massive online disinformation campaign aimed at undermining the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, according to findings by a cybersecurity group.
China is using a network of social media accounts and altered news articles to "sow division both between the U.S. and its allies and within the U.S. political system itself," according to a threat assessment by Mandiant, a cybersecurity and intelligence organization that works with governments and the public sector. China’s latest efforts to undermine the American democratic process come amid parallel attempts by Russia and Iran to interfere with the upcoming elections.
The CCP influence operation, dubbed Dragonbridge, is attracting concern in the cybersecurity sector for its "aggressive attempts to discredit the U.S. democratic process, including attempts to discourage Americans from voting in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections," according to Mandiant’s research. The organization assesses "with high confidence" that the online campaign is "operating in support of the political interests of the People’s Republic of China."
Efforts by foreign actors to meddle in the upcoming elections have fueled concerns among federal authorities, including the FBI, which recently warned that an Iranian government-backed hacking collective is working to target U.S. entities. Russia also "is working to amplify doubts about the integrity of U.S. elections" as voters head to the polls next week, according to the Associated Press.
The CCP’s Dragonbridge operation has similar hallmarks to those of other foreign actors, according to Mandiant. Dragonbridge, through a network of online social media accounts that obfuscate their true identity, is promoting "narratives that appeared intended to discredit and undermine the U.S. political system."
In September, for instance, Dragonbridge-affiliated accounts posted an English-language video on online platforms that included "content attempting to discourage Americans from voting in the upcoming U.S. midterm elections." Like the efforts helmed by Russia and Iran, China wants to sow doubts about "the efficacy of voting and of U.S. government institutions more broadly," according to Mandiant.
The video, portions of which were captured by Mandiant, claimed "the solution to America's ills is not to vote for someone," but to "root out this ineffective and incapacitated system"—a narrative that mirrors those promoted by U.S.-based radical groups on the left and right.
Chinese operators also promoted rhetoric meant to divide Americans and reinforce the impression that the country is irrevocably broken.
Dragonbridge content collected by Mandiant promotes the narrative "that political infighting, partisanship, polarization, and division had become fundamental aspects of American democracy. The campaign also pointed to frequent mentions of ‘civil war’ on social media and incidents of politically motivated violence, including confrontations between individuals supporting opposing parties and acts against the FBI, as evidence of the deterioration of the political process and its impending demise."
The group also has been observed altering actual news articles and pushing content that appears to be legitimate but is actually the product of CCP manipulation.
Throughout the 2022 election cycle, the CCP-orchestrated campaign has exhibited "aggressiveness through both the content of its narratives and its willingness to experiment with new tactics to accomplish its aims," according to Mandiant. This includes attempts to mobilize American protesters to take to the streets and potentially commit violent acts.
"Such persistence, combined with clear intent and scale, renders the campaign a priority for monitoring," the security group warned.
John Hultquist, head of threat intelligence for Mandiant, said in a statement that while Russia and Iran are more aggressive in their efforts to undermine U.S. elections, "what’s troubling [about the CCP groups is] their aggressive growth."
A Chinese Influence Operation Promoted an Anti-Trump PAC for the Midterms
A Bay Area post office box and a shadowy online war.
In May 2022, Mary Trump tweeted, “Hundreds of voter subversion laws are only a governor’s signature away from going into effect. Please join the Democracy Defense Fund in supporting these gubernatorial candidates who are committed to protecting our #VotingRights.”
Mary Trump, the former president’s niece, has become an anti-Trump figure specializing in deranged rhetoric like calling him “mass murderer criminal Donald Trump”. DDF is a PAC that is intervening in races across the country, including in Pennsylvania, Georgia and Ohio.
The Democracy Defense Fund, a nationwide PAC, was supposedly created by Mary Trump, who has no apparent background or ability to create or manage such an organization. After an extensive search, I was unable to locate any other employees or personnel involved with it.
Who’s really behind DDF which claims to have a nationwide reach for the midterms?
Aside from Mary’s name out front, the DDF PAC has been a black box. The site only mentions her name and no other employees, advisers or board members. And yet DDF has sent out fundraising emails urging donations to Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke and Raphael Warnock. It bombarded mailboxes with a plea from Mandela Barnes, running against Senator Ron Johnson: something that the Democrat Senate candidate and DDF could do because it’s a hybrid PAC.
The only address listed by DDF is a post office box at a Bay Area post office. But this particular post office is also used by the Hold the House PAC fronted by former Democratic Rep. Mike Honda and run by a Silicon Valley strategy firm. The former congressman was a controversial figure who was accused of a pay-to-play scheme with donors.
An Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) report stated that there is “substantial reason to believe … Honda improperly tied official activities to past or potential political support.”
Honda’s “1,000 Cranes” list served as an index of special favors that appeared to be performed for top donors. And Honda was one of the politicians targeted by Fang Fang, a Chinese spy. Honda can be seen posing with the foreign agent at the Chinese Embassy in D.C.
The existing questions about who is really behind the Democracy Defense Fund took on a new urgency with the release of the Dragonbridge or the Spamouflage Dragon influence operation running out of China. The latest Chinese operation in which operatives pretended to be Americans made waves because for the first time they appeared to be directly interfering in an election by adopting American personas and promoting American political organizations.
While the Chinese Communist operatives pretended to be Americans from across the spectrum, the Left and the Right, one tweet was notable. It read, “Hundreds of voter subversion laws are only a governor’s signature away from going into effect. Please join the Democracy Defense Fund in supporting these gubernatorial candidates.”
Dragonbridge was amplifying Mary Trump’s tweet and promoting the Democracy Defense Fund. There is no record of the Chinese influence operation promoting any other PACs.
DDF claims that “our democracy is in danger”, but it’s being promoted by one of the world’s most brutal totalitarian dictatorships which is at war with the United States. It alleges that Republicans are “planning the next coup”, but DDF’s amplification by Communist China raises questions about where the real backing for the next coup is coming from.
The account in question has since been suspended but it raises troubling questions about not only Communist China’s involvement in the midterms, but its support for a Democrat PAC.
And it makes it more urgent than ever to answer the question of who’s really behind DDF.
While the Democracy Defense Fund seeks to intervene in battleground elections, its only listed address is in the Bay Area. That is also where China’s espionage and influence operations are strongest. It’s also the wellspring of money pouring into American elections.
California is the only state where the PRC’s Ministry of State Security has a unit. Chinese operatives were able to recruit a staff member working for Senator Dianne Feinstein. Fang Fang pursued primarily California Democrats like Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Ro Khanna.
Chinese-owned firms have already been caught donating to PACs. Others, like Huawei, TikTok and Hikvision have invested a fortune in lobbying Congress. But beyond the millions of dollars being spent by companies with links to the Communist Party, and with lobbyists formally registered as foreign agents, there is a hidden underworld of spies and political operatives.
It may be entirely a coincidence that a Chinese influence operation promoted a Democrat PAC, just a question of random algorithms and 50-cent party ignorance, but it is dangerous to assume that China has no interest in our political system and no plans for calculatedly disrupting it.
The Biden administration and the Democrats have dismantled many of the safeguards and preventative measures put into place to deter China by the Trump administration.
The destruction of the China Initiative by the Biden administration in particular has given the Communist enemy regime a green light to resume its mass theft of our technologies and secrets. Would Beijing like this state of affairs to continue? The answer is all too obvious.
A shadowy PAC with a post office box is out to influence midterm elections in Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania among other places. An even more shadowy Chinese influence operation has promoted it. While the media has eagerly talked up Mary Trump, it’s shown no interest in the question of who is behind the Democracy Defense Fund. That lack of accountability is a cloak under which foreign interests and enemy states can operate safely while knowing that they won’t be exposed. The media would rather attack Republicans than defend America.
And Communist China knows it.
Who is behind the Democracy Defense Fund? The answer likely lurks in the Bay Area, but who is to say that it may not have an echo thousands of miles away in the corridors of Beijing?
BLOG EDITOR: WAR PROFITEER DIANNE FEINSTEIN EMPLOYED A CHINESE SPY FOR 20 YEARS. PERHAPS TO MAKE SURE THAT FEINSTEIN WOULD ALWAYS BE VOTING IN THE SENATE FOR EVERYTHING THAT WOULD BENEFIT CHINA! GOOGLE IT!
For example, California Congressman Eric Swalwell was targeted for an affair by Christine Fang, an attractive young MSS operative, when he was a city councilor. When he bid for a Congress seat, winning against a well-established incumbent, he received significant fundraising assistance from Fang. She also funded his re-election campaign. She arranged for an associate to intern at his office, and advantageously for the MSS, Swalwell was in 2015 appointed to the House Intelligence Committee that oversees the CIA.
The turning of Soros, however, is perhaps the most interesting example of the MSS’s early successes, hinging on a fortuitous act of the billionaire. This was in 1984, when China was cash-strapped and desperately needed foreign investment even for basic development. Its intelligence operations then were poorly funded. (Now, they are run by some of China’s largest business empires.) Soros happened to read Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution, a bestselling account of China’s reopening to the West. Inspired by a vision of a liberalized China, he contacted Liang and ventured forth with a China Fund, aimed at transforming the country along the lines of his ‘open society’ philosophy. Liang set up an office in Beijing for the new entity, seemingly with the support of CCP officials who had liberal, reformist ideas.
But the MSS was there right from the beginning. Liang was sidelined, and eventually, the fund was directed to work with the China International Culture Exchange Center (CICEC). Its head Yu Enguang was made the fund’s co-chair. Far from being a cultural institution, the CICEC was a division of the MSS and meant to gain the trust of people like Soros while posing as liberals within the party. There were artists, poets, scientists, a future CCP leader, a clergyman, victims of the Cultural Revolution and so on. In fact, these were trusted MSS assets, adept at projecting the image of an open, reforming China, to attract foreign interest and investments.
And Yu Enguang was in fact a high-ranking operative of the MSS’s 12th Bureau, a special spy unit whose official mission was to protect China from external threats and lay the groundwork for influence ops worldwide. The book claims that a secretive vice-minister in the MSS called Yu Fang looks exactly like Yu Enguang, who, through the 1970s and 1980s had posed as a journalist, heading Xinhua bureaus in London and Washington D.C. All the while he had run an entire bureau of MSS spies. Fang/Enguang had framed laws codifying the MSS’s powers and overseeing propaganda, censorship, and the rewriting of history. He also established the practice of direct engagement with targets like Soros, a practice that has since grown into a huge, well-funded worldwide operation – one that free democracies, including the U.S., are unfortunately blind to.
Joske ends his book warning the West to recognize united front activity for what it. He says it’s also important to stop viewing “open source” intelligence gathering, that is, the kind obtained through interaction with scholars, policy experts, business leaders, etc., as inconsequential as compared to blatant stealing of classified information. The MSS is everywhere now, and the earlier free democracies wake up, the better.
American Corporate Community and its major players — BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Bridgewater, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Twitter, and Musk — and, of course, Gates — that draws them to a plutocracy that would never hesitate to betray America for a financial advantage or an opportunity to be a part of a global powerhouse oligarchy complicit with and colluding with malefactor government tyrannies. (avarice, cupidity, and rapaciousness) JOHN DALE DUNNJohn Dale Dunn
BANKSTER BLACKROCK IS JOE BIDEN'S BIGGEST PAYMASTER AND OPERATES ITS INTERESTS OUT OF THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE UNDER GAMER LAWYER BRIAN DEESE, A FORMER BLACKROCK EMPLOYEE.
World’s largest asset management firm was “front and center” of Fed’s Wall Street bailout
The close collaboration between the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the multi-billion dollar asset management firm Blackrock in devising the March 2020 rescue operation for Wall Street has been revealed in an article published in the New York Times yesterday.
According to the article, Larry Fink, the CEO of Blackrock, the world’s biggest asset management firm, was “in frequent touch” with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Fed chair Jerome Powell “in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency programs were announced in late March.”
Report: Blackrock, State Retirement Funds Invested in Chinese Firms Tied to Uyghur Genocide
A report published by Hong Kong Watch and Professor Laura T. Murphy of the University of Sheffield Hallam on Monday found that dozens of American, British, and Canadian state pension funds are passively invested in Chinese companies that face credible accusations of enslaving Uyghur Muslims.
China is currently engaging in genocide against the Uyghur people and other non-Han communities in East Turkistan, a western region under Chinese communist occupation the regime refers to as Xinjiang.
One of the companies spotlighted by the report is Foxconn Technology, the Taiwan-based company whose enormous plant in Zhengzhou, China, is the world’s largest facility for assembling Apple iPhones. The authors cited documentation that shows “hundreds of Uyghur workers have been transferred to Foxconn factories,” including the one in Zhengzhou, where they have “reportedly been required to work at least 100 hours of overtime every month.”
“Foxconn participates in the ‘Xinjiang Aid’ scheme, and Uyghur workers are under constant surveillance, subject to patriotic re-education, and expected to express gratitude to the Communist Party,” the authors noted.
File/Members of Muslim Uyghur minority present pictures of their relatives detained in China during a press conference in Istanbul, on May 10, 2022. Turkey’s Uyghur community urged the U.N. to probe so-called “re-education camps” during a long-delayed visit to China this month including to Xingjiang, where Western lawmakers have accused Beijing of genocide. (OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty)
The Foxconn plant in Zhengzhou is currently in the headlines because many of its workers fled a brutal coronavirus lockdown, and those who remain are rioting against poor living conditions and abusive labor practices. Apple is warning customers worldwide that iPhone supplies could be significantly delayed due to the unrest at the Zhengzhou plant.
“Xinjiang Aid” is the Chinese Communist Party’s official euphemism for its abusive Uyghur policies. China claims the massive concentration camps dotting Xinjiang province are merely “vocational training schools” that just happen to be surrounded by barbed-wire fences for no particular reason. The concentration camps hosted as many as 3 million people at their peak, but have since shipped thousands out to work in factories across the country as slaves. The Communist Party openly sells Uyghur slaves to companies online.
Xinjiang Aid presents China’s slavery programs as the benevolent Communist state offering free transportation to exciting job opportunities in other provinces for the graduates of these grim “vocational schools,” where they work for minimal-to-no pay and have no control over the terms of their employment.
The report lists investment funds that hold equities in the offending Chinese companies, a list that unfortunately includes “some of the largest private pension fund managers and important local public pension funds in the U.K., Canada, and USA.”
“Given MSCI’s popularity as a global benchmark for emerging markets, this list does not include all funds that are invested in these indexes; other funds may be equally exposed,” the authors noted.
Topping the list were funds managed by BlackRock, HSBC, UBS, Invesco, and Deutsche Bank, all of which were invested in six Chinese companies documented to employ forced labor, plus six companies involved in the “construction of repressive infrastructure” in the Chinese province of Xinjiang where the Uyghurs live.
The full list included 18 major international asset managers, 11 U.S. state pension funds, 4 Canadian pension funds, and 8 U.K. pension funds, plus two pension funds in New Zealand and Japan.
The U.S. pension funds included the immense California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the New York State Teachers fund, and investment or retirement funds in Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania.
File/Salih Hudayar (R), founder of the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement, leads a rally outside the White House to urge the United States to end trade deals with China and take action to stop the oppression of the Uyghur and other Turkic peoples August 14, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The report noted that only three of the Chinese companies it highlighted for abuses are currently covered by the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), a U.S. law that took effect in June. The UFLPA requires importers to prove that products harvested or manufactured in Xinjiang are not tainted with forced labor, a much higher standard than previous import controls.
“This is a noticeable blind spot, given the publicly available data that can be accessed about every firm listed. The U.S. government should expand the lists to ensure that companies known to be complicit in forced labor are excluded from importing goods under the UFLPA,” the report advised.
The authors also advised the U.S. government to “harmonize” the UFLPA with the list of entities covered by Executive Order 14032, a June 2021 order that banned investment in Chinese entities associated with human rights abuses and the rising security threat of the “military-industrial complex of the People’s Republic of China.”
The authors noted that UFLPA does not ban investments, so until it is harmonized with Executive Order 14032, it is possible for Americans to invest in firms whose imports are banned because they engage in slavery.
The report made similar recommendations to the European Union and Canada, advising the creation of carefully vetted “entities that are known to be involved in state-imposed forced labor in the Uyghur region” and using this master list to apply harmonized bans on “public procurement, pension, government investment, and imports.”
“Lawmakers and government officials must urgently consider how it could be morally defensible for federal employees’ pensions to be passively invested in companies complicit in gross human rights violations in the Uyghur Region,” the report said.
“13 companies on MSCI’s emerging markets index are either known to have directly used forced labor through China’s forcible transfer of Uyghurs, or been involved in the construction of camps,” said Hong Kong Watch co-founder Johnny Patterson.
“Given this Index is the most widely tracked Emerging Markets index in the world, it raises serious questions about how seriously international financial institutions take their international human rights obligations or the ‘S’ in ESG,” he contended.
ESG stands for “Environment, Social, and Governance Investing.” The concept was introduced precisely to avoid the kind of passive investing in support of human rights abuses documented by Murphy and Hong Kong Watch.
One of the report’s recommendations for Western corporations was to universally blacklist “firms complicit in genocide, crimes, against humanity, or moder-day slavery” from global indexes used by public pension funds and private investors.
Patterson said firms “known to use modern slavery, or known to be complicit in crimes against humanity” should be classified as untouchable “sin stocks,” like tobacco.
“Governments have a duty to signal which firms are unacceptable, but international financial institutions must also be doing their full due diligence. It is unacceptable that enormous amounts of the money of ordinary pensioners and retail investors is being passively channeled into firms that are known to use forced labor,” he said.
Murphy, a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at the Helena Kennedy Center for International Justice at Sheffield Hallam University, said investing in the Chinese companies identified by her research is both a “serious ethical risk” and a financial risk, because “these companies have been targeted by government sanctions and international advocacy campaigns.”
File/Setiwaldi Abdukadir holds up a shirt asking Muslims to pray for Uyghur victims of genocide in China in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in October 2021. (Getty)
“So many people’s pensions, retirement funds, and savings are invested passively because, as average consumers, we don’t have time to investigate each and every investment,” she observed. “No one should be passively invested in the oppression of the Uyghurs.”
“The brands called out in this report stand as a cautionary tale for what can happen when companies do business in opaque or high-risk geographies without appropriate and continuous human rights due diligence,” said Anita Dorett, director of the Investor Alliance for Human Rights.
“Millions of Uyghur and other Turkic, Muslim-majority peoples are subject to egregious human rights abuses, and the financial and human rights performance of companies and their investors are put at risk. When it comes to respecting human rights, there can be no such thing as a passive investor,” Dorett said.
“This report should be a wake-up call to every asset manager and pension fund. Investors should require companies they are invested in to fully trace their supply chains and urgently divest from any links to the Uyghur Region or to forced labor transfers from the Region,” declared Rushan Abbas, executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs.
Abbas urged investment indexes like MSCI to delist companies linked to slavery, “so that average citizens do not need to worry that they are funding crimes against humanity.”
The Toronto Starreported on Monday that Canada Pension Plan, one of the funds described as passively investing in the Uyghur genocide, rejected the report’s conclusions and insisted it has vigorous safeguards against investing in foreign companies that abuse human rights.
“We might use different programs to track an index, but we do that through a synthetic process of derivatives, and that means we’re not actually invested in the companies that make up the index,” said Michel Leduc, senior managing director of public affairs for the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
Hong Kong Watch policy and advocacy director Sam Goodman countered that his report’s data on the Canada Pension Plan is accurate, and does show the plan making over $13 billion in passive investments in Chinese firms linked to forced labor. He invited the investment board to furnish any updated information that might dispute the report’s conclusions.
“If the situation has changed and CPPIB has divested from any exposure to MSCI China and MSCI Emerging Markets, we would welcome clarification of their position and the publication of the full listing of new holdings on its website,” Goodman said.
Other analysts and Canadian lawmakers told the Toronto Star that the Canadian government should create lists of banned entities like the United States does to make it easier for fund managers to avoid passively investing in forced labor – and make it easier for individuals to know when their pension funds are making such investments.
“It’s almost impossible for someone sitting here in this part of the world to look at a company and understand its level of support for the Chinese military or the abuses in Xinjiang, if you don’t have good Chinese and research skills. Institutions have internal process, but most are skewed toward compliance, not toward ethical good governance,” explained Control Risks senior partner Dane Chamorro.
“In China, technology companies are selling surveillance technology to not only the Chinese government but also globally in areas that some business investors would find uncomfortable. Is this defensible to stakeholders? What’s acceptable two years ago may not be acceptable today so it’s a moving piece,” Chamorro said.
Another Canadian fund listed in Passively Funding Crimes Against Humanity, the Civil Service Superannuation Board (CSSB) of Manitoba, declined comment when contacted by the Toronto Star, as did Morgan Stanley and the office of Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland.
Deese Proclaims Dependence Day
National Economic Council boss confirms the colonization of America.
Last Thursday, in the roll-up to Independence Day weekend, CNN’s Victor Blackwell wondered how American families could cope with surging gasoline prices. Brian Deese, Biden’s director of the National Economic Council, replied, “This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.” And Joe Biden is behind him all the way.
“Brian is among the most tested and accomplished public servants in the country,” proclaims Biden, “a trusted voice I can count on to help us end the ongoing economic crisis, build a better economy that deals everybody in, and take on the existential threat of climate change in a way that creates good-paying American jobs.” Biden’s previous boss was also high on the world-order man.
A number of young people in the White House were “just amazing,” Obama told Rolling Stone in 2016, “Somebody like a Brian Deese.” The White House deputy chief of staff for policy, “engineered the Paris Agreement, the [Hydrofluorocarbons] Agreement, the Aviation Agreement,” and “may have helped save the planet.” This planetary savior, still in his 30s, must have had amazing preparation.
Brian Christopher Deese was born in in Belmont, Massachusetts in February, 1978. His father, David Deese, is a Boston College political science professor who “researches the international and comparative politics of energy and climate policies worldwide.” Brian’s mother, Patricia Stanton, served as deputy commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and assistant commissioner of waste prevention at the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Patricia and David sent him to upscale Middlebury College in Vermont, where he earned an undergraduate degree in international politics and economics. In 2002, Deese was named a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship but was not selected. Even so, the amazing graduate could boast extensive connections.
In 2002, Deese was co-author with Nancy Birdsall, John Williamson, Julian Mott and Anne Leeming on Delivering on Debt Relief: From IMF Gold to a New Aid Architecture. This tome was published by the Peterson Institute, “an independent nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to strengthening prosperity and human welfare in the global economy,” and was originally called the Institute for International Economics.
Brian Deese served as a junior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a research assistant at the Center for Global Development, and a senior policy analyst for economic policy at the Center for American Progress. The Middelbury alum was also “actively involved,” in the 2008 presidential campaigns.
Deese got into Yale Law School but left a few credits short of graduation to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, where he became her top economic staffer. When Clinton’s bid failed, Deese caught the eye of the composite character president Barack Obama, who tapped him to tackle the ailing auto industry. For some observers, Deese was not the best choice for the job.
“The wunderkind in charge of saving our auto industry is a 31-year-old with about as much experience as a summer intern,” noted Glenn Beck. “Despite having no formal business education, no business experience and no auto industry experience, 31-year-old Brian Deese is now in charge of dismantling General Motors.” David Sanger of the New York Times also weighed in with, “Meet the 31-Year Old in Charge of Dismantling GM.”
The “not-quite” graduate of Yale Law School “had never set foot in an automotive assembly plant until he took on his nearly unseen role in remaking the American automotive industry.” Deese’s role, Sanger noted, “is unusual for someone who is neither a formally trained economist nor a business school graduate, and who never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the future of the American and Japanese auto industries.”
Brian Deese earned no degrees in science but the administration tapped him to help out with climate change. In his 2013 confirmation hearing for deputy director the Office of Management and Budget, Deese claimed to have the people’s best interests in mind.
“Our economy is growing,” Deese testified, and the president and Congress were “strengthening our nation’s long-term fiscal position.” Still, “there is a lot more work that we need to do together to reach what I believe is the ultimate goal of an economy that is providing opportunity and real stability for working families.”
In 2016, the president tasked Deese to oversee the process leading to the nomination of Merrick Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2017, the Yale law alum became a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. From there it was on to BlackRock, where Deese headed the sustainable investing division, advising clients on meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Deese was reportedly bagging some $2.8 million a year, and building a net worth of $4 million.
BlackRock is the stomping ground of Obama national security advisor Tom Donilon, who worked in the Carter White House, on the campaign of Walter Mondale, and advised Joe Biden on his first presidential run in 1988. In 2012, it was Donilon who helped Joe Biden “get China.”
BLACKROCK IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Those connections doubtless played a role in Biden’s selection of Brian Deese as director of the National Economic Council.
In June of 2021, Deese outlined his vision for a “new industrial strategy,” an “activist government,” approach including “targeted public investment, public procurement, climate resilience and equity.” As Deese contends, “markets on their own will not make investments in technologies and in infrastructure that benefit an entire industry,” and “these are not your typical market failures.” Those failures, “require a different role for government.”
In Deese’s plan, “government also looks to pull forward the deployment and the dispersion of innovation, works with the private sector to overcome those barriers of information and communication that have stymied prior efforts.” And not to worry because inflation is not a concern.
“We’re looking at the implications of an economy that comes out of a policy-induced coma and comes roaring back,” Deese explained, “in part because demand is so strong because of the success of the ongoing vaccination campaign.” And so on.
Deese provides evidence that, like a Soviet zampolit, he was selected for political loyalty and party connections, not proven competence. By his own admission, Biden’s youthful NEC boss is shrink-wrapped in statist superstition. For Deese’s professed dedication to “stability for working families,” consider his response to Victor Blackwell on the surging gas prices.
“What I’d say to Americans across the country is you have a president, an administration that is going to do everything in its power to blunt those price increases and bring those prices down.” The amazing Brian Deese, who may have helped save the planet, is also a professional prevaricator. Under this ruling-class globalist, every day is Dependence Day.
Biden State Department Taps Beijing Bull To Run China Shop
Tom Donilon has promoted investments in China, opposed tariffs on regime
The Biden administration's pick to advise the State Department on "strategic competition" with Beijing chairs an investment think tank that urged Americans to triple their investments in China.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday selected BlackRock Investment Institute chairman and Obama administration national security adviser Tom Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board amid the State Department’s pivot to China.
Donilon’s work at BlackRock could pose a conflict of interest for the board, which provides "advice, feedback, and perspectives" to senior State Department officials on foreign policy matters. Under his leadership, the Investment Institute has urged investors to dramatically increase their stakes in Chinese companies. What’s more, BlackRock views "strategic competition" with China as bad for the company’s bottom line.
"Strategic competition between the U.S. and China and resulting tensions have also contributed to uncertainty in the geopolitical and regulatory landscapes," reads BlackRock’s most recent annual report. The firm listed U.S.-Chinese competition as a factor that could hurt its revenue and profit. BlackRock opened a mutual fund in China in September, making it the first American firm approved to sell financial products there.
BlackRock’s Chinese entanglements have raised concerns that the company is undermining the United States. The company has come under fire for investing in sanctioned Chinese companies, including surveillance giant Hikvision. Even progressive megadonor George Soros called BlackRock’s investments in China a "tragic mistake" that would damage U.S. national security interests.
Donilon has sided with China in the debate over tariffs imposed during the Trump administration. He chided government officials in 2019 about the tariffs and inaccurately warned that they would cause a global recession.
"Future generations of Americans will judge today’s leaders harshly for squandering this moment," Donilon wrote in an article touted byChina Daily, a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party.
Tariffs "are hurting U.S. businesses, consumers, and farmers," Donilon wrote. "They are alienating U.S. allies. And, analysts warn, they are increasing the risk of a global recession."
The Foreign Affairs Policy Board plays a crucial role at the State Department. The department says the board is "necessary to supplement the advice and support the Secretary gets from the Department" on a broad range of international issues. Its meetings are closed to the public due to "discussions on sensitive, and often classified, topics and materials."
Tariffs are likely to be an area of focus for the board, as will the administration’s position on China’s human rights record and increased military activity in the Pacific and South China Sea. Blinken has accused Beijing of waging genocide against Muslims in western China. Other officials, including climate envoy John Kerry, have refused to confront Chinese leaders on the topic for fear of hurting cooperative efforts on climate change.
Donilon, whom Blinken has called his "dear friend," is the latest in a string of Biden allies to land an influential advisory post. The State Department picked Dominic Ng, the chairman of East West Bank, to represent the United States on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s Business Advisory Council. Ng, a major Biden donor, has criticized U.S. foreign policy toward China and served on organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Biden selected his longtime friend, Chris Dodd, to serve as special adviser for the Summit of the Americas. Dodd signed an ethics agreement because his lobbying firm represents some of the countries represented at the summit. Biden appointed another major donor, Joe Kiani, to serve on the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
Neither the State Department nor BlackRock returned requests for comment.
WHAT FOOLS THEY ARE TO THINK THAT RED CHINA WOULD DO ANYTHING BUT 'MISLED'. FUKING MORONS ON THE TAKE!
DANCING WITH DICTATORS.... BOTH THE CLINTONS ARE EXPERT DANCERS!
“Facilitating strategic technology transfer in return for money is an old Clinton game. The Chinese bought their way to access of considerable space technology when Bill Clinton was president. Remember Charlie Trie, Loral, and the rest of the crew?”
THE BIDEN KLEPTOCRACY
American people deserve to know what China was up to with Joe Biden, especially when Beijing had already shelled out millions of dollars to Biden family members — including millions in set-asides for “the big guy.” What else is on that infamous Hunter Biden laptop? The conflicted Biden Justice Department cannot be trusted to engage in any meaningful oversight on this issue. We need a special counsel now.
Washington, D.C. (November 16, 2022) – U.S. government officials and national security experts have raised a number of concerns about the viral video application TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, Inc. Of primary concern is the application’s extensive data harvesting that is reported to be accessible by the Chinese government. The Federal Communications Commission calls TikTok “a sophisticated surveillance tool” that “poses an unacceptable national security risk”, while the U.S. military has banned personnel from using it. Concerns about the cell phone application have been raised by members of Congress across the political spectrum. The question of how TikTok user data is handled, and who has access to that data, is one that has not been fully explored, particularly in the context of U.S. immigration programs.
Publicly available information and additional data obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies confirm that U.S.- based employees of ByteDance include foreign nationals who have obtained employment through the H-1B and Optional Practical Training (OPT) foreign worker programs, both of which are overseen by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
ByteDance executives say TikTok stores all U.S. user data in Virginia and Singapore and that the TikTok organization in the United States is independent from China. The claim of independence is difficult to square with the fact that citizens of China are working for the company inside the United States. These foreign workers maintain their Chinese citizenship and are to return back to the homeland when their visas expire. According to an analysis by Forbes, as of August 2022, a total of 300 employees of TikTok and ByteDance, including company directors and managers, have worked for Chinese government-controlled news media including Xinhua and China Radio International; the analysis found that some of these employees continue to work with the Chinese government media.
Few concerned about the government of China accessing data of American TikTok users through servers located oversees have considered that a foreign national closely connected to the Chinese government could easily obtain this same data while working for ByteDance in the United States.
For details about the number and nationality of foreign workers, similar national security issues pertaining to Microsoft, and ByteDance influence on Capitol Hill, read the full article, authored by Jon Feere.
House Republicans Warn TikTok May Have Misled Congress Over China Data Sharing
WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Republican members of Congress, who will set the agenda for the House next year, pressed short video app TikTok on Tuesday over concerns the company may have misled Congress about how much user data it shares with China, where owner ByteDance is headquartered.
Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Representative James Comer, top Republican on the Oversight Committee, wrote to TikTok to say information provided in a staff briefing appeared to be inaccurate.
"Some of the information TikTok provided during the staff briefing appears to be untrue or misleading, including that TikTok does not track U.S. user locations," the Republican lawmakers said in a letter to TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew and dated Tuesday.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Following election wins earlier this month, Republicans will take control of the House in January. The letter could be a sign of tough scrutiny they plan to apply to Chinese companies including TikTok, a target of the Republican administration of former President Donald Trump.
But the Democratic Biden administration has also expressed concern about TikTok. FBI Director Christopher Wray said earlier this month the Chinese government could harness the video-sharing app to influence users or control their devices.
Among other questions, the lawmakers asked TikTok to provide drafts of any agreement being negotiated with the Biden administration to allow TikTok to remain active in the United States.
The U.S. government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews U.S. acquisitions by foreign companies for potential national security risks, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears U.S. user data could be passed on to China's communist government.
CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for months aiming to reach a national security agreement to protect the data of TikTok's more than 100 million users.
President Joe Biden in June 2021 withdrew a series of Trump executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of TikTok and ordered the Commerce Department to conduct a review of security concerns posed by the apps.
McCarthy Plans Committee to Crack Down on China
'We will put a stop to this and no longer allow the administration to sit back and let China do what they are doing to America,' says House Republican leader
FILE PHOTO: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks during a news conference about the House Republicans "Commitment to America" outside the United States Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 29, 2022. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File PhotoReuters • November 21, 2022 12:35 pm
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WASHINGTON (Reuters)—Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, said on Sunday he would form a select committee on China if he is elected speaker of the chamber, accusing the Biden administration of not standing up to Beijing.
"China is the No. 1 country when it comes to intellectual property theft," he told Fox News in an interview.
"We will put a stop to this and no longer allow the administration to sit back and let China do what they are doing to America."
McCarthy also said he would keep his promise to oust a number of Democrats from key House committees, including Representative Adam Schiff, the chairman of the intelligence committee.
He said he would also remove Representative Eric Swalwell from the intelligence committee and Representative Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee.
McCarthy is vying to become speaker after his party won a narrow House majority in the midterm elections this month, although he will need to secure enough votes to be formally elected when the new Congress takes office in January.
A source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that McCarthy prevailed in Republican House leadership elections on Tuesday, overcoming a challenge from hard-line conservative Representative Andy Biggs in a 188-31 vote by the caucus.
McCarthy also told Fox News his party would "stop these police stations in America," after FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers on Thursday the United States was concerned about the Chinese government setting up unauthorized stations in U.S. cities.
Europe-based human rights organization Safeguard Defenders published a report in September revealing the presence of dozens of Chinese police "service stations" in major global cities including New York.
The report said the stations were part of Beijing's efforts to pressure Chinese nationals to return to China to face criminal charges as well as spread the Chinese Communist Party's influence and propaganda overseas.
China's Embassy in Washington acknowledged the existence of volunteer-run sites in the United States, but said they were not "police stations."
The sites "assist Chinese nationals who need help in accessing the online service platform to get their driving licenses renewed and receive physical check-ups for that purpose," an embassy official told Reuters.
video
What proof does House GOP have against President Biden?
This new Glazov Gang episode features Robert Spencer, the Director of Jihad Watch, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of his new book, Who Lost Afghanistan?
Robert discusses Bidens Finally to Be Investigated, but he asks: Will it be a genuine inquiry – or just a charade?
Don’t miss it!
And make sure to watch our 3-Part Series on FBI Corruption and Cover-Ups.
[1] Spencer: Using Paul Pelosi – How the Democrats are instrumentalizing a curious incident to buttress their false claims about “insurrection.”
[2] Greenfield:Who Are the Real Victims of Political Violence? – How the FBI, the media and the Democrats have achieved the cover-up.
[3] Spencer: The FBI’s Relentless Hunt for ‘Right-Wing Extremism’ – The deeply ominous implications.
After studying the documents on the Hunter Biden laptop, former criminal prosecutor and New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani concluded that: “What Hunter Biden is, is a bagman… I’ve prosecuted many cases like this. He’s collecting Joe’s bribes that come to about $12 million from Ukraine and $3.5 million from Russia. But the big money comes from China. And the amount of money involved is in the tens of millions of dollars.” Today, there is documented proof that that the Biden family has received at least $31 million from entities controlled by the CCP, with greater Chinese payoffs yet to come.
Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who will be the chairman of the House Oversight Committee in the new Congress, appeared on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Saturday and emphasized that Hunter and James Biden’s bank statements are going to be central to the committee’s investigation into President Joe Biden.
On Thursday, Comer announced at a press conference that the Oversight Committee would be launching an investigation into the Biden family for potential violations, including “wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, violations of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, tax evasion, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.”
While speaking with Breitbart News Saturday host Matthew Boyle over the weekend, Comer said the first focus of the investigation would be to obtain bank records from President Biden’s son, Hunter, and James Biden, the president’s brother.
James Comer (R-KY) on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images)
“The focus is on day one are those bank violations and those bank records,” said Comer. “We are pretty confident in what we’re going to find in those. We have two bank violations. We have some bank statements in hand, and we believe that suspicious activity reports, which are bank violations when the bank notifies the federal government that we’re pretty confident that our client has committed a crime, Hunter Biden and Jim Biden have at least 150 of those. And I’ve said this before, and I come from a strong banking background, I don’t think there’s anyone in the history of the United States that’s had that many suspicious activity reports.”
“So there’s precedents here in trying to get those suspicious activity reports,” added the representative from Kentucky. “And before Joe Biden became president, congressional committees had access to that. Joe Biden changed the rules to where Congress couldn’t get access to suspicious activity reports when he became president. I wonder why? It’s because his family had 150 of those.”
Comer added that the U.S. Treasury Department should provide the bank records and suspicious activity reports, but he plans to subpoena the banks if the Treasury Department does not cooperate.
Boyle asked Comer if Americans could expect hearings featuring bank and government officials and members of the Biden family, as well as an investigation report at the culmination of the probe and a criminal referral to the Department of Justice.
“Yes, that’s all of the above,” Comer replied. “With respect to the hearings, we really need to have some of these bank records in hand and comb through those before we have a good hearing because we are confident that the president has lied about his involvement in all of these shady business dealings. We are confident that many of these businesses have broken many laws in the United States, so we need to have 100% evidence that we can demonstrate and show to the American people about the severity of the wrongdoing of the Biden influence-peddling schemes.”
“I have two bank records… and one of the suspicious activity reports, basically, is a situation where Hunter Biden got a significant deposit from China from an unmarked account, which…doesn’t happen in the banking world, you know, there’s always a name and address,” Comer later noted. “All they know is it came from China. And he’s shifting it around to all these accounts he has, which is a… pattern of money laundering. And we know that’s part of what the Delaware U.S. attorney is looking at, money laundering. We need to know the source of his revenue. If the president’s family is getting millions of dollars from China, we need to know what it was.”
“Hunter Biden wasn’t manufacturing anything; he didn’t own any real estate. He wasn’t licensed to sell anything. He wasn’t licensed to be a lobbyist,” Comer went on to point out. “What the heck business were they in? Its influence peddling, which is illegal.”
The soon-to-be Oversight Committee chairman also expressed concerns that the investigation could be impeded if Hunter Biden is indicted by the U.S Attorney’s Office in Delaware.
“The troubling thing to me, and one reason I wanted to have the press conference so soon was I’ve always predicted that the U.S. Attorney DOJ will indict Hunter Biden before January to protect him from subpoena,” he explained. “So if he’s under indictment, we’ll never get him in front of the committee. And what we were hearing was he was gonna be indicted for tax evasion and lying on the gun application.”
“I wanted to throw some other things out there that I really can’t go into great detail,” continued Comer. “The human trafficking, that’s pretty serious, and obviously, the fact that no one in the mainstream media wrote about that, and no one in the White House commented on that, there’s a… huge problem with Hunter Biden. And remember, the laptop has videos on it. So the U.S. Attorney is not going to get away with just putting a little slap on the wrist for a misdemeanor and indicting Hunter Biden just to protect him from congressional oversight. We want the American people to know there’s a laundry list of items that Hunter Biden is potentially in huge trouble over. And this is not going to go away if they appoint a Hunter Biden Special Counsel or if they indict Hunter Biden.”
“So I feel like the press conference was very effective, and at the very least, we’re transparent with the American people on exactly where we’re doing on day one,” he added. “This is an investigation of Joe Biden. And we want those bank violations which Congress always had access to prior to Joe Biden changing the rules when he became president.”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing even to have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Hunter Biden is the subject of the narrative film My Son Hunter, marking Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution. The film was produced by the Unreported Story Society. It’s the story the establishment media don’t want you to see. The film is available RIGHT NOW for Streaming and Downloading at MySonHunter.com.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Nat’l Black Farmers Assn. Pres.: Biden Admin. Hasn’t ‘Done Anything’ on China Buying up U.S. Farms
On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends First,” National Black Farmers Association President John Boyd Jr. stated that President Joe Biden and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack haven’t done enough to help American farmers and have failed to act on China buying up American farmland.
Boyd said, “[T]his administration hasn’t put farmers first. Now, they’re out proposing another $37 billion in aid to Ukraine and we haven’t taken care of America’s farmers here at home and the administration, like I said, isn’t doing enough to make sure that farmers get the aid that they need and support that they need from this administration. We have 16,000 members that are still waiting for debt relief and we’re still finding aid for other countries. … Inflation is on the rise with no end in sight right now. And the President, the Agriculture Secretary [aren’t] doing enough to assist America’s farmers right now. We have China who’s buying America’s farms…and we haven’t done anything about it, and this administration has been totally silent on these issues.”
He added, “There’s been no meeting from this administration and I’ve reached out to high-level officials, Democratic leadership. They’re not keeping their word.” And “we’re facing farm foreclosures at a record high, farm input costs at a record high…and the administration isn’t doing anything about it. Totally silent.”
Elaine Chao’s -- Mitch’s wife -- family has made a fortune in shipping, primarily off the People’s Republic of China. McConnell and Chao, per Peter Schweizer, have both played key roles in furthering the Foremost Group’s interests. That’s James Chao’s -- Elaine’s dad’s -- company. Since 2004, the McConnells’ fortune has ballooned to as much as $36.5 million. How do two D.C. lifers get that rich?
Even President Donald Trump, who initiated a trade war with China and tried to block the CCP's inroads into America, found his efforts thwarted. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, his wife Elaine Choi (secretary of transportation), Wilbur Ross (commerce secretary), Steve Mnuchin (Treasury secretary), Gary Cohn (director of the National Economic Council), White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, and Trump's daughter Ivanka — all had strong business interests in China.
Mitch McConnell Wins Reelection as Senate GOP Leader, 10 Defectors Vote for Rick Scott
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Wednesday won reelection as Senate GOP leader with ten defectors voting for challenger Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL).
McConnell received 37 “yes” votes and ten votes against, with one senator voting present.
The votes against McConnell mark the first time he has received a “no” vote as leader, a sign the Republican Party has begun to turn against his establishment agenda.
“I don’t own this job,” McConnell told reporters after the vote. “Anybody who wants to run for it can feel free to do so. So I’m not in any way offended by having an opponent or having a few votes in opposition.”
First elected as GOP leader in 2006, with McConnell’s reelection he will likely become the longest serving Senate party leader in history.
Under McConnell’s leadership, the nation has struggled.
The national debt has increased more than $20 trillion, illegal immigration has persisted, real wages for American workers have remained stagnant, Obamacare was enacted in 2010, big banks were bailed out in 2008, social media companies have silenced individuals without repercussions, and Dr. Anthony Fauci remains unaccountable for allegedly twice lying to Congress.
Just seven percent of voters view McConnell favorably, while 81 percent view him unfavorably, Wednesday polling revealed.
McConnell’s reelection was challenged on Tuesday by Scott, who argued against the status quo and for a plan to advance conservative principles. His challenge gained considerable support, considering that McConnell holds significant power over the conference.
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) (C) speaks to members of the press as Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) (R) and Senate Minority Whip Sen. John Thune (R-SD) (L) listen. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“Despite what the armchair quarterbacks on TV will tell you, there is no one person responsible for our party’s performance across the country,” Scott blamed McConnell for the midterm election failures. “If you simply want to stick with the status quo, don’t vote for me.”
After Scott announced his bid, McConnell appeared unfazed. “I have the votes. I will be elected,” McConnell told reporters.
The GOP Senate leadership election also included additional races. McConnell’s leadership team will now be Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as Minority Whip, John Barrasso (R-WY) as Conference Chair, Joni Ernst (R-IA) as Senate Republican Policy Committee Chair, Steve Daines (R-MT) as NRSC Chair, and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) as Conference Vice Chair.
The U.S. Capitol as seen on Nov. 14, 2022. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) says it's time for a change in the Republican Party -- not only its Senate leader, but also the party's focus:
"Well, we need good, strong, independent leadership that actually listens to voters and doesn't just listen to the Washington lobbyists," Hawley told Fox News Monday night.
"And I'll just tell you, when it comes to the GOP, the Washington Republicanism that cares more about Wall Street than it does about working people, it's time for that to come to an end.
"The Washington Republicanism that's all about adventures abroad and the neoconservatism of these global wars, not focused on working people in this country, it needs to come to an end.
"I think what voters are asking us to do is pretty clear. Secure our streets. You know, let's put new cops on the street, 100,000 of them. Secure the border. Stop the indoctrination of our children, and bring jobs back to this country.
"It used to be you could support a family on one good wage. You can't do that anymore in this country because of the ruinous trade policies that, unfortunately, both parties have supported.
"That has got to come to an end. Republicans have got to be the party of working people and working class culture. That that's what we're fighting for."
Hawley said he will not support Mitch McConnell for Republican leader. "We need new leadership, but we also need real convictions. That's what we've got to be about going forward."
In a speech on the Senate floor Monday, McConnell noted that the nation remains "closely divided," and he called it an "outstanding thing" that Republicans appear poised to take control of the House of Representatives.
"If Washington Democrats do not want to pivot to sanity and common sense; if they will not help us address the ways their policies are hurting families, they will encounter stiff resistance from the sizeable Senate Republican Conference that half the country has elected to be their voice, to be their champions, to fight for them.
“We’re going to fight hard for the American families this administration is leaving behind,” McConnell said.
Elaine Chao’s -- Mitch’s wife -- family has made a fortune in shipping, primarily off the People’s Republic of China. McConnell and Chao, per Peter Schweizer, have both played key roles in furthering the Foremost Group’s interests. That’s James Chao’s -- Elaine’s dad’s -- company. Since 2004, the McConnells’ fortune has ballooned to as much as $36.5 million. How do two D.C. lifers get that rich?
But no stink on Mitch and Elaine for -- as Schweizer terms it -- “corruption by proxy.”
2022 Midterms: No Stink on the Republican Establishment?
Attacks on Donald Trump have begun in the aftermath of the midterm elections. We should have set our watches. Washington’s Republican establishment is pushing the line that the GOP’s underperformance in the midterms is “100%” Trump’s fault. Of course, there’s no stink on D.C. Republicans -- not Kevin McCarthy, not Mitch McConnell, not Ronna McDaniel, not Tom Emmer (chairman, RNCC), not GOP consultants and pollsters… Not on any Republican who hangs out at the Capitol Hill Club.
Conservatives shouldn’t be goaded into a Trump versus DeSantis fight. Trump and DeSantis shouldn’t permit themselves to be baited, either. It’s so transparent, it’s laughable. That’s exactly what the establishment is trying. Washington Republicans don’t intend to just knock out Trump, but split conservatives. Is that rank odor wafting through the air from Karl Rove and Jeb! lurking behind the curtains?
No stink on the insiders. Nope. Just Trump. Washington’s favorite game is in full swing: The Blame Game. Republicans play it as viciously as Democrats. It’s one of D.C.’s charms.
The long knives are aimed at Trump because he remains the Republican establishment’s nemesis. The aforementioned “players,” among many others, don’t like their apple carts upset. Why, they get all touchy about that. Trump the disrupter, Trump the change agent -- not good for business. And make no mistake, in D.C., it’s all about business. Show me the money, baby!
Why do you think parades of unrich politicians who go to D.C. leave -- if they ever do -- worth millions of dollars? You think Nancy Pelosi is the only member of Congress -- Ds and Rs -- who’s alleged to profit from insider trading?
Enriched, these “representatives of the people,” while producing absolutely nothing of real value… who retire from Congress or lose their seats to then get fat off defense contractor board appointments, consulting gigs with whatever special interest thinks their “ins” can be leveraged, and fat off consulting fees just because someone owed them a favor. Give me a guy making widgets in Paducah, Kentucky over these scammers any day.
And who -- somehow, mysteriously -- get rich off their family’s and friends’ connections.
Case in point, the august Mitch McConnell, who, in fact, has become the poster boy for everything cynical, smarmy, and loathsome about the Swamp. At least, on the Republican side of the aisle. R or D, Mitch isn’t alone.
Elaine Chao’s -- Mitch’s wife -- family has made a fortune in shipping, primarily off the People’s Republic of China. McConnell and Chao, per Peter Schweizer, have both played key roles in furthering the Foremost Group’s interests. That’s James Chao’s -- Elaine’s dad’s -- company. Since 2004, the McConnells’ fortune has ballooned to as much as $36.5 million. How do two D.C. lifers get that rich?
But no stink on Mitch and Elaine for -- as Schweizer terms it -- “corruption by proxy.”
And no stink on Mitch for publicly remarkingduring the midterms that “candidate quality” among Republican Senate hopefuls was lacking, which meant don’t expect the GOP to win the Senate. But Mitch wasn’t done. Caring more about retaining his Senate leadership position (even if that meant minority status), McConnell’s PAC pulled badly needed money from Blake Masters’ race in Arizona and Don Bolduc’s New Hampshire contest.
Worse -- if there is a worse -- well, yes, there is -- Mitch has poured money into propping up Lisa Murkowski’s campaign in Alaska. Murkowski, who just radiates political whore. But, hey, that’s the ilk Mitch runs with.
The dunce who penned the Daily Wire piece actually claims that had Trump not pushed Mehmet Oz, Dave McCormick would have been Pennsylvania’s GOP Senate nominee… “And McCormick most likely would’ve crushed the bumbling John Fetterman.”
That Dave McCormick, who made “$22 million last year [2021] as CEO of the world's largest hedge fund,” Bridgewater Associates? Bridgewater Associates that made truckloads of yen off the PRC, a communist regime that oppresses Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hongkongers? Dave McCormick’s Bridgewater Associates, which knows it’s more lucrative to help create jobs in China than the U.S.A.?
Does the Daily Wire dunce not appreciate that Democrats would have fricasseed McCormick for all of the above plus more? That Pennsylvania’s “No Questions” mail-in balloting would have done in Abraham “Mr. Freed the Slaves” Lincoln?
Details, details. Just get Trump.
Trump, who did more for the nation in 48 months as president than D.C. lifers have done in their careers. Trump, who kept the nation at peace, who had the economy humming, who stood up to Xi and Putin and Kim and the mullahs. Trump, who, against Democrat and Republican opposition, effectively closed the U.S.-Mexican border… who fought the drug scourge and child trafficking coming from Mexico.
Donald Trump who, this election season, made dozens of endorsements and took to the hustings to support Republican candidates via rallies in key states, while most establishment Republicans hung out in their nicely appointed D.C. offices, sitting on their fat rears, spinning whatever intrigues they believed advanced their petty interests.
In 24 months of the Biden administration and Democrat control of Congress, along with the passivity of Kevin McCarthy and conniving compliance of Mitch McConnell, what has happened to the nation? It’s become an awful mess. It’s tumbled into deep troubles -- thanks to utter incompetence, ideological blinkeredness, and greed -- that appear only to have begun. A potential Perfect Storm of crises, domestic and foreign, is brewing.
And yet no stink on the elites, whose conceit is their most outsized feature. Elites, who aren’t just Democrats but quisling establishment Republicans and pay-for-hire “conservatives,” whose devotion to liberty and nation are distant seconds to devotion to themselves.
All of them are miserably failing the country -- the honest, decent, hardworking Joes and Janes who comprise the real backbone of America. They’re being failed -- we’re all being failed -- by crimped minds whose reflex is to shift blame from themselves to Trump. Good Lord, deliver us from these fools.
Lastly and not least, Newt Gingrich has weighed in. I’ve long respected and appreciated Newt, starting when he was a firebrand backbencher in the U.S. House in the late 70s and early 80s. His contributions have been historic. But he, too, has decided to pin the blame on Trump for the GOP’s underperformance -- or was it more on the order of inflated expectations now being spun as underperformance?
Said the former speaker, per Just the News, November 10:
"I was pretty shaken because that was not the election I expected," he admitted. "And I don't have as much confidence in my own judgment as I would have had yesterday morning."
Well, Mr. Speaker, perhaps you shouldn’t. Perhaps most of us misread developments. Maybe we need the humility to admit we were wrong. But lackluster Kevin McCarthy, whom you mentored, and along with House Republicans, concocted the tepid “Commitment to America,” receives not a single word of criticism from you? And what about your role in counseling McCarthy and having direct input into the “Commitment?” Perhaps introspection and further reflection would help you arrive at a deeper, wiser understanding of your responsibility?
I’m decades past an infatuation with any politician. Donald Trump is no more perfect than the rest of us. He has his good and bad attributes. But we should all be damned if we allow feckless, self-absorbed, and incompetent Republican D.C. lifers to get away with evading their ample share of responsibility for the midterm outcomes. Yep, stink is on them, thick and pungent.
Conservatives, don’t take the bait. The lifers want us to form a circular firing squad. If we let them blame Trump “100%,” shame on us.
J. Robert Smith can be found regularly at Gab @JRobertSmith. He also blogs at Flyover.
Scheduled Vote for Mitch McConnell as Leader Remains Despite GOP Opposition
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) on Friday shut down attempts to remove Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from his leadership position in the Senate by writing a letter Friday to Republican senators denying their request to delay Wednesday’s leadership vote.
Barrasso, one of McConnell’s top lieutenants, wrote a letter Friday to GOP senators denying their request to delay Wednesday’s leadership vote until after all Senate votes had been counted.
“We look forward to meeting next week with our new and returning members. I expect a full and open discussion beginning at Tuesday’s policy lunch on our path forward,” he wrote in a letter obtained by CNN. “On Wednesday we will meet again for our scheduled conference for elections.”
“I welcome the questions and points made in the letter circulated by Senators Rick Scott, Lee and Johnson,” Barrasso, who is in charge of leadership elections, wrote.
Barrasso’s letter comes after Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Josh Hawley (R-MO), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Rick Scott (R-FL), and Mike Lee (R-UT) have voiced opposition to leadership elections until candidates’ dedication to conservative ideas are vetted.
In a second letter circulated Friday among Republican senators, those senators impressed upon their colleagues that “serious discussions” must occur about why the red wave did not materialize.
“We are all disappointed that a Red Wave failed to materialize, and there are multiple reasons it did not,” the letter reads. “We need to have serious discussions within our conference as to why and what we can do to improve our chances in 2024.”
Hawley has been particularly vocal in opposing McConnell’s reelection as the Republican leader. “[I]t’s pretty hard to convince folks, particularly independent-minded ones who don’t tend to trust the process much, to vote for you, if you don’t have something affirmative to say and offer,” Hawley told RealClearPolitics.
“I lay that at the feet of the Washington establishment that set the tone for these races,” he added. “They failed to offer that kind of vision.”
Senate Republicans are scheduled to vote on McConnell as leader on Wednesday. Only eight percent of voters view McConnell favorably, while 80 percent view him unfavorably.
Under McConnell’s tenure, the national debt has soared more than $20 trillion, illegal immigration has continued, real wages for American workers have remained stagnant, Obamacare was enacted in 2010, big banks were bailed out in 2008, and social media companies have silenced individuals without repercussions. Dr. Anthony Fauci remains unaccountable for allegedly twice lying to Congress.
Bidens of all sorts are under federal investigation for tax evasion, money-laundering, and unregistered agent foreign ties, as this Politico report citing
Naïve American people had no idea what they were getting with Biden: A senile, corrupt, debauched old man with a son who was a conduit for his dirty dealings and who has a personal life so disgusting it’s hard to write about it. That’s what the American media and the tech tyrants have done to America. ANDREA WIDBURG
New Hunter Biden revelation undermines president's comments: Turley
Bidens of all sorts are under federal investigation for tax evasion, money-laundering, and unregistered agent foreign ties, as this Politico report citing Hunter notes.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Antony Blinken Checks in with Chinese Foreign Minister for Routine Scolding
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a phone conversation with his Chinese counterpart Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Monday in which the latter chided Blinken to “stop trying to put up new obstacles to bilateral relations.”
The State Department readout of the call, published on Sunday (the call appears to have taken place on Monday Beijing time), does not mention anything that Wang said, instead focusing on Blinken, who allegedly “raised Russia’s war against Ukraine” and the “security situation in Haiti.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry and the government, through state propaganda outlet Global Times, offered much more specificity, depicting a frustrated Wang hectoring Blinken to urge the administration of left-wing President Joe Biden to stop trying “to contain and suppress China.”
The tone echoed that of multiple past encounters between the two, as well as discussions held between Blinken and other Chinese Communist Party envoys, in which aggressive Chinese representatives badgered Blinken over his government not acting sufficiently in the best interests of China. The pattern began after a disastrous meeting between Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Wang and senior Politburo member Yang Jiechi in Alaska last year during which Yang ranted for 16 minutes about alleged racism and “Black Lives Matter” in America.
“On human rights, we hope the United States will do better on human rights. China has made steady progress in human rights, and the fact is that there are many problems within the United States regarding human rights, which is admitted by the U.S. itself as well,” Yang protested in Alaska. “The challenges facing the United States in human rights are deep-seated. They did not just emerge over the past four years, such as ‘Black Lives Matter.’ It did not come up only recently.”
The Biden representatives notably did not mention the fact that China is currently engaging in genocide against majority-Muslims groups in occupied East Turkistan, among other Communist Party atrocities.
Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi L meets with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a day after the Group of 20 G20 foreign ministers’ meeting, in Bali, Indonesia, July 9, 2022. (Xu Qin/Xinhua via Getty Images)
According to the State Department, Blinken “discussed the need to maintain open lines of communication and responsibly manage the U.S.-PRC [China] relationship” with Wang, adding no more detail on what would presumably be the most important issue between the top diplomats of the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China.
“The Secretary raised Russia’s war against Ukraine and the threats it poses to global security and economic stability,” the readout continued. “The Secretary also noted the deteriorating humanitarian and security situation in Haiti and the need for continued coordinated action in support of the Haitian people.”
In contrast, the Chinese Foreign Ministry depicted a fuming Wang berating Blinken on American foreign policy.
“The US side should stop its efforts to contain and suppress China, and not create new obstacles to the relationship between the two countries,” the ministry paraphrased Wang as saying. “Wang Yi pointed out that bringing China-US relations back to the track of stable development is not only in the common interests of China and the US, but also the general expectation of the international community.”
The Global Times claimed that Wang spent much of the call pressuring Blinken to closely study the 2022 Communist Party Congress, which concluded last month and cemented dictator Xi Jinping’s stranglehold on power. The Congress, which occurs every five years, determines who remains or gets promoted to the Politburo, the highest authority in the Party. This year, Xi removed several top officials on the basis of their advanced age, replacing them with a host of loyalists that are unlikely to question controversial policies such as an endless wave of city lockdowns to fight Chinese coronavirus.
The Congress was also the site of a bizarre scene in which elderly former President Hu Jintao, who preceded Xi Jinping in power, appeared to be hauled off violently by security while pleading with Xi for mercy. Hu has not been seen in public since his apparent purge was caught on camera.
Wang, the Global Timessaid, essentially assigned Blinken to read Xi Jinping’s report to the Congress as homework.
“If the US truly wants to know about China, it should carefully read the report, Wang said, noting that China’s domestic and diplomatic policies are open and transparent and its strategic intention is frank and forthright,” the state newspaper relayed, “and the US should not make subjective conjectures, nor be blinded by its ideological prejudice.”
It also repeated Wang’s lecture on respecting the genocidal communist Chinese government.
“When talking with Blinken, Wang pointed out that bringing bilateral relation back on track is not only in accordance with the two countries’ mutual interests, but also what the international community expects,” the Global Times reported. “The US should stop cracking down on China, and also stop trying to put up new obstacles to bilateral relations, Wang urged.”
The state newspaper nonetheless described the phone call as “positive” and potentially an avenue for future high-level talks, including a possible meeting between Biden and Xi. Biden and Xi are both expected to attend the G20 summit in Indonesia this month, but have not made any official announcements on meeting. As of Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry denied having any information on a potential in-person discussion between the two leaders.
The G20 is expected to be an explosive meeting this year due to its invite list, which not only includes Biden and Xi but both Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose nations are currently at war. Biden has publicly demanded Indonesia disinvite Putin to no avail.
Also expected to attend is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose relationship with Biden is arguably the world’s most deteriorated. The White House has denied any plans for Biden to meet with the crown prince amid a growing diplomatic crisis triggered by Washington accusing Riyadh of supporting OPEC oil production cuts to support Putin. The Saudi government has reacted to the accusation with outrage and received support from Zelensky. Saudi officials have also taken Biden’s strident stance as an indication to enhance diplomatic ties with China.
At least year’s G20 summit, Blinken and Wang repeated their regular scolding sessions on the issue of Taiwan, which did not reportedly come up during this week’s call. Taiwan is a sovereign, democratic nation off the coast of China that has long sought relations with America. Beijing falsely claims Taiwan as a province of China and regularly pressures America to cut economic and strategic ties with Taipei, even though Washington does not recognize Taiwan as a country.
“We urge the United States to realize the serious harm of the ‘Taiwan independence,’ to pursue a real one-China policy, instead of a fake one, to fulfill its commitments to China faithfully rather than treacherously,” Wang demanded last year.
Wang also complained about specific legislation in the American Congress at the time, meddling in domestic affairs.
“The United States has wantonly interfered with China’s internal affairs, Wang stressed, noting that the current U.S. Congress has introduced more than 300 anti-China bills,” Xinhua reported, “and the United States has included more than 900 Chinese entities and individuals in various unilateral sanctions lists, which severely disrupted the normal bilateral exchanges.”
WION
KERO 23 Bakersfield, CA
cloak-and-dagger ops alone to a sophisticated collection of innocent-seeming front groups. He shows how these groups, speaking the language of transparency, globalism, and cultural, academic, and business exchanges, influenced key persons in every sphere of endeavor in the West, masking China’s quest for world dominance, its military build-up, its stealing of technology, its human rights violations, and its territorial expansionism. Appearing eager for cultural and business reciprocity, China presented intelligence operatives as journalists, scholars, and trade and tourism representatives. The U.S. – and other western governments – engaged with China, mistaking it for a useful partner, and often acting under pressure from businesses that sought lucrative deals with Beijing.
Tom Donilon / APChuck Ross • 
The U.S. Capitol as seen on Nov. 14, 2022. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
That Dave McCormick, who made “$22 million last year [2021] as CEO of the world's largest hedge fund,” Bridgewater Associates? Bridgewater Associates that made truckloads of yen off the PRC, a communist regime that oppresses Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Hongkongers? Dave McCormick’s Bridgewater Associates, which knows it’s more lucrative to help create jobs in China than the U.S.A.? 
