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Photo by aboodi vesakaran on Unsplash
Last night’s speech by President Trump wasn’t fun. Perhaps the least fun aspect of it is that it was so unsurprising. China sees the United States as an obstacle to its goal of becoming the dominant global force, and since that’s a position we currently hold, they’re not wrong to see us as an obstacle.
While we’re not remotely close to a shooting war, the truth is that there is an ongoing battle taking place similar to what we saw during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
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Take, for example, the documents declassified by the White House. They paint a serious picture about election integrity, to say the least, to say nothing of what sure looks like complicity by some of our intelligence personnel. Whether they were knowingly complicit or just retarded is something I hope an investigation will look at.
Still, it wasn’t the only news involving shenanigans with China .
John Harold Rogers, 64, a former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB), was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 38 months in federal prison in connection with making false statements to federal investigators about sharing restricted Federal Reserve information with Chinese intelligence operatives.
A federal jury deliberated for two days before finding Rogers guilty on February 3 of making false statements to government investigators at the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In addition to the 38-month prison sentence, Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Rogers to serve 12 months of supervised release. Federal prosecutors had requested a 60-month prison term.
“The United States entrusted Rogers with its most sensitive economic data,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “He violated that sacred trust and lied repeatedly to conceal his collaboration with individuals in China with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exposing his own country, the United States, to counterintelligence risks.”
Now, this isn’t quite the same thing as handing over classified material regarding our most important defense systems, but it’s not nothing, either. We’ve been in an economic struggle with China for years now, so providing this kind of information is detrimental to the American effort.
And since President Trump revealed that it was learned China planned to pay “journalists” critical of Trump to ramp up the coverage. In other words, TDS might well have had a financial motive.
It’s unclear if any offers were made, much less accepted, but I suspect that China had reason to believe offers would be at least considered.
Since the Chinese government also has ties with an American commie who lives there, and has used a network of NGOs to fund various communist causes, the truth is that China is likely meddling in more than the 2020 election.
A lot more.
In fact, I’ve got a piece going live at Bearing Arms on Saturday morning that highlights a bit of speculation I’ve had involving some of these revelations meshing with things I’ve observed.
Regardless of whether or not that speculation is accurate, I can’t help but recall how the Soviets also funded domestic groups aligned with their causes, all in an effort to either topple the United States or to drag it into communism from within.
I don’t think China is really interested in turning us communist, but I don’t think they’d mind if we became their ideological ally, either. Instead, they’re engaging in a bit of rational self-interest. If they can destabilize the United States, potentially push us into a civil war, initiated either by the left or the right, then they get just that.
How much of the extreme left is potentially funded by these NGOs? How much money ended up in various coffers so they could transport people from across the nation to some “protest” with the intention of getting rowdy? How many times were supposedly organic expressions of outrage—you know, the ones with legions of professionally printed signs that just happened to be on site as this organic outrage erupted—actually the result of foreign influence?
Again, nothing here rises quite to the level of shooting at China, but we’d best wake up and recognize that they’re not our friend, and if we don’t step up and pull back our dependence on a hostile power, we’re going to be screwed.
More than that, though, it’s clear that we need to clean house in the intelligence community. People were keeping information from the president. One openly bragged about running a shadow government in a work email she knew would be accessible. They knew there were concerns, and rather than acknowledge them, they enabled China to potentially disrupt the electoral process.
And now, the left is actively engaged in preventing election integrity legislation, though not without help from so-called Republicans who don’t seem to see a problem.
Maybe they will now, but I doubt it, and the left is already pretending this is a non-issue, including CBS News, which I was starting to expect better of.
Still, we need to recognize the threat that is China. They appear to be running a pretty aggressive and subversive operation. Think of the many things I’ve talked about here, and I haven’t been exhaustive in my coverage. They put software in solar components that would allow them to shut them off remotely. They own tens of thousands of acres of American farmland. They’re apparently at least willing to consider using their resources to pay journalists for coverage hostile toward the president, all in an effort to get a different guy in the Oval Office.
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They’re running Chinese police operations out of American cities, for crying out loud, and not to run down people guilty of crimes in China for extradition. No, they’re here to intimidate Chinese people living in America to keep them from telling the truth about the government of their homeland, while at the same time validating the criticism, even if they didn’t mean to.
These are not the actions of a global friend. These aren’t the actions of a mere rival.
These are the actions of an enemy, and it’s time everyone wakes up to this fact.
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