(The audio version of this essay can be found here.)
Imagine for a moment that a major American corporation, say Walmart or McDonalds, decided to enforce an official religion in its office. From now on, anyone working for these companies would be required to take the Eucharist every morning, recite Muslim prayers in the afternoon, or wear a yarmulke when on the job. Imagine that the government itself mandated that you must follow the tenets of one religion or another. That would be absurd, right? The very first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from establishing a religion in the United States, and our courts have applied that to most employers as well. However, there a new religion that has taken over America in the guise of secularism. Call it wokeness, or social justice, or equity; whatever it is has become the de facto official religion of this country, and of the entire western world. Refusing to participate in its rituals and incantations can result in ostracism, unemployment, and censorship. Who is enforcing the tenets of this new religion? Who has established it as the new law of the land? Not our government. Not our elected leaders. No, the enforcers of this new faith are unelected, unaccountable, and they hold themselves above governments and nations. These are the technocrats, the rootless cosmopolitans who believe that their expertise gives them the right to rule. The very concept of the sovereign nation-state is being erased before our eyes in favor of a globalist technocracy based on the religion of wokeness.
While it is not true to say that religion is the primary cause of war, religious differences can contribute to strife between peoples. By the 17th century, the Protestant Reformation had torn at the fabric of medieval Europe by challenging the supreme authority enjoyed by the Roman Catholic Church for over a thousand years. The Thirty Years War initially began as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire, but it eventually evolved into a bloody brawl that left millions of people dead. Europe would not see slaughter on such a scale until World War I nearly three centuries later. The series of treaties that concluded the Thirty Years War are collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. These treaties did more than end a war; they established the very system of international relations that we take for granted to this day. Most importantly at the time, the Peace allowed kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire to choose whether to be Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist, without interference from the Emperor, neighboring kingdoms, or the Pope in Rome. Furthermore, subjects who followed a different Christian denomination were guaranteed the right to practice their faith without fear of persecution.
The consequences of the Peace of Westphalia extended far beyond denominational disputes, however. For the first time, the kings of Europe agreed that nation-states were a thing. The borders of pre-Westphalian Europe were in constant flux as kings and nobles fought to control land and resources, and they all understood themselves to be under the ultimate authority of the Pope in Rome. Popes often used their authority to interfere in the affairs of kings and kingdoms, such as when Pope Innocent III excommunicated King John of England in a dispute over who could appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury. In another example, Pope Sixtus V induced Spanish King Philip II to invade England in retaliation for their embrace of the Protestant Reformation under Queen Elizabeth I.
Westphalia changed this paradigm. Now, European leaders recognized that nation-states were sovereign entities, neither bound to the authority of the Pope nor subject to interference from their neighbors. This concept of national sovereignty remains the cornerstone of international relations to this day. Our grandfathers took it for granted that the internal affairs of foreign nations were none of our business. The idea of invading another country to convert them to your religion or force them to accept your laws and customs became unacceptable in the new international order. Henry Kissinger describes the Peace of Westphalia as a situation where “…each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious vocations of its fellow states and refrain from challenging their existence.”
While it might be too much to say that the Peace of Westphalia created the modern world, it certainly recognized the structure that world would take. The wave of independence movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries was inspired by the idea of national sovereignty. If European nations were not supposed to interfere in each other’s affairs, then what right did they have to interfere in South America, Africa, or Asia? Slowly but surely, the Westphalian nation-state became the norm throughout the world. Sometimes this process went awry, such as when British and French diplomats tried to create nation-states out of diverse Arabic tribes in the former Ottoman Empire; the arbitrary borders that they drew a century ago are still causing strife today.
It was in the wake of World War I that the Westphalian system began to falter. US President Woodrow Wilson joined the war not so much to defend American territory as to “make the world safe for democracy”. If “democracy” was a religion, rather than an ideology or a system of government, then Wilson would not sound very different from the most zealous Crusaders of medieval Europe. Despite Wilson’s idea for a League of Nations failing to gain congressional approval at home, the leaders of Europe went ahead and formed the organization themselves. While the main purpose of the League was to make war obsolete, it utterly failed to do so; nevertheless, it laid the groundwork for the United Nations that was born out of the Second World War two decades later. The UN Charter claims that “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” However, the very purpose of the UN is to establish a higher world authority than national sovereignty. Whereas our Founding Fathers appealed to heaven for the redress of their grievances against their sovereign lord King George, today we appeal to the UN Security Council.
As usual, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and a charitable look at the crafters of the postwar world order suggests they at least had good intentions. There must be some mechanism to stop the powerful from trampling over the weak, or some way of stopping sovereign nations from engaging in human rights abuses within their own borders. What is to be done if a sovereign nation engages in genocide? The leaders of Europe regretted not intervening in Germany sooner; perhaps they could have prevented the Holocaust. None of them wanted to let that happen again, so they went all-in with the United Nations. The first major use of the UN as a peacekeeping body was to intervene in the civil war in Korea. The Soviet Union and newly Communist China both intended to spread their ideology throughout the world, and so they supported communist North Korea with money, weapons, and training. What was the civilized world to do but intervene?
The new world order constructed after World War II was an explicitly globalist order. Whereas Westphalian nationalism held that each country was its own sovereign unit, postwar globalism instead held that certain concepts such as liberal democracy and civil rights were universal to all humanity, and therefore any nation that restricted such things lost the protections of sovereignty. In 1991, US President George H. W. Bush announced a war against Iraq, which had invaded and occupied the neighboring nation of Kuwait. In his speech that night, he said:
This is an historic moment. We have in this past year made great progress in ending the long era of conflict and cold war. We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations a new world order — a world where the rule of law, not the law of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations. When we are successful — and we will be — we have a real chance at this new world order, an order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the U.N.’s founders.
Nearly every American and European leader since World War II has accepted the axiom that world peace requires international organizations that can, in some cases, supersede national sovereignty. Anyone who speaks approvingly of Westphalian nationalism, such as Patrick Buchanan, is derided as backwards and archaic. Conventional wisdom had long held that increased centralization of power was inevitable, the “arc of history” so to speak. The European Union, for example, was only expected to grow larger and more powerful, subordinating national governments to the new Tower of Babel in Strasbourg and Brussels. The idea of a country withdrawing from such a union was considered lunacy, until Britain did just that. The reaction to Brexit by the globalist class has been one of outright hysteria. They cannot believe that the citizens of a 21st century nation would seriously want some level of sovereignty. It goes against everything we have been taught for the past seventy-five years.
At some point, the United States ceased to exist as a sovereign nation-state and instead became, as Mencius Moldbug put it, an international free trade zone. We took the idea that America was a “nation of immigrants” to the extreme, coming to believe that there is no such thing as a core American nation. Capitalists and businessmen who once served the American public no longer feel any loyalty to this country. They incorporate in offshore havens to avoid paying taxes, they outsource manufacturing to developing nations whose citizens will work for pennies on the dollar, and when they claim to “give back” to their communities, it is generally in a way that diminishes the historic American nation in favor of immigrants and refugees.
Tax dollars are now prioritized for foreigners rather than American citizens. We began handing out foreign aid during the Cold War to keep other countries on our side rather than letting them become part of the Communist bloc. We were a rich country, and we could afford to share the wealth. Despite the end of the Cold War in 1991 and our own skyrocketing national debt, foreign aid has only increased in the past thirty years. We have been doing it for so long that nobody in Congress can even remember a time when we spent our money on the priorities of the American people. Like globalism itself, the use of American capital to prop up the rest of the world has become so ingrained in our political system that any criticism is looked upon as crazy talk.
President Trump recently signed a budget bill that was included as part of a so-called covid relief package, after spending a week denouncing the massive waste contained therein. This budget includes billions of dollars for foreign nations, or, more accurately, for the non-governmental organizations that claim to act on behalf of those nations. For example, the bill allocates $10 million to the country of Pakistan for something called “gender programs”. Like missionaries spreading the Gospel of Christ throughout the world in the 19th century, today’s NGOs spread the ideologies of modern America: feminism, globalism, and LGBTQ supremacy. The American people did not vote for this. We never held a referendum on spending money to promote feminism or homosexuality in foreign nations. We were not asked our opinion about sending half a billion dollars to Israel or hundreds of millions of dollars to Nepal, Myanmar, and Cambodia. In theory, the American people exercise control over our government by electing new leaders and representatives, yet there are few in Washington of either party who are interested in halting the foreign aid racket. No matter who we send to Congress, they continue to vote for these things without a second thought. America really is nothing more than a free-trade zone, and the purpose of the American worker is to fund the globalist agenda throughout the world.
Why do the American people seem to have such little control over the actions of our government? Why are our elected officials not accountable to us for how they spend taxpayer money? The logical conclusion is that they do not serve the American people, but instead take their orders from someone else. Who?
Big Tech and social media giants certainly exercise outsized influence in our society. Social media has grown into the de facto public square in 21st century America, but the companies that run these networks have become increasingly hostile to free speech. This kind of censorship began with provocative personalities such as Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, and Milo Yiannapolous, but it did not stop there. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube now routinely ban anyone who steps beyond the bounds of their nebulous community standards. Establishment conservatives and libertarians who haughtily proclaim that private companies have the right to do whatever they want are whistling past the graveyard. Like monkeys hoping that the crocodile will eat them last, these naïve conservatives think that they will be fine if they just agree to ritually denounce anyone to their right. They always seem so surprised when they find themselves targeted by the censors as well.
Twitter has censored or placed disclaimers on President Trump’s tweets more than five hundred times since Election Day, while Joe Biden has never suffered such an indignity no matter how crazy his statements. Twitter also censored the New York Post when it published damning information about Hunter Biden, information that likely would have swung the election in Trump’s favor had it been allowed to spread. Now that the election is supposedly over, mainstream news has suddenly found time to talk about the Hunter Biden story, despite claiming it was “Russian disinformation” just weeks ago. Twitter is surely preparing to ban Donald Trump from the platform the moment he is no longer President of the United States.
Google and its subsidiary YouTube are heavily engaged in censorship as well. Conservative YouTubers who have built their livelihoods on producing video content find themselves demonetized and banned with no recourse, simply for disagreeing with Big Tech’s positions regarding the elections, Covid, or vaccines. Big Tech claims to use so-called “authoritative sources” as the basis for their censorship, but these sources are often incredibly biased and dishonest. Google deliberately tweaks YouTube’s algorithm to hide conservative content while elevating mainstream or progressive content in its place. Google does the same thing with its search engine, which is the lens through which millions of Americans see the world. Some social scientists have estimated that Google’s influence is enough to shift 5-10% of the vote to the left.
Facebook also uses its influence to censor conservative thought. Many people, especially of the Baby Boom generation, use Facebook as their primary source for information about the world. Facebook’s supposedly independent fact checkers are, unsurprisingly, far-left activists. Even more insidious, however, is the way in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg chose to involve himself in the recent presidential election. In the guise of improving voter participation, Zuckerberg invested tens of millions of dollars in outreach, voting machines, and dropboxes – almost entirely in heavily Democratic regions. This too might have been enough to swing the election.
These three Big Tech companies, along with others such as TikTok, Nextdoor, and Pinterest, have tremendous influence over how the average American citizen sees and interprets current events, and they are using that influence to fundamentally transform our society. Republican politicians have made noise about reigning in the oligarchs of Big Tech, to no avail. The social media giants donate millions of dollars to politicians on both sides, ensuring that nothing of substance will happen no matter how many hearings and campaign promises to crack down on censorship they make. Google spreads millions of dollars to politicians and political organizations, including supposedly conservative organizations like National Review, ensuring that they enjoy favorable press no matter how evil they act. This is on top of Google’s near monopoly in the field of internet advertising. These companies have tremendous amounts of cash, pervasive influence in our society, and little to fear from government oversight.
These social media companies do not consider themselves beholden to US law; they see themselves as above such petty things as borders or patriotism. They span the globe, enforcing their community standards as a quasi-world government, much in the same way that the Catholic Church once did in medieval Europe. Our Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but Big Tech will censor you if you engage in wrongthink. Our Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms, but a teacher seeing a gun on a student’s wall in a Zoom class thinks she has the right to suspend him. Our Constitution guarantees us the right to due process, but Big Tech can eliminate your social persona and even your livelihood with no recourse. The telephone system has been regulated as a “common carrier” by the government for nearly a century, which means that companies such as AT&T or Verizon do not have the right to cut off your service if they disagree with what you say on the phone. Yet this is exactly what Big Tech companies do every day.
Twitter is the social network on which I am most active, so it is the one I am most familiar with. Over the past ten years, Twitter has become one of the most important methods of communication between politicians, journalists, and regular citizens. President Trump has used his Twitter account in the same way that Franklin Roosevelt used radio: to bypass the gatekeepers and speak directly to the American people. It is for this reason that Twitter is often the first social media battlefield between the new censors and advocates for free speech. In early 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey appeared with Vijaya Gadde, the head of Twitter’s Orwellian “Trust and Safety Council” on Joe Rogan’s show to discuss the issue of censorship. While Dorsey seems to support free speech in the abstract – he once referred to Twitter as the “free speech wing of the free speech party” – It is the Indian-born Gadde that is the real power behind the censors. She and her team decide what to allow and what to ban not based on western ideals of free expression, but instead on a new quasi-religious paradigm.
I try to be careful with my own Twitter account, lest I find myself running afoul of the woke censors that make up their “Trust and Safety Council”. Yet when I did finally receive a ban, it was not for anything objectively offensive, but rather an innocuous comment about how Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben were being erased in the name of racial tolerance. Rather than serving a 24-hour suspension, I appealed, and was therefore locked out of my account for two weeks until they responded and upheld their original decision. If you do not obey, then the process becomes the punishment. Unlike American law, where we have a constitutional right to confront our accuser and have a trial by a jury of our peers, those targeted by the “Trust and Safety Council” have no recourse, and there are no specific people to whom we can take our case. The censors on this shadowy committee are nameless, faceless, unaccountable, yet all-powerful. To put it another way, Big Tech and the social media giants are imposing a totalitarian-style justice system on a people who have always taken American jurisprudence and English common law for granted. What happens when Big Tech becomes even more powerful than the governments that are supposed to protect our liberties?
If you will recall from my recent essay about the Great Reset, globalist technocrats are using the chaos of this past year as a mechanism for instituting their vision of the future. Big Tech is an important part of that vision. Rather than taking a principled stand to protect our American rights of free speech and freedom of conscience, they are cheerfully enacting a Chinese-style social credit system, deciding who can take part in society based upon their political opinions and views. The standard by which we are judged in this social credit system is not based upon the traditional Western ideals of freedom and liberty, but is instead a new secular religion based on wokeness, on social justice, on equity. The guiding principles of this religion are those of Critical Theory, and its demonic offspring Critical Race Theory, which demands that we tear down every structure of society to build a new inclusive utopia.
If an older and more established religion had come to America intending to control the daily lives of our citizens, they would have been stopped immediately. Forcing people to take the Eucharist, recite Muslim prayers, or wear a yarmulke would have been correctly seen as an immoral and unconstitutional establishment of religion upon a free people. However, forcing people to participate in rituals to denounce their own “white privilege”, to recite the tenets of Critical Theory, and to wear Black Lives Matter branded t-shirts is considered acceptable, and even laudable. By pretending that the new woke religion is not a religion at all, merely good manners, the technocrats have created a monstrous new universal faith, with its own priests, acolytes, doctrines, inquisitions, and even devils.
If you do not believe that wokeism is a fully-fledged religion, consider the following: In the weeks and months after the death of career criminal and drug addict George Floyd, his visage was painted on murals across the country, in the same manner as a saint in the old days. Pilgrims flocked to the street corner where he died, and some make-believe pastors even baptized people there. Consider that an ultra-left wing black church once replaced the bread and wine of the Eucharist with skittles and iced tea in worshipful memory of Trayvon Martin. Consider that schools, universities, and corporations have demanded that their employees obediently intone the holy words “black lives matter,” and anyone who refuses is summarily fired. Consider that employers from large corporations to the federal government itself have instituted mandatory training sessions based upon Critical Race Theory that compel white men ritually denounce themselves in the manner of Chinese Communist struggle sessions. If this is not a religion, it certainly looks like one.
The new religion of wokeness has its prophets and priests as well. Domestic terrorists like Angela Davis are given places of honor in this faith, and their every utterance is treated as the words of a god. So too are those of critical race theorists like Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ibram Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. There is a hierarchy at work here, one based upon race and other characteristics. “Intersectionality” is an absolute dogma of this religion. A disabled black woman has, by virtue of her ethnic and social status, secret knowledge that is unattainable by an able-bodied white man. This explains why they claim that two plus two does not necessarily equal four: we must be open to “other ways of knowing” besides the empirical tradition of Western Civilization. After all, what is observation and the scientific method compared to the “rich lived experience” of an “oppressed” person of color? I say this facetiously, but they take it very seriously.
Like most religions, wokeism has its own devils as well. The current chief demon is none other than President Donald Trump. In their eyes he is evil, racist, sexist, a dictator, and the source of everything that is wrong with the world today. The acolytes of wokeism dream of setting up formal inquisitions to judge and punish anyone who ever supported President Trump. They already control unofficial inquisitions in the form of social media mobs that demand blood whenever a public figure says something disrespectful about their faith, such as “all lives matter” or “it’s ok to be white”. These acolytes feel a thrill at the prospect of depriving American citizens of their jobs, their livelihoods, and even their lives.
In the end, wokeism is a perverse parody of Christianity, growing parasitically on the ruins of Christian America. In a piece for Humanitas this month, Michael Vlahos writes:
…today’s woke religion is a mocking, empty caricature of Christianity, like earlier, Marxist heresies of the last century.
So here we are. After four centuries of the Westphalian nation-state, international borders are once again becoming fluid and amorphous. Rather than a supranational Roman Catholic Church making itself the highest earthly authority, we have Big Tech implementing a religion of wokeness on everyone, no matter their citizenship. This alliance of globalist technocrats and Big Tech commissars has become more powerful than our elected government, and they answer to nobody but themselves. Or do they? It is time to talk about the ten-ton elephant in the room: The Peoples Republic of China.
The relationship of China to the West has always been complicated. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Chinese people chafed under colonial interference from western powers such as Great Britain. Throughout the 1930s they fought a long and bloody war with Japan that only ended when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong had previously launched a Communist revolution but was forced to work together with nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to fight their common enemy. With Japan defeated, however, Mao resumed his revolution, defeating Chiang and establishing the Peoples Republic of China in 1949.
Nearly half a century ago, US President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing to meet with Chairman Mao and his premier Zhou Enlai. This historic trip ended twenty years of isolation between Communist China and the western world. Nixon and his advisors believed that engaging with the Chinese communists would be better, in the long run, than allowing them to remain an isolated enemy. Every American president since then has agreed with this view. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter granted China “most favored nation” trading status, on the condition that they improve their human rights record. Despite the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989, we continued to push for more openness. In 1994, President Bill Clinton rhetorically asked, “Will we do more to advance the cause of human rights if China is isolated?” In late 2000, Clinton signed a law that permanently normalized trade relations with China.
The idea behind openness with China has always been that our liberal democracy would prove attractive to the Chinese people, causing them to demand more freedom and liberty rather than authoritarian control. After all, this idea seemed to work with the former Soviet Union. In 1989, future Russian President Boris Yeltsin visited the United States on a goodwill tour and stopped by a Texas grocery store to see how the common people lived. In contrast with the sparse shelves and long food lines in Communist Russia, the American store was overflowing with food. When Yeltsin saw this, he knew that the Communist system was doomed. He said at the time, “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.” Just two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.
China, however, is not Russia. The China that President Nixon visited in 1972 was a mostly agrarian society, still reeling from the triple punch of World War II, the civil war between the Communists and the nationalists, and the Cultural Revolution, not to mention the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. It was easy for Nixon and his advisors to see how western-style capitalism might appeal to a population of peasants and poor farmers. Yet China seems to have found a third way. Mao’s successors Deng Xioping and Jiang Zemin allowed a capitalist economy to grow under the supervision of the Chinese Communist Party. Businessmen are permitted to make money, and even to grow wealthy, so long as they obey the CCP. The cheap trinkets that have come to define American prosperity in the past four decades do not impress the Chinese, especially considering most of them are manufactured in China itself. China uses modern technology to effectively control its population in ways that the old Soviet Union could have never dreamed of. Facial recognition and AI maintain the social credit system, and dissenters are quickly and quietly dealt with. The Chinese Communist Party has an extensive propaganda system that extends from teams of young people making pro-China social media posts to organizations such as the Confucius Institute which has integrated itself in public school systems throughout the United States and Europe.
At the conclusion of President Nixon’s visit in 1972, the United States and China issued a joint statement outlining their differences that has come to be known as the Shanghai Communique. In this statement, the Chinese delegation stated that, “Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Countries want independence, nations want liberation and the people want revolution–this has become the irresistible trend of history. All nations, big or small, should be equal: big nations should not bully the small and strong nations should not bully the weak. China will never be a superpower and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any kind.” In 1972, it seemed obvious that China would never be a superpower; despite being the world’s most populous nation, they were still technologically and industrially backward compared to the United States, the Soviet Union, and Europe. Yet the first two decades of the 21st century have shown that China does indeed desire to be a superpower. The fall of the Soviet Union left a vacuum in the world, a vacuum that China hopes to fill. If the 19th century belonged to Britain, and the 20th to America, China is determined to make the 21st century the Chinese century. Whether they can accomplish this or not is still an open question – many experts consider the Chinese economy to be built upon smoke and mirrors. But they are undoubtedly trying. Xi Jinping appears to be the most ambitious of his country’s leaders since Mao himself.
Scott Greer pointed out on a recent podcast that China learned well the lessons of Russia’s failure. Rather than proclaiming their desire to impose Marxism-Leninism on the whole world, China has instead played the American game of capitalism, using money and investment to gain influence across the globe. China already controls a significant amount of manufacturing, especially in the medical and technology fields. US corporations discovered that it was cheaper to pay Chinese workers than their American counterparts, and so they began building factories over there instead of over here. The profit margins were so great that these corporations were willing to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party demanded in return for cheap labor. While American companies like Apple and Google feel free to criticize US government policy, to the point where they will boycott states that have laws that they consider to be “anti-transgender,” they are all too happy to bow and scrape before their Chinese masters. The same Big Tech corporations that enthusiastically embraced the Black Lives Matter movement have lobbied against a bill that would condemn China’s alleged genocide of the Uyghur people, fearing it might disrupt their access to cheap Chinese labor. I do not believe that President Nixon could have envisioned American companies simping for China while at the same time undermining American democracy back home.
China has also been quietly buying land and infrastructure all around the world. Chinese ownership of land and buildings in places like Vancouver BC is a well-known joke, and their management of factories, ports, and even military bases throughout Africa worries many international observers. Most troubling is their ownership of buildings and companies in the United States. We might consider these Chinese investors to be private companies, but there is no such thing when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party. Every corporation based in China or Hong Kong is made to serve the ultimate goals of the CCP.
In 2013, one of our largest meat processing companies was acquired by a Hong Kong holding company. This drew some attention during the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic when they were forced to close several plants in the United States. One might be forgiven for wondering why we would allow a belligerent rival to control a significant portion of our food supply. In 2012, China-based Cosco (the shipping company, not the warehouse chain) signed a contract with the city of Long Beach, California to operate their port, one of the busiest in the world. This was part of what China calls the Belt and Road Initiative, a project to take over as much of the world shipping infrastructure as possible. While the Obama Administration had no problem with China taking over one of our biggest ports, the Trump Administration forced them to divest it from their holdings. However, even President Trump has not stopped all of China’s ventures. Earlier this year, a Chinese-based investment group purchased over a hundred thousand acres of land in Texas, ostensibly to develop a wind farm. Not only is this land near several military bases, but it is also quite close to the Mexican border. We know that China has been surreptitiously smuggling fentanyl and other drugs into the United States; allowing them to control a section of our border seems dangerously foolish. Yet our politicians seem to be inviting Chinese control. Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia recently recorded a video begging China to invest in his state, complete with a Chinese Communist flag as a backdrop.
Victor Davis Hanson recently published an article for National Review explaining how China is looking forward to a more compliant America under the Biden/Harris administration. He writes,
Europe has been apologizing for its 19th- and early-20th-century imperialism and neo-colonialism for 75 years. Yet China proudly boasts of its new brand of exploitation, the Belt and Road Initiative, to develop abroad infrastructure, harbors, ports, rails, industry, power grids, and highways. The aims of such a vast $8 trillion project are multifarious. Beijing seeks to establish control over the world’s commercial choke points (from Suez to the Panama Canal) that will offer advantage in times of tensions and war.
The Chinese Communist Party is taking the fight for the 21st century very seriously. The aforementioned Confucius Institute teaches western grade school children about the glories of China, while their Thousand Talents Program has an unlimited budget with which to lure western scientists and researchers to work for the Chinese Communist Party. Oftentimes these researchers are persuaded to turn over their proprietary research to their new Chinese bosses as well. Some of these researchers are now in prison for this treason. After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a technological race to make the best missiles, computers, and spacecraft. Both nations were focused on victory; the United States had no problem recruiting Nazi rocket scientists to ensure we were the first nation to land on the moon. Today, we do not seem to realize we are even in competition. Our leaders show little concern about the prospect of China winning the AI or nanotechnology race, or of becoming the first nation to perfect quantum computing or genetic engineering. A Soviet satellite scared us out of complacency in 1957, but China’s single-minded determination to win the future does not faze us at all. We remain distracted while our leaders promise that Chinese hegemony is nothing to be feared. Even a recent leak that disclosed the identities of two million members of the Chinese Communist Party who had infiltrated institutions throughout the world barely made the evening news.
The same politicians and journalists who have found a Russian bogeyman under every bed for the past five years seem remarkably blasé about China’s constant interference in our society. Why is that? Could the answer be so banal as money? Hunter Biden received millions from several nations, including China, while his father was Vice President. Were they simply buying a major political figure, someone who had a chance to become President of the United States, at a bargain price? Maybe it is sex as well as money. Congressman Eric Swalwell of California, one of the most outspoken believers in the Russian collusion hoax, turns out to have had a relationship with a bona fide Chinese Communist Party spy named Christine Fang. Not only did she bag Congressman Swalwell, but she also apparently had relations with several midwestern mayors as well. While this story gained traction on right-wing websites, mainstream media sees nothing worth reporting, and as of this recording Swalwell retains his seat on the House Intelligence Committee. Remember when we learned that California Senator Dianne Feinstein’s longtime driver was a Chinese spy? The media quickly forgot about that story as well.
There is also the matter of American leaders and oligarchs who married into Chinese families. I would not suggest that the simple act of marrying a Chinese woman is inherently suspicious, of course. In some cases, however, it is enough to at least raise some eyebrows. Longtime Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is married to Elaine Chao, who was born in Taiwan before emigrating to the United States as a child. That would not necessarily mean anything, but for some reason she was appointed to cabinet positions in not one but two Republican presidential administrations. She served as Secretary of Labor during all eight years of President George W. Bush’s term and has served as Secretary of Transportation for President Trump. In addition to that, Michelle Malkin has documented Chao’s numerous ties to powerful businessmen and oligarchs in China. Her father gave Mitch McConnell millions of dollars during the 2008 financial crisis, and the Chao family has also established a forty-million-dollar scholarship fund to send ethnic Chinese students to Harvard University. Again, none of this in isolation is evidence of anything, but it should provoke greater scrutiny by the American people.
As Victor Hanson points out, China has learned the language of Critical Theory and anti-racism and uses it to their own advantage. Any criticism of China’s actions or motives is dismissed as “racism”. Chinese ownership of American corporations is promoted, and even subsidized, as “minority ownership”. China will take its turn on the UN Human Rights Council next year and will surely use that pulpit to lecture us about our supposed racial sins even as they engage in a fully-fledged genocide of the Uighur people.
During the Cold War, the United States constantly undermined democracy in nonaligned nations. We often put our thumbs on the scales of elections in foreign countries, and even instigated coups at times, to elevate leaders who were friendly toward us rather than toward our rival the Soviet Union. In 2020, we discovered that the shoe was on the other foot. The story of 2020 is how the Peoples Republic of China unleased a global pandemic and then used that to install their preferred leader, Joe Biden. If they are successful, this would be the culmination of a long project by the Chinese Communists to gain influence over our government. I am old enough to remember the minor scandal of illegal Chinese donations to the Clinton/Gore campaigns of the 1990s.
A Chinese academic named Di Dongsheng recently said, “…we have people at the top. We have our old friends who are at the top of America’s core inner circle of power and influence.” If Joe Biden takes the oath of office as the 46th President of the United States, China will have carte blanche to do whatever they want, not only in the Asia/Pacific region but throughout the world. For example, the United States has guaranteed the safety of Taiwan against Chinese aggression since 1949, but do you really think that Joe Biden would take a stand against his Chinese masters? When Great Britain turned over governance of Hong Kong to China in 1997, they did so with the understanding that China would respect the rights and liberties of the people of Hong Kong. However, the world watched and did nothing over the past two years as China overruled those liberties and ruthlessly crushed dissent. Who is going to stop them? Like Hitler in the 1930s, China knows that their own will to power is greater than any will to hinder them.
Besides, globalism means not having to take a stand for anything. If we are all citizens of the world, then what does it matter who ultimately rules Taiwan, Hong Kong, or anywhere else? If borders are imaginary, then what does it matter if a factory is in China, Korea, Mexico, or the United States? The only thing that matters is that the elites maintain their wealth and power while we peasants are satisfied with cheap trinkets. If China is willing to pay Joe Biden millions of dollars, laundered through his worthless son, then why should he care about the plight of white Americans from Ohio? Proclaiming oneself above such petty things as borders or patriotism might sound good to the rootless cosmopolitans who write for Vox or the New York Times, but it is really just a cheap excuse to avoid caring about your fellow countrymen.
Victor Hanson concludes his piece with this:
China believes the current U.S. elite is unlike those who won World War II or sent a man into space. In their contempt, they believe instead that our best and brightest have grown naive, flabby, relativist, globalist, easily guilted, eager for repentance, decadent, and greedy — and can continue to be, and do, all that, while still becoming even richer with China.
For Chinese dissidents, whether in Hong Kong, Taiwan, on the mainland, or abroad, the 2020 United States presidential election has been vitally important. Donald Trump is the first American president to take a firm stand against the Chinese Communist Party, while Joe Biden is wholly owned by them. If you were a Chinese dissident, who would you rather have in the White House? I remember receiving an unsolicited copy of the Epoch Times newspaper earlier this year, describing in great detail how the coronavirus pandemic originated in China. They also recently published a documentary describing how the 2020 election was stolen from President Trump. It turns out that the Epoch Times is funded by Chinese dissidents and Taiwanese investors, some of whom have also partnered with former Breitbart editor and Trump advisor Steve Bannon. What is going on here? This election is existential for those in China who still believe in freedom and liberty. Why would they not do whatever they could to support the only American president who is willing to fight against our common enemy? It is ironic that the United States, the sole world superpower since 1991, has become a battleground in a Chinese cold civil war.
Openness was supposed to spread American-style liberty to China, but instead it has spread Chinese-style authoritarianism to America. Globalist technocrats use China’s controlled totalitarian society as a model for their would-be utopia. Every revolutionary knows that they have to erase the old system before implementing the new one. The French Revolution tried to erase France’s Catholic heritage in favor of a new society based upon rational secularism. The Chinese Cultural Revolution tried to erase traditional Chinese culture in favor of Marxist-Leninist socialism. Here in the United States, our own cultural revolution is already underway. It started with Confederate statues, but now even the names of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington are being erased from public life. This is not about tolerance or inclusivity, but is instead a form of genocide, no different from the way the ancient Assyrians used to reduce enemy cities to rubble to show their dominance. We are being conquered from within and many do not even realize it. The unique heritage of the United States of America is being erased in favor of a new technocracy.
The future that our globalist technocratic overlords envision is one with no borders, no Bill of Rights, and a Chinese-style social credit system keeping the peasants in line. While most students of history look at the Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its show trials, children turning in their parents, and struggle sessions, with horror, the technocrats consider it a noble experiment and a good start. A doctoral student at Purdue University named Habi Zhang emigrated to the United States in search of the freedom she was denied in China but found that Chinese authoritarianism had already preceded her. In an essay for Law & Liberty last month, she wrote:
American schools increasingly resemble the authoritarian Chinese schools that aim at transforming human beings into an instrument that serves the state. What I find more chilling is that the American replication of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is engulfing academia, media, the schools, the tech sector, Hollywood, sports, and government—that is to say, everywhere in society. And I wonder: how long will it take before the revolution creeps into households and regularly has people turn on one another?
Zhang concludes her essay with a warning:
For a decade, the Chinese Cultural Revolution thoroughly wrecked the economy, uprooted traditions, destroyed social trust by turning family members on each other, and worst of all, killed well more than a million people. One can only wonder how far its American replication will go.
One might wonder why globalist technocrats would be conspiring with the Chinese Communist Party to undermine our liberties, but it makes sense. They are not so much conspiring together as they are working toward a common goal. The liberty-minded peoples of the United States and other places throughout the world must be brought to heel both to ensure Chinese dominance of the 21st century and to enable the technocratic utopia. If this alliance of convenience were to succeed, both sides would undoubtedly attempt to annihilate the other. Perhaps the globalist technocrats would work to undermine China in the same way they have undermined the United States and Europe; perhaps China would crush the technocrats once they gained worldwide hegemony. In any case, as far as they are concerned, Western Civilization must first be dismantled.
A Joe Biden administration will hasten the end of our national sovereignty. President Trump did his best to regain that sovereignty by withdrawing us from the Paris Agreement and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, drawing down our troops deployed across the globe, and urging our allies to take a more balanced share of the maintenance of NATO and the UN. Unfortunately, a President Biden can erase those gains on Day 1. Additionally, Big Tech will now have an ally in the White House, who will allow them to march unimpeded to the Chinese-style social credit system they have been building. Most pundits assume that Biden will step down at some point in his term in favor of Kamala Harris. I can think of no better demonstration of the subordination of the American Republic to an international technocracy than for a half-Indian, half-Jamaican anchor baby to occupy the highest office of our land.
For four hundred years the Westphalian system allowed people to form sovereign governments to, as Thomas Jefferson explained, protect their God-given natural rights. This is an impediment to the aims of the globalist technocracy. The technocrat does not consider himself evil, rather he looks at the inevitable problems of human life and decides that he can solve those problems if only he had enough power. Freedom means we sometimes make the wrong choices, and the technocrat believes that he knows better how to run our lives than we do. Despite dressing like a Sith lord, World Economic Forum president Klaus Schwab surely believes that his Great Reset will make life better for the seven billion people who live on earth today. The technocrat believes he can solve every problem in the world, and if it costs our freedom and liberty then so be it – most people would probably vote for ultimate security even at the cost of our last freedom. Those of us who resist are labeled as malcontents and wreckers who would never be happy anyway, and so it is necessary for the greater good that we be silenced, imprisoned, or otherwise destroyed. They look on us as helpless children who need to be guided and controlled by a government with unlimited power and authority.
There will be no hiding from the technocracy. We call them “totalitarians” for a reason – they demand total participation in their new world order. Like all totalitarian states, they will demand complete control of society at every level. They cannot allow children to be raised believing in a Christian worldview and individual liberties – wokeism will be the established ideology of all public schools, and alternatives such as private schools and homeschooling will be banned. They cannot allow true worship of a Being higher than government – wokeism will be the primary doctrine of our churches, and any that do not get on board will be persecuted. Chinese Christians have experienced this persecution for decades. Any dissenting voice will be censored. This will all be done, of course, for our own good. C.S. Lewis saw it coming almost a century ago:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against ones will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
The administration of President Donald Trump was only going to be a speed bump on the road to technocracy, whether he served four years or eight. With him apparently out of the way, the last brake has been released. How can we hope to stop this runaway train when even our Republican leaders think that the purpose of the American worker is to finance globalist NGOs? We cannot count on our government to save us, because most of them are in on the plot. We cannot count on the Constitution to save us, because it failed to prevent the problem from arising in the first place. The only way to preserve our freedom is to start with ourselves, our families, and our communities.
The goal of our cosmopolitan technocrats is to keep you atomized, isolated, and fully dependent upon government. You must not let them succeed. Build strong families. Form communities of like-minded people who will be there for you when the world comes crashing down. No matter what happens to our nation, to our world, it is communities like this that will be the building blocks of a renewed American nation. Take heart and keep the faith. Western Civilization and Christendom survives in you and in me.
The Decline and Fall of the United States of America 