Lee Smith: The American Elite's Primary Allegiance Is No Longer to America, But to the Communist Party of China, That Makes Them Rich and Keeps Them In Power

Great article called "The Thirty Tyrants" -- a reference to a period of Athenian history in which the city-state was controlled by tyrants allied with foreign enemies-- that everyone was reading last Monday.

He just appeared on Tucker Carlson, talking about the article. Two clips from that appearance are below.

He starts the article by quoting from a Tom "Chinese Dictatorship Should Be Our Model" Friedman column from ten years ago, noting that the corporate elite had previously used the Republican Party as its vehicle for gaining favorable policies. But the Tea Party made the GOP a less welcome place for the aborning oligarchy.

The GOP was still rolling over for the US Chamber of Commerce and Wall Street and the corporate elite -- but it wasn't rolling over hard enough.

But the elite easily found a new home in the transnational left.

In the more than 10 years since Friedman's column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism--that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.

Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model--which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished--who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?

...

Because of Trump's pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness--and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China's spy services and the People's Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. The world-famous Brookings Institution had no scruples about publishing a report funded by Chinese telecom company Huawei that praised Huawei technology.

...

And because it was true that China was the source of the China Class' power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite's private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.

Smith really gets into how... convenient the Chinese Covid Virus was for the China Class and the Chinese Communist Party.

Evidence the pandemic didn't start in a Wuhan wet market was published as early as January 2020, days after Beijing implemented the lockdown on Jan. 23. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, 13 of the first 41 cases, including the first one, had no links to the market. In May the head of China's center for disease control and prevention confirmed that there was nothing to link COVID-19 and the wet market. "The novel coronavirus had existed long before" it was found at the market, said the Chinese official.

After the Lancet report, Republican officials close to the Trump administration disputed Beijing's official account. "We don't know where it originated, and we have to get to the bottom of that," Sen. Tom Cotton said in February. "We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China's only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases." Cotton said the Chinese had been duplicitous and dishonest. "We need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says," Cotton said. "And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all."

The corporate American press disparaged Cotton's search for answers. Jeff Bezos' Washington Post claimed that Cotton was "fanning the embers of a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked by experts." Trump was derided for contradicting American spy services when the president said he had a high degree of confidence that the coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab. Sen. Ted Cruz said that in dismissing obvious questions about the origins of the pandemic the press was "abandoning all pretenses of journalism to produce CCP propaganda."

The January publication of a New York Magazine article by Nicholson Baker arguing the same case that Trump and GOP officials had been making since last winter raises useful questions. Why did journalists automatically seek to discredit the Trump administration's skepticism regarding Beijing's origin story of the coronavirus? Why wait until after the election to allow the publication of evidence that the CCP's story was spurious? Sure, the media preferred Biden and wanted Trump gone at any cost--but how would it affect the Democrat's electoral chances to tell Americans the truth about China and COVID-19?

China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face--for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn't the bad guy here--it's a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China's lead. And by March, with Trump's initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.

Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer--$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone--while impoverishing Trump's small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign.

By the way: The China-dominated WHO had previously pretended to investigate the possibility that the Chinese coronavirus originated in that level 4 biosafety lab.

With China Joe now in office, and no longer likely to ask pesky questions about the virus' origins, they have stopped pretending to investigate, and have dropped any inquiry into the Wuhan lab.

A World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic downplayed the possibility that the virus leaked from a lab near Wuhan, China, during a news conference on Tuesday.

Instead, coronavirus likely spread from an animal to humans, WHO food safety and animal diseases expert Peter Ben Embarek said. The WHO and China have faced strong criticism from around the world over their pandemic response, as China blocked WHO investigators from entering Wuhan for months; they finally arrived in mid-January of this year.

"Our initial findings suggest that the introduction through an intermediary host species is the most likely pathway and one that will require more studies and more specific, targeted research," Embarek told reporters.

"However, the findings suggest that the laboratory incidents hypothesis is extremely unlikely to explain the introduction of the virus to the human population," Embarek said. "Therefore it is not a hypothesis that we advise to suggest future studies ... into the understanding of the origin of the virus."

Make sure you listen to China's official propagandists... aka the "American" media.

Below, Lee Smith's appearance on Tucker, noting that the CIA brass bullied analysts out of criticizing China, for fear the truth would support Trump's anti-China impulses.

Update: Just today, the chief propaganda organ of the China Class, the New York Times, dropped straight-up CCP propaganda in a "news" story.

Smith recently wrote the well-received book, The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President.

posted by Ace at 05:25 PM

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