“Everyone is in favor of free speech… but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ― Winston Churchill
Wherein we learn more of why the NY Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had to be suppressed.
*Cognitive dissonance warning:*
*Those who get their news from Facebook may experience paradigm dysphoria.*
The first 3 links will refresh your memory if needed, but aren’t necessary to peruse. They’re documentation. The last is longish, but documents a Swallwell-type honey trap previously unknown. That was during Hunter’s dalliance with CEFC China Energy (a CCP oil conglomerate), which was later (2018) to collapse when its secretary general Patrick Ho was convicted of bribery in a US federal prosecution. Hunter had described Ho as ‘spy chief of China.’
Hunter’s continuing relationship with BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Company is a separate issue.
2019:
It’s NPR, so Republicans are “reacting” “without evidence” to Hunter Biden’s promise to divest his 10% ownership of BHR, co-owned by the CCP’s Bank of China. Hunter Biden to step down from Chinese board
“Reuters has reported that BHR also invested in China General Nuclear Power Corp, a state-owned company. The company employed a naturalized U.S. citizen and nuclear engineer, Allen Ho, who was indicted in the United States in 2016 for allegedly enlisting U.S.-based nuclear experts to assist in developing and producing special nuclear material in China. “Prosecuting those who unlawfully facilitate the acquisition of sensitive nuclear technology by foreign nations continues to be a top priority of the National Security Division,” the Justice Department said its news release about Ho’s sentencing to 24 months in prison.”
That directly follows this quote from a Boston College political scientist:
“[W]hat was known as the Obama administration pivot toward Asia began in 2010. This predated the creation of BHR. [So?]
“This policy shift aimed to resist Chinese security policy initiatives,” Ross said. “Overall security and economic trends reflected a significant hardening of U.S. policy toward China, as compared to both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. For instance, U.S. policy developed greater security cooperation with South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to strengthen the alliances and to better contend with Chinese policy.”
But Ross said that he knows of “no U.S. agreements with China that entailed U.S. security interests, much less that compromised U.S. security.”
He must have a different definition of “U.S. agreements” and/or “security interest” than I do. IAC, the Allen Ho indictment was known before Hunter took a $420,000 (2017) ownership stake in BHR.
“Joe Biden promised in October 2019 that if elected president, nobody in his family would have any business relationship with any foreign corporation or country.
“No one in my family will have an office in the White House, will sit in on meetings as if they are a cabinet member, will, in fact, have any business relationship with anyone that relates to a foreign corporation or a foreign country,” Joe Biden told reporters in Iowa. “Period. Period. End of story.””
Now, the last BHR business filing is from July 2020; 9 months after the promises. Maybe Hunter is shut of the ChiComs by May of 2021. However, Hunter’s lawyer, the White House, and BHR Equity have all declined to comment. You’d expect they would all be happy to tell us if Hunter did, indeed, divest.
The ruination of the word in the U.S. arguably started around 1913 with a President openly hostile to a Constitutional Republic. A dedicated racist who RE-segregated the Federal civil service, and an oligarch who bypassed the Bill of Rights with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918; WoodrowWilson.
His ideas picked up steam in 1932. That’s when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nudging the Enlightenment political definition of Liberal, “a belief in individual liberty,” toward a phrase made popular by another collectivist snollygoster: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
FDR admired the man who uttered it: “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’”
–Henry Wallace, New Frontiers, p. 31.
That admirable gentleman was Benito Mussolini, and it’s no wonder FDR was interested. Benito put the principles of the New Deal more plainly than FDR dared:
“The … State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.”
-Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore. p 41.
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.
-Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers pp. 135-136
Do you detect any similar policy tendencies in current American Maim Scream Media™ headlines, or in Biden executive orders?
Il Duce’s characterizations are authoritative. So, China, among many others, is clearly a fascist state. It may not surprise you that Mussolini was a socialist before he took up the fascist cause, and you may be forgiven if you wonder whether fascism was just a way to avoid the word “nationalization.”
By the time FDR took office there were many Americans who had good things to say about Benito Mussolini’s fascism. Here’s a link to the Leftist WaPo, a site your Progressive frenemies cannot easily dismiss. It manages to bash Trump, always a Progressive treat, and lists many prominent American Mussolini enthusiasts. The author manages to get through the whole thing while never mentioning FDR, and includes this hilarity:
Mussolini’s powerful handlers tapped into widespread misgivings about the domestic cost of Wilson-style democracy and growing anxieties about gender equality by pitching Mussolini as a strong male leader with a nationalistic brand of effective governance.
‘Handlers’? Ha. You want handlers? Look up Edith Wilson in the context of Woodrow’s stroke, and think about Jill Biden. The 25th Amendment had to wait until 1967 to be added to the Constitution, and until 2020 to be part of Democrat election strategy.
‘Wilson-style democracy’? Wilson was an oligarchist.
‘Misgivings’? Ha, ha. While our Democrats were making Henry Wallace FDR’s Veep?
Implied misogyny’? Ha, ha, ha. The Italians were worried their leader didn’t respect women, while FDR was … well, not worried about it:
“Franklin deserved a good time,” Alice Longworth, a confidante of FDR, once said. “He was married to Eleanor.”
‘Gender equality’? A construct beyond the imagination of Italians or Americans of the time. In 1932 “gender” was rightly regarded as a feature of some Romance languages, not a social justice crusade necessitating a redefinition of “sex.”
The Great Depression helped FDR get away with the New Deal, and when WWII came along to actually end the Depression (FDR had prolonged it), it only reinforced FDR’s power to shift the country to acceptance of the “dollar a year man” authoritarian bureaucracy. It’s not so cheap anymore.
We still see this autocratic urge expressed through redefinition today. The word “science” used to mean “falsifiable,” for example. Now it means whatever the consensus of government dependent boffins come up with. From “climate change” to lockdowns and mask mandates. From denials of biological sex to outcome equality. For example: Translating Social Justice Newspeak – Law & Liberty Liberals Redefine Words
Worth reading, but both neglect some important redefinitions. “Democracy,” for example.
I don’t know when that started, but the false premise is that the United States is a Democracy rather than a Constitutional Republic (Thanks, Woodrow.). Now Democracy “belongs” to Democrats, and you aren’t part of that if you object to voting without regard to legality, dislike open borders, believe sex is binary, think the Second Amendment applies to individuals, or get grumpy when someone calls you a murderer for not wearing 2 masks. Here’s a 4 minute video worth watching for how the Democrats view “Our” Democracy. WSJ Opinion: The Progressive Push to Redefine ‘Our Democracy’
Another important word that’s been redefined is “Capitalism.” It’s depressing how many people describe China’s economic system as capitalist. If you look at Mussolini’s definitions, China is fascist. In America, it’s fashionable for Progressives to blame “free market failures” for botched government interventions. American corporatism pays homage to the blustering Italian, and is familial with the Chinese Communists.
What words mean matters. Those who make the changing of meaning their tactic for gaining political advantage are characters in 1984.
A friend sent the the first quote following the other day as a post topic, and I’ve added another from the same source:
“Undermine the enemy first, then his army will fall to you. Subvert him, attack his morale, strike at his economy, corrupt his leaders, sow internal discord. Destroy him.”
“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”
― Sun Tzu
For the Chinese, The Art of War remains current doctrine. But it is more than an ancient (~5th century BC) Chinese military treatise on strategy and tactics.
Consider it as Rules for Radicals v1.0. Saul Alinsky wasn’t such an original thinker. His major contribution (maybe V1.05?) was no more than an amoral gloss: Glorifying personal mendacity, celebrating corrupt nihilism, and justifying individual persecution by the mob.
“War” does make for a much punchier title than “Business, Sports, Politics, Strategy, Tactics, and Life in General.” But, Sun Tzu’s advice is often general. With Alinsky’s help it applies to American Leftist academicians and authoritarian politicians as much as to the present day Chinese People’s Liberation Army; and to our SJW Community Organizers as much as to the Russian CyberKommand. Even though they all are enemies.
If you’ve been paying even slight attention, you easily can supply many recent examples of the Chinese Communist Party’s deceitful undermining of the United States. The list includes attempts at subversion, demoralization, economic disruption, corruption of high officials, and sowing of internal discord. That would be in line with Sun Tzu’s advice. I hope we’re doing it to them. But their Fifth Column is much better than ours.
That is, the Chinese have had a lot of help with their efforts. While we can draw parallels to Art of War, more damage results from domestic application of Rules for Radicals. As a few of Alinsky’s aphorisms will illustrate:
“The enemy properly goaded and guided in his reaction will be your major strength.”
“The organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems… The organizer must first rub raw the resentments of the people of the community; fan the latent hostilities of many of the people to the point of overt expression.”
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.”
“Human beings do not like to look squarely into the face of tragedy. Gloom is unpopular.”
“A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism…”
“To say that corrupt means corrupt the ends is to believe in the immaculate conception of ends and principles.”
“Accuse the other side of that of which you are guilty.”
“They have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. When we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.”
“Always remember the first rule of power tactics; power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
And my favorite – which you never hear – in these days of BLAMTIFA and ‘gender’ chaos:
“The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.”
Anything strike you about Alinsky’s advice and current events?
Mask mandates? Lockdowns? Riots, looting and arson unopposed by civic leaders? Pronoun wars? Cancel culture? Election fraud? Destruction of small business? Dollar gutting multi-trillion dollar pipe dreams? Self-debasement of our media? Objections to “Wuhan Virus” as racist?
Further reading:
“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
– Theodore Dalrymple
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were- cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
-George Orwell, 1984
We’ll let Sun Tzu have the final word:
“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”
Facebook and YouTube continue to bury, or outright ban, well founded commentary on CCP virus public policy and the myriad election irregularities of which the Uniparty disapproves.
They aren’t alone. Amazon has banned books. Twitter banned all mention of Hunter Biden’s laptop, including suspending the New York Post‘s account.
That ban arguably lasted long enough to affect the election, and now that we know Hunter Biden has been under Federal criminal investigation since 2019 for his foreign business dealings, it seems like Twitter, et. al., should have some accountability.
The article slice below is behind a paywall. I think Glenn Greenwald is worth the less than a buck a week as an honest liberal entrepreneur. You pay as much for the CNN/MSNBC/CBS/PBS/ABC/NBC channels on your cable.
Some of what he writes is public. A link appears in TOC’s blogroll under Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald leftThe Intercept (he was a founder) because they spiked an article he wrote about Hunter Biden before the election. That’s when I checked out his independent gig on Substack.
Greenwald (this one is paywalled) provides a gimlet eyed view:
The revelation that Hunter Biden is being criminally investigated for his business activities in China came on Monday from the investigative target himself, and he predictably and self-servingly depicted it as just a narrow probe about his “tax affairs” by the U.S. Attorney for Delaware. As I wrote last night, that by itself would be significant enough — the documents published in the weeks before the election by The New York Post contained ample information about exactly that matter, yet were widely repressed by a union of mainstream news outlets, the intelligence community and Silicon Valley based on propaganda and lies. But new reporting suggest the investigation has been far broader.
“The federal investigation into President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been more extensive than a statement from Hunter Biden indicates,” Politico reported Monday night. Specifically, “the securities fraud unit in the Southern District of New York also scrutinized Hunter Biden’s finances”; “investigators in Delaware and Washington were also probing potential money laundering and Hunter Biden’s foreign ties”; and “federal authorities in the Western District of Pennsylvania are conducting a criminal investigation of a hospital business in which Joe Biden’s brother James was involved.” CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz added that “at least one of the matters investigators have examined is a 2017 gift of a 2.8-carat diamond that Hunter Biden received from CEFC [China Energy’]’s founder and former chairman Ye Jianming after a Miami business meeting.”
We’re slipping into fascism backwards. One normally thinks of the formal government (Mussolini comes to mind) as the instigator of fascism*, but in the current case it’s most certainly rent-seeking large corporations leading the charge. And that goes far beyond our cybernetic overlords. It’s also Maim Scream Media™, academiots, and corporate whores mau-mauing the swamp dwellers.
Of course, Antifa and the present cadre of BLM have raised mau-mauing to an actually dangerous level with arson, looting, assault, and murder. They would be the brownshirts.
Perhaps Eric Swalwell could do with a serious “debriefing.”
*That definition is fatally flawed because it includes a mention of capitalism, but the misunderstanding is pervasive. Free markets are required under capitalism. Fascism precludes free markets.
Or so the recent Hong Kong protests have indicated.
So, being assholes, the Chinese Communist Party is now running full court dezinformatsiya on the CCP virus origin.
All you need to know about the Chinese/Wuhan/Kung Flu/CCP virus talking points distributed to the NYT and WaPo and the Democrat Party about the Chinese Communist Party Pandemic, is that the Chinese Communist Party reported zero deaths from CCP virus yesterday – and zero deaths from the Tiananmen Square Massacre, in 1989. That is, you need to know they lie consistently. Over decades. In every case this requires oppressing the Chinese people.
Actually, there were very likely more than 10,000 deaths at Tiananmen.
China is being defended in the West by people who hate the implications of individualism, capitalism and freedom of conscience. That is, the Democratic Party, the American TDS press, the Chinese Press in America, and all those whose affinity lies with the CCP rather than the Chinese people.
Chinese aid
Making a few bucks on shoddy goods in a pandemic, or selling charitable donations back to their benefactors. In a pandemic they lied about and failed to contain.
Fight fiercely, Harvard
fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill
Albeit they possess the might
Nonetheless we have the will
-Tom Lehrer
While the majority of the Maim Scream Media™ is parroting Chinese Communist Party talking points because of the Trump Derangement Syndrome Pandemic, it’s worthwhile to review the general tenor of Communist China.
Xi Jinping has implemented precisely the agenda of which the Progs accuse Trump
In 2018, Xi decided to abolish presidential term limits, signaling his intention to stay in power indefinitely. He has indulged in heavy-handed purges, ousting prominent party officials under the guise of an anticorruption drive. What is more, Xi has suppressed protests in Hong Kong, arrested hundreds of human rights lawyers and activists, and imposed the tightest media censorship of the post-Mao era. His government has constructed “reeducation” camps in Xinjiang, where it has incarcerated more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities. And it has centralized economic and political decision-making, pouring government resources into state-owned enterprises and honing its surveillance technologies.
…but that’s OK because at least Harvard can prevent individual Chinese students from admittance because they display “poorer personal qualities than white applicants”… or something. By that, they do not mean “we prefer football players to those suspected of eating bat soup and pangolin fritters.”
Sometimes individuals must be sacrificed for the greater good of collectives to which they do not belong. That’s not racist if you have ‘reasons,’ while the phrase “Wuhan virus” is racist if uttered by the Orange Man.
When Barack Obama was president “Chicago” was a racist word.
The ruination of the word in the U.S. arguably started around 1913 with a President openly 
