THE COLUMN: Big Trouble in Little China

In a commencement address at Notre Dame in 1977, President Jimmy Carter observed that "democracy's great recent successesin India, Portugal, Spain, Greeceshow that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear." Carter was widely criticized on the right for implying that communism was not the existential danger conservatives thought it was, but it was clear from the rest of the sentence that he was instead criticizing America's enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend strategy that had led us into bed with some distinctly unsavory characters, among them the Shah of Iran. Carter went on:

For too many years, we've been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We've fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.

That "lost confidence" quickly vanished when less than a year later the Ayatollah Khomeini appeared on the scene and by January of 1979 had driven the Shah from power, leading to the establishment of the "Islamic Republic" and ultimately to the hostage crisis that destroyed the Carter presidency and to Ronald Reagan's smashing victories in 1980 and 1984 and thus the fall of the Soviet Union. Moral: do not project your own domestic virtues and expectations onto men from other countries and other cultures, a critical variation on the time-honored principle of never underestimating your enemy by overestimating his fundamental sympathies with you regarding such malleable concepts as "human rights."

Which brings us to China: the Mysterious East, beloved by Hollywood and once an exotic fixture of the American imagination, brimming with sinister orientals, foreign adventurers, Sikhs and sheiks, and Mother Goddam herself in a 1926 play and 1941 movie directed by Josef von Sternberg. It's Not Like Us, never has been, never will be:

The Peoples Republic of China is a slave state boasting a record of military ineptitude unrivaled by any other large nation on earth, and is entirely of a piece of nearly all Chinese governments that have come before it. It has no affinity with the West, nor does it desire one. Almost congenitally incapable of creativity, innovation and exploration, it has instead adopted financial colonization as a central instrument of its foreign policy, using its own people as pawns in an international chess game only one side is playing. Today, having scorned them as an undifferentiated mass of coolies led by a handful of mandarins, we fear them, but for all the wrong reasons.

As I've often observed, based on the historical record, the only people the Chinese can defeat in combat are themselves, as the stupefyingly high body counts of the Taiping Rebellion and Mao's civil war attest. The British easily conquered China during the Opium Wars, and in the runup to Pearl Harbor, tiny but ferocious Japan whipped them twice, in 1931 and again in 1937—not to mention Japan's victory in the First Sino-Japanese War at the end of the 19th century. In 1979, the Vietnamese gave the Peoples Liberation Army all it could handle, repelling its invasion during the Sino-Vietnam War.

Indeed, China's futility in combat with outsiders dates back as far as the Battle of Talas in 751 A.D., when the Abbasid Muslims and some Tibetan allies crushed the armies of the Tang Dynasty, halting Chinese westward expansion into central Asia. Nor could the Chinese stop the Mongol Conquest of the 13th century, nor the incursions by the Turkic Muslim Timur (Tamerlane) of the 14th. At the head of the Ever-Victorious Army in 1863, General George Gordon (who later died defending Khartoum against the Mahdi in 1885), led his peasant army defending Shanghai armed with little more than a swagger stick; they won. On the field of battle, big China is very much Little China.

One of China's principal cities, Shanghai, was for a long time under foreign occupation, a wide-open international city with British, French, and American residential and administrative zones; during World War II, Shanghai also had a Jewish ghetto, established for European Jewish refugees fleeing both Hitler and Stalin by the Japanese in a Chinese part of the city at the behest of their National Socialist German allies. (Among the famous "Shanghai Jews" born there are Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, Hollywood producer Mike Medavoy, and concert pianist Misha Dichter.)

Which is to say, America's inordinate fear of the Chinese does not arise from any evidence they can actually fight, in the way the Japanese, Germans, and Russians could. Even today, with their massive army and plastic navy rattling the sabers of stolen (and, as they might well find out, booby-trapped) martial technology confronting a woke American military establishment more concerned with "critical race theory" and the affirmative promotion of risible transsexuals to high rank, China does not pose an existential military threat. Instead, it comes from their hand-me-down Marxism-Leninism—even their failed system of government has been hijacked from the West—has risen in direct proportion to our cozying up to them economically. And why not? If they treat their own people like slaves, why shouldn't Apple and other rapacious and immoral international corporations employ them to make the iPhones that will hang us?

In other words, China has not become a major player on the international stage by military means, but by traditional culture methods of often-unscrupulous economy savvy, effective use of bribery, and a massive diaspora that has seen Chinese communities established all over the world, including Malaysia, Singapore, India, Indonesia (where they made themselves so unwelcome that there widespread anti-Chiinese riots in 1998) and, latterly, in Africa and South America. Fear of Chinese soft power was so strongly entrenched in the United States after thousands of Chinese arrived to work on the railroads that Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which began a general tightening of immigration that lasted until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.

Ever since the hapless Carter dumped the losing side in the most recent Chinese civil war and recognized the "Peoples Republic," China has employed its only weapon—people—as a weapon against the West and in particular against the United States. It floods the country with spies called "students," it bribes politicians and academics and then hides behind the usual cries of "racism." It obviously has suborned and corrupted the current president of the United States and members of his contemptible family even as Biden tells Americans "they're not bad folks, folks,"

Perhaps, like Carter, Biden is temporarily right for the wrong reasons regarding the Chinese threat. At the moment, China is rapidly descending into chaos—in a fine bit of dramatic irony if not actual karma, entirely owing to its own maleficent role in the creation and weaponization of Covid-19, which has resulted in totalitarian lockdowns, civic violence, and now calls for the head of dictator-for-life Xi Jinping. Whether Xi, like Julius Caesar before him, has taken a step too far and will soon be decisively deposed, remains a matter of conjecture in a land once routinely referred to as "inscrutable." But if history tells us anything, it's that China's appetite for internal bloodletting is far greater than its desire for world conquest; all we really need to do is sit back and let nature take its course.

In the end, it's still a place of obscure motives, intense tribal relationships, alien customs, and ways that are not our ways. A place that relies on the sloth and greed of others to hook them on cheap plastic electronics and third-rate steel and concrete as they willingly hollow out their own industries and junk their national pride to make a buck. It's Chinatown. 

David v. Goliath in Cyberspace

In his 20007 book, An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit, wrote optimistically that an army of ordinary people (“Davids”) could use technology and the market to beat the Goliaths of “Big Media, Big Government and other Goliaths.” Thirteen years later, big media is on the ropes but the Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions. Not the least of their favored views has been the notion that we are in an existential crisis of climate change for which the only remedy is killing reliance on traditional energy sources. 

Last week in an effort to curb the manifest bias in social media platforms, President Trump signed an executive order preventing online censorship. The justification for now treating social media as "publishers" responsible for content -- instead of "platforms," which are not -- stems, inter alia, from their behavior in stifling the free exchange of views inconsistent with those of their owners and staff.

The growth of online platforms in recent years raises important questions about applying the ideals of the First Amendment to modern communications technology. Today, many Americans follow the news, stay in touch with friends and family, and share their views on current events through social media and other online platforms. As a result, these platforms function in many ways as a 21st century equivalent of the public square.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube wield immense, if not unprecedented, power to shape the interpretation of public events; to censor, delete, or disappear information; and to control what people see or do not see. As President, I have made clear my commitment to free and open debate on the Internet. Such debate is just as important online as it is in our universities, our town halls, and our homes. It is essential to sustaining our democracy. 

Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse. Tens of thousands of Americans have reported, among other troubling behaviors, online platforms “flagging” content as inappropriate, even though it does not violate any stated terms of service; making unannounced and unexplained changes to company policies that have the effect of disfavoring certain viewpoints; and deleting content and entire accounts with no warning, no rationale, and no recourse.

The website Wattsupwiththat greeted the President’s move as an opening for climate change skeptics who’ve been abusively treated by these outfits. I anticipate the order’s enforcement will meet with significant challenges along the way, but in support of the president’s claim, there is ample evidence of both the abusive treatment of climate change skeptics and the impact this has had on public debate and policy. Examples abound of censorship by Google, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and You Tube.

Apple no longer allows its iPhone to access an app called Inconvenient Facts which challenges Al Gore’s views on dangerous climate change. Reddit moderators have banned climate skeptics from the “/r/science” feature which has millions of monthly visitors. Wattsup documents countless incidents of social media censorship by Google, twitter and Microsoft. Twitter is the worst in its view. It bans tweets whose content it omnisciently determines is “inaccurate. “At the same time it runs and sometimes promotes ads without marking them as paid ads or putting the word “promoted “ in tiny font.

Google is only slightly better, censoring and banning messages, including ads “in the middle of a run,” none of which contain misrepresentation, but conflict with the views of its apparatchiks. The censoring of skeptic ads, even after approval, seemed significant just prior to the Paris conference re-enactment. Microsoft and LinkedIn banned messages, sometimes at their onset and other times in the middle of ad campaigns. Sometimes they did not outright ban them, but kept them in review “indefinitely.”

Is the simultaneous banning by multiple big social media companies evidence of marketplace monopolistic collusion, the author asks, noting these companies did enter into various agreements with the European Commission and German government to suppress some content? Adding to this suspicion of collusive practices is the fact they often hire the very same “fact checkers” and censors. If so, such collusion could subject the firms’ officers to prison sentences under 15 U.S. Code Sec. 24.

And then there’s YouTube (owned by Google). It is the “platform” that carries videos on everything from White House pressers to how to trim and tie a beef tenderloin or make your own silly putty. “1,300,000,000 use YouTube. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! Almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day.” https://merchdope.com/youtube-stats/
You Tube is adding “fact checks” to videos that dare to question the climate change credo. 

Wikipedia is the recipient of a significant grant from Google, so if you see collusion in the fact that YouTube will tag some climate change skeptic videos with text from Wikipedia stating “multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming” you may not be off the mark. (If the solar minimum happening right now indicates the system is in a cooling phase, will they remove the text, confess error, or just change the text from “warming” to “cooling”? It will be interesting to watch, I think.)

Adding to the injury to YouTube viewers seeking information and posters advocating their position is the secrecy with which the policy was made effective.

The Heartland Institute, for example, a conservative think tank that posts videos of its staff and others questioning climate change, told BuzzFeed News that it noticed the change a few weeks ago and had not been notified by YouTube. Spokesperson Jim Lakely declined to comment on the policy or its impact.

PragerU, a nonprofit online "university" that made some of the other affected videos, says YouTube’s policy shows its political bias. "Despite claiming to be a public forum and a platform open to all, YouTube is clearly a left-wing organization," Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, said by email. "This is just another mistake in a long line of giant missteps that erodes America’s trust in Big Tech, much like what has already happened with the mainstream news media."

YouTuber Tony Heller, who also makes climate denial videos, described the policy on Twitter as YouTube "putting propaganda at the bottom of all climate videos." (He did not respond to a request for comment.)
It’s not just misleading climate videos. The same climate blurb was appended to dozens of videos explaining the evidence and impacts of climate change.

This access-point censorship not only hurts those censored persons and messages. Since Google controls 92.2% of all online searches, and clearly considers views other than its own on climate “disinformation,” it is able to keep alternative views and evidence out of educational and public discussion and consideration. David Wojick makes a compelling argument that its “algorithmic definition of ‘authoritative’ makes liberals the voice of authority.”

It’s rather circular, the more the liberal sites (which in various ways these online giants promote) get linked, the more authoritative, these same giants consider them, and place them at the top of the search results. Also rigging higher authority-based search algorithm results are negative attacks on skeptics, including suggestions that the source of their funding influenced their work, while never making such a connection between “funding of alarmists by self-interested government agencies, renewable energy companies, far-left foundations or Tom Steyer.”

Wojick ‘s investigation into Google's censorship concludes “No matter how well reasoned, articles questioning the dominance of human factors in climate change, the near-apocalyptic effects of predicted climate change, or the value and validity of climate models are routinely ignored by Google’s algorithms.”

It is a certainty, that the information moguls of Silicon Valley and their supporters are using every strategic advantage they possess, from search placement, to fat thumbs on the scales, to outright censorship, to influence the debate to the advantage of those whose views they support on climate change and to the disadvantage of anyone who questions them. The president's executive order is an effort to level the playing field in the battle between the Internet Goliaths and the Army of Davids. Lets hope it succeeds.