Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution

by Matt Gaetz

  The Chinese story has been a fairy tale, but like a lot of fairy tales it has come to a deadly end—the coronavirus outbreak there leaving an estimated hundred thousand dead in the first few months of 2020 alone, drowning in their own fluids, alone in a hospital bed. Why is it that so many pandemics seem to come from China? Why can’t they get it together? Why can’t China function like other modern countries? It is not unreasonable to ask these questions.

  Motivated by naivete and political correctness, we’ve looked the other way and played pretend. It’s hard to grasp the enormity of the problem. We are outnumbered by the Chinese, and we have lost our focus. Han Chinese is the default setting for the human species—1.3 billion and counting. When you’re one in a million in China, there are still 1,300 just like you. While we’ve wasted our time and treasure putzing around the Middle East, the Middle Kingdom has grown larger, smarter, and more ambitious. For most of my life, America has chased desert democracy mirages while the Chinese have steadily built positional advantage over their neighbors and us. We’ve been drained, clumsily attempting to build democracies out of sand, blood, and Arab militias.

  Meanwhile, the Chinese have built skyscrapers, aircraft carriers, and supply chains to enhance their might. While we were fretting about the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans Americans from paying business bribes to Third World countries, the Chinese were showing up with suitcases of cash and ready prostitutes. In the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas—right in our backyard—the Chinese are closing deals. They have been as cunning as we have been clueless. Chinese intelligence professionals know the motives for creating double agents summed up among English speakers by the acronym MICE—money, ideology, coercion, and ego—and they have many promising targets among the global elite. They have found it is easy to corrupt the very people who have been serving as the China-dismissing, clueless storytellers.

  When I was a boy, I was taught to feel sorry for the Chinese. My mother would tell me to clean my plate because there were starving kids in China. Their one-child policy meant they sent their daughters—and they were all daughters; Chinese culture is rough on women—abroad for eager American couples to adopt. That is, those who weren’t aborted. China was a tragic case and certainly not a great power. We had to be magnanimous to help our Chinese friends up out of poverty. At the end of the twentieth century, there was a Chinese economic miracle, but we lost sight of the cost to the American dream.

  Things have changed—fast.

  The enormity of the Chinese problem is a modern one, brought on in the last fifty years. Only Nixon could go to China, but it was Henry Kissinger, after traveling there in 1971, who went to work for China and cashed the checks. You’re never too old—Kissinger is ninety-seven as I write this—to sell out. There’s a lot of green to be had in Red China but none of it is going to go to you. No, you get the bill for the elite’s virtue signaling and adventurism.

  The former national security advisor and secretary of state even wrote a book titled On China, but it really ought to have been titled Bought by China. Kissinger would be the first but by no means the last one to have his palm stuffed with China’s money. The Chinese pay cash and buy your soul.

  What’s been good for China has also been good for Kissinger. The architects of America’s Chinese policy have had their policies “Made in China” too.

  Kissinger headed up China Ventures, a company that partnered with China’s state bank but only in projects that “enjoy the unquestioned support of the People’s Republic of China.” Kissinger has received millions from China and from American businesses hoping to move to China since 1988. Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialka wrote an article called “Mr. Kissinger Has Opinions on China—and Business Ties” that detailed some of the cozy relationships Kissinger has enjoyed.

  Kissinger even supported the Chinese crackdown in Tiananmen Square and argued against economic sanctions, which would have hurt his bottom line: “China remains too important for America’s national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment…. No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators,” argued Kissinger in a Washington Post op-ed in August 1989, just two months after the Chinese government massacred protestors in Tiananmen Square.

  Should we really be so surprised? Frauds gravitate toward frauds. And there’s little punishment for sellouts. Kissinger’s conflicts of interest did not preclude him from having an honored spot among our foreign policy elite.

  “The relationship between China and the United States has become a central element in the quest for world peace and global well-being,” he wrote in On China. To build world peace, he got a piece of every deal.

  But has the deal been good for us? And whose peace is it? Globalization is too often sinification, making non-Chinese things more Chinese. We’ve seen that with the growing number of multinational organizations and companies that depend upon being in China’s good graces, from the NBA to NBC. The status quo is China gets richer and we get poorer. This is by design. We let them launder their polluted profits through our real estate markets—and push Americans further and further out into the countryside, where nature is paved and commutes lengthened. Our cities become Chinese playgrounds, our universities their training grounds.

  We let the Chinese take seats in institutions meant for Americans, ones supported with tax dollars, because the Chinese pay top dollar to get in. Sometimes they pay more than a little extra. College counselor Rick Singer accepted bribes to get undeserving kids into colleges across the country, but his best customers were Chinese party bosses. One family paid $1.2 million to get their daughter into Yale. Another paid $6.5 million to get their daughter into Stanford. Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard, though how he can afford the $70,000 tuition on an official salary of $13,000 I leave to you to figure out. The FBI accuses our top schools of accepting hundreds of millions in fishy donations—and yet tuition keeps going up year after year for Americans.

  President Trump recognized the risk of Chinese infiltration of higher education when he announced from the Rose Garden that student visas from China would be vetted more rigorously. I wonder if they should be here at all. Our professoriat has also been bought off, and some of them have found themselves the witting or unwitting tools of Chinese espionage, a topic we will examine in further detail in the chapter “Big Tech Hates America.”

  The bipartisan consensus on China has been created by bipartisan payoffs. Whereas the Russians cause chaos, the Chinese open their checkbooks—and find out how cheaply our retired senators can be rented or bought.

  In addition to Kissinger, there’s former Sen. David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, who survived a prostitution scandal but lost a gubernatorial campaign, then managed to prostitute himself as a lobbyist for China-based Hikvision. Vitter was secretly recorded promising to do all he could to stop Hikvision from being barred by the Commerce Department. Sen. Vitter co-sponsored a resolution in 2015 that made trade deals contingent on a country’s religious freedom record. But lobbyist Vitter has seemingly no problem selling the technology used in China’s concentration camps to surveil its Muslim minority. The word “Orwellian” gets thrown around often these days, but helping the Chinese state drum up money from American taxpayers to spy on American citizens is pretty jarring. It turns out David Vitter is far more dangerous as the trick than as the John.

  Not to be outdone is former Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, who is actually on the board of advisors of Alibaba, a Chinese company that traffics in counterfeit goods. Last year Alibaba settled a $250 million lawsuit for failing to disclose its counterfeit problem to investors. That wasn’t all it failed to disclose. Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma promised for years that he wasn’t a Communist Party official. Turns out he was a Communist Party official. Most recently, Baucus got in a spot of trouble for comparing Trump to Hitler on Chine
se state TV. One wonders how he justified working for Chinese companies that make the equipment necessary for real modern-day concentration camps. Vice President Biden personally advocated for Baucus to serve as U.S. ambassador to China during the Obama/Biden administration. One wonders what position Biden would offer Baucus if he had the chance again.

  Joe Biden is the classic China First American politician. The Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania may have China connections that would make even the Clinton Foundation blush!

  According to a much-cited National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) complaint, UPenn has systemically failed to report China gifts and contracts, despite a pesky provision of the Higher Education Act that requires disclosure of foreign gifts exceeding $250,000. Converting Chinese money into Chinese influence on American policy is big business for some of our nation’s most ivy-draped universities. For Biden, this was perfect. He set up the Biden Center as “a place where policymakers here and abroad will know they can be in touch with some of the best minds.”

  As is typical with Biden, more may be getting touched than we originally knew. The Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman connects the dots:

  The Biden Cancer Initiative, which had $2.1 million in total assets in 2018 before suspending its operations [in 2019], according to its tax records, declined to provide a list of donors. The Biden Institute at the University of Delaware has also declined to reveal its funders.

  While the Penn Biden Center has not released information on its donors, foreign funding to the University of Pennsylvania has risen more than threefold since its soft opening, spiking to over $100 million last year from $31 million in 2016, according to Department of Education records. China has been the largest contributor during that time…

  The donations included a $502,750 “monetary gift” in October 2017 from the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, a Chinese government agency that helps administer the regime’s “Thousand Talents Plan.” Federal prosecutors claim the program is linked to Chinese espionage operations at American universities and have prosecuted academics for hiding their involvement in it…

  Penn received a total of 23 anonymous gifts from China between March 2017 and the end of 2019, totaling over $21 million. In the preceding four years, the university had disclosed just five anonymous donations from China, totaling less than $5 million.

  There may be a perfectly good explanation for why the Biden Center’s affiliation with UPenn coincided with a tripling of Chinese cash to the school, much of it delivered anonymously. But there is no excuse for UPenn violating black letter transparency laws intended to protect us all. I’ve joined NLPC in calling for a review of these shady transactions. If in fact the Biden Center is yet another in a string of international money-laundering operations to facilitate political power, this could be the most damaging Biden scandal yet. It is just all too common.

  Sen. Joe Lieberman, a former Democratic vice presidential candidate, once shared the slogan “Leadership for the New Millennium. Prosperity for America’s Families” with Al Gore. Today, Lieberman works for China’s ZTE, a company that routinely flouts U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea and paid a $1 billion fine. Sen. Lieberman called the 5G operator a national security threat, but lobbyist Lieberman is happy to work the phones and give them a “security” review—whatever that means.

  If lobbyist Lieberman ever completes that “security” review, he should conclude that our national security comes from understanding that ours is a nation that values its rights and fights to maintain them. China doesn’t share our concerns about human rights, animal rights, copyrights, or really any kind of rights because they don’t understand the notion of rights. If the government can kick you out of your property without just compensation, you don’t own it. The absence of ownership isn’t progressive but regressive and brings about even more of the income inequality supposedly derided by the political Left.

  So why is China favored by American liberals? New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wished America could be China for a day. “China’s one-party autocracy can impose the important policies needed to move a society forward in the twenty-first century,” Friedman wrote admiringly in 2009. Billionaire and Google investor Mike Moritz celebrated the slavish society he saw before him in a piece titled, “Silicon Valley Would Be Wise to Follow China’s Lead.”

  In China…it is quite usual for the management of 10 and 15-year-old companies to have working dinners followed by two or three meetings. If a Chinese company schedules tasks for the weekend, nobody complains about missing a Little League game or skipping a basketball outing with friends. Little wonder it is a common sight at a Chinese company to see many people with their heads resting on their desks taking a nap in the early afternoon.

  Our elites have seen the future and it works—for them. Chinese workers are as the American elite hoped we Americans might become: compliant, voiceless, interchangeable, and therefore expendable. Faced with the coronavirus outbreak, the American Left was only too happy to import the lockdowns that Communist China forced on its people indefinitely. But Americans resisted and disobeyed because we believe in liberty or death. There are things worth dying for, after all.

  To the elites we are all interchangeable—just labor, a commodity even. We don’t have any specialness or any habits of free people that make us separate and unique. This idea of the substitutable nature of people means we can invade Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria and turn them into Jeffersonian Democrats. All you need are some institutions and some platitudes about human rights and free markets will work out.

  But such a view undervalues what makes America great: her people and her habits. Our foreign policy elites don’t take seriously how different we are from the rest of the world and how precious the institutions that we’ve built up over centuries are.

  We are not and never will be Chinese; they are not and never will be a free people.

  The Chinese Communist Party has always been despotic. This is what the neoconservatives get wrong. The neocons separate the world into panda-cuddlers (the liberals) and dragon-slayers (them). I am neither a hawk nor a dove but an eagle, and I can see clearly and at a distance what we have to do. We should do all we can to help China’s neighbors avoid being turned into Chinese serfs economically. It is they we should trade with (on fair terms for our people). Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam all seek to avoid Chinese dominion. The enemy of my enemy can be my friend. Containment breeds alliances. Nations that share our priorities and our values are our friends; nations that share neither are our foes. The world’s largest consumer market, which is still the U.S., will find plenty of people willing to meet its needs. We don’t need China; China needs us. That’s why they buy our politicians.

  China has had tremendous economic growth and yet their air is toxic, and their rivers polluted. They dump their trash into the world’s oceans and don’t give a damn. We should tax their goods and brand it the Chinese carbon tax. You should not be able to poison the air in Shanghai so you can buy a penthouse in Manhattan.

  Our political class has been so wrong about China because they were too busy getting rich to get smart. Only when we stop the former can we do the latter. How wrong have they been? Look at a few examples.

  The internet will not make China free. Tim Wu’s book, The Master Switch, teaches us that while technology may start out naively libertarian, it always ends up centralizing power. All technology means is doing more with less. Technology doesn’t necessarily mean freedom. You can have more totalitarianism with less effort. That too is a sort of technological advance. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, they told us. The internet would inevitably make China move toward democracy. “Good luck,” President Clinton joked about Chinese efforts to censor the internet in March 2000. “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

  But the country that built the Great Wall had no problem naili
ng the proverbial Jell-O to it. Indeed, Chinese control of the internet bled into American companies as well, with YouTube censoring videos critical of the Chinese state. Google has even proposed working with the Chinese military instead of working with ours. “In China, there is pretty much only one rule, and it is simple: Don’t undermine the state. So titans like Weibo and Baidu heed censorship orders,” writes Raymond Zhong of the New York Times. “Unwanted beliefs and ideologies are kept out.”

  Share the wrong meme or tweet the wrong thing and you and your family can be shut out of polite society through China’s social credit system, which bears an uncanny resemblance to Big Tech’s effort to shadowban and suspend American conservatives. The East German Stasi dreamed of such power, but in China, it is extremely routine. China’s walled-in tech world gives them serious advantages. When you have a billion people, you collect a lot of data. That data can be mined and trained through artificial intelligence. The insights gleaned can be weaponized without a human even passing judgment. You can build authoritarianism through algorithms.

  Naturally, China seeks to expand its reach globally through its technology. Globalization is sinification, after all.

  The Commerce Department has barred some forty or so companies from doing business here, including most famously Huawei. They need to ban a lot more, including TikTok and drone manufacturer DJI. Throw in BGI, who massively discount their genetic sequencing technology to build up a database of genomes for experimentation and analysis. Just as the China virus COVID-19 turns our immune system against our bodies, so too does the broader Chinese attack on America alter what is supposed to be good into evil.

  We should restrict federal contracting to companies that have an anti-Chinese espionage policy and undergo background checks by the FBI. The Chinese cannot be allowed to use LinkedIn to spy on American companies as recently detailed by the New York Times. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are among a number of American companies that are still providing web services to blacklisted Chinese surveillance firms. That includes Zoom, which hosts its servers in China.