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Today, if a major American university is looking for government support to promote study of the foreign language—Chinese—that will be most crucial to the future shape of global competition, it may well come instead from the Chinese government, in the form of the Confucius Institutes that provide funding, teachers, and curricula to study Chinese language and culture. The goal of these institutes, explains the website of Hanban (their coordinating headquarters within the Chinese Ministry of Education), is to help develop “multiculturalism” and build “a harmonious world.” But for the Chinese Communist Party, “harmony” means never being questioned by society. China’s vast global network of some 500 Confucius Institutes (most of them on university campuses) may be the most benign dimension of an increasingly visible and troubling Chinese government effort to penetrate and influence democratic cultures and societies.
The experience of New Zealand and Australia suggests that what begins with the cultural and social progresses to the political. In November, an Australian commercial publisher postponed its commitment to publish a book by a highly respected professor, Clive Hamilton, detailing China’s efforts to shape and censor public expression in Australia. The clumsy cave-in to China’s sensitivities, reflecting rising Chinese pressure on Australian publishers and media companies, outraged the Australian public and appeared to confirm the book’s title: Silent Invasion: How China is Turning Australia Into a Puppet State.
More recently, as reported in the Telegraph this week, “An Australian MP was forced to quit over revelations he adopted pro-China positions after accepting donations from a wealthy Chinese property developer with links to China’s Communist Party.” As accounts have piled up of Chinese government-linked donations to Australia’s two major parties, Australia’s government has proposed legislation that would ban foreign donations to political parties and groups that lobby the government and institute a public register for foreign lobbyists. The political scandal—coming amid years of accelerating Chinese influence activities—may represent a “Sputnik moment” for Australia.
But the situation in neighboring New Zealand is more urgent still. . . .
What these two resurgent authoritarian states are projecting, argue Walker and Ludwig, is power that is not “soft” but rather “sharp,” like the tip of a dagger: It enables them “to cut, razor-like, into the fabric of a society, stoking and amplifying existing divisions” (in the case of Russia) or to seek, especially in the case of China, “to monopolize ideas, suppress alternative narratives, and exploit partner institutions.”
There is also an alarming technological dimension to China’s sharp power: a relentless, multidimensional, and highly orchestrated campaign to capture, transfer, and innovate the technologies of the future, including artificial intelligence, supercomputing, drone vehicles, robotics, gene editing, and other advanced medical technology. Within a decade, China could well overtake the United States in the development of these critical technologies, which will increasingly drive the next generation of global economic growth and China’s continued rise to superpower status.
Yeah, it was probably a mistake for the Clinton Administration to open up our technology to them so readily.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Profs propose using classrooms to counter Trump rhetoric.
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RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: Mystery Pooper Is Running Amok in Buffalo Suburb.
F-22 REFUELING OVER IRAQ: With serpentine river below.
END OF GOVERNMENT FM RADIO IN NORWAY: The government stations have gone to digital audio broadcasting (DAB).
However:
Some radio stations in Norway are maintaining an FM presence in protest of the government conversion.
Stay tuned?
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: 8 Worst Defenses Of FBI Agent’s Anti-Trump ‘Insurance Policy’ Texts.
THE POLITICAL SUICIDE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS: “Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. . . .. That showed me just how bad things have become, and how much things have changed since I first got started here in 2005. It seems easier to accidentally speak heresies in San Francisco every year. Debating a controversial idea, even if you 95% agree with the consensus side, seems ill-advised.”
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THIS ISN’T AN ARGUMENT ABOUT POLICY, IT’S JUST A DUMB ATTEMPT TO PERSONALIZE THE ISSUE: Brookings fellow rips Trump: I entered through lottery system. It’s like the people who defend affirmative action by saying “I’m a product of affirmative action!” as if that should silence any critics.
SOMETIMES NOT-SO-SECRETLY: 5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men.
REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP WAS LITERALLY HITLER: Graham rips Trump over interrogation policy: It’s like ‘Obama and his team never left.’
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) turned his fire on President Trump on Friday over the Trump administration’s hesitance to depart from trying suspected terrorists in the criminal justice system.
In a series of tweets Friday afternoon, the South Carolina Republican and frequent ally of Trump turned on the administration for its decision to charge Akayed Ullah, the suspect in Monday morning’s pipe bombing in New York, in criminal court.
“I am incredibly disappointed to see the Trump Administration continue to treat terrorists as common criminals,” Graham wrote. “Giving Akayed Ullah a lawyer and putting him directly into the criminal justice system means we lose the ability to gather intelligence from a person who fits the profile of an enemy combatant.”
In 2020, expect to see Kamala Harris attack Trump as a squish and promise to try terrorists in front of military tribunals and execute them by firing squad. Heck, she’s already got experience defending fake confessions.
WALL STREET JOURNAL: SECRETS THE FBI SHOULDN’T KEEP.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team is emphasizing its ejection of FBI agent Peter Strzok immediately upon learning about anti-Trump texts he exchanged with another FBI employee, Lisa Page, before the 2016 election. But when did the FBI learn of the messages? The inspector general’s investigation began in mid-January. The letter explains that the FBI was asked for text messages of certain key employees based on search terms, which turned up “a number of politically-oriented” Strzok-Page texts. The inspector general then demanded all of the duo’s text messages, which the FBI began producing on July 20.
But when did the FBI dig up and turn over that very first tranche? How long has the bureau known one of its lead investigators was exhibiting such bias? Was it before Mr. Mueller was even appointed? Did FBI leaders sit by as the special counsel tapped Mr. Strzok? In any case, we know from the letter that the inspector general informed both Messrs. Rosenstein and Mueller of the texts on July 27, and that both men hid that explosive information from Congress for four months. The Justice Department, pleading secrecy, defied subpoenas that would have produced the texts. It refused to make Mr. Strzok available for an interview. It didn’t do all this out of fear of hurting national security, obviously. It did it to save itself and the FBI from embarrassment.
This week’s other revelation of jaw-dropping FBI tactics came from a separate letter from Mr. Johnson. In November 2016, the Office of Special Counsel—a federal agency that polices personnel practices and is distinct from the Mueller probe—began investigating whether former FBI Director Jim Comey violated the Hatch Act, which restricts political activity by executive-branch officials, while investigating Hillary Clinton’s private server. The office conducted interviews with two of Mr. Comey’s confidantes: FBI chief of staff James Rybicki and FBI attorney Trisha Anderson.
Sen. Johnson in September demanded the full, unredacted transcripts of the interviews. But it turned out the FBI had refused to let the Office of Special Counsel interview them unless it first signed unprecedented nondisclosure agreements, giving the FBI full authority to withhold the information from Congress. The bureau has continued to insist the office keep huge swaths of the interviews secret from Congress, including the names and actions of key political players. (The Office of Special Counsel closed its investigation in May.)
In his letter this week, Mr. Johnson demanded that Mr. Wray authorize the release of the full transcripts and other documents. Even the redacted ones have revealed important information, for instance that Mr. Comey was drafting his Hillary Clinton exoneration statement well before she was interviewed. Congressional investigators believe the unredacted versions contain pertinent information about the actions of former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and key investigators such as Mr. Strzok.
This whole thing stinks.
WELL, IT’S A DAY ENDING IN “Y,” SO: Another errant anti-Trump hit piece from the Washington Post.
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REMEMBER THIS NAME AND REMEMBER THIS DATE: The name is Michael Horowitz. The date is Jan. 12, 2017. Horowitz is the Inspector-General of the Department of Justice. January 12, 2017, is the date Horowitz announced an investigation of these factors:
• Allegations that Department or FBI policies or procedures were not followed in connection with, or in actions leading up to or related to, the FBI Director’s public announcement on July 5, 2016, and the Director’s letters to Congress on October 28 and November 6, 2016, and that certain underlying investigative decisions were based on improper considerations;
• Allegations that the FBI Deputy Director should have been recused from participating in certain investigative matters;
• Allegations that the Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs improperly disclosed non-public information to the Clinton campaign and/or should have been recused from participating in certain matters;
• Allegations that Department and FBI employees improperly disclosed non-public information;
• Allegations that decisions regarding the timing of the FBI’s release of certain Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents on October 30 and November 1, 2016, and the use of a Twitter account to publicize same, were influenced by improper considerations.
The Horowitz probe is why Peter Strzok’s amazing emails were discovered. As sensational as those emails are, the more important question is what occasioned their becoming available to the Horowitz investigators. The DOJ IG is nobody’s fool and his report is just over the horizon. Just ask American Thinker’s Thomas Lifson.
There are more than 70 IGs in the federal government in positions created in 1978 during the Carter administration. There have been some bad eggs among the IGs over the years but collectively, the IG community has been the unsung hero in efforts to expose and prosecute waste, fraud and abuse in government. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has been the IGs’ strongest advocate in Congress.
And there’s this: The journo community in the nation’s capital has been rumbling in recent days about a bombshell report supposedly being prepared for publication by the Washington Post that will ruin the careers of dozens of Members of Congress, from both parties.
Fasten your seatbelts, folks.
ANOTHER OPEN THREAD. You know what to do.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Political Journalists Have Themselves to Blame for Sinking Credibility: Sloppy work creates self-inflicted wounds.
“Our record as journalists in covering this Trump story and the Russian story is pretty good,” legendary reporter Carl Bernstein recently claimed. Pretty good? If there’s a major news story over the past 70 years that the American media has botched more often because of bias and wishful thinking, I’d love to hear about it.
Four big scoops recently run by major news organizations—written by top reporters and, presumably, churned through layers of scrupulous editing—turned out to be completely wrong. Reuters, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and others reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office had subpoenaed President Donald Trump’s records from Deutsche Bank. Trump’s attorney says it hadn’t. ABC reported that candidate Trump had directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. He didn’t (as far as we know). The New York Times ran a story claiming that K.T. McFarland, a former member of the Trump transition team, had acknowledged collusion. She hadn’t. Then, CNN topped off the week by falsely reporting that the Trump campaign had been offered access to hacked Democratic National Committee emails before they were published. It wasn’t.
Forget your routine bias. These were four bombshells disseminated to millions of Americans by breathless anchors, pundits and analysts, all of whom are feeding frenzied expectations about Trump-Russia collusion that have now been internalized by many as indisputable truths. All four pieces, incidentally, are useless without their central faulty claims. Yet there they sit. And these are only four of dozens of other stories that have fizzled over the year.
Yep.
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