90 Miles From Tyranny

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Girls With Guns

The leftist narrative of “white privilege” is “disgusting,” said J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow, editor-in-chief of Breitbart News and author of Breaking the News: Exposing the Establishment Media’s Hidden Deals and Secret Corruption.

Vance speculated that some criticisms of the film Hillbilly Elegy — based on his book — are rooted in left-wing rejection of the existence of struggle among white “working class” Americans. He noted that the reality of struggling whites in America profiled in his book and film is incompatible with the left-wing framework of “white privilege.”

“There is a narrative in our country, right now, that if you’re white, you’re privileged,” Vance stated, “and the idea that there is a family that is white, that is working class, that is struggling in ways that are identifiable to a lot of non-white Americans — and a lot of white Americans, too — is just not something the current cultural zeitgeist is comfortable with.”

Vance added, “They don’t like to think of people who are living in communities like mine — who look like my family — as struggling. Of course, many of those folks are [struggling]. That’s not what [those] people want to hear… This moment met the identity politics, the hyper-woke white privilege moment, and the the movie suffered from that, too.”

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Vance warned that left-wing commodification of imaginary victimhood undermines the centrality of character in defining one’s path in life. He identified Meghan Markle’s recent interview with billionaire media mogul Oprah Winfrey as illustrative of this phenomenon. He noted how perceptions of victimization strip individuals of agency.

“This interview that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry had a few weeks ago … I was watching that and I was amazed by just how much whining and how much victimhood...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who won’t use his city’s police force to effectively fight violent crime, has proposed that NYPD officers confront people for “hurtful” conduct that isn’t criminal.

Asked during a news briefing about an increase in attacks on Asian-Americans in the city, de Blasio said New Yorkers should report any such incidents and residents should be warned about the consequences of their behavior.

“We need to know everything we can to find those who did it and bring them to justice. Because I’m a believer that we, of course, need the bigger efforts, the education, the outreach, but we also need consequences,” de Blasio said at a news briefing Thursday.

The worst mayor in America declared that police in his city should confront people accused of committing what one would assume are perceived social infractions.

“I also think even if something is not a criminal case, a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it’s NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they’ve done was very hurtful to another person and could, if ever repeated, lead to criminal charges — that’s another important piece of...

Our Growing China Problem

The People's Republic of China is an existential threat to the national security, health, and prosperity of the United States. Communist China has viewed the U.S. as its primary enemy since its founding by Mao Zedong in 1949. For Beijing, the idea of the Chinese people embracing American-style freedoms is always a threat to their rule. We are a threat to them just by being who we are. As such, we must be attacked.

Over the years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has expanded its economy and military relentlessly, intending to supplant America in world prominence. And now, with a doddering and corrupt Joe Biden in the Oval Office, the CCP may be in a position to make their boldest moves yet.

The CCP's goal has been to defeat the U.S. through countless attacks below the threshold of war. They use our openness against us for intellectual and economic theft. So far, their strategy has been to gradually grow their strength while weakening us through a myriad of cyberattacks and other actions below the level that would prompt a kinetic military response. It is a stratagem of war by other means worthy of Sun Tzu.

For insight on their strategy, we turn to a brilliant book, Unrestricted Warfare. China's Master Plan to Destroy America, written by two PLA colonels, which contends that war between the U.S. and China is inevitable. With that premise, the book says the CCP must be prepared to use whatever means are necessary to achieve victory. These actions include economic warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, political warfare, terrorism, biological warfare, and conventional and nuclear warfare. The book's purpose was to shape Chinese policy and set U.S. policymakers' idea that the CCP regards nothing off the table. By understanding the lengths to which the CCP is willing to go, they hope the U.S. might prefer some accommodation instead of open conflict.

First, they infiltrate our institutions. Brian T. Kennedy, President of the American Strategy Group, explains:

The CCP operates a vast intelligence network in the US. It is made up not merely of intelligence operatives working for the Ministry of State Security, but also a myriad of business and industry officials, Chinese scholar associations, Confucius Institutes operating on American campuses, and 370,000 Chinese students attending American universities. Every one of these Chinese citizens is subject to Article 7 of the PRC's National Intelligence Law of 2017, which requires that "any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work." Students and others must report to handlers in Chinese consulates and embassies about who they meet, the research they're working on, and whatever else is demanded.

Then they weaken us from within, which leads us to the COVID pandemic. While we are not entirely sure the Wuhan Institute of Virology created the virus, it likely did. We will probably never know the whole truth of what happened.

Dr. Li-Meng Yan has been a courageous whistleblower making headlines alleging that the coronavirus was manufactured inside the laboratory instead of a wet market. She worked there as a virologist and alleged her seniors all knew about it and chose to...

Top NATO Scientist With High-Level Security Clearance Spied For Chinese Intelligence

Intelligence services for the country of Estonia have reportedly uncovered that one of its top scientists had been recruited by Chinese military intelligence and was working at a sensitive NATO research institution specializing in maritime and submarine research, according to a bombshell Daily Beast report.

It's been revealed that the spy, identified as 57-year old Tarmo Kõuts, was recently arrested and stood trial last week. The man "renowned in the Estonian scientific community for his research" was convicted of espionage and handed a three year prison sentence (reportedly the "lighter" sentence was due to his case not being deemed "treason").

While Baltic countries' intelligence services have been heavily focused on exposing Russian plots and operatives, it's believed that Chinese operatives have recently made deep inroads into Eastern Europe, despite this latest case being the first conviction of its kind.
The spy for the Chinese was a leading expert in oceanography at Tallinn Technical University, via Facebook/SCMP

The case had until just days ago remained under a strict gag order, only coming to light upon the conviction. He was alleged to have had access to sensitive NATO technology and research while at the same time maintaining contact with his Chinese handlers for up to three years. Some of the details are as follows:

According to Aleksander Toots, the deputy director of KAPO and Tallinn’s top counterintelligence official, Kõuts was recruited in 2018 by China’s Intelligence Bureau of the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission—as Beijing’s military intelligence agency is known—along with an alleged accomplice who is yet to be tried in court. Both were arrested on September 9, 2020, with no publicity or discussion of the case in the Estonian media.

The top Estonian intelligence official further said that Kõuts was recruited on Chinese territory during a trip: "He was motivated by traditional human weaknesses, such as money and need of recognition," Toots said.

Akin to recent cases in the US involving similar accusations of Chinese influence ops and research theft and gaining access to trade secrets, the spy's handlers had used a think tank as cover. He had earned over $20,000 from Chinese intelligence, but what's more is he had enjoyed multiple paid trips across southeast Asia which was said to include high-end luxury hotels and Michelin star restaurants.

"From 2006, Kõuts became directly involved in the national defense sector," the report details of his background. "He was named a member of the Estonian Ministry of Defense’s Scientific Committee, which oversees the country’s military research and development initiatives." He'd long been on the scientific committee of NATO's Undersea Research Center in Italy. There he helped advise the...

At a virtual meeting for the National War College on Friday, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the economic security and governance differences between the U.S. and China have come into sharper focus. In recent times, she said Beijing has demonstrated increased military confidence and a prominent willingness to take risks.

“Beijing is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system,” Hicks said.

She added, the country adopted a more forceful and aggressive approach. Additionally, in 2020 alone, Beijing escalated tensions between its neighboring countries, including Australia, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines. The Pentagon’s No. 2 official urged that the U.S. must invest financially in military capabilities, technologies and operational concepts upheld by the Department of Defense.

“The PRC’s actions constitute the threat to regional peace and stability,” Hicks noted. “And to the rules-based international order on which our security and those of our allies depend.”

This came after Washington’s diplomatic talks with Beijing in Anchorage, Alaska ended Friday. The meeting showed the U.S.-China relationship is likely to remain challenged under the Biden administration. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted the U.S.’s concern of China’s actions in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan as well as the cyberattacks on the United States.

The foreign affairs commissioner from the Chinese Communist Party struck back and said “the U.S. does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”

“I think really what you’ve got here is a Chinese elite that believes it can push the United States around,” Gordon Chang, author of The Great U.S.-China Tech War, stated. “We have heard voices from Beijing, especially in November, [say] that they own the Biden administration because of Wall Street and Hunter Biden. So this is a time where the Chinese attitude can cause great tumult in...