WHO ARE THE ‘THIRTY TYRANTS?’: MUST READ WARNING ABOUT CHINA
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STORMING THE CAPITOL WHILE BEING TRACKED
WHO ARE THE ‘THIRTY TYRANTS?’: MUST READ WARNING ABOUT CHINA
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In Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create “therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.”
The example Machiavelli gives of the last is the friendly government Sparta established in Athens upon defeating it after 27 years of war in 404 BCE. For the upper caste of an Athenian elite already contemptuous of democracy, the city’s defeat in the Peloponnesian War confirmed that Sparta’s system was preferable. It was a high-spirited military aristocracy ruling over a permanent servant class, the helots, who were periodically slaughtered to condition them to accept their subhuman status. Athenian democracy by contrast gave too much power to the low-born. . . .
The Athenian government disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions was known as the Thirty Tyrants, and understanding its role and function helps explain what is happening in America today.
For my last column I spoke with The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman about an article he wrote more than a decade ago, during the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency. . . .
In the more than 10 years since Friedman’s column was published, the disenchanted elite that the Times columnist identified has further impoverished American workers while enriching themselves. The one-word motto they came to live by was globalism—that is, the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children.
Undergirding the globalist enterprise was China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige. Why did they trade with an authoritarian regime and by sending millions of American manufacturing jobs off to China thereby impoverish working Americans? Because it made them rich. They salved their consciences by telling themselves they had no choice but to deal with China: It was big, productive, and efficient and its rise was inevitable. And besides, the American workers hurt by the deal deserved to be punished—who could defend a class of reactionary and racist ideological naysayers standing in the way of what was best for progress?
Returning those jobs to America, along with ending foreign wars and illegal immigration, was the core policy promise of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the source of his surprise victory in 2016. . . .
The only people who took Trump seriously were the more than 60 million American voters who believed him when he said he’d fight the elites to get those jobs back.
What he called “The Swamp” appeared at first just to be a random assortment of industries, institutions, and personalities that seemed to have nothing in common, outside of the fact they were excoriated by the newly elected president. But Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. . . .
Because of Trump’s pressure on the Americans who benefited extravagantly from the U.S.-China relationship, these strange bedfellows acquired what Marxists call class consciousness—and joined together to fight back, further cementing their relationships with their Chinese patrons. United now, these disparate American institutions lost any sense of circumspection or shame about cashing checks from the Chinese Communist Party, no matter what horrors the CCP visited on the prisoners of its slave labor camps and no matter what threat China’s spy services and the People’s Liberation Army might pose to national security. Think tanks and research institutions like the Atlantic Council, the Center for American Progress, the EastWest Institute, the Carter Center, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and others gorged themselves on Chinese money. . . .
Author Lee Smith appeared on Tucker Carlson and offered a brief summary of his concerns. Watch the segment HERE.
The billions that China gave to major American research universities, like $58 million to Stanford, alarmed U.S. law enforcement, which warned of Chinese counterintelligence efforts to steal sensitive research. . . .
Indeed, many of academia’s pay-for-play deals with the CCP were not particularly subtle. In June 2020, a Harvard professor who received a research grant of $15 million in taxpayer money was indicted for lying about his $50,000 per month work on behalf of a CCP institution to “recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.” . . .
For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s. China’s lockdowns had nothing to do with the difference in outcomes. . . .
Andrew Cuomo and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, are signaling publicly that it is imperative they be allowed to reopen immediately now that Trump is safely gone.
That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. . . .
The poisoned embrace between American elites and China began nearly 50 years ago when Henry Kissinger saw that opening relations between the two then-enemies would expose the growing rift between China and the more threatening Soviet Union. At the heart of the fallout between the two communist giants was the Soviet leadership’s rejection of Stalin, which the Chinese would see as the beginning of the end of the Soviet communist system—and thus it was a mistake they wouldn’t make.
Meanwhile, Kissinger’s geopolitical maneuver became the cornerstone of his historical legacy. It also made him a wealthy man selling access to Chinese officials. In turn, Kissinger pioneered the way for other former high-ranking policymakers to engage in their own foreign influence-peddling operations, like William Cohen, defense secretary in the administration of Bill Clinton, who greased the way for China to gain permanent most favored nation trade status in 2000 and become a cornerstone of the World Trade Organization. The Cohen Group has two of its four overseas offices in China, and includes a number of former top officials, including Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis, who recently failed to disclose his work for the Cohen Group when he criticized the Trump administration’s “with us or against us” approach to China in an editorial. . . .
Just after defeating communism in the Soviet Union, America breathed new life into the communist party that survived. And instead of Western democratic principles transforming the CCP, the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy. Tech became the anchor of the U.S.-China relationship, with CCP funding driving Silicon Valley startups, thanks largely to the efforts of Dianne Feinstein, who, after Kissinger, became the second-most influential official driving the U.S.-CCP relationship for the next 20 years.
In 1978, as the newly elected mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein befriended Jiang Zemin, then the mayor of Shanghai and eventually president of China. As mayor of America’s tech epicenter, her ties to China helped the growing sector attract Chinese investment and made the state the world’s third-largest economy. Her alliance with Jiang also helped make her investor husband, Richard Blum, a wealthy man. As senator, she pushed for permanent MFN trade status for China by rationalizing China’s human rights violations, while her friend Jiang consolidated his power and became the Communist Party’s general secretary by sending tanks into Tiananmen Square. Feinstein defended him. “China had no local police,” Feinstein said that Jiang had told her. “Hence the tanks,” the senator from California reassuringly explained. “But that’s the past. One learns from the past. You don’t repeat it. I think China has learned a lesson.”
Yet the past actually should have told Feinstein’s audience in Washington a different story. . . .
Throughout the period, America defined itself in opposition to how we conceived of the Soviets. Ronald Reagan was thought crass for referring to the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire,” but trade and foreign policy from the end of WWII to 1990 reflected that this was a consensus position—Cold War American leadership didn’t want the country coupled to a one-party authoritarian state. . . .
It started with Bill Clinton’s 1994 decision to decouple human rights from trade status. He’d entered the White House promising to focus on human rights, in contrast to the George H.W. Bush administration, and after two years in office made an about face. “We need to place our relationship into a larger and more productive framework,” Clinton said. American human rights groups and labor unions were appalled. Clinton’s decision sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, “no matter what America says about democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most.” Some Democrats, like then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, were opposed, while Republicans like John McCain supported Clinton’s move. The head of Clinton’s National Economic Council, Robert E. Rubin, predicted that China “will become an ever larger and more important trading partner.”
More than two decades later, the number of American industries and companies that lobbied against Trump administration measures attempting to decouple Chinese technology from its American counterparts is a staggering measure of how closely two rival systems that claim to stand for opposing sets of values and practices have been integrated. Companies like Ford, FedEx, and Honeywell, as well as Qualcomm and other semiconductor manufacturers that fought to continue selling chips to Huawei, all exist with one leg in America and the other leg planted firmly in America’s chief geopolitical rival. . . .
Unsurprisingly, the once-reliably Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce was in the forefront of opposition to Trump’s China policies—against not only proposed tariffs but also his call for American companies to start moving critical supply chains elsewhere, even in the wake of a pandemic. The National Defense Industrial Association recently complained of a law forbidding defense contractors from using certain Chinese technologies. . . .
In the Trump administration, says former Trump adviser Spalding, “there was a very large push to continue unquestioned cooperation with China. On the other side was a smaller number of those who wanted to push back.”
Apple, Nike, and Coca Cola even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. On Trump’s penultimate day in office, his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the United States has “determined that the People’s Republic of China is committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Xinjiang, China, targeting Uyghur Muslims and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups.” That makes a number of major American brands that use forced Uyghur labor—including, according to a 2020 Australian study, Nike, Adidas, Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and General Motors—complicit in genocide. . . .
Riding the media tsunami of Trump hatred, the China Class cemented its power within state institutions and security bureaucracies that have long been Democratic preserves—and whose salary-class inhabitants were eager not to be labeled as “collaborators” with the president they ostensibly served. . . .
The Central Intelligence Agency openly protected Chinese efforts to undermine American institutions. CIA management bullied intelligence analysts to alter their assessment of Chinese influence and interference in our political process so it wouldn’t be used to support policies they disagreed with—Trump’s policies. It’s no wonder that protecting America is not CIA management’s most urgent equity—the technology that stores the agency’s information is run by Amazon Web Services, owned by China’s No. 1 American distributor, Jeff Bezos.
For those who actually understood what the Chinese were doing, partisanship was a distinctly secondary concern. . . .
Loathing Trump provided their political excuse, but the American security and defense establishment had their own interest in turning a blind eye to China. Twenty years of squandering men, money, and prestige on military engagements that began in George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” have proved to be of little strategic value to the United States. However, deploying Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly benefited Beijing. Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil.
In Afghanistan, the large copper, metal, and minerals mines whose security American troops still ostensibly ensure are owned by Chinese companies. . . .
As late as the summer of 2019, Trump looked like he was headed for a second term in the White House. Not only was the economy soaring and unemployment at record lows, he was rallying on the very field on which he’d chosen to confront his opponents. Trump’s trade war with Beijing showed he was serious about forcing American companies to move their supply chains. In July, top American tech firms like Dell and HP announced they were going to shift a large portion of their production outside of China. Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet said they were also planning to move some of their manufacturing elsewhere.
It was at exactly this same moment, in late June and early July of 2019 that the residents of Wuhan began to fill the streets, angry that officials responsible for the health and prosperity of the city’s 11 million people had betrayed them. . . .
Authorities censored social media accounts, photos and videos of the protests, and undercover policemen watched for troublemakers and detained the most vocal. With businesses forced shut, there was nowhere for protesters to hide. Some were carted off in vans. They’d been warned by the authorities: “Public security organizations will resolutely crack down on illegal criminal acts such as malicious incitement and provocation.”
What sent the residents of Wuhan to the streets at the time wasn’t COVID-19—which wouldn’t begin its spread until the winter. In the early summer of 2019, what threatened public health in Wuhan was the plague of air pollution. . . .
The way to keep unrest from going viral, the CCP had learned, was to quarantine it. The party has shown itself especially adept at neutralizing the country’s minority populations, first the Tibetans, and most recently the Turkic ethnic Muslim minority Uyghurs, through mass quarantines and incarcerations, managed through networks of electronic surveillance that paved the way to prisons and slave labor camps. By 2019, the grim fate of China’s Uyghurs had become a matter of concern—whether heartfelt or simply public relations-oriented—even among many who profited hugely from their forced labor.
The country’s 13.5 million Uyghurs are concentrated in Xinjiang, or East Turkestan, a region in northwestern China roughly the size of Iran, rich in coal, oil, and natural gas. Bordering Pakistan, Xinjiang is a terminus point for critical supply routes of the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s $1 trillion project to create a global Chinese sphere of interest. . . .
According to a November 2019, New York Times report, Chinese authorities were most worried about Uyghur students returning home from school outside the province. The students had “widespread social ties across the entire country” and used social media whose “impact,” officials feared, was “widespread and difficult to eradicate.” The task was to quarantine news of what was really happening inside the detention camps. When the students asked where their loved ones were and what happened to them, officials were advised to tell “students that their relatives had been ‘infected’ by the ‘virus’ of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured.”
But it wasn’t just those most likely to carry out terrorist attacks—young men—who were subject to China’s lockdown policy. According to the documents, officials were told that “even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared.”
When a real virus hit in the fall of 2019, Chinese authorities followed the same protocol, quarantining not just prospective troublemakers but everyone in Wuhan in the hope of avoiding an even larger public outcry than the one they’d quelled in the same city just months before. . . .
At the end of December 2019, Chinese authorities began locking down social media accounts mentioning the new virus, doctors who warned of it or spoke about it with their colleagues were reprimanded and another, allegedly infected by COVID-19, died. All domestic travel in and out of Wuhan was stopped. If the purpose of the lockdowns was really to prevent spread of the contagion, it’s worth noting that international flights continued. Rather, it appears that the domestic travel ban, like the social media censorship, was to keep news of the government’s blunder from spreading throughout China and leading to massive, perhaps uncontrollable, unrest. . . .
In January, the Trump administration’s former Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger told British officials that the latest American intelligence shows that the likeliest source of COVID-19 is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. . . .
According to a State Department fact sheet published in January, the United States “has reason to believe that several researchers inside the Wuhan lab became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak.” The fact sheet further explains that the Chinese government lab has conducted research on a bat coronavirus most similar to COVID-19 since 2016. . . .
Evidence the pandemic didn’t start in a Wuhan wet market was published as early as January 2020, days after Beijing implemented the lockdown on Jan. 23. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, 13 of the first 41 cases, including the first one, had no links to the market. In May the head of China’s center for disease control and prevention confirmed that there was nothing to link COVID-19 and the wet market. “The novel coronavirus had existed long before” it was found at the market, said the Chinese official. . . .
China had cultivated many friends in the American press, which is why the media relays Chinese government statistics with a straight face—for instance that China, four times the size of the United States, has suffered 1/100th the number of COVID-19 fatalities. But the key fact is this: In legitimizing CCP narratives, the media covers not primarily for China but for the American class that draws its power, wealth, and prestige from China. No, Beijing isn’t the bad guy here—it’s a responsible international stakeholder. In fact, we should follow China’s lead. And by March, with Trump’s initial acquiescence, American officials imposed the same repressive measures on Americans used by dictatorial powers throughout history to silence their own people.
Eventually, the pro-China oligarchy would come to see the full range of benefits the lockdowns afforded. Lockdowns made leading oligarchs richer—$85 billion richer in the case of Bezos alone—while impoverishing Trump’s small-business base. In imposing unconstitutional regulations by fiat, city and state authorities normalized autocracy. And not least, lockdowns gave the American establishment a plausible reason to give its chosen candidate the nomination after barely one-third of the delegates had chosen, and then keep him stashed away in his basement for the duration of the Presidential campaign. . . .
In November a video circulated on social media purporting to document a public speech given by the head of a Chinese think tank close to the Beijing government. “Trump waged a trade war against us,” he told a Chinese audience. “Why couldn’t we handle him? Why is that between 1992 and 2016, we always resolved issues with the U.S.? Because we had people up there. In America’s core circle of power, we have some old friends.” The appreciative crowd laughed along with him. “During the last three to four decades,” he continued, “we took advantage of America’s core circle. As I said, Wall Street has a very profound influence … We used to rely heavily on them. Problem is they have been declining since 2008. Most importantly after 2016 Wall Street couldn’t control Trump … In the U.S.-China trade war they tried to help. My friends in the U.S. told me that they tried to help, but they couldn’t. Now with Biden winning the election, the traditional elites, political elites, the establishment, they have a very close relationship with Wall Street.” . . .
Longtime Biden security aide Colin Kahl, tapped for the No. 3 spot at the Pentagon, worked at an institute at Stanford University that is twinned with Peking University, a school run by a former CCP spy chief and long seen as a security risk by Western intelligence services. . . .
Biden’s special assistant for presidential personnel, Thomas Zimmerman, was a fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, flagged by Western intelligence agencies for its ties to China’s Ministry of State Security. . . .
Reports claiming that the Biden administration will continue the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to roll back China’s technology industry are misdirection. . . .
Yellen says that “China is clearly our most important strategic competitor.” But the pro-China oligarchy is not competing with the country from which it draws its wealth, power, and prestige. Chinese autocracy is their model. . . .
What seems clear is that Biden’s inauguration marks the hegemony of an American oligarchy that sees its relationship with China as a shield and sword against their own countrymen. . . .
What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year. . . .
(Excerpt from Tablet. Article by Lee Smith. Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)
Share your insights into this article in the comments below!
Here is author Lee Smith summarizing these concerns on Tucker Carlson:
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There is only BC, not BCE!
Thanks.
DP
“Lord, as only You can do, we ask for Your divine shield of provision and protection over Tucker Carlson, his family, work, resources, research, health and employment! Thank you, in the Name of our One and Only Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Amen.”
It is interesting to note that some of the harshest rebukes in some of the minor prophets about Israel’s sin in the OT are aimed at 1. merchants and 2. leaders. Human nature has not changed. The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.
So thankful. This was a much needed expose of recent American history. I am sending it to people who do not understand why the hate war against our President was so irrationally fierce & praying it might crack some hard shells!!
I recommend reading chapters 17&18 of Revelation on Mystery Babylon (did u see the ziggurat Bezos is planning to build in VA?! We know satan is driving these billionaires. I don’t think this was at all by chance. Its an altar of their greedy worship. Then read the one worlders‘ Klaus Schwab’s last statement in their global blueprints; its essence is found in Gen 11:6. Babel was the first “city” Rev 18:21). These verses cause me to think that the wicked elites of our world are preparing now, unknowingly, for the final showdown. (18:3-19; v13…slaves & human lives**, Uyghurs among so many others, sex trafficking, ad nauseum)…am not implying a timeline, just that with the state of things these chapters are sure coming alive.
Lord I thank you for All those who are revealing truth***. Thank You that You have put the love of Truth into our hearts!! that we may see & understand, our hearts having been enlightened (Eph 1:17-18). Please bring more & more exposure of the evil plans that have for decades brought about our country’s ultimate downfall [by that I mean vote & freedom canceling corruption & rule by the wicked]. I am amazed that Time mag would reveal exactly* what this evil has perpetrated against us! Use it oh GOD!! against their scheming & to open*eyes. Foil the plans of our archenemy by redeeming their schemes to our benefit & for Your Glorious Name! Let their be a revival of love for truth that leads to You alone.
“I am exceedingly jealous for Zion, yes, with great wrath I am jealous for her…I will return to Zion…then Jerusalem will be called the City of Truth…& the streets will (again v4) be filled with boys & girls playing…Let your hands be strong, you who are listening* these days…..” Zech 8:2-5;9. Maranatha!!
Almighty God you will NOT BE MOCKED! Your WORD will prevail. Give us the shaking we need to walk in obedience and wake up. You have given all authority to your church. The power of the spoken word will accomplish what it is set out to do.
Wow!
Right on! Money has become the God of our leaders on both sides of the isle. Pres. Trump stopped the “free flow express” and he his is hated by lobbyists, pols, businesses, other governments and many other sources. There is also Hollywood and the Media who take their marching orders from bad people.
President Biden and his entire family have close ties to China and other governments. Actually America has “for sale” signs all over it now.
The two-tier justice system has embolden crooks on both sides of the isle. Pres. Trump stopped a lot of that action, but now the hose is turned back on. Prayer is our answer….God is still om the throne!
Thank you for making the ugly mask of greed and sin perfectly clear. I pray GOD our Father will have mercy on us and save us by His Grace. I pray He will open the eyes and hearts of people everywhere to study His Word and do His will.
LORD, have mercy on this nation. “In repentance is our salvation and our rest.”
Lord, we as a country have become so materialistic and my prayer is that you would bring us back to values that were impressed in my mind years ago in post depression time that we need to love and care for those who needed help and show them the Love of God. Bless our country and help our leaders to see the dangers of trade and friendly relations with Communistic countries, In Jesus Name, Amen
Love of money is. Money can be a useful tool, but when it becomes an idol, we are in trouble.
as God’s word clearly says, The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, in this we see this being played out. Not money which can also be used for good, but, “the love of money”
Father please help save our country from these evil doers in control of our country
correction, sorry
1 Tim 6:9-10 says “But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and many into foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”
(love of money is not THE root…)
I believe we have been told that PRIDE, rebellion toward God, is THE root of all kinds of evil
Dear Lord, please search our own hearts, and please quicken us to hear and follow You, alone!
if you like to split hairs, then that’s cool but the point was that money in and of itself is not bad , just like food is not bad or work is not bad, taking pride in the work you do is not bad either etc… but whatever you give more importance to than God that can stop you from seeking him can then become evil. thank you
right, whatever you give more importance to than God…
My main point is that 1 Tim 6:10 is so often misquoted as saying the love of money is THE root of all kinds of evil, and I just didn’t want you falling in that same trap.
Because, as you implied, whatEVER you give more importance to than God can then become an idol, a stronghold, binding us to the evil one.
So, love of money is only ONE root of evil, “A” root of all kinds of evil, certainly not THE ONLY one.
God has given us many things to richly enjoy and share, including money, but when we forget that every good gift came from Him, or think that checking off this one box saves us, or that WE have it all figured out, God resists us (James 4:6)
Grace and peace to you, Dan
Lord, please protect our nation from destruction. Reveal the truth about China and the danger of the influence that country has on our leaders. I pray also that Your Word, truth, and justice will prevail in the midst of the chaos going on in our nation. In Jesus holy and precious name, Amen.
Money is the root of all evil.
No, money isn’t the root of all evil. It’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil.
Exactly right! Amen!
No, the root of all evil is the love of anything or any one, besides God.
(in other words, pride, disobedience, and rebellion toward the One who made us and breathed into us our very life breath)
See also my reply to Dan Moylan, above; love of money is only one root of all kinds of evil.