Americana

At CPAC, China is the new big bad

THE SCENE

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Roy Liu had not come to CPAC to hear Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville accuse leftists of wanting “one gender,” or to buy a “Biden-Fetterman 2024: It’s a No-Brainer” T-shirt. He, and dozens of other activists with the New Federal State of China, wanted to build support for destroying the Chinese Communist Party.

“The U.S. needs to decouple from the CCP, and needs to stop supporting it on all fronts,” said Liu, who had been conducting on-camera interviews with people stopping at the NFSC booth. “Then the Chinese people can rise up and take down the firewall and learn the truth. And then, they can take down the CCP.”

DAVID’S VIEW

Challenging China is the great bipartisan cause in Washington these days. On Capitol Hill, it has united lawmakers behind ambitious science and tech legislation and spurred the creation of a House select committee focused entirely on threats posed by Beijing that leaders in both parties have endorsed. Democrats and Republicans alike joined the week-long uproar about China’s spy balloon last month.

But if the mood at CPAC is any indication, the danger of the CCP has become an all-consuming issue for the conservative base in a way it simply has not for Democrats. Nearly every topic discussed in the conference’s first day had a China angle — a change from just one year ago, when a poll of CPAC attendees found that they considered President Biden, not Beijing, the biggest threat to America.

This weekend’s CPAC is the first to be held at the Gaylord National Resort, down the road from Washington, since 2020. That year’s was the last large political gathering before the COVID pandemic, commemorated in “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”

This year’s began right after the Energy Department and FBI Director Christopher Wray suggested that the virus may have spread after a lab leak in China. Conservatives who’d questioned early media coverage, dismissive of the “lab leak theory,” felt validated. Yet another threat from Xi Jinping’s China — stealing jobs, producing fentanyl, suppressing human freedom, and then a pandemic.

“It’s becoming a domestic issue,” said Brett O’Donnell, a Republican strategist who works with ex-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. “They’re in the sky. They’re buying our land. They’re in your kid’s phone.”

Pompeo, who’ll address the conference today, planned to contrast his hard line against China with Donald Trump’s initial reluctance to criticize its handling of the COVID outbreak. “It was wrong to praise the Chinese Communist Party for how they handled the virus,” Pompeo will say, according to an excerpt shared with Semafor. “I have always been clear that Communist China gave us COVID and they lied to cover it up.”

Some of the heated rhetoric from politicians at the conference wouldn’t have been that out of the ordinary on Capitol Hill. Tennessee Sen. Bill Hagerty accused the CCP of “violating our sovereignty every single day when they kill our youth, here in America,” while discussing smuggled fentanyl.

“If your child or grandchild is on TikTok, you get them off of TikTok tonight!” said Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn. “Tonight! Because the Chinese Communist Party is building a virtual view of your child online. They’ve got their face, they’ve got their keystrokes, they’ve got their search history. And they are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive your child where they want that child to go.”

KNOW MORE

But at CPAC, those kinds of familiar riffs were supplemented by media and lobbying groups that support regime change in Beijing, and have never been more visible.

The Epoch Times, a newspaper associated with the Falun Gong religious movement suppressed by Xi’s government, had a sprawling presence at the conference, including the screening of “The Shadow State,” billed as “the first documentary about ESG” — another target of conservatives, both at CPAC and on the Hill.

And the New Federal State of China, “declared” three years ago by Steve Bannon and exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, made its first CPAC appearance with a $75,000 sponsorship, and two high-tech booths where volunteers handed out leaflets and explained why the battle to destroy the CCP had to be won in America.

That isn’t hyperbole. “The elimination of the Chinese Communist Party is essential in breaking the shackles of slavery imposed on the Chinese people,” Bannon said at the 2020 ceremony launching the NFSC, “and also, in bringing about peace to the international community and all mankind.” Guo, citing “Chinese culture,” pricked his finger and signed the declaration with his blood.

The Bannon-Wengui partnership burst into the headlines before the 2020 election, when Bannon was arrested on Guo’s yacht on charges that were later superseded by a pardon from President Trump. Guo declared bankruptcy last year, claiming that his wealth had dwindled to less than $100,000. But their flashy CPAC presentation, including some advocates who described fleeing China after the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, found a receptive audience, and rhymed with what was happening on the main stage.

“In Michigan, we have a CCP presence,” Michigan Republican Party chair Kristina Karamo told one NFSC interviewer. “We have an ESG compliance officer implementing Agenda 2030 in our county. We have UN logos on our county documents.”

The Republicans shuttling between National Harbor and the Hill might not go that far. But they were speaking to a base that saw China’s hand in everything from COVID-era school closures to TikTok-driven mental illness — and, as several legislators said, literally saw China’s spying eye when they looked skyward.

ILLINOIS

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot didn’t just lose on Tuesday. She hobbled to a mere 17% of the vote in the nonpartisan election, placing third in the nine-way field — the only incumbent, at any level, who failed to make the April 4 runoff. Ex-schools CEO Paul Vallas led with 34%, and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson grabbed 20% to make the runoff.

Turnout fell slightly from the 2019 election, and the runoff will pit a white candidate endorsed by the city’s right-leaning police union with a black candidate endorsed by its left-leaning teachers union. Lightfoot had dismissed Johnson until the campaign’s final week and told Charles Blow in a pre-election interview that Vallas was giving “voice and platform to people who are hateful of anyone who isn’t white and Republican in our city.”

A review of the ward-by-ward results showed Vallas winning far more than the Trump vote, though he did best in districts where the ex-president ran strongest in 2020. Johnson surged into the runoff thanks to his strength in the city’s progressive north side. In January, Lightfoot had pummeled Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia with negative ads about a donation from disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Friend, who is an investor in Semafor, and his work with disgraced ex-state house Speaker Mike Madigan. Garcia’s support outside of Latino wards collapsed, moving to Johnson, while Lightfoot won most of the city’s Black wards with a weak plurality of the vote.

D.C.

President Biden said on Thursday that he’d sign a resolution rolling back an update to D.C.’s new criminal code, which got unanimous support from Republicans and critical support from some Democrats.

That caught the D.C. council and its allies — included most Democrats in Congress — flat-footed. The White House had indicated its opposition to the resolution, which invoked Congress’s rarely-used power to reverse laws passed by the district’s government. (It hadn’t been used to reverse a change to the criminal code since 1981, when a bipartisan majority stopped the city from removing penalties for consensual sex.)

The criminal code update, a years-long project, raised the maximum penalties for some crimes and lowered them for others — particularly carjacking, which saw the maximum recommended sentence lowered from 40 to 24 years. Republicans, and some Democratic critics, seized on that to say that the city was encouraging crime during a spike in both carjackings and murders. Lobbying to stop the resolution, Mayor Muriel Bowser focused less on defending the changes than saying that it was up to the council, not Congress, to fix it.

A mini-wave of polls has arrived since Nikki Haley joined the presidential race, none of them finding more than single-digit support for her. The contest in the high-awareness GOP voter’s mind is still between Trump and DeSantis, but Arizona is particularly friendly territory for Trump, the first Republican presidential candidate to lose the state this century. By 18 points, more Republicans say the party should nominate candidates like Trump than candidates like ex-Gov. Doug Ducey, as the hangover from the 2020 count and 2021 attempt to overturn it continues.

“Palo Alto,” a new history of California by Malcolm Harris, traces the development of modern capitalism from the gold rush to Palintir. He talked with Americana about the story outlined in his book, and how it clashes with the one myth-makers have been telling for decades.

Americana: You open the book with this quote from Karl Marx, from a letter he wrote in 1880: “California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.” What is Marx talking about?

Malcolm Harris: That quote’s been jarring for people. “How could Karl Marx know about California?” This is the middle of the 19th century, and California is where things were happening. We’d never seen the practice of capitalism go so fast, anywhere. In California, it hits like a meteor. In 1880, as far as the Western world is concerned, California is the furthest corner of the earth. It’s right out there with, like, Australia and islands in the middle of the Pacific.

Spanish colonization was coastal. Russia looked at it, the British looked at it, France looked at it — no one could figure out how to thoroughly colonize Alta California until the Anglo-Americans in the second half of the 19th century, and they brought in capitalism as fast as they could. That meant bringing in technological advancement, too. California goes, very quickly, from being at the edge of the world to the center of a new world system.

From the very beginning, all production in California was high tech — agricultural, mining, whatever. They’re using the latest practices, not just in terms of tools and machinery, but in labor practice and social practices, applying them to this blank slate.

Americana: The story that Silicon Valley tells about itself is usually about counter-culture guys in their garages, experimenting and disrupting. What’s missing from that story?

Malcolm Harris: Yeah, they’re great at telling it. And it doesn’t start in the 60s: Look at Wallace Stegner, who runs the Stanford MFA program for a long time, and ends up being the most important Palo Alto literary figure. “Angel of Repose” — that’s all about mythologizing the 19th Century West and northern California. He’s mythologizing a mining engineer. When you look at the prevailing history of Silicon Valley, it’s often “the hippies invented the internet, and that was good,” or “the hippies invented the internet and the personal computer, and that was bad.”

There’s been a lot of effort put into retelling that story. The more I researched, the less and less important it seemed, and the more and more it sounded like a cover story. They’re not talking about Oliver North and Iran Contra and Stanford Technology Corp, or the selling of signal intercept technology to the Shah, or networking out of the Panama Canal Zone where they’re cataloging future murder victims across Latin America. That’s what’s going on. The Grateful Dead are not actually the prime movers of the 20th century.

Americana: What role does Palo Alto play in the making of American conservatism?

Malcolm Harris: It’s funny that we think of the California Palo Alto tech guys entering the conservative movement as an aberration, or some crazy new thing. Herbert Hoover, Stanford’s most famous early graduate, is not just some one-term president. He’s the guy who really wins the 20th century; he’s the progenitor of the conservative movement as we know it today. He out-lives FDR, not just literally but politically.

If you look at Ronald Reagan, he’s consecrated at the Hoover Institution by George Shultz and that milieu. David Packard, the founder of Hewlett Packard, was not just a member of the Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution. He becomes a Deputy Secretary of Defense for Nixon during the Vietnam War. He pulls out money from his own pocket and rescues the American Enterprise Institute. The back rooms where Reagan and George W. Bush get picked are in Palo Alto.

Americana: What worries you the most that’s coming out of the valley right now?

Malcolm Harris: I think it’s the nationalist turn in tech, which really goes back to 9/11, and the market opportunities that the tech industry saw, really led by Larry Ellison. The Snowden revelations, as disturbing as people found them, did not lead to any sort of reckoning in terms of the relationship between tech and the government and user privacy. After you see Peter Thiel meeting with Trump, suddenly, all these tech companies started going for prime defense contracts.

Silicon Valley has been very close to the military-industrial complex for a long time, but it’s almost always been as subcontractors. They’ve never wanted to be accountable to the government. That changes in the wake of that Trump meeting. You start to see prime contracting now snapped up by Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. And that’s frightening to me. Because we have the same internet now that we did before Snowden.

• 32 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election and Chicago’s mayoral runoff
• 74 days until primaries in Kentucky
• 247 days until elections in Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, Mississippi, and Virginia
• 613 days until the 2024 presidential election

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