A Biden-Harris White House would restore many known and some new ghouls to the corridors of foreign policy-making power...
What happens on November 3rd ? It’s like a larger than life replay of the famous Hollywood adage: “No one knows anything.”
The Dem strategy is crystal clear, spawned by the gaming of election scenarios embedded in the Transition Integrity Project and made even more explicit by one of TIP’s co-founders, a law professor at Georgetown University.
Hillary Clinton, bluntly, has already called it:Dems must re-take the White House by any and all means and under any and all circumstances.
And just in case, with a 5,000-word opus, she already positioned herself for a plum job.
As much as Dems have made it very clear they will never accept a Trump victory, the counterpunch was vintage Trump: he told the Proud Boys to “stand back” – as in no violence, for now – but crucially to “stand by”, as in “get ready”.
The stage is set for Kill Bill mayhem on November 3rd and beyond.
Say it ain’t so, Joe
Taking a cue from TIP, let’s game a Dem return to the White House – with the prospect of a President Kamala taking over sooner rather than later. That means, essentially, The Return of the Blob.
President Trump calls it “the swamp”. Former Obama Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes – a mediocre hack – at least coined the funkier “Blob”, applied to the incestuous Washington, DC foreign policy gang, think tanks, academia, newspapers (from the Washington Post to the New York Times), and that unofficial Bible, Foreign Affairs magazine.
A Dem presidency, right away, will need to confront the implications of two wars: Cold War 2.0 against China, and the interminable, trillion-dollar GWOT (Global War on Terror), renamed OCO (Overseas Contingency Operations) by the Obama-Biden administration.
Biden became the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1997 and was the chair in 2001-2003 and again in 2007-2009. He paraded as total Iraq War cheerleader – necessary, he maintained, as part of GWOT – and even defended a “soft partition” of Iraq, something that fierce nationalists, Sunni and Shi’ite, from Baghdad to Basra will never forget.
Obama-Biden’s geopolitical accomplishments include a drone war, or Hellfire missile diplomacy, complete with “kill lists”; the failed Afghan surge; the “liberation” of Libya from behind, turning it into a militia wasteland; the proxy war in Syria fought with “moderate rebels”; and once again leading from behind, the Saudi-orchestrated destruction of Yemen.
Tens of millions of Brazilians also will never forget that Obama-Biden legitimized the NSA spying and Hybrid War tactics that led to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff ,the neutralization of former President Lula, and the evisceration of the Brazilian economy by comprador elites.
Among his former, select interlocutors, Biden counts warmonger former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen – who supervised the destruction of Libya – and John Negroponte, who “organized” the contras in Nicaragua and then “supervised” ISIS/Daesh in Iraq – the crucial element of the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy of instrumentalizing jihadis to do the empire’s dirty work.
It’s safe to game that a Biden-Harris administration will oversee a de facto NATO expansion encompassing parts of Latin America, Africa and the Pacific, thus pleasing the Atlanticist Blob.
In contrast, two near-certain redeeming features would be the return of the US to the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, which was Obama-Biden’s only foreign policy achievement, and re-starting nuclear disarmament negotiations with Russia. That would imply containment of Russia, not a new all-out Cold War, even as Biden has recently stressed, on the record, that Russia is the “biggest threat” to the US.
Woke Kamala in da house
Kamala Harris has been groomed to rise to the top from as early as the summer of 2017. Predictably, she is all for Israel – mirroring Nancy Pelosi (“if this Capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid…and I don’t even call it aid…our cooperation with Israel.”
Kamala is a hawk on Russia and North Korea; and she did not co-sponsor legislation to prevent war against Venezuela and, again, North Korea. Call her a quintessential Dem hawk.
Yet Kamala’s positioning is quite clever, reaching two diverse audiences: she totally fits into The Blob but with an added woke gloss (trendy sneakers, the advertised affection for hip hop). And as an extra bonus, she directly connects with the “Never Trumper” gang.
Never Trumper Republicans – operating especially in Think Tankland – totally infiltrated the Dem matrix. They are prime Blob material. The ultimate neo-con Never Trumper has got to be Robert Kagan, husband of Maidan cookie distributor Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland; thus the running joke in many parts of West Asia, for years, about the “Kaganate of Nulandistan”.
Kagan, self-glorified and idolized as a star conservative intellectual, is of course one of the co-founders of the dreaded neo-con Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That subsequently translated into gleeful Iraq War cheerleading. Obama read his books in awe. Kagan forcefully backed Hillary in 2016. Needless to add, neo-cons of the Kagan variety are all rabidly anti-Iran.
On the money front, there’s the Lincoln Project , set up last year by a gang of current and former Republican strategists very close to, among others, Blob stars such as Daddy Bush and Dick Cheney. A handful of billionaires gleefully donated to this major anti-Trump super-PAC, including J. Paul Getty’s heir Gordon Getty, the heir of the Hyatt hotel empire John Pritzker, and Cargill heiress Gwendolyn Sontheim.
Those Three Harpies
The key Blob character in a putative Biden-Harris White House is Tony Blinken, former deputy national security adviser during Obama-Biden and arguably the next National Security Adviser.
That’s geopolitics – with an important addendum: former national security adviser Susan Rice, who was unceremoniously dropped from the Vice-President shortlist to Kamala’s profit, may become the next Secretary of State.
Rice’s possible contender is Senator Chris Murphy, who in a strategy document titled “Rethinking the Battlefield” predictably goes undiluted Obama-Biden: no “rethinking”, really, just rhetoric on fighting ISIS/Daesh and containing Russia and China.
Suave Tony Blinken used to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 2000s, so no wonder he’s been very close to Biden even before the first Obama-Biden term, when he rose to the top as deputy national security adviser and then, in the second term, as deputy Secretary of State.
Close to Blinken is Jake Sullivan, who under the protective wing of Hillary Clinton replaced Blinken as national security adviser in the second Obama-Biden term. He will have a top place either in the National Security Council or the State Department.
But what about The Three Harpies?
Many of you will remember The Three Harpies, as I coined them before the bombing and destruction of Libya, and again in 2016, when their remixed version’s push for a glorious sequel was rudely interrupted by Trump’s victory. When it comes to Return of the Blob, this is the 5K, 5G, IMAX version.
Of the three original Harpies, two – Hillary and Susan Rice – seem set to snatch a brand new power job. The plot thickens for Samantha Power, former US ambassador to the UN and the author of The Education of an Idealist, where we learn that such “idealist” rips Damascus and Moscow to shreds while totally ignoring the Obama-Biden drone offensive, kill lists, “leading from behind” weaponizing of al-Qaeda in Syria re-baptized as “moderate rebels”, and the relentless Saudi destruction of Yemen.
Samantha seems to be out. There’s a new Harpy in town. Which brings us to the real Queen of the Blob.
The Queen of the Blob
Michele Flournoy may be the epitome of the Return of the Blob: the quintessential, imperial functionary of what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern brilliant christened MICIMATT (the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex).
The ideal imperial functionary thrives on discretion: virtually no one knows Flournoy outside of the Blob, so that means the whole planet.
Flournoy is a former senior adviser to the Boston Consulting Group; the co-founder of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS); a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center; under secretary of Defense during Obama-Biden; favorite of top Harpy Hillary to be Pentagon chief after 2016; and once again favorite to become Pentagon chief after 2020.
The most delicious item on Flournoy’s CV is that she’s the co-founder of WestExec Advisors with none other than Tony Blinken.
Every Blob insider knows that WestExec happens to be the name of the street alongside the West Wing of the White House. In a Netflix plot, that would be the obvious hint that a short walk of fame straight into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue looms in the horizon for the star protagonists.
Flournoy, more than Blinken, turned WestExec into a certified hit in the Beltway MICIMATT profiting from virtually no P.R. and media blitzes, and talking exclusively to think tanks.
Here’s a crucial glimpse of Flournoy thinking. She clearly states that just a benign American deterrence towards China is a “miscalculation”. And it’s important to keep in mind that Flournoy is in fact the mastermind of the overall, failed Obama-Biden war strategy.
In a nutshell, Biden-Harris would mean The Return of the Blob with a vengeance.Biden-Harris would be Obama-Biden 3.0. Remember those seven wars. Remember the surges. Remember the kill lists. Remember Libya. Remember Syria. Remember “soft coup” Brazil. Remember Maidan. You have all been warned.
Baltimore Halts Spy Plane Flights As Program Fails To Reduce Homicides Tyler DurdenSat, 10/31/2020 - 23:00
All flight operations for Baltimore's spy plane program will be canceled today, Saturday (Oct. 31), a Baltimore City Police (BPD) spokeswoman told WBALTV 11. Grounding of the spy plane comes as surveillance flights failed to deter violent crime in the metro area.
Called the Aerial Investigation Research program (AIR), readers may recall we've highlighted this dystopic surveillance program several times (see: here & here), of civilian planes, outfitted with high-tech, possibly military optical sensors, recording citizens' every move.
Since April, the program has been in operation, providing support to investigators who solve violent crimes, such as murders, robberies, and carjackings.
The program was financed solely by Texas philanthropists Laura and John Arnold, via their organizations called Arnold Ventures. The plane's optical sensor is able to record large swaths of the city at a given time.
A BPD spokesperson told WJZ 13: "We will continue to work with our vendor, independent evaluators, and stakeholders to provide additional analysis, briefings and related activities."
Last month, BPD published a preliminary report on the spy plane's effectiveness. The report found only 17 of the 121 homicides in the city between May 1 and Aug. 20 happened during flight hours.
"Evidence from the planes was used in 107 cases out of a total of 874. The report concluded the program helped close a number of homicide cases and more arrests were made in cases with air evidence than without," WJZ said.
City officials hoped the spy plane program would reduce violent crime in a city where the murder rate is some of the highest in the country. Though, judging by homicides trends below, the program has failed to reduce homicides this year.
Opponents of the surveillance program, including the ACLU of Maryland, have been up in arms about the planes buzzing overhead - they argued the program had violated the First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights of residents.
More or less, in Baltimore's case, spy planes failed to deter violent crime - time for the surveillance state to go back to the drawing board - so what's next, drones?
This is a crucial time in the history of our republic.
UN Secretary‑General Antonio Guterres, speaking to the General Assembly on September 22, said the world must do everything to prevent a new Cold War. "We are headed in a very dangerous direction," he said.
We can agree with that dangerous-direction assessment, but we might not agree with his recommendation. Guterres recommended that the world embrace multilateral cooperation.
We can, of course, cooperate with a China that is a partner or a friend. We can even cooperate with a China that is a competitor; all nations to some degree compete. The question is this: Is China just a competitor? Can we, for instance, cooperate with a China that is an opponent or an enemy?
We have to remember that Guterres was speaking at the event marking the 75th anniversary of the formation of the United Nations. It was a rather somber event, because multilateralism, the core ideology of the UN, is failing. Countries are bypassing the UN because they realize it cannot provide security. Countries are defending themselves.
The same thing happened in the 1930s. Countries then bypassed the UN's predecessor, the League of Nations. They realized it was ineffective. Countries could not, in a multilateral setting, cooperate with that era's aggressors: Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
So is China merely a competitor, or is it an enemy? To answer that, I would like to look at four things:
China's spreading of disease,
China's meddling in US elections,
China's subversion of the United States, and
China's militarism.
First, disease. The People's Republic of China has attacked us with a microbe. This attack shows how, and to what lengths, China will go to injure other societies.
Everyone talks about how Chinese generals and admirals are changing the definition of war. Unfortunately, we now have an example of how they are doing so. China's unrestricted warfare -- a term Beijing has been using for at least 21 years -- now includes biological attack.
China's leaders knew for at least five weeks, maybe as much as five months, that the coronavirus was highly contagious, but during this period they propagated the narrative they knew was false.
They were telling the world that this was not readily transmissible from one human to the next. Chinese leader Xi Jinping enlisted the World Health Organization in propagating that narrative, which by the way, senior doctors at WHO knew was false. They knew this virus was highly contagious.
That is why it was right for President Donald Trump to defund and withdraw from WHO.
To make matters worse, Xi Jinping pressured countries not to impose travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals from China. WHO helped him in this regard.
At the same time as Xi Jinping was leaning on other countries, he was imposing those same travel restrictions and quarantines internally. That means he thought these measures were effective. That means he thought his efforts regarding other countries were going to spread the disease.
Fortunately, President Trump imposed travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals from China quickly, on January 31. He took a lot of heat, not only from Beijing, but also somebody called Joseph Biden. Biden called the president "xenophobic" for those travel restrictions, which saved tens of thousands of lives.
Now, President Trump is making China pay. We must make China pay. We must make China pay because we need to establish deterrence. As of this morning, more than 200,000 Americans have been killed by this disease and more will be killed later on.
Worldwide, we recently passed the one million death mark. We cannot allow Beijing to think they can maliciously spread another pathogen ever again.
Trump was cruising to reelection before the disease, but this reversal of fortune -- the result of China's actions -- shows the lengths to which they will go.
Beijing is working hard to unseat President Trump. They are doing so not only with their social media feeds but also with their public pronouncements and other efforts. These efforts are much greater in scope than Russia's in 2016 or Russia's this year. It is not "Russia, Russia, Russia." It really is "China, China, China!"
As an initial matter, Chinese state media and Communist Party media have gone on a bender with unprecedented numbers of news stories, pronouncements, articles, all the rest of it. As a part of this campaign, Beijing has unleashed its trolls and its bots against Trump. The New York Times reported in March that Beijing propagated, through social media feeds and text messages, the rumor that President Trump was going to invoke the Stafford Act and lock down the entire United States. Of course, Beijing knew that was false.
Beijing has also been running operations and networks, including the one called Spamouflage Dragon, which relentlessly attacked the president. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have since taken down that network.
China's effort is massive. We have seen periodically American social media companies take down fake Chinese accounts. In June alone, Twitter took down 174,000 fake Chinese accounts. That is just one month, one social media platform, 174,000 accounts.
This blends into the third topic, which is subversion. TikTok, the wildly popular video sharing app, employs the world's most sophisticated commercially available artificial intelligence. It uses that artificial intelligence to pick videos to send to people.
TikTok, because of its artificial intelligence, knows what you like, so it sends you more of it. It knows what you do not like. It does not send you videos you do not want. This gives Beijing an opportunity to change American public opinion.
The Chinese Communist Party probably changed public opinion in connection with this spring's riots. Some observers think TikTok got college-attending white women to believe they were oppressed and therefore motivated them to demonstrate.
As Paul Dabrowa, an Australian national security expert told me, "Because of TikTok's artificial intelligence and because of its sophistication, it can get people to do things which could end up, for instance, triggering wars, economic collapse, insurrection."
This weaponized propaganda can turn people against one another and also ruin the credibility of their governments. Engineers working for Douyin, TikTok's sister app in China, develop the algorithms for TikTok's use. That is the reason China does not want TikTok sold to an American company: it wants to keep control of that algorithm.
The algorithm curates content and can motivate people to do things they otherwise might not do. People believe Beijing "boosted the signal" this June to help a "prank" against President Trump. Teens were using TikTok to spread videos to encourage people to reserve seats at his June rally in Tulsa but not go. That is exactly, in fact, what happened.
While on the subject of TikTok, we should talk about China's Houston consulate. The question is: Why did the State Department, in July, out of all China's five consulates in the US, pick the one in Houston to close?
The State Department said Houston was being used for espionage. I think State picked Houston -- although there are a lot of other consulates involved in espionage, especially the one in New York and the one in San Francisco -- because in Houston it was providing financial and logistical support to violent protesters in the United States.
Radio Free Asia reports that an intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army actually based themselves in the Houston consulate. Using big data and artificial intelligence, they identified Americans who were likely to participate in Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests.
The PLA unit then created videos and sent them out through TikTok. Those videos instructed people how to riot.
There are also other indications China has been involved in these protests. For instance, on the night of May 31st, one block north of the White House on 16th Street, there were demonstrations. This was the burning, for instance, of St. John's Church.
At that time, there were Chinese demonstrators in the streets. A number of people observed that protesters were not only speaking Mandarin but also seemed to be acting in a coordinated fashion. Some of them were actually overheard talking about how the Chinese government had organized them to do this.
These reports are unconfirmed, but they mirror what people saw of Chinese protesters in Los Angeles, as well as other southern California locations. This month we have also read reports linking Chinese Communist Party front organizations with Black Lives Matters affiliated people.
Further, there have been a number of reports of suspicious activity. In late January, for example, US Customs and Border Patrol agents seized 900,000 counterfeit one‑dollar bills from China at the International Falls Port of Entry in Minnesota.
In China's total surveillance state, no one can counterfeit American currency without Beijing's knowledge, so it appears that this operation had at least the tacit support of the Chinese government. The question is, who counterfeits one‑dollar bills? People certainly do not do that for profit: the cost of counterfeiting those bills and getting them across the Pacific is higher than one dollar.
What probably happened in this case was that China was trying to support violent protesters financially. It is just a guess, but it is the only explanation that makes sense.
By the way, counterfeiting another country's currency is more than just subversion. That is an act of war. If you want another act of war, that is indeed what the PLA did at the Houston consulate.
We just covered subversion. Let us go on to the fourth topic: China's militarism. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ambitions that span the world and are greater than we have seen since Mao Zedong or the dictators of the Axis in the 1930s and 1940s.
Xi has always believed that China should rule the world. He has also always believed he had to get the United States out of the way -- especially because Americans promote ideals that are anathema to totalitarianism.
Xi Jinping has targeted America from the beginning. This is what makes the situation so dangerous. At the same time, Xi's political position seems to be fragile. To bolster his position, Xi has looked to certain flag officers, generals and admirals, to be the core of his political support.
Many now say that, after his purge of "corrupt officers" and after his top-to-bottom reorganization of the military a half‑decade ago, Xi is in control of the military. One can say this, but one can also say Chinese military officers are now so powerful that they can effectively tell him what to do. To put it another way, maybe Xi Jinping realizes that to survive politically he has to let Chinese officers do what they want. We know that the Chinese military, the most cohesive faction in the Communist Party, and other hardliners in Beijing are now setting the tone.
China's military officers are making their "military diplomacy" the diplomacy of the country. We now know that in Beijing, only hostile answers are considered to be politically acceptable.
Xi Jinping is under pressure, things are not going his way. Chinese leaders, civilians and perhaps military officers as well -- know that there is a closing window of opportunity. This became clear in January when the Xinhua News Agency, the official media outlet, ran a story titled: "Xi Stresses Racing Against Time to Reach Chinese Dream."
This is a clear indication that senior Beijing leaders know they are running out of time. It is really no mystery why they may feel this way. China's demography is in the initial stages of accelerated decline. We know that China's environment is exhausted. Think scarcity of water, despite all the flooding. Also, China's people are restive. China is losing support around the world. The Chinese economy is in distress. That was true even before COVID‑19.
The reason this is important is because, up to now, the primary basis of legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party has been the continual delivery of prosperity. Without the assurance of prosperity, the only remaining basis of legitimacy is nationalism. Nationalism, as a practical matter, means military misadventure abroad.
To understand military misadventure abroad, think what is going on in India and what China is doing to threaten Taiwan at this moment -- and not just India and Taiwan. The whole periphery of China has now become a danger zone.
Let's put this hostility in the context of what is occurring inside Beijing. Xi Jinping, since he became general secretary of the Communist Party at the end of 2012, has accumulated almost unprecedented power -- and with it, unprecedented accountability. Unfortunately for him, there is no one else to blame.
At the same time, Xi Jinping has raised the cost of political failure in Communist Party circles. This means Xi knows that should he fail, he could lose everything. He could lose not just power. He could lose assets, his freedom, maybe even his life.
China's ruler right now has a low threshold of risk, meaning there is very little stopping him from engaging in especially dangerous conduct. The concern, of course, is if he thinks he is going to lose everything, he may believe that one way out of his problems is to cause history's next great conflict.
We may think that Xi Jinping should be cautious. Unfortunately, he now has incentives to cause a crisis -- one that for us would be unimaginable.
Question & Answer
Question: On the economic front, here was a deficit primer report from Bloomberg News indicating that Chinese ownership of US Treasuries is down to a little over a trillion dollars. In the Obama years, Chinese ownership was approaching three trillion when total debt was a fraction of what it is today. This suggests the Chinese now have no more power to disrupt the Treasury than a fly on an elephant unless, of course, that fly is carrying the Wuhan flu. Where has China spent or invested that money? There is not another government debt market that could have absorbed two trillion dollars without raising a lot of noise. If it has gone to the Bridges, Roads, and Ports Initiative, isn't that going to end up as one of the worst economic decisions ever?
Chang: First of all, we do not know exactly the full extent of China's Treasury holdings. We have not known that for a very long time. The reason is that China holds a number of its Treasuries through nominees, especially in London.
Those numbers seem roughly correct, especially the one about one trillion dollars now. I am not exactly sure what the number was in the Obama years. Obviously, it was a big number. The reasons there was a fall in their Treasury holdings... two come to mind.
First, since the middle of 2014, China has actually dumped about a trillion dollars or so of Treasuries. They have done that to defend their currency, the renminbi, because the fall in their own currency's value is, perhaps, the most critical problem they face. They have got to defend their currency. They use Treasuries to do that. They use the dollars they receive when they sell Treasuries to buy their own currency, thereby supporting their own currency's value.
The other reason is because Xi Jinping, as we know, has announced his Belt and Road Initiative: a huge infrastructure development plan spanning the world. They spend a lot of money on that.
This spending has resulted in a decrease in their foreign reserves.
These reserves, by the way, although they put out a number every month, that number is probably inflated. China is counting assets that do not meet the definition -- the IMF's definition -- of what may be counted as a reserve asset.
China actually may not have as much money as it says it does. All of this is critically important because of the question of the sustainability of China's initiatives. We may be seeing some very interesting developments. Their Belt and Road investments were may be the worst ever because a number of countries around the world are not paying back China on their loans. These loans were extended under terms that were onerous. Countries nevertheless accepted them.
The point is, these projects are not economically viable. China's ability to achieve its ambitions is very much dependent on the amount of money it has, specifically the amount of Treasuries.
Even China does not have enough to affect markets, at least for more than a month or so. The reason is the world is awash with liquid assets. It still is.
Although China's holdings are big, they probably cannot use them to permanently to undermine the ability of the US Treasury to borrow. The US should not borrow as it is doing, but if it wants to, it does not need China's permission.
Xi Jinping, as mentioned, had two separate initiatives. One was the Belt. The other was the Road, the road being the sea routes between China and Europe, the Belt through central Asia. Basically railroads and highways.
The idea was to be able to get Chinese goods from its east coast over to Europe. These two initiatives have now been amalgamated into the Belt and Road and now span the world. There's a Polar Belt and Road, a Latin American Belt and Road, a Caribbean Belt and Road, and so on. China wants countries to build infrastructure. This is infrastructure generally the private sector would not build. These projects, in general, are not economic. The loans that China extended actually have high interest rates.
The reason leaders in countries accepted these loans was because China just bribed them. Countries took on very high interest loans, and countries cannot now pay them back, including, maybe most importantly, Pakistan, where China's Belt and Road Initiative contemplates something like $60 billion in loans.
Pakistan has now gone to the IMF to get relief on a portion of its indebtedness.
What we are seeing right now is a number of countries, including African countries, that are not able to pay back. People ask, "Why is China's only military base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa?"
One reason is that Djibouti owed China a lot of money and could not pay back. So, China was able to get a concession on a former US military base and now has turned it into China's first offshore base for the People's Liberation Army.
If we want to understand why this is important to us, it is because a Chinese enterprise is now pouring about three billion dollars into Freeport in the Bahamas, 87 miles east of Palm Beach. That container port in Freeport never made economic sense, but it certainly does not make economic sense now that we have COVID‑19 and global trade volumes are declining.
I think that we are going to see, unless the US stops it, the People's Liberation Army with a naval base 87 miles east of Palm Beach.
Question: Dr. Li-Meng Yan has said the COVID-19 virus was released intentionally. Have you please any information on that? [Dr. Yan escaped to the US, but her mother, who had nothing to do with the virus, was arrested in China on October 3. Ed.]
Chang: Dr. Yan released a non‑peer reviewed paper, which looks at this strain and analyzes the splicing of protein into it. When we first heard of the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, my wife said to me, "All diseases in China come from southern China, either Guangdong or Yunan. How come this outbreak is in central China, in Wuhan? There's something suspicious about this."
Of course, China's only P‑4 biosafety lab, that is the highest level of biosafety, is located in Wuhan, about 20 miles away from the seafood market that everyone originally suspected was the origin of the disease. There is certainly a lot of reason to be suspicious.
Also, we know that the State Department sent a team to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, this P‑4 lab, in 2018. They reported a shocking disregard of safety protocols there.
Indeed, China Daily, an official newspaper for China, actually published photos on their website trying to convince the world how safe this lab was, but people who looked at the photos noticed that the seals on refrigerators where vials of coronavirus were being stored were broken.
There is another reason to be concerned. The Chinese themselves have admitted they stored more than 1,500 strains of coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute.
Also, they have, in Nature in November 2015, published a paper about gain-of-function experiments. In other words, artificial manipulation of coronaviruses to make them more deadly.
You put all of these things together and you have to be suspicious. There is also some physical evidence that something went on in that lab in October.
We have been monitoring their cell phone traffic. All of a sudden, there is a big two‑week period where there are no cell phone transmissions from the lab. Something may well have gone on there in October or maybe earlier.
Also, in late January, China sent its top bioweapons expert, General Chen Wei, to the Wuhan Institute. She was possibly sent to clean up the lab.
The question is, why did they send their bioweapons expert to head the lab after the outbreak?
I do not have any proof that Dr. Yan is correct in her assertion, but it does not matter how this started because we know what Xi Jinping did after it crippled his country. He took steps he knew or had to know would lead to the spread of the disease beyond his borders. This is a deliberate spread. That is why this is mass murder. There is no other way to term it. China deliberately spread this disease, causing infections and deaths around the world. One million deaths and counting.
Question: Do you think Xi might try any aggression before November 3rd to derail the presidential election and derail Trump?
Chang: Xi Jinping does not want President Donald J. Trump to be reelected. Whether Xi would do anything or not, I do not know. With a president who is behind in the polls, Xi may decide he doesn't want to disrupt anything. If you listen to what domestic political experts are saying, Xi Jinping looks as if he is going to get the result he wants.
Question: What is going on in the other consulates? What should the US do with China? Decouple? If so, partially? Totally?
Chang: Just a couple of days ago, a former CIA director of Counterintelligence, James Olson, said there are more than a hundred Chinese spies in the City of New York and that many of them report and get directions from the New York consulate.
The remaining ones probably get direction from China's UN mission. Some of them must be directly monitored from China itself. We do not know.
This was brought to light because of the Tibetan who was a NYPD Community Outreach Officer and who is alleged now to be a spy for Beijing. This highlighted China's intelligence operations in Manhattan. Beijing has basically overwhelmed the city with spies.
We can also say the same thing about San Francisco. About two months ago, a Chinese researcher at the University of California Davis failed to disclose her relationship with the People's Liberation Army on her visa application and was questioned by the FBI.
She immediately ran to the San Francisco consulate, where she held up for about two weeks or so while trying to evade capture by the United States. Eventually, China surrendered her.
It is not just a question of the consulates. It is also the embassy itself. China's ambassador, Cui Tiankai, was revealed in FBI transcripts to have been trying to recruit a US scientist in Connecticut as a spy for China. By the way, Ambassador Cui did that in connection with somebody from the New York consulate.
One other thing that happens out of the New York consulate, and happens out of the other consulates, as well. That is, China monitors universities in the United States. A good friend at the City University of New York talks about being visited by Chinese consular officials whenever he gets in their face. He is very much a pro‑democracy guy. He gets sat on by the Chinese consulate.
They are very much involved in trying to manipulate American public opinion and engage in activities that are inconsistent with their status as diplomats.
In terms of what to do about it? I think these consulates should be closed when we find they've been involved in inappropriate activities. I think we should also close much of the embassy because there is so much inappropriate activity.
I would leave the Chinese ambassador in place because we need someone to talk to, but I would expel the current ambassador because of his attempt to recruit a spy. I would tell China, "Look, we would be happy if you want to send a replacement, but in the Chinese embassy itself the only people that will be allowed are the ambassador, his family, a secretary or two, and a bodyguard."
To maintain diplomatic relations with China, the only thing that we need is a phone. Unfortunately, we may get to that point because we cannot afford to have these consulates not only engaging in espionage but also trying to bring down the government of the United States.
I know people are going to say, "We close their consulates. They close our consulates in China." People are going to make the reasonable argument that because China's a closed society, we need our consulates there more than China needs consulates in the United States.
That is a perfectly reasonable argument. It has a lot of validity, but because what China's doing is so dangerous, we have to make a political point to China that we are willing to take a hit to stop their attempts to bring down our government.
No one really wants to do this, everyone wants to maintain friendly relations with every country, but we cannot maintain friendly relations with a country that is trying to subvert us in the way China's been doing.
Question: What changes in China's behavior do you expect, based on your analysis, if there is a new administration?
Chang: Beijing will always test a new American president. And so, for instance, George W. Bush was tested with the Hainan incident on April 1st, 2001, when a Chinese jet clipped the wing of a US Navy EP‑3 reconnaissance plane. The Bush administration was certainly found wanting as it allowed China to strip the plane. The administration even offered China a ransom to get our aviators out of China -- a low point in American history.
We know what they did to Obama. After Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that human rights was not important -- in February 2009, the second month of the Obama administration -- the following month, China interfered with the operation of two US Navy vessels, the Impeccable and the Victorious.
The interference with the Impeccable was so serious that it actually constituted an attack on the United States. The US let it slide.
Ultimately the issue of Biden's China policy is not so much a question of what Biden thinks or what his advisors think. It is a question of what Beijing will force America to do. No one know what that will be.
We know one thing. Every new president will give China a grace period. President Trump did that for about 15 months to try to develop cooperative relationships with Beijing, to see if they could work something out. We know that Xi Jinping did not reciprocate Trump's generous overtures. That is why Trump, starting around the spring of 2018, actually started to impose severe costs on China.
The problem right now with a new president -- this is not just Biden himself, what he thinks -- is that we cannot afford to lose any time giving grace periods to a regime that is relentlessly attacking us. We have to be concerned that an incoming president will do what every president has tried to do. That is the impossible: to attempt to develop cooperative relations with a militant Chinese state.
Question: Would you think that one of the key lessons companies have learned from having their supply chain in China, that replacing that manufacturing capacity outside China may potentially reduce employment and create greater security for those very companies?
If the US encouraged companies to replace Chinese labor in Central America, for example, would that take care of enhancing employment there and reduce the pressure of people wanting to enter the US?
Chang: I think the Trump administration clearly wants to decouple. It wants to reduce American vulnerability to China. We have seen that, of course, in the coronavirus epidemic where China actually nationalized an American factory making N95 masks and also turned around ships on the high seas because they were taking to the US personal protective equipment that China felt it needed for itself.
Companies are reluctant to move out of China because they do not set US foreign policy. They do not consider issues of national vulnerability. They go where they think they can make the biggest profit. That is business.
It is up to the President of the United States to change companies' incentives. He can do that with the use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977.
Trump used that on TikTok. A US federal judge in the District of Columbia overturned, or at least stayed, his order, which means President Trump needs, first of all, to start thinking about not only the '77 act but also the 1917 act, which is the "Trading with the Enemy Act," because judges would have less scope for overturning a designation of that sort.
On the question of Central America, that is important. These societies started to experience real problems after China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 because factories not only left the United States but they also left Central America. That shift destabilized those societies.
It's important to bring manufacturing back, not only to the United States but also to our neighbors to the south because with employment, with factories, with prosperity, that would stabilize those societies. That would mean much less pressure on our southern border.
We Americans -- this goes back, president after president after president -- just ignore our own hemisphere when it comes to security. It is important for us to refocus.
Trump has made some initiatives in this regard. They are good ones. Not only with regard to Mexico, the USMCA, the replacement for NAFTA, but also with his Caribbean initiative. We need to do much more because China is not going to let us alone in our own hemisphere.
Question: Do you think we should treat China as we are treating Iran: imposing sanctions and cutting off countries that do business with China? Also, have thoughts on China's attempt at overtaking globalization of communications with 5G?
Chang: On 5G, go back to the beginning of this year. It looked as if Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer, was going to take over the world's 5G networks.
The Trump administration -- and this is a triumph -- Huawei is dependent on American chips, semiconductors. President Trump, through various actions, has restricted and cut off the sale of chips to China and to Huawei.
That means Huawei may not have a future. You have to see how dramatic this is. Huawei is the world's number one supplier of telecom networking equipment. As of the last quarter, it is also the world's number one maker of smartphones.
Now, Huawei's future is in doubt. If Trump's policies in this regard are continued, we are probably not going to see Huawei as a challenger.
There are other developments that I think will undercut Huawei, as it will undercut Ericsson and Nokia, the other two suppliers of 5G equipment. We are going to go away from these one-company telecom networks. We are going to go to a diversified plug-and-play model where many companies supply 5G equipment and software for a network. This is what happened in the computer industry, for instance.
That model has certainly created a lot more innovation and lowered costs. The Lego model, as it is sometimes called, is certainly going to help the US because we have the companies that can actually compete. This model will undercut China's position.
Other countries have made it clear that they are cutting off Huawei, as well. Perhaps the best example is India. Because China killed 20 Indian soldiers on June 15, India has gone in a good direction, cutting off Huawei, cutting off TikTok, cutting off Chinese companies.
I believe we need to do the same thing. You've got to remember, China declared a "people's war" on the United States in May of last year. They told us we're the enemy, so we might as well take them at their word and start defending ourselves with the vigor that is needed.
There is a lot that we can do. I know the president wants to do that. Right now is not a time for him to do that, of course, because of the sensitivity of the election.
If he is not reelected, others, I hope, will work to make sure that the new president does the same things as Trump would do.
We have a lot to learn from India. China is trying to dismember that country. That has been clear from the writings of Chinese security analysts and goes back to the first decade of this century.
China has been increasing its territorial claims on India and would break the country apart because it has claims not only on Ladakh, which is the area of the fighting since the first week in May, but it also wants the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh.
There would not be much left of India if China gets its way. That is why India, right now, has a very resolute stance. We have seen some extremely important developments.
The first week of May, China invaded India, essentially, in Ladakh, in the Himalayas. The Chinese, in a premeditated act, killed 20 Indian soldiers on June 15. India actually responded. They counterattacked. They took back territory that the Chinese grabbed from them.
What we have found is really interesting: That is China's Ground Force, which is the army portion of the People's Liberation Army, has been incapable of fighting Indians in an area where they had initial success.
In addition to India actually engaging in successful military operations against the Chinese, more importantly, India banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, which was a crippling blow. It also has cut off Chinese contracts in India. It is also, as mentioned, going after Huawei. If India can do it, the question is why can't the United States?
Question: What are the places near the United States besides Freeport is China trying to encircle?
Chang: In the Atlantic, there are two other places that China would like military bases. One of them is Walvis Bay in Namibia, and the other is Terceira, in the Azores. Terceira is home to the Lajes US Air Force base. The US Air Force has redeployed, basically making it, as they say, a ghost base.
China has been eyeing Lajes. Lajes is actually not far from Washington, DC. From there, China could control the mouth of the Mediterranean, control the North Atlantic, put Washington, DC and New York at risk.
I think it's up to the US Air Force to start putting people in Lajes, so the Chinese realize that they cannot take over the airfield. Its runway is almost 11,000 feet long. It can accommodate any aircraft and can threaten the United States. The Atlantic, which we have seen as a preserve, could very well become a Chinese lake.
Question: There is talk that China owns the presidential challenger because of $1.5 billion that China paid his son. Have you thoughts on that?
Chang: Most China analysts believe Beijing favors Trump. I don't buy it -- for two reasons. First, in the Democratic primaries, Chinese propaganda favored Biden over Sanders. Then we have seen Communist Party media, Chinese state, government media, overwhelmingly done its best to tar President Trump.
Chinese media has also said some nice things about Biden recently, so I think that's a real indication of where Beijing is going.
Also, if you look at their troll activities, their bots and things, we do not know the full extent of it, at least people who do not have security clearances. What we have seen, however, is that this underground Chinese social media activity is overwhelmingly directed against President Trump.
This is different than Russia. Russia in 2016 was going after everyone. They were just totally trying to create chaos. China has been much more thoughtful in the way it has been doing it. It is directing its activities against the president. That is an indication of what it wants.
Further, Biden's son, Hunter, has had unusual business dealings with China. Now, there are a lot of Americans who have been entrusted with a billion, $2 billion in Chinese money to invest. If Hunter Biden got a billion and a half, that by itself does not say anything.
What says a lot, however, is that Hunter Biden did not have experience as a fund manager. He still got a billion and a half to manage. This is extremely suspicious, along with all the other facts that are now out in the public. It is evidence of a bargain that certainly looks corrupt.
Question: Should the US ban TikTok if China keeps the algorithm?
Chang: I think we should ban TikTok this very moment. I would not wait. If I were President Trump, I would do everything possible, including the designation under the 1917 Act. I would say that TikTok's operations in the US are over.
Part of the reason the district judge overturned President Trump's 1977 act designation to stop downloads is because it looks like an attempt to permit a US company to buy, to grab TikTok. Now, I think there is nothing wrong with that, but it does not look good.
The president would be on stronger legal grounds if he just said, "Look, we're banning all of TikTok's operations this very moment, and then we will let the chips fall where they may." This would mean that Oracle could still buy it.
The terms of the deal that we know about, Oracle/Walmart, on one hand, and ByteDance, the owner of TikTok on the other, are completely unacceptable. They leave the algorithm in the hands of China.
Oracle with its cloud-providing services could deal with the issue of China using TikTok to surveil Americans. China has been using TikTok to get metadata from Americans, and then use it to power their artificial intelligence back home.
They have also been inserting malicious software on the devices of users that allows China to spy. They have been doing some other stuff like grabbing the data of minors, which is illegal. All of those things could be taken care of if Oracle hosts the data. That is not the problem. What is the problem is the control of the algorithm because that allows China to manipulate US public opinion.
The Radio Free Asia report shows how dangerous this can be. This is an act of war. I do not see why we allow a company that has committed an act of war against the United States to continue to operate here.
Question: If China purposefully released or spread the virus as an act of war, do you think they predicted the economic damage lockdowns would do to the Western economies? And would they continue to propagate data supporting lockdowns to do further damage? Would they release an additional pathogen, or intensify support of domestic groups like Black Lives Matter destabilizing US society?
Chang: I guess all of the above. The thing about what their next step would be, well, we know they are propagating the narrative that China's response to the coronavirus was superior to that of the United States and superior response shows China's form of government is superior to America's.
They had been continually attacking democracy before the coronavirus, but they are especially doing that now. They are going to use their vaccine, which I think will be out first. It might not be reliable, it might even be dangerous, but it will be out first, and they will tout that.
They are going to tout their vaccine in a massive public relations campaign against the United States. In terms of the initial part of the question, whether there might be another biological attack or not, you have to remember that China has been sending seeds, unsolicited, to Americans, to people in Britain, to people in Taiwan. That could very well be an attempt to cause havoc in the United States.
All of these things indicate a real maliciousness. In going back to that earlier question of what we can do about it, we first need to talk about these things in a realistic, blunt way. These go to the core of China's attack on the United States.
Question: Why wouldn't Trump or Pompeo get on the media and announce this, since our media refuses to report on it? Also, didn't we know about this virus in 2016 from the CDC. If not, why was our CDC not prepared?
Chang: The CDC was not prepared. Not only did China lie about the disease, not only did it pressure countries to accept arrivals from China, thereby spreading the pathogen around the world, China did something else. China, on January 20, finally admitted the coronavirus was contagious. On January 21, one day after that, they started a campaign to convince the world that the coronavirus was no big deal. Their line was that the coronavirus would be no more deadly than SARS, which is the 2002, 2003 epidemic that infected, according to the WHO, 8,400 people worldwide, killed 810.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Task Force Coordinator on Coronavirus, at her March 31 press briefing actually said, when she looked at the data from China, she thought this was not going to be a big deal. She first thought this was going to be another SARS‑like event. She also said it was only after she saw the devastation in Italy and Spain did she realize that the Chinese had misled her. Because they misled her, we did not take precautions that we otherwise would have adopted. By the way, Dr. Anthony Fauci has also publicly talked about being deceived by China.
That is probably one of the reasons the response in the US was not as fast as it could have been. Remember, President Trump acted on his gut on January 31, really fast, cutting off arrivals from China. The administration then became lax on this. The Democrats say it is because of the failure of Trump's governance.
A large reason why, if that is true, is because China told the Trump administration, "Don't worry about this."
Question: Would it not be best for Trump to create an alliance to contain China? He has not, it seems, made efforts to create a multiple-country front. Had China not killed the Indian soldiers, India would also not be pushing China back. Do you think there could be an alliance of more countries to counter China?
Chang:: Actually, this is one criticism that a lot of people make about the Trump administration, that it does not work well with allies. I think that is wrong. For instance, here are two examples from recent headlines. One, of course, is the Bahrain, UAE deal with Israel, which is going to be expanded when perhaps Sudan joins, and maybe even Morocco.
You are going to see a Sunni Arab coalition in the Middle East -- a really important development. It is historic. It is important from so many different aspects, and part of it is, it is the real beginning of a US‑led initiative in the region. We have been working with the Gulf States and Israel. They have been happy on their own, to cooperate below the surface. The Trump administration brought this out into the light and is sheparding really important developments.
Of course, the other thing is the Quad: India, Japan, Australia, and the United States. The Quad is actually becoming an effective grouping, and we are going to see other countries join that as well.
US relationships in Asia are actually stronger now than they were under Obama, with the exception of South Korea.
South Korea is not Trump's fault. That is because the South has a communist as a president. Moon Jae‑in is very happy with what China is doing, and very happy with North Korea, and he wants to merge South Korea out of existence.
That is not Trump's fault. As a matter of fact, Trump's South Korea diplomacy has actually been the best under the circumstances.
The administration has worked hard with other countries around the world. The question is, could Trump have done more? One always could do more, but also, let us give the president a lot of credit for some really historic accomplishments that will be remembered, not just during his administration, not just next year, not just next decade. We will be talking about his accomplishments for a very long time.
Question: If after November 3rd, there is no definitive result for a month, would China risk attacking Taiwan with US leadership unknown?
Chang: Yes, I think so. I think that if Trump looked as if he was going to win the election, they might even attack before then. Now, the attack very well may not be a full‑on military attack. They might grab some of the outlying islands, which are just one or two miles away from the Chinese coast.
They could also do something to destabilize Taiwan, which could have consequences that would lead to a full‑on military conflict.
China right now knows the US eventually could win a full‑scale war, so they are reluctant to start one. The point, however, is that China is engaging in conduct that risks accidental military encounters, which could spiral down into history's next great conflict.
We cannot control these things. Especially with Chinese generals and admirals out of control, anything can happen.
So we have to be concerned about China provoking an incident. China has regularly been sending its planes into Taiwan's Air Defense Identification Zone. They have also been initiating especially provocative island-encirclement missions with their nuclear‑capable H‑6 bombers. They have been doing a lot of stuff.
The point here is, we have to be prepared for anything. We need to make a clear declaration in public that the United States will defend Taiwan because Taiwan is crucial to maintaining our western defense perimeter.
Since the end of the 19th century, we Americans have drawn our western defense perimeter off the coast of East Asia. Taiwan is at the center of that crucial line. It is where the East China Sea and South China Sea meet.
Taiwan is absolutely critical because it protects us from a surging Chinese air force and Chinese navy, trying to get to Hawaii. We need to be very clear about this. If we are not clear, China may try to do something that leads to tragedy.
Savage Corp To Shield High-Value Targets With AI-Drone Killing Missiles Tyler DurdenSat, 10/31/2020 - 22:00
Weaponized drone swarms could easily take out oil refiners, nuclear power plants, airports, government buildings, electrical grids, or even cause unfathomable loss of life at sports stadiums.
A recent paper titled "Are Drone Swarms Weapons of Mass Destructions?,"argues such attacks like those mentioned above could be viewed as "weapons of mass destruction."
For example, a massive swarm of drones blew up oil production facilities in Saudi Arabia in 2019. As we recently noted, another incident was unearthed via Freedom of Information Act documents that showed mysterious drone swarms had breached airspace over America's largest nuclear power plant last year.
The question readers should be asking: Where are the layered defense systems that protect these high-value assets?
Well, we might have found one that combats and could completely neutralize a small drone attack.
Defense firm Savage Corp. has developed the SAVAGE missile (Smart Anti-Vehicle Aerial Guided Engagement), a low-cost smart weapon designed with a solid-fuel propellant rocket motor, able to travel around Mach 1, with an effective range of 3 miles, uses thrust-vectoring engines with artificial intelligence to knock small, fast-moving targets out if the sky, like drones.
Forbes said, "the most expensive part of any missile is the guidance system, and this is where SAVAGE is revolutionary."
"SAVAGE uses AI-based computer vision algorithms to detect and track the target," Savage Corp CEO Nick Verini told Forbes in an interview.
Verini said SAVAGE uses a high-tech sensor to detect flying objects in day or night conditions. He said an infrared sensor is an additional option for clients that want to combat drone attacks at night. The warhead on the drone killing missile is "hit-to-kill," meaning it uses kinetic energy to destroy enemy targets.
"We prefer the kinetic impact approach — one missile, one drone — but a potential customer is interested in an explosive payload option for taking down several drones in a 'swarm' with one missile," said Verini.
Launcher concepts on Savage Corp.'s website show the missile can be launched from a shoulder-fired launcher, a vehicle-mounted launch that can hold 64 SAVAGE rounds, and also an aerial launcher from a warplane.
Shoulder-Fired Launcher
Vehicle-Mounted Launcher
SAVAGE missiles aren't a stand-alone system at defending high-value targets. Verini said, "launchers can be integrated with any long-range radar surveillance system, which would cue the launcher to the presence, range, and direction of threats."
He said defense industry partners and military customers have inquired about the missiles:
"We are working with the DoD and several U.S. companies to get to a finished product," said Verini.
With drone threats fast emerging and already a couple of notable incidents, it's only a matter of time before weaponized drone swarms disrupt our way of life via an attack that could be classified as a WMD.
Maybe Savage Corp. has a solution to protect high-value assets via low-cost drone killing missiles?
Wikipedia is the most widely used source of information in the world, and a great deal has been written about its impact on public perception of certain topics. Wikipedia shapes both scientific research and real-world economic outcomes, and is the top source of medical information for both doctors and patients. The widespread reliance on Wikipedia would not be a problem if it were a neutral and authoritative source, but earlier this year Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger declared that “Wikipedia’s ‘NPOV’ (neutral point of view) is dead.” Is Sanger’s statement correct?
A 2018 study by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu compared levels of political bias in Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica by quantifying each encyclopaedia’s respective usage of phrases favoured by Democratic or Republican members of US congress. Their study found that Wikipedia articles are more politically biased than those in Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as being slanted towards Democratic (as opposed to Republican) points of view. The study also found that the amount of bias in Wikipedia articles tended to decrease the greater the number of people who had edited them. The reason for this trend was explained in an earlier study by the same authors: “Benefitting from the efforts of many contributors, an article is also more likely to present controversial content in an unbiased way: thus diversity may help reduce content bias.”
One limitation of Greenstein and Zhu’s study is that it considered only the contents and histories of Wikipedia articles, and did not examine the site’s internal social dynamics. In this article, we build upon Greenstein and Zhu’s analysis by examining specific mechanisms that produce political bias in Wikipedia, with a focus on administrative decisions at the Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard. We also discuss how this bias ultimately affects the site’s content.
Bias in judgments about sources
Wikipedia has several internal policies intended to prevent the spread of false or biased information. One policy, named “Verifiability,” requires that all content on Wikipedia be based on “reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy.” Another policy, “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), requires that Wikipedia articles include all viewpoints in proportion to their prominence in the source material. This does not necessarily mean giving equal validity to all views: for example, most reliable sources that discuss creationism describe it as an unscientific viewpoint, so NPOV policy requires that Wikipedia present it the same way.
An inevitable consequence of these two policies is that the more sources taking one perspective are judged as reliable, and the more sources taking the opposite perspective are judged as unreliable, the more Wikipedia’s articles will lean towards the viewpoint of the first group. Decisions about which sources may or may not be used are left to the judgment of “editors” (that is, people who write, edit, or otherwise contribute to Wikipedia articles), and these decisions are usually made at Wikipedia’s reliable sources noticeboard. Most relevant to assessing bias is the question of which sources have been “deprecated,” which means a source that has been formally prohibited from being used in all but a handful of cases.
Wikipedia’s list of deprecated sources currently contains 16 right-leaning sources: Breitbart, the Daily Caller, the Daily Mail, the Daily Star, the Epoch Times, FrontPage Magazine, the Gateway Pundit, Infowars, LifeSiteNews, News of the World, One America News Network, the Sun, Taki’s Magazine, VDare, WorldNetDaily, and Zero Hedge – and just one left-leaning source, Occupy Democrats. Other politically biased sources have also been deprecated, but it is harder to position them on the left-right political axis, such as media companies controlled by the Russian or Chinese government. The deprecated right-leaning sources include both those that advance far-right conspiracy theories (Infowars and WorldNetDaily) and those that advance ordinary conservatism (the Daily Mail and the Sun), as well as many shades of grey between those two extremes. It could be argued that even the non-extreme sources that have been deprecated are not of a particularly high quality, so the prohibition against citing them is not a problem per se, but a similar standard has not been applied to lower quality, left-leaning sources such as CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos.
According to Ad Fontes Media‘s widely-used media bias chart (which is commonly cited in discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard), CounterPunch, AlterNet, and the Daily Kos are all less reliable than the Daily Mail. This is significant because the Daily Mail, a deprecated right-leaning source, is often used as a benchmark for judging whether other right-leaning sources should be deprecated. All three of these left-wing sources are widely used at Wikipedia. An external links search shows around 2,580 Wikipedia pages linking to CounterPunch, around 2,400 linking to the Daily Kos, and around 1,640 linking to AlterNet. (These search results include both articles and talk pages, because Wikipedia’s software does not have a way to confine an external links search to just articles.)
A proposal to deprecate AlterNet was made in April 2019, but the proposal received very little support. One user argued that AlterNet should be deprecated due to the site’s distribution of false medical information—that anthrax can be treated using homeopathy, for instance—meant that following its instructions can cause bodily harm. On the other hand, one of the users opposed to deprecation argued that AlterNet is “valuable for providing progressive viewpoints and reporting or interviews of progressive organizations.” The majority of the Wikipedia articles citing AlterNet are not medical articles, but in light of Wikipedia’s status as the most widely used source of medical information for doctors and patients, allowing citations to AlterNet poses a risk that does not exist for most of the deprecated right-leaning tabloid newspapers and political websites.
The discussion that failed to deprecate AlterNet had sparse participation, with comments by only seven users. This outcome underlines the subjective nature of judgments about sources because with a different balance of viewpoints among its participants the discussion could have easily produced a different result. To understand the root cause of bias in discussions like this it is necessary to understand the factors affecting the balance of viewpoints among the discussion’s participants.
Bias in Arbitration Enforcement
Wikipedia calls itself “The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit,” but this is only true for uncontroversial articles. Many controversial topics have additional restrictions about who is allowed to edit them, such as only users who have registered an account and have accumulated a certain number of edits. More relevant to content or sourcing decisions is another type of restriction applied to some topics known as discretionary sanctions. These are a special set of powers given to administrators (admins) in some topic areas that allow them to place blocks or sanctions on any person editing the topic whom they believe to be acting disruptively. Discretionary sanctions can only be authorized by the Arbitration Committee (a.k.a. ArbCom), which is English Wikipedia’s highest ruling body, and usually are authorized at the conclusion of an arbitration case covering a topic.
Discretionary sanctions are authorized in most of Wikipedia’s controversial topics, and cannot be lifted or modified unless there is a consensus among admins to do so. Because it is quite difficult for them to be lifted or modified, and because it is up to admins’ individual judgment what behaviour should be punished under this system, it would be quite easy for any administrator to use this system to suppress one side of a dispute. This could be done by blocking or topic banning most of the editors on one side (a topic ban prohibits a person from contributing to any articles or discussions related to a topic), or by making editors on one side feel unwelcome until they choose to leave. If this were to occur it would affect the balance of participants in discussions about sources or article content, and ultimately affect the outcome of those discussions.
We have examined the history of reports at Wikipedia’s Arbitration Enforcement noticeboard with respect to four politically controversial topics in which discretionary sanctions are authorized, and how the viewpoints of editors involved in those reports relate to the reports’ outcomes. Arbitration Enforcement is Wikipedia’s main forum for implementing discretionary sanctions, as well as for reporting possible violations of decisions made by ArbCom. To make our analysis as systematic as possible, we have excluded reports made on other noticeboards, as well as sanctions imposed by ArbCom directly, because outside of Arbitration Enforcement it is much more difficult to measure the number of opportunities for disciplinary action to occur. This examination was performed using the chi-squared test for independence, which measures whether there is a statistically significant relationship between categorical variables and represents the core of our analysis. Click here for a complete description of the statistical analyses and its results, including tables of the raw data.
The first topic area we’ve examined is the articles covered by the American politics 2 arbitration case, and more specifically those reports that relate to President Trump, as well as to closely related topics such as the 2016 election and the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. We decided to include just these topics because other disputes that have fallen under the American politics 2 case can be difficult to break down along party lines. For example, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign has received criticism both from the Republican party and from his rivals in the Democratic party.
Figure 1: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in American politics AE reports.
The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when Trump won the Republican nomination in July 2016 until the end of August 2020, and includes a total of 114 disputes, each consisting of two or more editors. We have classified most of the editors involved in these disputes as either “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump.” An editor being classified as “pro-Trump” does not necessarily mean that they consider Trump a good president or that they voted for him—it simply indicates that this person’s edits or proposed edits to Trump-related articles were more favourable than negative, while being classified as “anti-Trump” indicates the opposite.
Our analysis of this topic found an odds ratio of 6.02 (95 percent confidence interval: 3.23, 11.23), meaning that pro-Trump editors were about six times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement (AE) than anti-Trump editors.
The second topic area that we examined is the articles covered by the Gun control arbitration case. The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the gun control arbitration case concluded in April 2014 until the end of August 2020. Our analysis of this topic, which included 19 disputes of two or more editors, found an odds ratio of 3.73 (95 percent CI: 0.98, 14.23), meaning that editors who were opposed to stricter gun control laws were about four times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement than those who were in favour of stricter gun control. (As before, these classifications refer to the overall balance of a person’s edits to gun-related articles, as it is not always possible to know an editor’s personal opinions.) This analysis, though trending in the same direction as the others, was not statistically significant at the p < .05 level, likely due to the small sample of reports available for analysis.
Figure 2: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in gun control AE reports.
The third topic that we examined is the articles covered by the race and intelligence arbitration case. The dispute covered by this arbitration case, and by the subsequent AE reports, has mostly been between those who argue that the cause of ethnic group differences in average IQ scores should be described as a legitimate scientific debate, and those who argue that research about race and IQ should primarily be described as racist pseudoscience. This topic’s political nature becomes clear when examining the various attempts to have academics who have written about race and IQ, such as Noah Carl and Bo Winegard, fired from their positions. These attempts have come almost entirely from the Left, while right-leaning publications such as the Spectator, the Telegraph, and Spiked Online have generally been more sympathetic to these researchers.
The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the race and intelligence arbitration case concluded in August 2010 until the end of August 2020, for a total of 43 disputes (several of which involved more than two editors). Our analysis of this topic found an odds ratio of 6.23 (95 percent CI: 2.26, 17.13), meaning that editors who are favourable towards research about race and intelligence are over six times more likely to be disciplined at Arbitration Enforcement than those who are opposed to it.
Figure 3: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in race and intelligence AE reports.
The fourth topic area that we examined is the abortion arbitration case. The timespan examined for this topic is the period from when the abortion arbitration case concluded in November 2011 until the end of August 2020. Only seven AE reports have been made under this case, which limits the power of the analysis, but the limited data from this topic shows the most unequivocal relation between viewpoints and administrative results of any of the four topics we examined. Every AE report in this area against an anti-abortion editor has resulted in a warning or sanction, and no such reports have ever resulted in a warning or sanction for someone whose edits were favourable to abortion, although this perfect alignment between editorial positions and report outcomes would not necessarily have been the case in a larger sample.
Figure 4: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in abortion AE reports.
Among the 30 or so topic areas in which discretionary sanctions are authorized, these four topics were chosen because they are areas where the two sides of the controversy tend to align with the left-right political axis (whereas this is less the case in other DS-authorized topics such as, say, Scientology or India and Pakistan). In other words, people who lean to the left politically are more likely to view President Trump and race research unfavourably and are more likely to be in favour of stricter gun control laws and keeping abortion legal. In all four of these topics, the evidence for bias points in the same direction: editors who support views associated with the political right tend to receive disciplinary action more frequently than those who support views associated with the political left.
Considering this common trend shared by the four topics, we have performed an aggregate analysis of the data from all four topic areas, comparing the overall rate of disciplinary action for editors with left-leaning positions and those with right-leaning positions. This leads to a total of 368 opportunities for disciplinary action, split nearly 50/50 among right- and left-leaning editors. Examining these four topic areas in aggregate produces an odds ratio of 6.41 (95 percent CI: 3.94, 10.43), meaning that overall, in these politically loaded topics, editors who support right-leaning views are over six times more likely to be sanctioned at Arbitration Enforcement than those who support left-leaning views.
Figure 5: Contingency table and association plot for position and action in combined American politics, gun control, race and intelligence, and abortion AE reports.
Administrative attitudes
In the absence of any additional context, one possible interpretation of some of these results is that Wikipedia’s administrators are apolitical, and that right-leaning editors are sanctioned more often because their behaviour tends to violate Wikipedia’s policies more often. This argument has been made with respect to Trump-related AE reports: that because the coverage of President Trump in the mainstream media is predominantly negative, people whose edits take an anti-Trump viewpoint inevitably are supported by reliable sources, while those whose edits take a pro-Trump viewpoint are not.
However, our results indicate that the tendency for right-leaning editors to be sanctioned more harshly is not limited to reports related to Trump. The same tendency also exists in areas such as gun control, where this alternative explanation presumably would not apply, at least not to the same degree.
In addition, the argument that Wikipedia’s admins are apolitical ignores another important point: in many cases they do not claim to be apolitical. It is a widely expressed view among Wikipedia administrators, as well as by Wikipedia’s parent organization, that Wikipedia should show little tolerance for editors perceived as having right-wing points of view.
In December 2018, when several administrators were applying for positions on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, all of the applicants were asked the following question:
With the rise of far-right and hate groups online, are you concerned that editors espousing such beliefs may try (or are already attempting) to use Wikipedia as a vehicle for propaganda? Why or why not? If yes, what role do you think ArbCom could play in counteracting their influence on Wikipedia?
The majority of the candidates, including four of the six candidates who went on to win positions on ArbCom, answered that far-right editors were a particularly severe problem at Wikipedia and that ArbCom must take an active role in stopping them. (Of the two candidates who were elected without giving this answer, one responded that dealing with these editors was the responsibility of the Wikipedia community rather than of ArbCom, while the other declined to answer.) One experienced administrator who has served several terms on ArbCom gave an answer representative of the majority view:
Yes, Wikipedia has had this problem since before [the arbitration case] Race and intelligence, but the methods of these groups have become more sophisticated in recent years. Biased use of sourcing and other neutrality problems is the first problem posed here … The use of biased sourcing and other verifiability problems is the other problem. This is more difficult to tackle in arbitration (ArbCom cannot easily say “That source looks and sounds real, but it’s a far-right mouthpiece and your use of it was disruptive”), but we make do with what we have.
The perceived need to combat right-wing editors is explained in greater detail by a Wikipedia essay stating that editors who are Nazis or racists should be blocked on sight, even if their behaviour is not violating any Wikipedia policies. (This essay uses the terms “racist” and “Nazi” interchangeably.) Wikipedia essays do not have the same force as actual policies, but they are commonly used as guides for administrative actions. The essay’s definition of racism is very broad: A subpage of the essay listing “pages often edited by racists” includes the articles “Ann Coulter,” “Intelligence Quotient,” and “All Lives Matter.”
Individual administrators have expressed similar views. For several years, a personal essay written by one administrator argued that “uncritical right-wing ideology is disqualifying for Wikipedia editors” or (in another version of the essay) that “in my view, believing that Trump is a good president indicates that you are probably not competent to edit Wikipedia,” although following criticism from several non-admins he rewrote the essay in milder form in May of this year. His rewriting of this essay does not appear to indicate a real shift in attitude about the politics he expects Wikipedia editors to have, as he has expressed a similar sentiment in a subsequent discussion about the Black Lives Matter movement: “You can be one of three things: ally, enemy, or collaborator. Be an ally.”
The most recent major statement about the political views expected from Wikipedia editors has come from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia. In June 2020, the organization published a statement endorsing the goals of Black Lives Matter, which reads in part: “On these issues, there is no neutral stance. To stay silent is to endorse the violence of history and power; yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is well past time for racial justice in America and beyond.”
The statement “there is no neutral stance” is probably a reference to Wikipedia’s “Neutral Point of View” policy, which is still an official Wikipedia policy. This apparent rejection of a core Wikipedia policy by the site’s parent organization did not go unnoticed by members of the Wikipedia community, who subsequently debated the statement’s implications.
The views expressed by various Wikipedians about the WMF’s statement reveal an informative contrast. Non-admins commenting on the statement expressed a variety of opinions, but more disapproved of the statement than approved, with a few being highly critical. However, no Wikipedia administrators openly criticized the statement. Of the seven administrators commenting in the discussion about it, two (Nosebagbear and DGG) expressed mild concerns or disagreements, one (Llywrch) commented without expressing an opinion, while the other four (Pharos, Sj, The Blade of the Northern Lights, and Amorymeltzer) all defended the WMF’s statement. Ironically, one of the more prominent Wikipedians to directly criticize the WMF’s statement was an ex-administrator, who was stripped of her admin powers in January of this year.
This contrast between the views of admins and of non-admins hints at the existence of a cultural divide over the issue between Wikipedia’s management and its ordinary members. In general, Wikipedia’s management has expressed more positive views than its ordinary members about the idea of requiring editors of controversial articles to hold left-leaning views. However, only administrators have the authority to decide the outcome of Arbitration Enforcement reports, so the broader Wikipedia community cannot easily prevent this type of activist approach from being used there.
How administrative bias affects articles
Over a period of many years, as Wikipedia editors on one side of a dispute receive disciplinary action more often than those on the other side, the position that is supported by admins tends to become over-represented among editors. One might expect this imbalance to result in article wording that is subtly biased in favour of the dominant viewpoint, or to result in an excessive number of sources that support the opposite viewpoint being judged as unreliable, but the imbalance also can affect articles in more profound ways. Here we’ll examine one of these more significant effects on Wikipedia’s article about Linda Gottfredson, a psychologist who has published research about race and IQ among many other topics (and consequently an article that is covered by the “Race and intelligence” arbitration case).
From January 2016 until October 2017, Wikipedia’s article about Gottfredson contained a highly disparaging quote. The Wikipedia article said the following:
Barry Mehler writes in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education that Gottfredson is attempting to promote racial theories used by the Nazis:
Thus, we see that Gottfredson’s opposition to affirmative action is based not in any such claimed “objectivity,” but in a sanitized resurrection of ideas put forward by Nazi racial theorists. Under the false pretence of intellectual honesty, she has endorsed the same poisonous ideology that half a century ago led to the Holocaust.
There is one problem with this quote: Mehler most likely never said it. The citation that Wikipedia gave for the above quote is “Mehler 1994,” with no title or issue number given. But according to Google Scholar, Barry Mehler has never published a paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) in 1994 or any other year. Mehler published only a single paper in 1994, and while the paper does compare the twin studies used by behavioural geneticists to Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz, it does not mention Gottfredson. Mehler’s writings have a tendency to be examples of Godwin’s law, so the quote comparing Gottfredson’s views to Nazism does seem like the type of thing he might have said. But there is no source indicating he actually did.
The non-existence of a real source for this quote can be corroborated with a date-restricted search for the quote on Google, Google Books and Google Scholar, limited to before it was added to the Wikipedia article in January 2016. These three combined searches turn up a single result: the 2005 book Destructive Trends in Mental Health. This book contains a chapter by Linda Gottfredson (which is probably why it appears among the Google results), but it does not contain this quote, or cite Mehler. Judging by the Google results, the Wikipedia article about Linda Gottfredson was the first place this quote ever appeared.
This alleged Mehler quote was removed from the Wikipedia article as “unverifiable” on October 20th, 2017, but by that point the damage had been done. This quote was subsequently repeated in the bookModern American Extremism and Domestic Terrorism, published by ABC-CLIO in 2018. Instead of copying Wikipedia’s vague reference to a non-existent JBHE paper, this book instead cites the quote to a 1999 article from the Southern Poverty Law Centre. While the cited SPLC article mentions Gottfredson, it does not contain this quote.
Wikipedia’s policy regarding biographies of living people, also known as BLP policy, requires that all statements about living people be supported by a reliable source, and for unsourced and poorly-sourced material to be immediately removed. But like all Wikipedia policies, this policy can only be applied if there is someone willing to uphold it. During the 21 months that the Gottfredson article contained this apparently fabricated quote, the article was being sporadically edited by several people, who quickly undid attempts at removing negative material from the article. But the people maintaining the article during this time were almost entirely people who had unfavourable opinions of Gottfredson, and their diligence did not extend to making sure all of the negative material was cited to sources that actually existed.
The principle illustrated by this series of events is that members of Wikipedia are far less likely to notice and remove vandalism or hoax material if it is in support of a viewpoint that they agree with. (This is true of all viewpoints, both left-leaning and right-leaning.) While this particular example was more severe than most, the same principle also applies to more subtle violations of Wikipedia’s content policies, such as article text not adequately supported by the sources it cites. When Wikipedia’s administrators suppress one side of a dispute in a controversial topic, one of the long-term results is that policy violations favourable to the opposite side may be overlooked for months or years.
The history of the Gottfredson article also demonstrates one of the dangers that arise from suppressing one side of a dispute, and the resulting lax enforcement of BLP policy or other Wikipedia policies. Many journalists and academics rely on Wikipedia as a source of information, so when hoax material—including hoax material about living people—is not removed in a timely manner it may eventually be repeated in published books or articles, as happened in this case.
The importance of viewpoint diversity
In the view of the Wikimedia Foundation, on certain controversial topics there is only one acceptable opinion, and this view also has been supported by many of English Wikipedia’s administrators. This attitude is reflected in administrative decisions at Arbitration Enforcement and, ultimately, in the content of articles. The problem currently facing Wikipedia is that the creation of a high-quality encyclopaedia requires the exact opposite attitude, for the reasons explained by Greenstein and Zhu: A diversity of editorial viewpoints and backgrounds makes controversial topics more likely to be presented in an unbiased manner.
As both the news media and academia become steadily more partisan, perhaps it was inevitable that Wikipedia would eventually follow a similar route. However, one difference between Wikipedia and most newspapers is that Wikipedia has core policies, such as NPOV and BLP policy, that still theoretically remain in effect. It remains to be seen how Wikipedia and its parent organization will handle the contradiction between these policies and their growing politicization.
There are three possible outcomes:
One is for Wikipedia or the WMF to implement reforms protecting the viewpoint diversity necessary for its core policies to be upheld.
A second option is for these policies to be officially overturned, although it is unlikely the Wikipedia community would agree to a change on that scale.
The final possibility, and perhaps the most likely, is the one predicted by Larry Sanger: that these policies will remain on the books, with perhaps a few half-hearted attempts at reform, but that in the long term they will come to be understood as unenforceable.
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Shuichi Tezuka and Linda A. Ashtear are pseudonyms of two American academics.
