My NatCon 3 Speech: China’s Capture of U.S. Elites and What to Do About It
On the imperative to be America with American characteristics
America with American Characteristics
The fine folks at the indispensable American Mind were kind enough to publish my remarks from this year’s third annual National Conservatism Conference in Miami.
The subject of my speech—which I was proud to deliver alongside eminent co-panelists Matthew Turpin, Joshua Steinman, and Sumantra Maitra—was “China’s Capture of US Elites and What to Do About It.”
Here’s how I opened:
China poses the most formidable foreign challenge we face. But in my view, the most formidable aspect of this challenge is domestic. The obstacle is us ourselves.
More specifically, it is our ruling class—those seated atop the commanding heights of our most influential institutions from Harvard to Hollywood; Seattle to Silicon Valley; and Wall Street to Washington, D.C. The very people who see events like this, and their participants, as “dangers to our democracy”—rather than as essential exercises for restoring some semblance of a republic.
I chose to focus on the ruling class today, not because there aren’t myriad other aspects to the China challenge worthy of exploration—economic, military, technological, and beyond. These are critical topics, meriting substantial focus if we are to devise a plan to defend our national interest.
But as a practical matter, it will be near-impossible to implement and execute any such plan if every power center in the country is averse to it because their occupants have conflated China’s self-interest with their own. We will not get anywhere while our leadership is serving, at best, as unwitting agents of influence for Beijing. And that is the result of the last 50 years of U.S.-China policy: The Chinese Communist Party has pulled off the ultimate influence operation, using our greed, naïveté, and the nature of our elites and their institutions against us.
If we hope to triumph, a precondition is not only that the elements of U.S. national power be as robust as possible, but that those at the helm have the will to wield them in defense of the American way of life. And we are far from that today.
Combatting the China challenge therefore requires overcoming an American ruling class whose zealotry for globalism, environmentalism, and Wokeism—pillars of the new secular state anti-religion—collectively serve as one big euphemism for China First. This anti-religion serves to strengthen China, our greatest enemy, and weaken America, which is portrayed as scourge of the Earth, conceived in sin, and brimming today with semi-fascists.
The ruling class has been literally and figuratively invested in China’s rise for nearly 50 years. It threatens to make its belief in the inevitability of China’s rise to world preeminence a self-fulfilling prophecy. If this ruling class persists in its present course unchallenged, it may never give us a chance to combat Communist China. Rather, we may well converge with it, as can be seen in our elites’ aping of the CCP’s tactics in a bid to subjugate the deplorables and cement oligarchic power and control, eviscerating liberty and justice and threatening to render us “America in Name Only,” or post-America.
Read the whole thing here.
I also spoke at length about this subject in an interview with NTD News here, and delivered a variation of these remarks regarding China’s capture of our media for the Committee on the Present Danger China several weeks back that you may also find of interest beginning at around 33:41 here.
The Damning Danchenko Case
Check out my commentary on recent developments in John Durham’s case against Igor Danchenko, and the broader context as the disappointing special counsel appears to be winding down.
