“The conquest of cultural power comes before political power and this is achieved through the concerted action of intellectual ‘organic’ callouts. Infiltrated into all of the communication, expression, and academic media.”
-Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party in 1921
China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi stopped short of banging a Khrushchev-like shoe on the table when he met face to face with new U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Anchorage last week. But he did use our own progressive left’s anti-American propaganda to beat the hapless Blinken about the head and shoulders.
Oppotunistically borrowing from Western academia’s critical race theorists, Black Lives Matter and Antifa street mobs, and a Democratic Party seemingly obsessed with purported “voter suppression” (nearly six decades after passage of the Voting Rights act and as minority voter turnout rises), Director Yang spoke aggressively about the superiority of “Chinese-style democracy” and the “little confidence” that many Americans have “in the democracy of the United States.”
This stunning attack forced Mr. Blinken into a corner from which he really had only two choices. He could, as a more patriotic, if imagined, Secretary Billy Martin might have done, get in the face of his Chinese counterpart, denouncing both the Chinese Communist Party’s murderous, religion- and speech-suppressing regime and leftist propagandandists here at home. But that would surely would have brought a political backlash from the tyrannical minority now running Blinken’s party, including globalist elites eager to profit in China’s market of more than a billion consumers. (See Hunter Biden and his “energy consulting” racket.)
Instead, a struggling-to-gather-himself Mr. Blinken chose the “soft power” option, meaning soft as a grape, spineless, self-flagellating. Defensively, Blinken nodded to acknowledge the obvious, “that we’re not perfect, we make mistakes, we have reversals, we take steps back.” So, in other words, we’re really in no position to complain too loudly about China carting off a million slow-to-assimilate Uighers to labor camps. Especially since work will set them free, right?
Of course, Mr. Yang, his boss President Xi Jinping and other ruthless enemies of the U.S. would never have dreamt of using the American left’s self-loathing propaganda to undermine our diplomatic standing and national security posture if the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, NPR and other woke media outlets hadn’t been so uncritically eager to echo and amplify that propaganda for the past five years or more. The only question now is whether responsible media executives and boards of directors, assuming some still exist, will soberly reflect on the cancerous damage their companies are doing to our nation in the name of circulation, ratings and clicks.