Forgotten Pandemic Offers Contrast to Today’s Lockdowns

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In the late 1960s, the Hong Kong flu was allowed to run rampant until a vaccine was introduced. The outbreak started in China, where it quickly engulfed the city of Wuhan before racing across the globe on commercial flights and ships, eventually killing more than 1 million people, over 100,000 of them in the U.S. The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City; caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden. Severely ill patients suffering from acute pneumonia were put on ventilators, often in vain. It was the late 1960s, and the Hong Kong flu was sweeping the world. 

Coverage of the pandemic in The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 17, 1969.

That pandemic raged over three years, yet is largely forgotten today, a testament both to our resilience and to how societies are now approaching a similar crisis in a much different way. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Premier Boris Johnson and President Emmanuel Macron of France have described the coronavirus pandemic as their countries’ greatest challenge since World War II. Mr. Macron described it as a war. But scientists and doctors say the Hong Kong flu is a more apt comparison. And because it happened in recent times—unlike the more devastating and better remembered Spanish Flu of 1918—it can offer lessons for today, though experts disagree on what these might be.

The second wave of the pandemic, covered in this Wall Street Journal article on Jan. 23, 1970, was deadlier than the first. The Hong Kong influenza, caused by the H3N2 strain of the virus, came in two waves, the second far deadlier than the first. A vaccine was developed relatively quickly—researchers had learned from the other two 20th-century influenza pandemics, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian flu of 1957—but wasn’t widely available before the disease had reached its second peak in most countries. Epidemiologists are now warning that this pattern could be repeated with the new coronavirus, with a second peak this winter when the world is unlikely to have a vaccine. But this time, governments and societies have responded far differently than they did in the late ’60s.

In 1969, the British postal and train services and French manufacturing suffered large disruptions from flu-induced absenteeism. In West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead because of a lack of undertakers.

In affected countries, some schools had to close as teachers fell ill. In less than two years, over 30,000 people died in France and Britain, and up to 60,000 in both parts of divided Germany, according to recent estimates.

Doctors say the Hong Kong flu, named from being first identified in the then British colony, was less lethal than Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, but it appears to have spread in much the same way.

A Deadlier Second Wave The second peak of the Hong Kong flu was deadlier in most countries. Excess mortality in the A/H3N2 influenza pandemic, in people under 65, deaths per 100,000Sources: The Journal of Infectious Diseases; Cécile Viboud, Rebecca F. Grais, Bernard A. P. Lafont, Mark A. Miller, Lone Simonsen

First pandemic season1968–1969Second pandemic season 1969-1970England and Wales France Australia U.S. Canada 0510

Yet governments and the media didn’t call for restrictions on public life and economic activity. The disease was allowed to run though communities virtually unhindered until a vaccine became available to stop it about four months after it surfaced.

This is in contrast to today’s official responses, which have largely focused on imposing a large degree of economic and social disruption to slow the spread of the virus and allow medical authorities to focus on isolating the most vulnerable and protecting individual lives. Strict confinement measures and wall-to-wall media coverage have made the new coronavirus a central presence in most people’s lives.

How the New Coronavirus Became a Global Pandemic?

In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.

Pierre Dellamonica, a French physician who started his medical career in 1969 as the epidemic was raging, says dead patients were piling up in his hospital in the south of France. But doctors and the public were fatalistic in accepting the death toll, he said.

Mortality rates for the 1968 pandemic were significantly lower than those of Covid-19, said Susan Craddock, professor at the Institute for Global Studies of the University of Minnesota. And without 24-hour news coverage, online resources and social media to heighten public anxiety, politicians were under less pressure to act than they are today, she said.

The German government played down the lethality of the Hong Kong Flu, welcoming that it seemed to only kill the elderly and the very young, said Malte Thiessen, a German historian specializing in pandemics.

“Today, medical progress has pushed up life expectancy,” Mr. Thiessen said. While this has heightened people’s sense of security, he said, it has reduced the public’s acceptance of disease and death, especially among the most vulnerable.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the carnage of World War II was a recent memory. Life expectancy was significantly lower than today and such diseases as polio, diphtheria, measles or tuberculosis were part of everyday life.

Many doctors and epidemiologists see today’s approach, with its focus on saving lives and shielding the most vulnerable, as progress. But some say it comes at a cost, and call for a more calibrated approach.

Johann Giesecke, a veteran epidemiologist who advises Sweden’s health-care authorities, said today’s lockdowns are counterproductive because mortality rates will rise again as soon as they are lifted, forcing renewed closures.

Sweden has taken an approach more akin to that used during the Hong Kong flu. Authorities haven’t ordered stores, restaurants or offices to close, letting the virus spread through the population. Today, Sweden has among the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths in the region as a percentage of population.

Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, a New York-based physicist who predicted the coronavirus pandemic after the outbreak in China, disagrees. Since developing a vaccine will take months—if it ever succeeds—curbing the death toll isn’t only a humanitarian imperative, but will also eventually prevent greater economic damage, he said.

The 1968 pandemic killed an estimated 1 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If anything, Mr. Bar-Yam said, the pandemic should have been a warning to today’s governments to be better prepared and ready to act much faster. Instead, he said, naive faith in technological progress let the crisis fade from memories.

The Black Death, the bubonic plague that ravaged populations in Europe in medieval times, has a bigger place in Western culture than more recent deadly pandemics, said Laura Spinney, author of “Pale Rider,” a book about the Spanish Flu.

That is a problem, she said, because “if you don’t remember the past, you can’t prepare for the future.”

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A couple of months ago, the media, almost as one, decided that Governor Ron DeSantis was a public menace who was going to get Floridians killed with his lax response to the coronavirus crisis.

In an interview with National Review, DeSantis says he was surprised at “how knee-jerk” the hostile coverage was, but he “also knew that none of these people knew anything about Florida at all, so I didn’t care what they were saying.” 

The conventional wisdom has begun to change about Florida, as the disaster so widely predicted hasn’t materialized. It’s worth delving into the state’s response — as described by DeSantis and a couple of members of his team — because it is the opposite of the media narrative of a Trump-friendly governor disregarding the facts to pursue a reckless agenda. DeSantis and his team have followed the science closely from the beginning, which is why they forged a nuanced approach, but one that focused like a laser on the most vulnerable population, those in nursing homes.

An irony of the national coverage of the coronavirus crisis is that at the same time DeSantis was being made into a villain, New York governor Andrew Cuomo was being elevated as a hero, even though the DeSantis approach to nursing homes was obviously superior to that of Cuomo. Florida went out of its way to get COVID-19-positive people out of nursing homes, while New York went out of its way to get them in, a policy now widely acknowledged to have been a debacle.

The media didn’t exactly have their eyes on the ball. “The day that the media had their first big freakout about Florida was March 15th,” DeSantis recalls, “which was, there were people on Clearwater Beach, and it was this big deal. That same day is when we signed the executive order to, one, ban visitation in the nursing homes, and two, ban the reintroduction of a COVID-positive patient back into a nursing home.”

DeSantis is bemused by the obsession with Florida’s beaches. When they opened in Jacksonville, it was a big national story, usually relayed with a dire tone. “Jacksonville has almost no COVID activity outside of a nursing-home context,” he says. “Their hospitalizations are down, ICU down since the beaches opened a month ago. And yet, nobody talks about it. It’s just like, ‘Okay, we just move on to the next target.’”

Perhaps more understandably, The Villages, the iconic senior community, was a focus of media worries. According to DeSantis, as of last weekend there hadn’t been a single resident of The Villages in the hospital for COVID-19 for about a week. At one point, the infection rate in The Villages was so low that state officials were worried that they were missing something. “So I got the University of Florida to do a study,” he says. “They did 1,200 asymptomatic seniors at The Villages, and not one of them came back positive, which was really incredible.”

So how did DeSantis go about responding to the epidemic? It began with the data, and trying to learn the lessons of other countries.

At the outset, DeSantis looked at South Korea’s experience: “I just thought it was so dramatic, the extent to which this was concentrated in the older age groups. I think the first real fresh set of South Korea numbers I looked at, I think it had no fatalities under 30, and then 80 percent of them were 70 and above or something like that. It was really, really dramatic.”

Then there was Italy: “I think a lot of the policymakers in the U.S. acted like Italy would happen in the United States, but when you look under the hood of Italy, there were huge differences, and there were reasons why that part of Italy fared as poorly as it did. I think the median age of fatality was something like 82 in some of those areas in Northern Italy. So we looked at that, but that really helped inform the strategy to focus most of our efforts on the at-risk groups.”

He was hesitant about sweeping lockdowns, given that there wasn’t much of a precedent for them. “One of the things that bothered me throughout this whole time was, I researched the 1918 pandemic, ’57, ’68, and there were some mitigation efforts done in May 1918, but never just a national-shutdown type deal,” he says. “There was really no observed experience about what the negative impacts would be on that.”

“So I was very concerned about things on that side as well,” he continues, “and I think that’s why I had a more nuanced and balanced approach than some of the other governors. Because you have some of these health officials saying, ‘You’ve got to do this. This is science,’ or whatever. But really, these were unchartered territories.”

The DeSantis team also didn’t put much stock in dire projections. “We kind of lost confidence very early on in models,” a Florida health official says. “We look at them closely, but how can you rely on something when it says you’re peaking in a week and then the next day you’ve already peaked?” Instead, “we started really focusing on just what we saw.”

Florida was better able to do that than many states because of its routine experience dealing with natural disasters. “Many states simply did not have the data infrastructure that Florida has,” says Mary Mayhew, secretary of Florida’s Agency for Healthcare Administration. “We have an emergency status system that gets stood up, as I mentioned, in the case of a hurricane. Hospitals and nursing homes and other long-term-care providers are required to submit data on a daily basis, twice-daily basis, regarding their bed availability.”

The Florida Department of Health produces a report that DeSantis sees every morning: new cases, number of tests, positivity rates, etc. He also gets a rundown of the people who have gone into hospitals and of ICU usage. He can follow the key indicators down to the county level. This allows granular visibility into what’s happening. He cites the example of rural Hamilton County. It had 67 cases the other day. DeSantis was able to call the surgeon general of the state to find out what was going on, and learn it was an outbreak in a prison rather than a wider community spread.

His focus has been on “clinically significant cases,” or serious cases that might require hospitalizations, and that pointed to the nursing homes.

Here, Florida is indeed quite vulnerable. The state has roughly 350,000 residents and staff at more than 4,000 long-term-care facilities.

The state took precautions with its seniors generally. “We advised, before there was even mitigation,” DeSantis points out, “if you’re 65 and older, stay home as much as possible and avoid crowds. And that was just something that made sense.” The state talked to senior communities like The Villages about what they were doing to mitigate risk, and they took common-sense measures, such as stopping big indoor gatherings.

But the nursing homes represented a different level of risk. “It was clear to me,” says Mary Mayhew, “that there were much higher standards related to infection control being outlined by the federal CDC that well exceeded what our nursing homes traditionally have been expected to adhere to. So we never had false expectations.”

Inspectors and assessment teams visited nursing homes. The state homed in on facilities where, Mayhew says, “we had historically cited around infection control. We used that to prioritize our visits to those facilities, understanding that the guidance from CDC was changing frequently. So our initial focus was to be an effective resource education to provide guidance to these facilities to make sure they understood how to request personal protective equipment from the state.”

Florida, DeSantis notes, “required all staff and any worker that entered to be screened for COVID illness, temperature checks. Anybody that’s symptomatic would just simply not be allowed to go in.” And it required staff to wear PPE. “We put our money where our mouth is,” he continues. “We recognized that a lot of these facilities were just not prepared to deal with something like this. So we ended up sending a total of 10 million masks just to our long-term-care facilities, a million gloves, half a million face shields.”

Florida fortified the hospitals with PPE, too, but DeSantis realized that it wouldn’t do the hospitals any good if infection in the nursing homes ran out of control : “If I can send PPE to the nursing homes, and they can prevent an outbreak there, that’s going to do more to lower the burden on hospitals than me just sending them another 500,000 N95 masks.”

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of this insight, and how much it drove Florida’s approach, counter to the policies of New York and other states. (“I don’t want to cast aspersions on others, but it is incredible to me, it’s shocking,” says the Florida health official, “that Governor Cuomo [and others] are able to kind of just avoid real questions about their policies early on to actually send individuals into the nursing home, which is completely counter to the real data.”)

Mary Mayhew had daily calls with the hospitals, with people involved in discharge planning on the line. “Every day on these calls,” she says, “I would hear the same comments and questions around, we need to get these individuals returned back to the nursing home. We drew a hard line early on. I said repeatedly to the hospital, to the CEOs, to the discharge planners, to the chief medical officers, ‘I understand that for 20 years it’s been ingrained, especially through Medicare reimbursement policy, to get individuals in and out. That is not our focus today. I’m not going to send anyone back to a nursing home who has the slightest risk of being positive.’”

“What we said constantly is let’s not have two cases become 20 or five become 50,” she continues. “If you don’t manage this individual as you return them back, you will have far more being transferred back to the hospital.” Early on, when tests had a slow turnaround, there was a lot of pressure to give way, but Mayhew was unmovable on the question.

At the other end of the equation at the nursing homes, the state made it clear, according to Mayhew, “if you are unable to adhere to these infection-control standards, if you are unable to safely isolate and dedicate staff to an isolation wing or unit, you need to transfer that individual to a hospital.”

As the health officials put it, succinctly, “We wanted people out, not in.”

When the state was seeing infections at nursing homes presumably caused by staff, DeSantis deployed what he calls “an expeditionary testing force,” 50 National Guard teams of four guardsmen together with Department of Health personnel that tested staff and residents.

Most facilities haven’t had confirmed cases. “But the ones that have,” he says, “the majority of them have had between one and five infections. So the infections are identified, but then, you’re isolating either the individual or the small cluster before you have an outbreak.”

The state has just deployed a mobile testing lab in an RV that has a rapid test with results in an hour or two. It goes to a community and the staff goes to different long-term-care facilities. “If you’re talking about an asymptomatic carrier, if you can identify that person instead of waiting 48 hours for lab results to come back, I mean, that could be the difference between saving a lot of infections,” according to DeSantis.

The state has also started a sentinel surveillance program for long-term-care facilities, routinely taking representative samples to monitor for flare-ups.

Finally, it has established several COVID-19-only nursing homes, with a couple more in the pipeline. The idea, again, is to get COVID-19-positive residents out of the regular nursing homes to the maximum extent possible.

At the same time Florida was devoting enormous attention to nursing homes and establishing highly restrictive policies to protect them, it was giving its counties latitude in how they reacted to the crisis.

“I said from the beginning,” DeSantis explains, “we’re a big, diverse state. The epidemic is not going to affect this state uniformly, and what’s appropriate in Miami and Broward may not be appropriate for Jacksonville or the Panhandle. And that’s pretty much the way we did it.”

“We worked with the locals in Southeast Florida,” he continues. “They had more restrictive measures than the rest of the state.”

And understandably so: “Even at this point, 60 percent of our cases have come from just those three counties. I mean, they represent 29 percent of the population, but 60 percent of the cases, and certainly a majority of the fatalities and hospitalizations.”

DeSantis eventually did issue his own statewide order, but he argues that it was more flexible and less prescriptive than those of other states. “We had a broad essential-business definition,” he says. “So we basically had businesses operating. We had the daycares open, we had recreation open, and my order never actually closed any businesses. We allowed them to operate within the context of just limiting contact between people outside the household.”

He was relaxed from the beginning about outdoor activities, even as critics sounded the alarm about the beaches: “I always believed that respiratory viruses were less likely to be transmitted in a hot outdoor environment, and then you started to see the studies come in, in March, saying that that’s what it was.”

He thinks that the relatively short, relatively capacious shutdown order has allowed Florida to be ahead of the curve of reopening of the more restrictive states. DeSantis maintains that “what we did in March and April is the equivalent of what New York will be or California, when they go to phase three.”

Looking ahead, he says, “being measured and being thoughtful and just following data is important.” He’s not following the advice of some people to, as he puts it, “just rip off the Band-Aid and just go whole hog.” In looking at the cases every day, there are cases in prisons and nursing homes, but “outside of southeast Florida, we’re not seeing a huge amount of community transmission, which is a good sign.” Of course, testing will continue to be a priority, as it has been all along.

“Our 13 drive-through sites in the state of Florida, we can do about 10,000 tests a day, just on those sites,” he says. “And we obviously have so much more testing going on in hospitals, doctor’s offices. But we can do 10,000 tests a day, and we average about 5,000 people that actually come to test. So we have a surplus of availability.”

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Perhaps things will still go wrong in Florida, perhaps its relative good fortune can be chalked up to weather, perhaps county-level lockdowns made a big difference, but no one can say that the state hasn’t taken a thoughtful approach to the crisis. Or, no one can reasonably say that — which, of course, hasn’t stopped many journalists.

“I view it more as a badge of honor that I was doing a good job,” DeSantis says, “and that they viewed me as a target, because if I wasn’t, they probably would just ignore me.”

New Medical Analysis of 12 Global Coronavirus Studies Finds 9 of 12 Show COVID-19 Fatality Rate Similar to Seasonal Flu  

Dr. John Ioannidis 

In April Stanford University researcher Dr. John Ioannidis presented a summary report from his recent coronavirus study in Santa Clara, California.

The research project looked at 3,300 people in Santa Clara County in California. The Stanford study revealed that 2.5% to 4.2% of people tested for COVID-19 were positive for antibodies.

The doctor’s data indicated that there are between 50 to 80-fold more infections in the general population than the confirmed cases.

This was a huge development.

In describing his findings Dr. Ioannidis concluded that the coronavirus has an infection fatality rate that is in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza.

Dr. Ioannidis added in April, “It suggests that even though this is a very serious problem, we should not fear. It suggests that we have solid ground to have optimism about the possibility of eventually opening our society and gaining back our lives.”

On Tuesday Dr. Ioannidis released a follow-up investigation on the coronavirus.

The abstract was published at medRxiv.

The new Ioannidis study reveals the infection fatality ratios (IFRs) of the Coronavirus from 12 seroprevalence studies of greater that 500 individuals per sample found:
** 7 of 12 studies saw a corrected IFR of 0.06-0.16, similar to seasonal flu
** 3 of 12 studies saw a modestly higher IFR of 0.25-0.40 – slightly higher than flu
** 2 of 12 studies saw a modestly lower IFR of 0.02-0.03 – slightly lower than flu

The new study shows the coronavirus has a similar mortality rate as the seasonal flu — according to Dr. Ioannidis.

Dr. Andrew Bostom wrote about this study earlier today.

Fewer people are testing positive for COVID-19 and those who test positive don’t seem to be getting as sick, a UPMC doctor said Thursday.

“All signs that we have available right now show that this virus is less prevalent than it was weeks ago,” said Dr. Donald Yealy, the chair of emergency medicine at UPMC.

Yealy further said, among people who test positive, “the total amount of the virus the patient has is much less than in the earlier stages of the pandemic.”

The proportion of people with COVID-19 getting so sick they need a breathing ventilator has fallen, according to Yealy.

“We see all of this as evidence that COVID-19 cases are less severe than when this first started,” he said.

Yealy said those observations apply to western and central Pennsylvania along with communities in New York and Maryland served by UPMC.

He said UPMC has so far conducted about 30,000 coronavirus tests, with less than 4% showing positive. He further said UPMC has tested about 8,000 patients who had no symptoms, with those patients testing positive at a rate of about 1 in 400.

He said that suggests the widely-feared prospect of getting COVID-19 from someone with no symptoms is unlikely. However, that assessment is based on the likelihood of encountering someone who is COVID-19 positive but doesn’t know it. It doesn’t address the likelihood of catching COVID-19 from someone who actually has it but doesn’t feel sick.

“Your risk of getting into a car accident if you go back and forth across the turnpike in Pennsylvania is greater than your risk of being positive for asymptomatic COVID-19 infection,” he said. “This should give you some reassurance that the risk of catching COVID-19 … from someone who doesn’t even know they have the infection, in our communities, is very small.”

Yealy said he doesn’t know exactly why the prevalence and severity of COVID-19 seems to have fallen. He said it likely reflects an interplay of things including weather, possible genetic changes in the virus, people watching themselves more closely for symptoms, and better medical decisions and treatment.

 UPMC hospitals have discharged about 500 people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19, Yealy said. They are presently treating about 100. 

 Made in China is a mutating phrase depending upon its political context. At one time, made in China inferred precision manufacturing and low prices. If clothing was made in China the stitches were precise, uniform, and accurate. Tools, computers, sports equipment, shoes, furniture, virtually anything made in China was considered high quality low price. What happened? 

China’s Cultural Revolution is the “sociopolitical movement in China from 1966-1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements (imperialism) from Chinese society, and to reimpose Mao Zedong thought (Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the CPC.”

Chairman Mao was ideologically a Marxist-Leninist, a hybrid political philosophy of gradualism that seeks to establish a socialist state in preparation for an eventual communist state. Communism is the collectivist socio-political system marketing itself as, “a classless system with common ownership of the means of production, with full social and economic equality of all members of society.”

The seductive narrative of the Chinese Cultural Revolution was that capitalism was evil and had to be removed by violent class struggle. Mao engaged young people to participate in “purging” the country through widespread destruction of historical, religious, and cultural artifacts. Sound familiar? It should. China’s Cultural Revolution was a reeducation campaign designed to erase China’s history and culture.

Mao’s Marxist-Leninist dogma is the source of the “social justice” and “economic equality” narrative taught in American universities, in American high schools, in American middle schools, and even elementary schools K-12. Marxist-Leninist dogma is the root of the slogans that indoctrinated Americans echo like parrots at political protests, and that paid political anarchists shout while burning American cities.

The weaponized education of disinformation launched when Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education in 1979, has succeeded in graduating indoctrinated, impassioned, American Marxist-Leninists. They are the ideological soldiers in the American Cultural Revolution seeking to erase our history and culture, overthrow the government, and replace our free-market capitalism with socialism. The Chinese communist narrative has been unapologetically adopted by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists in the United States. Even the black fisted BLM flag is taken from the red fisted communist flag. There are many more similarities.

Marxist-Leninist teachings are the central thesis of the Culture War on America launched by America’s enemies after WWII, and the source of today’s American Cultural Revolution seeking to purge American history, American values, American culture, and American capitalism. Soeren Kern’s explosive July 2, 2020 article, “Black Lives Matter: ‘We Are Trained Marxists’” describes the effort. “On the surface, Black Lives Matter (BLM) presents itself as a grassroots movement dedicated to the noble tasks of fighting racism and police brutality. A deeper dive shows that BLM is a Marxist revolutionary movement aimed at transforming the United States – and the entire world – into a communist dystopia.”

Kern quotes Black Lives Matter (BLM) leaders. In there own words:

“We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia [Garza] in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.”——Patrisse Cullors, July 22, 2015.
“We are anti-capitalist. We believe and understand that Black people will never achieve liberation under the current global racialized capitalist system.”——Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), of which BLM is a part, June 5, 2020.

Marxist-Leninist teachings are rooted in the false premise of collectivist, common ownership. Mao’s collectivist proletariat ownership is not equivalent to private property ownership in free market capitalism. Communism’s common ownership exists in theory only because the Communist Party controls the production and distribution of all goods and services. This means that no individual can buy, sell, or profit from anything that any individual produces. In practice, everything is owned by the party, including the citizens. The centralized government has absolute and total control of the people. The fatal flaw of theoretical ownership is that there is no incentive to work.

The centrally planned economy of China’s Cultural Revolution was a disaster. When President Richard Nixon visited China and met with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in February 1972, Nixon said at a banquet in his honor: “This is the week that changed the world.” It was. The cold war balance of power shifted, and China tilted toward the U.S, and away from the Soviet Union. Rapprochement opened U.S. trade with China.

Trade with China was an economic bonanza for the globalists. China was an untapped labor market with .86 billion people in 1972, and is the world’s largest population today at 1.43 billion. American corporations could manufacture their goods very cheaply in China, and sell them globally at enormous profits. China’s interests were economic growth and the development of Chinese industry.

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Secretary of State and globalist extraordinaire, practiced Realpolitik. Realpolitik is diplomacy based on particular circumstances and practical objectives rather than ideology. At the time, America was looking for an immediate end to the Vietnam War, and cheap labor for quality, precision manufacturing. China was looking forward to their long-range future. The problem with Realpolitik is its focus on immediate circumstances and short-term gains. It seriously undervalues the power of ideological commitments and strategic long-term gains.

Chairman Mao established a long-term system of economic development that required foreign investments in China, and partnering with the Communist Chinese central government. So, while American companies were busy making huge immediate profits, the Chinese were busy stealing our technology and innovation for their long-range plans.

China’s Cultural Revolution was a murderous reeducation effort, and the death toll remains a classified state secret. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, an anti-communist organization created in 1993 by an Act of Congress, estimates the death toll of communism at 100,000,000. The purpose of the Memorial Foundation is “educating Americans about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism.” The Foundation is an abject failure. It simply cannot compete with the anti-American dumbed down K-12 education, the university propaganda, and the globalist mainstream media indoctrination.

You think the American Cultural Revolution cannot succeed in America? Think again.

Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. His eight years of job-killing economic policies sent American manufacturing to China and weakened America. His eight years of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism supported the anti-American, Marxist-Leninist propaganda indoctrinating our children through Common Core. The first casualty of freedom is always free speech. The colluding globalist Internet behemoths are curating and censoring news with impunity. They are even censoring the President of the United States! The mainstream media defends China and advances the radical leftist anti-American, Marxist-Leninist narrative.  Why?

The globalists need the social chaos created by the radical leftists, particularly Antifa and BLM, to make the country ungovernable in hopes of defeating Trump in November. Here is the problem.

While Kissinger was busy congratulating himself on opening trade with China, and the globalists were busy congratulating themselves on the profitability of exploiting China’s cheap labor markets, China was quietly pursuing its China Dream of becoming the premier global superpower by 2049, the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The China Dream, a 2010 book written by military strategist Chinese Colonel Liu, advised against antagonizing the United States. “The competition between China and the United States will not take the form of a world war or a cold war. . . .It will be like a protracted ‘marathon.’ China’s Hundred-Year Marathon will be a struggle for supremacy over economics, trade, currency, resources and geopolitical alignments.”

What better way for China to win the hundred-year marathon than to support the American Cultural Revolution with ideological, material, and financial support for Marxist-Leninist Antifa and BLM. The 279 globalist companies that manufacture and/or do business in China are supporting the insurrection with the fiction that America is a white supremacist country of institutionalized racism. The vulgar “virtue-signaling” actions like the National Basketball Association’s decision to paint Black Lives Matter on the court floor, and the National Football League’s decision to sing the “Black National Anthem” are corporate complicity in the American Cultural Revolution.

The globalist elite and the Communist Chinese have common cause to defeat Trump in November. Their shared objective is to install a pro-Chinese, radical leftist Democrat, like Joe Biden, in the oval office.

Today’s American Cultural Revolution is not Orwellian, it is made in China.