During the Obama administration, the government rightly exposed how Russia was using offshore donor advised funds to send dark money support to American environmental groups and NGOs undermining US science in energy and food, Russia's two biggest exports.
State sponsored media groups like Russia Today and Sputnik were in a circular retweet cycle with paid flunkies of the organic industry like US Right To Know and Sourcewatch and they were forced to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which the Trump administration then extended to all RM Broadcasting and RIA Global LLC entities. Progressive journalism groups objected, as they would, given their role in undermining American science, claiming it was a dangerous precedent; "Congress is relying on a notoriously opaque unit within the Department of Justice to draw an impossible line between propaganda and journalism. Source protection, media access, and the US promotion of press freedom abroad may all be compromised.”
Compromise like getting people banned from Twitter using a hidden cabal of employees and the federal government and “NGOs that aren’t academic” to decide who goes and who stays on social media? All things progressive journalists were complicit in doing as exposed Twitter documents show.
Highlight by Matt Taibbi, who is either a journalist or "not a real journalist" depending on how much you love communism. https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1633830032526417928 (1)
Yet during the time of growing concern about Russia, China was continually given a free pass. The federal government quite literally refused to notice, even when schools cracked down on academics who were being given millions of dollars in hidden funding to 'pave the road' for China.
It was about about intellectual freedom, and science knowing no borders, and bringing people under the umbrella by being inclusive, was the rationalization. Even the US government was sending money to China - when COVID-19 exploded from Wuhan, American progressives even alleged it happened because the US hadn't sent enough money to China. Americans even teamed up with Chinese researchers to state that any concern about COVID-19 originating in China was racist and xenophobic. Ecohealth money launderer Peter Daszak even thanked Dr. Anthony Fauci for defending the Chinese coronavirus researchers who were getting American taxpayer money from him.
Of course France was on Team China, they joined in 2004 while protesting American involvement in Iraq, an invasion which had disrupted their lucrative black market violation of embargoes of that country. The home of the anti-science movement in Europe was going to team up with anyone undermining their competitors in the US, especially if they could use the the halo of 'scientific collaboration', but as more and more groups concede that the fake BSL rating of labs in Wuhan - by 2019, researchers had already gone to jail for selling research animals to the wet market nearby - might have led to a leak, more and more groups are being forced to walk away from all that money.
The latest to exit Team China is the Pasteur Institute, where the communist party was funding hundreds of scientists. One thing is well-known dealing with the Chinese Communist Party; you can believe anything you want about scientific freedom, but once the check clears you will do as you are told. The first generation of scientists from Pasteur who went there were likely hand-picked because they would 'play ball' with the CCP, but later young scholars who were not in on the meetings and thought they'd have intellectual freedom may have resented the interference, and those are a ticking time bomb for Pasteur. If they have emails pressuring them to do one thing or another, one contrarian scientist would ruin the reputation of the entire group.
Chinese researchers are scrambling to say the Chinese Academy of Sciences no longer needs Pasteur, China is a "powerhouse" in its own right, but that is nonsense - the same nonsense some academics in the west claimed once about the USSR.
NOTE:
(1) Dear Rep. Sylvia Garcia, this does not mean I am in a threesome with him.
