The Pentagon has finally won its war on tai chi and calligraphy classes! Pete Hegseth announced on Friday that the Department of War has designated Confucius Institutes a national security threat, with a sinister mission “to steal intellectual property and to infiltrate the minds of American students”. It is unclear how language lessons, calligraphy classes, tai chi sessions, Lunar New Year celebrations, and the occasional dumpling-making workshop threaten anyone’s national security. Meanwhile, China isn’t unique in promoting its culture abroad. Britain has the British Council, France the Alliance Française, Spain the Instituto Cervantes. The US State Department runs hundreds of “American Spaces” around the world. Apparently the US regime has reached the conclusion that any exposure to Chinese culture; any contact with Chinese people; any appreciation of Chinese civilisation; any notion of friendship and cooperation with China is a danger to white supremacy and the global imperialist order. Which, in a sense, it is. But that’s not the same as being a threat to national security. Anyway, this ship has sailed. Sensible young people in the US despise their own regime and are increasingly appreciative of China’s role in promoting peace, its leadership in climate action, and its commitment to improving the lives of ordinary people. Crass McCarthyism will solve no problems and will only make the US government look more ridiculous in the eyes of its own citizens and the world.

Fox News has uncovered a global conspiracy: 101 organisations in 13 countries involved in “organising, participating in, or amplifying” protests in Europe and India. At the centre of this web sits Neville Roy Singham, a US entrepreneur living in Shanghai who funds left-wing causes. Who are these sinister organisations? According to Fox, they’re student associations, labour unions, socialist and communist groups, advocacy groups and media outlets. That labour unions and socialist parties would support radical protests is, of course, pretty shocking stuff. The means of organisation, participation and amplification amount to… posting supportive messages on social media. That might sound fairly innocuous, but how else are we to explain the fact that young people in France, Italy, Spain, Albania, India and elsewhere are taking to the streets? In France, young people are putatively protesting over education, public spending and the cost of living. In India, they claim to be opposing a revision of the electoral rolls that has removed around 130 million names. Across the Western world, a generation has spent three years watching its governments arm and defend a genocide in Gaza. But it’s now clear that the real reason for these protests is the prolific social media activity of Roy Singham’s friends. The whole thing calls to mind the mid-20th century in the US, when otherwise perfectly happy workers went on strike at the instigation of Soviet-paid agitators. Or when Black people in the South, treated very fairly under Jim Crow, came over all uppity upon contact with Chinese communist propaganda. Being serious for a moment: what Fox News and others are complaining about is the anti-imperialist left having any voice at all. Liberal “freedom of speech” has always worked fine as long as the ruling class enjoyed an effective monopoly on propaganda and dissent was marginal. Now anti-war and anti-imperialist voices are growing louder and more effective, it seems that rules have changed. We can see where that leads. In India, NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha was arrested in 2023 over alleged Singham-linked funding, an arrest the Supreme Court later declared invalid. In the US, Senator Grassley wants CodePink and the People’s Forum registered as foreign agents. In Britain, Palestine Action has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation, and more than 90 percent of last year’s 3,061 terrorism-related arrests were for supporting it. In the US, NSPM-7 lists “anti-capitalism” as an indicator of domestic terrorism. Dimitrov defined fascism as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”. This line of reporting and policy points in that direction. When liberal democracy can no longer win the argument, both liberalism and democracy are abandoned.