Look what I found: After USAID's Food for Peace program was moved to the USDA last year, Food for Peace seems to have stripped food aid from all Muslim-majority countries. To this amazing chart from @CFR_org, I added a column showing the % of the population that is Muslim:

None of those 7 countries are majority-Muslim. But 6 out of the 8 countries most at risk of famine are majority-Muslim, and none of them receive food aid under the USDA's revamped Food for Peace program.

I will never, ever stop believing that liberal democracy and human rights are worth fighting for, and here's why. It is the easiest thing in the world to say that those people over there don't need human rights. It's so, so easy to do this. "They don't deserve it. They don't need it. They're happier without it. Society is better overall if they don't have it." Easy, easy, easy. But EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON in the entire world wants human rights for themselves and their children. Without exception. Every single person on earth wants justice if their loved one is murdered. Every single person on earth wants to be able to hold their government accountable if the government steals their home, wages, or land. Every single person on earth wants to be able to speak freely to other people about injustices they or their children have personally suffered. Those arguments you're hearing about why liberal democracy isn't all it was cracked up to be? It's all crap. It's steaming garbage repeated by people who believe that it will be other people, not themselves, who have to give up these rights. I know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. It is my lighthouse in a world increasingly shrouded in choking, blinding fog.

I increasingly find that my primary role in the "China influence" space these days is to debunk a lot of very, very poor quality "China influence" research reports that have been coming out. I don't think it would be an overreach to call this slate of reports "China influence slop." But such a term is too kind, because it fails to indicate that these reports are primarily motivated by the desire to delegitimize grassroots American organizating by attempting to associate them with "hostile foreign forces" — a tactic widely used by the CCP to delegitimize grassroots Chinese civil society whenever it finds such movements inconvenient. Let me start with a couple recent ones: — The reports from Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future which have led House reps to call for an investigation into anti-data center organizing — And this latest one about how China is supposedly bankrolling climate activism at the University of California system and thereby acting to "shape California’s climate and energy policies." I can demonstrate, very easily, that these reports are 1) exceedingly poor quality as China influence reports go and 2) primarily and overwhelmingly motivated not by a desire to uncover China's influence (and thus to preserve the integrity of US civil society), but rather to delegitimize what are very obviously organic US movements (and thus to compromise the integrity of US civil society) Reports like these represent an anti-democratic abuse of the concept of China influence research, which denies agency to real Americans. These reports, given both their methods and their political goal, are also a form of disinformation and propaganda, very similar to how China paints Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters as stooges of America. And finally, these reports make a mockery of actual, high-quality China influence research. This must stop now — and journalists reporting on this style of report should do so with the highest degree of journalistic professionalism and scrutiny.

And yet another thread debunking extremely compromised China influence research, this time from the National Association of Scholars, an ideologically hard-right organization. Like the recent reports from Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future, this report's primary goal isn't to ensure the integrity of American civil society. Rather, its primary goal is to achieve domestic ideological and political goals, namely to delegitimize 2 bogeymen of conservatives: Progressive energy policies, and California's public universities, which conservatives have hated since the 1960s.

Unlike the Bitcoin Policy Institute and Power the Future reports, the basic research in this report is skilled and sound. The report traces the history of partnerships between California universities and Tsinghua University in China. All that is fine. The fatal flaw of this report, however, is that these basic factual findings are distorted beyond recognition to fit NAS's ideological agenda, which is to fight progressive energy policies and weaken the independence of U.S. universities. The conclusions this report draws are part of a growing line of argument in far-right (currently mainstream) conservative strategy, which is to view the green energy transition as a plot to destroy America. This report's basic line of reasoning is this: — Climate change isn't a serious or pressing issue. Climate alarmism is the real threat. --> — The green energy transition is bad for America, and damages America's energy grid, national security, and military preparedness. --> — Chinese efforts to cooperate with western governments and institutions on climate change policies thus actually represent a purposeful, insidious Chinese Communist effort to compromise the energy and defense base of the U.S. and other western countries. --> — Efforts by progressive government officials and institutions to support the green energy transition, and to work with Chinese people to do that, represent a national security threat. --> — One of this report's recommendations (I kid you not) is to "Open Federal investigations into officials and regulators who have engaged in formalized agreements with China." Essentially, this report (and others like it) represent an effort to paint the entire green energy transition movement as a traitorous communist plot. The point of high-quality China influence research is to ensure that Americans can exercise all their rights and freedoms without foreign government interference. But the point of this report is to use China influence research to crush domestic progressive policies that hard-right conservatives (and science deniers) don't like. That's why I'm writing this thread. I've worked too hard to fight for high-quality China influence research — against attacks from both sides of the aisle in the US, and against attacks by Beijing-backed actors — to see it weaponized like this against basic democratic principles and scientific facts. Read the report here. nas.org/wp-content/uploads/2…