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A disturbing trend is emerging among Virginia Democrats in Richmond, as the entire state House and Senate chambers are up for reelection in just a few months: by word and deed, they are increasingly serving as useful idiots for the Chinese Communist Party.
In recent weeks, Virginia Democrats have warned that so-called “China-bashing” could lead to mass internment of Chinese Americans, and argued against requiring taxpayer-funded universities to disclose grants from the CCP.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Democrats were excited to focus on abortion this year in the hopes of further stymying Republican governor Glenn Youngkin’s legislative agenda, much of which the Democratic-controlled State Senate has stopped. Youngkin, however, had other things in mind.
Much of the China-related drama kicked off when Youngkin nixed a Ford plant’s construction in the state because of concerns that it was tied to the Chinese Communist Party. According to Youngkin, the deal was “an economic arrangement engineered to tap into federal government subsidies paid for with taxpayer money that is going to economically benefit the Chinese Communist Party.” And he’s onto something: Fox News reported that the CEO of Contemporary Amperex Technology, or CATL, which Ford would work with in the plant, is part of the CCP’s “United Front” propaganda arm.
“Made in Virginia cannot be a front for the Chinese Communist Party,” Youngkin said. The plant is instead being relocated to Michigan, where Virginia Republicans argue that Michigan taxpayers are footing a $400,000 bill per job. Michigan’s governor, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, famously refuses to stop using Tik Tok in her government capacity. Whitmer even tacitly acknowledges the privacy threat posed by Tik Tok, because she has a phone specifically designated for Tik Tok usage. She would of course not need that phone if she felt that her private data would be secure if she used TikTok on her normal government phone.
According to Virginia Democrats, Youngkin’s national security concerns are completely meritless. “The only plausible explanation for the rejection of this [Ford] project is it allows [Youngkin] to participate in the China-bashing sweepstakes in the Republican presidential primary with Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott,” Democratic state senator Scott Surovell said.
By Surovell’s logic, opposing China’s growing influence in America is… a bad thing. Never fear: Surovell makes this claim crystal clear himself, arguing that criticizing the Chinese Communist Party is tantamount to when his fellow Democrats interned thousands of Japanese Americans during World War Two.
“I think China-bashing is a hot meme in the Republican Party right now,” Surovell said, “but what really worries me is it could lead to anti-Asian xenophobia or racism… We locked up thousands of Japanese during World War Two and I worry that these kinds of actions that don’t differentiate between a government and a people can take us to a dark place.”
Another legislative push by Virginia Republicans that Richmond Democrats are proud to have halted is to require taxpayer-funded colleges in the state to disclose funding from foreign governments. American universities have been hit by a series of high profile instances of Chinese spies using their roles on college campuses to steal American intellectual property and send it back to China.
In one example, a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Arlington leveraged his position to obtain a circuit board from Silicon Valley’s CNEX Labs, but ended up sharing the proprietary information with Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant that has been blacklisted in the United States. The professor, Bo Mao, expressed no remorse and ultimately moved back to China after being sentenced to jail time in America.
Democrats in Richmond, however, argue that grants from China are no different from those from American allies, saying that bans on funding from adversary countries are “getting out of hand.” State senator Mamie Locke, a retired professor, said that “there are all kinds of collaborations that go on between universities.” Locke, who defeated a bill that would have banned grants from China going to Virginia universities, carefully erected a straw man: “I mean if you stop China, what’s next?… Are we going to stop all kinds of intellectual work that takes place at the university level?” Did anyone suggest that?!
Caleb Max, the co-founder of the Athenai Institute, told me that Locke’s reaction is typical of what he’s seen out of Democrats in Richmond. Through his work at Athenai, a nonpartisan group that works to educate Americans about “the genocidal, anti-democratic Chinese Communist Party’s influence on our college campuses,” Max helped shut down all three Confucius Institutes that had been set up at colleges in Virginia. Confucius Institutes are widely seen as fronts for Chinese Communist Party agitprop, which push a positive spin of the Party to American students under the auspices of providing free Chinese language lessons.
“Regardless of their political party, students understand the atrocities being carried out at the hand of the CCP and are fighting back,” Max told me. On the other hand, he noted that “Richmond Democrats like Locke seem to believe Communist China poses no threat.”
Much like Whitmer in Michigan, most Virginia Democrats in Richmond seem to have no problem with the national security concerns posed by TikTok, even though Virginia’s Democratic senator Mark Warner is one of the leading voices pushing for a full TikTok ban. Following a flurry of executive orders from Republican and Democratic governors that ban state employees from using TikTok, Virginia became the first state to pass legislation that bans state employees from using the software on government-funded phones.
One of the “no” votes on the TikTok ban was state senator Jennifer McClellan, who is poised to become Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan after winning a special election to Congress this week.
Now one of the groups tasked with defeating the Democrats in Virginia is using their failures on China to put them on notice. Mike Joyce, the communications director at the Republican State Leadership Committee, called the Democrats’ opposition to Youngkin “pretty rich” given their recent opposition to a ban on TikTok usage by state employees.
The RSLC has its work cut out for it to flip the Virginia State Senate back to the GOP in November, but Democrats in the state seem hellbent on giving them all the fodder they need to get the job done.
