The U.S. political “debate” over platforming anti-Semites must be utterly hilarious to the Chinese Communist Party, whose allies have been injecting the political version of fentanyl into the American bloodstream and is now watching the political class of the global superpower behave like junkies for misinformation.
Tell me if this quote sounds like it applies to our current moment:
“They are thinking that if a war breaks out between the U.S. and China, that an anti-war movement breaks out around the world, spontaneously—or appearing spontaneous—that can restrain the U.S. And that includes in the United States itself. There is a coincidence of interest between Beijing and these people trying to bring down so-called ‘U.S. domination of the world.’”
That is Johns Hopkins scholar Ho-fung Hung speaking in 2023 to William Bredderman, a reporter writing an article about pro-Beijing propaganda networks. Bredderman’s article, published in the Daily Beast, documented the pro-China propaganda empire of Neville Singham, a Marxist billionaire married to progressive activist and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans.
The piece begins with BreakThrough News, a “slick online media machine” that “has recruited a slew of characters from Russian state-affiliated outlets” over to its pro-Beijing operation. Among them: Rania Khalek, who parlayed her anti-Zionist propaganda into a career of promoting authoritarian regimes.
And there was Rania Khalek of BreakThrough News partying at the Zohran Mamdani victory rally on Election Night, giddily celebrating on camera with Katie Halper, who was draped in a keffiyeh. Why it’s so important for the pro-China and pro-Russia propaganda world to continue making anti-Zionism its center of gravity is a question worth asking. But first, let’s just note who else was at Mamdani’s celebratory party.
There was progressive uber-influencer Hasan Piker, who has called Jews “inbred” and “bloodthirsty” and said “America deserved 9/11.” He was with Holocaust revisionist Mehdi Hasan, formerly of Al Jazeera, along with anti-Semitic former congressman Jamaal Bowman who complained during his reelection that he was “being attacked by the Zionist regime we call AIPAC.”
Piker’s left-wing rise after October 7 mirrored several such influencer breakthroughs on the right, as well as the podcast-specific success of some already-established right-wing figures who cashed in on the explosion of anti-Semitism and the market for anti-American propaganda—Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens. What brings Piker and Carlson and others in this ideologically diverse band of lunatics together is an obsession with reducing every political question to an anti-Jewish conspiracy theory. The same pro-Beijing propaganda web that hired Khalek was also involved in funding parts of the “pro-Palestinian” conference in Detroit last year, in which Rep. Rashida Tlaib headlined an event with close ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist terrorist organization.
As for the question of why anti-Zionist pro-terror propaganda continues to be the backbone of a pro-Chinese Communist Party strategy in which it allies with Moscow and elevates Marxist personalities, there are two answers. The first is that the template already exists, so it’s easy to adapt to today’s news cycles.
As Wilson Center scholar Izabella Tabarovsky has painstakingly documented for years, modern anti-Zionist discourse was developed and mass produced by the Soviets: “Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, the campaign had achieved numerous successes. For a significant portion of domestic and some foreign audiences, it succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid.”
The second answer is that because America has been more resistant to global anti-Semitism than the rest of the West, it’s the perfect subject to tear society at the seams. Such anti-Semitism is increasingly finding an audience in American institutions, so pumping it on behalf of Beijing and Moscow (and Tehran) is an easy way set those institutions and the wider, non-anti-Semitic public at each other’s throats. The pro-Hamas rallies paralyzed American higher education, for example—a perfect target for a pro-CCP agitator.
None of this bodes particularly well for U.S. politics, which has been infected with some of the same poison that has been floating around cultural institutions for some time. And that’s the point: China wants to undermine America far more than it cares what happens to Israel. It’s therefore been a fun week for Beijing.
