 To be aware, this meeting is also being livestreamed across our social media platform. So while that will primarily focus on the slide to the speakers, if you're not hoping to get a mini cameo out to just you turn your camera off. But with that being said, we will be getting started very soon. So today we'll be hearing from Kate Codepinck's newest staffer, Cale Holmes, who is our China is not our enemy campaigner, as well as Lawson Adams, who is a very dedicated volunteer who's what we could do to try to end it. Every the war rages on civilians and soldiers are being killed. Millions. There we go. Sorry about that, folks. Like I was saying, we will be hearing today from Cale and Lawson, who are on our China is not our enemy team and who have lots of years of combined experience talking about China, trying to prevent a war with China through propaganda and misinformation wars and who have so much to share. So today we're going to learn a bit about some of the popular discourse and propaganda used to promote war against China, as well as how we can identify propaganda and be a better, more internationalist feminist participant in the conversation. So I'll hand it over to Lawson. Like I said, we will be opening up for the last 15 minutes for Q&A, but please at any time feel free to drop a question in the chat and engage there and we will be monitoring the chat as well. If anybody has any questions or needs tech support at any time, please feel free to message me. I'm Jasmine and I'll hand it over to you guys. Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Jasmine, for that introduction, and thank you, everyone, for coming to Disarming Discourse, How the Media Purchases War on China. I'm Kale Holmes, as Jasmine was saying, I'm the newest addition to the Codeping team and I'm organizing the China is Our Enemy campaign. I also would like Lawson to kind of introduce himself more because he has a very impressive background, love, important insight that background informs. So Lawson, yeah, just take it away. Everyone, I'm really glad to see so many people here and I'm so thankful for Codeping and organizing all this. I'm Lawson Adams. I joined the Navy one year after I graduated high school and I served for a total of four years, during which time I studied Mandarin at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. And after graduating, I was in station on Hawaii, where I worked for the NSA for close to two years as a Chinese translator. And I joined Codeping's China is Our Enemy campaign because my time in the Navy really made me realize just how serious of a threat war with China really is. It's a real possibility and it's something that we really need to be working to prevent. So thank you all for being here. Absolutely. And some more background on me. I'm an international relations analyst, also a journalist. I've been based in Beijing for over three years. I've lived there. I've also traveled to China multiple times. I've learned Mandarin in Chinese history and politics. Also, my major involved researching China's policy at the UN, involved in Syria and Libya during wars in both of those countries, as well as other international issues like sub-Saharan Africa land reform. And I've covered stories in the Persian Gulf about AFRICOM, about the Korea peace process. But yes, I think it's really important. And I joined Codeping because I think we've had recently an attack on the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. And we're in this climate where that kind of thing is happening more and more, especially in tandem with a climate of anti-Asian hate in the United States. And there was a Princeton University study that found that Americans who perceive China as a threat are more likely to find Chinese people as immoral and untrustworthy. And this goes back to the sneaky Asian stereotype of the 19th and early 20th centuries, really the 21st century as well, which we were still living with. And this is also happening amid expanded military bases in the Pacific, amid sanctions on Chinese companies, amid escalations all over the place. And recently, the USA Department issued a report on disinformation coming from China. But what we actually don't realize enough is that a lot of our discourse is filled with a lot of militarized and pro-war propaganda when it comes to reporting about China. And we hope to kind of highlight the ways in which we can spot that out and help people identify what's pro-war bias and how to actually think critically about the crisis of coverage in China news. So yeah, thanks so much for joining us, everyone. Over the next 45 minutes, you really hope to, as the slideshow says, disarm the discourse. And I think disarming the Pacific can start with disarming the public conversation about China, so we can have a much more normal relationship. So I want you all, I don't know if, can everyone see my screen? Okay. Yeah. If you kind of look at this collage of news clips about China, and yeah, feel free to just write in the chat what kind of things come to mind, what kind of descriptions you see when you look at a lot of these headlines. Are there any common themes? And what does that do for the public discourse about China, especially when it comes to viewing China as a threat or a danger or some kind of dangerous place? So yeah, feel free to drop kind of descriptions in the chat. And I wanted to share this because I think it kind of underscores how you see a lot of fear mongering, a lot of war mongering, a lot of cold warrior rhetoric, you know, a lot of racism tied to kind of the yellow peril syndrome, concepts, a lot of, you know, medical racism, you know, there was a lot of issues during COVID-19 where whenever there was an uptake in cases, whether it was Delta variant or Omicron variant, they would always use kind of the face of a person that was either from China or from East Asia, and what does that do for the way people view these really important topics, right, that affect the public? And a lot of ads will talk about China being a certain problem, like the sick man of Asia is like this Wall Street Journal opinion piece. And you also have at what costs headlines is kind of a way to picture China as something that is, you know, even if there's something mildly positive going on, what kind of spin is there given to actually, you know, make people afraid of that development, whether it be something as an economic recovery or reducing COVID cases. So I just wanted to share this collage to kind of illustrate the crisis of coverage in China and the way the U.S. covers China. I also wanted to show this Daily Show clip, so let me see. Can Alasdair, can you come from there? Can you see the Daily Show? Yeah, okay. The audience. Obviously, America's going through a tough patch. We're nation in decline, the American century is over. Oh, we had toilet paper stuck for a shoe since 2005, and nobody bothered to tell us. It could even leave, you know, some of our young people feeling hopeless. End up dressing in black and writing in a notebook all the time. What rhymes with on we? This country isn't hopeless, especially compared to China. Well, we're sucking fun in dust and going broke. It seems like China has it all, a growing economy, the power that comes with us owing them trillions of dollars, and so many pandas, they've been forced to institute a two-panda policy. So now on in China, this is true. Only two pandas per family. Place is just right, but pandas. Well, guess what? The grass isn't always greener. In China, hazardous record high pollution levels in Beijing have prompted what's called an orange fog warning. It brings us to a new segment. Things may be bad, but at least we can't chew our air. Oh, I know what you're going to say. Oh, but unemployment is at 7.8% and it's not coming down. Our economy is stagnant. Let me stop you right there. Just being outside can make eyes itch and throats burn. One expert told me it's like becoming an instant smoker. Oh my God. A billion instant smokers. How many Marlboro miles do you think they would get? You know, this is great. We got to stop being afraid of China. I just started thinking of them as another wheezing smoker. Very hard to be an evil arch-villain with a heavy smoker's cough. I think you've made your particle fingers. You expect me to talk? No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to. So I wanted to share that because there's an interesting, I think, dynamic that we view China and when we look at the mainstream media and even alternative media or even satire. One thing that I want everyone to have an idea about is even something normally subversive, like satire, like The Daily Show, that goes with a lot of dominant narratives about China as a kind of bleak place where it's like really helpless and kind of plays, I think, on some sort of like Orientalist tropes, right? Like a totalitarian nightmare where nothing good comes from there. And like challenging that is very, very important because I feel like even, you know, for example, when you, when we remember the history of like the run-up to the war in Iraq and like the war on terror in general, like these platforms are like very, like sought after for a critical commentary about, you know, making fun of the people in power, waging those wars. But even though, even those like satires kind of, it's like a fish in an ocean, right? Won't describe their environment as wet. And imperial propaganda has a way of even influencing kind of all of our thinking when it comes to China. And even though I would say, like, John Seward's piece has like, what do you call it? Something, it's joking about something that really doesn't affect Americans. It's something that I feel informs the way Americans understand China. And for example, air pollution. But there's two things I think that we should focus on, which is one, that like, even comedians like John Seward can frame China as a backward place, like what good could come out of it? And then two, what kind of, there's like an undercurrent of American imperial anxiety, because it starts off talking about kind of American economic issues, and how the US is like in a state of relative economic decline amid like China's research is on the local stage. But I also wanted to share this, which is that, you know, on CNN on August 30th, this year, my French niece and Shanghai shared the story, she was so surprised that there was actually a positive story. And it's like, this story comes in and talks about how for the air pollution problem in particular, there actually was progress made. And it shows that there's a lot more dynamic things happening in China. It's not really static is portrayed. And even life expectancy has increased because of kind of the reforms when it comes to environmental protection, when it comes to like air. So, but of course, like the Orientalist view still persists with like the magnitude of this information. And that's what we are about to get into. So before we get into that, though, I kind of want to go over just a bit of the timeline of escalation between China and the United States. And Lawson, I feel like I would love to, you know, have you kind of chime into on how, especially from the vantage point of the NSA, what this means for China-US relations. So after the China revolution, you know, there was the Communist Chinese victory, I should say, there's an interesting development where you have the Nationalists and which are called the Gouming Dong and Mandarin are the KMT. I'll kind of refer to those interchangeably, but the KMT lost the Chinese Civil War, they end up going to Taiwan, which was regarded as a part of China back at that time. And even after the KMT lost the Chinese Civil War, they rejected the idea of two Chinas, even though that was kind of floated by various American and British diplomats and various American British newspapers. Both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China rejected the idea of two Chinas in both flame sovereignty over all of China, you know, both flame masses across the Taiwan Strait. And there's an interesting development where like Truman, there's the famous phrase that Truman lost China because during the China Civil War, President Truman backed the KMT against the Communists, but the Communists ultimately won and, you know, the Chinese Civil War is very long and it's really bloody, but the kind of key points are there was a massacre in Shanghai where the KMT killed the Communists who were actually part of the coalition within the KMT. They were part of the United Front to unify China. But they ultimately, that coalition ultimately collapsed and there was the Civil War, the Long March, Communist kind of uprisings across China. And there was a pause during Japanese invasion where they actually worked together again, but then you have the late 1940s where Truman is back in the KMT. They lose and Noam Chomsky writes about how like the loss of China actually, it's a very kind of like, you know, it's a very patronizing way to frame things, but that was the way people viewed the Communist victory. And in fact, China had relations with other countries, which viewed Taiwan as part of China as part of that condition of having relations with China, like Pakistan, Indonesia, but John Foster Dulles and other people also had the idea that Taiwan was a part of China, that they wanted the KMT to liberate the rest of Chinese mainland quote unquote, as did Mao in the Communist up until the Korean War. But the important thing is they were both perceived of as one China both sides. But then in 1970, in the early 1970s, you have a breakthrough when Kissinger and Nixon reach out to China and establish diplomatic relations and you have the Shanghai communique. And that's a very important moment because that's when you have the United States acknowledge that both sides acknowledge that there was one China. There's tricky language there. They say that both sides of the US acknowledges both sides think there's one China, but the US doesn't make a judgment about that. And that opens door for the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which under US law obligates the United States to send weapons to Taiwan. You have Reagan in the six assurances, and I'm just going to read those real quick because they're really important. While Reagan issued the six assurances to Taiwan, and they are one, we do not agree to set a date certain for ending arms sales to Taiwan. Two, we see no mediation role for the US between Taiwan and the PRC. Three, nor will we attempt to exert pressure on Taiwan to enter negotiations with the PRC. For there has been no change in our long standing position on the issues of sovereignty over Taiwan, which is already problematic because the US adheres to the one China policy, and even Taiwan at this point still believes in that, then that has a lot of questions going forward. Five, we have no plans to seek revisions to the Taiwan Relations Act. And six, the August 17th communication should not be read to imply we have agreed to engage in prior consultations with Beijing on arms sales to Taiwan. So as you can see, there's no room for mediation or negotiation, so pretty hard for peace. And this ultimately comes to a crisis where the president, the leader in Taiwan visits Cornell University in the mid 90s, and the Clinton administration in response to Chinese protests sends weapons into the Taiwan Strait. From 97 to 2004, the US is steadily sending more and more heavy weapons, like medium range air to air missiles, studying Taiwan's military capabilities. This goes back to Eisenhower, but this is in the new phase of relations with China, definite escalation when it comes to bilateral ties. Then during the NATO war in Yugoslavia, the former Yugoslavia, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which was actually at that time kind of described as an intelligence mistake. The Chinese disagreed with that because they said there was clear markings, but you know, Bill Clinton, President Clinton at the time pleaded with President Jiang Zemin of China that it was a mistake. That was kind of one of the first kind of turning points of anti-US or anti-American imperialism within a Chinese context post normalization. And in 1999, you have a period where the US initially does not want China to even be part of global trade, kind of blocking the entry to the WTO. You know, there was the negotiated Jews didn't make enough concessions. This all kind of was a big sore point. And then there's the Hainan Island incident, which Lawson, I think that's something that I would, you know, you could chime in on on what that meant for relations. Yeah, we actually talk about this a little later on. In 2001, there was a Navy reconnaissance plane that was flying in the South China Sea that was intercepted by a Chinese pilot, and ultimately collided. These two planes ultimately collided with one another, killing the Chinese pilot, and sending the Navy reconnaissance aircraft crashing down where they decided to land on a Chinese military air base on Hainan Island. So the crew was taken in by Chinese authorities and interrogated for several days, and it resulted in a real serious diplomatic crisis between China and the United States. Because obviously China is blaming the United States for even being there in the first place, and they're the reason why our pilot's dead now. And the United States is saying, well, now you're holding our crew hostage. And so both sides are going at it over this crisis, which really shouldn't have happened at all, because why do we need to be flying reconnaissance planes in the South China Sea? Exactly. And that kind of opens up the door to kind of push and pull between China and the United States, where China is doing making, sorry, the United States rather picking some concessions to China about reducing arms sales to Taiwan. But remember, there's Reagan's six assurances, which kind of, you know, even though the precondition for bilateral ties with China is not kind of interfering in Taiwan, the United States kind of has this policy of doing it anyway. And then you have, you know, George W. Bush sending amphibious assault vehicles and Apache attack helicopters, Black Hawk utility helicopters. That last kind of helicopter was actually not sent with notification to Congress. So you have much more of like the executive branch of government, you know, intervening in Taiwan. And 2006, the US stopped disclosing data to the United Nations on what kind of specific weapons are sent. So there's actually a lot of gray area. There's a lot of, there's kind of like a little bit of an information blackout when it comes to the degree of weapons that are being sent. Also during this time, you have Philippines being upgraded to a non-nado ally of the United States. You have kind of military expansions in the Asia Pacific region in the Pacific, in South Korea, in Japan. Noam Tromsky has an interesting book called Failed States where he actually goes into how during 2006, 2007, a lot of reporting was kind of peer-mongering about China, the link up to military, but it kind of ignored that it was in response to a lot of these trends. So then you have what I like to call the great game, the Pacific Edition, which is, you know, the great game, of course, was between Russia and Great Britain to compete over control over Afghanistan in the 19th century, as well as other periphery, parts of the global periphery in Central Asia. But, you know, this time in the Pacific, you have this interesting moment where the pivot to Asia is launched. And you have kind of conflicting statements from the State Department where former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says, the US is neutral. We don't take sides in any South China Sea disputes, but we want open access to those trade routes to South China Sea resources, etc. Then you have this period in the early 2010s where the Obama administration said sends $14 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan. And I actually worked in China. I had friends who told me like this is when they launched a show on CCTV, which is China's state broadcaster, about cross-strait relations in response to this kind of unprecedented, you know, expensive weapons sales to Taiwan. These escalations kind of continue militarily to the Philippines, to Australia. The Philippines, of course, has disputed, China and the Philippines have disputes over maritime borders in the South China Sea, particularly when it comes to islands that fall within what China calls its like tin dash line. But you have the tariff war on solar panels, which kind of leads into like the trade war, which happens later. And you also have the beginning of FEMA navigation exercises in 2013. And that's been ongoing. There's actually right now the Santa Sama kind of joint naval patrols that are happening between the US, Britain, France, Australia, and the Philippines and the South China Sea. And back in 2013, there are actually posed by a lot more countries locally in the region, not just China. China was the only one who was kind of covered when, you know, they protested these freedom of navigation exercises. But after the South China Sea dispute claims kind of get more intense, the US gets more involved. When Trump is elected president, you know, this is a really pivotal moment. He calls Taiwan's leader Tsai Ing-wen on the phone, which is really unprecedented. You know, presidents have not done that in the past up until Trump. You know, then Trump again tells President Xi Jinping when they meet in Florida, he's not going to send more weapons to Taiwan. He of course, sends more anyway. This kind of goes back to Reagan six assurances, right? We have no obligations to tell Beijing whether or not whether or not we're going to send weapons or not to send weapons. Then you have Steve Bannon saying there's going to be a war in 2027. I actually went to Congress recently to a hearing about arms sales to Taiwan and they were kind of openly talking about this 2027 year is a crucial year for some kind of conflict over Taiwan when it comes to China. And this is something that other presidential candidates have said like Vivek around the Swami. Of course, you have the trade war, which Richard Wolk I think is a good point. Trade wars can often become actual wars very easily. The opium war was kind of a conflict between China and Britain that had its origins in a trade dispute. You have more sanctions also on Hong Kong, for example, the mayor of Hong Kong couldn't even go to certain banks because of US sanctions in 2020. Then you have this precedent of both sides doing this tit-for-tat measures like closing cons lips. Then Mike Pompeo just says China engagement has failed completely. Increases sanctions on Chinese companies from various special administrative regions and autonomous regions. And you have the COVID-19 pandemic where you have Trump saying go ask China for the problem of COVID. Biden becomes president and we even have more escalation with AUKUS, which is a military pact between US Britain and Australia. The security pact to kind of patrol the Pacific, the Indo-Pacific is what they call it, and involves nuclear armed submarines. Actually Congress just issued a report about those submarines and how if there's a mistake or some kind of accident with those submarines there might be a reduction in public support for AUKUS. A lot of US allies in the region don't want to host them. You have more and more attempts from Biden cabinet level officials to kind of keep things cool between China but still urge to kind of delink our economy with China's as it has become so linked after the US eventually let China join WTO. And then we have more escalations this year of course with the Philippines, with joint military patrols as I was mentioning before with the Philippines and Japan. All right. So I'm going to be talking about something that I'm very familiar with, coming from an intelligence agency, and that is the consequences of compartmentalized information and the power of secrecy itself. So I just want to start off by kind of breaking down the US classification regime, which consists of three main designations. And these designations are supposed to be indicative of the danger posed to national security if the information is leaked, with top secret information being expected to result in exceptionally great damage to the United States, secret information resulting in serious damage and confidential information resulting in damage. And if this criteria seems pretty vague to you, that's exactly right. It is very vague. And in fact, a lot of different classification authorities can be inconsistent with how they determine what's the top secret, what's the secret. But this is all kind of assuming that that information is always classified with the intention of protecting national security. The reality is in many cases it just isn't. In many cases, information is classified in order to hide embarrassing or even illegal conduct and just to prevent people from being aware of it. And many people who have had top security clearances will tell you most of the classified information you've come across isn't even all that interesting. A lot of it's just over-classified simply due to the employees herring on the side of secrecy to protect themselves. They might be unsure of which designation to use. And so their state is better to just over-classify it. So this kind of over-classification and over-compartmentalization of information results in things that might be useful for the public's understanding of certain issues being withheld, which impacts public opinion. And worst of all, it creates an environment where people who withhold information that would be useful for the public are never held accountable because we simply don't know the information that's being withheld. Another problem that stems from over-compartmentalization of information is just the absurdity that can result from it. For example, there could be, you know, there are tons of examples of just unethical or faulty experiments and just invalid information being manufactured out of these intelligence agencies. A great example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about here is, you can see in the slide, acoustic kitty. This was basically a horror story about the CIA cutting open a cat and retrofitting it with electronic components that are supposed to make it, you know, remote-controllable so that it can be used as a listening device. Ultimately, there's no real benefit that came out of the study. They concluded that it was a great achievement to learn that we can make cats travel short distances. But all in all, it was a complete failure of a scientific study, if you can even call it scientific. And the entire reason that such a horrible project was conducted is just because it's not done in the same way that academia is almost done in terms of sharing and scrutinizing information so that it can be, you know, so that, you know, bad research can be sifted out from the good research. You know, other examples of this include injecting homeless people with plutonium and uranium and pretty much every program that was attached to MK Ultra. A lot of it was just quack science. So this part gets to just the pure power, the potency and power that lies behind secrecy. And part of this is what's known as the secrecy heuristic. There was a study done by the University of Colorado Boulder where they concluded that people use classifications, you know, just the simple fact that information comes out of intelligence agencies to assess, one, how valuable the information is, and two, the quality of the information, you know, how important is this information and how accurate it is. If it's coming from an intelligence agency, people are more likely to believe that it is accurate and that it is important. And not only that, the study concluded that people assessed judgments that were based off of intelligence reports as being more, I guess, grounded in reason. So for example, if we can draw a lot of parallels back to the war in Iraq, where the entire war was based off of the false intelligence that said that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, you know, people who perceived, people who knew that our intention or our going to war with Iraq was based on classified intelligence being weapons of mass destruction, were more likely to agree with the war. So in terms of disarming this power that comes along with secrecy, just one thing that we always have to keep in mind is, you know, how credible and how valid are the information that intelligence agencies are producing, if that makes any sense, like we can also question the motivations behind the information that intelligence agencies come up with. For example, with the FBI's counterintelligence program, the entire motivation behind that program was to delegitimize left wing grassroots causes. And yeah. So this slide touches on strategic leaks. We see strategic leaks in the media all the time and they're meant to influence the perceptions of opinions or the perceptions and opinions of Congress and the public. You know, the monopoly of a flow over information is extremely powerful in the same way that a monopoly over the use of violence is extremely powerful. Intelligence agencies can essentially use secrecy like a brush to paint any picture that they want with the media. They don't have to necessarily, you know, give all the information that they have collected. They just have to give information that pushes their narrative. Media outlets readily run with this and effectively becomes stenographers to power. For example, like if an intelligence official wants to procure more funds for their office, you know, what might they do to procure more funds? Well, they have to convince Congress and the public that there's an issue that they could deal with or they just have to convince them that the current resources that are allocated aren't enough to deal with their focus. And so all they have to do to accomplish that is release, you know, selective reports that paint that picture that there is an issue that they can deal with and that, you know, the resources that they have aren't adequate. And this has been a problem that every president has dealt with since FDR. A lot of times you can see presidential candidates running on an attention to, you know, take away this power from intelligence agencies because ultimately it undermines the power of presidents themselves, but they can't. You know, a president isn't going to be able to reign in their intelligence agencies because if you're going to prevent intelligence agencies ability to selectively leak for their own agendas, you're necessarily taking away the president's ability to selectively leak information for their agenda. So in order to actually, you know, address this problem of, you know, a monopoly over the flow of information, it has to come from Congress. Congress needs to start allocating, I'm sorry, there was actually, but Congress needs to allocate more resources in terms of declassifying information so that, you know, intelligence agencies can monopolize it. So this next part I like to refer to as, you know, throwing the stone and hiding your hand. And we see this all the time. If in the media you see the word unprovoked being thrown around everywhere, this is probably the strategy that's being used. The United States is notorious for provoking its enemies only to portray, you know, the ensuing response as an act of aggression. You know, history starts from the moment, you know, the enemy responds. It doesn't matter what led up to that point. For example, the South China War in post reported in 2021, large U.S. reconnaissance aircraft conducted around 1,200 close-in spine flights over the South China Sea alone. And that's not, you know, that's not even considering the East China Sea and the entirety of China's coast. That's 1,200 close-in spine flights in the South China Sea alone. And in response to these flights, the Chinese military deploys fire jets to intercept and deter the aircraft that encroach on its airspace. And, you know, when these jets come in close contact with the, with our reconnaissance flights, we characterize them coming too close as, you know, aggression and them being unprofessional when it's really on us because we're daily flying multiple reconnaissance flights all along their coast. You know, there's an AP News article that I linked to where the focus lies solely with the conduct of the Chinese pilot without even considering the larger question as to why we're even there. And again, this is what we touched on earlier, the, in the Highland Island incident in 2001, a U.S. Navy reconnaissance flight collided with the Chinese JAA. And the entire, you know, at least in Western media, the entire focus was just on the fact that the crew of, you know, our reconnaissance aircraft is being detained. And we focused on no, we didn't focus at all on the fact that, you know, our reconnaissance flight resulted in the death of a Chinese pilot. We kind of absolved ourselves of all responsibility. We can go to the next slide. So yeah, this, we can, yeah, we can play this video. Following this U.S. Navy playing now for about 15 minutes, it is pretty remarkable to see this Chinese warplane operating at such close proximity to several hundred feet away from our aircraft. The Chinese fighter escort part of a regular routine. I'd say it's another Friday afternoon, South China Sea. Right. For us, it's just another afternoon in the South China Sea. We don't see anything wrong with this being a regular occurrence that we're just flying, you know, our reconnaissance flights all along their coast. But what about if we flip the script and it was Chinese pilots who were flying all along the California coast or all along the East Coast? Would U.S. opinion be the same then? I don't think so. The prevailing narratives in the United States criticized how countries react to circumstances the United States itself has never had to endure. You know, Western media can't fathom why deepening economic ties between Taiwan and the United States is unacceptable for China. These pictures on the, sorry, these two pictures on the right were just kind of to show a hypothetical scenario in regards to the United States. If, you know, China, North Korea, Iran, Russia had naval outposts situated all around the United States, there would be mass hysteria. I mean, it would never even get to that point because the second there were at least one or two of these bases, you know, around the United States, people would probably be calling for war. People would probably be calling for these things to be air-striped. And in fact, that was a serious proposal during the Cuban Missile Crisis that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously decided that the best course of action was to air-strike Cuba, which was ultimately, thankfully, projective for John F. Kennedy. Yeah, this is, okay. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we should also talk about how these, you know, intelligence leaks and, you know, intelligence-focused narratives are actually a channel through the mainstream media. I feel like Lawson has kind of set like a very, very crucial foundation for us to think critically about the stories we see, whether it's a spy balloon or, you know, different epithets like the Wuhan virus and how that interplays with all of that. So we have, you know, these two stories come out, you know, in early February, everyone was, you know, who was following the news might have waken up to this kind of hysteria over, oh, there's a Chinese balloon, perhaps a spy balloon flew over Montana. And, you know, even though CNN and BBC both published these articles on the same day, there's a lot of inconsistencies where it comes to, you know, whether or not it was able to transmit certain types of data. You also have a lot of the lines on anonymous sources, which is going to be a common theme when you, when we talk about the way the U.S. portrays the so-called China threat. And, you know, you have, for example, yeah, there was inconsistencies, can it take pictures? Can it not? After, I guess, a few months, Reuters finally called them the question, the validity of the claim made by the two previous articles, because the Biden administration couldn't say, actually, if it was transmitting data or not. And NBC even reported we don't know. So it's like there was all this big rush of fear. The U.S. was even shooting down balloons, civilian balloons after this. There was a group of high school students and old people in Illinois balloon enthusiasts. They sent out a balloon flew over Canadian airspace and the U.S. shot it down for fear it could have been Chinese. But even the president admitted later that we actually don't know if it was spying on us. Even so, the New York Times had this propaganda campaign to kind of scare our allies in the thinking that there's a global conspiracy of Chinese balloons, you know, collecting surveillance. There were briefings designed to show, like literally designed, as the New York Times article says, uncritically, to show that balloons are equipped for intelligence gathering. And, you know, they're targeting places like Japan, like Philippines. And this kind of goes a lot, for me, back to like the U.N. speech that Colin Powell gave in 2003, where he was like holding up anthrax and trying to scare members of the international community. But this is a former colleague of mine who works for a local news station in Maryland. He was even able to kind of debunk actually the inconsistencies because, you know, as Lawson was alluding to some of the intelligence that like people are getting their pitches from is not even rooted in like anything concrete, right? And even, you know, my former colleague Dan Satterfield was talking about how the logistics make it possible that China's narrative is correct. It was just a meteorological balloon. Ultimately, in June, you have the Pentagon come out and say it wasn't spying. So many words. Pat Ryder was saying it didn't transmit data. So like, what do they think? What's the whole purpose of spying if it's not getting intelligence, right? And they were saying, you know, everyone was scared about how it was flying through the United States, by military bases. If you look at this map, you can see there's military bases all over the continental United States. And, you know, if you really look closely at it, the story kind of falls apart when it comes to whether or not it was really a spy balloon. But even though Pat Ryder, the general refuted claims that could gather intelligence, ABC dropped the story the same day using the word spy balloon. The Wall Street Journal even published this article saying the Chinese balloon used American text spy on Americans, right? And the damage had already been done by this point, because Blinken, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was supposed to go to Beijing in February to like many ties between China. He postponed because of the so-called spy balloon hysteria. And he eventually did go, but he ended up going to meet leaders in Papua New Guinea to talk about expanding military ties. Locals were kind of concerned about whether or not this was actually not really just for security, but for militarizing their country. Locals in Papua New Guinea. In May 2020, we get to COVID-19 being a big problem in America, right? In May 2020, I was living in China. I was working in news. I was hearing reports about how by the end of the month, the death toll could rise to 100,000. And the Trump administration told a very, very scared country that COVID was China's fault, essentially. And you had all these images and CNN about wet markets, which, again, back to the Wall Street Journal, echo the sick man of age atrope. But just a year later, the story from political breaks down, how the Trump administration was just cherry picking intelligence. Even so, nonetheless, the United States was, after Biden got elected, diving into the same narratives about trying to counter China, trying to get the lab leak theory life. Michael Gordon, who's he's a reporter with the Wall Street Journal, he and Judith Miller published the original kind of fear mongering about Iraq having biological weapons. And he's kind of, I guess, failed upwards to do the same kind of fear mongering about China, right? And despite relying on non-sources and circumstantial evidence, he published a story in the Wall Street Journal based on these, based on this kind of shoddy intelligence. And also referencing folks from like right wing think tanks. And so this is how the media goes along with Biden taking the torch from Trump on COVID. And it has real world effects, because even though you have Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists sharing info about the origin of COVID, even though you have the WHO saying the most likely cause was from animal transmission, you still have an increase in anti-Asian hate in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. You have seen in debate moderators during the democratic primaries asking Bernie Sanders how he punished China, right? If he got elected president. And also kind of back to what we were saying before, there was a lot of focus on China covered this up, even if they didn't leak it from the lab. But the Supreme People's Court in China, which is their Supreme Court even punished people who did contribute to the initial slow response. And so all that nuance was lost in the COVID China reporting. Of course, the damage was still done at the end of the day. I feel like with the Pentagon to Silicon Valley pipeline, you have an interesting case of, you know, intelligence feeling this information as well. CBS, for example, only quoting intelligence officials, not even quoting data experts about TikTok. And Justin Trudeau relies on the same kind of narratives, right? From Canada's intelligence agencies, which were very closely with US intelligence. And, you know, Microsoft companies like Microsoft, even also fearmonger about China interfering in the election, right? And this rings back to Russiagate and other kind of media narratives that are very, very reliant on sources who are unnamed, unknown. The same goes for Google. And, you know, we are in an AI arms race with China and a lot of these fears motivate US policy, right? And we're launching a new drone warfare fleet, AI powered to fight China. And unfortunately, propaganda works. As I was saying before, there was a Princeton University study that said, you know, people who find China as a threat will be Chinese people's immoral and untrustworthy. And you can see the dramatic decrease in people who have a favorable view of China. And again, you know, when it comes to Taiwan modifications, I feel the media doesn't really even take the necessary journalistic standards to fully investigate what conditions are like when it comes to China and tensions over Taiwan, whether it's public opinion in Taiwan, whether it's acknowledging critics of Taiwan independence, which again, only became something that had power after the 1990s, or, you know, news reports that exaggerate like the threat of a Chinese military response to the Taiwan issue. And we have right here, for example, this interesting article in the New York Times where they're saying Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in support of the island, where the Brookings Institute outlines that, you know, people in Taiwan even viewed Nancy Pelosi's visit is honestly a threat to their security. And I also want to go back a little bit to say that, you know, pro reunification voices are really rarely heard in our media, at least in the United States. This link, for example, is from the Labor Party in Taiwan, which supports reunification. And, you know, that link is from 1989. They're still active, they still compete in elections, but they're not really acknowledged when we discuss voices about this conflict, right. And yeah, I think we should be conscious of the material reasons, right, you know, what's motivating this kind of propaganda, whether it's the US decline in imperial anxiety as we were discussing before, or whether it's, you know, control over trade routes in the South China Sea. There was a representative young Kim, she visited the South China Sea recently, and she explicitly said, you know, we need to counter China, we need more joint military patrols with our allies in Asia against China to protect, you know, trade routes. And you have, for example, a lot of the people who were grilling the CEO of TikTok and Congress really this year received lots of money from META and Alphabet. And again, of course, there's that intelligence community to Silicon Valley Pipeline. So here, I actually want to kind of share some good resources about, you know, Clipset exposed the pro-war bias when it comes to China. There's this AJ Plus documentary from Sanaa Seed, a very great journalist. And she has a really good breakdown about how the threat of China was made in the United States. A lot of think tanks that promote aggression against China have links to the military industrial complex, you know, very, very traceable links. And this is, you can, you know, read the story by Amanda Yi. And, you know, Code Pink, we've done lots of webinars. You should check out this one, we've done with Pathways to Peace. It's really good for underscoring how propaganda is all around us and how it's, it really makes it difficult to have a normal relationship with China. And in fact, easy to have a dangerous relationship that could veer into nuclear war. And, you know, yeah, I lost it. I'd like you to kind of chime in here about how, you know, why we need to really disarm the discourse. Yeah, I mean, I think I kind of want to see, I wanted to, are we still going to do questions at the end or should I address questions now? Yeah, sure. You can, you can address questions now. I did want to address Christa's question about for, or I guess I'll address why we need to disarm the discourse now. While I was in the Navy, there were so many CO all calls were basically, you know, the commander of our base or, you know, like a top official, like in my office at the NSA would, you know, call us all together and basically brief us on, you know, what we're doing or they're basically just chats. But, you know, in these, in these conferences in these meetings, the message that you walk away with is them telling you, you know, get prepared because war could basically be coming in the next few years. Like the military prepares for war with China every day. And the culture inside the NSA and in the military is like what Kale was referring to earlier. A lot of it is based in this cold warrior rhetoric where people refer to Chinese people as the commies, you know, they're not people, they're commies. And, you know, we can't, it's, it's a fool's errand to prepare for war with a nuclear armed power, you know, because two nuclear armed powers going to war with one another is mutually assured destruction like we all learned in history, hopefully. But, you know, the military genuinely thinks there are think tank reports that you can find that say, you know, this is how we win a nuclear war with China. You can't win a nuclear war between two superpowers. Yeah, so it's crucial that we disarm the discourse. It's crucial that we're able to identify when narratives are being pushed in media to manufacture people's consent for war with China and push back against it. Yeah, and I think it's also important to realize that the media often paints China's successes like the United States' failure. And, you know, for example, you have politicians on both sides of the aisle like Joe Biden and Ron DeSantis have both said iterations of we can't let China develop or get rich or something of the sort. And it's like, you know, we, our governments claim to have shared interests and, you know, we have, you know, shared crises in Brooklyn. We recently had very catastrophic floods and I, you know, reported on the floods in Hulunan province when I lived in China. And there's lots we can do to actually cooperate on and I think that's really important. I think it's just key to just be suspect of articles with unnamed sources. You know, I, you know, worked in news. I think anonymity has a place, but when it comes to stories where people's lives are on the line where societies are on the line and a story could lead to the destruction of those lives in those societies, I think we should be more suspect. And, you know, the media in the US government position being the same is also a very red flag when it comes to reporting on China. And I think it's also important to cross-reference news articles with those historical record and what we already know, which is why I was, you know, I felt really important to share kind of the overview of Chinese relations from 1949 until now. But yeah, I, that's kind of the, that's the presentation that we want to share with all of you. And we also want to inspire you all to take action, tell the media to disarm the discourse. It's very important. This is a petition to the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times about calling out their reporting about the Chinese balloon, which is a really nicely called the spy balloon. And, you know, it led to increase in anti-Asian hate in derailment of China-US relations. And that's, that matters. That's really critical to respond to and to reverse. And so, you know, please follow us. China is our enemy on Twitter or X. And yeah, would you like to take questions? Yeah, so I, Krista asked the question that I wanted to respond to. And it was just what, what does my take on the Freedom of Information Act in terms, no, to declassify intelligence doesn't work or are there too many barriers? And I think the Freedom of Information Act is really important. A lot of people use it pretty effectively, Ken Pupinstein and Beth Irvin, I think are pretty good examples of people who use the Freedom of Information Act pretty frequently to uncover a lot of, you know, important stories. But in terms of, you know, it, it obviously isn't a solution because I'm going to send this video in the chat. That kind of puts into perspective just how much information is classified every day and how little of that information we will ever see, you know, because like I said earlier, we don't, we don't know the things that are being held from it. So it's like the Freedom of Information Act a lot of times, people don't even know where to begin. So we need a, we need Congress to devote a lot more resources to systemically declassifying information that should, that the public should know. So yeah. I'd also like to respond to, sorry, I'd like to respond to Chris's question on state media. I feel like, you know, the, the important part about media and the important part about storytelling is everything openly, everything ultimately comes down to a bias when we're the other. I feel like propaganda is very central to a lot of state narratives. And what people don't realize though is that if you ask most journalists what they're doing, they'll probably won't say they're engaging in propaganda when in fact they, they actually are. And I feel like there's just much more honesty in acknowledging that some media sources do have a certain bias while some don't acknowledge that. I think that's actually more dishonest. So I'd say, you know, it's always important to see if things are multiply tested, if there's multiple news sources saying the same thing. But I feel like there's, you know, bias in any media and media shouldn't be discredited whether or not it's from a certain source, unless it's, you know, there's evidence to say it should be discredited. Thank you so much, Kellan Lawson. I've learned so much and I'm sure other folks have. So I do want to give folks a little time to process, but if you have, as we have a couple minutes left here, maybe time for one or two more questions. If anybody has any pressing ones, so feel free to drop those in the chat and then Kellan Lawson can try to pull out the ones that they have time to answer. But please know that everyone who is attended today will get a follow up email with more resources, maybe a copy of the slides and we're happy to answer more questions, even if we can't get into the day. So I'll leave it back for you too, maybe enter a question or two before you're ready to go and then we can wrap up. Yeah, I see one from Laura Gibney that asks, is the focus on Taiwan to prevent China from capitalizing on the material gains it would get from reunification. And I think to a large extent is the United States is worried about China's rising economic influence. And it's also worried about their advancing military, like in the military, you constantly hear about how rapidly China's military capabilities are increasing. And Taiwan obviously is a very advanced economy, but it's also a strategically important position for the United States to keep as a bulwark against China. Because if China does reunify with Taiwan in the eyes of the United States, that allows them to project their military power across the Pacific. It makes it much easier to contain China, you know, just militarily. If there is that Western bulwark in the same way that John Mearsheimer describes Ukraine as a Western bulwark on Russia's borders, Ukraine can be used in the same way against, sorry, Taiwan can be used in that same way against China. So it is economic and also it's a geo-strategic place of importance. I'll take this question. So RIMPAC are these annual military exercises? It kind of means RIM of the Pacific. It's like a multilateral joint military exercise. And, you know, I think it's important to underscore how much that, you know, military drills, military patrols rarely in history have ever solved anything. You know, if you look at the history of whether it's the beginning of Spanish-American War or the outbreak of World War I, there's a lot of ways in which outward military expansion overseas actually has led to escalation. It's gotten us into wars. It's also been used as pretext to get into wars, even if, you know, there's been an issue with some warship really not being involved in any kind of conflict, that there's, you know, some assortment of evidence to make it seem like there was. So I feel like it's important that the United States de-escalate whether it be the RIMPAC military exercises or, you know, the joint military patrols on the South China Sea specifically. You know, the U.S. has sent warships to Iran. It's an aircraft carrier just off the coast of Palestine just recently. These kinds of escalations don't make for peace. I think peace talks are the way to go. And, you know, there was an article in the Boston Globe recently about how there should be a mutual security guarantee kind of pact between U.S. and China focusing on South China Sea, Taiwan, and also the Korean Peninsula to, for the U.S. not to escalate for China to escalate in the regions. I think that's really important. All right. We do want to wrap up there just because we, lots of great information. I'm going to be processing for a while and I'm sure you all are also. So I want to thank Kale and Lawson one more time for putting so much work into this workshop. I want everyone to know that this will not at all be the end of hearing from Code Pink about misinformation and disinformation. We take it very seriously as our responsibility as feminist internationalists to make sure that we're disrupting the war machine and the propaganda machine. So please feel free to check out our website at any time. Kale's dropping links below. We routinely try to post about propaganda. We've even just released a fact coming out later today about Palestine for folks who have questions there. We are unequivocally for peace and people's right to self-defense and we want to thank you all for joining us today. So like I said, you all will get a follow-up email from us with lots of links and great information. And Kale, if you don't mind dropping your email in the chat and I'll drop mine as well. So folks are welcome to reach out at us at any time if you want to get more involved with China. It's not our enemy. Thank you so much folks. We're so glad to have you and please enjoy your evenings. Thank you. Can everyone still hear? Oh yeah. Thank you so much Jasmine. Thank you so much Lawson. I really appreciate it. Give me a sec. I can put all the stragglers back in the waiting room. They're probably just away from their computers. There we go. Y'all did great. That was great. People seemed so engaged. People were like super into it in the chat. Like I think people learned a lot from y'all. How do you feel? Yeah, sorry. Go on Lawson. No, you can go. I feel a little bit, I felt like I spent too much time in the beginning slides. I felt a little rushed. I was throwing too much information, but I guess I'm assuming to improve on for next time. Right. We could definitely, honestly feel like it'll be worthwhile to run practically the same conversation again in a couple months because it's like always going to be relevant. So definitely keep it in your pocket. We can definitely do it again. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like I was, I got a little flustered at a certain point because like thinking like I was pressed for time, you know, and then I was reading through my notes and like kind of got lost a little bit. So I was going off, you know, just memory rather than notes and, you know, I was trying to keep concise and coherent. But yeah, I think I'm going out of the flustered. I don't think y'all sounded flustered at all. But also as always, I'm always learning from doing things like this, you always learn like, Hey, maybe next time we do need 90 minutes. Or maybe next time I can see where folks are interested in where my focus better. So we can always