In a cold, sterile room, officials at two long tables, separated by a wide divide, sat, staring. On one end, Team USA was represented by the Biden administration. On the other end, Team China. As U.S. officials slowly rolled out each scripted word, they informed the People’s Republic of China of their modern-day human rights abuses. <a href="https://nypost.com/2021/03/26/china-defends-itself-on-human-rights-by-pointing-to-history-of-slavery-in-us/">Then came China’s turn</a>. Staring down the barrel of the divide, right into the eyes of America’s top diplomat, the Chinese leader spat out, unscripted, that the U.S. no longer spoke from a position of strength; it had no authority to lecture on human rights abuses.
They painted the picture of America’s human rights abuses as “deep-seated … they did not just emerge over the past four years, such as Black Lives Matter.” On the issue of forced labor, Chinese officials rebuked the U.S., saying it had no moral authority to judge. They then proceeded to show pictures of their machine cotton production versus America’s historical production through slavery.
Even through a screen, you could feel the air sucked out of the room.
And that’s when I realized, as a public relations professional, China was officially on track to win the PR war. Just a few short years later, it looks like they’ve done just that.
This month, the Pew Research Center <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2026/07/15/people-in-many-countries-now-view-china-more-positively-than-the-u-s/">released a blockbuster report</a> showing that more nations had a favorable view of China than the U.S. The data also pointed to an indisputable trend: most countries still believe America respects its citizens’ freedom more than China does, but that gap is rapidly shrinking. Across the board, global sentiment toward China trended up. Pakistan topped as China’s biggest fan. But most telling, the countries with the highest regard for the U.S. were those in China’s crosshairs: Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and, most interestingly, India.
I can attest to this. As someone who grew up in Taiwan, the closer you are geographically to China, the more acutely aware you are of its striking capabilities. Literally. The <a href="https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/nwc-review/vol52/iss3/2/">mid-90s Chinese missile attacks on Taiwan</a> are seared in my mind, as my school operated daily air raid simulations. The people who live closest to China’s power often have the least romanticized view of it.
But lest you think this positive shift is just a global phenomenon, it’s not. We’re seeing the same trend here in America.
Pew also noted <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/14/americans-views-of-china-have-grown-somewhat-more-positive-in-recent-years/">Americans are steadily warming to China.</a> Today, over a quarter of Americans have a positive view of China, doubling over the last three years. Just like the global data, 2023 seems to be a pivotal year, with the graphs showing, pretty much across the board, most countries softening their views on the PRC. Why is that? I’m not sure anyone knows for sure. But as a PR professional, I’m convinced it is in part due to China’s refreshed messaging.
Every PR practitioner knows that two of the biggest PR metrics are message pull-through and audience sentiment. China appears to be excelling at both. The ultimate victory isn’t when someone repeats a paid message but when they repeat it organically, in their own words, believing it’s their own conclusion. Scroll through TikTok, and you’ll see videos of young influencers comparing the human rights abuses of America vs. China, debating who is more “imperialistic.”
Look at top streamer and socialist political commentator Hasan Piker. His recent trip to China was viewed millions of times as he stood in Tiananmen Square, not mentioning the atrocities but rather holding a Chinese flag, stating he had <a href="https://thehill.com/video/hasan-piker-blasted-for-china-livestream-i-dont-have-any-patriotism-for-america/11256155/">“no patriotism in his heart for America.”</a> Later, he showed reverence for former communist dictator Mao Zedong by claiming he would never criticize him. In an interview with a <a href="https://www.scmp.com/news/us/diplomacy/article/3343845/hasan-piker-talks-about-his-controversial-china-trip-and-thinking-chinese-thoughts">Chinese news outlet</a>, Piker said that China&#8217;s social contract outperforms America&#8217;s, emphasizing the country’s perceived achievements.
When it comes to positive sentiment, it’s not just Piker; we can also look at social media to reflect the patterns found in the Pew data. Social media accounts share “Chinamaxxing” content: A social trend where Gen Z romanticizes the communist nation and adopts Chinese aesthetics. For years, experts <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/5432077-tiktok-china-influence-us/">recognized the significant impact</a> China’s use of TikTok can have on its 170 million U.S. users. Even <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/19/the-guardian-view-on-perceptions-of-superpowers-the-world-isnt-chinamaxxing-its-america-avoidant">The Guardian points out</a>, “China is increasingly investing in overseas influence operations, including working with or amplifying local social media content creators.” It appears that the CCP understands a critical point of PR sentiment: You don’t have to win complete adoration; sometimes reducing opposition is victory enough.
I see this in my personal interactions as well. Because I grew up in Taiwan, many people share their thoughts with me about China. And what I’ve heard is a definite softening on <a href="https://freedomhouse.org/country/china">China’s human rights abuses</a>. “They just want to be left alone” or “They only want to operate in their sphere.” They paint China as some geopolitical Greta Garbo, when that’s just not the case.
It’s why Chinese President Xi Jinping recently described U.S.-China relations through the framework of the <a href="https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/discussing-thucydides-trap">Thucydides Trap</a>, wishcasting his nation to surpass the U.S. as the global superpower. It’s why <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1630978524684413">U.S. farmers are alarmed at American farmland being sold</a>. Even Hollywood can’t produce some American movies without agreeing to zero mentions of the <a href="https://www.heritage.org/china/heritage-explains/how-china-taking-control-hollywood">“Three Ts”</a>: Taiwan, Tibet, or Tiananmen Square.
China doesn’t need to convince Americans that it’s good. It just needs to convince us we’re hypocritical. Make us feel its ambitions are harmless. The latest Pew data confirms China’s global sentiment is improving, while its talking points are increasingly repeated by Americans themselves. By the two measures I know best, sentiment and message pull-through, the country appears to be gaining. Regrettably, China has been waging the PR war for years — and it appears to be winning.
***
Emily Osment Davis is a writer and communicator with a background in non-profits and politics and a not-so-secret love of celebrity gossip. She covers the space where Hollywood meets D.C. — because sometimes the two aren’t so different. You may have read her work in Newsweek, USA Today, Fox News and more.

Hands waving small Chinese flags

Is China Winning The PR War?

Chinamaxxing

Communist China

DW Opinion

Foreign Policy

Hasan Piker

Hollywood

Public relations

Taiwan

Thucydides Trap

Tiananmen Square

TikTok

Xi Jinping

On Thursday, July 16, 2026, President Donald Trump accused the People’s Republic of China of conspiring to undermine his presidency. Appearing before the nation from the White House, Trump <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HmhOFfJr5ro">shared</a> intelligence indicating that Beijing “engaged in…election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.” According to the president, Beijing “fought like hell” to head off a second term and “make him resign or prevent his reelection.”
The next day, administration officials <a href="https://www.c-span.org/program/white-house-event/peter-navarro-speaks-to-white-house-reporters-about-election-security/682908">said</a>, inexplicably, that Trump’s speech about Beijing’s election influence was “not a story about China.” Instead, Peter Navarro claimed, the true villains were domestic “nefarious actors” who wanted to swing the election away from Trump. Later on that day, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt <a href="https://x.com/katiadoyl/status/2078171530257686641?s=61">confirmed</a> that Chairman Xi Jinping’s upcoming trip to the White House remained on track. Apparently the punishment for meddling in American democracy is pageantry and hospitality.
Friday evening, Reuters reported new <a href="https://www.justice.gov/olc/media/1453136/dl">guidance</a> from the Department of Justice: TikTok was now safe to download on government devices. No matter that the CCP still appears to control the app’s all-important <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us-lawmaker-says-licensing-deal-tiktok-algorithm-would-raise-serious-concerns-2025-10-16/">algorithm</a>, or that Beijing <a href="https://www.hudson.org/technology/stop-giving-beijing-advantage-through-tiktok-michael-sobolik">leveraged</a> that control last year to turn the American people against Trump’s trade war with China. Or, most alarmingly, that a National Intelligence Council <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/NICM-Declassified-Cyber-Operations-Enabling-Expansive-Digital-Authoritarianism-20200407--2022.pdf">assessment</a> from 2020 identified TikTok as a primary vector of CCP election interference in the United States. With its hand on the app’s algorithm, the CCP can still manipulate TikTok’s content and shape U.S. public opinion.
If President Trump wants to prevent China, Russia, or any foreign adversaries from meddling in U.S. elections, he needs to address these contradictions immediately. As it stands now, his administration is unwittingly doing Beijing’s work for it.
Consider this warning from an NIC <a href="https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/NICM-Declassified-Cyber-Operations-Enabling-Expansive-Digital-Authoritarianism-20200407--2022.pdf">assessment</a> on April 7, 2020. China uses a variety of means, including TikTok, “to extend the coercive reach of their ideological enforcement and political control efforts beyond their borders. In some cases, they are impinging on Western democracies’ sovereignty and interests to enhance their domestic stability.” Beijing targets American democracy because its autocracy is weak. The CCP, like most authoritarian regimes, is parasitic. It has no internal source of legitimacy, and can only survive on the strength of others. Xi sought to destabilize Trump not primarily to weaken an American president, but chiefly to make himself strong.
It was bad enough that Navarro misidentified the antagonist in this whole episode. This story is clearly about China. But understanding the CCP’s motive is even more important: it’s less about preferring Trump or Biden, and more about sowing doubt in U.S. elections. Missing that theme will invite further meddling.
These assessments, and China’s own actions, give Trump considerable leverage. Xi clearly has his own political challenges at home, based on the persistent high-profile <a href="https://thedispatch.com/article/xi-jinping-china-military-purge/">purges</a> at the party’s highest levels. As much as Trump wants high-level meetings with Xi for trade negotiations, Xi may need these meetings even more for his own domestic standing. By inviting Xi to Washington in September and letting China off without any punishment or deterrent action, Trump will telegraph considerable weakness.
There is one thing that Trump could do immediately to alleviate these concerns, buttress U.S. election integrity, and regain the upper hand against Xi: revisit his TikTok negotiation. The app is the CCP’s most potent weapon of psychological warfare against Americans, and a powerful tool to turn us against each other. Congress moved as quickly as it did in 2024 to separate TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance because of compelling evidence that the app was directly responsible for spikes in antisemitism, just months after Hamas’ barbaric attacks against Israel on October 7th. The powerful algorithm behind that operation still rests under CCP control.
It isn’t weakness to revisit a bad decision. Letting it stand, and leaving Americans vulnerable to threats, is weakness. Should the day come when China leverages TikTok in elections, we will look back on this moment as a lost opportunity. Thankfully, the president has time to fix this problem. He has accused Xi of trying to ruin his presidency. Will he turn around and receive Xi at the White House in September? Will he allow the CCP to retain control of TikTok’s algorithm? More than Trump’s legacy rides on the answer to these questions. The resiliency of America’s democracy depends on them.
***
Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Trump Truth Social Post About TikTok Shown On Smartphone With Chinese And U.S. Flags In Background

TikTok Is The CCP’s Most Potent Weapon Of Psychological Warfare. Will Trump Stop It?

ByteDance

election integrity

Peter Navarro

Trump Administration

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) has spent years advocating for China&#8217;s persecuted Uyghur minority while investing in Chinese companies that have faced scrutiny over alleged ties to Uyghur forced labor and surveillance.  
The Uyghurs are a predominantly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic minority in northwest China whom the Chinese Communist Party has been accused of subjecting to forced labor, mass detention, and other human rights abuses.  
Suozzi’s advocacy dates back to March 2020, when he co-sponsored the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which was later signed into law by President Joe Biden. However, while publicly advocating for Uyghurs, Suozzi also traded shares of NIO, a Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer linked to supply chains <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/world/asia/china-uyghur-labor.html">associated</a> with Uyghur forced labor. According to congressional financial disclosure reports, Suozzi purchased between $1,001 and $15,000 of NIO stock on September 2, 2020, followed by another purchase of between $15,001 and $50,000 on October 5, 2020. He sold between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of NIO stock on May 20, 2021. 
Suozzi also invested in Baidu, a Chinese search engine that drew criticism after a patent described facial-recognition technology capable of identifying ethnicity, including Uyghurs. The company, when faced with allegations, claimed it has “never developed or permitted its technology to profile any ethnic group&#8221;, saying the patent does not represent &#8220;the expected implementation of the invention.” Suozzi sold between $15,001 and $50,000 of stock in 2017. 
Suozzi co-sponsored the Uyghur Genocide Accountability and Sanctions Act of 2025 and has served as co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Uyghur Caucus since 2024. When he relaunched the caucus, he said, “What’s happening to Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang should shock everyone’s conscience. As Co-Chair of the bipartisan Congressional Uyghur Caucus, I will continue to stand up, call out, and push back against the Chinese Communist Party for its oppression and persecution of Uyghur Muslims.” Suozzi added, “The CCP is brutally and systemically trying to destroy the Uyghur people with mass internment camps, forced labor, sexual abuse, and forced sterilization. We cannot shy away from this. We must shine a light on these atrocities.”
Since entering Congress, Suozzi has reported 671 stock transactions totaling roughly $20.9 million in disclosed trading volume. 
Suozzi is among roughly half of the members of Congress who report trading individual stocks, while the other half report no individual stock trades. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI) introduced the &#8220;Stop Insider Trading Act,&#8221; earlier this year. Steil&#8217;s bill would stop lawmakers from buying individual stocks during their time in office, and if they were to sell stocks they would need to provide at least seven days notice before the trade. 
&nbsp;

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Long Island, Queens) at poll event in Woodbury, New York

This Democrat Spoke Out Against China’s Abuses. Then Came These Investments.

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Last night, President Trump gave a prime time address. On its face, the president&#8217;s speech was about election meddling.
In general, of course, he&#8217;s right. We do need to pass the SAVE America Act and secure our elections. It’s not Jim Crow 2.0 to require ID to vote or to show proof of citizenship to register to vote.
But beneath the president&#8217;s big speech last night lurked a threat far greater than the question of election interference or election security.
No one seems particularly interested in covering that threat, and it is the greatest external threat our country has ever faced.
That threat is China.
They&#8217;re a threat to America. They have many allies here in the United States. Bernie Sanders does open events with the Chinese. Hassan Piker has an actual Chinese flag in the background. Zohran Mamdani, China-friendly Democratic Socialists of America, and many big corporations that want to do business over there are all a part of this.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ben-shapiro-show-ep-2466?elementPosition=1&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=Recent+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-981859" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif" alt="" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner.avif 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-300x50.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/10/ben-banner-768x128.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
China must be defeated.
China is not a strategic opponent. They&#8217;re not a country with whom we should seek a conciliatory relationship.
They are an enemy, period. They are the most insidious and dangerous enemy we have ever faced.
Nazi Germany never put phones with their propaganda in the hands of your children. The Soviet Union didn&#8217;t own trillions of dollars of American bonds.
China is not only a country that has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens, that supports literally all of our enemies abroad, that unleashed a global pandemic that killed millions of people and shut down the entire Western economy, and that wants to develop artificial intelligence to take over our minds and outcompete our military; they&#8217;re a country with global ambitions, and their ambition runs right up against the United States.
President Trump stated:
<blockquote>Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People&#8217;s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China&#8217;s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote and engage in other nefarious activities, which is exactly what was happening.</blockquote>
The accusation is not that China hacked voting machines or changed voter tabulation outcomes; it’s that they gained access to hundreds of millions of voter records.
Some of that is public information. You or I could gain access to voter records because voter registration is, in many states, public information.
The question is why China was doing that. Answer: They were doing that in order to manipulate American citizens. They were going to do a deep dive into the registration status of Americans and then use that information in order to target Americans.
The president contended last night that there were members of the Deep State — people who are career appointees in the executive branch — who spent the year 2020 suppressing information about China meddling, essentially on behalf of Democrats.
One declassified document, which appears to be from the national intelligence wing, said, “Ahead of the 2020 presidential elections, China had extensive plans to utilize potential (blacked out) and cyber operations to sway public opinion against the Trump administration and international opinion against the U.S. government. The China plans were designed to exploit U.S. societal fissures and vulnerabilities, to influence U.S. and other audiences, and, by extension, U.S. government decision-making. The plans addressed several scenarios, including military conflict between the United States and China, as well as other potential crises.”
China was attempting to exploit U.S. fissures and vulnerabilities, perceived or real, including racial tensions. They would allege that white people hate black people, incite demonstrations and marches as evidence of racial divides, increase the level of conflict between police and anti-racism activists, and feed any sense that U.S. law enforcement resents people of color.
Did that stuff materialize in 2020? Of course it did. They wanted to ramp up political party disagreements and disagreements between Congress and the Trump administration. They wanted to ramp up international propaganda. The intelligence stated, “China had developed capabilities to project themes on these topics into social media (TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others) as well as mainstream media, through a variety of overt and hidden influencers and media contributors. One of the options included gathering information on senior U.S. government officials to influence public opinion on those officials.”
We should have suspected all of this. These subversion operations, demoralization operations, really, have been long-time communist policy dating back to the Soviet Union.
Former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge published a report in April that addressed this. She reported that the CIA, led by Director Gina Haspel, would not document the Chinese influence operations formally, out of concern that President Trump would use the intelligence to his advantage.
This, presumably, was the sort of Deep State Trump was talking about.
If you actually would like to end the threat to the United States, you have to contain and strangle Chinese power. You must. China is not a strategic opponent. They are an enemy.
Here are some things we should do.
First, we need to economically wreck them. That means, yes, tariffs. It means we need to crack down on our trade with China. But to do that, we have to strike better trade deals with our allies in the region. If you&#8217;re going to make people choose between China and us, we have to offer a carrot to our friends and a stick to our enemies.
It also means we have to radically lower our spending. We can&#8217;t just keep selling our bonds to China. We cannot make the future of the country dependent on China holding our debt, because that means any time they want to hurt us, they just sell our debt into the open market and destroy our capacity to borrow.
It means that we do have to restore important manufacturing in countries other than China. That doesn&#8217;t mean all the way back home, which is very expensive sometimes. It means you have to go to allies. Sometimes you have to manufacture in India, for example. We need to draw closer to India.
We need to go after the countries that trade in necessary valuables with China. We need to secure our supply lines for rare earth minerals.
The United States is the economic gorilla on planet Earth, and we ought to throw our weight around. With regard to China, this notion that we thrive and China thrives, China has played the markets against us. China has used a certain opening of its economy in order to maximize its own leverage and power. We need to reverse that.
Second, we must rebuild the American military. This is not optional. This is necessary. The president has called for a significant upgrade in our military capacity, including for things like Patriot missiles and THAADs. Democrats are stalling this on the basis that they&#8217;re angry about the Iran war.
We should point out that Iran does not exist as a baseline military power without Chinese and Russian help. These are people who could not construct an IKEA box, but somehow they have fairly sophisticated weaponry courtesy of the Chinese.
We need to build up our military, and that means getting sophisticated about it. China is building a massive drone capacity. We need to work with firms to develop sophisticated weaponry to stall out the Chinese threat. There is no excuse for the American government purposely handicapping and kneecapping our own military capacity.
Third, we have to crack down on China&#8217;s technological infiltration of American society. That means we need to crack down on their information operations. It also means cracking down on nonprofits that act essentially as pass-throughs for the Chinese Communist government. We need to end the practice of people dropping babies from China. We need to end student visas from China. Why are we educating hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens who go back to China and bring stolen IP and knowledge back to our enemies?
There are a ton of people in positions of power who want to keep making nice with the Chinese. Bernie Sanders has been doing a full-on propaganda effort on behalf of the Chinese to undermine our AI industries. Believe me, the Chinese want nothing more than to destroy our forward capacity with AI. They want us to destroy the lead that we currently hold in AI, and they are succeeding because they are spreading a bunch of nonsense about data centers and how they&#8217;re going to wreck our industrial farmlands.
There are 875 million acres of farmland in the United States. If we were to build all of the data centers you could possibly want in the United States, four or five million acres out of 875 million acres, and it&#8217;s not all going to be built on farmland — what are we talking about here?
Some large-scale businesses are trying to do business in China. This was the problem with Apple.
Very few politicians are willing to stand up and say the truth, but President Trump is one of them. He has reoriented the political landscape regarding China. Until President Trump took office, most American politicians were still preaching the idea that China was a strategic partner. Trump largely moved them from strategic partners to strategic opponents.
In 2014, after Xi Jinping became the Chinese dictator, he wrote, “The battle for mind control happens on a smokeless battlefield. It happens inside the domain of ideology. Whoever controls this battlefield can win hearts. They&#8217;ll have the initiative throughout the competition in combat. When it comes to combat in the ideology domain, we don&#8217;t have any room for compromise or retreat. We must achieve total victory.”
These are our enemies, and we need to fight them using all the means at our disposal.

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The Conversation America Needs To Have

Ben Shapiro

Data Centers

Opinion

Trade War

More satellite images have been captured showing China’s scheme to bomb American ships, planes, and potential bases by testing weaponry on exact replicas of them.
In June 2026, images taken the month prior were released to the United States, showing a <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/china-builds-replica-u-s-destroyer-to-test-missiles-on?author=Gus+Wilson&amp;category=News&amp;elementPosition=30&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;title=China+Builds+Replica+U.S.+Destroyer+To+Test+Missiles+On">replica</a> of a U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer in the Taklamakan Desert that was surrounded by debris from previous missile testing. The Telegraph revealed additional <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/15/revealed-chinas-plan-to-bomb-us-warships/">photos</a> of the same site in a Wednesday report. 
Chinese President Xi Jinping has stated that he wants to “reunify” Taiwan and China — a plan which has broadly been interpreted as more of an annexation than a reunification — causing extreme tensions between the two. 
In preparation for the United States potentially sending naval support, China has been building and destroying replicas of American warships for years. Hidden behind mountains in a remote stretch of the desert, the site holds debris from tests dating back to 2021, along with replicas ready to serve as targets
A 23-mile railway was made to recreate how ships move across the ocean. The copies of the U.S. warships are placed onto railcars and moved across the tracks for training purposes to simulate a moving target for guns and missiles. Currently, the destroyed target on the tracks is the same one that has been publicly known for five years.
Surrounding the tracks are multiple other mock-ups of American warships, including at least two replicas of the USS Gerald R. Ford and the U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class destroyer that was revealed to the public last month.
In the same region of the desert, U.S. aircraft and runways were built for simulated attacks on other types of American weaponry. Craters surrounded the testing grounds. The runway has 20 planes split into two separate groups. 
The first group features two rows of F-22 model jets, four of which have already been destroyed. The second group is made up of four F-16 planes and six F-35s — the most advanced stealth aircraft in the world and currently in use by the U.S. Air Force. While the U.S. has yet to sell any of those specific models to Taiwan, it seems Xi still wants testing done on the plane.
Satellite images also uncovered a recreation of Yokosuka Naval Base, the largest American naval base, that would likely be involved in a potential conflict between Taiwan and China. The naval base, located on the eastern coast of Japan, is home to ten of the Arleigh Burke ships.
In addition to the Chinese replicating numerous targets that resemble an array of American maritime assets, they have also created Taiwanese bases and political buildings to practice tactics ahead of a potential invasion.

U.S. Navy Warship

Inside China’s Secret Plans To Bomb U.S. Warships

Military

Gov. Kathy Hochul slammed the brakes on New York&#8217;s data center boom Tuesday, handing China a gift-wrapped win in the global tech arms race.
A <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-york-impose-countrys-first-statewide-moratorium-data-centers-rcna587429">report</a> stated she would sign an executive order that freezes state permitting for massive AI server farms. It halts new hyperscale data center approvals and orders state regulators to establish rules on energy use, water consumption, and other environmental impacts before any more projects move forward. Hochul framed it as consumer protection, saying she couldn&#8217;t sit by while server farms threaten to increase utility bills and drain New York&#8217;s water supply.
But tech industry backers say the real story is who&#8217;s actually driving the anti-data-center movement — and it isn&#8217;t people worried about their electric bills.
House Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie and fellow Republicans recently fired off a <a href="https://d1dth6e84htgma.cloudfront.net/2026_06_04_Letter_to_PCAST_and_FBI_on_Foreign_Influence_AI_Data_Centers_99f6aa6cda.pdf">letter</a> to the FBI and White House science advisers demanding answers on what they call a coordinated foreign influence campaign involving China.
“Investigations by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) and Power the Future (PTF) have exposed new information regarding how foreign influence campaigns — many originating from China — have engaged in a coordinated effort to slow U.S. growth in AI development and the building of infrastructure supporting AI data centers,”  they wrote. “Equally sinister, PTF’s report details how billionaire donors filter money through a complex financial web to fund America’s non-profit ecosystem — often with strong political or ideological leanings — to skew public opinion against the buildout of AI data center infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI reported catching Chinese-linked bot networks using ChatGPT to gin up fake outrage over electricity prices.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5931292-data-centers-influence-campaigns-china-republicans/">didn&#8217;t mince words</a>, declaring, “Any place that’s trying to build data centers is getting bombarded with foreign-directed propaganda to try to block these from being built.” Investor Kevin O&#8217;Leary, backing a $100 billion Utah project, said his team traced suspicious social media surges to what he flatly called &#8220;the CCP at work.&#8221;
A Facebook group with 170,000 members, &#8220;Say NO to Data Centers,&#8221; has also become the online engine of the resistance. Its digital mapping guru, George Duarte, who built a nationwide tracker of data center projects, moonlights as a strategist at a D.C. consulting shop whose client roster reads like the Democratic Party&#8217;s who&#8217;s who — the DNC, the DCCC, the DSCC, and the Democratic Governors Association, as The Daily Wire <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/how-soros-linked-dem-operatives-weaponize-the-anti-data-center-push">reported.</a>
Money trails lead straight back to George Soros. Records show Soros’ Open Society Foundations funneled more than $7.6 million to Indivisible, the activist network that has organized data center protests from Texas to California. Soros also poured $23.7 million into the Working Families Party — the same outfit now recruiting data center opponents to run for office in swing states.
Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss chipped in too, reportedly routing another $1 million to Indivisible last year through his Berger Action Fund, according to tax filings. A spokesperson for the Wyss foundation stated, “The Wyss Foundation does not provide funding to block or oppose data centers. These reports are false, misleading, and an attempt by special interests to manipulate the public into accepting data centers.”
One watchdog group tallied more than $39 million in foreign money flowing to a dozen organizations fighting data centers nationwide.
Hochul&#8217;s Republican rival, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, wants local governments — not Albany — deciding whether to strike deals with tech firms. He argues the moratorium sacrifices jobs and cedes American ground to Beijing in the AI race.
For now, New York joins a handful of states flirting with similar bans — even as evidence mounts that the &#8220;grassroots&#8221; revolt against America&#8217;s AI buildout has some very well-funded and very foreign fingerprints on it.

Data center under construction at Waltham Cross, England.

Liberal State Takes A Major Step In The AI Data Center Fight

Hochul Pulls Plug On Data Centers In NY, As Foreign Actors Fuel The Backlash

George Soros

Kathy Hochul

New York

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell&#8217;s (R-KY) wife Elaine Chao released a statement acknowledging her decision to remain in China despite her husband&#8217;s lengthy hospitalization.
After weeks of public speculation about McConnell&#8217;s condition — and even some rumors that he was not expected to recover — a spokesperson for Chao said she did not believe the senator&#8217;s health was considered serious enough to require cutting her planned trip short.
&#8220;The secretary was on a long-planned trip in China to support her family&#8217;s philanthropic endeavors. During the trip, she met with a number of people, including the U.S. ambassador. The senator&#8217;s health did not warrant an immediate return to the US,&#8221; the <a href="https://www.wlky.com/article/elaine-chao-mitch-mcconnell-health-statement/71858467?fbclid=IwY2xjawS6XxxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFiR09rYlJIRlozV1lEWG10c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHmqXHN1RvqPWm5GcAUKVkyU7NtTKYD_m1LlbAUC6G9RaZBwk-viy1fLmpXws_aem_TVpgFeulR4GNuDSq2V1PfQ">spokesperson</a> told CBS News affiliate WLKY.
The former Commerce Secretary left the country on June 12, just two days before the news broke that the Kentucky senator had been hospitalized. In the weeks since, Chao completed her travels and returned to the United States — and very little has been heard from Sen. McConnell or his office.
The silence surrounding McConnell led to speculation — both in traditional media and across social media platforms — that the longest-serving Senate Majority Leader could even be on life support.
On July 2, nearly three weeks after McConnell was first hospitalized, his office released a statement to WLKY: &#8220;Senator McConnell appreciates the outpouring of support he’s receiving while he continues his recovery in the hospital. The Senator continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters while the Senate is out of session.&#8221;
In the days that followed, several Republican allies said that they had spoken to the aging senator. CNN commentator and radio host <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/top-republicans-speak-with-hospitalized-mcconnell-to-shut-down-rumors">Scott Jennings</a>, who previously worked as an advisor to McConnell, was among them.
&#8220;I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior Senator from Kentucky. He’s still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes … about IRAN, UKRAINE, the unfolding situation in MAINE, my visit to the TR Presidential Library, and even a little bit of Senate history. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible,&#8221; he said.

Donald Trump Announces Air Traffic Control Reform Initiative At White House

Mitch McConnell’s Wife Breaks Silence Amid Mysterious Health Saga

Mitch McConnell's Wife Breaks Silence Amid Mysterious Health Saga

Media

Mitch McConnell

Senate

Two hundred and fifty years ago, a ragtag band of farmers, merchants, and thinkers reached a breaking point. The Crown had rigged the rules of trade against them: extracting their resources, flooding their markets with favored goods, blocking their ability to compete on fair terms, and using economic dependency as a tool of political control.
They didn’t petition for fairness.
They didn’t write a strongly worded letter.
They declared independence.
The United States faces a remarkably familiar challenge today — not from a King but from a communist government across the Pacific that has built its rise on the systematic rigging of global trade at the expense of Americans. As we celebrate the courage and fortitude of our Founders, it is worth asking ourselves whether we are living up to that same renegade spirit.
The case for free trade relies on the assumption that all participants are playing by the market’s rules. That means private firms chasing profits, prices that reflect true production costs, and competition that rewards the most efficient producers.
China&#8217;s industrial strategy is built on the systematic rejection of every one of those assumptions. Instead of letting markets decide, the state drives outcomes through massive subsidies that create excess capacity, regardless of profitability. The CCP artificially suppresses resource costs (land, energy, capital, labor) and mandates joint ventures that force technology transfer from foreign firms. By deliberately flooding global markets with goods sold at prices no unsubsidized private competitor can match, the CCP tramples on market rules using state power
The old bureaucratic debate in Washington, D.C., has long centered on whether to protect American industries from foreign competition. But the CCP isn’t competing; it’s attempting to <a href="https://americancompass.org/a-hard-break-from-china/">eliminate</a> the American industry sector by sector. Made in China 2025, China’s self-proclaimed industrial strategy, <a href="https://www.uscc.gov/research/made-china-2025-evaluating-chinas-performance">targets</a> advanced industries that the United States pioneered and historically dominated. For example, China&#8217;s solar panel subsidies caused global prices to collapse by 80% as state-backed producers flooded global markets with below-cost products, building domestic capacity while suppressing investment elsewhere. Naturally, the Chinese domination driven by those subsidies had a <a href="https://cdep.sipa.columbia.edu/sites/cdep.sipa.columbia.edu/files/content/Marullaz%20paper.pdf">negative impact</a> on innovation in the rest of the world.
The point of this strategy? Make the United States structurally dependent on an adversary for the inputs that a modern economy and military cannot function without. The electric vehicle (EV) sector makes the point obvious. Chinese automakers are winning because the Chinese government has poured an estimated $230 billion in <a href="https://www.csis.org/analysis/hidden-harbors-chinas-state-finance-and-ev-industry">subsidies</a> into the EV sector over the past decade, allowing domestic producers to sell vehicles at prices that bear no relationship to their actual cost of production. China-owned BYD <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/byd-overtakes-tesla-worlds-top-ev-seller-2023-2024-01-02/">surpassed</a> Tesla in global vehicle deliveries in 2023, powered by land grants, discounted state financing, and government procurement contracts that effectively socialized the risk of building a dominant global manufacturer. The European Union reached the correct conclusion in 2024, finding that <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_3231">imposing tariffs</a> of up to 38% on Chinese EV imports following a formal anti-subsidy investigation was the only path.
The founders understood that economic and political independence were two sides of the same coin. Alexander Hamilton&#8217;s Report on Manufactures, submitted to Congress in 1791, argued that a free nation could not remain free if it depended on foreign powers for the goods its economy and defense required. Sadly, today we are once again dependent.
China’s state-dominated economic model is fundamentally <a href="https://americancompass.org/letter-to-the-trump-administration-on-chinese-foreign-direct-investment/">incompatible</a> with free and fair trade. No amount of enforcement actions within the existing framework will resolve an incompatibility that runs to its core. The pivotal long-term step requires Congress <a href="https://www.commonplace.org/p/trump-should-go-on-offense-against">to revoke</a> China&#8217;s Permanent Normal Trade Relations status and replace the current patchwork of reactive enforcement with permanent, predictable tariffs on Chinese goods that increase steadily over time, creating a durable signal for investment to move elsewhere.
For decades, the prevailing consensus view held that manufacturing&#8217;s decline was a natural and even welcome consequence of America&#8217;s comparative advantage shifting toward services and finance. President Trump has helped discredit that archaic view using <a href="https://americancompass.org/how-trump-can-rebuild-america/">evidence</a>: decades of globalization and financialization have slowed investment, innovation, and growth, while industrial output and productivity have stagnated relative to their potential. Meanwhile, the communities that shouldered the brunt of that decline saw little to no benefit as the foundations of their communities eroded.
We need to confront China&#8217;s dumping strategy with more than defensive enforcement measures and to treat American industrial capacity as a strategic asset to be deliberately rebuilt. We need investment rules that keep CCP capital out of American supply chains, export controls that stop American technology from feeding Chinese military-industrial development, and a trade posture built around the principle that the United States does not grant open market access to a communist government whose explicit strategy is to weaponize that access to destroy American industry.
A free market cannot win a fight it refuses to enter. China made its choice long ago. In honor of Independence Day, Washington must decide whether it has the courage of our Founders to once again unshackle itself from a tyrannical state.
***
Tricia McLaughlin served as the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Follow her on X: @TriciaOhio

concept photo for China-USA trade war conflict

America Needs To Declare Independence From China

electric vehicles

Free Markets

Free Trade

Green energy

Subsidies

Supply Chain

President Donald Trump reacted on Tuesday to the Supreme Court&#8217;s decision on birthright citizenship and congratulated Chinese President Xi Jinping on a ruling that he said would ultimately benefit other nations more than the United States.
&#8220;I would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!&#8221; Trump declared via his Truth Social platform.
The court&#8217;s decision protects, for now, the practice of &#8220;birth tourism,&#8221; which is used by many wealthy Chinese nationals who travel to the United States to give birth to their children.
In an <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116839981384247632">earlier post</a>, the president&#8217;s first reaction to the decision was slightly more subdued as he called on Congress to take legislative action on birthright citizenship.
&#8220;The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process,&#8221; Trump said. &#8220;No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!&#8221;
The <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/supreme-court-rules-against-trump-in-birthright-citizenship-case">high court</a>, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that children born in the United States — regardless of their parentage — were American citizens under the 14th Amendment.
&#8220;Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,'&#8221; Roberts wrote, adding, &#8220;We keep that promise today.&#8221;
In a <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf">separate opinion</a>, partly concurring and partly dissenting, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that he disagreed with the majority in holding that Trump&#8217;s executive order banning birthright citizenship ran afoul of the 14th Amendment. Instead, he argued that the order was at odds with current federal statutes, meaning that if Congress were to take legislative action, that could change.
In a scathing dissent, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “The court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens. In doing so, the court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

U.S. President Trump Meets With China’s President Xi And Attends State Banquet

Trump Congratulates Xi Jinping On Major Win At SCOTUS

birthright citizenship

Donald Trump

Global Politics

Supreme Court

&#8220;Death to America.&#8221; These are the only words Tim Sheehy needs to hear to understand what motivates the Iranian regime. The senator from Montana and former Navy SEAL understands this threat and doesn’t hesitate to speak plainly about what is at stake for America and the broader Middle East. In this weekend&#8217;s Punch interview, DW talks with Sheehy about the importance of the fight with Iran to the future of the region and American interests, the rise of radicals within our borders, and his views on the Trump administration’s foreign policy strategy.
***
Ben Domenech: Why do you think that what <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/republican-senator-delivers-blunt-message-on-iran-talks">you had to say</a> about this current situation with Iran hit a nerve with a lot of people?
Tim Sheehy: I don&#8217;t have any problem with us trying to come to an agreement with Iran. That&#8217;s not the issue. My issue&#8217;s not with the administration or the negotiating teams. The issue is with Iran. And as one of the few people on the Hill who actually fought the Iranians directly, and their proxies, who spent years of my life — and my wife&#8217;s a combat veteran and all my friends — fighting against the Iranian influence. I think it gives us a very clear-eyed realization of how insidious the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] and their proxy groups really are and how brutal and barbaric they actually are.
Their designs on the world don&#8217;t end with Israel in the Persian Gulf or with Azerbaijan. They want a global caliphate, and they will literally kill everybody to get that caliphate. And they don&#8217;t want to kill them in a lethal injection snap of a finger. They want to brutally wipe us off the face of the earth, like what happened on October 7.
They want us to be in pain. They want us to be burned alive and destroyed. So I think we have to keep that in mind, and trust cannot be a component of our negotiations. We cannot have them say something, and we say something, and we trust that they&#8217;re going to carry it out. And I support President Trump and his team&#8217;s campaign. I think it was way overdue — the first president ever to do this. And I support getting a resolution to the conflict that truly has structural limits around it because we don&#8217;t want to invade Iran.
We don&#8217;t want 500,000 troops there. But I simply feel propelled as someone who fought there and who lost friends to Iran, to remind our side of this negotiation that we need to not forget who we are dealing with. We need to remember what they&#8217;re capable of and what they want because we don&#8217;t have to think or assume what they want; they tell us that every single day, and they act on it every single day. And that is death to America, death to Israel.
BD: Do you think that there is an attitude of naiveté about the Iranians that has perhaps seeped in over the last couple of years, just given the fact that people are so tired of foreign wars, but particularly of Middle East wars, that they perhaps downgrade that threat mentally?
TS: I think that is the wrong answer. I think it&#8217;s just general non-awareness of the threat. I mean, the average American, the average politician, the average person who works in government is not aware of what Iran has done, does every day, and is capable of. They&#8217;re just not. And that&#8217;s a good thing, Ben. That&#8217;s the whole point of these forever wars that everyone hates, and I get it. I fought them, too. I don&#8217;t like forever wars, but we&#8217;ve been able to keep this terrible threat at bay thousands of miles away for the last 50 years. And that&#8217;s a good thing. As a result, the average American, luckily, doesn&#8217;t have a personal experience with radical Muslim psychopaths who want to murder them and their family. And as a result, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;What&#8217;s the big deal? Why do we care about Iran? I don&#8217;t want six-dollar-a-gallon gasoline; this is unpopular. Let&#8217;s get back to bringing inflation down, housing prices down, and immigration under control.&#8221; All very valid points, and they&#8217;re not wrong, but they&#8217;re also just not aware that because we&#8217;ve kept these savages at bay, they actually still exist. And not only do they exist, but they also want to come kill us. And I don&#8217;t want it to be another 9/11. I don&#8217;t want it to be another October 7. And I certainly don&#8217;t want to funnel billions of dollars, as Obama did, into a terrorist regime that wants to kill all of us in any way possible. So I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s naive today. It&#8217;s generally not awareness of the reality of it. And I think the vice president and his team are cheering on the president&#8217;s directive to try to bring an orderly close to this. And I think it&#8217;s very important.
I&#8217;ve expressed skepticism about our ability to get a deal. I have not expressed skepticism about the president and his team at all. I&#8217;m simply reminding everyone that our counterpart here is not trustworthy. And our counterpart will say and do anything to create time and space to rebuild themselves and come at us. They have a very long view on this; they’re not in a hurry. They say, &#8220;You know what? Fine. This guy Trump, he&#8217;s pretty tough on us. Let&#8217;s just play nice. Let&#8217;s get a few hundred billion dollars of revenue. We&#8217;ll act like nice people for a couple of years until he&#8217;s gone, and hopefully we&#8217;ll get another Biden or Kamala or Mamdani for Christ&#8217;s sake. That would be a dream come true.&#8221; And then they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Great, we&#8217;re back, baby.&#8221; And then, with all the money we give them access to, they&#8217;ve rebuilt a whole new infrastructure.
One thing we did learn from this is that a lot of people underestimated how many drones and missiles these dudes really built. They had them buried everywhere, like squirrels with acorns. And on every mountain, they had a goddamn cave full of missiles. And we&#8217;re like, &#8220;Where did those come from? Oh, they came from the American taxpayer when we gave them the money to build them.” And I&#8217;ll be goddamned if we let that happen again.
BD: You talk about radical Muslim psychopaths. I think that you could be talking about them or you could be talking about the latest round of Democrats who ran and won in New York this week. Why do you think the Democratic Party is tolerating this degree of psychopathy on its side? And do you think it&#8217;s actually a more serious problem than perhaps Republicans have been paying attention to? As much as they talk about it, I feel like they didn&#8217;t take it seriously.
TS: I don&#8217;t think they did. And once again, I try not to be a history professor, but sometimes you have to remind people where these issues come from. As you well know, the Red Green Alliance goes back a long way. Radical Islam and Marxist communist ideology have been interwoven for the last 60 years. This is nothing new. The IRGC is really the most virulent example of that. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise in 1979 was very much a Red-Green alliance. So this collectivist, Marxist-revolutionary mindset is interwoven with radical Islamic ideology in many ways. And it&#8217;s always been there. Hell, even the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panther Movement were very tied in with that. Muhammad Ali changed his name because of that. So there&#8217;s always been that tie. But I think what&#8217;s happened lately is there&#8217;s been a very targeted investment into our media markets by Muslim influencers who don&#8217;t like us.
They&#8217;re paying off people to say things specifically to incite opinions and events that are obviously, number one, antisemitic and number two, anti-American. It&#8217;s a very engineered attempt to undermine the fabric of our society. And the Democratic Party, of course, traditionally the home base for the American Jewish voter, shockingly became their vessel to do this. I shouldn&#8217;t say shockingly because, actually, it makes perfect logical sense, because the Democratic Party has drifted more and more into the Marxist direction of the past couple of decades, which again, is a natural home for radical Islamic ideology.
So I&#8217;m not surprised by this per se, but I am disappointed that the establishment hasn&#8217;t made a stronger effort to clarify their moral positioning. Because at this point, as you know, the Democrats for the last 30 years, anytime there&#8217;s a policy disagreement with Republicans, we&#8217;re racist, we&#8217;re Nazis, we&#8217;re homophobes, we&#8217;re transphobes, and we&#8217;re sexist. Pick your name, and they call us that. Well, now they&#8217;ve embraced an ideology that literally murders gay people, that stones women to death, that condones the rape and murder of innocent families on October 7, and then condones terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of Americans.
In a terrible way, it&#8217;s politically good for Republicans because they have removed any moral high ground, if they ever had any, to accuse us of being anti-women, anti-minority, or racist. They don&#8217;t have a soapbox anymore because their flagship candidate – the leader of the Democrat Party today – is Zohran Mamdani. That is who leads the Democrat Party. That is their mascot, and that is their messaging platform.
BD: You mentioned that this has been something that&#8217;s been fomented. There&#8217;s an interesting piece that ran in New York magazine recently called “Your Feed Is Fake,” which dug into the number of essentially AstroTurfed campaigns designed to help things go viral. They were looking at it in the context of mostly Hollywood, but also other things. Just to give one example, there were firms that were hired around the Sydney Sweeney Jeans ad that were fomenting and pushing both sides of that argument, meaning the negative and the positive at the same time, to gin up more activity. Do you think there needs to be some kind of transparency requirement, or more government attention, to the number of people out there who are paid influencers advocating for these DSA plans because they are everywhere?
TS: There absolutely should be. And to your point, I do think, though, the podcast-social media influencer world has reached its peak because I think in the 2024 election, we saw that the podcasters were a game changer, the influencers were a game changer, and that&#8217;s because it was legitimate. And I think it&#8217;s been so saturated now. There are so many podcasts, and so many fake influencers with AstroTurf content, that the average person is now starting to just not believe any of it, and they don&#8217;t have the bandwidth to absorb it all. So I think we&#8217;re going to start to see the influence wane. I think it already is waning, but I do believe, just like in TV commercials, there should be a requirement to disclose who&#8217;s paying for this. You can&#8217;t run a political ad without saying who&#8217;s paying for this and this is no different. So that would obviously fall within my purview as a member of the Commerce committee. And I think there&#8217;s already been discussions about that to say, listen, you should be forced to disclose who&#8217;s paying you for this podcast.
If a foreign government gave you $20 million to buy your podcast, well, you need to say that because if you&#8217;re going to pretend like you&#8217;re in your basement in the heartland with your Coors Lite beer and a rifle on the wall and act like you&#8217;re a red-necked hillbilly, but in fact, you&#8217;ve been bought by the Chinese Communist Party, well, we should know that.
BD: The issues related to Iran obviously flow into other foreign conflicts. And one of the big open questions is what does this mean for China – particularly their interest in Taiwan? Do you think that, given the way this played out, it makes China&#8217;s attempt to take Taiwan and absorb it more or less likely?
TS: I think on the whole, this whole campaign makes it less likely. Number one, we had a tremendously successful military campaign, and despite the media just looking for any reason to bash the president, despite the Democrats being abjectly un-American during this process by going after our troops. It was disgusting how the internal backstabbing was happening here against our campaign, against the country that&#8217;s been working after 47 years. So I think we displayed a level of precision and ferocity in those strikes all the way from Midnight Hammer through the latest campaign that China said, &#8220;That&#8217;s oppressive. They can&#8217;t do that.” But let&#8217;s not forget that China has not fought a war since the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953. So they have a big paper-tiger military that should not be underestimated but is not combat-tested, unlike ours. So we showed extreme capability and ferocity in our targeting. That&#8217;s going to give them a good bit of pause.
At the same time, look at Ukraine and say wow, Russia – big, giant, big bear Russia – they&#8217;ve been beaten back and essentially knocked into a stairway now by little old Ukraine with a bunch of off-the-shelf drones and scrappy fighters and trenches.
So China will realize it&#8217;s a lot harder to project military power, especially across a body of water, than you think. It has really only been one time in history where military power has been successfully projected amphibiously over a body of water. That&#8217;s America during World War II with our island-hopping campaign and the Normandy invasion. It&#8217;s really hard to quickly and effectively move thousands of people across a body of water without getting your ass kicked. So I think that will be a tale of caution.
At the same time, though, if China is able to hack this deal in some way on the backend and recognize revenue from a very dependent Iran.
China is always dependent on cheap, sanctioned Iranian oil. That’s been a superpower for their economies. They get oil for cents on the dollar. With Iran being weaker than ever, they&#8217;re going to be more and more desperate to make a deal with China, and they may even give them cheaper oil, and China can take more of it for cheaper. Additionally, sanctions-dodging will continue. No matter what we do, they aren’t going to follow any sort of sanctions regime. So they&#8217;re going to want to try to find a way to continue to use the Chinese yuan as their exchange currency for oil, and that’s, of course, good for China and bad for us. So on the whole, this is going to be worse for China and the designs on Taiwan, but in the end, they might have better access to Iranian oil.
BD: I’m just going to ask a question on behalf of one of our younger staffers. She said, &#8220;Why didn&#8217;t we just keep bombing, and why didn&#8217;t we bomb the IRGC?”
TS: Well, that&#8217;s obviously a question for the executive branch. I&#8217;m not in the chain of command, so I can&#8217;t give you specific reasoning why. The reality is probably that a full collapse of the government would have required the follow-on commitment of ground forces, be they American, allied, Kurdish, or others, which I think would have required a broad alliance to support. And my assumption is that at the time, nobody wanted that. The American people have made it very clear they&#8217;re tired of ground wars in the Middle East. They don&#8217;t want it. And I think that the president said, &#8220;Listen, we&#8217;ll do what we have to do, but I think we can probably get this done without that.&#8221; And I think that&#8217;s where it ended up. However, I&#8217;ll say the president is absolutely locked and loaded and ready to go back in again for another round should they welch on these talks and resume their bad behavior.
***

Punch-Sheehy-3

Don’t Trust Iran, They Want Us All Dead

Iran war

IRGC

Punch

Tim Sheehy

Our great country is celebrating 250 years of independence. That’s on 250 years of freedom, innovation, and economic strength that all began with the strong and simple declaration that we would no longer be controlled by a hostile foreign power.
Today, maintaining that independence is not just a political necessity; it’s an economic one too. The threat is real, and countering it starts in our factories, our supply chains, and our homes.
For too long, we&#8217;ve allowed foreign adversaries, including the Chinese Communist Party, to quietly take control of the brands Americans trust, the infrastructure Americans depend on, and the household products Americans bring into their living rooms. They didn&#8217;t get there only through espionage or cyberattacks. They got there through deals, acquisitions, and joint ventures that most Americans never saw coming.
Put simply, buying products made here is no longer enough on its own. We need to ask who owns the company making it.
Once that Chinese appliance, smart bulb, or other device is connected to your Wi-Fi, Xi Jinping’s thugs could then have an opening to weasel their way in to spy on and disrupt every aspect of your family’s life.
Just pause and think about everything we entrust to apps, online banking, and social media. Now imagine it all being pipelined straight to a state-affiliated hacker farm in Communist China. Then imagine those hackers now having an off switch to disrupt every utility and service your family relies on.
That’s not a free and independent America, but it’s the one we’re willingly paying for right now.
Take GE Appliances. Most Americans still think it&#8217;s still the same all-American brand. Not anymore. In 2016, it was <a href="https://pressroom.geappliances.com/news/ge-completes-sale-of-appliances-business-to-haier">sold</a> to Haier, a company whose roots trace back to a Chinese state-owned factory and that has operated for decades under Beijing&#8217;s close watch. That brand now sits in millions of American kitchens, connected to home networks, drawing power from our grid. Americans buying that product have no idea who is really on the other end. But China knows what they’re doing here. They’re listening to you — all the while <a href="https://www.rickscott.senate.gov/2026/5/exclusive-sen-rick-scott-rep-andy-ogles-america-s-cybersecurity-cannot-be-an-easy-target-for-communist-china">tapped into our power and water grids</a>. The Soviet Union only wished it could have had the same access to Americans’ information.
Last month, the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/05/31/chinese-owned-company-is-bringing-factory-jobs-back-united-states/">heralded</a> Haier for bringing jobs back to America under the GE Appliances name. In the piece, GE Appliances leadership claims they would never hand Americans&#8217; data over to Beijing. But they don&#8217;t get to make that choice.
Under China’s police state laws, no Chinese company can refuse a government data request. No exceptions. That means every Chinese-owned brand operating on American soil is a potential instrument of Beijing.
Zhang Ruimin, former CEO and chairman, has long-standing <a href="https://www.bjreview.com/17thCPC/txt/2007-10/18/content_81345.htm">ties</a> to the CCP. Zhou Yunjie, current chairman of the board of directors and CEO of Haier Group, is a <a href="https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202503/05/WS67c7abcea310c240449d8b3b.html">Deputy to the National People&#8217;s Congress</a>. Haier has been promoted by the state as a model of a successful Chinese enterprise, which means pleasing Xi Jinping comes before protecting customers.
Then there is Lenovo, which <a href="https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-completes-full-acquisition-motorola-mobility-from-google/">acquired</a> Motorola Mobility from Google in 2014. Lenovo is a Chinese company with deep ties to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a state-linked institution. Yet Motorola Mobility smartphones sit in the pockets of American workers, law enforcement officers, and government contractors, connected to voice, location, and network data around the clock. Think about all the personal and data that goes through those phones and how it could be used against those officials to blackmail them and undermine our safety.
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, Electrolux <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/electrolux-group-and-midea-group-form-a-highly-complementary-long-term-strategic-partnership-in-north-america-to-accelerate-profitable-growth-and-strengthen-innovation-302752046.html">announced</a> a joint venture with Midea, a Chinese-owned appliance giant, that includes partial operational control of a factory in Anderson, South Carolina. Not only does this further expose American information and our infrastructure, but now <a href="https://www.foxcarolina.com/2026/04/24/electrolux-lay-off-more-than-1000-workers-upstate-plans-new-partnership/">1,200</a> American workers are temporarily displaced while a CCP-linked company moves into their plant. This is happening right now to real American workers in real American communities, to American workers and their jobs today.
In response, President Trump made his position clear. He’s <a href="https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/trump-orders-federal-agencies-prioritize-american-made-goods-curb-waiver-use">called</a> on every federal agency to buy American, close waiver loopholes, and implement policies that prevent the federal government from purchasing foreign products when great American alternatives already exist.
He&#8217;s right. This is exactly how we become less dependent on foreign nations, create more American jobs, and protect our country.
Still, there’s more we can do. My <a href="https://www.rickscott.senate.gov/2025/8/sen-rick-scott-introduces-protect-the-grid-act-to-target-communist-china-s-control-of-smart-devices">PROTECT the Grid Act</a> would direct the Department of Commerce to assess exactly how deeply CCP-linked smart devices have penetrated American homes and our power grid and create a clear pathway to cut off that access before it’s too late.
If we want to remain truly independent, we cannot keep handing our adversaries the keys to our economy, our infrastructure, and our power grid, one appliance, one joint venture, one government contract at a time.
Communist China is playing the long game. It is time we started playing ours — and playing to win.
***
Rick Scott is currently serving as a U.S. Senator from Florida.

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Satellite images revealed Wednesday morning that China has built a replica of a U.S. destroyer at a remote missile-testing location in one of its deserts.
The image captured in May 2026 that was just released depicts the structure of a U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer in Xinjiang in the Taklamakan Desert that will be used to test missiles. The subject looks to be an exact copy of a ship currently used in the U.S. Seventh Fleet that covers the Western Pacific and the waters surrounding Taiwan.
Co-founder of the Taiwan Defense Studies Initiative Joseph Wu first identified the structure.
Debris that appeared to be left from previous missile tests surrounded the mock ship in the desert. Given the available information, the assessment is that those replicas are being used as target practice for China&#8217;s military to test out new anti-ship weaponry.
Earlier in the month, Taiwan test-fired dozens of practice rockets from U.S.-supplied HIMARS launchers into the Taiwan Strait in a drill simulating a Chinese invasion, its first such live-fire exercise on the coast facing China.
On Wednesday, the de facto British, French, and German embassies in Taipei issued a rare joint statement voicing concern over recent Chinese coast guard patrols in the waters east of Taiwan, saying the activity threatened regional stability and freedom of navigation.
This is not the first time satellite images have surfaced showing China building replicas of U.S. ships on which to test their firepower. In 2021, the U.S. Naval Institute reported that two of the same destroyer models and an aircraft carrier were seen at a testing range in the southeastern region of the desert in Ruoqiang. 
<div class="image"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-1122567 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/ChinaReplicaWarship.jpeg" alt="" width="362" height="212" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/ChinaReplicaWarship.jpeg 362w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/06/ChinaReplicaWarship-300x176.jpeg 300w" sizes=" (max-width: 362px) 100vw, 362px" /></div>
Recreations of U.S. airfields and Taiwanese roads have also appeared in the same deserts over the years.
While building mock-ups is a common use around the world for a country’s military, the complex relationship between the United States and China raises concerns for what the communist country may have planned. 
Neither China’s Defense Ministry nor the U.S. Department of Defense responded to Bloomberg’s request for comment.

China Builds Replica U.S. Destroyer To Test Missiles On

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