An investigative analysis takes apart a hackneyed piece of propaganda authored by an international alt-right clique with links to the Pentagon.
by Raul Diego
Part 8 - The authors
A look at the authors´ backgrounds is enough to discern the real interests lurking behind the China-bashing document. American tax attorney Michael P. Senger tops the list of authors on the paper, itself. Senger claims to have advised the US on the “domestic and international provisions” of Trump’s corporate giveaway known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 in his Alston & Bird bio – the tax firm he left in April 2020, according to his Linked In page.
The firm’s clients include Amazon, Microsoft and a host of other transnational corporations with considerable interests in China, especially in the realm of Alston & Bird’s core competency of intellectual property; notably, also at the center of Trump’s “trade war” with China.
Since leaving Alston & Bird, Senger has been dedicated to mounting the anti-China Covid propaganda, which he has been peddling since September 2020. In an appearance on Sky News that month, Senger declares that the basis for his theory that China is leading the global lockdown “fraud” is a “huge ring of tweets” uncovered by an unidentified Israeli company. It was these “thousands and thousands of tweets, using essentially identical language, denigrating all these other governments”, that apparently convinced Senger to embark on this crusade. Senger has been the most visible among the paper’s authors and has used his own personal Twitter account to disseminate it.
Joining him on the document’s credits is another former attorney, Stacey A. Rudin, whose prolific blog posts on the Koch-funded American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) form much of the basis for the denigration of WHO Secretary General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom, painting him as a puppet of Xi Jinping. Rudin also keeps a page on Medium, where she also rails against China and the lockdowns she claims are the Asian superpower’s “new concept weapon in the post-nuclear age”, which perfectly aligns with American Chinahawk’s Cold War revivalism.
Moving down the list we find Dr. Clare Craig, a former Head of Pathology at a company called Panakeia. Notably, Dr. Craig also left her position recently to embark on this anti-China mission. Her former employer specializes in the distribution of “innovative medical products, services and modalities to the Military Health System worldwide for active duty men and women”, as well as opening the door to companies looking “to enter the Federal Government, VA, Department of Defense and Military markets”. In November of last year, Dr. Craig was featured in lockdownsceptics.org, an online anti-lockdown website run by an associate editor of the libertarian/alt-right online magazine Quillette, Toby Young. In the interview, Craig takes issue with the scientific literature regarding asymptomatic transmission, which “were all published in China,” according to her.
The libertarian-right wing associations of the paper’s authors are irrefutable and continue down the line with individuals who have displayed disturbing xenophobic tendencies, such as Canadian politician Randy Hillier, who twice was embroiled in very public racism scandals while he was serving in the Ontario legislature. Hillier also contributed to a bilingual libertarian online journal called Le Québécois Libre between 2003 and 2010. In 2019, Hillier was expelled from his own party’s caucus – led by the infamous Doug Ford – over insensitive remarks made to the parent of an autistic child, among other matters of incompetency.
British activist and radio presenter, Maajid Nawaz, comes in second to last on the list. The controversial founder of a counter-extremism think tank called Quilliam made his name through a “transformation” from a one-time extremist who went from embracing Islamist militancy to advising David Cameron and George W. Bush on Muslim extremism and making a career in the media. Nawaz’ family and former friends accuse him of embellishing and lying about his past, with one saying that Nawaz is an opportunist who “is whatever he thinks he needs to be” and “neither an Islamist nor a liberal”. Researchers recently uncovered Nawaz’ ties to Republican ‘dark money’ that funneled $3 Million to the Quilliam Foundation.
Next, we find Indian economist Sanjeev Sabhlok, PhD, who has been writing about Xi Jinping’s “use of hysteria of warfare” on The Times of India, outright calling lockdowns a “Trojan Horse”, despite admitting in the very next sentence that “there is no evidence, however, to suggest that Xi Jinping had planned the lockdowns”. Sabhlok is yet another one of the authors who has recently exited his day job in the government of Australia, the country he made his adoptive home after leaving his native India over policy disagreements there. Another proponent of libertarian economics, Sabhlok regularly shares his thoughts on Covid and lockdowns, as well as his love for Hayek in his personal blog.
Keeping with the theme, Francis Hoar is a Barrister specializing in commercial law and contributes to a Brexit Central, a pro-Brexit website run by Matthew Elliot, who was the CEO of Vote Leave – the organization that created the campaign to leave the European Union in the first place and who is considered to be the “mastermind” behind Brexit. Such links to the top of the UK power structure and the commercial aspect surrounding Brexit, in particular, should be noted as tensions rise between the government of Brexit poster-boy Boris Johnson and China.
Completing the British connection is Simon Dolan, a businessman, entrepreneur and founder of the anti-mask Keep Britain Free (KBF) movement. Ironically, one of Dolan’s side businesses over which he exercises significant control as its director and company secretary is a charter airline called Jota Aviation, which has been delivering personal protective equipment (PPE), such as masks to the NHS, and masks are required for all passengers on Jota Aviation flights. The hypocrisy does not seem too surprising since Dolan admits that “the only British politician he admired was Margaret Thatcher“.
Capping off the anti-China lockdown propaganda authors’ list is none other than retired United States Air Force brigadier general and current senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Robert S. Spalding III. A true Chinahawk, Spalding’s area of focus is U.S.-China relations, economic and national security. The General spouts a level of anti-China rhetoric that would even make his new Hudson colleague Mike Pompeo blush, blaming everything from the destruction of the working class in America to the problems of the 2020 presidential elections on China. Spalding’s 2019 book “Stealth War: How China Took Over While America’s Elite Slept”, purports to detail China’s “most brilliant ploys”, which include inculcating insidious communist narratives among “unsuspecting American students” and funneling American technology to China. Spalding has been at the cutting edge of technological advancements in the U.S. military, developing a biometric data collection program at the DoD as early as 2006, according to his Linked In profile.
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