“You are surrounded.”

One of my shocks over the past year has been the rise of the People's Republic of China in an assertive way. Like most happy and content Americans, I don't necessarily look for evil behind each smell. Sometimes it's just a smell. 

But then you detect something behind the smell. This event or that commentary or that particular news story intrudes on your peace and you realize there's a deeper story to be told. As you migrate along this path you make new and different discoveries. Dig deeper and you find ugly stuff, often unbelievable. But then you dig still deeper, going back in time for your research sources, or going behind, then behind again, then behind yet again all of the prettier treatments of things, to find something far uglier, not widely promoted, and you end up thinking:

Well that certainly explains things.

Legal research is sometimes like this, particularly when faced with issues not commonly treated by cases heard by the courts. Legal research takes us to the first and obvious cases, usually too broad to be useful to finer, narrower points, so we dig deeper, and we end up finding our case - and sometimes it's a pretty obscure case from a learned judge, but well off the beaten path of New York or California case law. But legal truths and traditions exist elsewhere too, of course, and so we find our gold nugget of precedent.

No one in their right legal mind would ever say, "well, if it's not a reported California or New York case, I'm just not going to read it." That would be foolish, of course. So we look and find it elsewhere. We use it in our briefing, and we (hopefully) win, with congrats from the court for providing the assistance of an obscure but helpful case.

How do we not read our news like that? How do we not dig down? Shouldn't anyone be embarrassed by the limitations and information constructs imposed by "leading media"? If we find that our so-called "leading lights" lack substance, do we just stop and disregard deeper, different possibilities to get at the truth? There is no excuse for not doing so nowadays. During my university years as a student researcher, we had to go to actual books, and review bibliographies for our leads to secondary sources. Time-consuming, but yet we were better informed precisely because of this. We certainly knew not to exclusively depend on one source for anything. Even in law school the electronic age had not yet dawned. Research was still painstaking. But perhaps it was the notion of pulling your cases from larger physical volumes that reminded you the researcher that these were just snippets of information from a far larger universe of knowledge - representing all of the possibilities available to us.

But now with electronic research, we don't have that instant awareness of the vastness of knowledge. We have the click, and presto: the information is on our screen. Rather than being surrounded by volumes of other works that take up rooms and rooms visible to us, we have just that snippet of information we called up and our computer screen. No vastness. No volumes.

When researching anything we read on the web, it is useful to imagine ourselves back in those rooms full of books, and that this or that click on our computer is an almost microscopically small part of that vast expanse. Click again and you're taken to another information source, click, click, click and suddenly you're repeating what we once did.

You're researching. You're no longer an unhealthy dependent on someone else's news gathering. You're gathering news yourself. You can in an instant go from 2020 to 1939 to 1945 to 1968 to 1789 to 1776 to 1595.

There is absolutely no excuse for ignorance - yet ignorance seems to have descended on us like an anvil. It is stupefying.

I prize connectedness over time. I apply that everywhere. I remind the kids in my life that "our family has been Catholic for centuries," and that they are part of a longer continuum that preceded them by 100, or 500, or 1000 years, and back even farther than that. I often share that we in our time are the beneficiaries of those learned people from other times, from recent to ancient. There is no such thing as new evil. It's been here before.

And we suddenly learn the value of learning, of wisdom, of investigation, and awareness.

When I hear someone I respect speaking as if they've just read that one volume in the vast human library, I almost instantly think "it's no use." Here is someone comfortable in ignorance while believing they've found ultimate truth. It is dismaying. All that education and learning, and here you are, still stuck on that single page, not clicking, not going for that other volume back in the stacks.

Earlier this year, I had a chance interaction with a small group of elected officials at a conference in Southern California. I learned that moderate Democrats (including in San Francisco and Los Angeles) were being targeted by the far Left. In jurisdiction after jurisdiction, almost always in off-year elections (low turnout means unlikely winners and candidacies under the radar), good and moderate incumbent Democrats - DEMOCRATS! - were being beaten by far Left candidates. It happened in San Francisco. In Los Angeles, they're headed to a run-off - African-American incumbent Jackie Lacey, a moderate, against the far Left candidate George Gascon. Gascon resigned his elected DA position in San Francisco to run in LA, an unheard of relocation in the entire history of California. His replacement in San Francisco? A far Left candidate Chesa Boudin, son of the Weather Underground domestic terrorists, won in San Francisco, beating a moderate Democrat. How?

George Soros. That’s how.

The elected officials said Soros had funded both campaigns, and he was repeating it as a deliberate disruption across the country.

Soros? Did I really want to sign-on to this train of thought? But then again, the relocation of an elected San Francisco DA to Los Angeles was so unheard of and so bizarre that it demanded careful research. So I researched. I entered the library and didn't stop at the first volume. I researched and researched some more, until I had the broad Soros panorama of influence and disruption and, what's worse, amorality, and yet so few had connected the dots - the dots being vividly present not in today's headlines, but in yesterday's more detailed studies and articles. What had been reported over time? How did those stories point to events of today? And that's how I learned about Soros - through The New Yorker, 60 Minutes, Forbes, The New York Times. He had been everywhere, and so were his "philanthropies," about 200 separate philanthropies with documented support from Soros. Here were the most disruptive and disrupting movements over the last 10 years, all with common funding.

Who could be taken in by this? Why were the wise not commenting?

What came next? The virus came next, almost immediately.

And suddenly I was nearly mesmerized by the scandalous behavior of the People's Republic of China, imprisoning its own who spoke of this new virus, imprisoned, vanished. Deception, wittingly or unwittingly joined by the World Health Organization. (January 14: no danger of human to human transmission.) Meanwhile, China sat on evidence and silenced its domestic science, and the world went along, duped. To put a chilling twist on things, we had the spectacle of our domestic politicians crying "racist!" in response to a China travel ban.

As the world came to limp along, the focus by our domestic media was not the chilling spectacle of a tyranical regime whose tyrrany allowed it to hide the truth from the world, but on the President of the United States.

There was the media's villain?

You might say in an unguarded moment, WTF?

As a sample, I read of Hillary Clinton's criticism of the President. Mrs. Clinton and her foundation received funding for their advocacy on behalf of China before the World Health Organization on the subject of vaccines, 2014.

Then I read of several more American politicians seeming to adopt in full China's talking points, which all took aim at the president.

Wait.

Wasn't this the same group who oversaw the migration of our manufacturing out of this country, wounding the working class?

Isn't this the same group who themselves have become wealthy through the rape of our manufacturing sector and betrayal of our poor and working class?

Exactly what kinds of alignments are on display here?

Who is involved with whom?

Whose wealth is traceable where?

How much did the Clinton Foundation "earn" when it advocated for China just one year after Mrs. Clinton was President Obama's Secretary of State and one-year before she was to seek the Party's nomination for President?

And the media?

How did the idealistic intrepid reporter of yesteryear become so associated with talking points inimical to the American nation?

Have I just been dropped into the middle of a horror thriller full of international intrigue but brought to us by our own - including our own elected officials?

Take stock America, because you're surrounded. You have now learned the price of relying on snippets of information available online or through a CNN screen crawl. You have been duped.

Who is behind our news? Have you checked? Have you done the research? Do you know who influences CNN, or Disney-ABC, or Bloomberg?

We have our mavericks still. To the dismay of many, President Trump is a maverick. Elon Musk is a maverick, in fact a true maverick - Tesla is California's last remaining car manufacturer. (California Democratic Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, commenting on Mr. Musk's criticism of California's hostility to business: "F**k Elon Musk.") Unless we commit to the re-industrialization of America and the rejuvenation of the working class, heeding the words of the mavericks, we are in for a very rough time.

The pay-off of this story is related to a new case I'm working on that symbolizes what I warn about here:  the pernicious influence of the People’s Republic of China and its many tendrils into our own media – through investments mostly, but by threats too.  The Federalist Society, a lawyer’s group dedicated to the United State Constitution, was astute enough to host on its website a summary of the many tendrils already sent from the People’s Republic of China to the United States of America.  There in the summary is the grim expose we may have feared.  China has seeped into our media and exerts its authority already.  I now don’t wonder about the incendiary news coverage of many of the very same media outlets listed in the article, all with powerful ties to the People’s Republic of China:  The New York Times, The Washington Post, Warner Media (CNN), NBC Universal (MSNBC and NBC), Bloomberg, The Walt Disney Company (ABC, ESPN; and Shanghai Disney World is 57% owned by a People’s Republic holding company).

Remember the propaganda leaflets the Germans dropped on the Allied troops trapped at Dunkirk, June 4, 1940, urging surrender? The leaflets showed a map of France, with arrows pointing at Dunkirk.

"You are surrounded," the leaflets warned.

Fellow Americans, we are surrounded. 

Christopher J. Bakes is a trial attorney.

Image credit: public domain