More Trump China lies
From today’s Bloomberg:
The U.S. intelligence community concluded with “high confidence” that China didn’t attempt to change the outcome of the 2020 election, an assessment that contradicts repeated assertions by former President Donald Trump and his allies.
“We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. Presidential Election,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in an unclassified report released on Tuesday. “China sought stability in its relationship with the United States” and “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.”
Instead, it was Trump’s pal Putin who was actively trying to defeat Biden:
The agencies also found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered influence operations to hurt President Joe Biden’s candidacy, favoring Trump just as the intelligence community says he did in 2016 against then Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, another overhyped threat seems to be much ado about nothing:
Courts have repeatedly sided against Trump’s TikTok ban, ruling that the effort appeared to be politically motivated and lacked a solid finding that the popular app posed a risk to Americans’ national security.
Well before Trump took the extraordinary step of attempting to shut down a business legally operating in the U.S., TikTok had been cooperating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an interagency panel that reviews companies that have overseas ownership.
And never forget that at the same time Trump was trying to prevent Americans from using Tik Tok and WeChat, he was quietly encouraging Xi Jinping to put one million Uighurs into concentration camps. Soon after, he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol building, and pressure Congress to overturn the election of Biden.
And people think the CCP is the biggest threat to our freedom.
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16. March 2021 at 16:32
you’re a clueless rube, really
16. March 2021 at 22:37
Aren’t state security services like the FBI and the CIA the biggest threats to the freedoms of US citizens? Why trust anything they say? What makes them more credible than the FSB? Of course that doesn’t make Trump correct, but information whose sole source is the “US intelligence community” is very weak evidence.
17. March 2021 at 02:04
I wonder what lessons Xi and other Chinese leaders draw from the Trump era. They probably perceive our nation as even more volatile, dangerous, and disorganized. They have strong evidence that democratic systems do not work because they can lead to such bad outcomes and polarization. They see how misinformation becomes so dangerous in an unregulated media environment. And they get to feel smug about their ability to manage a public health crisis.
I don’t mind that Scott isn’t letting Trump go. The 2022 elections will be dominated by his influences and endorsements. And 2024 will be another grab-assed disaster. I give Trump even odds at re-election. More ominously, local and state politics will have to deal with Trump/Qanon lunatics for decades.
17. March 2021 at 05:29
I’m guessing you’ll have an interesting take on this piece. Did Noah accurately characterize the state of knowledge of hyperinflation?
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-one-knows-how-much-the-government
17. March 2021 at 06:35
Hi Scott,
Can I put in a request for a post on monetary policy? I’m struggling to with quadrupling for the ratio of M1/NGDP that we’ve seen from Feb 2020 to Feb 2021. We didn’t see this in the last crisis nor did we see anything of this magnitude during the Great Depression nor Japan in the 1990s/2000s. How does this play out? I would think that as interest rates rise people would want to hold less M1, so I can’t see why the ratio could stay this high. So will the Fed have to sell USTs fairly aggressively at some point to drain money from the system? The monetary situation seems different than the last cycle where excess reserves shot up but the Fed effectively re-defined high powered money by paying interest on reserves. This time the printed money is sitting in demand deposits and in people’s wallets. Does that matter? What could this look like when Covid is no longer impeding activity?
Thanks
17. March 2021 at 08:16
Lizard, Let me put it this way. Trump made the charges. It’s up to Trump to back up the charges with evidence. And yet just as with the charge that the virus was made in a Chinese lab, Trump refused to provide any evidence. OK, so maybe the evidence is secret. So Trump appoints the heads of agencies like the FBI and CIA, which hold this secret evidence. And what do they tell us? There is no evidence.
Someone making these charges has a moral obligation to back them up. If they refuse to do so, the most plausible interpretation is that they are liars. I conclude that Trump is a liar. What do you conclude? Does Trump have evidence that he is refusing to reveal?
Policy wank, Thanks, Maybe I’ll comment on that.
Classical, I don’t pay much attention to M1. I presume this reflects the Covid pandemic, and I’d guess that some of it will go away over the next few years. I’d encourage people to focus on market inflation expectations, not the M1 money supply.
17. March 2021 at 08:53
Fairness that’s an extremely weak assertion. The CIA – basically the branch of government in charge of lying and creating propaganda – which hates trump says Russia interesares for trump.
And at most they ran a couple ads on Facebook.
There’s also video of fb execs admitting they tilted the scales in Biden’s favor and probably won him the election.
17. March 2021 at 09:49
Not all people. 🙂
Keep these posts coming. I love them.
17. March 2021 at 10:00
Of course, it would be nice if CCP China did not interfere. It’s also plausible. CCP China seems to be intelligent enough to know that you can’t truly interfere in US elections.
As much as I detest Putin’s Russia, I’m a little short on evidence in this case. Of course, China and Russia will always engage in intelligence operations against the US, but I have yet to see a report where I thought: Wow here Russia really interfered in the US elections in a relevant and notable way. Is this a state secret or where is the proof of the specific operations – and how they played out in a relevant way.
17. March 2021 at 14:34
The west has Putin derangement syndrome. Perhaps a result of the 50 year civil war?
RU is not a threat.
On the other hand, the Chinese military is more superior than the US military. And the CCP is a criminal organization that has made it their intention to do anything to destroy America. Destroying America is written in their constitution. It’s their #1 goal. And they are playing the long game. They want to suck the country dry, and weaken beyond repair.
Only Trump and his administration stood up to China. Obama was very weak. Bush was also weak.
And Clintons were simply corrupt. Amazing how their donations went from 80M a year, to less than 1M after she lost access to power.
Pay to Play NGO! Obama is doing it now.
17. March 2021 at 16:29
@Sean:
Video evidence you say…got a link?
17. March 2021 at 16:31
@ankh:
Written in their constitution you say….got a link?
Trump does the grift differently, he raises money from rubes saying he’ll use it to “fight the fraud”
17. March 2021 at 21:17
[…] commenter directed me to a Noah Smith post that begins as […]
19. March 2021 at 07:06
It’s project varitas stuff. Usually their fairly questionable but they do have a high level guy saying fb flipped the election to Biden. Social media is likely the most influential media now so it’s not exactly surprising that an election decided by 50k votes could be flipped based on what’s promoted by their algos.
19. March 2021 at 10:21
Sean, my personal bias is anti-big-tech and frustration towards the double-standard (eg I think Russiagate was indeed a nothingburger), so I’ve been searching for the project veritas you referred to, and closest I could find is Benny Thomas (FB Global Planning Lead) talking about a FB voter-registration drive and happily agreeing that probably helped Biden win.
Ideologically-biased censorship is one thing. I’m 100% convinced FB does it, often, and I’m opposed to it. However a voter-registration drive, even if it may be biased in effect, doesn’t qualify as inappropriate interference in an election to me.
19. March 2021 at 10:46
Followup: I don’t know the details of the voter-registration drive, I could imagine some sort of disparity in the action itself (eg an algorithm biasing the drive toward D-leaning individuals or D-leaning IP geographies) that would be more concerning.
19. March 2021 at 11:04
@Sean:
Project Veritas stuff you say…got a link?
Also, there was a pretty close election in 2016 too. Any chance some online shenanigans from, say, Russia could have flipped that election?
There are two alternatives:
Either you think the elections of 2016 and 2020 were valid, or you are stupid. Which are you?
19. March 2021 at 11:05
@myb6:
Well said. Of course Trump lost in 2020 legitimately, just as he won in 2016 legitimately.
20. March 2021 at 13:26
Putin is pensive, cordial, and cunning; he has no interest in developing a nanny state like the US, nor does he want to emulate the CCP’s Orwellian dystopia, in which every citizen has a government loyalty score.
RU is only interested in protecting their interests, and their culture, from an increasingly powerful and outspoken central body (United Nations).
The US people are NOT living in a free society. And if they continue down this leftward path, then they will soon have no freedoms at all.
25. March 2021 at 11:05
Hi Scott,
I agree that Trump was hypocritical in regards to China however I have to wonder how much better the Democrats would be in the same circumstance. After all, Joe Biden recently stumbled in a talk where he appeared to refer to the Uighur Genocide as a “cultural difference”: which is of course an awful thing to say. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAgJZ81s_-0 (6:53).
If you think he meant something else (as he often stumbles), what do you think he was really trying to say?
26. March 2021 at 10:28
Noah, No, Biden is saying that our culture is one that won’t refrain from speaking out on atrocities in other cultures.
But I do agree that Biden is a clumsy speaker; I’ve called him a “buffoon” for years, even before he ran in 2020.