From Hong Kong to America Freedom Is under Siege
Is America ready to surrender free speech and other civil rights? A daring escape from Hong Kong and its encroaching Communist Chinese regime should raise alarms.
Just a few weeks before America shuddered in abhorrence over a post-election mob raid at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, something remarkable unfolded in Hong Kong. Two young Danes — Thomas Rohden, age 25, and Anders Storgaard, age 26 — choreographed a young democracy activist’s escape from Hong Kong. It’s a story worthy of a John le Carré novel. The story was first written in The Wall Street Journal as “A Hong Kong Dissident’s Daring Escape” (Jan. 13, 2021) by Editorial Page writer Jillian Kay Melchior, and it’s fascinating.
The two young Danes, in opposite political parties, belong to a group called the Danish China Critical Society. Its purpose is to raise awareness among Danish citizens about human rights abuses in Communist China. After meeting with some Hong Kong pro-democracy activists in Copenhagen last year, they remained in contact with Mr. Ted Rui, age 38, a Hong Kong legislator who has openly dared to protest legislation that threatens free expression for Hong Kong citizens.
Last summer, China imposed a new law on Hong Kong citizens that outlaws any form of dissent. Mr. Hui’s protests resulted in an arrest for which he was out on bail awaiting prosecution. He had begun to notice that he and some of his family were being followed since the arrest. Other members of the Hong Kong freedom movement have been assaulted. Though Mr. Rui had not yet been charged under China’s new dissent law, he knew that its penalty is life in prison.
A little history: Hong Kong island and the Kowloon Peninsula were ceded by China to become a British dependency in 1841 and 1860 respectively. Over the next 150 years, Hong Kong became a global financial center and one of the world’s largest trading ports.
An agreement signed by the British and Chinese governments in 1984 provided for China to resume sovereignty over Kong Kong and the region in 1997. The agreement was that Hong Kong would become a Special Administrative Region with its laws guaranteeing its citizens rights for a period of fifty years. The “One State - Two Systems” agreement remained in place until Beijing began to crack down on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in recent years. The massive pro-democracy protests were sparked by a bill introduced in the Hong Kong legislature giving Beijing arrest and extradition authority in Hong Kong.
After Ted Hui was released on bail, Thomas Rohden and Anders Storgaard concocted a bold plan to host a fake climate change conference in Copenhagen and invite Mr. Hui in an effort to get him and his family to safety. Fearing that his telephone might be monitored, they never told him that the planned conference was not real when they invited him. He had already been considering finding a way to go into exile when the invitation came.
Postponing the exile plan, he told the Danes that Hong Kong courts wanted to review the climate change conference before Mr. Hui could accept the invitation to Copenhagen. The Danes put something together in haste while Mr. Hui booked flights for his wife and two children to go to London. Ted Hui arrived in Copenhagen ready to address climate change without ever even suspecting that the conference was a ruse. He was relieved beyond words that he and his family had escaped Chinese communist tyranny.
Beijing and Hong Kong were not amused. Beijing has asserted that its anti-dissent laws also apply to citizens of other countries who conspire to free Chinese residents. Rohden and Storgaard now must avoid travel to or through any country that has an extradition agreement with Beijing. The most important part of this story is Ted Hui’s reaction to his freedom:
The Rise of Socialism
The United States has just witnessed firsthand the need for a warning like Ted Hui’s, formerly of Hong Kong, that “freedom is very fragile.” Exactly as he has warned, “it can go away in months or weeks.” In the month since the mob attack at the U.S. Capitol, forces in this nation have shamed Americans using progressive ideology and the “cancel culture” pandemic to accept without dissent the open suppression of three foundational civil liberties guaranteed in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and religious freedom.
After years of denials by Facebook and Twitter that the platforms suppress conservative points of view, that suppression is now in the open and inflicted without apology. As information technology, these venues have also suppressed freedom of the press. Here is the example that comes most readily to mind: In October, 2020, the New York Post, this nation’s fourth largest daily newspaper, covered on its Front Page a potentially explosive story that has since emerged as both factual and with hard evidence and witnesses that back it up. That story was about the business practices of Hunter Biden, President Biden’s son.
Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, blocked the story from exposure through social media. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did so as well. The rest of the mainstream media, taking their marching orders from Twitter and Facebook, suppressed the story as fraudulent. It was not. The obvious reason for the suppression was the fact that the story emerged a month before an election, but it had little to do with the election. The business practice that was exposed in the story was an allegation that Hunter Biden had received millions in profit from foreign entities through “influence peddling” by selling access to his father during the administration of President Obama.
It was and is an ugly story involving three of the most politically contentious foreign enterprises now faced by President Biden’s administration: China, Russia, and the Ukraine.
My purpose in writing of this is not to denigrate the current president, nor is it to determine truth and falsehood. That is for the Justice Department to do. It turns out that the FBI has been investigating Hunter Biden for many months, and that investigation now includes allegations of multi-million dollar deals within China while his father was vice president. That said, Hunter Biden deserves, and should have, the full spectrum of due process rights afforded to him, but the suppression of news coverage is not one of those rights.
The arrogance of some in the mainstream media being what it is, admissions of culpability are as rare as the unnuanced truth. The story remains suppressed by most of the mainstream news media, but that is changing as the DOJ investigation can no longer be ignored or covered up. Under public pressure, Facebook and Twitter have finally stopped removing the story or suspending the accounts of those sharing it. U.S. foreign policy has been critical of the Chinese Communist government for its suppression of news, but I have been hard pressed to see the difference.
That is the real harm caused by media suppression of this story. Repressive regimes that balk at America’s claim of having a free press all know of it. The mob that attacked Washington all knew of it, and it lent fuel to their insistence that the election was not a free and fair election. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Adam Schiff both knew about it even as they dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.”
The greatest harm has been to President Biden himself. This story will not go away. The fact of its pre-election suppression will cause it to expand and fester. It will haunt his term in office for the next year as he is drawn further into it. Freedom of the press has been abdicated in favor of a deeply partisan bias about the news we should be allowed to see and hear. The institution in our society that should act as a bipartisan government oversight for and by the people has openly betrayed that role. Freedom itself will suffer for it. So will we all.
The Assault on Freedom of Speech
The mob that assaulted the Capitol on January 6 — purportedly Trump supporters all — inflicted far more damage on Donald Trump and his presidency than any of his political enemies could accomplish. This mob attack at the heart of democracy was not an example of freedom of expression, but it is one of the core rights of our democracy —freedom of speech — that now suffers for it. And, again, so will we all.
Back in 2016, I wrote a pre-election post entitled, “Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables.” That seems almost a reserved and innocent time when compared with the unfathomable chasm between left and right that the four years hence have wrought. I had no frame of reference then for just how relatively fair Mrs. Clinton was being when she relegated a mere half of Trump voters to “a basket of deplorables.” There is now a highly charged and partisan effort to lump all 74 million Trump voters into that basket, keep them there, and silence them.
Blacklists are now emerging among publishers. Simon & Schuster just cancelled a forthcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley entitled, “The Tyranny of Big Tech.” Remember Mike Lindell? He’s the contagiously happy guy who sells pillows and “Dream Sheets” on TV. Exposed now as a Trump campaign donor, several large U.S. retail outlets have ordered his products pulled from their shelves. I could fill pages with similar examples of political suppression.
It is a credit to Hillary Clinton that she only called half of Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. The other half, she said with candid honesty, “are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them; nobody worries about what happens to their lives and futures ... Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
President Biden should call upon Democrats to end this blood lust for Republicans who cannot in conscience embrace cancel culture, identity politics, and a partisan disregard for the most inherent civil right of all, the right to life. Our newly elected president did not get off to a good start when he called for unity and healing with the insistence that “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” It seems clearly to me right now to be rather the other way around.
Catholics Still in the Basket of Deplorables
There have been some unfortunate — scandalous is a better word — examples of the suppression of free speech even among Catholic leaders since the mob scene of January 6. A reader sent me a very troubling article from America magazine by Father James Martin, SJ entitled, “How Catholic Leaders Helped Give Rise to Violence at the U.S. Capitol” (Jan. 12, 2021).
The article is little more than a shameful attempt to use the events of January 6 to score political points against the author’s perceived theological and ideological enemies. I found it to be profoundly sad. Father Martin singled out Father James Altman, Father Ed Meeks, Father John Zuhlsdorf, Father Richard Heilman, Father Kevin Cusick, Bishop Richard Stika, Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, among others, to be examples of “priests and bishops who count themselves as pro-life (but) helped spawn a hate-filled environment that led to mayhem, violence and, ultimately, death.”
These names, and others like them, are the heroes of traditional Catholics and the Catholic pro-life community. They are deeply respected for speaking openly and with fidelity to Church teaching about the Holocaust of our time, the infanticide of 60 million aborted Americans who have no free speech rights of their own. By denigrating and accusing them so duplicitously, Father Martin scored some ideological points, but only within his own tribe — far left Catholics who would likely be far more comfortable in the U.S. Episcopal church. Frankly, no one else would even be reading America.
In his unfortunate America article, Father James Martin contributes to the atmosphere of tribalism that has so separated Americans in recent years. And clearly, he separates Catholics along the same sad partisan lines.
President Joe Biden’s greatest challenge may not be the conversion of Republicans to more progressive ideologies. It may well be the conversion of the progressive left to the tolerance and unity he rightly calls for. Trump is gone. The Democrats control the House and the White House and have the deciding tie-breaker vote in the Senate. But Portland, Seattle, and other-Democrat controlled cities are still rioting, as they did all last summer. CNN blamed it all on Donald Trump then, and is still calling these “peaceful protests.”
Portland, Oregon police reported that the “peaceful protesters came armed with pepper-ball guns, tasers and other electronic crowd control weapons, fireworks, rocks, and shields.” Some were armed with molotov cocktails, knives, batons, chemical spray, and crowbars. In Seattle, the January 20 “peaceful protesters” burned American flags and caused damage to an ICE headquarters. In Portland they carried signs reading, “We don’t want Biden. We want revenge!" They identified themselves as anarchists and antifa protesters responding to racism, fascism, and police brutality.
They also attacked the Democratic headquarters. Police made multiple arrests at the “peaceful protests.”
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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Thank you for reading and sharing this post. You may also like a related post that is mentioned in the text above:
Wikileaks Found Catholics in the Basket of Deplorables
And for an example of media duplicity and coverup: