When Eric Met Dianne

The struggle against China’s American agents is the struggle of memory against forgetting

In his forthcoming book, Sen. Eric Schmitt charts The Last Line of Defense: How to Beat the Left in Court, and the Missouri Republican practices what he preaches. “Schmitt even sued China,” notes Mark Judge in his review at Chronicles. “At the height of the COVID pandemic, Schmitt sued China for causing and exacerbating the spread of COVID-19 across America.” The author is a big fan of Milan Kundera, who cites the struggle of memory against forgetting, and that case deserves a second look.

In April of 2020, as attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt filed a lawsuit charging that Chinese Communist officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians.” For Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Schmitt’s lawsuit was the problem.

“We launch a series of unknown events that could be very, very dangerous,” Feinstein told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. “I think this is a huge mistake.” On the other hand, the San Francisco Democrat had only praise for the China.

“Where I live, we hold China as a potential trading partner,” Feinstein said in the hearing. “As a country that has pulled tens of millions of people out of poverty in a short period of time. And as a country growing into a respectable nation among other nations. And I deeply believe that. I’ve been to China a number of times. I’ve studied the issues.” Much of that study was on location.

“I’ve been coming to China for 31 years, so I’m not a newcomer,” Feinstein told James Areddy of the Wall Street Journal during a 2006 visit to Shanghai. In Beijing, the U.S. Senator explained, “we spent time with Zhu Rongji, the former premier who was a mayor of Shanghai” and “a good friend.”

On June 4, 2014, the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Feinstein issued a statement recalling “perhaps even thousands” of demonstrators killed. “I know of no other country that has made as much economic and industrial progress in the last 25 years than China,” Feinstein wrote, “but what this anniversary reminds us is that progress still must be made in the areas of human rights, rule of law and governance.”

Feinstein failed to explain what progress China’s one-party Stalinist dictatorship had made on human rights, and the senator expressed no second thoughts about China’s membership in the World Trade Organization. That removed congressional review of China’s record on human rights and weapons proliferation. Sen. Feinstein also kept rather quiet about democratic protesters in Hong Kong, but her issues with the PRC were far more serious.

“A Chinese spy managed to stay by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s side for nearly 20 years” CBS News reported in 2018. The Chinese spy was Feinstein's driver, an ideal position for spying, and “even attended Chinese consulate functions for the senator.” As Ben Weingarten explained, there was more to it.

Feinstein’s husband has “profited handsomely from the greatly expanded China trade she supported.” And the senator “served as a key intermediary between China and the U.S. government, while serving on committees whose work would be of keen interest to the PRC.”

Sen. Feinstein was one of the first to cry “racism” over the Wuhan virus that caused massive damage in the United States and around the world. When one American state attempted to hold China accountable, Feinstein called it dangerous and praised the regime responsible for some 60 million murders, according to The Black Book of Communism, and the occupier of Tibet since the 1950s.

For all but the willfully blind, Sen. Feinstein was an unregistered agent of the PRC, a model replicated by another San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newson. If the PRC ever did anything with which the semi-literate Newsom disagreed, it’s hard to know what it might be.

In April 2020, he gave the Chinese company Build Your Dreams (BYD) $1 billion to manufacture masks, which the company does not make. BYD builds electric vehicles and Newsom’s mandate for electric-only cars by 2035 was advance planning for BYD to flood the American market.

For all but the willfully blind, Gavin Newsom is an agent of the People’s Republic of China, and should be made to register as such. To paraphrase Justice Holmes, one generation of China’s unregistered agents is enough. Learn from Eric Schmitt, one of the few willing to take on the PRC.

“The Last Line of Defense is a terrific book,” Judge contends. “Informative, well-written, funny and with plenty of Midwestern horse sense, it proves a strategy that conservatives have ignored for too many decades. With the Constitution as its co-counsel, the right can go to court and win.”