Did Australia’s China paranoia make ‘spy’ Wang Liqiang’s claims too easy to believe?

Did Australia’s China paranoia make ‘spy’ Wang Liqiang’s claims too easy to believe? | South China Morning Post

On Friday, the Sydney-based Daily Telegraph reported that Australian intelligence officials had briefed Prime Minister Scott Morrison on their assessment that Wang was not a Chinese spy “at a level that would attract any interest from Australia”.

Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0

Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0

But Steve Bannon, who was deeply involved with getting Trump to nominate his ally Michael Pack, sees the ousters as a reckoning for an agency that he believes has been too soft on covering China.

“We are going hard on the charge,” Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and executive chairman of Breitbart, told me. “Pack’s over there to clean house.”

The Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics

The Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics

All of this is proceeding according to the Steve Bannon playbook. Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and Trump-whisperer who went largely forgotten by the U.S. electorate after he was bounced out of the White House in 2017, always viewed himself as a Bolshevik, someone willing to use a great emergency to build a technocratic dictatorship that operated on behalf of the agitated, propagandized masses. The populist linchpin of this Bannonism-Trumpism has always been xenophobia, and its key object—even more than brown Americans, or global Islam—has been the specter of Chinese dominance, an obsession for Bannon since his youth as a Navy officer.

The Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics

The Bipartisan Appeal of “Yellow Peril” Politics

All of this is proceeding according to the Steve Bannon playbook. Bannon, the former Breitbart chairman and Trump-whisperer who went largely forgotten by the U.S. electorate after he was bounced out of the White House in 2017, always viewed himself as a Bolshevik, someone willing to use a great emergency to build a technocratic dictatorship that operated on behalf of the agitated, propagandized masses. The populist linchpin of this Bannonism-Trumpism has always been xenophobia, and its key object—even more than brown Americans, or global Islam—has been the specter of Chinese dominance, an obsession for Bannon since his youth as a Navy officer.