There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true. —Soren Kierkegaard. "…truth is true even if nobody believes it, and falsehood is false even if everybody believes it. That is why truth does not yield to opinion, fashion, numbers, office, or sincerity–it is simply true and that is the end of it" – Os Guinness, Time for Truth, pg.39. “He that takes truth for his guide, and duty for his end, may safely trust to God’s providence to lead him aright.” – Blaise Pascal. "There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily" – George Washington letter to Edmund Randolph — 1795. We live in a “post-truth” world. According to the dictionary, “post-truth” means, “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Simply put, we now live in a culture that seems to value experience and emotion more than truth. Truth will never go away no matter how hard one might wish. Going beyond the MSM idealogical opinion/bias and their low information tabloid reality show news with a distractional superficial focus on entertainment, sensationalism, emotionalism and activist reporting – this blogs goal is to, in some small way, put a plug in the broken dam of truth and save as many as possible from the consequences—temporal and eternal. "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." – George Orwell “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard
(Daily Signal)—President Donald Trump returned to Washington in January with a mandate from the American people to end mass migration. That same month, however, the foreign-born population living within America’s borders hit a record high, in an echo of the Roman Empire. Is it too late to save America from mass migration? Even if America is saved, will it be fundamentally changed in the process?
As a California farmer, Victor Davis Hanson faces the reality of this demographic change every day. As a historian and classicist, he knows all too well what happens to regimes and empires that fail to confront mass migration. This week, he joins “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss.
“Everybody,” Hanson told The Daily Signal, “is bewildered why [former President] Joe Biden, or whoever was controlling him, did this.”
Hanson described the pressure to keep migrants streaming into the country as “a consortium of interests” that include corporations (which desire cheap labor), other nations (which benefit from remittances), the cartels, and liberal ideologues.
Whatever the motivation, “it’s catastrophic,” Hanson said. January’s Current Population Survey from the Census Bureau found that America’s foreign-born population has surpassed 53 million. In percentage terms, that’s 15.8%, a full percentage point higher than the previous record set in 1890.
Hanson’s family has lived on a farm in Central California since 1870. “Where I live in the Central Valley is kind of ground zero, where people come up for agriculture or hospitality industry and it’s changed my life markedly.”
While the migrants of yesteryear might stay for a season, work on a construction site or in the fields, make some good money, and then go back to their home country, today’s migrants are staying.
“Where I live out in the country, if a person had a one-bedroom house or something, why not bring in Winnebagos or sheds,” Hanson said of the growing migrant population. “There may be 40 or 50 people living in a single-family zone residence.” Meanwhile, California citizens are punished by the regulatory environment for going about home improvements in the right way.
The end result is a governance structure that has two contradicting systems.
“It’s very strange about California,” Hanson said. “It’s the most regulated state in the country and it’s the least regulated.” While businesses have fled the state due to overtaxation, authorities simultaneously allow “a huge black market economy,” created by migrants, to flourish.
“It’s kind of disheartening when your family has been there since 1870 and you’re afraid to walk a quarter mile out of your house at night.”
America is not the only civilization that faced a crisis of this nature. “If you look at what I’d call [the] late republic, early imperial literature” of Rome, Hanson explained, “you get the Italian agrarian mindset, protocol, morality, and it’s now globalized and it’s diluted.”
During this early empire time period, there was “a lot of money being made in this global system of trade that Rome created.“
“And one of the things that’s happened is Rome has now become from 300,000 [people] to over a million,” Hanson continued. But “the number of people who are Italian or reflect that in the literature is considered dwindling, eroding, and you’ve got too many people from all over the world that are not on the same page.”
”There’s much more wealth, there’s much more technology, there’s much more leisure,” Hanson said, but “there’s no moral restraint” and “there’s no republic anymore.”
“It’s very similar to the United States,” Hanson added. “There was this kind of an agrarian American code that you see in movies of the 1930s and ’40s and now we’re … powerful, wealthier, but people are less happy or they don’t seem to reflect what the Founders thought the country should be. It’s the same dichotomy.”
All this raises the question of whether the age of the American empire is coming to an end or just beginning.
Hanson told The Daily Signal, “We’re in a transitional period.”
“Our globalization is the modern equivalent of an empire,” Hanson explained. “There’s still a sense inside the United States that we’re still operating under Republican principles, but there’s a doubt that these next generations are going to be able to continue that” due to the lack of civic education and moral decay. “They’ve been brought up on globalism.”
The Chinese have made enormous mountains of money by exporting cheap goods to the rest of the world, and this has given them a tremendous amount of economic power. Now they are attempting to extend their economic domination by constructing hundreds of very large self-sustaining “special economic zones” in other countries. These “special economic zones” are established in key strategic locations, and they are often exempt from many of the laws and regulations of the host nation.
The most famous “special economic zone” in the world is the Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Back in the 1970s, Shenzhen was just a very small fishing village. Today, it is help up as a shining example of China’s economic miracle…
The most successful SEZ in China was Shenzhen, one of the original pilot zones created by Deng Xiaoping. Shenzhen went from a population of 314,000 to 12.5 million over the span of 40 years. By 1992, within 12 years of its designation as a SEZ, Shenzhen attracted $4.3 billion USD in FDI annually, or 14% of China’s total FDI. Now Shenzhen is known as the Silicon Valley of hardware, because it is home to the world’s largest electronics factories.
China is now home to more than 2,500 SEZs. They range from small business parks to full fledged cities with populations in the millions. The World Bank estimates that China’s SEZs contribute 22% GDP, 45% of its FDI, and 60% of its exports.
After having so much success with special economic zones domestically, the Chinese started implementing this concept elsewhere.
In 2013, the Chinese government announced the creation of the global Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This plan would revive the silk road by financing the creation of connective infrastructure throughout Eurasia and Africa. The connective infrastructure to be built includes highways, fiber optic cables, railroads, oil pipelines, ports, and airports. This infrastructure would be connected by hubs made up of Chinese SEZs. The Chinese government expects to spend $2 trillion USD by 2030 developing the program.
Today, there are approximately 500 Chinese special economic zones outside of the nation of China, and some of them are the size of “full fledged new cities”…
There are now roughly 500 Chinese funded SEZs outside of China, mostly created as part of the BRI. As hubs of connective infrastructure, SEZs play a critical role in the success of the BRI.
BRI SEZs differ immensely from one another. Most are industrial parks, but some are full fledged new cities. Many are designed from the ground up by Chinese companies, while others are initiated by their home countries and later funded by Chinese interests. Some have budgets in the tens of millions, while others have budgets in the tens of billions.
CBS News recently visited one of these special economic zones in Cambodia.
A convoy of semi-trucks passed by as our CBS News team drove about two hours south of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Moments later we were greeted by an enormous arch with signage in two languages — the local Khmer and, beneath it, Chinese.
There could be no mistake about who’s in charge of the “Special Economic Zone” rising from the dirt. We approached a furniture factory, where the Chinese manager invited us in to shoot some video.
Right now, a lot of Chinese companies are moving into that particular special economic zone in an attempt to avoid the tariffs that President Trump has imposed on China.
So the next time you go to Walmart or Target you may see that a lot more products now say that they are made in Cambodia.
Interestingly, CBS News is telling us that construction at that particular special economic zone “goes on for miles”…
We asked the manager about his neighbors in the economic zone and he said most of the companies moving in are Chinese. A driving incentive behind the relocation of those manufacturing operations is avoiding U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods, and there are a lot of companies choosing to make the investment.
The scale of the industrial park growing in the south of Cambodia is hard to fathom. Construction goes on for miles.
Pakistan is another nation that has really embraced Chinese special economic zones.
The provincial administration of Sindh on Saturday announced the establishment of a special economic zone after the signing of a memorandum of understanding supported by Chinese authorities, projecting the initiative to transform Pakistan’s economy by attracting $3 billion in investment and creating over 100,000 jobs.
The announcement is part of the second phase of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which aims to enhance industrial development by setting up such economic zones. The first CPEC phase focused on infrastructure and energy projects, while the second phase emphasizes industrial collaboration between the two countries.
An even larger “special economic zone” is planned for Saudi Arabia.
It is being reported that it will be located “at the King Salman International Airport in Riyadh” and will be home to thousands of companies…
The KSA-Sino Logistics Zone will be located at the King Salman International Airport in Riyadh, which is expected to be one of the largest airports in the world when completed by 2030.
The project is expected to attract more than 3,000 wholesalers and retailers and about 200 light industrial manufacturers from China and Asia.
The new development aims to improve logistical connections between China and Saudi Arabia and help establish the kingdom as a base for air cargo movement in the region.
I was quite surprised to learn that the Chinese are moving so rapidly in the Middle East.
But they have been even more active in Africa.
There are 15 Chinese special economic zones in the nation of Kenya, and some of them are absolutely huge. Here is just one example…
The project will be undertaken in three phases and is expected to be one of Africa’s tech hub offering employment and propelling economic growth and development of Uasin Gishu County and the country at large.
In the first phase of AEZ Pearl River project, the Chinese firm will supervise the construction of an industrial park that will cover 700 acres.
It will consist of various industries in agro-processing, energy, machinery, engineering, construction, electronic, ICT, chemical and pharmaceutical sectors.
The second phase will consist of a science and technology hub on an 86-acre piece of land.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Wednesday launched the construction of Chinese-contracted “Addis Tomorrow Special Economic Zone” at the heart of Addis Ababa, the country’s capital.
The launching ceremony came a year after the Addis Ababa City Administration and China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) inked a deal to build the economic zone, with a planned area of 35 hectares, at an estimated cost of 700 million U.S. dollars.
Speaking at the event, Abiy said the economic zone is part of the government’s commitment to transforming Addis Ababa into one of the most beautiful cities in the world by building smart communities with various facilities, including residential houses, shopping malls, hotels, and recreational centers.
Constructing a vast network of major trade hubs all over the globe could help China become the number one economic superpower in the years ahead.
But is there another motive for what they are doing?
These special economic zones are allowing the Chinese to have a presence in key strategic locations throughout the world.
And once they are there, it will be nearly impossible to remove them.
It appears that the Chinese have been playing chess while we have been playing checkers.
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