Thanksgiving is a time to be grateful to God for the many blessings in our lives.
This year, however, food for Thanksgiving dinner is costlier, the price of gasoline is higher, crime is rampant, the Southern border is uncontrolled, and many of our schools are a disaster.
Read the full story
A delegation from a Chinese think tank associated with China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs secretly met with a billionaire New York executive and a group of politically-connected individuals last week to discuss faltering U.S.-China relations, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday, as China searches for ways to maintain influence over Washington.
Read the full story
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), in his bid to become the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, said on Sunday that if elected, he would form a select committee to investigate China.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, McCarthy declared that the Biden Administration is not doing enough to stand up to the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its leader, newly-reelected President Xi Jingping.
Read the full story
Senate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) told Fox News that former President Donald Trump “was right” in his warnings about social media platform TikTok.
“TikTok is a enormous threat,” Warner said. “It’s a threat on two levels. One, it is a massive collector of information, oftentimes of our children. They can visualize even down to your keystrokes. So if you’re a parent and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
Read the full story
A real estate firm in Los Angeles owned by a Chinese billionaire was found guilty of paying a city councilman more than $1 million in bribes to approve a skyscraper downtown.
On Thursday, a jury found Shen Zhen New World I, a real estate firm owned by Chinese billionaire Wei Huang, guilty after less than three hours of deliberation. The charges included “three counts of honest service wire fraud, four counts of interstate and foreign travel in aid of bribery, and one count of bribery,” according to the Justice Department.
Read the full story
American chipmaker Nvidia confirmed that it has developed an alternative high-performance chip to offer Chinese customers after the Biden administration introduced export restrictions on U.S.-made chips in a bid to hamper China’s military, Reuters reported Monday evening.
Nvidia initially revealed late in August that the U.S. government had introduced export restrictions on chips with potential military applications, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence. While Nvidia has made no formal announcement of the new chip, known as the A800, but Chinese businesses have begun advertising it on their websites and an Nvidia spokesperson confirmed the existence of the chip, according to Reuters.
Read the full story
Two troubling news stories have appeared in recent weeks. Neither story has received the attention it deserves.
Read the full story
On August 9, 2021, Benito Skinner, the Millennial Generation comedian known online as “Benny Drama,” posted a video on TikTok of his day-in-the-life experience as a White House intern, photocopying, making unrequested nail appointments for then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and generally making a mess.
All of it was for laughs, but there was a reason the Biden administration invited him into the West Wing. They wanted Millennials and members of Gen Z to hear a public health message from the TikTok influencer: “We need to get shots in the arms of every single American.”
Read the full story
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has sounded the alarm over a Chinese research lab’s purchase of land in Florida to establish a primate breeding facility.
JOINN Laboratories CA Inc. purchased 1,400 acres in Levy County, Fla., for a $5.5 million sum, per the Epoch Times. JOINN’s founders have close ties to the Chinese military. The sale is one of the largest Chinese land purchases in the U.S. in recent years. JOINN Laboratories, the parent company of the California lab that bought the land, is a Beijing-based drug developer.
Read the full story
Ford is urging the Treasury Department to ease restrictions placed on electric car parts sourced from China and other “entities of concern” to ensure more of its vehicles can qualify for the consumer tax credits included in the Democrats’ massive climate spending bill, Reuters reported Friday.
The Democrats’ $430 billion climate package, which President Joe Biden signed into law in August, prevents the $7,500 consumer tax credits from applying to new electric vehicles (EVs) if their battery materials were produced or assembled by a “foreign entity of concern” such as China. Ford is claiming that the restrictions, which were aimed at taking EV supply chains out of Chinese hands, are too strict and will not allow enough consumers to reap the benefits of the tax credit, according to Reuters.
Read the full story
Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty announced on Thursday that he and his Florida Republican colleague Marco Rubio wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin this week expressing alarm at the removal of America’s F-15-jet fleet from Okinawa, Japan.
The United States Air Force last week publicized its intention to phase out the fleet’s presence at Kadena Air Base on the southeastern Japanese island starting on November 1. The two squadrons now being withdrawn comprise half of the roughly 100 fighter aircraft the United States currently maintains in Japan. Instead of replacing the jets, the Biden administration anticipates periodically sending F-22 planes from Alaska to the base.
Read the full story
A cybersecurity group has claimed that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is actively taking steps to undermine the coming midterm elections in the United States, with just one week left to go.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, the threat assessment comes from Mandiant, an intelligence and cybersecurity-focused organization that has worked with both the government and the public sector. Mandiant claims that the Chinese government has been using an army of fake social media accounts and fake news “websites” in order to “sow division both between the U.S. and its allies and within the U.S. political system itself.”
Read the full story
The Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania invited a representative of the People’s Republic of China, General Jin Qian, to speak with students and faculty in a private meeting held on Oct. 6.
The purpose of this event was to open a respectful dialogue with the Chinese Deputy Consul General and others about Chinese and United States diplomatic relations and foreign perspectives.
Read the full story
The Pentagon identifies China as the No. 1 threat to U.S. national security in the latest version of the National Defense Strategy, released just days after the leader of the communist regime secured a third five-year term.
“The key theme … is the need to sustain and strengthen U.S. deterrence with the People’s Republic of China as our pacing challenge,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday during a press conference on the new document.
Read the full story
On Wednesday, White House spokesman John Kirby claimed that he had no information as to whether or not Hunter Biden is still co-owner of an investment firm that he shared with the Chinese government, even though Hunter’s lawyer has claimed that he has divested the entirety of his ownership stake.
The New York Post asked Kirby, the top spokesman for the National Security Council, if Joe Biden’s son still owns 10 percent of BHR Partners, a private equity company backed by the state.
“On China, this is a very simple question, but it’s an enduring point of uncertainty: Does the president’s son still co-own a company with China’s government?” The Post reporter asked at Kirby’s latest White House briefing. “And if not, can you provide some basic transparency about who bought that stake and for how much money?”
Read the full story
In a compromise, Germany’s cabinet agreed to allow China Ocean Shipping Company a nearly 25 percent stake in the country’s largest port Wednesday, according to Reuters.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Social Democrat ministry leaders pushed the deal through in spite of opposition within the cabinet, landing on a 24.9 percent stake in one of three terminals in Germany’s Hamburg port, Reuters reported. Although officials say they will not allow Cosco any say over port operations or management, it drew sharp criticism from members of the foreign ministry who have grown wary of foreign investment.
Read the full story
The Department of Justice unveiled allegations against Chinese nationals, including three intelligence officers working for China’s state security agency, of using a fake think tank to recruit espionage agents in the U.S. on Monday.
The indictment accuses Wang Lin and three others of a “wide-ranging and systematic effort” to recruit U.S. citizens, including professors at U.S. universities and a former federal law enforcement and state homeland security official, as well as others, to conduct espionage activities on behalf of the Chinese government’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). For at least a decade, the individuals used the Institute for International Studies (IIS) at the Ocean University of China as a front for their intelligence operations.
Read the full story
Several large American cities have contracted with a Chinese state-owned rail car manufacturer to design and manufacture subway cars for their subway systems, raising serious cybersecurity and human-rights concerns. Over the past eight years, China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC) has secured more than $2.6 billion in federal transit contracts to provide passenger railcars in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Read the full story
Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) this week announced she is cosponsoring a measure alongside Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) to identify broadcasting content that foreign governments are underwriting.
Called the Identifying Propaganda on Our Airwaves (IPA) Act, the bill directs the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to mandate that radio and television broadcast companies check foreign-media databases to ascertain non-American sources of programming and advertising.
Read the full story
President Joe Biden has made waves this fall with his plan to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, shifting the burden to taxpayers. Five years earlier, his family cashed in on a zero-interest, forgivable loan of its own from an energy company in communist China, according to evidence in the possession of the FBI.
Read the full story
Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed official guest host, Aaron Gulbransen in studio to comment upon the recent article by Just the News revealing emails that point to interest-free loans from China to the Biden family.
Read the full story
A coalition of leading House Republicans is raising the alarm and demanding answers after the Biden administration approved another round of grant funding for research on coronaviruses and bats in Asia.
The lawmakers sent a letter to Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and serves as the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden.
Read the full story
Eugene Yu, whom police arrested last week for alleged data theft, allegedly conspired to store California election workers’ personal data in China during the 2020 presidential election, prosecutors said in a court filing Thursday.
Yu’s firm, Konnech, entered a contract with Los Angeles County to provide secure poll worker management software for the 2020 election that stipulated all employee payroll and scheduling data collected by the company should be stored in the U.S., according to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. Despite multiple statements to The New York Times denying Yu or Konnech stored data in China, new court filings indicate that Yu deliberately collaborated with unknown conspirators to transfer the personal information of hundreds of Los Angeles election workers through third party contractors based in China.
Read the full story
The city of St. Paul is expanding its guaranteed basic income program that provides a monthly stipend to qualified families. Guaranteed basic income is one of several such programs going on in the city.
St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said the city would expand the city’s initial GBI with another guaranteed income program that would give 333 low-income families $500 a month for two years. This program would be funded by $4 million from the American Rescue Plan and $1 million from private philanthropy.
Read the full story
The Biden administration plans to shutter its predecessor’s investigations into undisclosed foreign funding of U.S. colleges and universities, the subject of years of warnings from elected officials, law enforcement and academic freedom groups, according to higher education lobbyists.
The commitment was recorded in an August letter from a higher ed lobbyist recapping a June 23 virtual briefing by top Department of Education officials for the American Council on Education (ACE) and other university groups, including the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), which includes medical centers and independent research institutes.
Read the full story
Eugene Yu, founder and president of East Lansing-based election software-technology company Konnech, Inc., was arrested Wednesday in Michigan and is facing California charges related to collecting election workers’ personal data and storing it on servers housed in the Peoples Republic of China.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón is seeking Yu’s extradition from Michigan on charges Konnech violated its contract with Los Angeles County, which prohibits access of election workers’ personal information from citizens and permanent residents outside the United States.
Read the full story
Electricity! It’s magical. It’s mystical. We’ve been obsessed with harnessing its power for thousands of years. As far back as 600 B.C. Thales of Miletus wrote how amber could be charged by rubbing it. In 1600, William Gilbert translated the Greek word amber to electricity.
On June 15, 1752, Benjamin Franklin promoted his theory that lightning was electrical by flying a kite during a lightning storm. Around this time, Michael Faraday discovered that moving a magnet inside a wire coil could generate electricity. From there, he built the first electric motor. He later built a generator and a transformer.
Read the full story
Civilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Read the full story
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Friday his multinational software company may “exit” Republican states over anti-abortion laws. At the same time, however, Benioff through his business has investments located in China, a country that has engaged in human rights abuses.
“If you’re going to discriminate against our employees, we’re not going to set up shop there,” Benioff said Friday to a CNN anchor asking whether Salesforce is “considering” moving out of places “restricting or outlawing abortion.’”
Read the full story
A decade-old Chinese-language press release reveals an elite Washington, D.C., think tank knew of a prominent Chinese academic’s high-ranking Communist Party position before hiring him a month later — an affiliation the think tank omitted from the English-language press release heralding the opening of their new center in Beijing.
Read the full story
On Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), announced a series of executive orders and proposed legislative actions aiming to reduce the influence of hostile foreign nations such as China.
The Daily Wire reports that DeSantis’ proposals focus on seven nations in particular: China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Syria. The proposed measures will cover each of these nations’ respective efforts to target the state of Florida through such means as cyberspace, real estate purchases, and academic influence.
Read the full story
Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee have obtained bombshell documents proving that Joe Biden was deeply involved in the family business of selling American natural gas to the Chinese–while he was planning to run for President. According to multiple whistleblowers, the Biden family made promises to those who worked with them in 2017 and onward that they would “reap the rewards in a future Biden administration.” These explosive revelations “pose national security concerns,” Oversight Republicans proclaimed Tuesday night.
Read the full story
China announced sanctions against CEOs of two major U.S. defense contractors Friday for their role in an arms package the State Department approved for Taiwan on Sept. 2.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the sanctions against Raytheon CEO Gregory J. Hayes and Boeing Defense CEO Ted Colbert will “defend China’s sovereignty and security interests” against U.S. “military contact” with Taiwan. The Biden administration notified Congress of its intent to transfer $1.1 billion worth of military equipment to Taiwan earlier this month, including 60 anti-ship missiles Boeing Defense agreed to produce and 100 air-to-air missilescontracted with Raytheon.
Read the full story
Wokeism is conventionally traced back through progressivism and Marxism to the fake liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The histories of wokeism have failed to focus on Maoism, even though some observers noticed the similarity between Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the West’s cultural revolution of the late 2010s.
Read the full story
A high-level TikTok executive repeatedly refused to stop sending American users’ data to China in a congressional hearing Wednesday, claiming that policies currently in development would be sufficient to satisfy America’s national security concerns.
Read the full story
Earlier this year, Ian Easton, a former China analyst with the Center for Naval Analyses and currently senior director at the Project 2049 Institute, a think tank that focuses on U.S. security interests in the Indo-Pacific region, wrote a book titled The Final Struggle: Inside China’s Global Strategy. In his author’s note, Easton describes the book as an analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “plan for world domination.” Easton contends that a close reading of President Xi Jinping’s speeches — some of them never before translated — reveals that that CCP is committed to spreading China’s communist totalitarian model of rule around the world.
Easton makes clear in the book that China’s goal of “world domination” does not envision Chinese armed forces conducting a long series of military invasions with “hordes of tanks, and fascist storm troopers swarming across the map” and “goose-stepping into fallen capital cities.” The CCP’s global strategy, he explains, “is much more sophisticated” than Hollywood visions or American novels of World War III. Instead, the CCP’s strategy involves “a protracted campaign of silent invasions to replicate on a global level what it sees as its own superior system.” The CCP’s geopolitical goal is a “totalitarian world order” led by China.
Read the full story
Joe Biden announced Friday that former Obama Administration adviser John Podesta would join the White House to oversee the spending of $370 billion for the purpose of addressing so-called “global warming.” His appointment, however, has led to criticism from China hawks who warn that Podesta is too close to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Podesta had previously called for more Chinese investment in American infrastructure as far back as 2013, claiming that there are “great opportunities for Chinese firms to directly invest in this nation, to build American infrastructure, to create American jobs, and generate steady and handsome returns.”
Read the full story
Chipmaking companies that receive U.S. taxpayer funding under the $280 billion CHIPS Act of 2022 will be able to do business with foreign countries like China after a 10-year waiting period, according to guidelines released by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Tuesday.
The legislation that President Biden signed last month was designed to build a domestic supply chain for computer chips, used for electronic devices and vehicle technology, as a way to reduce reliance on other countries like China and Taiwan.
Read the full story
The pace of China’s nuclear modernization has been described as breathtaking by Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command. The increased size and sophistication of the capabilities being developed make them a strategic threat to the U.S. and its allies. Along with that threat comes the uncertainty around how large China plans to grow its force.
Read the full story
American doctors go to great lengths to maintain the highest ethical standards as they work to save thousands of desperately ill patients waiting for an organ match, as underscored in recent reporting of innovative transplant experiments using genetically modified pig hearts. China’s transplant sector, unconstrained by rigorous ethical rules, found a more expedient solution. China created a thriving transplant industry, the world’s second largest, based on a supply of organs forcibly harvested from executed prisoners – most likely prisoners of conscience.
Read the full story
American chipmaker Nvidia announced in a Wednesday quarterly report that the U.S. government informed them of a new license requirement that would prohibit the sale of two advanced chips to China and Russia.
The U.S. government was concerned that the chips, which have applications in artificial intelligence work, might be co-opted by the Chinese or Russian militaries, according to Nvidia’s quarter two report. The chips were expected to generate $400 million in quarterly sales, revenue which is now in jeopardy from the new restriction, according to Reuters.
Read the full story
Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
Read the full story
New research from a former Google engineer warns TikTok has the ability to track user keystrokes in its Web browser, a claim that is alarming privacy advocates but receiving pushback from the platform’s parent company.
Read the full story
With China’s decision to close negotiations with the U.S. following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan visit, it’s fair to ask how the U.S.’s rapport with the People’s Republic got to this tense point in the first place.
The actor Dennis Quaid said his involvement with cocaine had three stages: “the fun, the fun with problems, and then just the problems.”
Read the full story
China imposed sweeping power cuts to households and factories in Sichuan province, including those belonging to major electronics companies where drought conditions have strained the region’s hydropower-based energy production capacity.
Water levels at hydropower reservoirs that supply the province of 94 million people have fallen by as much as 50% in August as China faces its largest heatwave since 1961, the AP reported, citing data from the Sichuan Provincial Department of Economics and Information Technology. After the provincial government ordered solar panel, cement, electronics and fertilizer factories to reduce power consumption, many shut down or reduced operations.
Read the full story
In just the short span of three decades, China has risen from a populous backwater to become the world’s dominant industrial economy. Western leaders, lured by the promise of profits and the naïve belief that investment would lead the Chinese Communist regime to change its ways, promoted economic integration with China, shipped millions of manufacturing jobs to China, and collaborated with China as it engaged in economic warfare against the rest of the world.
Read the full story
On Monday, U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) joined America Reports on Fox News in order to discuss the state of U.S. support of Taiwan in the face of aggression from the Chinese Communist Party the Asia-Pacific region.
Hagerty stated that he believes China is emboldened by what he calls the weakness of the Biden administration.
Read the full story
Three hundred employees at the parent company of ubiquitous social media app TikTok list Chinese state media outlets in their employment histories, a Forbes investigation of public LinkedIn profile information revealed Thursday.
The investigation may reveal Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ties to ByteDance, a Chinese technology company that operates several popular social media apps, through Chinese media organizations that generate CCP propaganda, according to Forbes. The profiles include 23 current directors of ByteDance responsible for “content partnerships, public affairs, corporate social responsibility and media cooperation,” and 15 who may still hold employment status with certain Chinese state-run media outlets, though it’s possible that the LinkedIn profiles were not updated after a change of job status.
Read the full story
Russia, China and other countries have escalated efforts to ditch transactions made with U.S. dollars in 2022, helping them bypass Western sanctions and keep their economies afloat.
Since Western countries levied heavy sanctions on Russia in punishment for its invasion of Ukraine, India has increased its imports of Russian coal and natural gas, paying in Chinese yuan, United Arab Emirates dirham, Hong Kong dollar, and euro, Reuters reported Wednesday. Turkey and Iran have also forged agreements with Russia to base bilateral commerce on the Russian ruble, an effort to divest from dependence on the “toxic” U.S. dollar while easing the effect of sanctions on the Russian economy.
Read the full story
While many are rightfully concerned about the growing influence of video-based social media platform TikTok and the Chinese government’s ability to harvest incredible amounts of user data from it, China’s largest social media and video game studio, Tencent, has quietly been acquiring a commanding stake in the most popular video game companies around the world, and no one has seemed to notice.
Read the full story