I do not often recommend new books in this column.
Mr. Schweizer, a former senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the president of the Government Accountability Institute.
He is also the author of a shelf-full of bestselling books.
The fact that all these books were bestsellers is not incidental.
Mr. Schweizer aims at the broadest possible audience for his books because the corruption he has uncovered affects us all.
This dispassionate concern for the truth is on conspicuous display in his new book about China’s complex if only semi-declared war against the United States and the West generally.
Fully a third of its 309 pages are devoted to source notes.
In order to outline the malign activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the United States, he has consulted a mass of material, including restricted Chinese military journals and Chinese corporate records as well as “private emails from key American leaders, leaked documents from the Department of Homeland Security,” and many other federal agencies.
The result is that every assertion, every revelation, every charge is meticulously documented.
Together with Mr. Schweizer’s understated, methodical prose style, that mountain of carefully culled research makes the story he tells all the more chilling and all the more compelling.
One involves the systematic deployment of strategies by the CCP to weaken the United States and harm or, indeed, kill its citizens.
If that last phrase seems hyperbolic, remember that fentanyl poisoning is killing more than 100,000 Americans a year and that the CCP is “involved at every stage of the drug’s production and distribution in the United States.”
Mr. Schweizer quotes one politician who tartly observed, “Make no mistake—there’s no fentanyl crisis without the CCP.”
The Chinese influence on U.S. COVID-19 policy was similarly lethal.
Forget about the origins of the virus.
What mattered was the way U.S. leaders followed China in promulgating policies that were far more deadly than the respiratory disease that they were ostensibly combatting.
The American people lived through what Mr. Schweizer rightly describes as “the largest suppression of civil rights during peacetime in U.S. history.”
The economy suffered a self-inflicted body blow.
Why? Largely because “our health care leaders hid information from us to protect their Chinese colleagues and themselves.”
The CCP are disciples of Sun Tzu and regard his book “The Art of War” as a how-to manual.
Article No. 1 is his declaration that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
The motto is engraved on various official buildings and is explicitly taught as a matter of military strategy.
Deception is the key.
Accordingly, the CCP is going after the “soft underbelly” of the United States, waging “disintegration warfare” that involves everything from drugs to social media to financial corruption.
It is, Mr. Schweizer says, a hydra-headed beast that has deliberately been “contributing to social chaos and killing Americans.”
Mr. Schweizer also devotes many pages to laying out how the CCP has attacked traditional American values through the “soft power” of Hollywood, education, and social media.
There has been a flurry of attention in Congress devoted to TikTok, the Chinese-owned company that spews an agenda of sexual exoticism, infantilization, and anti-American, anti-Western propaganda.
All this describes one side of Mr. Schweizer’s analysis.
The other side concerns the fecklessness, not to say the outright corruption, of U.S. leaders.
To a breathtaking extent, we have been sold out by our leaders to the CCP.
Is there a way out?
Yes, but it would require “a paradigm shift” in our foreign policy.
To counter the semi-covert assault on the soul of America by the CCP would “dramatically disrupt the lives and livelihoods of elites from Silicon Valley to Wall Street.”
That brings me to what is perhaps the most dispiriting revelation in this dispiriting but important book: the fact that the deceptive machinations of a foreign power to cripple the United States by stealth are possible only with the acquiescence of “those who benefit from partnerships with Chinese government-linked companies [who also] very often finance the campaigns of our political leaders.” Let that sink in.
Mr. Schweizer ends on a chilling note that I hope will also be a call to arms.
“We are,” he writes, “way beyond the 1960s la-la land mantra of ‘Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?’ The only people who haven’t shown up are the ones who should be defending us.”
