An Overblown Balloon Headline Inflates False Narrative on China, by Patrick Macfarlane

Much ado about nothing, but when people fearfully fall for nothings like the Covid fraud, the Ukraine fraud, and now the Chinese balloon, it says a lot about the state of the country. From Patrick Macfarlane at libertarianinstitute.org:

For several decades the American public has been instilled with an intrinsic fear of and hatred for China.

No singular event in this seemingly inevitable march to war is more emblematic of the American public’s warped psyche than the “Chinese Spy Balloon” narrative—perhaps due, in part, to its facial absurdity. The happening eclipses even similarly nonsensical yarns such as widespread TikTok paranoia (see the NSA’s PRISM program), China’s American farmland purchases (Chinese firms account for approximately .5% of all foreign-owned farm and forest land in the U.S.), and the “invasion” of Chinese fentanyl through the Southern border (fentanyl trafficking is illegal in China).

Indeed, even the pervasive use of the phrase “Chinese Spy Balloon”—an utterly unsupported Pentagon accusation—is emblematic of the absolutely captured state of the American consciousness.

This narrative control is critical to Washington as it manufactures consent for its declared “great power competition” with Beijing.

The saga began on February 2, when an official spokesman announced the Pentagon was tracking the passage of a “high-altitude surveillance balloon” over the continental United States. The spokesman expressed confidence that the “surveillance balloon” belonged to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In this initial announcement, it was importantly noted “[i]nstances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years.”

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