‘Damn socialism, why are you chasing me?’ Chinese-Americans see ghost of communism in Democrats’ leftward turn

When Saga Zhou first moved to the United States from China in 2009, she steered clear of politics. The Communist Party rules supreme in China, so most Chinese immigrants bring a built-in aversion to political involvement.

But Zhou’s interest in politics was piqued as she began to see the American Left embracing policies that reminded her of those she’d fled in China.

One such policy was the Left’s support for late-term abortion. When she lived in China, Zhou, like many young Chinese, didn’t consider abortion to be a big deal. But her view changed after moving to America, getting married, and bearing two children.

“After I became a mother, my understanding about life fundamentally changed,” she told me when we met at a Panera Bread in Irvine. “Now I am totally a mother.”

Zhou said her heart broke upon learning about a Virginia bill to loosen restrictions on late-term abortions. Appearing on a radio show as the bill was being debated, Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam pledged to sign the legislation, even suggesting it would sanction infanticide.

“Oh, when I saw the news, I cannot even open [the article],” Zhou said through tears. “It was really hard. I just felt something really strong into my chest. And then I said, ‘Let me adopt him, don’t kill him.'”

The proposed law hit especially close to home for Zhou, whose mother became pregnant with her just as China’s government began implementing its brutal one-child policy.

The policy prohibited most couples from having more than one child. Women who became pregnant with a second child were often forced to undergo sterilization; sometimes their babies were killed in the womb. Though she was her mother’s second child, Zhou escaped death because the one-child policy had not yet been implemented in her city.

“Somebody has to understand the roots, where these policies come from,” Zhou said. “That’s why I’m so pissed. Damn socialism. Why are you chasing me?”

As Democrats embrace policies such as so-called "Medicare for all," “free” college, 70 percent tax rates, the "Green New Deal," and late-term abortion, Republicans see an opportunity to frame the 2020 election as a referendum on socialism.

President Trump now includes a riff on the “dangers of socialism” in most of his speeches, including in last month’s State of the Union. “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” he told Congress and the nation.

An internal memo from the Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, discusses its plan to win the suburbs and retake the House of Representatives by framing the 2020 election as a choice between socialism and economic opportunity.

The Republican Party’s anti-communism has long attracted many Cubans, Vietnamese, Eastern Europeans, and other immigrants who fled communist countries during the Cold War.

Chinese immigrants have historically been an afterthought. But their numbers are rising. There are more than 3 million Chinese immigrants living in America today, up from fewer than half a million in 1980.

As their numbers grow, Chinese-Americans are becoming more active in politics. In 2014, a group of Chinese-Americans in Orange County, Calif., formed The Orange Club, a political action committee whose original purpose was to defeat Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5, which sought to overturn a 1996 initiative that ended affirmative action in state university admissions. The club argued that SCA-5 would unfairly hurt their high-achieving children’s chances of getting into California’s top state-run universities.

SCA-5 ultimately failed, due in part to strong opposition from Asian-American groups including The Orange Club, which remains active in local public policy debates and endorses candidates for office.

Zhou joined TOC last year and ever since has been attending meetings, signing online petitions, and protesting at public events–all things she couldn’t have imagined doing in China.

When I first met Zhou in February, she was volunteering at a phone bank for Don Wagner, the mayor of Irvine who was running in a special election for Orange County supervisor. On March 13, the morning after Wagner won the race, the Orange County Register’s front-page story included a photo of Wagner standing in front of several jubilant supporters, including Zhou.

In 2008 and 2012, many Chinese-American voters cast their presidential ballots for Barack Obama, believing Obama’s Democratic Party was more hospitable to immigrants. “On the first day when we land here, the media and Left reinforce the concept that minorities and immigrants are supposed to vote for Democrats and not supposed to be aligning with conservatives,” said George Li, a Chinese immigrant I met at a Starbucks in Irvine.

But many Chinese-Americans are repelled by the Democrats’ more recent embrace of policies they consider socialist. Socialism “is a great, great concern to [Chinese-Americans], which is why I’m really motivated to stop that,” Li said. “It’s our duty.”

As a college student in China in the late 1980’s, Li was active in China’s democracy movement and knew some of the students involved in the Tiananmen Square protests.

Not long after, Li moved to the U.S., earning a master’s degree in computer information systems and starting a family. Li has become active in local politics through The Orange Club, which he led last year.

Li believes the Republican Party is a natural fit for Chinese-Americans.

Traditional Chinese culture is conservative, he said, emphasizing hard work, independence, education, and family values.

He finds the Left’s obsession with political correctness maddening because it intimidates people into silence. “This intimidation is so bad for freedom of speech,” he said. “A lot of things I see in this country are very similar to what I saw in the Cultural Revolution era in China,” He calls political correctness a “form of cultural Marxism.”

Benjamin Yu, also of Irvine, saw the Democratic Party moving toward socialism long before some of its members began embracing the term.

Yu immigrated to the U.S. with his mother in the late 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Yu, then a U.S. Green Card holder, felt a “surge of patriotism,” prompting him to join the Army.

“When something happens so close to you, it doesn’t matter if you are an American by legal status,” he said. “You get a sense that that’s your country. You feel part of the community.”

Yu saw a nascent socialism developing under President Barack Obama, whom he voted for twice before turning to Trump in 2016. He believes more and more Chinese are voting Republican, though he thinks many are reluctant to say so for fear of being ostracized.

Zhou, Li, and Yu believe Republicans can win over Chinese-American voters by emphasizing the Democrats’ embrace of socialism, and the GOP’s staunch opposition to it.

“I just want America to be America,” Li said, “not another Soviet Union, Cuba, or China.”

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IT BEGINS: Beto Is Already Apologizing For His Whiteness On The Campaign Trail; “I’ve Enjoyed White Privilege”

Betomania has had a rough launch this week as embarrassing details continue to emerge about the quirky Texan who believes that is his destiny to save the planet if he is able to parlay his celebrity support into a shot at the White House.

It wasn’t that long ago that nobody had ever heard of Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke, an obscure backbencher who was relegated to obscurity in the House Of Representatives.

However, the desire of Democrats to get a signature victory by taking down Texas incumbent Senator Ted Cruz somehow transformed Beto into the second coming of John F. Kennedy and with the help of boatloads of California money, he nearly sprung the upset.

Now the 46-year-old with a record of exactly zero accomplishments is the trendy pick with limousine liberals to emerge from the identity politics mosh pit of the upcoming primaries to go mano a mano with President Trump next fall with the presidency as the ultimate prize.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation because Beto has quickly proven to be his own worst enemy from the bizarre video from the couch with his wife announcing his entry to the publication of a buried story about his past as a hacker, poet and writer of stories about running down children.

The guy is wasting no time showing that in addition to being an empty suit, that his head may be just as empty which might explain his contrition for his “white privilege” and early concession to the race-obsessed social justice warriors who wouldn’t cast their votes for a white man if their lives depended on it.

Beto O’Rourke said Friday night that he had been wrong for joking at several events in his first two days campaigning in Iowa that his wife has been raising their three children “sometimes with my help.”

The former congressman from Texas, who launched his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination Thursday, addressed the remarks during a recording of the podcast Political Party LIVE! in Cedar Rapids. The comments triggered complaints from Democratic operatives and activists, many of them women, that female candidates could never similarly joke about their roles raising their children.

“Not only will I not say that again, but I’ll be more thoughtful going forward in the way that I talk about our marriage, and also the way in which I acknowledge the truth of the criticism that I have enjoyed white privilege,” he said.

He pointed to his ability to walk away from two arrests as a young man without serious consequences as an example.

The use of the racially-charged term “white privilege” has little to do with Beto’s rise but the privilege of being the product of a wealthy family didn’t hurt.

Not just any schmuck can get into the hoity-toity Ivy League Columbia University and the family connections certainly didn’t hurt when it came to launching his political career either.

Clout like that also goes a long way in helping to bounce back from an ugly DUI arrest and a prolonged time spent as a member of a punk rock band, a slacker and as previously mentioned a computer hacker with the notorious Cult Of The Dead Cow collective.

On top of that, Beto married into money too and like other phony socialists like Comrade Bernie, isn’t exactly hurting while he whips up anti-capitalist sentiment with resentful, gullible millennial suckers who are too intellectually lazy to do a bit of research into this dopey snake oil salesman.

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Even WaPo Rejects Negative Demo Spin on Good Economy

Presidential hopefuls spread the misleading claim about Americans working multiple jobs.

In a surprising bit of actual journalism, The Washington Post published an article today calling out Democrats for their fallacious attempts to spin good economic news as somehow bad. While the Post pulled away from its usual practice of awarding “Pinocchios” to establish the degree of a falsehood uttered by a politician — maybe in an effort to soften the criticism — the article was critical of three leading Democrat presidential candidates and their fallacious statements on the economy.

The particular economic talking point several Democrats have recently and regularly asserted — and that has the Post crying foul — is the claim that the historically low unemployment numbers are hiding a nasty reality. And what is this nasty reality? Well, according to Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Beto O'Rourke, the number of Americans forced to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet has increased under President Donald Trump.

Harris uses personal anecdotes in spinning her yarn, as she carefully seeks to avoid making any direct assertions. Sanders works his spin by removing context that would otherwise undermine his entire argument. O'Rourke sites a notoriously unreliable data type, the self-selected survey, as the basis for his claim that “half” of teachers work “a second or third job just to put food on the table.” In fact, the U.S. Education Department’s most recent nationally representative sample survey finds that only 17% of teachers in the South and 18% across the rest of the nation work a second job. They do, after all, have summers off of school.

The fact is that the number of Americans working two or more jobs has actually decreased under Trump. The Post reports, “There are almost 156 million people with jobs. But only 251,000 people had two full-time jobs in February [2019], compared with 343,000 in February 2018, according to BLS. That’s a decline of more than 25 percent. Another 4.5 million had both a full-time job and a part-time job, while nearly 2 million were juggling part-time jobs.” In total, there are approximately 7.8 million Americans working more than one job. Sanders is technically correct when he references millions of Americans working multiple jobs, but he fails to note that this represents only 5% of working Americans.

Furthermore, who’s to say why they are working multiple jobs? It was under Barack Obama that many Americans were forced into working multiple jobs due to ObamaCare, which mandated employers provide medical insurance to employees who worked 30 or more hours a week. As a result, many Americans found their hours cut below the ObamaCare threshold because employers couldn’t afford that massive new expense. Thus, workers were often forced to get a second job. (Thanks Obama.) Trump, on the other hand, has worked to cut back on government regulations, which in turn has freed up employers and boosted the American economy. Spinning Trump’s economic record as bad is simply dishonest. And even the Post admits it.

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Trump administration approves Medicaid work rules in Ohio as judge weighs their legality

The Trump administration has approved Medicaid work rules in Ohio, even as a federal judge is currently weighing whether they are legal.

"With unemployment steady under 5%, there are great opportunities to connect adults on #Medicaid w/ opportunities to improve their lives & health – so I’m pleased to send @GovMikeDeWine the 9th approval of a community engagement waiver!" tweeted the administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seema Verma, after she signed off on the rules Friday.

The rules will require people who are on Medicaid, a government-funded healthcare coverage program, to work, take classes, or volunteer for 80 hours a month as a condition of being allowed to stay on the program. Ohio is the eighth state to be approved for work rules by the Trump administration. Only Arkansas has put its program into effect so far, though the Trump administration has encouraged more states to apply for similar programs.

Federal officials say Medicaid, which added low-income people to its rolls in most states under Obamacare, should instead be reserved for the most vulnerable populations. They have said the rules will help people move out of poverty and acquire private coverage.

A federal judge will decide by April whether to block the rules in Arkansas and strike them in Kentucky, where they are set to be enforced beginning July 1. Depending on how he rules, other states may have to halt their plans to impose the work rules. The case may also be appealed and eventually go before the Supreme Court.

Roughly 18,000 people are expected to fall from Medicaid rolls in Ohio once the rules go into effect, according to a report by the state. The rules won't apply to adults who are disabled, nor to pregnant women, children, caretakers, or to people living in parts of the state with high unemployment.

Critics of the policy argue that requiring people to report their work is overly burdensome and that the programs are intended not to help people find jobs but to kick people off Medicaid. In Arkansas last year, more than 18,000 people were disenrolled from Medicaid after failing to report their work.

Ohio applied for its work rules on April 1, 2018, and under the proposal they are set to go into effect July 1.

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Pentagon finds $12.8 billion for Trump's border wall

The Defense Department has identified $12.8 billion in possible funding that it could use to fulfill President Trump's call for a border wall.

Trump last month declared a national emergency at the border, and said he wants to use $3.6 billion for border wall projects. The Pentagon's list said it has found possible funding sources that are "in excess of the amount needed."

But it's not clear which projects the Defense Department will draw from. Some states that have been allocated big chunks of money that haven't been spent could see a hit.

California, for example, was identified as having more than $700 million in unused Army and Navy military construction that could be used. Hawaii has more than $400 million that could be used.

More than $200 million in similar funding allocated for Hawaii, Maine, New York, North Carolina, Guam, Germany, Guam, and Guantanamo Bay Cuba are also on the list.

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