The Washington Free Beacon reported this week that the taxpayer-funded University of California Berkeley has been partnering for years with the Chinese Communist Party to research data analytics and autonomous cars, two U.S. sectors the Chinese have long tried to infiltrate. Apparently, the Guizhou Berkeley Big Data Innovation Research Center (GBIC) was jointly operated by the Chinese province of Guizhou’s local government, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and, you guessed it, Berkeley. Since its opening, the GBIC has funneled nearly $1.9 million to the school in exchange for help improving its data collection operations, which is uses to monitor and control its own citizens and spy on its foreign enemies (including the U.S.). Berkeley’s automated car program has also received substantial cash “donations” from Chinese companies, including Huawei ($6.8 million) and Baidu ($1.5 million). SEE ALSO: Teachers’ Unions Capitalize on Biden’s Win by Halting Education Senior director at the Project 2049 Institute summarized my thoughts in his comments to the Beacon: “The Chinese Communist Party is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to build the most sophisticated system of state surveillance and repression in the world. Any American university or research lab collaborating with the Chinese Communist regime or its agents on technology research is directly collaborating with a hostile foreign power. The moral, ethical, and legal risks of such behavior should be obvious to any educated American.” Communists in the United States like to bill themselves as “socialists” in the style of Norway or Denmark. They aren’t really pushing to nationalize all means of production. They aren’t really hoping to centralize power into the hands of a single all-powerful party. They aren’t really working to “redistribute” all wealth in the United States and ally themselves with Communist nations around the world. SEE ALSO: We Won’t Have “Unity” Until the Media Stops Covering for the Democrats Berkeley’s close relationship with the Chinese should disabuse freedom-loving Americans of that lie. The Communists that have taken control of our educational institutions are hardcore Marxists. They’re willing to undermine national security for the benefit of their comrades in China, and they’re willing to overlook China’s human rights abuses in pursuit of their deranged utopia. Unlike China, America is a free country, so Communists in the U.S. are welcome to spread whatever lies and misinformation they want to convince Americans of their insane economic and social structure. But rather than hide behind the gentle mittens of Bernie Sanders’ “democratic socialism,” they should come out and say what their true goals are: the total economic takeover of the U.S. economy by a single-party state. That way, the American people can make an informed choice. Do they want to preserve the freedom that has made our country the greatest and most powerful in the history of the world? Or do they want to pursue a system that has led to millions of deaths and untold poverty? The choice seems pretty clear to me. The professors at Berkeley might disagree, but no one should be surprised about that.
