Jodie Evans Said That Peace Group Has Not Accepted Any Money From China or Any Other Foreign Government
At a webinar on “The New McCarthyism” hosted by CovertAction Magazine in collaboration with The Canada Files on October 9, Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans accused 11 New York Times journalists of spreading a “packet of lies” and carrying out “hate mongering attacks.”
This in an August article alleging that Code Pink—a peace group that adopts creative means of protest—was funded by the Chinese Communist government.
Evans said that Code Pink was “free from any government funding,” and that “she never took any money from her husband,” Neville Roy Singham, founder of a multimillion dollar IT consulting company.
The Times called Singham a “known socialist and benefactor of far left causes” responsible for a “lavishly funded influence campaign” through Code Pink “that pushed Chinese propaganda.”
According to The Times, Code Pink “once criticized China’s human rights record” but now, because of Singham’s funding, “defends China’s internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.”
Code Pink is currently running a “China is Not Our Enemy” campaign, which aims to push back against the reigning Sinophobia, and has issued a statement condemning the New McCarthyism that it says is targeting peace activists, critics of U.S. foreign policy, and Chinese Americans.
According to Evans, The Times article was a characteristic example of this new McCarthyism in which “those who stand for peace are bullied.”
The week before the webinar, Evans was arrested at Bernie Sanders’ (D-VT) office with other Code Pink activists protesting Sanders’ support for U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
Evans said that Congressmen and women told her they feel they cannot talk about peace or diplomacy in the current political climate—much like in the original McCarthy era of the 1950s.
Unfortunately, the “new McCarthyism is working,” Evans said. Hate crimes directed against Asian-Americans are up and a center for U.S.-China cooperation at the University of California at Berkeley set up by former California governor Jerry Brown was forced to close down.
Enhancing Foreign Policy Strategy
Evans was followed at the webinar by Ben Norton, a geopolitical analyst living in Beijing, who emphasized that the New McCarthyism has been manufactured by U.S. ruling elites in an attempt to enhance their foreign policy strategy of trying to weaken and contain a rising China.
According to Norton, China is a far greater threat to U.S. global hegemony than Russia because of the success of its socialist oriented economic model compared to the so-called Washington Consensus, or free market capitalism that has fueled rampant inequality worldwide.
China offers an alternative to Western neoliberal capitalism in which the banking sector is owned by the state and is run on behalf of the people, and in which the state invests in infrastructural development and job creation.
Western media has recently been talking about China’s economy being on the verge of economic collapse, which Norton said is hilarious.
In the real world, China is an emerging global juggernaut, which has lifted 800+ million people out of poverty. Overtaking Germany and Japan as a leading producer of cars, it is a top global leader in the green energy transition, rising to number one in the production of electric vehicles.
With 30% of China’s enterprises being state owned, Norton said that the quality of life for the Chinese is very good. There is heavy investment in public transport and high speed rail, which is a joke by comparison in the U.S., and state ownership of utilities and telecommunications keeps people’s bills down when these can be astronomical in the U.S.
During the 1990s, American pseudo-intellectuals like Frances Fukuyama claimed that history had ended and that there was no alternative to neoliberal-bourgeois democracy; but China has shown otherwise.
That is why the country is being attacked and why people who support cooperative relations with it in the U.S. are being attacked as well.
New McCarthyism Extends to Canada
The third speaker at the webinar, Wenran Jiang, a retired political science professor at the University of British Columbia, discussed the extension of the New McCarthyism into Canada.
Canada’s liberal government led by Justin Trudeau has aligned very closely with U.S. foreign policy in a departure from Trudeau’s father, Pierre Elliot Trudeau, Canada’s Prime Minister from 1968-1979 and 1980-1984, who adopted more independent policies and normalized Canadian relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1970.
Dr. Jiang said that McCarthyism is associated with unfair accusations that are not factually based. Chinese people living in Canada are being accused baselessly of disloyalty and are more and more subject to discrimination.
Academic freedom is being eroded, Canadian media outlets like The National Post and Toronto’s Globe and Mail have repeatedly run stories accusing Canadian MP’s of Chinese origin of collaborating with the Chinese government, and China has been falsely accused of interfering in Canadian elections—much like the Russians in the U.S.
Plus Ça Change—and the Hope For a Revitalization of the 1960s Counter-Culture
In introducing the speakers, I raised hope for an awakening among youth similar to the 1960s era that would repudiate the narrow-minded and paranoid views of the older generations and bring about a new society that was less materialistic and more peaceful.
Named after Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who catapulted himself to national prominence after giving a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia claiming without evidence that there were 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party working in the U.S. State Department, the term McCarthyism is associated with such negative character traits as bullying, anti-intellectualism and cruelty to others. It was driven by Democrats as much as Republicans and helped to decimate the American left in the Cold War, with serious ramifications still today.
Characteristic was the experience of a California woman who said that when she expressed opposition to the Korean War in her sixth grade class in 1950, she was accused of being a communist and laughed at by the teacher and students and went home crying.
Today, people have not matured very much as they continue to ridicule proponents of peace and call them new names like “Putin lover” or “Chinese government agent.”
One of the original victims of McCarthyism was Henry Wallace, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vice President who was pilloried while running for President as an independent in the 1948 election on a platform of peace with Russia, shutting down U.S. overseas airbases, and abolishing nuclear weapons.
Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. come to mind as two politicians who resemble Henry Wallace and have received similar treatment to him.
In Kennedy’s case, he has been attacked not only for his position favoring peace in Ukraine, but also because he wants to reopen investigation into the murder of his father and uncle and challenged the dominant Covid-19 narrative and corruption in the medical-pharmaceutical industrial complex and CIA which appears to have bio-engineered the coronavirus. A new smear term was applied to him; “anti-vaxxer.” This when Kennedy has made clear he is not against vaccines, only hastily manufactured ones that are unsafe for the public.
The vital role played by liberals in today’s McCarthyism was exemplified in the Russia Gate hoax when they baselessly accused a conservative Republican president—mentored by Joseph McCarthy’s cutthroat lawyer Roy Cohn no less—of being a Russian agent and puppet of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
This helped mobilize public support for a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine while poisoning the political atmosphere in a way reminiscent of the 1950s.
The Republicans for their part have resembled Joseph McCarthy in their attempts to censor the teaching of critical race theory and in their paranoid warnings about Chinese Communist infiltration of U.S. institutions.
In Oklahoma, the Education Secretary, Ryan Walters, recently accused the Tulsa school board of having been infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party because one of its Chinese language teachers obtained a grant to a go to a conference run by a Confucius Institute in Dallas.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has at the same time called for investigation of “far left organizations” for allegedly violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) because of alleged funding ties to China.
History is clearly repeating itself, though the McCarthy-style attacks and attempted censorship accompanying them may be even more virulent today because of the growing desperation of the ruling elite in an era when American global power is eroding.
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
The revelations in the New York Times article seems to have created a rift between the Quincy Institute and Code Piink. The Quincy Institute and Code Pink have had a very good relationship over the years, but the Quincy Institute did not come to Code Pink’s defense after the article was published and appear to have distanced themselves from Code Pink since this article was published. The Quincy Institute supports a positive relationship between the United States and China.