China Election Conspiracy | Far-Left Terrorism Deflection | How Great-Power Rivalry Causes Repression Politics | Ep. 311
Marco Rubio hosted a 60-nation meeting to promote the fake threat of “far-left terrorism.” It’s a greater danger than war, and evokes the Cold War in stupidly predictable ways that says something about the national security state.
Trump’s speech to the nation claiming that China stole the election from him is a farce, and an excuse to use the power of the state against his political enemies. I warned about this in my 2025 book with Mike Brenes, The Rivalry Peril: How Great-Power Competition Threatens Peace and Weakens Democracy—truly the only book that can explain why Trump is hanging his anti-democratic project on China in ways that even China experts don’t seem to grasp.
What’s bringing back the repression politics of the Cold War? A primer on how “great-power competition” facilitates political repression. How rivalry then and now created an anti-democratic political terrain at home and abroad. And why geopolitics today is racial in a way that it wasn’t against the Soviet Union.
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