World News

That's awesome. I mean that article is trash, but at least it's relevant. It's about a completely different bill (HR 1157) than the one linked above (HR 7476), but that's okay, for now we can chalk it up to platform9469's mistake rather than malicious intent. The latter will be evident after reading the bill, which is only a few pages long.

It's sad, and quite telling, that you felt the need to link an op-ed rather than the bill itself, but we can use it as an opportunity to teach some media literacy.

From the trash op-ed:

This legislation authorizes more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years to, among other purposes, subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese “malign influence” globally.

What other purposes? Activities financed by the bill are detailed in section 2.e in 7 parts, including the "influence campaign", anti-corruption and anti-crime initiatives, security services(?), and economic development including offering alternative financial assistance for key infrastructure projects.

There's a lot on that list that will cost a lot more than posting shit on social media. Calling it an "influence campaign" hardly does it justice, this is a wholistic expression of a countries soft power into regions that will benefit from it. That $1.6 billion will go towards more than any terminally online ml has ever imagined.

Speaking of money, let's see what this opinion slop you posted says about that:

That’s a massive spend — about twice, for example, the annual operating expenditure of CNN.

Well now, that's just a straight up lie. CNN doesn't even share it's expenses because it's a subsidiary of WB which groups CNN with other networks they own together in their expense reports, so idk how this Harvard genius figured it out. Estimates I've seen floating around put their annual expenditure at 1.2 billion. This bill allocates $325 million per year. We don't even know what this clown thinks the real CNN number is because he doesn't bother providing one.

He vaguely gestures towards the GEC and USAID so he can frame things as extra bad while saying basically nothing. He's probably happy that Trump deleted the GEC and USAID a few months later.

The slop slinger then brings up a "vision document", which as far as I can tell is like fan-fiction for military people, as an example of what this could all look like. A horrible story of honest Chinese capitalists being astroturfed and robbed of their business opportunities. It's a pity none of the language in the bill describes anything like this. Instead of tearing down the ops, the bill details providing alternative options for a wide range of things to whatever organisations need them so they don't need to rely on Chinese support.

He ends with something I thought was pretty funny, contemplating the potential for what he imagines the plan is to backfire by eroding trust in anti-china information by virtue of people being aware that the US has an interest in spreading it. Ignoring the fact that China does the exact same thing and we have multiple instances of ml's, plus myriad other leftist slopulists, who eat that shit up without a thought.

So yea, it didn't take you much effort to dig up some rando headline with a vestigial op-ed attached to it, but it didn't get you anywhere. You actually have to read shit and understand it, not just blindly follow every contrarian sock with a world-view throwing headlines at you.