The Taormina Interviews: Lee Fang - ChiCom Sleeper Agent

From College Political Dork to Nerd Journo, How He's "Changed" like Matt Taibbi, Corruption in Government, Media, and Corporations, and the HQ (Hapa Question)

Lee Fang said that he would sit for this interview only on one condition: that in place of writing up a standard bio, I would instead allow him to introduce himself to readers via this video:

I'm gonna cut straight to the chase and leave out all the niceties that people have come to expect from me, because I have a bone to pick with you.  You are recognized as a journalist by some, but in my view, you are much more a contrarian with a platform.  Journalists are supposed to be adversarial, meaning that they by definition are supposed to challenge power.  Information is power, and information comes in many forms including the following three: disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.  These three together form the greatest threat to our country and its interests.  Thankfully, we Americans are a very patriotic sort, and have responded wonderfully by launching an attack on this tri-headed beast, with the generous support of government, corporations, and multi-billionaires, all of whom are acting altruistically, in the spirit of cooperation, and for the sake of the common good.  You, Lee Fang Fang, have instead decided to attack these defenders of truth, these combatants against foreign-backed propaganda efforts.  I think that this has to do with the fact that you are angry at the world for being a Hapa, tied down by the Iron Chains of NOWAG (No One Wants Asian Guys).  Like Elliot Rodger, you are lashing out at the country that has given you everything, you ungrateful little shit.

Before you psychoracialanalyze me as a journalist, let’s get a few things straight. To paraphrase Chris Rock: There are really two kinds of Hapas, two kinds of mixed-race people in America. Lots of nonwhite people grow up in a white-parent household – either through adoption or biracial parents -- and it becomes kind of a racial albatross. Nikole Hannah-Jones, Andrea Long Chu, Shaun King, Colin Kaepernick (the list goes on and on) all grew up with a loving white parent and a mixed race identity that turned them weirdly hateful. They engage in extreme theatrics about being truly Asian, truly Black (or whatever), perhaps because they never fit into a neat box on the U.S. census. There’s this element of racial guilt and lack of belonging. They’re never really accepted as authentically “POC,” and of course they are responding to the new woke incentives in elite circles that valorize anything non-white. So they obsess over race and that obsession evolves into an identitarian worldview that attempts to cancel out one or both parents. A version of this extends to the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger. His manifesto whined endlessly about being "half White, half Asian" and not being able to fit in fully with the “normal fully-white kids.” I met a Korean Hapa once who sounded exactly like this, like a proto-Elliot Rodgers, who was filled with rage about his identity and wanted to be fully white. I’ve met tons of other mixed people of the lib variety, who go out of their way to tout Black pride or Asian pride while carefully concealing their white upbringing. It’s like those recent converts to Catholicism or Islam who paper over their insecurity about not really fitting in by being over-the-top pious. The troubled and insecure mixed race person in America goes all out in expressing racial resentment or ultra non-white pride. It’s sad, really.

Not me, though. It’s fake and lame to care about your race on that level and exhibit any kind of racial pride or guilt for that matter. There are a ton of mixed-race folks who share my disposition on this stuff -- Hapa people who are fairly chill about identity and basically the very opposite of the aforementioned extremists. Growing up in a racially diverse household can be very helpful in quickly realizing that every human being regardless of race is equally capable of being an oppressor, a victim, annoying, stubborn, selfish, etc., and that identity categories therefore are inherently evil, and race is really the most reductive and stupid way to understand the complexities of the world. So in conclusion, being Hapa can either give you laser-like insight into the folly of race, or it can make you into an insane racial demagogue. There’s almost no in-between.

I think that this only scratches the surface, Lee.  I think that we need to dive deeper into your background to explain your stubborn contrarianism.  Your father is from Qingdao, but his roots are in Fujian.  This is a south-to-north movement.  Your mother's side is Scots-Irish from Virginia (the South), and yet you grew up in and around Washington DC (Maryland Suburbs).  Now here is where it all falls into place: your name is Lee.  Virginia+Lee = Confederate General and Lover of Slavery Robert E. Lee.  There is a psychological profile that leaps off of the page when you put all these pieces together: an inferiority complex based on being a Southerner in a Northern setting, compounded by the frustration of southern pride, an inherent character flaw (always racist in expression, whether overt or subconscious).  This manifests itself in wanting to tear down everything around you, which is why you find yourself siding against America, on the exact same side as the Russians, and yes, the Chicoms too.

Yeah there’s intention there. Lee is a nice southern American name, and a nice Chinese name, a combo reflecting my Sino-American roots. I think it was my wise mom’s idea to name me that way. There’s also some symmetry to the far flung lives of my family. My Chinese grandfather on my father’s side remembers the Japanese bombing his town in southern China before he moved north for an education and to work as an agricultural biologist. My late grandpa on my mom’s side had his whole life uprooted by WW2. He flew planes for the US Navy. There’s a moment in family lore that occurred in the early post-war era: he remembers looking up at the sky, at Sputnik, the Russian satellite, and thinking, “Oh shit, there’s a space race and I need an education.” He left his small southern Virginia rural town, got an engineering degree, and moved the family up towards a middle class life.  

That’s about the extent of the parallels in my two grandfathers’ lives. 

As a scientist in Qingdao during the Cultural Revolution, my grandpa was falsely accused of something or other, tormented and imprisoned. The Chinese Communist Party sent my dad to a work camp as part of a family-wide punishment, and my dad spent his entire adolescence digging ditches along the Mongolian border. Seven long years in the desert digging ditches! That was terrible for him and for the whole family. He escaped China by way of Hong Kong, and managed to attend college in the USA as an older student thanks to supporting himself through working odd jobs involving computers. Both sides struggled, but I think my white side had a more comfortable experience, all things considered.

I grew up in a middle-class, predominantly African-American community in Maryland, riding the public school bus to a more distant school, because of a court-ordered desegregation plan to mix students from different backgrounds. No one in class looked quite like me or had my background. Unlike the formative experiences of my parents or my grandparents, I became obsessed with the events that followed September 11, 2001. I actually saw the pillars of smoke billow out of the Pentagon that day. I went with my dad on some volunteering thing and we stopped the car and saw it. Then came the rush to war in Iraq and the neocon-era jingoist ‘patriotism’……all the while the ultra-Democratic local politicians in my hometown were comically corrupt and socially conservative – it fueled my fixation on politics and my aversion to groupthink pretty early in life.

But there’s something to growing up with southern American ties, in a Black community, with half a family from China. Really unlimited ways to devour pigs. It’s a perfect storm of pork-eating cultures.

(The audience will note that Lee is so far proving to be unflappable in the face of the steady stream of insults directed towards him. Let’s shift gears - ed.)

You've changed, man.  Where before you used to rip into the Republicans for corruption, greed, policies that would negatively impact Americans by making their lives much harder, government overreach, unethical use of intelligence agencies to target US citizens, erosion of rights, etc., you now rip into the Democrats for corruption, greed, policies that would negatively impact Americans by making their lives much harder, government overreach, unethical use of intelligence agencies to target US citizens, erosion of rights, and so on.  This duplicity is incredibly transparent, and leaves people like me wondering what caused this shift. It has to be self-interest, whether monetary or something else.  We've seen the same change in Matt Taibbi, for example.

It’s definitely me, I’m the one who changed, not the other way around. Any criticism of FBI surveillance of political dissent, the Department of Homeland Security’s social media censorship apparatus, Democratic Party corruption, empathy with working class concerns around public safety….that’s basically the definition of a dangerous right winger. The American political culture hasn’t tied itself into a pretzel with polarization and reflexive partisanship – the real danger are the few writers who report on these issues.

Getting back to the Maryland ‘burbs and the nation’s capital: I can't think of a single good thing that has come out of Washington DC besides the DJ/Music Production duo Deep Dish.  Is the fact that Washington DC is so fucking dull the reason why you ended up getting into politics?  You were one of those irritating political dorks on campus, having served as the President of the Federation of Maryland College Democrats, Editor of the Maryland College Democrat Blog, and to round out the Dork Trifecta, you were also on the Campus Progress Advisory Board.  Were video games and Dungeons and Dragons not enough to keep you occupied?  Was Ritalin a factor in all of this?

DC is a horrible place that is a spiritual dead end, but there is local culture (or at least there used to be), some of which tangentially impacted me. There’s go-go, groups like Rare Essence and TCB….authentic DC-PG County music. That really wasn’t my scene, though I loved some of the music and went to a few go-go shows. There’s also the DC-originated Straight Edge hardcore punk scene, which was really a backlash to the hedonistic punk music from the 1980s. The straight Edge scene emphasized being clean cut, macho-violent, and free from the influence of drugs and alcohol. It was kind of like Wahhabism for punks; a purer form of rebellion that retained the DIY, anti-corporate edge of punk ideology, but without the strung out anarchism.

That type of hardcore punk was my entry point to politics, and in a weird way, it put me on a path to a lot of cringe. Please forgive me, I can explain: my proximity to DC growing up shaped me, like I said. I got into hardcore punk music, went to lots of protests as a teenager – some of which I barely understood at the time. Groups like Anti-Racist Action and ANSWER mobilized a lot of people to action. It never really made sense, though. If you wanted to end imperial American wars and get some semblance of public interest-minded policy enacted, how did marching around with a bunch of crust punks ever get any of that done? I got frustrated by that scene and veered into interning everywhere respectable that I could find, places where I could actually exert influence on the process. So in my disgust for the ineffective protest politics that I had participated in, I did a 180 and worked to get into the establishment. I interned for a political fundraising firm, for various congressmen and women, for think tanks, campaigns – I think I was even the very first intern at Media Matters in 2005. Imagine me – I’m 18, I read David Brock’s book about the ‘vast right-wing conspiracy’, then I start writing emails to any center-left institute that will take me. I wrote blog posts and got involved in local primary elections to toss out centrist Democrats. I invited Cindy Sheehan to speak on campus and was hated by other “College Democrats” for being too far left and obsessed with the war in Iraq. I wanted to be part of the action but also doing something righteous at the same time, while not being typecast as someone on the fringe. But getting elite jobs in DC only destroys your soul. You become a cog in a machine, one fueled by corporate money and dominated by cynical backbiting careerism. I became just as creeped out by the antics of the Center for American Progress as I was alienated by the punk protest-obsession of my younger years. 

So I took another turn, this time towards more explicitly progressive journalism, and the whole cycle continued. The unthinking partisanship and monoculture of the far-left media world also made me uncomfortable. There’s a lot of righteousness, but not a lot of independent thought and intellectual vigor at many of these self-styled lefty outlets. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that every corner of the political spectrum is filled with conformism. Any clique by its very own nature becomes blinded by a desire to be part of a group, leading it to sacrificing its own stated principles. What works best for me is to try to be as open-minded and independent as possible and not feel confined by some arbitrary political label or faction.

You came of age during the Occupy Protests.  Gen Xers like myself never believed that we could change the world for the better, because we were lectured to by our parents in the 80s about how they stopped the War in Vietnam through "peace and love", just as they drove off in their shiny new BMWs to go talk to their stock broker and see how their investment portfolio based around Michael Milken's junk bonds were doing that month.  You guys were imbued with idealism, and Occupy rode a groundswell of increasing dissatisfaction with the disastrous Dubya Presidency.  This was a decade of consumption, greed, and arrogance, and Occupy rose to the challenge....then everything went sideways.

I was initially taken with Occupy. I traveled the country reporting on Occupy Wall Street protests in Nashville, DC, Las Vegas, Sacramento, San Francisco, and a few other cities. At the time, I naively saw the moment as something powerful and transcendent, a rebuke to the weakness of Obama rolling over for the banks and the austerity-obsessed conventional wisdom in D.C. – a forceful vengeance for the betrayals around the bailouts. I met a lot of very sincere protesters – people crushed with insane levels of student debt, normal middle-class folks tired of completely stagnant politics that favored the very wealthy, and regular people with a visceral disdain for the uneven justice system that favors those with the best lawyers and lobbyists.

But the experience also gave me a dark preview of what was to become of the American left. The anarchist mindset took over, with many occupy encampments deciding to proceed with only unanimous consent, a rule that was easily gamed by Bob Avakian ‘tankies’ and random junkie drifters screaming incoherently into the microphone. Extreme victimhood generated a culture of accusations and cancellations within the camps. People even got raped while sleeping in tent cities that started to resemble skid row more than a utopian political project. The movement lacked any coherent policy ideas or political strategy, and quickly devolved into a grift for a few media-savvy activists. It accomplished nothing other than serving as a looking glass into the future, showing us a preview of the pathologies of every other left-identified protest movement that came to pass over the next few years.

I’m biased. I wanted a social democratic movement with coherent beliefs and a desire for state action to enact fair tax policies, reasonable redistribution of resources, and a forceful check on corporate power. Instead, Occupy gave us a new flavor of lefty libertarian narcissism, of brand-building hucksters who got drunk on empty slogans, burn-it-all down nihilism, and made-for-social media viral moments -- a great tactic for building out Twitter follower counts, but not that great at fixing anything in society. The same ethos later powered #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and much of the extreme climate-related movements years later.

The GOP story was (and still is) very simple: they were the party of the Chamber of Commerce, meaning that if you didn't figure out how to make money, well, too bad for you.  In the eyes of many, the Dems at least had some heart, and this is why so many people put actual hope in Obama.  I can't help but fail to notice how many liberals went from sunny optimism during Obama's first term to darkened cynicism by the end of his second term in office.  The “hope” projected onto Obama drowned in the waters of the Caribbean Sea as Obama enjoyed some post-Presidential sailing with Richard Branson on the billionaire’s yacht.  Was the lesson to be drawn from the Obama era that entrenched interests were just too powerful for one man to tame?  Or was it something else?

People forget this but there was a brief period in 2009 when Democrats had a supermajority in Congress and could pass anything they wanted. It was a brief window – between the late seating of Sen. Al Franken and before Sen. Ted Kennedy’s brain failed – to remake American society, rebuild labor rights, restructure the tax code, provide a public option health insurance program, lower the age to qualify for Medicare, do something about climate change, etc.

They missed the boat. At the time, Republicans manipulated Obama into believing that if he just waited to pass health reform and gave them a seat at the table, they would give him bipartisan approval. Instead, they delayed and delayed until public opinion turned against him and the supermajority popped from Kennedy’s death. I was reporting on the debate and followed Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) to Miami, where I snuck into the Biltmore in Coral Gables to observe his birthday party that was being thrown by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). At the donor event, the GOP crowd laughed and cheered on Grassley for fooling Obama into waiting for him, turning the tides on health reform. That’s on Obama, not the Republicans, for being outsmarted.

Just look at almost anyone from Obama’s inner circle; they laughed their way to lucrative employment at banks, tech giants, chemical companies…..all of them passing through the revolving door Obama promised to close. I think the most likely scenario is that Obama meant some of what he promised, quickly realized that he was in over his head, gave up, sold out, and ended up a slightly less hawkish version of Hillary Clinton once in office.

As mentioned earlier, you interned for three different Democrat politicians as an undergrad, but instead of going into politics, you chose to dive into the treacherous waters of journalism.  You were juggling both during your college days.  Was there a specific event that helped you choose media over politics as a career path?

One of my first gigs just out of college was doing “opposition research” on John McCain and Sarah Palin for a campaign outfit working on the presidential race. I was a nobody with no connections in media or politics….but I came up with some unique ideas that my then-boss pitched around, and my research notes were transformed into articles in the New York Times and Washington Post just like that! It was crazy to see the news cycle churn over the fruits of my labor. It was an incredible feeling and made me think: If I could land big stories just by coming up with original news ideas, why shouldn’t I write those stories myself? Politics is filled with nepotism and ladder climbing. Media seemed like a way to live my values and get ahead with merit. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of low-level corruption and self-dealing in media, but it seemed like a far more interesting path than working for some politician.

That era seems like a totally different world now. One thing from those years that has stuck with me to this day was the claim that Obama was the “first post-racial President” because of just how completely wrong that turned out to be.  The USA today is nowhere near post-racial, and is instead hyper-racial, where personal identity (or identities) immediately assigns a value to whatever that person is saying, regardless of the merit of what they say.  When you encounter a person now, you have to be like Robocop in a way, scanning them for signifiers/identity markers that indicate their racial background, faith (if they are religious), gender identity (with the pronouns that come attached to it), and sexual preference, before you even say “hello”.  This is done to mitigate the risk of offending them based on any of those identifications.  When you think about it, this is a very, very cumbersome way of navigating through daily life.  You (like many others), also see a possible hidden purpose in the promotion of “identity politics” in that they help protect the powers-that-be from scrutiny (and from challenges), by pitting people against one another, exhausting them in the process.  Is IdPol the mechanism by which the elites defend their class interests?

All you need to know is that if you talk to normal, working-class people, everything you just said isn’t applicable. No normal person cares about pronouns or walks around on stilts, carefully avoiding microaggressions like landmines. It’s a phenomenon of our ultra-educated upper-middle class and elite. That isn’t to say it isn’t a problem, but one we just need to view in context.

There are a few dynamics that explain this: one is the mass retreat from communal politics. It’s too hard to fix the tax code, or to reform almost any intractable economic problem. But it is easy to cancel your coworkers and family members. So people drift to the politics of the personal when that’s the path of least resistance and towards the highest level of personal satisfaction.

The other dynamic is the cynical high-level nature of it all. When the American economy was built upon labor-intensive industries – resource extraction, factories, agriculture – the biggest threat to the capitalist class was the possibility that workers would band together and demand higher pay and better working standards. So they cynically pitted Black versus White, or Chinese versus Portuguese, or Italian versus Polish, and so on. Now we have a highly educated workforce obsessed with victimhood, and so the same capitalist class keeps us divided with a different flavor of identity politics. They have the same goal in mind: Keeping our eyes off of the ways in which the elite picks our collective pockets, while keeping us hating each other and divided, but through a new form. Now every major bank and Silicon Valley giant ruthlessly deploys left-wing racial justice rhetoric to manufacture consent for policies that help entrench special interest power. It’s brilliant, cynical, and effective.

I like to say that “the genius of America is its ability to identify any potential challenges or risks facing it, co-opt it, defuse it, re-purpose it, monetize it, and weaponize it”.  Think about how IdPol has gone through this process that I have described over the past decade or so.  It’s now a tired joke to point out how Raytheon is inclusive in its hiring practices, or how Lockheed Martin marches in Gay Pride parades, but this self-serving transformation is rather indicative. You have written about how ESG serves as a way for corporations to polish their own image, for example.  It’s all so very cynical.

The Republican anger at ESG is all wrong. It’s funny to watch how unhinged these debates become. To listen to some generic House Republican rail against ESG, you would think that this BlackRock-engineered marketing dynamic is a social engineering project to make America socialist –when it’s literally the opposite.

Corporate interests want to subvert democratic control in every way possible while maximizing profit, and ESG is just the latest way to harness liberals into that project. If you’re a company that pollutes, abuses workers or exploits customers in some way, you have an image problem that could become a government regulation problem. Rather than change your fundamental business practice, you hire a legion of consultants to produce an array of ESG index performance metrics to make it look like your business is actually a social justice cause that is making the world a better place. No need for government intervention – we’re doing ESG.

The ESG metrics are all shifting and self-reported. Private prisons use their non-white prison guard employee base to argue for higher “racial equity” ESG scores, pharmaceutical firms do the same – somehow, a racially diverse corporate board that approves sky-high drug prices for live-saving medicine is progress. Should this type of behaviour be rewarded? MSCI, the rating agency that powers most asset manager ESG platforms, actually *rewards* some corporations that pollute more by measuring whether climate change could pose more opportunities for a given firm. McDonald’s hilariously hiked its carbon emissions and then scored higher on its ESG green rating.

ESG is basically green/wokewashing corporate greed on an industrial scale, with the added benefit for Wall Street asset managers to sell retail and pension investors on “socially responsible” funds. Look under the hood at the State Street or BlackRock or Goldman Sachs ESG index funds and you find basically the same set of normal corporations – ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, Raytheon, etc. – as you would find in a non-ESG fund, except with slightly higher fees.  

If we had normal a normal political environment with at least one faction that actually held corporate America responsible, we’d have a healthy debate on this. But we don’t. We have Republicans lying and claiming ESG is a scheme to turn us socialist, and Democrats so knuckle-draggingly stupid that they now defend ESG simply because Republicans are against it.

To me, the most interesting development of the past several years in the USA has been the increasing cooperation between government, big tech, NGOs, and mainstream media.  Collusion best describes the general tone of the relationship between these four, particularly when it comes to matters of national security (at least as to how they are defined by those in charge of running it).  We have seen how government gets around the First Amendment by subcontracting censorship out to corporations (particularly Big Tech), with an assist from media, and from the NGO complex as well.  Everyone reading this is by now aware of the Twitter Files, and how deeply involved US Intelligence and security agencies have been in trying to remove dissenting voices from that social media platform.  The early years of the World Wide Web (WWW) were rife with techno-utopianism, insisting that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”.  What was implied in that statement was that the monopoly on narrative formation and control that was up until then shared by government and corporations would cease to exist.  Instead, we are seeing the continual erosion of freedoms, and the shutting down of voices that do not conform to desired narratives in the name of “fighting disinformation”.  Thanks to your recent investigation, we learned how the FBI helps Ukrainian intelligence “hunt disinformation” on social media.  That’s just one example.

I gotta admit I drank the Kool-Aid on this. Earlier in life, I really thought the open internet would lead to more voices and more accountability, making society more free and democratic. It hasn’t exactly worked that way. A few corporations are slowly transforming the internet into walled gardens, and those corporations are more than willing to permit expansive government meddling and surveillance, and increasingly, censorship of political dissent and unpopular ideas. Meanwhile, the tech giants sucked the advertising revenue away from most responsible media outlets and local journalism and then plowed that money into DC influence, making meaningful media reform virtually impossible.

When I was at Twitter HQ helping put together the Twitter Files, it was jarring to see the near-daily emails from the DHS and the FBI asking about content decisions. But that’s just one company. Imagine what’s going on at Facebook, Reddit, and others?

The government saw the awesome power of social media in shaping US elections, and saw how it influenced the Arab Spring, as well as other revolutions that you’ve written extensively about. It’s a powerful force, and there’s every incentive for the intelligence agencies to have a hand in how public opinion is formed and how ideas are exchanged….or how to use this technology to launch revolutions.

Let’s step back for a second to bring up the subject that you touched upon earlier in this interview. There is a revolving door between the public and private sectors, particularly government and media.  To be honest, it’s a rather lucrative one that serves as a win-win for both sectors, especially for the individuals that pass through it.  Is this one of the reasons why media in the USA is broken?

The Louisiana congressman responsible for the “Part D” rule requiring the government to pay for drugs for seniors, but making it illegal for Medicare to negotiate for lower prices, was Billy Tauzin, a former member of the US House of Representatives. Part D was and is a boondoggle that poured hundreds of billions of dollars into a small set of pharmaceutical giants. Tauzin ended up with a one year payday of $11.6 million as a drug lobbyist. That’s not that far from the average salary for CEO of a Fortune 500 company….but all he did was insert a bit of legislative language and helped negotiate some political deals. This loophole went on from 2003 through this year, 2023, after Biden partially reformed it. Twenty years of sky-high subsidies for drug companies were the result of influence peddling. Those hundreds of billions of dollars could have fixed a lot of problems in America, but instead it went to Big Pharma shareholders.

Not that long ago in America, this type of corruption was unusual. Lawmakers retired to go farm, to teach, to actually live out their retirement. Now the goal seems to be to get deep enough into the political machinery to embed some type of legislative gift to an interest group, and get a payday later as you cycle through into the Gucci loafer lifestyle. The biggest media outlets in DC celebrate this, with quarterly lists of the highest paid lobbyists, and parties toasting their success. It’s a cultural-legal-phenomenon that never gets fixed. Obama and Trump campaigned on fixing this and both just made it worse.

Corruption is so endemic that it seems like it’s too massive to even contemplate dealing with.  Pfizer funded lobbying groups pushing for COVID mandates.  Intel contracts go to pro-war think tanks.  Certain Congressmen and women aided the rail industry to block safety regulations.  Do we even need to mention Sam Bankman-Fried and his influence peddling?  The scale of corruption is so monumental, with so many vested interests working to perpetuate it endlessly.

What’s fascinating to me is that there is a precedent for fixing this. The FBI actually has a very decent public corruption unit. The problem is that it’s just applied almost entirely to low-level figures. The agency sets up elaborate sting operations to go after mayors, city council members, state politicians, etc.. In California, the FBI set up a fake weapons smuggling operation and a whole dummy movie studio in order to ensnare state lawmakers for petty corruption. Why don’t they aim higher? It can be done, but there’s just no political will to do so. And the FBI seems more focused on censoring naughty words on social media and spying on political dissent, rather than combating this existential corruption problem.

What frustrates many is that there are a lot of tangible issues that need to be dealt with, but take a back seat to more sexy, media-friendly ones.  In a way, it’s a misallocation of attention by politicians. Take a look at the subway violence in NYC, the CHAZ experiment in Seattle, the low-level urban conflict in Portland, or the open warfare in Chicago.

It’s more than that. The most liberal cities in America are the most unequal and violent, with the most backwards housing policy, and with the most ineffective and inhumane treatment of the homeless and addicted. We need ethical and professional policing. People living on the streets desperately need psychological intervention, rehab, or other mental health services. But in California, for example, state lawmakers literally made it illegal to offer mental health or drug treatment as part of any housing program. The billionaire class of these cities pours foundation funds to activists who actively make these problems worse. There’s no lobby groups with a SuperPAC fighting to get people the treatment or the psychological intervention they need. They are lost to the culture wars, because the left-elites carefully ignore the human plight in these cities (or actively make the problem worse), and the right just sneers at it as if these human beings are a political score to settle. It’s a miserable situation.

San Francisco has long been a maverick in US urban politics.  From electing the first openly gay politician in the USA by way of Harvey Milk, to appointing Jim Jones Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority, it has always gone against the grain. To the outsider, it seems that San Francisco is now working to benefit the unhoused, the sex workers, the drug workers, and the product removal workers above all others.  The latter one interests me most as it seems to be a roundabout way to copy Reagan’s Trickle Down Economics: businesses send product to their shelves in San Francisco, and product removal workers enter these businesses to complete their tasks, understanding that they cannot exceed $950 (I’m not sure of the actual figure) in product in total per each site visit.  These products are then redistributed to the poor from the rich.  The wealth trickles down.  America has long been the pre-eminent global leader in creating new economies, its dynamism unmatched.  Who could have thought that a left wing city government like the one in San Francisco would not only lead to the creation of a new and sustainable economic system, but that it would be inspired by the Gipper himself?

Innovation happens on every level. Look, a friend of mine, Leighton Woodhouse, has reported closely on the low-level schemes through which “fencers” mobilize homeless or addicted thieves to rob stores. The goods are then sold on online marketplaces, or just on the sidewalk, often in exchange for money to buy drugs. It doesn’t take an investigative journalist to see this. San Francisco has declined rapidly. It’s a playground for the very rich and the very poor to live a kind of libertarian utopia with no rules. But it’s not exactly a free market system – layered atop the anarchy there’s a big government partially privatized through dozens of nonprofits and private sector contractors, many of whom are very politically active and protest any attempt to restore some level of rule of law and public safety. Several local groups – some funded by taxpayer grants and by shakedowns of local developers – defended an open air market of stolen goods as an indigenous form of “vending” that has a long tradition in Latin American cultures, and should be respected as it takes place here in San Francisco. How can you argue with that iron-clad line of reasoning?

You have told me previously that the biggest influence in your life has been Yukio Mishima, and that your personal credo is “Sun and Steel”.  You have mastered Kung Fu, Aikido, and Kendo, spending years in residence overseas learning each discipline under the most respected instructors.  Have you ever used one of these arts to beat the fuck out of fat guys who say to you: “you’ve changed, man”?  Imagine if Brooklyn Dad approached you and began to push you in the chest, calling you a Russian disinfo agent.  Imagine if some douchebag from the Koch Industries web of institutes and think tanks started screaming “CHICOM SPY” in your face.  Do you think that you could take down Eliot Higgins in a street fight?  Do you get tempted to recite the Chinese proverb 不能一口吃成胖子(you can’t get fat with one mouthful) to them?

Despite the endless stream of fight videos fed to me by Twitter algo, I am a man of peace. Nonviolence is the way. Ask Mehdi Hasan.

This one’s outrageous: 凡人不可貌相, 海水不可斗量 ( Man cannot be judged by looks; seas cannot be measured by the cup.).  Bullshit.  Physiognomy is real and it can be detected without even seeing the person (e.g. online posting physiognomy).  This really isn’t a question for you, but it made me think that you can fuck with people IRL by making up fake Chinese proverbs to say to them, and then act outraged if they don’t get it or make fun of it.  Funnier still would be to make up ridiculous ones and see if they pretend to understand them in an earnest fashion.

What happens to the respected field of physiognomy or its online posting cousin in a world of AI deep fakes? It will be a lost art, like basket weaving. I can already feign being offended when people mispronounce my name as FANG rather than the correct “fong,” despite the phonetic spelling. I don’t really care that much, but it’s a good gotcha. I can’t believe this is already the 100^th Chinese question in a row, but I would expect nothing less from a Serbian Substacker (SS).   (Jebem ti Mater - ed.)

What I didn’t mention earlier in this interview is that your actual name is Lee Lee Fang.  Your mother gave you the middle name “Lee” in honour of Lee Harvey Oswald, a communist agent.  Nomen est Omen, I always like to say.  Her choice in names for you meant that you would always have a chip on your shoulder, and always harbour a grudge against America.

The Lee multiverse has a fraught and venerable history. Lee Harvey Oswald, Lee Atwater, Lee Hamilton of the 9/11 Commission Report, Spike Lee, Lee Kuan Yew, Lee Iacocca to name a few. I have a Google Alert for my name and half of the results tend to be Malaysian teenagers these days, which is a troubling development to say the least.

Mel Gibson plays a 37 year old half-Chinese, half Scots-Irish American investigative journalist in what must be at first glance the worst casting decision in Hollywood history.  Mel visits his dying boss who asks him to track down his former business partner, to tell him that the long-kept government secrets that they are about to release in the ultimate takedown of USGov are in danger of being stolen by five former star employees who have possibly gone rogue.  These five each have codenames: Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad.  Mel must approach each and everyone one of these to try and figure out who works for the American people, and who has defected to the Disinformation Complex.  Using memes, ironic humour, and if all else fails, Kung Fu, Mel kills each and every one of them just for the fuck of it.  Would you watch this?

Plot a little too close for comfort. Is this even a question? Ofc.

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You can find Lee Fang on Twitter harassing decent people here, or you can check out his Substack, where he has the balls to try to compete with me!