All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone Project.
Of course, he wrote Goliath and the 51 Day War and the Management of Savagery, which is a great book on the terror wars.
And here he is on a sort of pseudo-color-coded revolution in Hong Kong.
An aspect of it, anyway.
Western media's favorite Hong Kong freedom struggle writer is an American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellow face.
Welcome back to the show, Max.
How are you doing?
Good to be back, and thanks for being the only host who's read my book.
Oh, well, there you go.
I loved your book, by the way.
I highly recommend it to everybody, and I'm kind of mad because it's a lot like my book, only it came out way before mine, which is still not done.
So I'm mad at it, but only because of its quality and timeliness.
Sounds like you got something on the way.
It's coming.
Oh, you know what it is?
I threw out the last year worth of work, because what happened with the Afghanistan book that was supposed to be chapter two, and then it became a whole book about Afghanistan.
So then I did it again, and I started writing about Iraq, and it started to become a whole book about Iraq War II.
And I was like, no, no, no, that's not what this is supposed to be.
So I threw it out and back to the drawing board, and I'm trying to do a much briefer take on all of them.
So I know for space, you had to skip Somalia and I think Pakistan, or one or a couple of them, but I want to have all of them in there, but it'll be briefer takes on each one, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, well, it'll still be timely.
You know, U.S. troops will still be in northeast Syria and Afghanistan.
That's right.
We might be moving on to China, but that doesn't mean we're leaving the Middle East.
It's all still very relevant, unfortunately.
But now, so this thing in China, I'm about to, in a little while, I'm going to be talking with Dan McAdams about virtually the same situation in Belarus, and it's the same thing for that matter in Panama or Iraq or anywhere else.
Like the Yanukovych government in Ukraine, whether it's 2004 or 2014, you can always point at any politician and say, this guy's a horrible guy or this regime is a horrible regime, and so we got to support the good guys against them.
And that's the narrative when they're not denying that they're supporting them.
Although in the case of Hong Kong, it's about as blatant as could be, right?
State Department officials crawling around everywhere, Amnesty International, people in yellow face on Twitter and all of these ridiculous things, right?
Yeah.
I mean, this guy, Brian Kern, who used to work for Amnesty and sort of emerged in Hong Kong as this ubiquitous figure on the front lines of these protests, who I exposed as a so-called Hong Kong freedom struggle writer named Kong Sangan, who really was posing as a native Hong Konger, was claiming that they grew up in Hong Kong, went to Hong Kong government schools, feared being thrown in jail for life under the national security law for colluding with foreign forces, those kinds of things.
I'm not sure if this was a US government agent, but it was certainly someone who is advancing the US geopolitical imperatives in Hong Kong and recruiting and working with Hong Kong youth at the Chinese International School.
But the main thing about this story that I think is salient is that it's a media scandal because Kong Sangan was being quoted by who's who of Western media as a native on the ground expert who was this frontline soldier, even though he wasn't a real person.
And now that my stories come out, you've seen very little, you've seen zero contrition from these mainstream outlets.
And my understanding is there is a mainstream Chinese outlet that's going around asking them about their reliance on someone who didn't exist, who turned out to be a white guy from America.
And the reporters are getting really defensive and upset about this.
So this really shows how the sausage is made in the US information war, which is part of its hybrid war on China.
And well, I want to hear the anecdotes about them getting defensive, because what could they say other than, boy, I sure screwed that one up.
But I wanted to ask you, because I didn't have time to click on the links, but I believe you how you heard these two interviews, one of them under his own name and the other under the name of his pseudonym here.
And so he's busted.
But was he like faking a Chinese accent and all that stuff, too?
Well, if you listen to the audio, he just has a distinctively weird American voice.
I think it sort of talks like, you know, we are sort of under occupation here in Hong Kong and this is how I talk.
So it just sounds like a strange person, but definitely a distinctively American voice, maybe from California.
I can't quite figure it out.
But what I did was analyze interviews that Brian Kern, the, you know, teacher, former amnesty staffer, had been giving and Kong Songgan's interviews.
And the audio was exactly the same.
So Kong Songgan would give interviews, but they wouldn't show his face.
And you know, fine.
It's fine to use a pseudonym, I guess, if you say that you're writing under a pseudonym.
But he was writing columns at Hong Kong Free Press, which is this, you know, pretty well-established independent or supposedly independent site in Hong Kong run by Americans and very anti-China.
And he wasn't saying that he was writing under a pen name.
And beyond that, he's yellow facing as an Asian.
So to me, given that Brian Kern at the same time was being filmed, being inside these protests, which were violent, in some cases they made Portland look like a Shriner's Parade, where you had, you know, masked youth actually beating cops with clubs and really overwhelming them.
Brian Kern was filmed coordinating with the protesters, giving them instructions in the streets.
He was even filmed taunting Hong Kong authorities, Hong Kong police, challenging them to kill us all in his words, calling them, you know, commie puppets and all this.
So he's obviously not afraid of the authorities.
He's not, he doesn't really have an excuse to use a pseudonym, except that it gave him more credibility as a native Chinese person from Hong Kong.
And I compared it to several cases of white poets from the U.S., including a middle-aged guy from Indiana who were constantly getting rejected from poetry journals until they submitted their poetry under Chinese or Japanese names.
And all of a sudden their careers took off in yellow face.
I think it's different with Brian Kern.
This is someone who's pushing a political agenda, who's extremely ideological and he wants to, he understood that the Western press would feast on his words much more fervently if he became, if he developed a Chinese persona.
So that's what I think was going on here.
And the Hong Kong free press editors seem to have been in on this hoax.
Well, and then, so back to the American media, you know, personalities and institutions that went along with this.
I mean, it seems somewhat relevant, I guess, whether his weird voice even seemed at all like the voice of a Chinese man talking or whether they themselves must have known that, as you said, this guy's from California or something.
I can't quite place it, but he ain't from Hong Kong for crying out loud.
Or were they just, are they going to say, no, we were just interviewing him by email or what's up with that?
Let me read you something from the Washington Post reporter in Hong Kong, if I can find it.
Yeah.
His name is Ryan Hoke Hillpatrick.
And he was asked by the South China Morning Post, which is supposedly working on this article.
And their reporter wrote me as well about Kung Sung Gan.
And he tweeted, you know, although I do hope the resultant piece will be even handed, I was troubled by the use of language such as fake identities and his being a made up person.
Well, how is this not a fake identity?
How is this troubling?
I mean, it was clearly a fake identity.
So this reporter, whose strings for the Washington Post, LA Times, is getting really defensive here.
And it looks like they may have been on it as well.
I'm reading his response to the South China Morning Post.
As professional journalists, we have a duty of care toward our sources that obliges us to respect this and protect their confidentiality.
So he would dispute the characterization of using a pseudonym as equivalent to taking on a fake identity or being made up.
Even when the guy's name is Brian Kern and his fake name is someone from an entirely different ethnicity who obviously, when it's relevant to what's going on on the ground in Hong Kong.
Yeah.
And he's not saying that he is operating under a pseudonym in his columns.
So then the Washington Post reporter goes on to say, Kong has proven a keen observer and sharp commentator and yada, yada, yada.
So it looks like he was in on it too.
Like the whole Western press knew this guy was this white guy who was like directing protests.
I mean, he's very distinctive.
You know, many people listening to this might have seen, you know, the Twitter, on Twitter video of this guy who kind of looks like vanilla ice.
He has this huge white flat top and the sides of his head are shaved.
And he's just like walking around with shorts and combat boots, just pointing to these, you know, teenagers with masks and umbrellas and telling them which way to go.
And this is someone that the Western media was relying on painting him as a Chinese person.
I mean, I just, I think it's a hilarious scandal and it reminds me also of the gay girl in Damascus.
If you remember that 2011 where a guy from University of Edinburgh named Tom McMaster, who was a grad student and was 40 years old, was posing as Amina Araf in Damascus, a lesbian, you know, human rights protester who was on the run from Assad's security services.
Oh, how intersectional.
Yeah.
So it's like intersectional regime change activist.
And her blog had just captivated the progressive world and the human rights community in the New York Times.
Robert Mackey, of course, was covering it with great interest and, you know, is stirring up all the pulling the progressive heartstrings as they followed the tribulations of someone they could really relate to.
And it turned out to be completely fake.
I mean, she even got captured by the security services at one point and everyone following the Facebook page, there are 70,000 followers of her Facebook page.
Oh my God, Amina has gone missing.
What will we do?
They started a free Amina movement.
And then it all turned out to be Ali Abunimah and Ben Daugherty at the Electronic Intifada exposed it.
It turned out to be completely fake.
And what it was, was, you know, an attempt to, an attempt by someone very similar to Brian Kern, someone who had a literature degree.
So they had a desire to have a successful literary career that could have only been achieved in their minds by posing as a, you know, as an ethnic person, as a native person.
And they had political motives.
McMaster had been in Syria.
He had been teaching English there or something, and was supportive of this kind of liberal internationalist or liberal interventionist perspective.
And he wanted to get, you know, people on the left on the side of regime change, which turned out to be, you know, an agenda that was supporting the most far right elements of the Middle East, the Wahhabi so-called moderate rebels.
So this was, this is very similar to me.
And the Hong Kong quote unquote freedom struggle, while it's not a group of religious extremists, it is a right wing movement that is, that is, you know, supported heavily by the U.S. government, supported directly with millions of dollars.
Just last month, when Trump made his reshuffle at the U.S. Agency for Global Media to install one of his cronies, Michael Pack, he froze $2 million.
Just in the reshuffle, it was a bureaucratic move, I don't think it was political.
$2 million were frozen that had been intended for the Hong Kong protesters to provide them with logistics, logistical assistance and encrypted technology.
They went to the Open Technology Fund to provide them with sort of streamlined versions of signal texting so they could evade Chinese authorities.
And you know, that meanwhile, officials at the U.S. Embassy were filmed meeting with Joshua Wong, who's like the poster boy of the protests.
And you can just imagine the scandal that would have erupted in the U.S. if CGTN or Xinhua or Chinese media outlets were proven to have been donating millions of dollars to the Black Lives Matter movement and giving logistical support to the George Floyd protests.
This would have been seen as an act of war in the United States.
But that's exactly what the U.S. has been doing in Hong Kong, and not just in 2019, at least since 2014 when the Umbrella protests broke out.
Well, and a lot of good it's done the people of Hong Kong, right?
They're now under the emergency law that's passed in the name of the protests against it.
And or, you know, the previous incarnation of it.
Now they've got a worse one.
And so maybe this is good for the Americans.
I'm not even sure how it's good for the Americans.
You know, Trump cut off the special status for business with Hong Kong that they had and all of that.
It's to be considered part of mainland China now and all those things.
So if the goal was making the regime in Beijing look meaner or something, OK, I guess mission accomplished.
But to what good end?
All that's happened is the people of Hong Kong are in a worse position now than they were before they provoked this reaction.
Absolutely.
I mean, in Hong Kong had a very high rating of human freedom within the two systems, one country arrangement with China, which was going to continue at least for several decades.
And that is seemed to have been upended.
And it was because the U.S. wanted to upend it.
I mean, we can see the U.S. pushing on China through Hong Kong, through Taiwan and through Xinjiang and trying to balkanize the country, trying to, you know, it's all based on the, you know, John Kennan conception of containment towards the Soviet Union, where, you know, the competitor or the enemy country feels that it's being squeezed on all sides and from within.
And it starts expending more and more money on its security budget, less on social programs.
So the public becomes restive, it, you know, becomes more paranoid and bureaucratized.
And then the human rights groups come in and point the finger and say, look at this oppressive authoritarian country.
And throughout the recent spate of Hong Kong protests, the U.S. media had been really seeking out a Tiananmen moment where they could point the finger and then demand harsh sanctions or some kind of intervention.
And that's what, you know, Hong Kong protesters were seeking as well.
The New York Times reported that they were employing the marginal violence theory where they would use as much violence as possible without being seen as extremely violent to provoke the Hong Kong police into carrying out more violence, lethal violence.
But it never happened.
There was one scene where a Hong Kong police officer was photographed pulling a gun on protesters.
And Nicholas Kristof said the Tiananmen Square moment has finally arrived.
It was like he'd had, he was having an orgasm.
It was like a political psychosexual release for this liberal interventionist.
It's the reality.
Yeah.
He's one of the worst.
I mean, he, he, he loves every war and then he runs around like buying Indian prostitutes to free them from slavery and pretends he's pats himself on the back.
Like he's this good guy.
But anyway, he, you know, they were all proclaiming this Tiananmen moment.
But if you actually watch the video, first of all, the police officer never discharged their weapon.
No one was shot, but he was, he and his colleagues were being beaten by a huge crowd of protesters with clubs and they were overrun and overwhelmed and were actually at risk of being, one was being pulled away by the crowd and was at risk of being beaten to death.
So the officer pulled their gun to frighten the crowd.
In fact, no one was killed during the Hong Kong protests.
And I would say to the great dismay and disappointment of the US State Department and the US National Security State.
What they were seeking to do is create this giant geopolitical confrontation.
The protests were, I would say, more violent than what we're seeing inside the US than what we saw in Portland.
And they were aimed, they had a different aim.
It was said that they wanted democracy and they had one.
What they wanted was separatism.
And so protesters were filmed singing the US National Anthem, flying the British flag, begging the UK to take them back to restore the colonial relationship.
From the Chinese point of view, this is the most serious violation of their national security.
It's as though foreign powers were stirring up a movement in California to secede.
I mean, just imagine the US reaction.
I mean, the one thing to understand about China is it has this real commitment to anti-colonialism.
It's not doing state building or activities abroad.
It's not supporting insurgent movements as during the Cold War in the 60s and 70s.
It doesn't, it really believes in the principle of non-interference.
It's part of the national ideology.
And when, if you want to upset China, if you want to make China aggressive, then violate their two systems, one government policy.
Try to put US military hardware in Taiwan.
Try to stir up protests in Hong Kong.
Support a violent separatist movement in Xinjiang.
Do something like that and you will see China become aggressive because China has suffered years and years of humiliation.
It has been under siege and it's finally restored its national integrity.
And that's precisely what the US has been doing in Hong Kong.
Last year we wrote about, Dan Cohen wrote a piece for us about the Hong Kong protests and he focused on Jimmy Lai, who is the publisher of Apple Daily.
It's a very anti-Chinese tabloid publication in Hong Kong.
It portrays Chinese mainlanders as cockroaches and locusts on the cover.
And Lai himself has been a key funder of the protests in Hong Kong.
He's been pumping his millions of dollars and then he's treated to high level visits when he comes to Washington.
He gets meetings with John Bolton when Bolton was national security director.
He gets to meet with Mike Pompeo.
He's as good as a US asset as far as the Chinese government is concerned.
I'm a little bit puzzled by this.
Again, if they're trying to provoke the worst reaction, I still don't necessarily understand to what end, but what could they be thinking really about meeting this openly with the dissenters?
Seeing the role of the NED and their affiliated NGOs, implicating themselves in all of this, encouraging the protesters to wave American flags and things like this.
On the face of it, it's stupid, but okay, if they're trying to provoke a reaction, sure, but even then, okay, they didn't get the massacre, but what if they'd gotten the massacre?
That would have justified what that we're not already doing.
Well, why was a massacre staged in Douma, Syria in April, 2018?
Well, but they got the ...
There are some in the American government who'd be willing to go to war with Syria, but you can't go to war with China because they got H-bombs.
Right.
So, yeah, it does seem to be a huge miscalculation.
I mean, if you're talking strategy or tactics, from that point of view, it's an absolute miscalculation.
It's not a national security law.
From the point of view of the US, given the way that the strategy of containment played out against the Soviet Union, they're thinking a little more long term.
They want to bureaucratize China.
They want to reveal it as authoritarian.
They want Jimmy Lai to get arrested.
They're disappointed that Jimmy Lai was let go after 24 hours.
This is this publisher I was just talking about, who has been at the center of these protests, if you can call them just protests.
It's really a separatist movement.
They want to expose China as the new Nazi Germany, which is why we're constantly hearing about millions of Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang.
From the US perspective, the people of Hong Kong or Xinjiang or Taiwan are worth just as much as the Ukrainian people who've been turned into bullet stoppers by the US in Donbass.
And by the way, and I'm sorry I gotta go because I'm late for my next guy here, but I wanted to mention to you in case you weren't aware of this, I don't know of any other sources about it, although I guess I could look further, but Eric Margulies, the great Eric Margulies says that in the summer of 2001, he was witness to CIA sponsored training camps in Afghanistan where Chinese Uyghurs were being trained for use against China as a policy left from the Clinton years.
Well, that's fascinating.
And of course, it's very likely some of those same Uyghurs ended up in Guantanamo Bay as terrorists after the Americans switched sides and the thing.
Well, I mean, I can just in closing, I can add something to that because we have a piece in sort of in the pipeline about that.
And I listened to all Eric's commentary, someone I really consider extremely credible, that Roshana Abbas, who was the translator that the US government brought in to Guantanamo, was essentially used to cultivate the Uyghur separatists who were being held there for release, basically to be sent back into the field to fight again against China.
Oh, man, I can't wait for that one.
Great.
And have you been talking with him?
I haven't, but you should definitely put us in touch.
Yes.
You know what?
I'll do it right now.
But at the same time, I got to go because Branko Marchteach is next about Kamala Harris and the Palestinians.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
Thank you very much, Max.
Great work as always.
Thanks.
Take care.
All right, you guys, that is Max Blumenthal.
He is at TheGreyZone.com and his books are, of course, Goliath and the 51 Day War about Israel and the management of savagery about the terror wars as well.
This piece is at The Grey Zone.
Western media's favorite Hong Kong freedom struggle writer is an American ex-amnesty staffer in yellow face.
I can't even read that without cracking a smile.
It's so funny.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
The Scott Horton Show, anti-war radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
APS radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
