Gady Epstein
@gadyepstein
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A longform editor at The Economist. Formerly China affairs and media editor. Views expressed may be the opposite of my employer’s
Brooklyn and sometimes London
Joined March 2009
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Not many presidents could make threatening nuclear war the second worst thing he did in a week.
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The portrait in the background of this Reuters photo is of Sen Charles Sumner, who was beaten nearly to death in the chamber by a Southern congressman who resented a speech Sumner gave attacking slaveholders. The Civil War started 5 years later
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Harvard’s endowment fund is tens of billions, laying off dining hall workers. Senators are begging Bezos to provide sick leave to workers. Bloomberg fired campaign staff who thought they were good til Nov. The world’s absolute richest are making a good case for taxing them more
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Few people know that George Orwell’s first draft of “1984” was about a publishing house canceling a book contract
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But you can win an election by telling voters that their imaginary concerns are real
You can't win an election by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary.
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I'd compare this to Chinese propaganda, which can be very tone-deaf. But not even Xi Jinping would, on visiting the area of a mass-killing tragedy, release only images of himself being showered with adulation, set to soaring music
My time spent in Dayton and El Paso with some of the greatest people on earth. Thank you for a job well done!
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Firing a US Attorney for not helping you overturn an election would, on its own, have led to impeachment in the past. This week it was just Monday
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China’s vaccine diplomacy appears to be not just about promoting its own vaccine, but also irresponsibly spreading scare stories about the (much more effective) Pfizer vaccine
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Welp. There’s always a tweet
I started to get very worried about Mitt's chances when I heard that A-Rod donated to his campaign. Everything A-Rod touches turns bad.
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I’m actually OK with ARod taking over Jared’s portfolio tbh
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I'd very much like to know what specific conditions CBS agreed to before Ivanka said yes to this interview
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Striking tweet. We've grown so accustomed to silence when there's money at stake in the China market
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Chinese diplomat with 272k followers spreads completely insane theory that US army might have brought the virus to Wuhan. China’s use of social media for disinfo is becoming ever more serious concern
2/2 CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!
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China’s official disinfo campaign shows no sign of abating. Here a foreign ministry spokesman re-ups the hoax that the coronavirus might have started in the US
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Declassified White House tapes of Nixon and Kissinger "reveal racism and misogyny at the highest levels, covered up for decades under ludicrous claims of national security," writes
@Gary__Bass
. Vile, disgusting remarks on these tapes
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More intrigue in Cindy Yang / Trump tale. She seems to have been active in an org overseen by the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front. The Florida branch of the China Council for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification (pushes Beijing line on Taiwan)
This is a huge scandal on its own, reminiscent of the One that badly damaged Clinton and Gore
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NYT vs WaPo. One does not mention racism. The other makes racism the point of the story
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Also a totally botched announcement that misled thousands of people. Most who are rushing back into the country are citizens who could have waited to fly back
These airport scenes are *infuriating*. A policy designed around propaganda rather than science and announced suddenly is now resulting in possibly exposing *thousands* of Americans to infection right before bringing them into the country. This is almost criminal malpractice.
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Wow the Washington Post went full hot-dog guy meme quoting Alex Berenson here. How indeed did we end up with a national divide over vaccines and masks?
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This is straight murder
MA received 17% of requested medical supplies from the Trump admin. ME: 5%. CO: 1 day's worth.
FL got everything they requested. + an identical shipment the next week. oh, and a 3rd is on the way.
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I’m so deeply impressed with the ubiquity and influence of Antifa, they’ve managed all this without having a single identifiable member
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Ah yes “murders per square mile,” a completely normal and useful crime metric
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Former head of NSA and CIA linking arms with the ACLU. The Trump Effect
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THREAD: Following our cover this week on Uyghurs, I wanted to highlight scholars, journalists, activists and exiles who have helped expose and explain what is happening in Xinjiang, from the camps to population control to the diminishing of Uyghur identity
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Horrific first-hand accounts in this new BBC report on Xinjiang. It’s never easy reading these stories but this one is particularly grim
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A Politico story that claimed Trump owes $$ to Bank of China has been "updated" to reflect that the bank says he doesn't, and hasn't since 2012. To be clear this is an "update" that guts the entire premise of the story
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China is increasingly throwing its weight around at the UN. Some in the West are starting to push back. My story this week on the UN becoming a battleground for competing visions of the world order in a way not seen since the Cold War
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She believes the world is flat. He believes the world is round. They are trying to find common ground...
She thinks the election was stolen from Donald Trump. He believes what dozens of courts and officials have found: that Joe Biden is the rightful winner. They're trying to find common ground but wonder whether they – and the nation – can do it.
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What a heartbreaking story. The anti-LGBTQ moral panic is enabling so much cruelty
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NYPD officer accused of spying on ethnic Tibetans for PRC
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I want to add something insightful about Peter Navarro but I can't come up with anything beyond amazement that anyone, much less a president, has ever taken him seriously. And yet here we are
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"For our enemies, we have shotguns" -- China is quicker to take offense, and retaliates more harshly, than in past. The Chinese ambassador to Sweden offers a glimpse of this more forceful brand of diplomacy. 1 of 2 stories by me this week on this theme
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A day after Trump stands by his defense of the marchers who chanted “Jews will not replace us”
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THREAD: Our cover this week is about the persecution of China's Uyghurs. In our editorial, we urge governments and others to do more about this crime against humanity
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*FBI seizes boxes of government documents from Trump*
Pundit: let’s not rush to judgment, let the process play out, I’ll have more to say later
*Beto uses a curse word once*
Pundit: In 49 tweets I shall explain why this disheartens me and confirms the decline of the republic
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If the excesses of the left pushed you to the right, but nothing about the right pushed you back to the left… then maybe you just like the right?
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Am I reading this right that Bolton is criticizing the House for not investigating things that... he knew about but didn't disclose publicly until publishing this book?
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the median 10yo girl is never forced to carry a pregnancy to term
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Imagine torching your brand so badly that famous people are frantically testifying that they didn’t pay for your product
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Another solution: the networks carry Biden’s covid videos, like they did the Trump rallies in 2016. Let people see the difference
Everyone knows that we're facing a real crisis from the coronavirus. But do you know how we got here and what we need to do next? Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, breaks it down for us:
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World leaders often asked if they are going to bring up human rights when meeting the president of China. Now also the US
“I’m not only saying this back home. I’m saying it here in Washington, in my talks with the president” - Merkel
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Trump is trying to cure the stock market instead of the epidemic, which is the same approach that has helped tank the market
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In which Bret Stephens accepts (via study he links) that there’s a 95% chance Ford is telling the truth about Kavanaugh, but constructs an edifice of outrage on the other 5%
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Hong Kong demonstration in London tonight, on the 25th anniversary of the handover. In front of the HK Economic and Trade Office
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Just had the realization that there will be days next year where nothing happens
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Thinking of that scene in Independence Day where a crowd is partying on top of a rooftop, in gleeful defiance of public safety instructions, so that they can greet the aliens. Who promptly obliterate them
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Jonah Goldberg is apparently unaware that fascist movements rely on idiots who believe they’re the good guys
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The Harvard Crimson identifies the official who in 2015 pushed to call off a campus event with a prominent Chinese dissident because then-President Drew Faust was in Beijing having just met Xi Jinping: William Alford, vice dean at the law school
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“We are at a very confused moment,” laments the guy who has been sowing confusion for the last 18 months
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This is a great example of “it’s not cancel culture when I do it”
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Singapore with a powerful condemnation of Russia at the UN session just now, saying that the world can’t tolerate one country attacking another “without provocation” and that it is an “existential” matter for small states like Singapore
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This week’s Economist cover says it all with a striking image
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An excellent investigation of China’s commandeering of thousands of accounts on Twitter for propaganda, by
@jeffykao
&
@MiaInChina
(my former colleague, I’m proud to say)
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After years of garment-rending about the left’s censoriousness over banh mi sandwiches at Oberlin we have high school plays being canceled or withdrawn for having characters who are gay or the possibility of boys portraying women
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Hey look what happens when you focus on testing instead of the stock market. South Korea is scheduled to restart basketball end of this month
South Korea has aggressively tested cases of COVID-19 and won praise for its handling of the pandemic. The country's basketball league now has games scheduled at the end of this month after a 4-week long hiatus.
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“If you seek constitutional recourse there will be more violence” is quite a position for an elected official to take
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A very dark day in Hong Kong with arrests of some of the territory’s most prominent pro-democracy figures
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Good job Facebook! ‘A firefighters union in Washington state called Facebook “an absolute cesspool of misinformation right now,” in a post that sought to quell more rumors about the fires’ origins’
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I wrote about China's efforts to intimidate Uighurs abroad into keeping silent about the Xinjiang gulag. Few have felt that pressure more acutely than the 12 exiles in America who produce Radio Free Asia's reporting on the region
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When Auschwitz feels compelled to distance itself from your product and your fans are in the replies accusing a Holocaust museum of trying to “virtue signal.” Everything’s going great!
After two days our account got the blue tick back. It seems it has something to do with '1M+ followers' accounts changes made by Twitter.
Yet, we seem obliged to clarify that the Memorial never subscribed and paid for the Twitter Blue as it might be implied.
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In which Steve Bannon headlines a panel of otherwise mostly serious China experts, convened by Tom Friedman, and no one on stage seems to think that's strange
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(THREAD) Exporting Xi Jinping thought: I wrote about the little-understood International Department of the CCP, which cultivates relationships with high-ranking and up-and-coming stars in political parties around the world
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Here's an old pernicious fake news problem: fake grassroots efforts that insinuate themselves into real news
Koch network planning fake town halls to pretend grassroots support for lower corporate taxes.
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I'm curious, when a source tells a reporter, "Jared is in total control of the situation," is there laughing on both ends of the conversation?
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This is outrageous on at least two levels: 1) The treatment of human beings by the US govt is absolutely appalling. 2) When caught, DHS officials had the gall to blame the problem on the migrants (
@adamserwer
's "the cruelty is the point" comes to mind)
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In recent days Chinese diplomats have worked with governors to help get ventilators to NY and masks to Massachusetts — the latter part of an effort to avoid the US govt seizing another shipment of supplies
The governor of Massachusetts worked with local rich guy and the Chinese government because he couldn’t trust the Feds not to take their masks
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WH had many chances to say Holocaust statement should mention Jews. They've doubled down on the omission. It is policy now, not an oversight
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Tucker Carlson, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and a mass killer in El Paso, all with the same hateful anti-immigrant message
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Turning people anti-vaxx, even when they’re not your own citizens, doesn’t seem like a sound long-term strategy in a pandemic
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Incredible description of what a functioning democracy would look like
ROMNEY: "Consider how different the Senate would be without the filibuster. Whenever one party replaced the other as majority, tax and spending priorities would change, safety net programs would change, national security policy could change."
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Sinclair TV program spreads claim that Fauci “manufactured the coronaviruses” and shipped them to Wuhan. Irredeemable madness
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So jarring, and dispiriting, every time I see a Chinese dissident I follow, and used to admire, retweeting one of these Stop the Steal GOP congressmen
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Election tracker: I think Mark Zuckerberg is not going to be running for anything
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I’m astounded at how out of control lab leak theorists have got. Literally no scientific evidence has emerged to support lab leak, so they’re reading a massive conspiracy into scientist slack messages, as if they had the power to cover up evidence if it existed (which it doesn’t)
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I slid into the DMs of a few Chinese diplomats to ask them about their tweets. In the last year dozens have taken to Twitter (which is blocked in China). They are pushing back aggressively against criticism--on Xinjiang, handling of coronavirus etc.
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Important story. Among the findings: Ben Shapiro was shadow-promoted on Facebook, giving him an algorithmic advantage over his ideological foes
The latest Facebook story from
@CraigSilverman
and me details a history of how political concerns influence important platform decisions. While employees are warning about it now the 2020 election is over, there have been plenty of signs in the past.
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Main problem is corruption. Imperial contracts go to crony suppliers, so you get inaccurate weapons, armor that can’t stop anything etc. Drain the swamp!
do we think the issue w the stormtroopers aim can be solved by improved training or no
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He only compared Soros to a Jewish Holocaust survivor super villain who wants to subjugate humanity to his master race of mutants, what are people getting worked up over
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Congrats you’ve just invented comic books, movies and video games
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I went through Xi’s 2014 speeches in Xinjiang and other secret party documents to learn how an authoritarian regime talks to itself, and ends up committing crimes against humanity
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With a couple resignations at the White House tonight, and Lindsey Graham taking a rare stand against Trump only at the end, it’s worth reading
@anneapplebaum
’s superb, historically rich piece on why some people collaborate and others resist
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This amazing photo is by Mike Theiler for Reuters. Sumner is the portrait on the right. On the left is John Calhoun, staunch pro-slavery senator and vice president whose politics helped sow the seeds of secession and the Civil War (he died in 1850)
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For those who worry about cancel culture, read this and tell me where the real power to cancel lies
a library director in Nevada signed a letter of support for BLM. she was then threatened by the local sheriff and right-wing militias, and now her own board is starting a witch hunt against her. this is extremely shameful and I hope
@ALALibrary
intervenes
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Hey NYT, I found a better headline and top for this story in your third graf File this under “burying the lead” and cross-index it with “letting Trump write your headlines”
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*Personal information* I'm pleased to announce I'm returning to my favorite subject as China Affairs Editor, reporting on China's impact on the world. I'll be based in NYC and, with some frequency, on planes and trains to a region of the world near you
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This is good video. Every time a Sunday or cable show allows itself to be used to transmit lies, there should be guests like Mehdi to call them out in real time (since the hosts usually won’t)
Me: "That is a lie, is it not, given 48 Republicans were entitled to attend? He lied, didn't he?"
Me again: "That is false Jack, can we agree on that? That is false?"
I tried my best on
@MSNBC
to get an ex-GOP congressman to admit Republicans are lying about impeachment - clip:
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"Imagine if cavemen had been shown the smartphone you’re using to record me. What would they have thought about this special rock? Now imagine that Oumuamua is the iPhone, and we are the cavemen"--Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb is worth hearing out
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Saying a newspaper should be run "correctly" or shut down is literally a Chinese authoritarian thing.
Somebody with aptitude and conviction should buy the FAKE NEWS and failing
@nytimes
and either run it correctly or let it fold with dignity!
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What goes through the mind of a nearly 80 year old Fox News viewer who is being told they should sacrifice themselves for their grandchildren?
(I can find this out with a phone call right now but am afraid to)
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