Michael P. Senger > Quotes

“Over decades in power, the CCP had constructed a multilayered system for stifling dissent in China based on the Soviet psychological warfare technique of Zersetzung, which translates roughly to “psychological decomposition.”[96] The regime’s threats instill fear of open discourse about reality, resulting in self-censorship. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of this silence, individuals willfully play down the evidence before their own eyes. The collective psychological effects are deceptively enormous.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Many people believe that it is OK to be like China for a time, because when the crisis ends we can go back to being like Britain again. These people are making a serious mistake. We cannot switch in and out of totalitarianism at will. Because a free society is a question of attitude, it is dead once the attitude changes.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Little reliable information reaches the outside world, but what is known is that at least half a million Tibetans have been detained in a massive system of concentration camps constructed across China’s western provinces, pursuant to the CCP’s unique hybrid of public health and security policy: Fangkong.[81]”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“The world was fighting a virus from China with a public health policy from China that effectively turned the world into China, and the narrative of the day was that all this was perfectly normal.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Whatever the reason, western governments proved unprepared to cope with or even comprehend wide-scale scientific fraud. The judges deferred to the politicians. The politicians deferred to the health officials. The health officials deferred the WHO. The WHO deferred to China. And China deferred to Xi.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Fauci wrote of Nilsen’s email: “Too long for me to read”; the email was 1,700 words.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“A New York City study found a 97.2% mortality rate among those over age 65 who received mechanical ventilation.[272] The WHO’s “early action” ventilator guidance, citing Chinese journal articles, had killed countless thousands of patients across the world.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“The CDC revealed that young adults aged 25-44 saw the largest increase in excess deaths from previous years, a stunning 26.5% jump, despite accounting for fewer than 3% of deaths from COVID-19.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Without fail, ZeroCovid supporters—whether “scientists,” influencers, or otherwise—would insist that China’s manifestly-fraudulent data was real. When asked to define a “real” lockdown—one which had succeeded in a mainland country—they could point to only one example: China.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“The hard truth is that an enormous portion of the China-watching, human rights, journalism, and think tank community is controlled opposition to the CCP—financially restrained from reporting anything that might be too damaging to China.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“For this letter, Ren Zhiqiang was sentenced to 18 years in prison.[177]”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Beginning at Tiananmen Square, the CCP sought to prove that even the newest information technology could be subverted to tyrannical ends, and that ideas really could be killed with the right amount of violence”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Elite universities developed an entire business model around the CCP. Chinese money came in through donations and full-freight tuition, and in exchange professors signed lucrative side deals selling federally-funded research to the CCP.[87] Whole academic careers could be made or broken by one’s views on China.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“About 230 million Indians fell into poverty—defined as living on less than $5 a day—in the first year of the crisis. Around 15%—including 47% of female workers—had failed to find employment by the end of 2020.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Not only are lockdowns historically unprecedented in response to any previous epidemic or pandemic in American history, but they were not even mentioned in recent guidance offered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“It’s no coincidence that lockdowns were specifically designed to ruin small businesses. They’re the one asset the CCP can’t easily buy.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“For decades, western policymakers insisted they saw China as a rival. But once China became their source of wealth and prestige, they came to see the CCP as a friend and a model. The western China class was born.[84]”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“What would Mao do” indeed.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Data showed that over 60% of business closures during the COVID-19 crisis were permanent, amounting to more than 97,000 businesses lost in the U.S. alone.[552] Half of Black-owned small businesses in the U.S. were wiped out.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Stories that Beijing was stealing scientific and military secrets, running spy networks in Silicon Valley, compromising legislators, and paying huge retainers to professors were downplayed. Signs that the CCP posed a threat in any way were muted and dismissed.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“The resurrection of Jacobson has been compared to “resurrecting Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, or Korematsu”—historical Supreme Court cases referred to as “anticanon” owing to not only their lack of intellectual rigor but to the awful human tragedies they precipitated.”
― Michael P Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“By corrupting global institutions, promoting forged data, publishing fraudulent science, and deploying propaganda on an unprecedented scale, the CCP under Xi Jinping transformed the snake oil of lockdowns into “science,” the greatest crime of the 21st century to date. The”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“The Chinese Communist Party is not Chinese, not communist, and not a party. The CCP is the world’s largest criminal organization, with no racial or geographic boundaries, which happens to have begun in China—led by an extraordinarily small number of extraordinarily evil people.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“A survey found that 22% of Canadians were experiencing high anxiety levels, a four-fold increase from before lockdowns, while the number reporting symptoms of depression doubled to 13%.[556] U.S. drug-overdose deaths soared nearly 30%.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“In a 2015 speech to the PLA, Xi Jinping outlined his vision for the CCP’s international propaganda: Wherever the readers are, wherever the viewers are, that is where propaganda reports must extend their tentacles, and that is where we find the focal point and end point of propaganda and ideology work.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“But six days in, the lockdown—being “unprecedented in public health history”—had produced no results, so Tedros was actually praising human rights abuses with nothing to show for them.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Italy was simultaneously bombarded with Chinese propaganda and disinformation. From March 11 to 23, roughly 46% of tweets with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and 37% of those with the hashtag #grazieCina (thank you China) came from bots.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“Roberts’ opinion is problematic in several respects. First, Jacobson had been overruled many times, not least because it was subsequently used to justify eugenics in Buck v. Bell, a decision that was then cited by several Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“In 2013, Xi’s General Office issued a secret directive known as Document No. 9, describing an “intense, ideological struggle” for survival, with “the very real threat of western anti-China forces and their attempts at carrying out westernization.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World

“In one incident, Xi was paraded onto a stage wearing a heavy metal dunce cap. His mother was forced to attend and shout “Shame on Xi Jinping!” along with the crowd. But Xi never lost faith in the Party, later recalling how he “recited the thoughts of Chairman Mao every day late into the night.”
― Michael P. Senger, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World