> It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West.

WE have thrown it away already, China is just trying to speed things up.

I've thought quite a bit about this, and my conclusion is that everything is cyclical and has a rise and fall because it only takes a few generations to unlearn hard-fought lessons. Only this time around technology is going to enable a level of control that has never been achieved before. I can only hope that technology will also allow the escape of that same level of control.

A perfect example is how larger and larger swathes of the populace is ok hampering free speech in the name of empathy. They don't fully understand the implications, and there will be generations that will be forced to relearn those lessons, and it won't be a cheap lesson.