X.com on August 27 reported that a suspected Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts has tried to get Americans to oppose AI data centers by using 200 of them to post “in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”
[Neville Roy] Singham, an American centimillionaire, lives in Shanghai and coordinates his efforts with the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The UFWD is the part of the Chinese regime tasked with subverting foreign governments.
In February, the State Department submitted a report to Congress linking left-wing groups Code Pink and the People’s Forum, both tied to Singham, to the Communist Party. These nonprofits push CCP narratives while taking cash from a “donor network” of the Chinese regime. The report, titled “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” specifically mentions the “Singham network.”
Singham is hard-core. Last November, he called for a “people’s war” to spread communism.
Singham, according to Fox News Digital, from 2017 through last year transferred $591 million through five continents. About $278 million went to anti-American groups. Singham’s network includes 67 core groups and about 2,000 organizations worldwide. The Department of Justice in June launched a grand jury probe into Singham for money laundering, wire fraud, and bank fraud.
Let’s not be surprised: The Chinese regime has been waging a decades-long, full-spectrum cognitive warfare campaign against America.
“China controls the most expansive, heavily resourced, and sophisticated propaganda capabilities available to any regime in history,” Kerry Gershaneck, author of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win Without Fighting,” told Hoover’s Strategika in 2021.
“Influence actions are cognitive warfare,” Rob Joyce, a former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Fox News. “Foreign actors don’t need Americans to become pro-China. They need Americans to argue for the outcomes Beijing wants,” he explains.
China, therefore, needs to convince America to stop building data centers. So far, it is succeeding.
You have to hand it to China’s cognitive warfare warriors: Republican politicians are now joining pro-China communists in working against the clear long-term interests of the United States. They are all united against building data centers on American soil.
There are, of course, legitimate concerns about these facilities, but protests against them, which have hit the U.S. like a hurricane in recent weeks, are not entirely organic.
X.com on August 27 reported that a suspected Chinese bot farm of 200,000 accounts has tried to get Americans to oppose AI data centers by using 200 of them to post “in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.”
“These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid,” the X Global Government Affairs post states. “Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public’s expense.”
Furthermore, a network linked to Neville Roy Singham and tied to the “No Kings” protests is campaigning against data centers and Flock traffic surveillance cameras. Code Pink and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, both associated with Singham, are involved in this campaign. As Fox News Digital reported this month, both groups built a national effort against data centers “with near-identical messaging and strategies.”
Singham, an American centimillionaire, lives in Shanghai and coordinates his efforts with the United Front Work Department (UFWD) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The UFWD is the part of the Chinese regime tasked with subverting foreign governments.
In February, the State Department submitted a report to Congress linking left-wing groups Code Pink and the People’s Forum, both tied to Singham, to the Communist Party. These nonprofits push CCP narratives while taking cash from a “donor network” of the Chinese regime. The report, titled “Countering Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” specifically mentions the “Singham network.”
Singham is hard-core. Last November, he called for a “people’s war” to spread communism.
Singham, according to Fox News Digital, from 2017 through last year transferred $591 million through five continents. About $278 million went to anti-American groups. Singham’s network includes 67 core groups and about 2,000 organizations worldwide. The Department of Justice in June launched a grand jury probe into Singham for money laundering, wire fraud, and bank fraud.
Singham has been getting results on data centers. As Wired reports, “some Republicans are turning tail on the issue.” For instance, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has ordered the Public Utility Commission and the Electric Reliability Council to halt, pending audits and studies, new grid connections for data centers. Local opposition is stopping these facilities across the U.S., most notably in New York, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.
Wired has downplayed China’s participation in the campaign against data centers. Of course, China is not solely responsible for all opposition, but it has magnified messaging and played a crucial role. Americans should be asking how, throughout this decade, China’s narratives have spread lightning-fast throughout their society.
Let’s not be surprised: The Chinese regime has been waging a decades-long, full-spectrum cognitive warfare campaign against America.
China’s regime, Fox News Digital points out, has employed “a repeatable political model, in which activists first identify a local grievance, then connect it to a larger ideological narrative and package the argument through national media and activist infrastructure and carry it into new communities.”
“The money, media, organizing capacity, and campaign objectives converge in the same ecosystem,” Alexandria, Virginia-based Consumer Action for a Strong Economy states in a recent report titled “The Compute War at Home.”
“China controls the most expansive, heavily resourced, and sophisticated propaganda capabilities available to any regime in history,” Kerry Gershaneck, author of Political Warfare: Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to “Win Without Fighting,” told Hoover’s Strategika in 2021. “This massive propaganda juggernaut has reaped tremendous benefits for China’s Communist rulers in pursuit of their strategic objectives. Through its state-run propaganda organs, United Front organizations, and foreign enablers, Beijing has been able to effectively shape perceptions globally, if not perfectly at least well enough for its purposes.”
“Influence actions are cognitive warfare,” Rob Joyce, a former director of cybersecurity at the National Security Agency, told Fox News. “Foreign actors don’t need Americans to become pro-China. They need Americans to argue for the outcomes Beijing wants,” he explains.
The Communist Party’s campaign is relentless. “China wages cognitive warfare on a daily basis,” Gershaneck, now at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University and author of the upcoming Multi-Domain Cognitive Warfare, told Gatestone this month. “China’s rulers characterize cognitive warfare as ‘the ultimate domain in great power competition and military conflict.’ To win its cognitive war, China needs massive amounts of data. Of equal importance, it simultaneously needs to deny America access to data.”
Compute — processing power — is critical. China’s frontier AI models are only months behind America’s, but China is well behind America when it comes to AI.
Why is China behind? Because, among other reasons, it does not have the infrastructure to compete in the long term. For instance, China’s Moonshot AI had to suspend new subscriptions for its Kimi K3 model within days of its July launch because the company did not have access to sufficient compute.
In April, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence reported that America had 5,427 data centers and China had 449. Moreover, the United States is about to out-science the Chinese. Elon Musk says SpaceX is aiming to build a data center in orbit late next year.
China, therefore, needs to convince America to stop building data centers. So far, it is succeeding.
“A free society that can’t build the power and govern the advanced technology is going to wind up renting it from the adversary, read the PRC, that doesn’t share its own values,” said Joyce. “And that scares me as an American.”
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