Greg, if you could indulge me for just just a few tweets...

In the 1950s, US went into a frenzy about Red China's "brainwashing" (mind control) of Korean War PoWs, thinking that the CCP had discovered and applied secret ways to effectively control the mind.

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THREAD https://twitter.com/GregoryVRaymond/status/1276711749517840384

They thought the CCP could remould one's mind, and make us human automatons devoid of independent thoughts.

It was hysterical, and looking back, plain silly to think that one can control minds so easily.

Charlatans such as Edward Hunter sold the "brainwashing" fantasy...

It was later concluded that the CCP used persuasion, psychology, and plain coercion to get US PoW's to cooperate.

Regardless, the US poured billions into chasing after mind-control, dark magic/psychology and all kinds of weird stuff.

In the process it popularised drugs, including LSD (thanks heaps CIA!), and provided the research for what later was to become the infamous "Enhanced interrogation techniques", that is, systematic torture of detainees in the War on Terror.

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What started as countering some grand scheme of the Reds led to the one of the most anti-democratic institutions in America, and a deep stain on US moral credibility.

So here is where I come back to UF and Beijing's influence campaigns...

UF is now seen by many as the "dark magic" for Beijing to achieve global domination, to be able to co-opt our elites and turn our democratic institutions against us just as they were able to get US POW to cooperate with brainwashing/ mind-control in the 1950s...

By exaggerating the risk of Beijing's penetration of our political system, and paranoid about Reds everywhere in our society, we may make repeat the mistakes of the past by overestimating the risk, leading to externalities that does more harm to our institutions than otherwise.