‘End CCP’ Rally Warns of Communist Infiltration, Subversion

OTISVILLE, N.Y.—The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has infiltrated the United States to an alarming degree, not just to steal economic and military secrets, but also to embitter divisions, finagle, cow, and coax; heard attendees of a rally in downstate New York dubbed “Wake Up to the CCP Threat.”

Resisting the CCP’s plan to bring America to its knees presents a rare opportunity of common ground for Americans of varied political stripes to unite, rally speakers said, urging people to spread the word and engage civically.

“The CCP aims to bring down America in a very comprehensive multi-domain warfare,” explained Sean Lin, a former U.S. Army virologist and member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

Following a doctrine of “unrestricted warfare,” the CCP regime uses any area of human action as a “battlefield,” Lin said at the Aug. 13 rally. Economic warfare seeks to “destroy U.S. industrial base” and “create supply chain dependencies;” financial warfare seeks to cajole Wall Street into shifting investments to China; political warfare seeks to “delegitimize” the American system of a constitutional republic and fuel “Maoist race theories” in the United States; information warfare focuses on propaganda to instill positive impression of the totalitarian system of the CCP; technology warfare aims to capture the intellectual property of American companies; cyber warfare seeks to steal Americans’ personal information; chemical warfare seeks to poison Americans by encouraging illegal trade in fentanyl, a powerful opioid; and biological warfare focuses on weaponizing viral pathogens.

Biological Warfare

The last category especially plays into Lin’s expertise. He noted how the CCP blocked and manipulated research into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic that started in Wuhan, China, in 2019, so there’s no way to say definitively how it started.

“But there’s no doubt the CCP let the virus spread to the whole world, let the people who got infected in Wuhan travel to the whole world while they locked down the city of Wuhan,” he said.

He pointed out that various types of “gain-of-function” viral research still continue in China and the CCP’s biological warfare projects continue to develop. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is now working on a “level four” bio-containment laboratory in cooperation with the Pakistan army, he said.

“There’s no famous research institute in Pakistan for any infectious disease. Why does PLA want to collaborate with the Pakistan army to have a P4 lab there? Because next time, if another outbreak happens, Pakistan is to blame, not the CCP. This is their strategy.”

Lin supports designating the CCP as a transnational criminal organization, similar to Mexican drug cartels.

“If our enemy is waging an unconventional war against us, if we still think the CCP is just a competitor or a collaborator, we will lose the war,” he said.

Political Activism

The way to resisting CCP influence in the United States is through strengthening core American values as well as becoming active in the political realm, said Rev. Bill Pannucci, head of the New York Faith and Freedom Coalition.

“I have two grandchildren now and I rue the day when I will have to sit down with them and tell them what it was like in America when we knew freedom,” he said.

He encouraged Americans not just to vote, but also to consider running for office, be it just a school board, a town board, or a county legislature.

He noted that Americans, though coming from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds, find their unity in the belief in the founding values of the country, such as that “in this nation, our rights do not come to us from the Washington, D.C., or from Albany, our rights come to us from the very hand of God.”

“When an outside force comes to threaten us, what do we do? We forget our internal squabbles and we lock arms and we join ranks against that outside enemy,” he said to the cheering crowd of about 120 people.

The rally was held in Otisville, New York, by the local Mount Hope Chinese Association and the New York-based Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP.

Robin Imbarrato, 52, came after her father told her about the rally, she said, just so she can stay educated on the topic.

“Communism is now becoming part of our world, it’s infiltrated here, so that’s why I came, to see what I can do possibly to combat it,” she told The Epoch Times.

It was “a big eye-opener,” she said, when the COVID-19 pandemic came and U.S. authorities to a large degree followed the type of response proscribed by the CCP, including business shutdowns and mandates.

Another participant, James Snyder, 32, said he came to “support the cause.”

“I don’t enjoy the way I observe the CCP’s tendrils infiltrating our media, government, and social media—our society as a whole,” he said.

He started to look into CCP influence in America in 2016 after hearing then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly bringing up China in his campaign speeches.

“What is the big deal about China’s Communist Party?” he started to wonder, and over time learned increasingly more as he remained “plugged in to alternative news sources and stay[ed] out of the mainstream news sources.”

Self-Censorship

He noticed that athletes or entertainment conglomerates would censor themselves in order to appease the CCP and be allowed to reach the Chinese audience.

“I’ve noticed these things just a little bit at a time and the more I notice it, it becomes harder and harder to ignore,” he said.

For Howard Bellingham, 37, the breaking moment came last year when he saw former pro-wrestler John Cena apologize to China for calling Taiwan a country in a promo video for the ninth installment of the Fast and Furious franchise.

“That was the wake up,” he said.

He then started to look into China’s economic influence, noticing that American corporations are becoming increasingly beholden to the Chinese market.

“[It used to be] they’d have a stake in the community, they’d have an interest in people coming to their business,” he said.

But the proliferation of online shopping, in his view, has divorced American businesses from their domestic clientele.

“China’s got a billion people, we have 330 million. Which market is going to command the authority there?” he said.

It was encouraging for him to see so many people show up for such an event in a small town.

“It’s easy—you don’t see it on mainstream news—to think that you’re by yourself with your thoughts on stuff like this,” he said.

“So when you come out to an event like this and you see a whole lot of people who are here for the same reasons, who think the same things, and want to learn about the same subject, it lets you know that you’re not alone, that people do care, that the community does exist, that we just got to dig through the dirt to find it again.”