The technology giant Intel is blackmailing Congress in order that it be allowed to keep assisting the Chinese Communist Party.
As Politico reports, Intel is lobbying Congress to eliminate legislative language that China opposes. The language is part of a congressional bill due to face a Senate vote this week. That bill would provide tens of billions of subsidy dollars to strengthen the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing chip base. Congress is rightly alarmed by China’s stranglehold over global semiconductor manufacturing.
Intel would benefit greatly from the federal subsidies. But the company is playing hardball. It is delaying a chip manufacturing plant planned for Ohio, demanding Congress first help China. Intel’s specific focus falls on two concerns. First, preventing any prohibition to stop companies that receive federal subsidies from expanding semiconductor facilities in China. Second, canceling a government review of investments in China that damage U.S. national security.
Those provisions aren’t just important — they’re critical. The Chinese Communist Party seeks to overturn the U.S.-led democratic international order and its associated rules of law. That order has made Americans and the world freer, richer, and more accessible than ever before. But Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime wants to replace that order with a Communist feudal mercantilist order. One in which absolute obedience to Beijing is the price tag for prosperity. China is prepared to kill Americans to build this order.
Intel doesn’t care.
Simultaneously appeasing China’s genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population and enabling the People’s Liberation Army to develop weapons with which to fight the U.S. military, Intel has sacrificed the ideal of patriotism at the trough of Communist gold. It’s not something that Intel is keen to admit. Indeed, the tech giant’s notoriously pro-China CEO, Pat Gelsinger, continues to pretend that his is a distinctly American kind of moral leadership. On Twitter, Gelsinger describes himself as a “Christian, farm boy at heart” who believes that “values are most enduring thing leaders create.”
Sure.
Gelsinger’s fundamental value is far simpler: Keep China happy at all costs. If young American sailors have to die, so be it. Intel’s slogan is: “Do something wonderful.” It should be: “Do something wonderful for Xi.”
