"This was more than a slight. Aside from a calculated insult to the dignity of the United States, the move indicates Xi Jinping is making clear that the accepted norms of diplomacy will not be respected by China anymore." — Charles Burton, former Canadian diplomat who served in Beijing, to Gatestone Institute, April 27, 2024.

Blinken was in China to discuss the growing list of disagreements between Washington and Beijing. Not surprisingly, he did not accomplish anything there other than register America's complaints on matters such as Beijing's support for the Russian war effort in Ukraine and unfair treatment of U.S. companies. On every major issue, the U.S. and China take different sides, and the Chinese have clearly dug in. Blinken was reduced to begging.

America is resorting to the dialogue-is-progress narrative.... In substance, therefore, Blinken in Beijing continued talking about talking.

There is no question that AI is an important topic, especially when it comes to the control of nuclear weapons. Yet this does not mean the U.S. should seek an agreement with China on that topic.

Burton and Weichert point out that China never honors agreements, so any deal with Beijing is akin to a unilateral promise.

The risk now is that the Biden administration will trade away its restrictions for meaningless promises from China's Communists.

"China is deeply committed to the weaponization of AI and would be counting its lucky communist star if the Americans basically deterred themselves with such a protocol," Weichert, also author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life, added.

The secretary of state should never have gone to China in the first place.

Columbia University, whose Hamas occupation fills the front pages of every newspaper in the country while driving Jewish students off campus, has changed little in some ways. A hundred years ago, Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler was laboring to keep Jewish students out while celebrating Mussolini's fascism.

They weren't liberals then and they're not liberals now.... A century ago they believed that human beings were defined by race and they still believe it now.

What does Hamas offer the Ivy League? Much like Nazism and Communism, it believes that America, individualism and free enterprise are worthless....

The one thing that the Ivy League can agree on is that the world should be run by the right sorts of people and that they are just the right sort of people to run it.

[T]tomorrow they will be cheering once again for race riots burning down cities or for some new evil wave of terror.

That hatred is why the Ivy League has always been so easy to radicalize with a steady drip-feed of students eager to be taught that everything they grew up with is a sham, that nothing can be trusted and that the only way to save the world is to put them in charge of managing it.

Generations of Ivy Leaguers have been told at ponderous graduation ceremonies that they are the hope of tomorrow, and that history has tasked them with solving the troubles of the nation and the world by implementing the dogma of the moment. No king was more blatantly endowed with the right to rule without the fitness for it than these puffed up and well-connected children.

Each ruling class is more vicious, hollow and inept than the last. From cheering Nazis to cheering Hamas, the only thing the Ivy League elites have learned is an appetite for destruction.