[VLM]

> Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.

There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.

In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.

China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.

Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.

[MagnumOpus]

Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. The most obvious counterexample is that the foreign state actors (not China but others) could successfully suborn and control several of these niches, and steer the groupthink of these groups in a direction favourable to themselves: Most obviously the take-over of the NRA in 2015 and the successful influence campaign on the "gun nut" niche by the Russian state; but there are countless other examples.