Paul Marshall's Chinese Takeover of the British Press
Britain's burgeoning right-of-center media tycoon has some problems
Many right-of-center Brits are crooked as all get-out. Like Paul Graham of Y Combinator, who spots places to stick dirty cash in Silicon Valley on behalf of the Tories. Or Sir Paul Marshall, who has been consolidating his role in the right-wing British media with his purchase of the Spectator this week, despite his involvement with Chinese equities for years.
It’s almost a truism that every rich evangelical has a China problem. For some reason that’s who the Chinese like to work with in the West. In Marshall’s case, we’re a long way from the Barchester Towers satire of sturdy and hardworking but obnoxious people. He looks at the Chinese mob the way a mahjong addict looks at his tiles. This is who Ken Griffin is supposedly joining forces with to try to purchase The Telegraph.
The real question with Sir Marshall is how hard the British deep state is twisting the nipples on his C-cups—they certainly know about all the China stuff. His Spectator acquisition is getting fairly positive coverage in the Financial Times in spite of it, which tells you a lot. I’ve reached out to him but he hasn’t replied.
Two of Marshall’s other properties haven’t payed me for the articles and appearances they said they would, so I look at the Spectator acquisition by a Chinese chiseler somewhat dimly. The staff there are naturally concerned for their editorial independence, but there are no wins to be had here. If heads start to roll, the Chinese are doing a purge; if things stay the same, well…
The fact is the Spectator’s editorial perspective already has a number of Chinese problems, and it has for a long time. Douglass Murray’s nauseating and creepy propaganda for the Likud Party tends in the direction of Chinese geopolitical goals, which favor the U.S. continuing to be bogged down in the Middle East. Dominic Cummings is very plugged in with the Chinese network, which is why he has sort of been shut down—“Singapore on the Thames” is a Chinese concept. Jonathan Miller’s son D.C., of IM-1776, who was involved in the weird legal imbroglio with the guy who made a career out of humiliating Shia LaBeouf, wanted to go to China recently to study Kung Fu.
Some of Sir Marshall’s philanthropic activities connect the Chinese-backed network in North America to the UK. The main one is the promotion of Jordan Peterson and the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship—Peterson has been backed by the Daily Wire, whose initial funding came from the Wilks Brothers’ natural gas sale to the Chinese. Doesn’t this seem like a lot of problems?
I’ll be honest, I have no time for this Tory cultural conservatism crap that infests this whole milieu, which leads Americans, wowed by the accents, to do things like put Richard Dawkins on a board at Austin’s fake university. It’s so unmoored from anything good or real. Peterson, Dawkins, these guys are flirting with Christianity, and it’s not speaking in the manner of a missionary to say this, but they need to shit or get off the pot. Their philosophical meanderings are of little interest. They should say they were wrong, accept baptism, and shut up for a little while.
Marshall’s other cultural activities, to say nothing of his progeny’s awful music (getting thrown out of Mumford and Sons could have been the best thing that ever happened to him, cachet-wise, until he ruined it by becoming an anti-woke commentator), are a complete mess. Last October Marshall’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship hosted Eduardo Veràstegui for a screening of Sound of Freedom. The movie has now been shown to have had an accused human trafficker involved in its production, Fabian Marta, and Tim Ballard, the main subject, has been exposed as an enormous fraud and probably worse.
Then there’s the Spectator’s hires in the U.S. They brought on the neocon princeling Matthew Foldi for some reason, but the worst choice was Ben Domenech. God help me, I sometimes imagine him downing a few slugs of Maker’s Mark and putting on the Band of Brothers soundtrack, a tear coming to his eye before grimly getting down to his marital duties. Probably an improvement on the customary method of courting Mrs. McCain prior to her marriage, which starts with a suitor banging on a frying pan: “SOOOOIIIIEEEEE!!!!”
Given the family’s corruption record, that thick slab of bacon has come up with the scent of the pigpen. When her father’s Tokyo Rose recordings came out, demonstrating his appreciation for his communist Vietnamese captors, her brother, to his credit, was glad they saw the light of day. Meghan was livid. We could go into how McCain Sr. stonewalled evidence that more of his fellow POWs were left in Vietnam once he got into office, but we all knew he was like this, that’s why the neocons liked him so much.
Today Meghan is so intent on being a good little influencer she hasn’t said anything about her mother’s fine work on the famine overtaking Gaza. Around the time of 10/7, she was tweeting that she would hide Jews in her house if it ever came to that. Her ethics are as strong as her operational security.
Domenech probably connects to China, too. The Malaysian FARA issue, more than a decade old now, involved David All handing cash to Joshua Treviño to dole out to various influencers, Domenech among them. Seth Mandel, too. The whole operation was basically influencer marketing 1.0, Treviño claimed to be taking a light touch to them, but the whole point was to sandbag the Malaysian social democrat who is now the prime minister. Mandel discovered troubling signs Malaysia is a predominantly Muslim country. Treviño has been made head of “Texas Identity” at the TPPF, presumably part of a bid by the Chinese and Tories to foment a second civil war—he is, of course, a Claremont fellow.
The government they were working for, we found out in 2019, had plans to sell out much of the country to the Chinese in the midst of the corruption scandal for which the former prime minister is now serving a twelve-year prison term. It may not seem obvious from London or Washington, but it’s obvious if you’re paying attention to what’s going on in Southeast Asia that this is all bad news and not going to work.